Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (33 page)

Berner Street was a narrow thoroughfare of small, crowded dwellings occupied by Polish and German tailors, shoemakers, cigarette makers, and other impoverished people who worked out of their homes. On the street was the clubhouse of the International Working Men’s Educational Club, which had approximately eightyfive members, most of them Eastern European Jewish socialists. The only requirement for joining was to support socialist principles. The IWMC met every Saturday night at 8:30 to discuss various topics.

They always closed with a social time of singing and dancing, and it was not unusual for people to linger until one o’clock in the morning. On this particular Saturday night, almost a hundred people had attended a debate in German on why Jews should be socialists. The serious talk was winding down. Most people were heading home by the time Elizabeth Stride set out in that direction.

Her first client of the evening, as far as anyone seems to know, was a man she was observed talking to on Berner Street, very close to where a laborer named William Marshall lived. This was about 11:45 P.M., and Marshall later testified that he did not get a good look at the man’s face, but that he was dressed in a small black coat, dark trousers, and what looked like a sailor’s cap. He wore no gloves, was clean shaven, and was kissing Elizabeth. Marshall said he overheard the man tease, “You would say anything but your prayers,” and Elizabeth laughed. Neither of them appeared intoxicated, Marshall recalled, and they walked off in the direction of the IWMC clubhouse.

Soon after, another local resident named James Brown saw a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride leaning against a wall and talking with a man at the corner of Fairclough and Berner streets. The man wore a long overcoat and was approximately five foot seven. (It seems that almost every man identified by witnesses in the Ripper cases was approximately five foot seven. In the Victorian era, five foot seven would have been considered an average height for a male. I suppose that height was as good a guess as any.)

The last time Elizabeth Stride was seen alive was by Police Constable William Smith, 452 H Division, whose beat that night included Berner Street. At 12:35 A.M. he noticed a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride, and it caught his eye that she was wearing a flower on her coat. The man she was with carried a newspaper-wrapped package that was eighteen inches long and six or eight inches wide. He, too, was five foot seven, Smith recalled, and was dressed in a hard felt deerstalker, a dark overcoat, and dark trousers. Smith thought the man seemed respectable enough, about twenty-eight years old and clean shaven.

Smith continued his beat, and twenty-five minutes later, at 1:00 A.M., Louis Diemschutz was driving his costermonger’s barrow to the IWMC building at 40 Berner Street. He was the manager of the socialists’ club and lived in the building. He was surprised when he turned into the courtyard to find the gates open, because usually they were closed after 9:00 P.M. As he passed through, his pony suddenly shied to the left. It was too dark to see much, but Diemschutz made out a form on the ground near the wall and poked it with his whip, expecting to find garbage. He climbed down and struggled to light a match in the wind and was startled by the dimly lit shape of a woman. She was either drunk or dead, and Diemschutz ran inside the clubhouse and returned with a candle.

Elizabeth Stride’s throat was slashed, and Diemschutz and pony and barrow must have interrupted the Ripper. Blood flowed from her neck toward the clubhouse door, and the top buttons of her jacket were undone, revealing her chemise and stays. She was on her left side, her face toward the wall, her dress soaking wet from recent hard rains. In her left hand was a paper packet of cachous, or sweets used to freshen the breath; a corsage of maidenhair fern and a red rose was pinned to her breast. By now, Police Constable William Smith’s beat had gone full circle, and when he reached 40 Berner Street again he must have been shocked to find that a crowd was gathering outside the clubhouse gates and people were screaming “Police!” and “Murder!”

Smith later testified at the inquest that his patrol had taken no more than a mere twenty-five minutes, and it was during that brief time, while some thirty members of the socialists’ club lingered inside, that the killer must have struck. The windows were open and the club members were singing festive songs in Russian and German. No one heard a scream or any other call of distress. But Elizabeth Stride probably didn’t make a sound that anyone but her killer could hear.

Police Surgeon Dr. George Phillips arrived at the scene shortly after 1:00 A.M. and decided that since no weapon was present at the scene, the woman had not committed suicide. She must have been murdered, and he deduced that the killer had applied pressure to her shoulders with his hands and lowered her to the ground before cutting her throat from the front. She held the cachous between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, and when the doctor removed the packet, some of the sweets spilled to the ground. Her left hand must have relaxed after death, Dr. Phillips said, but he could not explain why her right hand was “smeared with blood.” This was most strange, he later testified, because her right hand was uninjured and resting on her chest. There was no explanation for the hand being bloody—unless the killer deliberately wiped blood on it. That would seem an odd thing for the killer to do.

Perhaps it did not occur to Dr. Phillips that the reflex of any conscious person who is hemorrhaging is to clutch the wound. When Elizabeth’s throat was cut, she would have instantly grabbed her neck. It also made no sense to assume that Elizabeth Stride was pushed to the ground before she was killed. Why didn’t she cry out or struggle when the killer grabbed her and forced her down? Nor is it likely that the Ripper cut her throat from the front.

To do that, her killer would have had to force her to the ground, attempting all the while to keep her quiet and under control as he slashed at her neck in the dark, blood spurting all over him. Somehow she still held on to her packet of cachous. When throats are cut from the front, there are usually several small incisions because of the awkward angle of attack. When throats are cut from the rear, the incisions are long and often sufficient to sever major blood vessels and cut through tissue and cartilage all the way to the bone.

Once a killer devises a workable method, he rarely alters it unless something unanticipated occurs, causing the killer to abort his ritual or become more brutal, depending on the circumstances and his reactions. I believe that Jack the Ripper’s modus operandi was to attack from the rear. He did not lower his victims to the ground first because he would have risked a struggle and loss of control. These were streetwise, feisty women who would not hesitate to protect themselves should a client get a bit rough or decide not to pay.

I doubt Elizabeth Stride knew what hit her. She may have drifted toward the building on Berner Street because she knew the IWMC members—most of them there without their girlfriends or wives—would begin heading out around 1:00 A.M. and might be interested in quick sex. The Ripper may have been watching her from the deep shadows as she conducted business with other men, then waited until she was alone. He may have been familiar with the socialists’ club and shown up there before, possibly even earlier that night. The Ripper could have been wearing a false mustache or beard, or some other disguise to ensure that he would not be recognized.

Walter Sickert was fluent in German and would have understood the debate that had been going on for hours inside the club the Saturday night of September 29th. Maybe he was in the crowd as the debate went on. It would have been in keeping with his character to participate before slipping out close to one o’clock, just as the singing began. Or maybe he never stepped inside the club at all and had been watching Elizabeth Stride ever since she left the lodging house. Whatever he did, it may not have been as difficult as one might suppose. If a killer is sober, intelligent, and logical; knows several languages; is an actor; has hiding places; and does not live in the area, then it really is not so mind-boggling to imagine him getting away with murder in unlighted slums. But I think he may have spoken to this victim. There was never an explanation for her single red rose.

The Ripper had ample time to escape when Louis Diemschutz hurried inside the building for a candle and members of the socialists’ club rushed outside to look. Shortly after the commotion began, a woman living several doors down at 36 Berner Street stepped outside and noticed a young man walking quickly toward Commercial Road. He glanced up at the lighted windows of the clubhouse, and the woman testified later that he was carrying a shiny black Gladstone case—popular in those days and similar in appearance to a medical bag.

Marjorie Lilly recalled in her written recollections of Sickert that he owned a Gladstone bag “to which he was much attached.” On one occasion in the winter of 1918 while they were painting in his studio, he suddenly decided they should go to Petticoat Lane and he brought the bag out of the basement. For reasons she failed to comprehend, she wrote, Sickert painted “The Shrubbery, 81 Camden Road,” in big white numbers and letters on the bag. She never did understand the “Shrubbery” part of the address, since Sickert had no shrubbery in his patchy front yard. Nor did Sickert ever offer her an explanation for his bizarre behavior. He was fifty-eight years old at the time. He was anything but senile. But he acted strange sometimes, and Lilly recalled being unnerved when he carried his Gladstone bag out the door and took her and another woman on a frightening excursion into Whitechapel during a thick, acrid fog.

They ended up on Petticoat Lane, and Ms. Lilly watched in astonishment as Sickert and his black bag disappeared along mean streets as “the fog exceeded our worst fears” and it was almost as dark as night, she wrote. The women chased Sickert “up and down endless side streets until we were exhausted” as he stared at poor wretches huddled on steps leading into their slums, and joyfully exclaimed, “such a beautiful head! What a beard. A perfect Rembrandt.” He could not be dissuaded from his adventure, which had taken him within blocks of where the Ripper’s victims had been murdered exactly thirty years earlier.

In 1914, when World War I began and London was dark with lights unlit and blinds drawn, Sickert wrote in a letter, “Such interesting streets lit as they were 20 years ago when everything was Rembrandt.” He had just walked home “by bye-ways” through Islington at night, and he added, “I wish the fear of Zeppelins would continue for ever so far as the lighting goes.”

I questioned John Lessore about his uncle’s Gladstone bag, and he told me he wasn’t aware of anyone in the family knowing about a Gladstone bag that might have belonged to Walter Sickert. I tried very hard to find that bag. If it had been used to carry bloody knives, DNA could very well have come up with some interesting findings. Since I am speculating, I may as well add that for Sickert to paint “The Shrubbery” on his bag seems crazy, but then it may not be. During the Ripper murders, the police found a bloody knife in shrubbery close to where Sickert’s mother lived. In fact, bloody knives began to turn up in several places, as if left deliberately to excite police and neighbors.

The Monday night after Elizabeth Stride’s murder, Thomas Coram, a coconut dealer, was leaving a friend’s house in Whitechapel and noticed a knife at the bottom of steps leading into a laundry. The blade was a foot long with a blunted tip, and the black handle was six inches long and was wrapped in a bloody white handkerchief that had been tied in place with string. Coram did not touch the knife but immediately showed it to a local constable, who later testified that the knife was in the exact spot where he had stood not an hour earlier. He described the knife as “smothered” with dried blood and the sort a baker or chef might use. Sickert was an excellent cook and often dressed as a chef to entertain his friends.

While police were interrogating the members of the socialists’ club who were singing inside the building when Elizabeth Stride was murdered, Jack the Ripper was making his way toward Mitre Square, where another prostitute, named Catherine Eddows, had headed after being released from jail. If the Ripper took the direct route of Commercial Road, followed it west, and turned left on Aldgate High Street to enter the City of London, his next crime scene was but a fifteen-minute walk from his last one.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THESE CHARACTERS ABOUT

C
atherine Eddows spent Friday night in a casual ward north of Whitechapel Road because she did not have fourpence to pay for her half of John Kelly’s bed.

It had been seven or eight years now that she had been living with him in the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Before Kelly, she was with Thomas Conway, the father of her children—two boys, fifteen and twenty, and a daughter named Annie Phillips, twenty-three, who was married to a lampblack packer.

The sons lived with Conway, who had left Catherine because of her drinking habits. She had not seen him or her children in years, and this was by design. In the past when she would come around, she was always in need of money. Although she and Conway had never been married, he had bought and paid for her, she used to say, and his initials were tattooed in blue ink on her left forearm.