Complete History of Jack the Ripper (27 page)

We do not know whether Baxter adhered to his theory or not but it may be significant that he did not allude to it when conducting his inquest into the death of Elizabeth Stride, the next victim. Abberline remembered it and would revive it, in very curious circumstances, fifteen years later.

The Hanbury Street tragedy unleashed bitter recriminations against the Metropolitan Police from both press and public. Secondary writers have frequently taken press criticisms at face value. It should be understood, however, that the opposition and radical press quickly seized upon the murders as a weapon with which to embarrass the government by discrediting the Home Secretary and retaliate against the police for their anti-Irish Nationalist activities and stern policing of demonstrations by socialists and the unemployed. Much of their comment, then, was politically inspired and it is consequently hardly surprising that many of the specific accusations levelled against the police are demonstrably untrue. More ominous, perhaps, was the alienation of the Conservative press. The
East London Advertiser
denounced Warren as a ‘martinet of apparently a somewhat inefficient type’ who by militarizing the police, had made them neither good detectives nor good local guardians of life and property.
The
Daily Telegraph
acknowledged that under Sir Charles, an ‘admirable commandant of gendarmerie’, the uniformed branch was excellently organized but lamented that the want of an effective head of CID had reduced the detective service to an ‘utterly hopeless and worthless condition.’ Even The
Times
opened its columns to letters critical of the police.
²⁷
Such comment, however inaccurate, reflected grave public disquiet over this fourth unsolved murder in months.

Unquestionably the CID’s secrecy policy exacerbated the already strained relationship between press and police. Journalists, denied admittance to 29 Hanbury Street by stalwart constables and rebuffed at the police stations, were understandably frustrated. ‘If the London police were as capable in other respects as they are in holding their peace,’ one
Daily News
reporter tartly observed, ‘no criminal in the realm would pass undetected.’ For their part the police were particularly galled by the practice some newshounds adopted of following detectives about in the hope of discovering their informants. Calling at the Home Office on 18 and 19 September, Warren angrily denounced such antics. Neither Matthews, the Home Secretary, nor Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, his private secretary, were there but an under-official promptly transmitted the Commissioner’s complaint to Matthews:

Few of the columns of newsprint spawned by the Chapman murder displayed any recognition of the intractability of the detective problem confronting the police in Whitechapel. By now Abberline and his colleagues seem to have decided that they were dealing with a bold and cunning loner. He generally struck at night, in out-of-the-way places and so efficiently that his victims were unable to scream or cry out. In no case did he leave at the scene of his crime a weapon or any
other object that might be traced back to him. And although he was not a random killer in that he exclusively targeted the prostitutes of Whitechapel and Spitalfields there was nothing to suggest a previous relationship with any of them. There was thus no accomplice that might betray him, no witness or clue that could identify him, no clear motive that might suggest a profitable avenue of investigation. Even today, with all the benefits of modern forensic science, the police find parallel cases very difficult to solve, the killers sometimes either remaining uncaught or being delivered into their hands by chance.

We know that the Hanbury Street tragedy immediately set the police casting about for some means of breaking the deadlock. One method they considered was the use of tracker dogs.

Historically the dogs chiefly employed in police work were bloodhounds. Their remarkable sense of smell enables them not only to follow trails up to two days old for many miles over difficult country but also to distinguish the scent of one individual from those of others, thus selecting the real miscreant from among innocent persons. Although dogs of this type have existed in the mountainous regions of Europe and Asia from time immemorial, the modern breed is thought to have been developed by the crossing of several strains – the St Hubert, talbot and old southern hounds. Before the Act of Union (1707) bloodhounds were used in border forays between England and Scotland. Scottish raiders, having attacked and pillaged English border towns, might find themselves pursued and cornered by retaliatory parties equipped with these dogs which were then known as ‘slough’ dogs. Later they found employment in police work but the use of bloodhounds was gradually discontinued during the nineteenth-century because, it is said, of their sinister name and undeserved ferocious reputation.

The East End murders revived interest in bloodhounds, and trials were suggested by ‘A Whitechapel Workman’ in the
Star
on 8 September, the day of the Chapman killing. The most persuasive advocate of the use of dogs, however, was J. H. Ashforth of Nottingham. In 1876 Ashforth had urged the Lancashire police to employ them in the case of William Fish and the dogs had brought evidence to light that had led to the conviction of the murderer. Now, on 12 September 1888, he addressed a reminder of that episode to Sir Charles Warren:

When Annie Chapman was murdered the Metropolitan Police had no trained dogs to hand. Even had they possessed them their efficacy in a district like Whitechapel would at best have been doubtful. At 6.10 a.m., when the crime was reported to Inspector Chandler, the scent of the killer had probably already been obliterated by the market traffic which had then been heavy in Hanbury Street for more than an hour. Nevertheless, we know that soon after the murder, apparently within twenty-four hours, the police did consider the use of bloodhounds and consulted Dr Phillips about it. Phillips had opined, however, that dogs would be less likely to trace the murderer than the blood of the victim and the matter had been dropped. When Warren received Mr Ashforth’s letter he sent a courteous acknowledgement but took no further action at this stage.
²⁹

On 13 September the
Star
gave publicity to the bizarre suggestion that Annie Chapman’s eyes be photographed in the hope that the
retinas would retain images of her murderer. This possibility, too, had already been considered by the police and put to Dr Phillips. ‘I was asked about it very early in the inquiry,’ the doctor told the inquest, ‘and I gave my opinion that the operation would be useless, especially in this case.’

Probably springing from the development of photography in the first half of the century, the belief that the last image formed on the retinas of a dying person’s eyes remained impressed upon them was invested with a spurious credibility by American press reports in the 1850s. In 1857 the
New York Observer
, citing the
Democratic Press
, noticed a series of experiments made in August of that year by Dr Pollock of Chicago. The doctor, examining the retinas of dead people’s eyes, reputedly found ‘in almost every instance . . . a clear, distinct, and marked impression.’ Furthermore, according to the
Observer
, a Dr Sandford had examined one of the eyes of a recent murder victim and detected in the pupil ‘the rude worn-away figure of a man with a light coat.’ The myth achieved some currency through fiction, notably Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s ‘Claire Lenoir’ (1867) and, later, Kipling’s ‘At the end of the passage’ (1890), and at the time of the Whitechapel murders was widely believed. In February 1888, on the eve of the crimes, the
British Journal of Photography
published a
New York Tribune
claim that a killer had been convicted in France on the strength of eyeball photography.

Even had the basis for this suggestion been sound, which it was not, the detailed photography of pupils would not then have been practicable and it is scarcely surprising that Phillips was incredulous. His dismissal of the idea is not quite the last we hear of it. For Matthews, in a letter of 5 October to Warren, asked whether any of the doctors had examined the eyes of Elizabeth Stride. We do not know what response, if any, Sir Charles made to this query. But Walter Dew’s recollection, fifty years later, that attempts were made to photograph the eyes of Mary Kelly, the seventh victim, cannot be corroborated.
³⁰

With the police failure only too transparent it was to a large government reward that people increasingly looked for the unmasking of the killer. Warren, as we will discover, was by no means opposed to such an initiative but it was a measure only the Home Office could authorize and by 1888 it had set its face against the practice.

By the end of the seventeenth-century England had evolved two
main forms of government reward – parliamentary rewards and advertised public or public rewards.

Parliamentary rewards were fixed statutory rewards paid upon the conviction of certain classes of offender. The earliest were authorized by an Act of 1692 which offered a reward of £40 for the arrest and successful prosecution of every highwayman. This Act was deemed successful and was followed, over a period, by a series of such Acts establishing similar rewards for other offences. There was some justification for parliamentary rewards at a time when the trouble and cost of apprehending and prosecuting a criminal was borne by private individuals, usually the victim of the offence and his relatives, but Acts of 1752 and 1818 empowered the courts to compensate prosecutors and with the emergence of a paid, professional police force in the nineteenth-century the task of arresting and prosecuting offenders fell in practice to the police. By this time, however, parliamentary rewards had already fallen into disrepute. Upon them a dubious class of ‘thief-takers’, who hunted down and prosecuted thieves for the sake of the rewards, had flourished. Corrupt and dishonest, they had been prone to the distortion and falsification of evidence in order to secure convictions. They were widely believed to have deliberately ignored the activities of young criminals until these had become sufficiently emboldened to commit offences which carried the maximum reward of £40. And, as the blood money conspiracy of 1754 demonstrated, they had sometimes prosecuted unwary youths whom they themselves had first inveigled into crime or framed. Parliamentary rewards were abolished in 1818.

Public rewards were announced by the government through proclamations and by advertisement. For most of the nineteenth-century the Home Office continued to sanction them sometimes in cases of serious crime like murder or for offences against the state. But in 1884, after a plot to dynamite the German Embassy and then frame an innocent person in order to collect the anticipated reward was uncovered, Sir William Harcourt, then Home Secretary, decided to discontinue them also.
³¹

There were, then, some sound arguments against rewards, and in rejecting the regular calls for a government reward in the case of the Whitechapel murders Matthews was simply acting in accordance with the precedent established by Harcourt. Yet his apparent intransigence was greeted with dismay and anger throughout the East End. There were protests from the juries at both the Nichols and
Chapman inquests. At the former, on 17 September, the foreman bitterly complained that the last two victims would probably not have died if the government had published a reward after the George Yard murder.
The Home Office had not acted, he intimated, because the victims were poor but ‘these poor people have souls like anybody else.’ Coroner Baxter remarked that the next victim might well be rich. ‘If that should be,’ replied the foreman caustically, ‘then there
will
be a large reward.’
³²
In the meantime private individuals and institutions were beginning to stump up a considerable sum. Samuel Montagu stood by his offer of £100. By the end of the month the Mile End Vigilance Committee had assembled £50. The outspoken foreman of the Nichols jury offered £25. And the proprietor of the
Illustrated Police News
pledged another £100.