Complete History of Jack the Ripper (28 page)

Matthews, already an unpopular Minister, was scourged mercilessly by the press. The
Star
damned him as ‘a feeble mountebank who would pose and simper over the brink of a volcano’ while the
Telegraph
, which thought the government ‘otherwise so capable and so popular’, called repeatedly for his resignation. ‘We have had enough of Mr Home Secretary Matthews,’ it ranted on 19 September, ‘who knows nothing, has heard nothing, and does not intend to do anything in matters concerning which he ought to be fully informed, and prepared to act with energy and despatch. It is high time that this helpless Minister should be promoted out of the way of some more competent man.’
³³

To some extent Matthews himself was to blame for this state of affairs. For although he had forcible reasons for resisting the popular clamour for a reward he evinced not the slightest disposition to explain them, even to the embattled representatives of a badly frightened community. For the rationale behind his inactivity we must turn to a Home Office minute of 11 September, prompted by Mr Montagu’s proposal:

The Home Office were right about one thing at least. In the East End a general sense of outrage united the community against the killer and, reward or no, the public bestowed information upon Abberline and his team with largesse. It ushered into the police investigation a parade of lunatics, eccentrics, misfits and ne’er-do-wells whose behaviour or appearance had attracted attention to themselves. One arrest was particularly noteworthy.

At about nine on the morning of Monday, 10 September, three or four policemen entered Mulberry Street, Commercial Road East.
³⁵
Their leader was an erect, fresh-complexioned man with dark hair and a heavy, drooping, light-brown moustache. He was Detective-Sergeant William Thick of H Division. There was an air of industry about Mulberry Street. It was a quarter mainly occupied by foreign workers in tailoring and boot and slipper-making and it was here that many of the stage shoes worn in London and Continental theatres were made. But Sergeant Thick’s thoughts were far from the stage on this September morning. He went straight up to No. 22 and knocked on the door.

It was opened by a Polish Jew, a shoemaker of course, short, thickset and dark, with thinning black hair and a well-trained black moustache. The sergeant and the shoemaker knew each other at once. If we are to credit an interview which the latter gave later to a Press Association reporter his arrest was a dignified affair. Thick told him he was wanted. The shoemaker asked what for. ‘You know what for,’ replied Thick, ‘you will have to come with me.’ Secure in his innocence, the shoemaker was by no means disconcerted. ‘Very well, sir,’ he said, ‘I’ll go down to the station with you with the greatest of pleasure.’ News reports tell of a more dramatic encounter. The sergeant, averred one, immediately clapped a hand upon his quarry and said, ‘You are just the man I want.’ While the little Jew, by the relation of another, turned deathly pale and exclaimed: ‘Mother, he has got me!’

Sergeant Thick had good reason to be pleased with his catch because every policeman in the metropolis had been on the lookout for him for more than a week. He was John Pizer. He was Leather Apron.

N
O ONE COULD
have walked the streets of London’s East End that September without finding his ears assailed on all sides by talk of ‘George Yard’, ‘Buck’s Row’, ‘’Anbury Street’ – and ‘Leather Apron’. Street urchins mindlessly took up the theme. Two days after the Chapman murder a
Daily News
reporter saw them stage a bogus hue and cry outside Commercial Street Police Station. ‘The murderer! The murderer! Leather Apron’s ketched!’ they screamed to the crowd of idlers there before scurrying off round the corner of the station as if to the scene of this excitement. Echoes of those days survived until comparatively recently in the memories of elderly folk. As late as the 1950s a Mr Anderson, recalling his East End childhood for Dan Farson, could tell how he and other youngsters used to pick on some harmless old man and then, perhaps fifty strong, pursue him along the street with raucous cries of ‘Leather Apron!’ He remembered, too, that a local sweetshop started to make a new toffee called ‘Leather Apron Toffee.’
¹

Loafers were already standing about outside Leman Street Police Station when Sergeant Thick arrived with his charge. Feeling against Leather Apron ran so high that the police must have anticipated trouble but there was probably little truth in a newspaper tale of a large force of constables, with drawn staves, being held in readiness at the station. Such preparations, by signalling the arrival of an important detainee, would have drawn a huge throng about the building and endangered both suspect and escort. Rather, by
walking into the station with Pizer as casually and nonchalantly as possible the sergeant seems to have banked upon the significance of the event being lost upon the bystanders. In this he was almost entirely successful. Pizer, noted the
Telegraph
, was ‘led to Leman Street Police Station unperceived until close to the door of the station, when the cry was raised “Leather Apron!” and, as usual, there was a hostile demonstration.’ By that time it was too late. Pizer was safely through the door. Outside the news of his arrest was soon being disseminated in broadsheet and special edition. One of the former summed up the mood of the day:

At Leman Street Pizer made a statement accounting for his whereabouts on the crucial nights of 30–31 August and 7–8 September. According to his story, he was sleeping in a common lodging house called the ‘Round House’, in Holloway Road, when Polly Nichols was killed, and from Thursday, 6 September, until his arrest on Monday, 10 September, was sheltering with his relatives at 22 Mulberry Street, afraid to go out. The police, of course, sought to verify these assertions. Chief Inspector Swanson tells us that the first was ‘fully corroborated and the date fixed by the proprietor [of the lodging house] who knows Pizer’ and that the second was confirmed ‘by several persons’.
³

On Tuesday, 11 September, there was a new development. An identity parade was held in the station yard and Pizer was picked out by Emanuel Delbast Violenia, a half-Spaniard half-Bulgarian vagrant, as a man he had seen in Hanbury Street threatening to knife a woman early on the morning that Annie Chapman was killed. By the end of the day, however, the police were convinced that Violenia was lying. Press reports suggest that during a lengthy examination in the afternoon he contradicted himself ‘over and over again’ and that his ‘anxiety’ to view Annie’s remains led detectives to suspect that his evidence had been inspired solely by a morbid curiosity to see the corpse.
⁴
Whatever, the police decided that there was no case against Pizer and at about 9.30 that night, after nearly two days in custody, he was released.

The next day Pizer appeared as a surprise witness during the resumed Chapman inquest at the Working Lads’ Institute. It was
clearly intended that he be provided with an opportunity to clear his name in public. Sergeant Thick, flashily dressed in a suit of loud checks, escorted him into the court and Pizer, after taking the oath in the Hebrew fashion, ‘fell at once into an attitude of easy composure, which he maintained without moving a muscle through a tolerably long examination.’ The
East London Observer
has left us with a forbidding, perhaps prejudiced, portrait of the man as he stood before Coroner Baxter:

Pizer described his movements on the nights of the Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street murders and Baxter told the court that his statements had been verified by the police. At one point during the examination Baxter touched upon the popular hostility that had imprisoned the little Jew in the house of his relatives from 6 to 10 September.

‘Why were you remaining indoors?’ he asked.

‘Because my brother advised me.’

‘You were the subject of suspicion, were you not?’

‘I was the subject of a – false suspicion,’ replied Pizer, speaking very distinctly and making an emphatic pause.

‘It was not the best advice that could be given you,’ commented Baxter.

‘I will tell you why,’ Pizer retorted immediately. ‘I should have been torn to pieces!’

After his examination Pizer thanked the court and retired to the back benches. There, noted the
Advertiser
, he ‘looked somewhat pale and worried after giving his evidence though throughout he was perfectly cool and collected. He displayed not the slightest symptoms of insanity, and chatted freely and affably with Sergeant Thick with whom he sat until the adjournment of the inquiry.’ Perhaps he was worried about the large crowd gathered outside the institute. Certainly he was recognized at once and greeted with murmurs and muttering when he left the building but Sergeant Thick escorted him home. And with that, apart from some skirmishing in the libel courts and a complaint to Thames Magistrates’ Court in October of continued persecution, this most famous of Whitechapel murder suspects disappears from the records of the case.
⁵

Inspector Abberline told his superiors that the suspicions against Pizer had been ‘conclusively’ demonstrated to be groundless.
⁶
How far does the existing evidence justify this view?

Pizer was an unmarried man in his thirties. His relatives, who shared, of course, a natural disposition to protect him, insisted that he was sober, industrious and kind, and that, being ruptured, he was physically incapable of violence. He was ‘not a man to commit murder,’ his sister-in-law told the press, ‘and she was accustomed to trust her children to his charge.’ Since Pizer spent most of his time in common lodging houses, however, it is to be doubted whether his family at Mulberry Street knew very much about his activities. His stepmother conceded, according to one news report, that although he was always welcome when he came to visit them he was never asked where he had been. There is little doubt that Pizer
was
the man known locally as ‘Leather Apron.’ Sergeant Thick, who had known Pizer for eighteen years, and indeed Pizer himself, readily acknowledged that fact at the inquest. And although the allegations of his bullying prostitutes have never been substantiated there is certainly evidence to suggest that he was by no means the harmless put-upon he represented himself to be. On 7 July 1887 one John Pozer, almost certainly Pizer, was convicted at Thames Magistrates’ Court of stabbing James Willis or Williams, a boot finisher, and was sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. This incident occurred on the afternoon of the 6th. Willis was working at 42 Morgan Street when Pozer put his head through the window and complained: ‘No wonder I can’t get any work when you have got it all.’ Then, when Willis went to the door to send him away,
Pozer lunged at his face with a shoemaker’s knife. Throwing up a hand to shield himself, Willis received a wound in the back of the hand. A year later, on 4 August 1888, Pizer was charged at the same court with indecent assault. On this occasion, apparently, he was discharged, but for what reason is not recorded.
⁷

However, none of this makes Pizer the Whitechapel murderer. It is important to understand that when the police detained him on 10 September they possessed no direct evidence of any kind linking him with the crimes. The first and only such evidence materialized the next day in the form of Emanuel Violenia and this witness, as we have seen, was very quickly discredited. The knives that were found at Mulberry Street do not constitute tangible evidence against Pizer for they were only such as might have been expected in the possession of a man of his trade. Furthermore, Pizer pleaded alibis for the last two murders. That for the night of 7–8 September, when Annie Chapman met her death, is hardly convincing. He swore that he never left 22 Mulberry Street between Thursday, 6 September, and the following Monday. This, according to Swanson, was corroborated by ‘several persons’. But the only people who could have testified that Pizer stayed at home on the night of the murder were relatives anxious to shield him – his stepmother, his married brother and his sister-in-law. Pizer’s alibi for the Nichols murder, on the other hand, is very strong. His claim to have been staying in a Holloway Road lodging house when Polly was killed was, again by Swanson’s report, confirmed ‘and the date fixed’ by the proprietor. There is no reason to disbelieve the proprietor’s testimony for the date could have been impressed upon his memory by some association with the dock fires which also occurred that night. Indeed, in his inquest deposition, Pizer specifically recalled seeing the glow in the sky caused by the fires and discussing it, at about 1.30 a.m., in Holloway Road with the lodging house keeper and two police constables.