Complete History of Jack the Ripper (35 page)

By three in the morning two major murder investigations were thus going on simultaneously, one based upon Berner Street and in the hands of the Metropolitan Police, the other centred upon Mitre Square and the responsibility of the City force. But the night had still one more surprise in store for the embattled officers. For at 2.55 a
Metropolitan Police constable made a discovery that switched the centre of attention once more, this time back from Mitre Square to Whitechapel.

PC Alfred Long 254A had been temporarily drafted from A Division (Westminster) to serve in Whitechapel. There, on duty in Goulston Street at about 2.55, he found a piece of a woman’s apron, wet with blood, lying in the entry leading to the staircase of Nos. 108–119 Wentworth Model Dwellings. The constable immediately started to cast about for other signs of blood. There were none. But on the right-hand side of the open doorway to the entry, just above the apron, he saw something else. Written in white chalk on the fascia of black bricks edging the doorway were the words:

Long made no inquiries of the tenants in the building but he did search the staircases. He found no traces of blood or recent footmarks. Then, leaving the constable from the adjoining beat to guard the writing and observe anyone leaving or entering the premises, he took the piece of bloodstained apron and handed it in to the duty inspector at Commercial Street Police Station. When he arrived at Commercial Street it was about 3.05 or 3.10 a.m.
¹⁷

Soon there were City as well as Metropolitan officers gathering at Wentworth Model Dwellings. The precise sequence of events is imperfectly documented but a report of Long’s discoveries seems to have reached the City Police in Mitre Square and Detective Constables Halse and Hunt evidently went to the Metropolitan station at Leman Street to make inquiries. From there they were directed to Goulston Street. Having ascertained the situation at Wentworth Model Dwellings, Halse stayed to guard the chalked message while Hunt returned to Mitre Square to report and receive further instructions. When Hunt got back to the square he found that Inspector McWilliam had arrived. McWilliam listened to Hunt’s report. Then he gave instructions for the chalk message to be photographed and ordered Hunt, in the meantime, to return to Wentworth Model Dwellings and assist Halse in making a search of the tenements there.
¹⁸

The search was duly executed. As Halse later apprised the coroner, ‘when Hunt returned an enquiry was made at every tenement of the building but we could gain no tidings of anyone going in likely to be the murderer.’ But no photographs of the chalk message would be taken. For, in what was to prove his most controversial intervention in the Whitechapel investigations, Sir Charles Warren ordered the writing to be wiped away before a photographer arrived.

To Sir Charles alone is generally attributed the decision to obliterate the writing. He made the final decision and unhesitatingly accepted full responsibility for it but contemporary documents make it quite plain that it originated in a proposal of Superintendent Thomas Arnold of H Division. The news from Berner Street brought Warren to Commercial and Leman Street police stations in the early hours of 30 September. When he arrived at Leman Street, shortly before five, Arnold briefed him on the two murders and the discoveries in Goulston Street. The superintendent proposed that the writing be obliterated. Indeed he had already sent an inspector to Wentworth Model Dwellings with a sponge and instructions to await his arrival. But Warren considered it ‘desirable that I should decide this matter myself, as it was one involving so great a responsibility whether any action was taken or not’, and decided to call at Goulston Street on his way to Berner Street.

Why should Superintendent Arnold, in whose division four out of the six murders had been committed, advocate the destruction of an important clue? And why should Warren, whom the public would hold directly responsible for any failure to catch the murderer, entertain such a proposal for a moment? For more than a century Warren has been mocked and vilified over this matter and it is high time that he and Arnold were allowed to speak for themselves. Their cases are set out in reports for the Home Office dated 6 November 1888.
¹⁹

First, Superintendent Arnold:

Arnold’s dilemma on the night of the double murder is thus laid bare. He appreciated the possibility that the writing might yield a clue. But he also remembered the anti-semitic outburst that had disgraced Whitechapel after Dark Annie’s murder. And he dreaded what the consequences might be in the morning if the chalk message, with its overt incrimination of the Jews, became public property at a time when the East End was reeling with the shock of two new murders.

As Sir Charles was being driven to Goulston Street he would have been pondering Arnold’s proposal. He was not obliged to accept it, of course, but the superintendent knew far more about conditions in Whitechapel than he did and Warren would have accorded his opinion very great weight. Sir Charles’ report takes up the story:

When Warren decided to obliterate the writing only Daniel Halse, the City detective, protested. He wanted it to remain, at least until Major Smith had seen it, and suggested a compromise in which only the top line (‘The Juwes are’) would be rubbed out. But it was getting light, the area was already beginning to come to life with costermongers preparing for the Petticoat Lane market, and in Metropolitan Police territory Warren’s word was final. According to Constable Long, who was present, the chalk message was wiped off at about 5.30.
²⁰

There was still the piece of bloodstained apron that Long had found in the entry beneath the writing. It had been surrendered to Dr Phillips. Inspector McWilliam was at Golden Lane Mortuary when it was compared to the apron worn by the Mitre Square victim. About one half of the dead woman’s apron had been severed by a clean cut. And the piece retrieved by Long fitted exactly. Dr Brown’s testimony on the apron, part of his inquest deposition of 4 October, leaves no room for doubt that after murdering the woman in Mitre Square the killer escaped across the City boundary into Whitechapel: ‘My attention was called to the apron [found on the body]. It was the corner of the apron with a string attached. The blood spots were of recent origin. I have seen a portion of an apron produced by Dr Phillips and stated to have been found in Goulston Street . . . I fitted the piece of apron which had a new piece of material on it which had been evidently sewn on to the piece I have, the seams of the borders of the two actually corresponding. Some blood and apparently faecal matter was found on the portion found in Goulston Street.’
²¹

The escape had been almost as remarkable as the murder. Major Smith’s well-known description, however, is quite erroneous. ‘There is no man living,’ he wrote in 1910, ‘who knows as much of those murders as I do; and before going farther I must admit that, though within five minutes of the perpetrator one night, and with a very fair description of him besides, he completely beat me and every police officer in London; and I have no more idea now where he lived than I had twenty years ago.’ There is, unfortunately, no known occasion on which the major was within five minutes of the killer. He did visit
Mitre Square. But the earliest senior police officer on the scene of the crime was Inspector Collard and even he was eighteen or nineteen minutes behind PC Watkins’ discovery of the body. It seems likely that Smith would also have visited the Goulston Street site although there is no actual record of it. If he did the visit undoubtedly occurred after 5.30, when the chalk message was removed. The only possible justification for Smith’s curious claim to have been ‘within five minutes’ of the murderer lies, therefore, in just two sentences of his reminiscences: ‘In Dorset Street, with extraordinary audacity, he [the murderer] washed them [his hands] at a sink up a close, not more than six yards from the street. I arrived there in time to see the bloodstained water.’ This episode, however, cannot be corroborated from any other source. Furthermore, even if Smith’s recollection of it was accurate there was no way of knowing that the bloodstained water in Dorset Street had any connection with the murders. Smith’s claim to have been armed with a ‘very fair description’ of the killer is equally misleading. As we will discover, the City Police did find a witness – Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveller – who may have seen the Mitre Square murderer, but his evidence was turned up by Inspector Collard’s subsequent house-to-house inquiries in the area and was not available on the night of the double killing.
²²

The murderer’s escape was remarkable nonetheless. It would have been less so had he fled into Whitechapel immediately after the Mitre Square atrocity, before the City Police had been alerted, but this does not seem to have been the case. PC Long, whose beat embraced Goulston Street, patrolled it at about 2.20. Although he passed the spot where he would afterwards find the apron he was positive that it had not been there then. And Daniel Halse, who passed by the same spot at about the same time in pursuit of the criminal, also failed to notice anything. They might have missed it, of course, but if their testimony is to be depended upon the apron was deposited at Wentworth Model Dwellings some time between 2.20 and 2.55, as much as thirty-six to seventy-one minutes after Watkins discovered the body in Mitre Square. The murderer could have reached Goulston Street in five minutes from the square so where he was, and what he was doing, during the intervening time is a mystery. Whatever the cause of his delay, the killer evidently slipped unseen out of the City at a time when its officers had already become active in his pursuit and, again unseen, into a Whitechapel already alerted by the Berner Street murder. Not
only that, but he paused long enough in Goulston Street to leave a calling card!

In his memoirs Major Smith concluded his account of the double murder thus: ‘I wandered round my station-houses, hoping I might find someone brought in, and finally got to bed at 6 a.m., after a very harassing night, completely defeated.’ Inspector McWilliam, in a report for the Home Office, tells how he visited the City Mortuary and then returned to the Detective Office and wired the Mitre Square victim’s description to all divisions and to the Metropolitan Police. ‘Additional officers had then arrived,’ he wrote, ‘and they were sent out in various directions to make enquiry.’ To no purpose. And Sir Charles? From Goulston Street he drove to the site of the murder in Dutfield’s Yard, and from there, with Superintendent Arnold, to the City Police headquarters in Old Jewry. There, at about seven, he explained his reasons for ordering the obliteration of the writing at Wentworth Model Dwellings. If he anticipated support for his decision, however, he was disappointed. McWilliam thought that he had made a mistake and told him so. And Warren’s action rankled with Major Smith so much that, twenty-two years later, the major could still write of it as a ‘fatal mistake’, an ‘unpardonable blunder.’
²³

When the sun rose on Sunday, 30 September, the new day thus found the police baffled and bickering. Nothing was as apparent as their defeat.