Complete History of Jack the Ripper (36 page)

T
HE
B
ERNER
S
TREET VICTIM
, like Martha Tabram and Annie Chapman before her, had been killed within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police’s H Division. At 1.25 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September, a telegram bearing the news of the tragedy reached Detective Inspector Edmund Reid at Commercial Street Police Station. Twenty minutes later he was at the scene of the crime. Chief Inspector West, Inspector Pinhorn and several sergeants and constables were already there. Doctors Blackwell and Phillips were with the body.

The police did what they could. Dutfield’s Yard and the adjoining buildings were thoroughly searched several times. And a crowd of twenty-eight bystanders that had been shut in the yard by PC Lamb were detained. Some of them were tenants of the cottages in the yard, some members of the International Working Men’s Club, others merely passers-by drawn to the scene by the promise of excitement. They were interrogated, their names and addresses taken and their pockets searched. Then, before they were allowed to go, the doctors inspected their hands and clothes for traces of blood. These activities yielded no clue whatsoever to the mystery. Later in the day, acting under instructions from Inspector Abberline, detectives were extending the scope of their investigations to the extent of house-to-house inquiries in Berner Street.

Reid, in the meantime, had set about the task of identifying the victim. At St George’s Mortuary, where the body had been taken at about 4.30 a.m., he examined the dead woman and made careful
notes upon her appearance. Her age, he guessed, might be about forty-two. She was five feet two inches in height. Her hair was dark-brown and curly, her complexion pale. Reid lifted an eyelid. Her eyes were light grey. Parting her lips, he discovered that her upper front teeth were missing. The woman’s clothes consisted of a long black jacket trimmed with black fur, an old black skirt, a dark-brown velvet bodice, two light serge petticoats, a white chemise, a pair of white stockings, a pair of side-spring boots and a black crape bonnet. The jacket was decorated by a single red rose, backed by a maidenhair fern.

The inspector found nothing among the victim’s belongings that offered any clue to her identity. Her jacket pocket contained but two pocket handkerchiefs, a thimble and a piece of wool on a card. The description, however, was communicated by wire to all police stations.
¹

Identifying the dead woman and unravelling something of her history proved no straightforward task. Almost immediately police inquiries were bedevilled by the intrusion of Mrs Mary Malcolm. Mrs Malcolm was the wife of a tailor and lived at 50 Eagle Street, Red Lion Square, Holborn. On Monday, 1 October, she identified the body as that of her sister, Mrs Elizabeth Watts.

Mrs Malcolm had a very strange story to tell. She said that her sister, who lived in East End lodging houses, had been in the habit of coming to her for assistance for the past five years. They met every Saturday afternoon at four, at the corner of Chancery Lane, and Mrs Malcolm always gave her sister two shillings for her lodgings. But on Saturday, 29 September, the day before the murder, Mrs Watts did not come. Mary, who waited in vain from half past three to five, was troubled. Her sister had not missed a meeting for nearly three years. At twenty minutes past one the next morning Mrs Malcolm was lying in bed. It was then that she had a presentiment that some disaster had befallen her sister: ‘About 1.20 on Sunday morning I was lying on my bed when I felt a kind of pressure on my breast, and then I felt three kisses on my cheek. I also heard the kisses, and they were quite distinct.’ When, later in the day, she heard that another murder had been committed about that time, it seemed to Mrs Malcolm that her worst fears had been confirmed. She walked into Whitechapel, made inquiries at a police station and was directed to St George’s Mortuary.

On Tuesday, 2 October, Mrs Malcolm assured the inquest that
the deceased was undoubtedly
Elizabeth Watts. She also gave her sister a very dubious character indeed. Her husband had sent her back to her mother because he had caught her misbehaving with a porter. She had once left a naked baby, the product of an illicit affair with a policeman, on Mrs Malcolm’s doorstep. And she had been several times taken into custody for being drunk and disorderly. The coroner asked Mrs Malcolm what her sister did for a livelihood. She replied curtly: ‘I had my doubts.’ Notwithstanding all this, Mary was apparently genuinely distressed by the loss of her sister. One newspaper commented that she seemed ‘deeply affected’ as she gave her evidence. Upon several occasions during the examination she burst into tears.

The police can hardly have been impressed by Mary Malcolm’s fanciful tale of a presentiment. The credibility of her evidence, furthermore, was seriously undermined by her vacillation at the mortuary. When she first saw the body on the Sunday she could not identify it. Before the coroner, she gave various explanations of her failure. At one point she ascribed it to the fact that she saw the body in gaslight, between nine and ten at night. At another she said that she had been unsure because the body did not exhibit a crippled foot. Mrs Watts, she stated, had ‘a hollowness in her right foot, caused by its being run over.’ Whatever, on Monday she came back to the mortuary, twice, and this time she made a positive identification. Not, be it noted, because she recognized her sister in the dead woman’s face but from a small black mark on one of her legs. It was, she explained, an adder bite. As children they had been rolling down a hill when an adder had bitten Mary on the left hand and her sister on the leg.

Neither the police nor the coroner were happy with Mary Malcolm’s identification. And their misgivings were eventually vindicated when the real Elizabeth Watts, now Mrs Elizabeth Stokes, turned up, with an appropriately crippled foot, alive if not well. Married to a brickmaker and living at 5 Charles Street, Tottenham, Mrs Stokes said that she had not seen her sister Mary for years. On 23 October she inveighed bitterly against Mrs Malcolm at the inquest. ‘Her evidence was infamy and lies,’ she cried heatedly, ‘and I am sorry that I have a sister who can tell such dreadful falsehoods.’ By then, of course, Mary Malcolm had wasted a great deal of police time.
²

Despite such distractions the detectives did succeed in establishing the true identity of the victim. She was a Swedish woman named Elizabeth Stride and her last address had been a common lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. But no one, not even Michael Kidney, with whom she had lived for three years, seemed to know much of her past beyond what she herself had told them. And therein the police encountered another difficulty – for Elizabeth Stride had been gifted with an imagination every bit as lively as that of Mrs Malcolm.

Her principal fantasy was inspired by the loss of the
Princess Alice
in 1878. This tragedy, described by
The Times
as ‘one of the most fearful disasters of modern times’, has now been almost entirely forgotten. On 3 September 1878 a pleasure steamer,
Princess Alice
, collided in the Thames with a steam collier,
Bywell Castle
, and sank with the loss of between 600 and 700 lives. Elizabeth Stride gave out that her husband and two of her children had been drowned in the
Princess Alice
. She had saved herself by climbing a rope. But during that frantic scramble for life a man clambering up the rope ahead of her had slipped and accidentally kicked her in the face, knocking out her front teeth and stoving in the whole or part of the roof of her mouth. Elizabeth seems to have told this story to anyone who would listen – to Sven Olsson, clerk of the Swedish Church in Prince’s Square, to Michael Kidney, the waterside labourer who lived with her, to Elizabeth Tanner and Thomas Bates, the deputy and watchman respectively of the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street, to Charles Preston, a fellow lodger there, and doubtless to many another lost to record. Yet there was not a word of truth in it.

The story was dismissed by a Greenwich correspondent of the
Daily News
:

Wynne Baxter, the coroner at the Stride inquest, also pointed out that although a subscription had been raised to assist the bereaved relatives of the
Princess Alice
dead no person by the name of Stride ever applied for relief from the fund. Elizabeth’s upper front teeth were missing. But as for her assertion that the roof of her mouth had been injured during the disaster, that was easily disproved. On 5 October Dr Phillips, who had examined the mouth of the dead woman specifically to verify this point, reported to the inquest that he could not find ‘any injury to or absence of any part of either the hard or the soft palate.’
⁴

The truth, when Inspector Reid unearthed it, turned out to be a dull substitute for Elizabeth’s colourful tale. John Thomas Stride, her husband, survived the
Princess Alice
disaster by six years. He died of heart disease in 1884. It is probable, although we cannot know, that Elizabeth concocted her story to conceal a failed marriage and to elicit sympathy from the Swedish Church or such others as she dared approach for assistance.

Disregarding the red herrings and piecing together what the police discovered in 1888 and what subsequent researchers have been able to learn since, we can now reconstruct the broad outline of Elizabeth Stride’s life accurately.
⁵

Her maiden name was Elisabeth Gustafsdotter. The daughter of Gustaf Ericsson, a farmer, and his wife Beata Carlsdotter, she was born on 27 November 1843 in the parish of Torslanda, north of Gothenburg. Their farm was called Stora (meaning Big) Tumlehed. On 14 October 1860, when Elizabeth was nearly seventeen, she took out a certificate of altered residence from the parish of Torslanda and moved to that of Carl Johan in Gothenburg. She found work there as a domestic in the service of Lars Fredrik Olofsson, a workman, but soon moved on, taking out a new certificate to the Cathedral parish in Gothenburg on 2 February 1862. Elizabeth still gave her occupation as that of a domestic but this time her place of work is not known.

In March 1865 the police of Gothenburg registered her as a prostitute. Subsequent register entries tell us that she was a girl of slight build with brown hair, blue eyes, a straight nose and an oval face, that in October 1865 she was living in Philgaten in Östra Haga, a suburb of Gothenburg, and that she was twice treated in the special hospital, Kurhuset, for venereal diseases. On 21 April 1865 Elizabeth gave birth to a still-born girl. Nearly a year later, on 7 February 1866, she took out a new certificate of altered residence from the Cathedral parish to the Swedish parish in London. The certificate states that she could read tolerably well but possessed only a poor understanding of the Bible and catechism.
⁶

Why did Elizabeth come to England? According to Michael Kidney’s inquest deposition, she told him at one time that she first came to see the country and at another that she had come in the service of a family. This is not good evidence but it is the best we have and there is possibly some truth in both of Elizabeth’s explanations. Certainly they are not incompatible. Kidney understood, moreover, that at one time she was in domestic service with a gentleman living near Hyde Park.

On 10 July 1866 she was registered as an unmarried woman at the Swedish Church in Prince’s Square, St George-in-the East. Three years later she married. The bridegroom was a carpenter named John Thomas Stride and the service was performed by William Powell in the parish church of St Giles-in-the Fields on 7 March 1869. Elizabeth is described on the marriage certificate as Elizabeth Gustifson, spinster, the daughter of Augustus Gustifson, labourer. At the time of the marriage Stride was living at 21 Munster Street, Regent’s Park, and Elizabeth at 67 Gower Street.

Almost nothing is known about their marriage. Elizabeth later told Michael Kidney that she had borne nine children but this statement has never been corroborated. However, we do know that when Walter Stride, John’s nephew, last saw the couple,
soon after the marriage, they were ensconced in East India Dock Road, Poplar. And Kelly’s trade directory for 1870 lists John Thomas Stride as the keeper of a coffee room in Upper North Street, Poplar. In 1871 his business moved to 178 Poplar High Street and there it remained until taken over by John Dale in 1875.

By the late 1870s Elizabeth’s marriage was in difficulties. On 21 March 1877 she was admitted to the Poplar Workhouse. Then, soon after the
Princess Alice
went down, she told Sven Olsson, clerk of the Swedish Church, that her husband had been drowned in the tragedy. She was, Olsson recalled ten years later, then in ‘very poor’ circumstances and receiving occasional assistance from the Church. In 1878, of course, John Stride was very much alive. The fact that Elizabeth was accepting charity and giving out that he was dead, however, suggests strongly that the couple had separated. There was a reunion. The 1881 census records the Strides at 69 Usher Road, Old Ford Road, Bow. But it was temporary. From 28 December 1881 to 4 January 1882 Elizabeth was treated in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary for bronchitis and she was discharged from there into the workhouse. She does not seem to have lived with Stride again. From 1882 she lodged on and off at a common lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. John Stride died in the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum at Bromley on 24 October 1884.