Complete History of Jack the Ripper (37 page)

Elizabeth spent her last three years with a waterside labourer named Michael Kidney. Their address is of some import. For press versions of Kidney’s inquest testimony give it as 38 Dorset Street and this has led some writers, most notably Stephen Knight, to suppose a connection between Elizabeth Stride and two other victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly, who lived in Dorset Street. But Kidney was misreported. In a statement to the Central News he explained that he lived with Elizabeth ‘at 35 Devonshire Street down to five months ago, when they moved to No. 36 in the same street.’ That Devonshire Street, close to the river where Kidney worked, was the correct address is substantiated by other evidence. In May 1886, when applying for relief from the Swedish Church, Elizabeth gave her address as Devonshire Street, Commercial Road, and Catherine Lane, who lodged with Elizabeth at 32 Flower and Dean Street in 1888, also heard her say that she had once lived in Devonshire Street.
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On Elizabeth herself Kidney’s inquest testimony cannot be said to be very revealing, but he did say that she was in the habit of occasionally going away on her own: ‘During the three years I have known her she has been away from me about five months altogether . . . It was drink that made her go . . . She always came back again. I think she liked me better than any other man.’

From 1882 Elizabeth was an occasional lodger at 32 Flower and Dean Street. She seems to have been generally well-liked there and
was known affectionately as ‘Long Liz’. Elizabeth Tanner, the deputy, remembered her as a quiet, sober woman. And a Central News reporter, after interviewing her lodging house cronies, gave her a similar character: ‘According to her associates, she was of calm temperament, rarely quarrelling with anyone; in fact, she was so good-natured that she would ‘do a good turn for anyone’. Her occupation was that of a charwoman.’
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Notwithstanding such golden opinions Elizabeth was well known at Thames Magistrates’ Court. In the last few years of her life she appeared there frequently for being drunk and disorderly.

Unless her funds were being squandered on drink Long Liz may only have been an occasional prostitute. This was certainly the view of Thomas Bates, the watchman at No. 32. ‘Lor’ bless you,’ he told one reporter, ‘when she could get no work she had to do the best she could for her living, but a neater and a cleaner woman never lived!’ Kidney gave her money and she sometimes earned a little by sewing or charring. Elizabeth Tanner saw her frequently during the last three months. ‘She told me,’ Mrs Tanner deposed at the inquest, ‘that she was at work among the Jews.’ If all else failed Elizabeth could and did throw herself upon the charity of the Swedish Church. We know from its records that she applied for and received financial assistance from them on 20 and 23 May 1886 and on 15 and 20 September 1888.

The movements of Elizabeth Stride during the week before her death are obscure. Catherine Lane said that she turned up at 32 Flower and Dean Street on Thursday, 27 September, saying that she had had words with the man she had been living with. The man, Michael Kidney, told a different story. He said that he had last seen Elizabeth in Commercial Street on the Tuesday. At that time they were on friendly terms and when he got home after work he fully expected her to be there. But although she had been home she had gone out again and returned but once – in his absence the next day – to collect a few belongings. This story of a sudden and unexplained departure does not ring true. It is very likely that there was a quarrel. There had been others. In April 1887 Elizabeth had charged Kidney with assault but had then failed to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court to prosecute.
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Kidney was obviously anxious to deny a new argument with his paramour lest he be suspected of her murder but there is little reason to doubt his statement that he did not see her after Tuesday. Mrs Tanner and
Catherine Lane testified that Elizabeth arrived at their lodging house on Thursday. They seem, however, to have been mistaken. Thomas Bates, the watchman, said she arrived on the Tuesday and, besides, we have evidence from a most unexpected witness that Elizabeth was at No. 32 at least as early as Wednesday, 26 September.

Dr Thomas Barnardo, in a letter to the
Times
, said that on that day he had visited No. 32 in order to elicit from the residents their opinions upon a scheme he had devised ‘by which children at all events could be saved from the contamination of the common lodging houses and the streets.’ Talking to them in the kitchen, he found the women and girls ‘thoroughly frightened’ by the recent murders. One poor creature, who had apparently been drinking, cried bitterly: ‘We’re all up to no good, and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next!’ They were prophetic words indeed, for Barnardo later viewed the remains of Elizabeth Stride at the mortuary. ‘I at once recognized her,’ he wrote, ‘as one of those who stood around me in the kitchen of the common lodging house on the occasion of my visit last Wednesday week.’
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According to Mrs Tanner, the deputy, Elizabeth spent the nights of Thursday and Friday at her house. On Saturday morning she cleaned two rooms and Mrs Tanner paid her sixpence. The last time the deputy saw her alive was at about 6.30 on Saturday evening. They drank together at the Queen’s Head in Commercial Street and then walked back to the lodging house. Elizabeth went into the kitchen. Mrs Tanner, who went to another part of the house, did not see her again until she was called upon to identify her body.

At least two lodgers saw Elizabeth in the kitchen between six and seven. Charles Preston, a barber, noticed that she was dressed to go out. She asked him to lend her his clothes brush but he had mislaid it. At that time there was no flower in her jacket. The charwoman Catherine Lane saw Elizabeth leave the kitchen. She remembered that Elizabeth had given her a large piece of green velvet to keep for her until she came back. ‘I know deceased had sixpence when she left,’ said Mrs Lane. ‘She showed it to me, stating that the deputy had given it to her.’

Elizabeth did not say where she was going. Nor did she intimate when she might be back. It is possible that she intended to return to
the lodging house for the night. Admittedly she had not paid Mrs Tanner for a bed on Saturday night but, as Charles Preston pointed out, the lodgers sometimes did not pay their money until just before going to bed.

Inquiries into the background of a murder victim are usually productive of some clue pointing to the identity of the killer. This is because in the majority of cases murderer and victim are known to each other. By the fifth Whitechapel investigation, however, it must have become apparent that this type of information was not going to elucidate this particular series of crimes. Chief Inspector Swanson, writing his summary report on the Stride murder, did not deem what the police had learned about the victim’s past even worthy of recapitulation. ‘It may be shortly stated,’ he noted gloomily, ‘that the inquiry into her history did not disclose the slightest pretext for a motive on behalf of friends or associates or anybody who had known her.’
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The post-mortem examination commenced on 1 October at St George’s Mortuary.
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In several respects public criticism during and after the Chapman inquiry seems to have forced the police to sharpen up their procedures. Medical men, for example, had lamented the lack of a second medical opinion at the inquiry. It is perhaps significant then that two surgeons – Phillips and Blackwell – conducted the autopsy upon the body of Elizabeth Stride. Blackwell consented to perform the dissection while Phillips took notes. For part of the time Dr Reigate and Blackwell’s assistant, Edward Johnston, were also present. In this case, too, the body was stripped by the doctors themselves.

They found a long gash in Stride’s throat. Dr Phillips described it for the benefit of the inquest on 3 October:

There were no other cuts, no signs of gagging, no marks about the head and neck to indicate strangulation. An abrasion that Phillips at first thought he could detect on the right side of the neck, below the angle of the jaw, proved to be nothing of the kind. When it was washed the mark disappeared and the skin was found to be uninjured. There were, however, bluish discolourations over both shoulders. They were under the collar-bones and in front of the chest. These were neither bruises nor abrasions but pressure marks, apparently caused by the pressure of two hands upon the shoulders. One point will be of some interest to us later on. The lower lobe of the left ear was torn, as if by the forcible removal or wearing through of an ear-ring, but this was an old wound, now thoroughly healed.

The doctor agreed that the cause of death had been haemorrhage resulting from the partial severance of the left carotid artery and the division of the windpipe.

We have a few comments from Dr Blackwell on the murderer’s technique. On the day of the crime he told the press that ‘it does not follow that the murderer would be bespattered with blood, for as he is sufficiently cunning in other things he could contrive to avoid coming in contact with the blood by reaching well forward.’ Two days later he told the inquest that he thought the killer had probably caught hold of Stride’s silk scarf, which was found tight and knotted, and had pulled her backwards before cutting her throat. The throat had not been cut while she was standing up: ‘the throat might have been cut as she was falling, or when she was on the ground. The blood would have spurted about if the act had been committed while she was standing up.’

On 5 October Dr Phillips gave the inquiry his reconstruction of
what had occurred. It was his contention that the murderer had seized his victim by the shoulders and placed her on the ground. From a position on her right side he had then cut her throat from left to right. This injury might have been inflicted in just two seconds. The murderer would not necessarily have been bloodstained because ‘the commencement of the wound and the injury to the vessels would be away from him, and the stream of blood – for stream it was – would be directed away from him, and towards the gutter in the yard.’

A single incision in the neck provided little basis, of course, for pronouncements upon the degree of anatomical knowledge displayed by the killer. But both doctors seem to have believed at least that he knew what he was doing. Interviewed by the press, Blackwell spoke of a man ‘who is accustomed to use a heavy knife.’ And the injury to the left carotid artery prompted Phillips to remark at the inquest that ‘in this case, as in some others, there seems to have been some knowledge where to cut the throat to cause a fatal result.’

The doctors also gave evidence relating to a knife that had been found on a doorstep in Whitechapel Road on Monday morning. It was the type of instrument commonly used in chandler shops and known as a slicing knife. The blade was long – perhaps nine or ten inches – and rounded at the tip. Blackwell and Phillips agreed that although the knife could conceivably have inflicted the injury to Elizabeth Stride it was most unlikely to have been the murder weapon. ‘It appears to me,’ Blackwell told the coroner, ‘that a murderer, in using a round-pointed instrument, would seriously handicap himself, as he would be only able to use it in one particular way.’ Phillips conceded that there was nothing to indicate that the killer had employed a sharp-pointed weapon. But, taking into account the relative positions of the murderer, the victim and the incision, he considered it improbable that such a long-bladed knife as that found in Whitechapel Road had been used. In his opinion a short knife, like a shoemaker’s well ground down, could have made the cut.

By contrast with the previous murders the killing of Elizabeth Stride produced a bumper crop of witnesses who claimed to have seen the victim in company with a man shortly before her death. Two of them, PC William Smith 452H and Israel Schwartz, came forward with what appeared to be vital information.

PC Smith’s beat, a long, circular one that took him 25-30 minutes to patrol, embraced Berner Street. He was there at 12.30 or 12.35 on the morning of the murder and passed a man and a woman standing talking on the pavement, a few yards away from where the body was later discovered but on the opposite side of the street. The woman was wearing a red rose in her coat. PC Smith saw her face and subsequently identified the body as that of the same woman. The man was about five feet seven or eight inches tall and had a ‘respectable’ appearance. Smith did not take much notice of his face. However, he later described him as about twenty-eight years old, of dark complexion, with a small dark moustache. He wore a hard felt deerstalker hat of dark colour, a white collar and tie, and a black diagonal cutaway coat, and he carried in one hand a parcel wrapped up in newspaper. It was about eighteen inches long and six to eight inches broad. Both the man and the woman appeared to be sober but the constable did not overhear any of their conversation.
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