Complete History of Jack the Ripper (45 page)

In the case of Annie Chapman the murderer had removed the womb intact but in that of Kate Eddowes a stump of about three quarters of an inch had been left in the body. Despite this, Dr Brown concluded that Kate’s killer, too, must have possessed both anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. He based his case primarily upon the careful extraction of the left kidney: ‘I should say that someone who knew the position of the kidney must have done it . . . I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them . . . It required a great deal of knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed. Such a knowledge might be possessed by someone in the habit of cutting up animals.’
¹⁵
According to a press version of his testimony, Brown explained to the court that the removal of the kidney would have required ‘a good deal of knowledge as to its position, because it is apt to be overlooked, being covered by a membrane.’
¹⁶

It is worth reiterating – given some of the eccentric interpretations of Brown’s evidence put about in recent years – that the doctor attributed surgical skill as well as anatomical knowledge to the killer. His references to the left kidney being ‘carefully taken out and removed’ and to the murderer possessing knowledge of the position of the organs and of ‘the way of removing them’ demonstrate this. The
point is more explicitly made in some of the newspaper transcripts of his deposition. The
Daily Telegraph
quoted him thus: ‘The way in which the kidney was cut out showed that it was done by somebody who knew what he was about.’ And the
Daily News
thus: ‘The left kidney had been carefully taken out in such a manner as to show that it had been done by somebody who not only knew its anatomical position, but knew how to remove it.’ More, in an early interview, Brown told a
Star
reporter that the murderer ‘had some knowledge of how to use a knife.’
¹⁷

Brown did not believe, however, that the
degree
of knowledge and skill displayed would only have been possessed by a medical man. A slaughterman, for example, would have known enough to have inflicted the injuries.

What of the other medicos?

Implicit in Brown’s view was the belief that the murderer had deliberately sought out the kidney. Sequeira and Saunders do not seem to have been so sure. Perhaps they wondered whether he could have come across the organ fortuitously and cut it out without understanding what it was. Anyway, they both told the inquest that they did not think that the killer had had designs on any particular organ and that he did not seem to have been possessed of ‘great anatomical skill.’
¹⁸
The wording is unfortunate because it has led some writers to assert, incorrectly, that these doctors testified to a
total
absence of skill on the part of the killer. In fact, if they were endorsing Brown (and they both explicitly said that they were), they meant that the killer possessed an elementary degree of skill rather than none at all. That this was Sequeira’s intended meaning is confirmed by an interview he gave to the
Star
. He told its reporter that the atrocity had been performed quickly. ‘By an expert, do you think?’ queried the reporter. ‘No, not by an expert,’ explained Sequeira, ‘but by a man who was not altogether ignorant of the use of the knife.’
¹⁹

Dr Phillips made no report to the inquest but his position seems to have been very close to those of Sequeira and Saunders. A report of Chief Inspector Swanson gives us the most detailed précis of Phillips’ view:

In other words, although the murder
might
have been committed by a qualified surgeon the degree of expertise
actually displayed
could also have been possessed by a hunter, butcher, slaughterman or medical student. Phillips saw less evidence of medical expertise in the Eddowes murder than in that of Annie Chapman and for this reason was inclined to the belief that these crimes had been done by different men.
²⁰

While the doctors were thus learning something about Kate’s killer in the post-mortem room the detectives were finding out a little more by knocking on doors. Searches of Mitre Square and neighbourhood lodging houses, launched soon after the discovery of Kate’s body, had availed them nothing. But a house-to-house inquiry in the vicinity of the square turned up two Jews who saw a woman who might have been Kate in the forty-five minutes between her discharge from Bishopsgate Street and the discovery of her body by PC Watkins. Furthermore, the woman was talking to a man, and if she was indeed Kate her companion was almost certainly the murderer.
²¹

The witnesses were Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveller, of 79 Fenchurch Street, and Joseph Hyam Levy, a butcher, of 1 Hutchinson Street, Aldgate. On the evening of Saturday, 29 September, these men, together with Harry Harris, a Jewish furniture dealer, went to the Imperial Club at 16–17 Duke Street. It rained that night so they stayed on there until 1.30 the next morning. Then they prepared to go. At the inquest Lawende said that they left the building at about 1.35. Levy put the time at 1.33 or 1.34.

As they left the club they saw a man and a woman standing at the corner of Church Passage, about fifteen or sixteen feet away. ‘Look there,’ Levy said to Harris, ‘I don’t like going home by myself when I see those characters about.’ But however unsavoury the couple might have appeared there seemed nothing noteworthy about them.
And this, together with the fact that they were standing in a badly lighted spot, may explain why Levy’s recollection of them was so vague: ‘I passed on, taking no further notice of them. The man, I should say, was about three inches taller than the woman. I cannot give any description of either of them.’

Lawende, walking a little apart from his companions, was nearer to the couple. He saw more. The woman was short and wearing a black jacket and bonnet. She stood facing the man, one hand resting upon his chest. Lawende only saw her back. There was no quarrel in progress. Rather the couple appeared to be talking very quietly and Lawende could not hear what was being said.

Lawende saw the man too but the official transcript of his inquest deposition records only that he was taller than the woman and wore a cloth cap with a cloth peak. Press versions of the testimony, however, add the detail that ‘the man looked rather rough and shabby’
²²
and reveal that the full description was suppressed at the request of Henry Crawford, the City Solicitor, who was attending the hearing on behalf of the police. Fortunately this deficiency in the record can be redressed from other sources. Lawende’s description of the man was fully published in the
Police Gazette
of 19 October 1888:

On the same date Chief Inspector Swanson attributed precisely the same details to Lawende in his report on the Stride murder.
²³

Much later some remarkable claims would be made in relation to Lawende’s sighting so it is important here to note that he did not see his suspect well enough to feel confident that he would be able to recognize him again. Our sources make this absolutely clear. On 11 October, only eleven days after the event, Lawende told the inquest: ‘I doubt whether I should know him again.’ At the end of the same month Inspector McWilliam reported to the Home Office that ‘Mr Lewend (sic), who was nearest to the man & woman & saw most of them, says he does not think he
should know the man again.’ On 6 November, also writing for the Home Office, Swanson similarly asserted that ‘the other two [Levy and Harris] took but little notice and state that they could not identify the man or woman, and even Mr Lawende states that he could not identify the man.’ Although Major Smith’s memoirs may recall Lawende’s description inaccurately they also corroborate the commercial traveller’s diffidence: ‘The description of the man given me by the German [Lawende] was as follows: Young, about the middle height, with a small fair moustache, dressed in something like navy serge, and with a deerstalker’s cap – that is, a cap with a peak both fore and aft. I think the German spoke the truth, because I could not “lead” him in any way. “You will easily recognize him, then,” I said. “Oh no!” he replied; “I only had a short look at him.”’
²⁴

Lawende and his friends walked down Duke Street into Aldgate, leaving the couple still talking at the corner of Church Passage.

A weakness of Lawende’s testimony is that he did not see the woman’s face. It is possible that she was not Kate Eddowes although when Lawende was permitted to examine Kate’s clothing at the police station he expressed the opinion that they were identical to those worn by the woman he saw. Church Passage, moreover, led directly into Mitre Square where Kate was found dead just nine minutes after Lawende’s sighting.

Many minor mysteries surround the Eddowes murder. To begin with there are several unanswered questions concerning Kate’s conduct on the day of her death. When John Kelly last saw her, on Saturday afternoon in Houndsditch, he was quite sure that she was destitute and sober, and she gave him to understand that she was going to her daughter’s in King Street, Bermondsey, to see what she could scrounge. Whether she went there or not we do not know but if she did she did not find her daughter because Annie left King Street two years previously without leaving a forwarding address. Where Kate went, who she saw and what she did our sources do not tell. Somewhere, however, she acquired enough money to drink herself into a stupor. More important, we know nothing of Kate’s movements between 1.00 a.m., when she was discharged from Bishopsgate Street, and 1.35 a.m., when she was seen, apparently soliciting, in the entry of Church Passage in Duke Street. She had spent her former earnings on drink and may have been making her way to the casual ward at Mile End. If so she was not averse to
exploiting any opportunity that presented itself along the way to earn a few coppers. Perhaps she aspired to raise sufficient to pay for a bed at Cooney’s or to make her peace with Kelly. ‘I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home,’ she had told PC Hutt.

A yet more intriguing question concerns Kate. The City Police seem to have seriously considered the possibility that her presence in Mitre Square had not been entirely fortuitous, that she had, in fact, kept a pre-arranged appointment there with the man who slew her.
²⁵
The rationale for this view was that since no policeman observed Kate and her killer walking
together
towards Mitre Square – and the City Police were under instructions to keep men and women out together under close surveillance – they may have made their separate ways there as to a pre-arranged rendezvous. Support for such a contention might be read into Kate’s anxiety for an early discharge from the police station and into her insistent inquiry of PC Hutt about the time. More, the appointment theory could tie in neatly with this tantalizing item from the
East London Observer
of 13 October:

This snippet is one of those scraps of evidence that surface occasionally to challenge our conventional view of the Whitechapel killings. But however intriguing, as it stands it is nothing more than a piece of unsupported hearsay. It may even be less than that because the parting exchange alleged between Kate and the casual ward superintendent is so like that between Kate and John Kelly that it is tempting to see the
Observer
’s tale simply as a piece of dishonest reporting drawing upon confused memories of Kelly’s various press statements. That no police officer observed Kate and
her killer wending their way together towards Mitre Square proves nothing. The fact is that they
were
apparently seen – by Lawende in Duke Street – and it is entirely possible that they had just met there. No, at present there is little reason to suppose that the penniless waif who was ‘always singing’ met Jack the Ripper by anything but a desperately unlucky chance.