Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen Read online

  Its destruction was certainly unfortunate. We could not afford to lose even the slenderest of clues. But I doubt if it made a lot of difference anyway. There was no reason, so far as I can see, why this particular message should have proved more useful than many others which Jack the Ripper was supposed to have written.

  As I have said before, it is questionable whether these messages were the work of the murderer at all. Why should he fool around chalking things on walls when his life was imperilled by every minute he loitered?

  Murderers do foolish things, I know, but such an action does not fit into the mental picture I have formed of the character of Jack the Ripper.

  The efforts of the Metropolitan Police to catch the killer of Elizabeth Stride were colossal. The members of the International Working Men’s Club were immediately searched, their clothes examined and statements taken. Some 80,000 leaflets appealing for information were distributed, in addition to house-to-house enquiries. The local common lodging houses were visited and 2,000 lodgers searched. Eighty people were detained at police stations, and enquiries were made into the movements of around 300 more. An odd assortment of suspects was added to the seventy-six butchers and slaughtermen who were questioned. These were a band of Greek gypsies, three cowboys from a travelling Wild West show, and three insane medical students. The Thames police joined in the hunt, questioning sailors on board ships at the docks and on the River Thames.

  Two possible leads emerged. Matthew Packer, an elderly Berner Street fruit seller, had identified the body of Elizabeth Stride at the mortuary as the woman who had been in his shop with a man shortly before she was found murdered. Dew was excited by this possible clue, which ‘for a time, raised the hopes of us all’. Packer was interviewed and said that the man with Stride was between twenty-five and thirty years old, and 5ft 7in tall. He had broad shoulders and a rough voice, and wore a long black coat and a soft felt hat. The man bought Stride half a pound of black grapes before they left the shop, and headed in the direction of the socialist club.

  Dew was dismayed when, a few days after the murder of Stride, Packer saw the man again pass by his shop. Packer did not give chase or look for a policeman, and the man was lost. Dew described it as ‘the most maddening incident of the whole Ripper mystery’. Dew asked the question:

  But was he Jack the Ripper? This is a question none can now answer. One can, however, ask how it came about that a man, who had shown himself to be a master of cunning, should have fallen into the elementary error of risking recognition by passing so soon again along that street and exposing himself to the view of a man whom he must have known linked him with one of his crimes.

  It might also be asked why, on that occasion, the Ripper should have departed so far from custom as to purchase fruit for one of his intended victims?

  Although it has never been seriously suggested that the Berners [sic] Street murder was not a Ripper crime. I confess I am puzzled. Frankly, I cannot reconcile the buying of those grapes in the company of the woman he was about to kill, and his reappearance a few days later in the same street, with the undoubted cleverness of the Ripper.

  At that I must leave it, with the comment that if the shopkeeper was right in his second identification it was about the worst piece of luck the police could possibly have had. This was not the only bad luck we had. I used to feel at times that the fates were conspiring against us and doing everything to assist the man behind the problem which was daily deepening in horrifying mystery.

  There had been another sighting of Stride just before she died. A man named Israel Schwartz was in Berner Street around 12.45 a.m. He saw a man stop and speak to a woman who was standing in the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard. The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned her round and threw her down to the ground. The woman screamed three times, but not loudly. Schwartz described the man as being thirty years of age, 5ft 5in, with fair hair, a small dark moustache, a full face and broad shoulders.

  The City Police also found a witness, this time in connection with the Eddowes murder. Just after 1.30 a.m., commercial traveller Joseph Lawende saw a woman he later identified from her clothes as Eddowes. He saw her in Church Passage, which led to Mitre Square. She was facing a man slightly taller than herself, but Lawende said, ‘I doubt whether I should know him again.’

  Both Metropolitan and City Police forces were being inundated with letters claiming to have been written by the Ripper. One of the most significant was again forwarded by Tom Bulling of the Central News Agency to the police. The Agency had received it on 1 October. It ran thus:

  I wasn’t codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. You’ll hear about saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. Had no time to get ears for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

  Jack the Ripper.

  The most disturbing communication received throughout the Whitechapel murders was a packet sent to the chairman of the East End Vigilance Committee, George Lusk. On 16 October Lusk opened the package containing a letter and half a kidney. The note read:

  From hell

  Mr Lusk

  Sir

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you. tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

  signed Catch me when you can

  Mishter Lusk

  Lusk took the kidney to the London Hospital, where Dr Openshaw examined it before declaring it came from an adult human.

  The public’s alarm continued unabated. Dew observed that:

  Panic became more widespread. Rumours became wilder. We worked harder than ever, but except for the fearful evidences of his coming the Ripper remained as phantom-like as ever.

  4

  13 Miller’s Court

  The most gruesome memory of my police career.

  Walter Dew

  Over a month passed, but there were no more murders. Commissioner Sir Charles Warren had resigned his position on 8 November due to disagreements with the Home Office and Home Secretary Henry Matthews. Despite press assertions that his resignation was forced by the Metropolitan Police’s failure to catch the Ripper, it seems that Warren would have resigned then and there regardless of the Whitechapel murders. In a private letter to Sir Edwin Chadwick written on 19 November 1888, Warren confided to the sanitary reformer, ‘I should not have resigned had I felt I could do my duty in face of the difficulties so constantly placed in my way by Mr Matthews. Mr Matthews’ statements in the House about my actions are most untrue; but the public do not want to know the truth, they only want to sacrifice someone.’1 Warren was replaced by James Monro, a former Assistant Commissioner of the CID. Dew supported his former chief, and thought the torrent of newspaper criticisms of Warren were undeserved.

  The all-too-brief hiatus was shattered on 9 November when Thomas Bowyer was sent by his employer John McCarthy to collect the rent from Irish prostitute Mary Jane Kelly, who rented a room from McCarthy at 13 Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street. Bowyer knocked on the door of No. 13 at 10.45 a.m. There was no answer. Looking through the room’s window, Bowyer saw the hideously mutilated corpse of Mary Kelly lying on the bed. He rushed back to tell McCarthy, who saw the terrible scene himself before sending Bowyer to Commercial Street police station. Inspector Walter Beck was on duty, and was chatting with Dew when Bowyer burst into the station with his terrible news.

  ‘Come along, Dew’, said Beck. Bowyer led them to Miller’s Court, collecting any available police officers on the way. Dew takes up the story:

  The youth led us a few yards down Dorset Street from Commercial Street, until we came to a court approached by an arched passage, three feet wide and unlighted, in which there were two entrances to houses which fronted on Dorset Street. The place was known as Miller’s Court.

  Leaving the constables to block Dorset Street and to prevent anyone from leaving th
e court itself, Inspector Beck and I proceeded through the narrow archway into what might be described as a small square. It was a cul-de-sac, flanked on all four sides by a few mean houses.

  The house on the left of the passage was kept by McCarthy as a chandler’s shop, while one room of the houses on the right was rented by a girl named Marie Kelly.

  The room was pointed out to me. I tried the door. It would not yield. So I moved to the window, over which, on the inside, an old coat was hanging to act as a curtain and to block the draught from the hole in the glass.

  It was Inspector Beck who first pushed the coat aside and peered into the little room. ‘For God’s sake, Dew’, he cried, ‘Don’t look.’ But Dew did look. What he saw was described by Dr Thomas Bond, who examined the body in situ after the door had been broken down:

  The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs were removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.

  The viscera were found in various parts viz; the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side & the spleen by the left side of the body.

  The flaps removed from the abdomen & thighs were on a table.

  The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, & on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about 2 feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed & in line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.

  If the sight of this was not bad enough, Dew suffered further by slipping and falling ‘on the awfulness of that floor’. Dew’s own description of the room revealed more of its dreadful contents:

  I followed the others into the room. The sight that confronted us was indescribable, infinitely more horrifying than what I had seen when peeping through the broken pane of glass into the room’s semi-darkness.

  I had seen most of the other remains. They were sickening enough in all conscience. But none of the others approached for bestial brutality the treatment of the body of poor Marie Kelly, whom I had known well by sight as a pretty, buxom girl.

  The effect on me as I entered that room was as if someone had given me a tremendous blow in the stomach. Never in my life have I funked a police duty so much as I funked this one.

  Whatever the state of the killer’s mind when he committed the other murders, there cannot be the slightest doubt that in that room in Miller’s Court he became a frenzied, raving madman.

  Dew always referred to the latest victim Mary Kelly as Marie Kelly, as had the unfortunate prostitute in her lifetime. The murder seemingly had a greater effect on him than any of the other Whitechapel murders. In addition to the frightful mutilations she suffered, there was also the fact that Dew knew her ‘quite well by sight. Often I had seen her parading along Commercial Street, between Flower-and-Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road.’ The shocked detective said, ‘No savage could have been more barbaric. No wild animal could have done anything so horrifying.’ Decades later Dew could still not forget the horrors of 13 Miller’s Court and ‘the old nausea, indignation and horror overwhelm me still. Yet my mental picture of it remains as shockingly clear as though it were but yesterday.’

  Kelly’s eyes were, by Dew’s recollection ‘wide open, and seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror’. The archaic belief that the retina retained the image of the last thing a person had seen led to the police taking the unusual step of photographing Kelly’s eyes. Dew described the event:

  I do not for a moment think that the police ever seriously expected the photograph of the murderer to materialise, but it was decided to try the experiment.

  Several photographs of the eyes were taken by expert photographers with the latest type of cameras.

  The result was negative … the very fact that this forlorn hope was tried shows that the police, in their eagerness to catch the murderer, were ready to follow any clue and to adopt any suggestion, even at the risk of being made to look absurd.

  Opposite: Plan showing the locations of the Whitechapel murders from Emma Smith to Mary Kelly. The original caption reads: ‘PLAN OF THE LOCALITY IN WHICH THE SEVEN WOMEN HAVE BEEN MURDERED SINCE APRIL LAST. THE PRECISE SPOT WHERE EACH CRIME WAS COMMITTED IS INDICATED BY A DAGGER AND A FIGURE. 1. April 3.—Emma Elizabeth Smith, 45, had a stake or iron instrument thrust through her body, near Osborn-street, Whitechapel. 2. August 7.—Martha Tabram, 35, stabbed in thirty-nine places, at George Yard-buildings, Commercial-street, Spitalfields. 3. August 31.—Mary Ann Nicholls, 47, her throat cut and body mutilated, in Buck’s-row, Whitechapel.

  4. September 8.—Annie Chapman, 47, her throat cut and body mutilated, in Hanbury-street, Spitalfields. 5. September 30.—Elizabeth Stride (or Watson), discovered with her throat cut, in Berner-street, Whitechapel. 6. September 30.—Catherine Eldowes, 43, found with her throat cut and body mutilated in Mitre-square, Aldgate.

  7. November 9.—Mary Jane Kelly, 25, found with her throat cut and dreadfully mutilated in a house in a court off Dorset-street, Spitalfields. (The People)

  Dew again commented on the photographing of Kelly’s eyes in a letter to a newspaper in the 1940s:

  As perhaps the only police officer alive who assisted in inquiries throughout the series of ‘Jack the Ripper murders,’ I still retain the awful memory of seeing each of the victims [in his autobiography Dew said he had not seen all of the victims].

  I was the first officer on the scene at Millers-court. What a fearful shock when I peeped through a window in that small back room!

  It was suggested that the mutilations showed evidence of medical skill. I have always maintained that this was not so.

  The poor girl Kelly was cut to ribbons as if a raging lunatic had been let loose with a knife. I have always considered that was the last murder committed by Jack the Ripper.

  With regard to photographing the retina of the eye to see if it retained the picture of the murderer, Sir Charles Warren, the then Commissioner, visited Millers-court soon after we had the door opened, and at once had the girl’s eyes photographed, in my presence, but, of course, without result.2

  Dew was consistent in his assertions that Kelly was the last Ripper victim, and that the Ripper possessed no medical skill. However, there was another lapse of memory, perhaps more forgivable over fifty years after the event. Charles Warren had not gone to Miller’s Court.

  Two witnesses provided information which for a while raised hope. On the night of the murder another prostitute who lived in Miller’s Court, Mary Ann Cox, said she saw Mary Kelly at around 11.45 p.m. returning home with a man who Cox described as being about thirty-six years of age, around 5ft 5in tall, with a fresh complexion with a blotchy face, and a thick carroty moustache. Dew thought that this man was Jack the Ripper:

  In spite of contradictory evidence which came to light later, and in spite of a departure from his method of swift and sudden attack, I think he was, always providing Mary Cox was correct in what she said.

  Another witness named George Hutchinson, who was acquainted with Kelly, later said that he had seen her on the night of her murder at about 2 a.m. going towards Thrawl Street. Hutchinson said he had seen a man approaching from the other direction carrying a small parcel in his left hand. Kelly and the man spoke and went off towards Miller’s Court. Hutchinson described the man as being between thirty-four and thirty-five, 5ft 6in, with a pale complexion, dark eyes and hair, and a curled moustache. He looked Jewish and surly. Hutchinson said he could identify the man if he saw him again. Dew thought Kelly had died sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. This meant that he thought George Hutchinson was mistaken in his sighting of Kelly.

  A further witness claimed to have seen and spoken to Mary Kelly at the much later time of 8.30 a.m. on 9 November, later than the medical evidence woul
d indicate that Kelly was still alive. The witness was Caroline Maxwell, the wife of a lodging house deputy who lived in Dorset Street.

  Dew could offer no explanation for Maxwell’s story, which she had told the coroner’s inquest ‘with conviction’. Dew did not believe Maxwell to be a sensation seeker. She seemed ‘a sane and sensible woman, and her reputation was excellent’. While Maxwell’s alleged sighting was of Kelly throwing up the morning after she had been seen drunk by Cox, Dew could not reconcile the late hour of her sighting, and concluded:

  Indeed, if the medical evidence is accepted, Mrs. Maxwell could not have been right. The doctors were unable, because of the terrible mutilations, to say with any certainty just when death took place, but they were very emphatic that the girl could not have been alive at eight o’clock that morning.

  And if Mrs. Maxwell was mistaken, is it not probable that George Hutchinson erred also? This, without reflecting in any way on either witness, is my considered view. I believe that the man of the billycock hat and beard was the last person to enter Marie Kelly’s room that night and was her killer. Always assuming that Mrs. Cox ever had seen her with a man.

  But nothing came of these potential leads. A pardon was offered to any accomplice of Mary Kelly’s murderer who was not directly involved in the murder if their information led to the arrest and conviction of the killer. This was seen as something of an admission of defeat by some – but not to Dew, whose opinion was that ‘the step was taken after careful consideration with the definite object of securing vital information which the police were convinced existed. The effort failed, like all the others, but it was none the less commendable for that.’

  5

  Other Whitechapel Murders

  I have never been satisfied that they were the handiwork of the demon Jack.

  Walter Dew

  The murder of Mary Kelly convinced Dew that Jack the Ripper was ‘being shielded’. He reached this conclusion after viewing the state of 13 Miller’s Court. Dew could not imagine that Kelly’s murderer could have left the room without being