Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen Read online

  covered from head to foot with blood. Some of these traces must have remained when he reached his house or his lodgings. Yet no one came forward to voice the suspicions which such a spectacle must have aroused. Proof positive to my mind that the Ripper was shielded by someone.

  Dew had no qualms about admitting that neither he nor the rest of the police force had any real idea about the identity of Jack the Ripper. He admitted that ‘Jack the Ripper remained as mythical as ever so far as the police were concerned. The only certain evidence of his existence was his fearful crimes.’

  Several suspects were arrested after the glut at Miller’s Court. A Swedish traveller named Nikaner Benelius was arrested after entering a house in Mile End for no apparent reason. He just grinned at the inhabitant, Harriet Rowe, who alerted a constable who promptly arrested the Swede. Benelius had previously been arrested in connection with the murder of Elizabeth Stride, but subsequently released. The Swede had remained living in the area, staying in a German lodging house despite having no obvious means of subsistence. Dew told the Worship Street police court that Benelius ‘had been arrested under circumstances which made it desirable to have the fullest inquiries made as to him’. Although Benelius’s innocence was established it was thought that the erratic Swede was ‘likely to be arrested every time the public attention is strained to the point of suspecting every man of odd behaviour’.

  That the police, and Dew in particular, were still no wiser about the identity of Jack the Ripper was demonstrated at the trial of the great silk robbers at the Old Bailey in January 1889. The great silk robbers were responsible for the theft of vast quantities of precious material and goods in the East End of London at the time of the Whitechapel murders. The robbers were eventually caught after an undercover operation led by Inspector Reid. At the trial one of the robbers, Harry Fife, gave an unusual alibi for the night of one of the robberies – he had been at Commercial Street Police Station accusing a man of being Jack the Ripper.

  This was indeed the case. The suspect had acted suspiciously in Fife’s coffee shop, and was taken to the police station. He was eventually released, the police believing he was suffering from some form of ‘religious mania’. Dew suspected at the time that this man was Jack the Ripper, for Thomas Stacey (who shared the ‘Squibby’ adventure with Dew) testified that ‘he was charged with behaving in such a manner that Dew thought he might be the Whitechapel murderer’.1

  As ever, the Ripper had ‘[run] the gauntlet successfully, and escaped’. However, despite subsequent murders of prostitutes in the East End, Dew firmly believed that the murder of Mary Kelly was the last to be committed by Jack the Ripper. The ‘graduating ferocity’ of the murders had surely culminated with the Miller’s Court murder, and now ‘even the seemingly insatiable monster was satisfied. He came no more.’

  While Dew was satisfied that, for whatever reason, the Ripper scare was now over, not everyone else was. There were to be several more unsolved murders of prostitutes in the East End of London, but Dew had by now been transferred to F Division, Paddington, and promoted to the rank of detective sergeant, and took no part in the investigations. On 20 December 1888 Rose Mylett, a prostitute who had left Whitechapel when the Ripper murders began, was found dead in Poplar High Street at 4 a.m. The case was to cause some confusion.

  The police surgeon who initially examined the body thought that Mylett had been murdered, although there was no sign of a struggle and Mylett’s features were placid. The doctor suggested that the marks around her neck were caused by strangulation with a cord, even though there was no abrasion to the skin around Mylett’s neck. After a further medical examination suggested that Mylett had been strangled, Commissioner Monro was in no doubt that ‘the case was one of murder – and murder of a strange and unusual type … How this murder could have been carried out, without a sign of the ground being disturbed by the struggles of the victim, or of her murderer, I confess is very difficult to understand.’

  Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson examined the body for himself at the mortuary and ‘came to the conclusion that the death had not been caused by homicidal violence’. He thought Mylett had died by accidental strangulation while drunk. As far as Dew was concerned, the death of Rose Mylett ‘needlessly revived’ the panic in the East End of London. The only resemblance to the other murders was that the victim was a prostitute.

  A seemingly more likely candidate for a Jack the Ripper victim was Alice McKenzie, who was found at 12.50 a.m. on 17 July 1889, in Castle Alley. She had been fatally stabbed in the neck, and her exposed abdomen had been scored with a zig-zag-shaped cut, probably after death had occurred. Commissioner Monro and Dr Bond were convinced that McKenzie was a victim of Jack the Ripper. Dew was sure she was not. Dew argued his case forcibly, as he had done when he had attempted to make a case for Emma Smith being a Ripper victim. This was the crux of Dew’s case.

  The trouble was that people’s minds were so dominated by Jack the Ripper thoughts and fears, that they sought to fasten upon him every murder no matter how, where or when it was committed.

  Many diabolical murders were committed in the Whitechapel district after the Miller’s Court drama. Several of these are still ascribed to the Ripper. People seem to forget that there were plenty of similar crimes in Whitechapel long before Jack the Ripper was ever heard of.

  There were similarities with the previous murders, and Dew admitted that Castle Alley was ‘just such a place as Jack the Ripper himself might have chosen’. The lack of mutilation could be explained by the suggestion that the killer was disturbed before he could inflict any.

  Dew countered these arguments with his interpretation of the fact that a highly polished farthing had been found under McKenzie’s body. Dew thought that McKenzie’s killer had tried to trick her by offering her the polished farthing, passing it off as a half-sovereign in the poor light:

  This was probably the true explanation, for another woman came forward to say that the offer of a similar coin had been made to her, but she had discovered the trick and had run away. Her description of the man was ‘a dark foreigner, speaking good English’.

  Jack the Ripper had never been in the habit of decoying his victims with bright farthings. Nor had he ever made the mistake of allowing one of his intended victims to escape.

  To conclude his argument, Dew dismissed the similarity of the elusiveness of the Ripper to McKenzie’s killer: ‘It is true that this murderer succeeded in getting away, but so have many others.’

  Dew did not even mention the next Whitechapel murder, disclosed by the discovery of a woman’s torso in Pinchin Street on 10 September 1889. The woman had been killed and cut up elsewhere, before the remains were deposited in Pinchin Street. Dew had dismissed a similar case, when a woman’s torso was found on 2 October 1888, when New Scotland Yard was being built.

  The last Whitechapel murder was that of Frances Coles, whose throat was cut on 13 February 1891 at Swallow Gardens. Dew saw similarities with the McKenzie case, as again ‘there was disarrangement of the clothing without mutilation, and again those who attributed the crime to the Ripper argued that he must have been disturbed’. This did not convince Dew.

  There was great excitement. Ripper panic was revived. My view is that this was a false alarm. There was a tendency – and a natural enough tendency – for years for any violent murder which was not followed by a conviction to be laid at the Ripper’s door.

  A seaman named James Thomas Sadler had been seen in Coles’ company on the night she was murdered. He was arrested the next day and questioned. It appeared that the police initially believed, or at the very least hoped, that Sadler and Jack the Ripper were one and the same. Efforts were made to establish his whereabouts on the nights of other Whitechapel murders. These proved that he had been at sea at the time of several of them.

  A witness provided Sadler with an alibi for the time of the Coles murder, and he was subsequently released. After his release Sadler stayed in the East End for a time, b
efore reportedly taking to gun-running in South America.2

  6

  Theories and Suspects

  I saw so much that was uncanny during the reign of Ripper terror that it would be in keeping with the whole case were the most unlikely solution to be the correct one.

  Walter Dew

  The police had failed to catch Jack the Ripper, but several senior police officers named suspects who, to their minds, might have been the Whitechapel murderer. In February 1894 Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten named three police suspects in response to a series of articles in the Sun newspaper which suggested the Ripper was an incarcerated lunatic named Thomas Cutbush. Macnaghten dismissed Cutbush as a viable Ripper suspect, adding that the Ripper had only five victims: Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly. Macnaghten noted the cases ‘of 3 men, any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush to have committed this series of murders’:

  1. Montague John Druitt, a 31-year-old barrister and school teacher whose body was found in the Thames on 31 December 1888. Macnaghten said he was ‘sexually insane and from private inf. I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer’. Druitt was dismissed from his teaching post in late November 1888 after getting into unspecified ‘serious trouble’ there, but carried on working as a barrister until shortly before his untimely death. He was the son of a surgeon, and his mother was in an asylum at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Other members of his family had committed suicide. In a suicide note Druitt wrote, ‘Since Friday I have felt as if I was going to be like mother.’

  2. Kosminski, a Polish Jew from Whitechapel who ‘had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889’. Macnaghten added there were many circumstances which made Kosminski a strong suspect. There was an Aaron Kosminski who was sent to Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in February 1891, before being transferred to Leavesden Asylum for imbeciles in 1894, where he eventually died in 1919.

  3. Michael Ostrog, a habitual criminal who had frequently been incarcerated in prisons and asylums. At the height of the Ripper murders, the Police Gazette reported that ‘[s]pecial attention is called to this dangerous man’. Macnaghten said that Ostrog ‘was said to have been habitually cruel to women, & for a long time was known to have carried about with him surgical knives & other instruments’. It has since been established that Ostrog was in prison in Paris at the time of the Whitechapel murders.1

  Dr Robert Anderson also had a Polish Jewish suspect, the same Kosminski named by Macnaghten, although Anderson did not name him. In 1895 Anderson had ‘a perfectly plausible theory that Jack the Ripper was a homicidal maniac, temporarily at large, whose hideous career was cut short by committal to an asylum’. When Anderson’s memoirs were published in 1910, he added

  that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type; that he was living in the immediate vicinity of the scenes of the murders; and that, if he was not living absolutely alone, his people knew of his guilt, and refused to give him up to justice. And the conclusion we came to was that he and his people were certain low-class Polish Jews; for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to gentile justice.

  Having regard to the interest attaching to this case, I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer and of the pressmen who wrote the letter above referred to. But no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer. I will merely add the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.

  Chief Inspector Littlechild named Dr Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American quack doctor, in a private letter to the journalist George R. Sims. Littlechild considered Tumblety a ‘very likely’ suspect. Tumblety was arrested in London for gross indecency on 7 November 1888, but jumped bail and fled to France, before returning to America where he died in 1903. American newspapers featured Tumblety heavily in November and December 1888, but he does not appear to have been mentioned by name in the English press at the time.

  The City of London Police also had a suspect they took seriously. He was a man who worked in Butcher’s Row, Aldgate, and was kept under careful observation. Although not named, he was described physically as being ‘about five feet six inches in height, with short, black, curly hair, and he had a habit of taking late walks abroad. He occupied several shops in the East End, but from time to time he became insane, and was forced to spend a portion of his time in an asylum in Surrey.’ As was always the case, ‘not the slightest scrap of evidence could be found to connect him with the crimes’.

  Dew does not appear ever to have mentioned any of these suspects (and it is not clear whether he had heard of them in 1888). He admitted of the investigation that ‘failure it certainly was, but I have never regarded it other than an honourable failure’. Despite this, Dew had no qualms about addressing the question ‘Who was Jack the Ripper?’ While he could not answer that question, Dew sometimes discussed his views on the type of man he thought Jack the Ripper was, but as he explained, ‘I was closely associated with the murders. Yet I hesitate to express a definite opinion as to who or what the man may have been.’

  Dew was not alone in admitting defeat. In his retirement, Detective Inspector Edmund Reid said, ‘I challenge anyone to prove that there was a tittle of evidence against any man, woman or child in connexion with the Ripper murders.’2 Upon his retirement in 1893, Superintendent Arnold confessed that he had wanted to retire earlier but had ‘remained a few years in the hope of solving the mystery. Anyhow, they all did their best and no-one could do any more.’3

  Writing in his retirement in the seaside town of Worthing, Sussex, Dew first expressed his puzzlement at how the Ripper managed to gain the confidence of his victims, who were, after all, only too aware that they were likely targets of the Red Terror. Dew speculated that the explanation could have been ‘that the man in appearance and conduct was entirely different from the popular conception of him’. That perception was that ‘in their midst stalked a human devil who could pass noiselessly among them and murder at will’. Dew elaborated his theory:

  Is it not feasible that there was something about him which placed him above suspicion?

  Let us assume for a moment he was a man of prominence and good repute locally. Against such a man, in the absence of direct evidence, it is too much to expect that local police officers would hold such a terrible suspicion.

  And, assuming this to be the case, the man’s amazing immunity can be the more readily explained. The same qualities which silenced the suspicions of his women victims would keep him right with the police officers who knew and respected him.

  I am not putting this forward as anything more than a reasonable deduction from the facts as they are known. It is merely one of the many possibilities, though, I must say, far more likely than some of the wild theories that have been advanced.

  I cannot conceive any woman at that time accompanying any man of whom she entertained the slightest suspicion into that dark and dismal court off Berners [sic] Street into which Mr Diemshitz [sic] drove his pony and cart just a few minutes too late.

  That was the closest Dew would ever come to offering an identification of Jack the Ripper. He speculated on the Whitechapel murderer’s state of mind, and on this subject he was more confident. Dew said that ‘one of the strongest inferences to be deduced from the crimes was that the man we were hunting was probably a sexual maniac. This angle of investigation was pursued relentlessly.’

  Another angle of investigation was that the Ripper was insane. Dew recalled that ‘[i]nquiries were made at asylums all over the country, including the Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Broadmoor, with the object of discovering whether a homicidal lunatic had been released as cured about the time the Ripper crimes commenced.’ But, as ever, ‘
No useful evidence was obtained.’

  Despite this, Dew was convinced that Jack the Ripper ‘at times must have been quite mad. There can be no other explanation of those wicked mutilations. It may have been sex mania, blood lust, or some other form of insanity, but madness there certainly was.’ However, even if this was the case it was of no help to Dew, who also thought that ‘it is quite possible that Jack the Ripper was quite sane at all other times. There have been plenty of instances of this. Seemingly clever, cultured and normal people can be found in any lunatic asylum – even in Broadmoor – but they are none the less dangerous for that.’

  Dew did not accept the theory that the Ripper committed his murders during periods of insanity, forgetting all about them the following morning:

  There is a big stumbling block to the acceptance of this theory. It is that the man who committed the Whitechapel murders had with him when he met his victims the weapon – and no ordinary weapon – with which the deeds were done. This surely suggests premeditation and indicates when he set out on his evil excursions it was with deliberate intent.

  The fact that the Ripper always worked in the same area, and chose prostitutes as his victims, also indicated to Dew that there was method behind his actions. Why the Ripper murdered prostitutes was a mystery to Dew. For him it was ‘one of the questions which will now never be answered’.

  Even in Dew’s lifetime the theories about the identity of Jack the Ripper were legion, but Dew was not dismissive of the armchair theorists:

  Far be it from me to ridicule the most improbable of them. I saw so much that was uncanny during the reign of Ripper terror that it would be in keeping with the whole case were the most unlikely solution to be the correct one.

  He may have been a doctor. He may have been a medical student. He may have been a foreigner. He may even have been a slaughterman, and so on.