Whitechapel murders
The Whitechapel murders were committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891. At various points, some or all of these eleven unsolved murders of women have been ascribed to the notorious unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
Most, if not all, of the eleven victims—Emma Elizabeth Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles, and an unidentified woman—were engaged in prostitution. Smith was sexually assaulted and robbed by a gang. Tabram was stabbed 39 times. Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, Kelly, McKenzie, and Coles had their throats cut. Eddowes and Stride were murdered on the same night, within approximately an hour and less than a mile apart; their murders are known as the "double event", after a phrase in a postcard sent to the press by someone claiming to be the Ripper. The bodies of Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly had abdominal mutilations. Mylett was strangled. The body of the unidentified woman had been dismembered and decapitated, but the exact cause of her death is unclear.
The Metropolitan Police, City of London Police, and private organisations such as the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee were actively involved in the search for the perpetrator or perpetrators. Despite extensive enquiries and several arrests, the culprit or culprits evaded capture, and the murders were never solved. The Whitechapel murders drew attention to the poor living conditions in the East End slums, which were subsequently improved. The enduring mystery of who committed the crimes has captured public imagination to the present day.
Background
In the late Victorian era, Whitechapel was considered to be the most notorious criminal rookery in London. The area around Flower and Dean Street was described as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis"; Dorset Street was called "the worst street in London". Assistant Police Commissioner Robert Anderson recommended Whitechapel to "those who take an interest in the dangerous classes" as one of London's prime criminal "show places". Robbery, violence and alcohol dependency were commonplace. The district was characterised by extreme poverty, sub-standard housing, poor sanitation, homelessness, drunkenness and endemic prostitution. These factors were focused in the institution of the 233 common lodging-houses within Whitechapel, in which approximately 8,500 people resided on a nightly basis.The common lodging-houses in and around Whitechapel provided cheap communal lodgings for the desperate, the destitute and the transient, among whom the Whitechapel murder victims were numbered. The nightly price of a single bed was 4d and the cost of sleeping upon a "lean-to" rope stretched across the bedrooms was 2d for adults or children.
All the identified victims of the Whitechapel murders lived within the heart of the rookery in Spitalfields, including three in George Street, two in Dorset Street, two in Flower and Dean Street, and one in Thrawl Street.
Police work and criminal prosecutions at the time relied heavily on confessions, witness testimony, and apprehending perpetrators in the act of committing an offence or in the possession of obvious physical evidence that clearly linked them to a crime. Forensic techniques, such as fingerprint analysis, were not in use, and blood typing had not been invented. Policing in London was—and still is—divided between two forces: the Metropolitan Police with jurisdiction over most of the urban area, and the City of London Police with jurisdiction over about a square mile of the city centre. The Home Secretary, a senior minister of the British government, controlled the Metropolitan Police, whereas the City Police were responsible to the Corporation of London. Beat constables walked regular, timed routes.
Eleven deaths in or near Whitechapel between 1888 and 1891 were gathered into a single file, referred to in the police docket as the "Whitechapel murders". Much of the original material has been stolen, lost, or destroyed.
Victims and investigation
Emma Elizabeth Smith
On Tuesday 3 April 1888, following the Easter Monday bank holiday, 45-year-old prostitute Emma Elizabeth Smith was assaulted and robbed at the junction of Osborn Street and Brick Lane, Whitechapel, in the early hours of the morning. Although injured, she survived the attack and managed to walk back to her lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She told the deputy keeper, Mary Russell, that she had been attacked by two or three men, one of them a teenager. Russell took Smith to the London Hospital, where a medical examination revealed that a blunt object had been inserted into her vagina, rupturing her peritoneum. She developed peritonitis and died at 9:00am the following day.The inquest was conducted on 7 April by the coroner for East Middlesex, Wynne Edwin Baxter, who also conducted inquests on six of the later victims. The local inspector of the Metropolitan Police, Edmund Reid of H Division Whitechapel, investigated the attack, but the culprits were never caught. Walter Dew, a detective constable stationed with H Division, later wrote that he believed Smith to be the first victim of Jack the Ripper, but his colleagues suspected her murder was the work of a criminal gang. Smith claimed that she was attacked by two or three men, but either refused to or could not describe them beyond stating one was a teenager. East End prostitutes were often managed by gangs, and Smith could have been attacked by her pimps as a punishment for disobeying them or as an act of intimidation. She may not have identified her attackers because she feared reprisal. Her murder is considered unlikely to be connected with the later killings.
Martha Tabram
On Tuesday 7 August, following a Monday bank holiday, prostitute Martha Tabram was murdered at about 2:30 am. Her body was found at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel, shortly before 5:00 am. She had been stabbed 39 times about her neck, torso and genitals with a short blade. With one possible exception, all her wounds had been inflicted by a right-handed person.On the basis of statements from a fellow prostitute, and PC Thomas Barrett who was patrolling nearby, Inspector Reid put soldiers at the Tower of London and Wellington Barracks on an identification parade, but without positive results. Police did not connect Tabram's murder with the earlier murder of Emma Smith, but they did connect her death with later murders.
Most experts do not connect Tabram's murder with the others attributed to the Ripper, because she had been repeatedly stabbed, whereas later victims typically suffered slash wounds and abdominal mutilations, but a connection cannot be ruled out.
Mary Ann Nichols
On Friday 31 August, Mary Ann Nichols was murdered in Buck's Row, a back street in Whitechapel. Her body was discovered by cart driver Charles Cross at 3:45 am on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance. Her throat had been slit twice from left to right and her abdomen was mutilated by a deep, jagged wound. Several shallower incisions across the abdomen, and three or four similar cuts on the right side were caused by the same knife used violently and downwards. As the murder occurred in the territory of the J or Bethnal Green Division of the Metropolitan Police, it was at first investigated by the local detectives. On the same day, James Monro resigned as the head of the Criminal Investigation Department over differences with Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren.Initial investigations into the murder had little success, although elements of the press linked it to the two previous murders and suggested the killing might have been perpetrated by a gang, as in the case of Smith. The Star newspaper suggested instead that a single killer was responsible and other newspapers took up their storyline. Suspicions of a serial killer at large in London led to the secondment of Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore and Walter Andrews from the Central Office at Scotland Yard. On the available evidence, Coroner Baxter concluded that Nichols was murdered at just after 3 am where she was found. In his summing up, he dismissed the possibility that her murder was connected with those of Smith and Tabram, as the lethal weapons were different in those cases, and neither of the earlier cases involved a slash to the throat. However, by the time the inquest into Nichols's death had concluded, a fourth woman had been murdered, on which Baxter noted, "The similarity of the injuries in the two cases is considerable."
Annie Chapman
The mutilated body of the fourth woman, Annie Chapman, was discovered at about 6:00 am on Saturday 8 September on the ground near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Chapman had left her lodgings at 2 am on the day she was murdered, with the intention of getting money from a client to pay her rent. Her throat was cut from left to right. She had been disembowelled, and her intestines had been thrown out of her abdomen over each of her shoulders. The morgue examination revealed that part of her uterus was missing. The pathologist, George Bagster Phillips, was of the opinion that the murderer must have possessed anatomical knowledge to have sliced out the reproductive organs in a single movement with a blade about long. The idea that the murderer possessed surgical skill was dismissed by other experts. As the bodies were not examined extensively at the scene, it has also been suggested that the organs were removed by mortuary staff, who took advantage of bodies that had already been opened to extract organs that they could sell as surgical specimens.On 10 September, the police arrested a notorious local called John Pizer, dubbed "Leather Apron", who had a reputation for terrorising local prostitutes. His alibis for the two most recent murders were corroborated, and he was released without charge. At the inquest, one of the witnesses, Mrs Elizabeth Long, testified that she had seen Chapman talking to a man at about 5:30 am just beyond the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, where Chapman was later found. Baxter inferred that the man Mrs Long had seen was the murderer. Mrs Long described him as over forty, a little taller than Chapman, of dark complexion and of foreign, "shabby-genteel" appearance. He was wearing a brown deerstalker hat and a dark overcoat. Another witness, carpenter Albert Cadosch, had entered the neighbouring yard at 27 Hanbury Street at about the same time, and heard voices in the yard followed by the sound of something or someone falling against the fence.
File:George Lusk, President of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.jpg|thumb|upright|alt=Lusk has a moustache and wears a bowler hat, topcoat and leather gloves. He holds a cane in the right hand and a cigar in the left.|George Lusk, President of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee
In his memoirs, Walter Dew recorded that the killings caused widespread panic in London. A mob attacked the Commercial Road police station, suspecting that the murderer was being held there. Samuel Montagu, the Member of Parliament for Whitechapel, offered a reward of £100 after rumours that the attacks were Jewish ritual killings led to anti-Semitic demonstrations. Local residents founded the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee under the chairmanship of George Lusk and offered a reward for the apprehension of the killer—something the Metropolitan Police refused to do because such an action could lead to false or misleading information. The Committee employed two private detectives to investigate the case.
Robert Anderson was appointed head of the CID on 1 September, but he went on sick leave to Switzerland on the 7th. Superintendent Thomas Arnold, who was in charge of H Division, went on leave on 2 September. Anderson's absence left overall direction of the enquiries confused, and led Chief Commissioner Sir Charles Warren to appoint Chief Inspector Donald Swanson to co-ordinate the investigation from Scotland Yard. A German hairdresser named Charles Ludwig was taken into custody on 18 September on suspicion of the murders, but he was released less than two weeks later when a double murder demonstrated that the real culprit was still at large.