Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [19]
Meanwhile, PC Lamb had secured the gates and made preliminary searches of the club, the yard and the surrounding cottages.Those attending the club were held until their statements had been taken and their persons searched. Dr Phillips examined them for bloodstains. The body was removed to St George’s Mortuary in Cable Street. By 5.30am, the last signs of the murder were washed away by PC Albert Collins. But by then events had moved on. The Ripper, it seemed, had not tired of his ‘funny little games’ for the night.
Approximately three-quarters of a mile and twelve minutes walk away from Berner Street lay Mitre Square. It was situated just behind Mitre Street and was mainly enclosed by warehouses. A small, cobbled area of about twenty-four square yards, it was heavily trafficked by day but at night it was poorly lit and deserted.The lighting, such as it was in the square, meant that the south-west corner, by a row of deserted houses, was the darkest part.The solitude it offered made it a favoured haunt for prostitutes and their customers.
At about 1.44am, PC Edward Watkins of the City Police (Mitre Square lay just within the eastern boundary of City jurisdiction) completed his fifteen-minute circuit and arrived back in Mitre Square. When he had last walked through it, it had been deserted.This time, there were signs that it had been occupied during his absence. In that darkest corner was the body of a woman, her throat cut and her stomach ripped open, lying on her back in a pool of blood.
Within twenty minutes, Mitre Square was buzzing with police activity. Also summoned were Dr George Sequeira, who declared the woman dead, and police surgeon F Gordon Brown. Close to the body was found a mustard tin containing two pawn tickets that would later aid identification. The body was taken to the City Mortuary at Golden Lane where Dr Brown, observed by Drs Sequeira, Sedgwick Saunders and Bagster Phillips, would perform the post-mortem.
Goulston Street Graffito
PC Alfred Long was one of the police drafted in from A Division (Westminster) during the night of the ‘double event.’ His second patrol of Goulston Street, at 2.55am, was a momentous one, for it revealed the first clue ever left by the Ripper in his flight back to Whitechapel and another clue that, whether left by the Ripper or not, proved to be one of the most controversial pieces of evidence discovered during the ‘Autumn of Terror’. Outside the entrance to the staircase of Nos. 108–119, Wentworth Model Dwellings he found a piece of a woman’s apron, still wet with blood. The piece would later be found to match a gap in Catharine Eddowes’ apron exactly.There were no other traces of blood on the pavement nor on the stairwell, but on the right-hand side of the doorway to the dwellings’ entrance there was a message, written in white chalk on the black bricks.
The message read, as best we can gather from notes taken at the time:
The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing
Long took down the message. Arriving later, DC Daniel Halse took down a version with a slightly different intention: ‘The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing.’ Other versions claim that the word was spelled ‘Jewes’ or ‘Juews.’
Unfortunately, for the following reasons, these transcripts are all that we can rely on now.
Long took the apron to Commercial Street police station at around 3.05am. Following his alert both the City and the Metropolitan Police, including Halse, converged on Goulston Street. Notice was sent to Mitre Square where Inspector McWilliam ordered the message to be photographed and the surrounding tenements searched. The searches revealed no one who was likely to be the Ripper.
Sir Charles Warren was alerted to the situation and met with Superintendent Thomas Arnold at Leman Street. Here Arnold proposed that the writing be removed and had already dispatched an inspector with a sponge to await Warren’s arrival before proceeding. Arnold’s reasons are understandable but his methods remain questionable.The graffito was in a predominantly