Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [20]
Much discussion has surrounded the graffito. The main points are:
• That the killer threw the apron down by the message, which was already in place – which is fortuitous, but not impossible. Inspector Swanson notes that the writing looked blurred which suggests age (or possibly left-handedness, which the Ripper had not displayed), although others would state that it looked recent.
• The murderer must have written it, because an overtly anti-Semitic message written in such an area would soon have been obliterated by the inhabitants.
• Several newspapers, including the Pall Mall Gazette, erroneously stated that ‘Juwes’ is Yiddish for Jews, thereby suggesting that the killer was Jewish. Warren discussed this with the acting Chief Rabbi, who said that the Yiddish for Jews is ‘Yidden’. Warren would earn the Rabbi’s thanks for his actions in quelling further anti-Semitic protests.
• The murderer used deliberate subterfuge to incriminate the Jews and throw the police off the track. As we shall see, certain witness testimony suggests this theory is correct, if the Ripper was the murderer of...
Elizabeth Stride
Presided over by Wynne Baxter, the inquest into Elizabeth Stride’s death was held at the Vestry Hall, Cable Street. It was as detailed and lengthy (reconvened 2, 5 and 23 October) as Catharine Eddowes’ inquest would be expeditious. It was, at first, a confused affair, due to the fabrications that Stride had spun about her life and to Mrs Mary Malcolm who identified the body on 1 October as her sister, Mrs Elizabeth Watts. Malcolm claimed that every Saturday she met her sister on the corner of Chancery Lane to give her two shillings for her lodgings. That week she had had a premonition that something had happened to her sister and that Saturday she had waited in vain. On enquiring about the murder, the police had directed her to St George’s Mortuary. It took her three sightings to finally confirm that the deceased was Mrs Watts. Much time was wasted with Mrs Malcolm, whose increasingly bizarre claims about her sister’s behaviour were finally repudiated with the emergence of Mrs Watts, very much alive and not a little put out by Mrs Malcolm’s stories. Stride was eventually identified beyond all doubt by PC Walter Stride, a nephew of her estranged husband, who had recognised her from a photograph.
Stride was born Elizabeth Gustafsdotter in 1843, in Torslanda near Gothenburg, Sweden. From 1860 she had worked as a domestic servant in Carl Johan parish, Gothenburg, before moving to Cathedral parish in 1862, again working as a domestic servant. In 1865, she had been registered as a prostitute and gave birth to a stillborn daughter. During this time she was twice admitted to hospital with venereal disease.
In 1866, she moved to London where, according to acquaintances, she had worked as a domestic for a gentleman living near Hyde Park. In 1869, she married John Stride at St Giles-in-the-Fields. Her marriage certificate gave her maiden name as Gustifson. During their marriage, they allegedly ran a coffee shop in Poplar and in March 1877 she was briefly admitted to Poplar Workhouse. It seems that their marriage had broken down by 1882. Elizabeth Tanner, deputy keeper of a common lodging house at 32, Flower and Dean Street testified that Stride had lived there on and off since that year. It was there that she gained the nickname ‘Long Liz’ (not because of her height, 5 feet 5 inches, but because it is a common East End epithet for people named Stride).
Stride always told