Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

the murders spread as far as America. The headline in The New York Times on 1 October read, ‘Dismay in Whitechapel. Two More Murdered Women Found’, while the editorial stated: “The Whitechapel fiend has again set that district and all London in a state of terror…”. The following day, the Boston Daily Globe commented, “One after another the mutilated bodies of the victims of this mysterious demon have been picked up on the most populous thoroughfares, but no one has seen the murderer, and the police know not where to turn to begin the task of discovery.” And in further comment which encapsulated the enormous, morbid, fascination the murders generated worldwide, “Such is the story of murder and mystery that now not only holds the attention of all England, but the entire civilized world.”
    That the murderer of that night’s two victims were one and the same was confirmed by a forensic comparison of the manner in which the women were killed; they were both lying down when they were attacked, both their throats had been cut from left to right, the left carotid artery of each was deeply severed, while those on the right were barely scratched.
    The two murders left the police perplexed and they could not understand how they could have been committed in such a short period of time. It took the murderer less than an hour to get from the scene of the first of that night’s murders and to reach and leave the scene of the second murder. This included the time it would have taken to get from Berner Street, meet the victim somewhere, accompany her into Mitre Square, persuade her to lie down, murder her, mutilate her face, surgically remove two organs from her body – all this in complete silence – and then escape. No-one working or living in the square saw or heard a thing, even though the only residents were those who lived at number 3 Mitre Square: ironically they were the family of P.C. Pearce, a serving city police officer.
    P.C. Watkins last passed through the square on his beat at 1.30 a.m., when he saw nothing suspicious. P.C. James Harvey, who would be dismissed from the force within a year for reasons that are unknown, looked into the square from Church Passage at 1.41 or 1.42 and he too stated that he saw nothing unusual (but might he have seen a woman perhaps, thought nothing of it and failed to mention his sighting?). No more than two or perhaps three minutes after Harvey had left, P.C. Watkins returned to the square at 1.44 a.m. when he found the body. Once again, it was almost impossible that such a thing could have happened, but once again, it had.
    Still, the night was not yet over.
    At 2.55 a.m., P.C. Alfred Long, who had been searching the streets and alleyways to the east of Middlesex Street, made a strange discovery. A rectangular piece of dirty white material was lying on the ground in a doorway. It was the entrance to a tenement building that was occupied exclusively by Jews: the Wentworth model apartments in Goulston Street.
    When P.C. Long picked up the material, he found it wet with blood. As he cast his eyes about to see where it might have come from, he spotted something peculiar. Immediately above the spot where he had found the soiled material, a message was written in white chalk letters, each about 1about 1½ inches high inches high, on the black-edged bricks surrounding the doorway:

    The Juwes are
 
The men That  
 
    Will not  
 
be Blamed  
 
            for nothing
     
    Detective Constable Halse, who had searched the area half an hour earlier, was certain that neither the writing nor the soiled material had been in the doorway at that time. Therefore, the police concluded, both the writing and the bloodied cloth had been left there since 2.25 a.m. approximately.
    The view the police took was that the blood-soaked cloth was the missing part of the apron taken from Catherine Eddowes, and the murderer had used it to carry away his grisly trophies, the uterus and the left kidney. He had then chalked up the writing on the door surround, and deposited the severed part of the apron on the ground beneath, to draw attention to the writing.
    That it was the missing part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron was proved beyond doubt when it was taken to the mortuary. When the two parts of the apron were brought together, the remains of the apron taken from the victim and the soiled piece of apron found in the doorway of the apartments, they fitted perfectly.
    Once