Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

again, the police were baffled. Dr Sequeira thought that the Mitre Square victim, whose apron it was, had met her death at around 1.40 a.m. The writing on the wall and the part apron were discovered at 2.55 a.m., more than an hour later. Since Goulston Street is just three streets away, and no more than a five-minute walk, what the murderer had been doing in all that time, if indeed it was the murderer who had chalked up the writing and deposited the apron part where it was found, was a bizarre mystery.
    As for the message, P.C. Long had had the good sense to record in his notebook what he had seen, and he swore that he had copied it down exactly. This was just as well, because the view taken by Sir Charles Warren, the Chief Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, was that it appeared to incriminate Jews in the murders, so, in order to avoid bloody reprisals, he had ordered the writing to be erased.
    Stephen Knight’s imaginative assertion was that the words were a message pointing directly to the three assassins in an attempt to incriminate them – Sickert, Netley and Sir William Gull, who were pursuing their murderous campaign.
    It was the word Juwes , Knight claimed, which galvanised Warren, a leading Freemason, into action, because he recognised the word as Masonic, realised that it implicated Freemasons in the murders, and ordered the writing to be removed in order to cover up a fellow Mason’s crime. At 5.30 a.m. a little more than two and a half hours after the message had been discovered, it was obliterated by a police inspector with a damp sponge.
    Knight’s colourful explanation was that ‘Juwes’ was the collective noun for three apprentice Masons of biblical times, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, who had murdered the Grand Master, Hiram Abiff, for refusing to divulge his secrets to them.
    According to Masonic legend, Hiram Abiff was the son of a widow, and the chief architect of King Solomon’s Temple, built on Mount Zion in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant. Hiram Abiff alone bore the responsibility for the building of the great temple, and was one of only three people who knew the secrets of a Master Mason, the other two being King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre. Knowing the secrets of a Master Mason would enable other, lesser masons, to take on work enabling them to earn the much higher wages of a Master Mason.
    The three apprentice masons, ruffians, had cornered the Grand Master in the temple, intent upon extracting his secrets from him, but he neither could, nor would, reveal his secrets to them without the consent of the other two, King Solomon and the King of Tyre. Each of the ruffians had then struck him a single blow, giving him the opportunity each time to reveal what he knew. He refused, telling them that he was prepared to give up his life, but never his integrity. It had been the third and final blow which had laid him lifeless to the ground.
    It was an interesting explanation, and might have provided a valid reason why Sir Charles Warren, who was indeed a high-ranking Freemason, had acted as he did, except that the word Juwes was the pure invention of Stephen Knight, and is quite unknown in Freemasonry.
    After a fifteen-day search ordered by King Solomon, the assassins were caught and subsequently put to death for their crime. The murder of Hiram Abiff, and discovery of his body, is central to Masonic beliefs and the basis of a Masonic ceremony that is still reenacted to this day.
    Before his capture, Jubelo was heard to say: “O that my left breast had been torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over my left shoulder, carried into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and there to become a prey to the wild beasts of the field and vultures of the air, ere I had conspired the death of so good a man as our Grand Master, Hiram Abiff!” It is the left shoulder, therefore, which holds significance for Freemasons, and not the right.
    In Stephen Knight’s efforts to make Annie Chapman’s murder appear to be a Masonic ritual killing, he explained that her vitals were thrown over her right shoulder by ‘mistake’. Even if this were so, it is hard to believe that the very same error would have been repeated a second time. The report of Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, who attended upon Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, stated that “…the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared over with some feculent