Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

where Gull intended to kill her, and he was accompanied by, of all people, Sir Robert Anderson, the Assistant Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – a fellow Freemason. John Netley and Anderson followed Stride to Berner Street on foot, while Gull remained in the carriage, concealed somewhere south of Commercial Road. As they reached the gates to Dutfield’s Yard, Netley attacked Stride while Anderson kept watch; so, according to Knight, Anderson was the man Schwartz had seen leaning on the lamppost, calmly lighting a clay pipe.
    It did not seem feasible to us that Sir Robert Anderson, a well-known and instantly recognisable public figure, would be likely to involve himself in such a conspiracy, however well disguised. And to light a pipe with all the nonchalance of someone watching falling autumn leaves was equally implausible. Knight’s explanation just did not wash.
    Who the man with the pipe was is open to conjecture. He was never traced by the police; neither did he come forward to offer an explanation for his presence opposite the gates to Dutfield’s Yard. He could have been an accomplice of Stride’s attacker; equally, he might have been an innocent bystander, and using the knife to clean the bowl of his pipe. He may have left the club, by the Dutfield’s Yard entrance, for a breath of fresh air, as did Joseph Lave, an American photographer and printer who was lodging temporarily at the club. At 12.30, Lave went out through the yard and into the street where he saw no one. He said: “The district appeared to me to be quiet … no one came into the yard. I should have seen anybody moving about there.” Lave went back into the club ten minutes later. Or the mystery man may have been waiting for someone, perhaps even a prostitute, which would explain his reluctance to involve himself in the investigation that swiftly followed the discovery of Elizabeth Stride’s body. Since Schwartz did not even know he was being followed until he turned round, it seems feasible that the man with the pipe was running away for the same reason as Schwartz: a desire not to become involved in the fracas. In this event, although it is far from certain, there would have been two witnesses who could give a description of Stride’s attacker to the police, making it unlikely that he would be prepared to run the even greater risk involved of murdering Stride – leaving her free to be killed by someone else: Lizzie Williams.
    The motive for Catherine Eddowes’s murder was equally obscure and gave rise to the question: how, having disposed of Elizabeth Stride, had Lizzie Williams met up with and murdered her next victim so quickly and, for that matter also, so quietly? All the evidence surrounding Stride’s murder showed that Lizzie Williams had left the scene of her first crime that night by close to 1.00 a.m. at the latest, though, it could have been a few minutes earlier; perhaps between 12.46 and 12.56, which was the time Dr Blackwell thought the victim, Elizabeth Stride, had died. Whichever it was, we contend that within the hour Lizzie Williams had murdered Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, before making good her escape.
    Whitechapel was already swarming with police, the alarm having been raised after the first of that night’s murders: all neighbouring streets, alleys and passageways were combed inch by inch; houses, lodgings and tenements were entered and their occupants searched. Over 2,000 lodgers and their landlords were interviewed in the investigation which followed. Any man unable to answer questions satisfactorily was brought in for further questioning and every man who even looked over the age of fourteen years, whether in the company of a woman or not, was stopped, searched, questioned and inspected for traces of blood. Even Inspector Abberline, when his shifts ended, frequently took to the streets of Whitechapel until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, committed as he was to finding his man. He would often give the “wretched, homeless women he found there, four-pence or six-pence” so they could get themselves off the streets and “out of harm’s way”.
    But on 23 October, just over three weeks after the murders, the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard admitted that it had not discovered “the slightest clue of any kind”. Neither could any trace of the killer be found. It was hardly surprising: the police were searching for a man.

CHAPTER 9
     
     
    T he murder of young,