CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A GREAT JOKE
At 3:00 A.M., September 30th, Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long was patrolling Goulston Street in Whitechapel. H Division wasn’t usually his beat, but he had been called in because jack the Ripper had just murdered two more women. Long walked past several dark buildings occupied by Jews, directing his bull’s-eye lantern into the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. His bleary light shone into a foreboding passageway leading inside a building and illuminated a piece of dark-stained fabric on the ground. Written above it in white chalk on the black dado of the wall was
The Juwes are
The men That
Will not be Blamed
for nothing.
Long picked up the patch of fabric. It was a piece of apron wet with blood, and he immediately searched the staircases of 100-119. He would admit later at Catherine Eddows’s inquest, “I did not make any enquiries of the tenements in the buildings. There were six or seven staircases. I searched every one; found no traces of blood or footmarks.”
He should have checked all of the tenements. It is possible that whoever dropped the piece of apron might have been heading inside the building. The Ripper might live there. He might be hiding there. Long got out his notebook and copied down the chalk writing on the wall, and he rushed to the Commercial Street Police Station. It was important that he report what he had discovered, and he didn’t have a partner with him. He may have been scared.
Police Constable Long had passed the same passageway on Goulston Street at 2:20 A.M., and he swore in court that the piece of apron wasn’t there then. He would also testify at the inquest that he couldn’t say that the chalk message on the wall was “very recently written.” Perhaps the ethnic slur had been there for a while and it was simply a coincidence that the bit of bloody apron had been found right below it. The accepted and sensible point of view has always been that the Ripper wrote those bigoted words right after he murdered Catherine Eddows. It wouldn’t make sense for a slur about Jews to have been left for many hours or days in the passageway of a building occupied by Jews.
The writing on the wall has continued to be the source of great controversy in the Ripper case. The message – presumably dashed off by the Ripper – was in a legible hand, and in the Metropolitan Police files at the Public Record Office, I found two versions of it. Long was fastidious. The copies he made in his notebook are almost identical, suggesting they may closely resemble what he saw in chalk. His facsimiles resemble Sickert’s handwriting. The uppercase T’s appear very similar to ones in the Ripper letter of September 25th. But it is treacherous – and worthless in court – to compare writing that is a “copy,” no matter how carefully it was made.
People have always been intent on decoding the writing on the wall. Why was “Jews” spelled “Juwes”? Perhaps the writing on the wall was nothing more than a scribble intended to create the very stir it has. The Ripper liked to write. He made sure his presence was known. So did Sickert, and he also had a habit of scrawling notes in chalk on the dark walls of his studios. There is no photograph of the writing on the wall in Catherine Eddows’s case because Charles Warren insisted it was to be removed immediately. The sun would rise soon and the Jewish community would see the chalky slur and all hell would break loose.
What Warren didn’t need was another riot. So he made another foolish decision. As his policemen anxiously waited for the cumbersome wooden camera, they sent word to Warren suggesting that the first line, containing the word “Juwes,” could be scrubbed off and the rest of the writing left to be photographed for handwriting comparison. Absolutely not, Warren fired back. Rub out the writing right now. Day was breaking. People were stirring about. The camera had not arrived and the writing was rubbed out.
No one doubted that the piece of apron Constable Long found had come from the white apron Catherine was wearing over her clothing. Dr. Gordon Brown said he could not possibly know if the blood on it was human – even if St. Bartholomew’s, the oldest hospital in London with one of the finest medical schools, was right there in the City. Dr. Brown could have submitted the bloody piece of apron to a microscopist. At least he thought to tie both ends of Catherine’s stomach and submit it for chemical analysis in the event narcotics were present. They weren’t. The Ripper wasn’t drugging his victims first to incapacitate them.