I suspect the question of human blood wasn’t important to Dr. Brown or the police. The cut-out piece of bloody cloth seemed to fit the cut-out section of Catherine’s apron, and proof that the blood was human may not have been an issue if a suspect went to court. Perhaps not testing the blood was a smart investigative tactic. If the blood had come back as human, one still could not prove it was Catherine’s.
The police decided that the killer had cut off the bit of apron so he could wipe blood and fecal matter off his hands. For some reason, he hung on to the soiled fabric as he left the City and retraced his steps back toward Whitechapel. He ducked into the entrance of the building on Goulston Street to write the note on the wall, and then thought to discard the piece of soiled apron – perhaps when he rummaged in a pocket for a piece of chalk, which I suppose he just happened to be carrying around with him.
The bit of bloody apron was not viewed as part of the Ripper’s deliberate game, nor was his visit to Goulston Street seen as part of his ongoing mockery of authority. I wonder why police didn’t ask why the killer was carrying around chalk. Did people of the East End routinely carry chalk or even own it? Perhaps it should have been considered that if the Ripper did bring a stick of chalk with him when he set out that night, he had planned to write the bigoted message – or something like it – on the wall after he committed murder.
For the Ripper to backtrack from Mitre Square to Goulston Street involved his virtually returning to Elizabeth Stride’s crime scene. Quite likely, this route took him from the Church Passage out of Mitre Square, and to Houndsditch, Gravel Lane, Stoney Lane – and across Petticoat Lane, where Sickert went on his unnerving sojourn in the fog many years later when he carried his Gladstone bag and took Marjorie Lilly and her friend with him. The police were baffled that the murderer would be this bold. There were constables and detectives all over the place. The law enforcement community would have been better served had it spent more energy analyzing the killer’s outrageous backtrack and his piece of chalk instead of getting stuck in the muck of the meaning of “Juwes.”
“Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear,” the Ripper wrote in an eighty-one-line poem he sent the “Superintendent of Great Scotland Yard” November 8th a year later. “The man is keen: quick, and leaves no trace – ” His objective is to “destroy the filthy hideous whores of the night; Dejected, lost, cast down, ragged, and thin, Frequenters of Theatres, Music-halls and drinkers of Hellish gin.”
For Walter Sickert, it would have been another big “ha ha” to head back to the scene of Elizabeth Stride’s murder and ask a constable what was going on. In the same poem of 1889, the Ripper boasts, “I spoke to a policeman who saw the sight, And informed me it was done by a Knacker in the night…. I told the man you should try and catch him; Say another word old Chap I’ll run you in.
“One night hard gone I did a policeman meet – Treated and walked with him down High St.”
The 1889 poem was “filed with the others.” No significant attention was paid to the distinctive form of printing or the relatively clever rhymes, which were not those of an illiterate or deranged person. The reference to theaters and music halls as places where the Ripper spots “whores” should have been a clue. Perhaps an undercover man or two should have begun frequenting such places. Sickert spent many of his nights at theaters and music halls. Lunatics and impoverished butchers and East End ruffians probably did not.
In the 1889 poem, the Ripper admits he reads the “papers” and takes great exception to being called “insane.” He says, “I always do my work alone,” contradicting the much-publicized theory that the Ripper might have an accomplice. He claims he doesn’t “smoke, swill, or touch gin.” “Swill” was street slang for excessive drinking, which Sickert certainly did not do at this stage in his life. If he drank at all, he wasn’t likely to touch rot-gut gin. He did not smoke cigarettes, although he was fond of cigars and became rather much addicted to them in later years.