With nothing more than a small truncheon tucked into a special pocket of a trouser leg, these officers went out day after day and night after night, “well nigh exhausted with [our] constant contact with passionate wretches who had been made mad with want and cupidity.” Angry citizens screamed vile insults and accused the police of being “against the people and the poor,” read the unsigned article. Other better-off Londoners sometimes waited from four to six hours before calling the police after a robbery or burglary and then publicly complained that the police were unable to bring offenders to justice.
Policing was not only a thankless job but also an impossible one, with one sixth of the 15,000-member force out sick, on leave, or suspended on any given day. The supposed ratio of one policeman to 450 citizens was misleading. The number of men actually on the street depended on which shift was on duty. Since the number of policemen on duty always doubled during night shift (10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.), this meant that during day shift (6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.) and late shift (2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) there were only some 2,000 beat officers working. That is a ratio of one policeman to every 4,000 citizens, or one policeman to cover every six miles of street. In August, the ratio got even worse when as many as 2,000 men took vacation leave.
During the night shift a constable was expected to walk his beat in 10 to 15 minutes at an average pace of two and a half miles per hour. By the time the Ripper began his crimes, this requirement was no longer enforced, but the habit was deeply ingrained. Criminals, in particular, could tell a constable’s regular leathery walk quite a ways off.
The greater London area was seven hundred square miles, and even if the police ranks doubled during the early morning hours, the Ripper could have prowled East End passageways, alleys, courtyards, and back streets without seeing a single Brunswick star. If a constable was drawing near, the Ripper was forewarned by the unmistakable walk. After the kill, he could slip into the shadows and wait for the body to be discovered. He could eavesdrop on the excited conversations of witnesses, the doctor, and the police. Jack the Ripper could have seen the moving orange eyes of the bull’s-eye lanterns without any threat of being seen.
Psychopaths love to watch the drama they script. It is common for serial killers to return to the crime scene or insert themselves in the investigation. A murderer showing up at his victim’s funeral is so common that today’s police often have plainclothes officers clandestinely videotape the mourners. Serial arsonists love to watch their fires burn. Rapists love to work for social services. Ted Bundy worked as a volunteer for a crisis clinic.
When Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin to death in New York’s Central Park, he sat on a wall across the street from his staged crime scene and waited two hours to watch the body discovered, the police arrive, and the morgue attendants finally zip up the pouch and load it into an ambulance. “He found it amusing,” recalled Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor who sent Chambers to prison.
Sickert was an entertainer. He was also a violent psychopath. He would have been obsessed with watching the police and doctors examining the bodies at the scenes, and he might have lingered in the dark long enough to see the hand ambulance wheel his victims away. He might have followed at a distance to catch a glimpse of the bodies being locked inside the mortuaries, and he might even have attended the funerals. In the early 1900s he painted a picture of two women gazing out a window, and inexplicably titled the work A Passing Funeral. Several Ripper letters make taunting references to his watching the police at the scene or being present for the victim’s burial.
“I see them and they cant see me,” the Ripper wrote.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren did not care much about crime, and he didn’t know much about it, either. He was an easy target for a psychopath with the brilliance and creativity of Walter Sickert, who would have enjoyed making a fool of Warren and ruining his career. And in the end Warren’s failure to capture the Ripper, among his other blunders, brought about his resignation on November 8,1888.