It’s the dead of night in the mean streets of London’s impoverished East End.
On one particular street, a man’s horse suddenly rears up while pulling a cart.
Something has frightened it.
The guy then lights a match and makes a grizzly discovery: The body of a woman with her throat
sliced from ear to ear.
What this man doesn’t know is Jack the Ripper is hiding right next to him in the shadows.
If he pricked his ears, he’d probably hear the Ripper’s labored breathing, a consequence
of just cutting that poor woman’s neck.
The Ripper should have been seen that night.
He should have been caught.
In fact, as you’ll see in this show, it is frankly incomprehensible that he wasn’t
stopped in his tracks there and then.
That man’s name was Lewis Diemschutz.
We are going to come back to him and explain just how close he was to catching the Ripper,
but let’s first give you a small introduction to possibly the world’s most famous serial
killer.
One of the reasons it was difficult to catch this man is the fact that those London streets
in the 1880s were a giant labyrinth that was hardly well lit.
Some of the slum areas were ripe for murder at night, seeing that prostitutes wandered
around by themselves in the dark looking for gin-addicted clients.
The area of Whitechapel, where the Ripper committed his ghastly crimes, was heaving
in those days with people living in abject poverty.
When folks couldn’t get any work, some of them turned to crime.
Many of the women turned to what’s sometimes called “the oldest trade in the world.”
In fact, in 1880, there were a total of 62 brothels and 1,200 prostitutes in this area
alone.
Some of those women lived in lodging houses.
These were about the cheapest places you could live.
Some of the rooms even had a rope you could lean on as a form of bed.
This is where we get the term “hangover”, because people would literally hang over a
rope.
The rope cost two pence a night, and while uncomfortable, it was better than the street
and all the dangers that lurked there.
This was the kind of place where Jack the Ripper made his name.
It was a cauldron of violence, vice, racism, and some said, immorality.
In other words, it was an ideal place to kill people because the police can sometimes be
less than caring about victims of this so-called lower class.
But once the Ripper got going, he was hard to ignore.
That was because of the extreme nature of the crimes.
It’s thought he killed five people for sure, called the “canonical five”, but he might
have murdered as many as 11 people.
For instance, no one is certain if he killed Emma Elizabeth Smith.
She’d fallen on hard times and become a prostitute, with a detective later writing
about her: “There was something about Emma Smith which
suggested that there had been a time when the comforts of life had not been denied her.
There was a touch of culture in her speech, unusual in her class.”
In the wee hours of April 3, 1888, she was savagely attacked.
She didn’t die instantly but went into a coma and died shortly after.
Was this the work of the Ripper?
It’s hard to know.
She wasn’t mutilated like many of his later victims, but her injuries were horrifying,
nonetheless.
Then there was Martha Tabram, an alcoholic who had a reputation for staying out all night
and causing general havoc.
On August 6, 1888, she and some other women went to the Angel and Crown pub and as the
expression goes, got hammered.
She was later found dead, again with horrifying injuries.
Those included being stabbed in the heart and lungs.
The killer also stabbed her nine times in the throat.
The term “overkill” was suitable here, with 39 stab wounds on her body in total.
Detective Edmund Reid was on the case.
A mysterious man had been seen that night close to where the victim was found, so he
put a bunch of men in the line-up.
Nothing came of that.
There’s a slim chance it could have been the work of the Ripper, and if it was, he
was close to being caught that night, although he came a hell of a lot closer, as you will
soon see.
One of the reasons this woman is said to have been the victim of possibly a different killer
is the fact she wasn’t skillfully mutilated, and she hadn’t been eviscerated.
The murder weapon used to kill her was also cruder than the one the Ripper used.
Now we come to the first victim who is included in the canonical five.
She was Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly to her friends.
She was killed on August 31 that same year.
Yep, that is such a short time after the last murder, but as we said, those London slums
were terrible places to live back then, so it’s possible there were a few men who killed
women in the East End in those months.
The MOs might have been similar in the murders, but the Ripper had quite a unique signature.
That’s why you are watching a video about him right now.
It was his method of killing that made headlines all over the world, not just the fact he killed.
Killers were two a penny, but skilled mutilators were not.
Polly had also had a tough life, at times getting money for rent by working in one of
London’s brutal workhouses and other times by selling her body.
On the night of August 30, she went to Frying Pan pub and had some drinks.
It seems she might have spent all her cash, because later she was chucked out of her lodging
house for not being able to pay her rent.
She looked at the landlord that night and said, “I'll soon get my doss money.
See what a jolly bonnet I've got now.”
Maybe she thought her new bonnet would help her find a client or two, and so she’d have
a bed that night.
Early in the morning, she was seen staggering around, drunk as hell.
Slurring her words, she said to an acquaintance, “I have had my lodging money three times
today, and I have spent it.”
Those were the last words anyone ever heard from Polly.
Charles Allen Cross was the man that found her body at around 3.40 am.
What’s amazing, is that when Cross found her, she’d likely only been dead for about
10 minutes.
The Ripper couldn’t have gotten far in that time.
In fact, cops interrogated three horse slaughterers.
They were Harry Tomkins, James Mumford and Charles Britten.
They’d been close to the scene of the crime when it happened.
As we said, the killer had to be nearby.
Someone had to have seen something.
The cops were also taken aback by the sheer brutality of the murder.
The woman had not only had her throat cut, but her abdomen had been mutilated, so much
so, her insides were spilling out.
A six to eight inch knife had been used, possibly a shoemaker's knife, and it seemed to medical
experts that some anatomical skill had been employed in the murder.
There were so many injuries to Polly that police determined that the killer must have
been working on her for a full five minutes.
And this was out in the open!
Also, on his escape, the killer will have had some blood on him.
Was this man invisible or something?!
Surely someone had to have seen something.
Upon investigation, this is what the coroner had to say about that:
“It seems astonishing, at first thought, that the culprit should have escaped detection,
for there must surely have been marks of blood about his person.”
Still, he said that with their being so many slaughterhouses in this area, had a man been
walking around with bloodstained clothes, maybe onlookers would have thought nothing
of it.
Now there had been three brutal murders, although police couldn’t say if they had been committed
by the same person.
It was at this time that London’s infamous press got to work, which fomented chaos in
the city.
Nowhere seemed safe.
Then on September 8, there was the grisly discovery of Annie Chapman.
Her life was also a tale of woe.
She had a problem with the booze, which worsened after her daughter died and she had to place
her disabled son in care.
Then her husband split with her and took the last child, and she ended up living in one
of those rundown Whitechapel lodging houses.
After her husband died from his alcoholism, the little bit of cash he sent her was gone.
She made money doing odd jobs after that, but also prostituted herself when things got
desperate.
At 5:15 a.m. that morning, a man heard a woman’s scream when he was walking along Hanbury Street.
He didn’t bother to investigate, and so yet again, the Ripper could have been caught
if things had been a little bit different.
She was found at 6 am nearby and hadn’t been dead long.
This is what one of the doctors said in his report:
“The instrument used at the throat and abdomen was the same.
It must have been a very sharp knife with a thin narrow blade and must have been at
least 6 to 8 inches in length, probably longer.
The injuries could have been done by such an instrument as a medical man used for post-mortem
purposes.”
Those injuries matched the ones on Polly, with experts saying the killer must have had
some anatomical knowledge due to the fact in one movement he’d taken out her reproductive
organs.
The press went crazy, making up stories that some guy nicknamed Leather Apron might have
been to blame.
One report said, “Whatever information may be in the possession of the police they deem
it necessary to keep secret.
It is believed their attention is particularly directed to a notorious character known as
'Leather Apron'.”
A man named John Pizer was arrested and interrogated.
He was known as Leather Apron, and he had a history of violence, but in the end, he
proved his innocence and even claimed some compensation from the newspapers that named
and shamed him.
It might not have been him, but whoever it was, had committed the crime in a fairly busy
area.
Yet again, it seemed the culprit had a mask of invisibility.
But in the next murder, he must have basically done the deed right under someone’s nose.
Louis Diemschutz had spent the day of September 29 selling his cheap jewelry.
At the end of the day, feeling tired, he took his horse and cart back to Dutfield's Yard.
Little did he know that as he approached the yard, the Ripper was mutilating a woman named
Elizabeth Stride.
Again, her life was full of tragedies, a story including dying children and a dead husband.
Her misfortune led to her working as a prostitute, or at least on the days she couldn’t afford
to pay for her room in the slum.
Stride had been spotted about 11 pm that night with a man wearing a bowler hat.
He was also said to have been well-dressed and sported a rather fetching black mustache.
We may never know if he was the Ripper.
At around 12.45 am, she was seen again with a man who was well-dressed.
This was just after a policeman had seen her with a man wearing a hat, although he didn’t
describe it as being a bowler hat.
Whoever the man was, Stride had apparently said to him, “No.
Not tonight.
Some other night.”
Just before 1 am, she was seen by at least another two people, and both times she was
with a man.
The Ripper was certainly a brazen killer, knowing he’d been seen with Stride, but
he still carried the act through to its bloody end.
It was at 1 am when Diemschutz’s horse could be heard clip-clopping down the street.
He later explained: “I left home about half-past eleven in the
morning and returned home exactly at one am, Sunday morning.
I noticed the time at a tobacco shop in the Commercial-road.
I was driving a pony harnessed to a costermonger's barrow.”
It was as he entered the yard that his pony stopped in its tracks, as if startled by something.
Diemschutz thought he could see something in the way, but with it being so dark, he
had no idea what it was.
That’s why he pulled out some matches.
Now with the glow of the match, he pulled out his whip and nudged whatever it was on
the floor.
It was then that he realized it was a body, and noticing a dress, he knew it was a woman.
What he didn’t know is that she’d only just been killed.
He actually thought at one point that the body might be his wife.
This was the East End, coming across a passed out person in the street who’d had one too
many drinks was not unusual at all.
Diemschutz said so much in a statement, which read in part:
“I took no further notice of it but went into the club and asked where my missus was.
I found her in the front-room on the ground-floor.
I left the pony in the yard by itself just outside the club door.
My wife was with several of the members of the club.
I told them.
‘There is a woman lying in the yard, but I cannot say whether she is drunk or dead.’”
He subsequently left the scene, got himself a candle, and then returned to the body.
It was then that he noticed all the blood.
He then ran through the streets looking for a policeman, but unable to find one, he returned
to the body with another man.
Not one to understand much about contaminating a crime scene, he lifted up the woman’s
body.
He saw that her throat had been cut from ear to ear.
The actual autopsy report stated that Stride had not long before her death consumed some
cheese and potatoes.
It also said: “There was a clear-cut incision on the neck.
It was six inches in length and commenced two and a half inches in a straight line below
the angle of the jaw, three-quarters of an inch over an undivided muscle, and then, becoming
deeper, dividing the sheath.
The cut was very clean and deviated a little downwards.
The arteries and other vessels contained in the sheath were all cut through.”
This time, though, he didn’t remove any organs.
Maybe he didn’t have time.
Several families lived in that area.
Then even more people came forward and said they’d seen Stride either talking or arguing
with a man.
Another person said the man had a mustache.
Not only that, but the International Working Men's Educational Club, where Diemschutz was
a steward, was full of people singing and dancing.
This place was right next to where the murder had taken place.
Had they not been singing, people would have surely heard Stride’s screams through a
window that was open.
That’s debatable, though, seeing as the Ripper might have made his cut before she
had a chance to scream.
If he did coimmit this murder, he sure had a busy night.
That’s because about 45 minutes later, not too far away, he killed Catherine Eddowes.
She’d been slashed over the face and had her throat cut.
The autopsy report said, “The peritoneal lining was cut through on the left side and
the left kidney carefully taken out and removed.
... I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position
of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them.”
Still, it has always been disputed if such work required the skill of a surgeon.
Some thought, no, but the killer might have worked as a butcher.
What was certain is that all those mutilations must have taken around five minutes.
Another doctor testified that when he arrived on the scene, she’d only been dead for about
40 minutes.
It should be said in those days there was a lot of guesswork as compared to now, but
still, doctors had a fairly good idea about the time of death in such cases.
So, the Ripper had committed two murders in a short space of time.
He might have rushed the first one, seeing that he basically did it right under people’s
noses.
Even with the second one, he could easily have been seen.
That’s when the killer really started to push his luck.
Either he began a correspondence with the police and press, or someone was playing a
hoax.
After these murders, a postcard was sent to the cops and so was the famous “From Hell”
letter – accompanied with a kidney.
Part of the letter read: “I send you half the Kidne I took from one
women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise.
I may send you the bloody knif[e] that took it out if you only wate a whil[e] longer
signed Catch me when you can”
It might have been a hoax, but at the time, these missives made the Jack the Ripper case
explode in the global media.
As you know, there were only two more canonical victims, and there were perhaps some more
victims, too.
But the Ripper really should have been caught the night he committed the double murder.
As Diemschutz later said, the Ripper must have committed the act only seconds before
he arrived on the scene.
He wrote, “It would have been quite possible for a man to have escaped from the yard while
I was driving up to the club door.
but after I had told the members what I had seen nobody, I think, could have escaped.”
The cops speculated that the Ripper must have seen Diemschutz approaching, and that’s
when he took evasive action.
In fact, they said that when Diemschutz lit that match, it is very likely that the Ripper
was standing nearby in the shadows.
It must have been when Diemschutz went to get that candle that he made his escape.
Think about it.
If Diemschutz hadn’t gone to get the candle and instead shouted something, all those people
in the club would have come out and likely discovered the killer.
The Ripper wouldn’t have killed again, and the case would have quickly been written off
as just another set of gruesome events in a place where people were used to that kind
of thing.
Now you need to know more about Jack and watch “The Most Infamous Serial Killer - Why Was
He Never Found?”
Or, find some answers with “You Won't Believe Who Jack The Ripper Is - New 2019 DNA Test
Reveals His Identity.”