Jack the Ripper

At the inquest, Phillips said, "The whole inference seems to me that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body." This police surgeon with 23 years of experience was very surprised that the mutilations had been done so skillfully and in what must have been a short period of time, saying that he could have not done such work in less than fifteen minutes and more likely an hour.

Coroner Wynne E. Baxter agreed in his summation:

"The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts (like in the Tabram murder). It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed to the post-mortem room."

Phillips conjectured that the murder instrument was not a bayonet or the type of knife used by leather workers, but rather a narrow, thin knife with a blade between 6 and 8 inches long. The kind of knife used by slaughtermen and surgeons for amputations could have been such an instrument.

Abrasions on Annie's hands indicated that her rings had been forced off her. Later, from conversations with Annie's friends, police were able to determine that Annie wore cheap brass rings, which may have been mistaken for gold.

Inspector Abberline, who was in charge of the Polly Nichols murder, was instructed to help with the Chapman murder which was in Spitalfields, a different police jurisdiction. However, the lead inspector was Joseph Chandler of the Metropolitan Police's H Division. There seemed common agreement among the inspectors that the same man who killed Polly Nichols also killed Annie Chapman.

The Chapman investigation was just as frustrating as the Nichols investigation. The physical evidence - the leather apron, a nailbox and a piece of steel - were owned by Mrs. Richardson, one of the residents, and her son. The envelope with Sussex Regiment seal on it was widely sold to the public at a local post office. Furthermore, a man at Annie's lodging house saw her pick up the envelope from the kitchen floor to put her pills in when her pillbox broke.

Extensive conversations with the associates of Annie Chapman yielded neither good suspects nor any reasonable motive for the crime. Nor was there any suspicious person found escaping the scene of the crime.

However, the investigation was not entirely fruitless and three important witnesses were found, one of which almost certainly caught a glimpse of the murderer. The first witness, John Richardson, was Mrs. Amelia Richardson's son. Between 4:45 and 4:50 on the morning of the murder, he visited 29 Hanbury to check the locks on the cellar in which Mrs. Richardson kept her tools and goods for her packing case enterprise.

He opened the yard door and sat down on the step to cut a piece of leather from his boot that had been hurting his foot. As it was beginning to get light outside, he could see that the cellar locks had not been tampered with while he sat fixing his boot. He could also see that at that time, there was no body of Annie Chapman in the backyard. "I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there then," he said at the inquest.

Another witness, Albert Cadosch, living next door to 29 Hanbury Street testified that he heard voices coming from the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street just after 5:20 a.m. The only word he overheard was No. A few minutes later, around 5:30 a.m., he heard the sound of something falling against the fence.

The most important witness was Mrs. Elizabeth Long who was coming to the Spitalfields market and passed through Hanbury Street when she heard the Black Eagle Brewery clock strike 5:30. She saw a man and a woman talking "close against the shutters of No. 29." Mrs. Long identified Annie Chapman in the mortuary as the woman who had been facing her as she passed down Hanbury Street. Unfortunately, the man Annie was conversing with, who was almost certainly her killer, had his back to Mrs. Long. She did her best to describe him in her testimony to Coroner Wynne E. Baxter:

Some of the merchants in the area were quick to sense the growing anti-Semitic fever and took action to contain it. They formed the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was primarily composed of Jewish businessmen. George Lusk, a building contractor and vestryman in his local church, was elected to head this committee of 16 prominent local citizens. This committee, far from being the vigilante group that some had claimed, was closer to an organized "neighborhood watch." Samuel Montagu, who was the Jewish Member of Parliament for the Whitechapel area, offered a reward for the capture of the Whitechapel killer, an action sanctioned by the Mile End committee.

In a week or so, the bawdy nightlife of Whitechapel surged back to its normal pitch. There were just too many people whose daily subsistence depended upon prostitution and other forms of evening entertainment to let the pace lapse for long.

While Whitechapel was unsatisfied with the lack of results of the police investigation, it was hard to fault the police for the quantity of work that was produced. On Tuesday, September 11, a few days after the death of Annie Chapman, John Pizer, the famous "Leather Apron," was arrested.

Despite attempts by his family to portray Pizer as a victim of malicious rumors, there was sufficient evidence to show Pizer was an unpleasant character with at least one documented case of stabbing, for which he served six months at hard labor. The allegations of bullying and extorting money from prostitutes were never proven. The East London Observer described in a not altogether unbiased view, Pizer's testimony to Coroner Baxter:

He was a man of about five feet four inches, with a dark-hued face, which was not altogether pleasant to look upon by reason of the grizzly black strips of hair, nearly an inch in length, which almost covered the face. The thin lips, too, had a cruel, sardonic kind of look, which was increased, if anything, by the drooping dark moustache and side whiskers. His hair was short, smooth, and dark, intermingled with grey, and his head was slightly bald on the top. The head was large, and was fixed to the body by a thick heavy-looking neck. Pizer work a dark overcoat, brown trousers, and a brown and very much battered hat, and appeared somewhat splay-footed

When Baxter asked Pizer why he went into hiding after the deaths of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, Pizer said that his brother had advised him to do so.

"I was the subject of a false suspicion," he said emphatically.

"It was not the best advice that could be given to you," Baxter returned.

Pizer shot back immediately. "I will tell you why. I should have been torn to pieces!"

Just because Pizer was an unpleasant character did not make him the Whitechapel murderer. First of all, he had alibis for the times at which Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman were murdered. When Polly was killed, Pizer was at a lodging house, which was corroborated by the proprietor. When Annie was killed, he was afraid to be seen and was staying with relatives, a story, which was corroborated by several people. Secondly, he lacked the skill to carve up Annie Chapman and remove her uterus.

Pizer was released, but a number of others were picked up and questioned. Some were just eccentric and drunken characters that shot off their mouths about the murders; others were insane. Few were worthy of prolonged investigation, either because they lacked the medical skills or because they had alibis for the time the women were murdered. Often the alibis consisted of confinement in asylums or jails.

Insanity and medical qualifications became the key factors in sorting out suspects. Another factor was foreign origin, recalling Mrs. Long's testimony in the Annie Chapman murder. The focus on medical knowledge led the police well beyond the reaches of Whitechapel into the middle and upper classes of London as the eccentric and violent behavior of some surgeons and other physicians came into question.