Jack the Ripper

While the police were coping with yet another Whitechapel murder, a most extraordinary thing happened just 1/4 of a mile away in Mitre Square. Some 24 yards square, it was generally a respectable area surrounded by commercial buildings and warehouses, with very few residences. At night, when the businesses were closed, Mitre Square became a dark and somewhat secluded area.

Mitre Square was on the beat of Police Constable Edward Watkins of the City Police. He had been through the square at 1:30 and all was quiet. He came around again at 1:44 a.m., some 45 minutes after the discovery of the woman in Dutfield's Yard. Again, it was quiet and deserted. When he shined his lantern in one corner of the square, he made a horrible discovery.

He described it to the coroner a few days later: "I saw the body of a woman lying on her back with her feet facing the square, her clothes up above her waist. I saw her throat was cut and her bowels protruding. The stomach was ripped up. She was lying in a pool of blood."

He ran over to one of the businesses on the square to get George Morris, a retired constable who worked as a night watchman. With his whistle, he got help from a couple more policemen. The City Police then began to search the area to see if the killer could still be found.

At 2:18, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown got to the scene of the crime and made his examination. Her abdomen had been ripped open and she had fearful mutilations to her face. The "body was quite warm; no death stiffening had taken place; she must have been dead most likely within the half hour," he later said at the inquest.

There was no money found on the corpse and there was no evidence that she had struggled with her killer.

All in all, the Mitre Square event was pretty amazing, if for nothing more than the aggregation of police in that particular area at the time of the crime. In addition to Watkins and Morris, another policeman, whose beat included a perimeter of Mitre Square had reached the square at about 1:42 a.m. Like the other policemen, he heard nothing and saw nobody. Also, there was a police constable who lived on the square who slept through the entire thing.

As it turned out, the murderer got his victim into the square, killed her, carved her up silently and completely escaped in the space of fifteen minutes. But the night was not over yet.

At 2:55 a.m. Constable Alfred Long found a piece of a bloody apron lying in the entrance to a building in Whitechapel's Goulston Street. Just above the apron, written in white chalk on the black bricks of the archway was the wording:

The Juwes are
The men That

Will not

be Blamed

For nothing.

The piece of bloody apron came from the woman who had been murdered in Mitre Square and the police believed that the writing was the killer's. A constable was left to guard the writing and some preparations were made to have the writing photographed. But before the writing could be photographed, it was ordered destroyed in a highly controversial move by Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Warren explained his rationale for an action which would be criticized for over a hundred years:

The writing was on the jamb of the open archway...visible to anybody in the street and could not be covered up...I do not hesitate to say that if the writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.

How this murderer was able to accomplish two such murders in such a short time, particularly with the mutilations of the second victim, without being seen by the police or anybody and then, when the area was in a heightened state of alarm, create the chalk writing on the archway is nothing short of amazing.