Jack the Ripper

Several other cuts were sustained on the face, plus the right ear lobe had been completely severed and had fallen from her clothing when she was taken to the morgue.

An important witness surfaced -- Joseph Lawende who left the Imperial Club with two friends at about 1:35 a.m. The men saw a couple conversing at Church Passage near Mitre Square. Lawende described the young man as dressed in a dark jacket, wearing a deerstalker's hat. The man was young, medium height and with a small, fair-colored moustache. He did not see the woman's face, but identified Kate's clothing. Nine minutes after this sighting, Kate Eddowes was murdered.

What about the chalk writing found over an hour later on Goulston Street under which lay a portion of Kate's bloody apron? "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing."

Philip Sugden discusses three feasible interpretations of this message. First is that the message was not written by the murderer and just happened to be where the killer dropped or placed the bloody piece of apron.

A second possible interpretation offered by Walter Dew, a Whitechapel police officer in 1888, is that the message represents "the defiant gesture of a deranged Jew, euphoric from the bloody 'triumphs' in Dutfield's Yard and Mitre Square." One of the many problems with this interpretation is that, according to the Acting Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, " I do not know any dialect or language in which 'Jews' is spelled 'Juwes.'"

The third possible interpretation was that the message was "a deliberate subterfuge designed to incriminate the Jews and throw the police off the track of the real murderer." This third interpretation was much favored by Scotland Yard and the Jewish community.

Whoever the author of the message was, it yielded very little in the way of identifying its writer. The belief of some authors that the word "Juwes" is a Masonic term is disputable. "It is a mystery why anyone ever thought that 'Juwes' was a Masonic word," wrote Paul Begg, an expert on the Ripper murders.