Still not a Metropolitan Police officer in sight, and we had better enjoy this description of a proper and professional City police investigation while we may. Bro Warren was on his way.
We are about to get into one of the most extraordinary mind-games ever played by two human beings. It’s a game in which one side is predetermined to win, and the other must pretend not to lose. The rules of the ‘Funny Little Game’ were chosen by the dominant player, and were exclusively Freemasonic. It was a clever strategy by a clever psychopath. Freemasonry was an arena in which the killer was omnipotent and the System was most exposed. To protect itself, the System was obliged to protect him – and that’s about the size of the ‘mystery’.
What Long, Arnold and Warren were later to write of that September night was an outrage. The City Police were busting a gut to find the bastard, whereas Arnold was fretting over how he might dismiss the evidence that had been left by him.
On essay day, 6 November 1888, Arnold was to write: ‘I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot.’ (In which case, why hadn’t he already ordered up a hundred police as a contingency plan?) As a complementary fiction, from Warren, we read: ‘Having before me the report that if it [the writing] was left there the house was likely to be wrecked.’9
This threat of the demolition of numbers 108–119 Goulston Street had never occurred to any officer of the City Police, and is nowhere to be found in Arnold’s November composition. So what ‘report’ is Warren referring to? Does anyone imagine that imminent riot and attendant calamity was the tenor of the wire City Inspector McWilliam had sent to Scotland Yard?
I don’t think so. There had been two murders in the last two hours. Who was to say there wouldn’t be a third? Why wasn’t every available Metropolitan policeman in London on the street? Indeed, why wasn’t Warren, like Commissioner Smith, already down there, having been telegraphed about the earlier discovery of Elizabeth Stride’s body? Plus, if the writing on the wall was really so volatile, why had Arnold left it showing at all? Why dither for another hour and a half over something that could be covered up and guarded within two minutes?
If, as was subsequently claimed, the writing was nothing more than a bit of inflammatory scribble (‘graffito’), why was it necessary for Warren to see it for himself before it was destroyed? If he needed to see it, he could have seen the City’s intended photographs, so avoiding any problems with the local residents – who McWilliam’s search was going to wake up anyway. So what was it that actually brought the treacherous buffoon scuttling out of his bed? Anyone of an enquiring mind might think there was a little more to it than anxiety about a possible riot in the deserted streets. That perhaps there was some arcane agenda, and that it was the true reason for the Bro Commissioner’s nocturnal haste.
From the moment of Arnold’s intercession, every imaginable effort was made to trash the importance of the writing on the wall. At first sight, Jack’s ‘schoolboy’10 scrawl was enough to send PC Long running. An Inspector from Commercial Road ran with him. But subsequent to that, no Metropolitan policeman was allowed to comprehend the matter of it. Priceless evidence linking Catherine Eddowes to the writing was to be transformed and repackaged into something else.
Superintendent Arnold, a copper of thirty-five years’ experience, put in a report of that night’s proceedings as if he were some kind of social worker, engaged above all else to look out for the sensibilities of the Jews. I reproduce it in full.
H Division
6th November 1888
I beg to report that on the morning of 30th Sept last my attention was called to some writing on the wall of the entrance to some dwellings No 108 Goulston Street Whitechapel which consisted of the following words ‘The Juews [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’, and knowing that in consequence of a suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named ‘John Pizer’ alias ‘Leather Apron’ having committed a murder in Hanbury Street a short time previously a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally, and as the building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited principally by that sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed having in view the fact that it was in such a position that it would have been rubbed by the shoulders of persons passing in & out of the building. Had only a portion of the writing been removed the context would have remained. An Inspector was present by my directions with a sponge for the purpose of removing the writing when the Commissioner [Warren] arrived on the scene.
T. Arnold Supd.11
The word ‘bullshit’ doesn’t rise to the occasion. You couldn’t even call it tosh. This was a doorway, in the middle of the night. PC Long felt confident of securing it with a single policeman whom he had instructed ‘to see that no one entered or left the building in my absence’. But where was everyone now? Apart from a solitary cop whistled up from his adjoining beat, not a man from the Met is ever reported as being on guard at Goulston Street.
Instead, in grotesque disproportion to the circumstance, the Jews were elevated to a status they had never previously enjoyed, and that would never come their way again. Hitherto, virtually every fantasy of police suspicion had fallen upon a Jew, and Jews were the focus of practically every false accusation and arrest. Yet that wasn’t convenient here. The Jews were suddenly the Met’s best mates; none more so than Mr John Pizer (a.k.a. ‘Leather Apron’), a Jew, according to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, ‘of unusually thick neck’, a ‘disgrace to their tribe’,12 who on this occasion Arnold was manipulating into a vulnerable alibi.
Never mind any suspicions over evidence of a ‘Double Event’ that are glaring at him; he’s concerned, he says, about the suspicion that fell upon Pizer in ‘consequence’ of the murder at Hanbury Street. Poor thick-necked Pizer’s Hebrew sensibilities have been transformed into a reason for destroying the most flagrant ‘clue’ Jack ever left. Yet the cops had hounded this innocent Yid through every casual ward and lodging house in Whitechapel, stirring up anti-Semitism as they went. ‘The public are looking for a monster,’ noted the weekly Public Opinion, à propos of Pizer, ‘and in the legend of “Leather Apron” the Whitechapel part of them seem to be inventing a monster to look for.’13 As will be discovered at Eddowes’ inquest, it was a policeman, appropriately named Thick, who invented this toxic junk.
Arnold’s highly selective hand-wringing for the Jews is bogus. ‘A strong feeling existed against the Jews,’ he laments. But this was as nothing compared to the strong feeling, amongst Jews and everyone else, that existed against the psychopath in their midst.
Arnold was a Superintendent of detectives, and the general idea is that he was hunting one of history’s most infamous and dangerous criminals. Yet not once in his cowardly ‘report’ does he mention that the writing on the wall may well have been the work of that very man. Not once does he allude to the piece of apron, proved unequivocally to have been taken from Eddowes, and thus of inestimable importance to the writing above it. Not once does he refer to the City Police, and their efforts to preserve such evidence rather than, insanely, for it to be destroyed. And not once does he refer to that tiresome little sideline of cut throats and guts all over the pavement about a mile away.
So obscene and implausible is Arnold’s explanation, you wouldn’t want to tell it to a snake. What we’re witnessing here is a breath-taking perversion of justice, bricklaying the cornerstones of the great ‘mystery’. Like Bro Baxter and his non-existent ‘Womb-Collector’, the whole Goulston Street episode reeks of pusillanimous deceit. While the City had its officers on the street – Collard, Izzard, Downes, Foster, Marriot, Outram,