They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper. Bruce Robinson

of Eddowes’ clothes. Crawford would have had to have been some kind of full-blown half-wit to want to conceal that.

      Bye bye, sailor.

      The problem with Mr Sugden is that he is all wallpaper and no wall. I sincerely have no desire to isolate him for criticism, but at every point of contention he’s there with his paste-pot and paper. It’s so frequent (not only from him, but from Ripperology in general) that it reads like a kind of corporate hypnotism.

      But this description of the man with the ‘reddish’ neckerchief raises some questions. To have been published on 2 October, it must have been known to The Times on the 1st. Where did it get the information? Harris said he saw nothing. Levy said he saw nothing either. He therefore didn’t see a thirty-year-old, five-foot-nine-inch man with a fair moustache and a red neckerchief tied in a knot. Two of these three witnesses are thus dismissed as sources, and what Lawende saw was withheld ever after.

      I think this nautical geezer with the red neckerchief is in the tradition of Metropolitan Police inventions (riots in Goulston Street, etc.), slipped by an unknown source to The Times. By this time the Met were under catastrophic pressure, and Warren was less than forty days from the exit. Swanson’s ‘report’ from Scotland Yard was three parts panic, and the rest distortion to fit the fiction Warren was committed to tell. We will never know from whence the seafarer and his neckerchief came, any more than we can know what description Crawford suppressed.

      But I don’t like half-arsed ‘mysteries’, and though I might never be able to find out what Crawford withheld, I thought there was a better-than-odds-on chance of discovering why he withheld it. I got a red light about Crawford, and I think it was precisely the same red light he had about ‘Juwes’ and Jack.

      If there really was a ‘special reason’ for stifling Lawende’s description, why was it not later revealed? Was it, in the short term, an effort to keep it secret from the Met? After the shenanigans at Goulston Street, it’s possible. Commissioner Smith never forgave Warren, calling his erasure of the writing on the wall ‘an unpardonable error’. Maybe he was determined to keep the slippery bastard out. But I was persuaded that there was a more complex dynamic to be discovered.

      Immediately following Levy/Lawende, PC Long was the next witness to be called – a patsy put up to try to divert attention from the duplicity of the men who didn’t care to show themselves.

      Long was the only representative of the Metropolitan Police to appear before the court. Neither Arnold nor Warren was called – the latter, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, because the court didn’t want to hold him to contempt. But contempt over what? It wasn’t yet widely known that London’s Commissioner of Police had colluded to conceal the identity of London’s most wanted killer. On 11 October the Evening News ran a report commenting on the court proceedings.

      The words ‘The Jews are not the men who will be blamed for nothing,’ were almost certainly written by the murderer, who left at the spot the bloody portion of the woman’s apron as a sort of warranty of authenticity. On Police Constable Long’s report consultation was held and the decision taken to rub out the words [emphasis in the original]. Detective Halse of the City Police protested. A brother officer had gone to make arrangements to have the words photographed, but the zeal of the Metropolitans could not rest. They fear a riot against the Jews and out the words must come. And the only clue [my emphasis] to the murderer was destroyed calmly and deliberately, on the authority of those in high places.

      Attempts to navigate the Juwes/apron débâcle were still high on the agenda of Warren’s hidden anti-detective work. On 3 October he had written to his City counterpart, Commissioner Colonel Sir James Frazer, attempting to solicit his blessing for a grab at the surreal. The ‘riot’ angle clearly lacked traction, so to accompany ‘the Nautical Man’ and ‘the Womb-Collector’ he conjured up the limpest suspect yet, ‘the Goulston Street Hoaxer’.