On the morning of Saturday, 4 April, Mrs Annie Gale was seen opening the shutters of the ground-floor windows, and she talked to a dairyman, telling him not to forget about leaving some milk on the doorstep on the Bank Holiday Monday. Although it seems that Jacob Myers had until recently rented two rooms in the house, Mr Levy and his housekeeper were now the only occupants. And although Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, it seems that Levy was not in the habit of attending the local synagogue and stayed at home that morning.
At 1 pm, Miss Laughton, following up Levy’s invitation to lunch that day, called at Number 31 and knocked at the door. There was no response. A small boy from nearby Sydney Street was hovering outside the house and when he approached her she spoke to him. He later told the coroner’s court what he presumably told Miss Laughton, that he had gone to the house earlier that morning (on an errand, it seems) received no reply to his knocking, noticed that there was no fire in the basement kitchen, and returned home to his mother, who had then sent him back to Levy’s house. After more knocking at the front door, Miss Laughton must have expressed some concern, even alarm, to the small boy at the lack of response within. Both of them continued to hover outside the house, unaware that an intruder had stood for a while on the other side of the front door, debating with himself whether or not to open the door and let the visitors in. ‘If I had,’ as he later said, ‘I would soon have floored them, so as they would not have walked out of that house again alive.’
Some other people would later say that odd sounds from within the house could be heard above the rattle and rumpus of horse-drawn vehicles, carts and people passing up and down, and the clatter of trams in Commercial Road. No doubt some of these sounds were reported to the deaf and elderly spinster by the little boy who, possibly encouraged by her, went off to have a look at the back of the house from Varden Street. While there he saw a man wearing a cap peer at him over a garden wall.
By 1.30 pm Miss Laughton was much perturbed and, going next door, communicated her worries to the couple who lived therein, Mr and Mrs Schafer. William Schafer, who was a tailor, determined to check the back of Number 31. He went into his back yard or garden and placed a ladder against the wall that separated Levy’s yard from his. He climbed up and saw a man inside Levy’s outhouse. Glimpsed by Schafer through a little outhouse window, the man, wearing a cap, was looking or bending down and, said Schafer later, ‘appeared to be doing something with his hands’. Schafer shouted: ‘What are you doing there?’ The man looked up, then ducked down out of sight. Schafer called out again, whereupon the man straightened up, left the outhouse and disappeared into the basement of Levy’s house.
The alarm was raised. Schafer instructed his wife to keep an eye on the back of the house while he went outside, to the front of Number 31. There he told Miss Laughton to fetch the police. By this time a small crowd had begun to gather and the intruder was again spotted out in the yard. When PC Walter Atkinson and another constable, both in plain clothes, arrived, they were taken through the Schafers’ house to their yard, from where the constables gamely climbed over the dividing wall and entered the yard of Number 31.
There was a scullery and a lavatory in the outhouse and there was blood on the scullery floor. Within the lavatory lay Mr Levy in a bloody, crumpled heap, face upwards, his clothing disarranged, his throat cut from ear to ear.
PC Atkinson hurried through the house to the front door, where Miss Laughton was now dispatched to fetch a doctor and Mr Schafer admitted to identify the body. The two constables then began checking all the rooms in the house. Atkinson said later: ‘In the top-floor front bedroom I saw the body of Mrs Gale, who was lying on her back on the floor. The body was lying nearest the door, and I could see that her throat had been cut. There was a quantity of blood at the foot of the bed and some on the bed. The room was in great disorder and boxes had been pulled out.’
Such was his agitation at finding the bodies, he apparently failed to register a ragged hole in the lathe and plaster ceiling, an old brown overcoat on the bed, both covered with fallen plaster, and an iron chisel and a long-bladed, bloodstained butcher’s knife, also on the bed. He rushed downstairs.
Meanwhile, out in the street, someone in the swelling crowd spotted a man on the roof and shouted. At that moment PC Edward Richardson arrived at the scene with PC Wensley and seeing the man on the roof entered the house, leaving Wensley to observe the intruder from below. Pounding up the stairs, he came to the ransacked bedroom, in which Mrs Gale lay dead, saw the hole in the ceiling, got onto the bed, and intent on making an arrest pulled himself up through the hole in the ceiling, into the attic space below the roof. Once up there he stumbled about and slipped and one of his feet broke through the ceiling, making another hole.
Daylight was flooding into the attic from a man-sized hole in the roof. Cautiously clambering out through the hole and on to the tiles, clutching his truncheon, PC Richardson saw a man about 15 yards away, edging along a gutter towards the outer parapet. As Richardson called out to Wensley down below in the street, shouting a warning, the man stepped onto the parapet and jumped. He fell about 40 ft.
Below, the crowd shrieked and scattered as he fell. His fall was partly broken by a little girl, whom he struck and was said later to have slightly injured. Seriously injured himself and unconscious, he was seized by the police. PC Wensley said later: ‘With considerable difficulty the man was got inside the house, and not before his coat had been torn from his back by the excited crowd, who would have lynched the prisoner if it had not been for the police.’ After being examined inside Levy’s home by a doctor, who merely diagnosed a fractured arm, the man was taken in a horse-drawn ambulance to the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, along with the little girl.
A gold chain, a two shilling piece, a pair of eyeglasses and a gold seal had fallen from the man’s pockets as he was manhandled in the street. These items and some money, amounting to 1s 3d, were gathered up by helpful citizens and the police. Other items found in the man’s bloodstained clothing included brooches, earrings, a gold watch, a jewelled pin and 10s 9d in silver. The jewellery was Mrs Gale’s. A stolen wedding ring and a diamond ring had been worn by Mr Levy. It seems that the murderer was disturbed by Mr Schafer’s shout while he was in the outhouse rifling Mr Levy’s pockets, for a purse containing 9d in stamps, a silver snuff box and a diamond-and-sapphire necktie pin were found on Levy’s body.
Some money and a purse were also found on the roof, as well as a broken hammer and a woman’s cap. The hammer’s shaft had snapped off near the head. The cap, with a hat-pin in it, was Mrs Gale’s. Jacob Myers would later say that she had worn it when she did her housework. Presumably the killer stole it because of the hatpin and then dropped or discarded it on the roof.
The hammer had been used to stun both Mrs Gale and Mr Levy before their throats were cut. It had also been used to make the holes in the bedroom ceiling and the roof. The police discovered that another hole had been made in the roof, from the outside, and there was hole in the chimney breast in the attic. It seems that the killer had tried to effect his escape by breaking through the chimney wall into the Schafers’ house next door. About a dozen bricks had been removed. When this proved to be too difficult and when he was out on the roof, he then tried to break back into the house. But this attempt was foiled when the hammer broke. Weaponless, without chisel or knife and with the police at his heels, he jumped off the roof into the street. Why he never ventured to scale the garden wall and flee into the street or escape through another property is a mystery. Perhaps the agitation and activities of Mr Schafer, Miss Laughton and the little boy had attracted a crowd so quickly and so aroused the neighbourhood that he felt himself to be caught in a trap.
Thousands of people visited the scene of the Whitechapel Murders, as they became known, over the Bank Holiday weekend, and on an overcast Easter Monday 31 Turner Street was added to other popular holiday attractions like the British Museum (6,000 visitors), the National Gallery (11,550), the South Kensington Museums (17,900), Hampstead Heath, Hampton Court Palace, and the Royal Gardens at Kew (50,000 went there that day).
For several days after he regained consciousness, the prisoner refused to reveal who he was, and at the coroner’s inquest, on Tuesday, 7 April, the possibility that the injured man was Mrs Gale’s husband was