Various witnesses corroborated the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Arthur Dyson. Mr Lockwood, defending, proposed that the shooting was accidental, that Peace’s threats were meaningless, and that the prosecution’s principal witness was unreliable and her evidence tainted and uncorroborated. The judge told the jury that the plea of provocation failed altogether ‘where preconceived ill-will against the deceased was proved’.
The jury took fifteen minutes to reach a verdict of ‘guilty of wilful murder’, and Peace was sentenced to death. On being asked if he had anything to say, he murmured: ‘Will it be any use for me to say anything?’
Peace was removed to Armley Jail in Leeds where, in penitential mood, he made a full confession of all his crimes to the Reverend JH Littlewood, vicar of Darnall. In it, he revealed that he had shot another policeman – and killed him – in Manchester on 1 August 1876, four months before the death of Arthur Dyson.
Peace’s story was that PC Nicholas Cock and another constable had disturbed him when he was about to burgle a group of prosperous houses called Whalley Range. PC Cock surprised Peace as he climbed over a wall and shouted at him to stand where he was. ‘This policeman was as determined a man as myself,’ said Peace, ‘and after I had fired wide at him, I observed him seize his staff, which was in his pocket, and he was rushing at me and about to strike me. I then fired the second time. “Ah, you bugger,” he said, and fell. I could not take as careful an aim as I would have done, and the ball, missing the arm, struck him in the breast. I got away, which was all I wanted.’
Two young Irish brothers called Habron, farm labourers, were accused of the crime at Manchester Assizes and one of them, William Habron, aged nineteen, was sentenced to death on 28 November 1876 – the day before the murder of Arthur Dyson. William’s brother, John was found not guilty, and the jury added a recommendation for mercy to William Habron ‘on the grounds of his youth’. For three weeks he was confined in a condemned cell. But on 19 December the Home Secretary granted a reprieve and William’s sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life. He was sent to Portland Prison, where he remained for over two years.
Peace had watched the Habron trial from the public gallery and kept silent. He said later: ‘What man would have done otherwise in my position?’ But now that he was to be executed himself, he told the Reverend Littlewood that he thought it right ‘in the sight of God and man to clear the young man’. He ended his confession by saying: ‘What I have said is nothing but the truth and this is my dying words. I have done my duty and leave the rest to you.’
Charles Peace was hanged by William Marwood at Armley Jail in Leeds at 8 am on 25 February 1879.
His last days were spent in interminable letter-writing and prayer and the Christian exhortation of others. But his reprobate real self prevailed. Of his last breakfast he said: ‘This is bloody rotten bacon!’ And when a warder began banging on the door as Peace lingered overlong in the lavatory on the morning of his execution, he shouted: ‘You’re in a hell of a hurry! Are you going to be hanged or am I?’ On the scaffold he refused to wear the white hood – ‘Don’t! I want to look’ – and insisted on making a speech of forgiveness, repentance and trust in the Lord. Four journalists who were present wrote down his last words, spoken as his resolution left him: ‘I should like a drink. Have you a drink to give me?’ As he spoke, Marwood, the executioner, released the trap door. Peace fell; the vertebrae at the base of his head fractured and dislocated, and his spinal cord was severed.
He wrote his own epitaph for the memorial card which he himself had printed in jail: ‘In memory of Charles Peace who was executed in Armley Prison, Tuesday, February 25th 1879. For that I done but never intended.’
On 19 March, William Habron was moved from Portland to Millbank Prison in London and then set free with a full pardon. He was told that his father had died six months earlier ‘of a broken heart’. He was given £1,000 in compensation ‘to ease his pain and anguish’.
In due course, DI Henry Phillips donated some items that had been used by Peace in his burglaries to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. A hundred years later, Phillips’s very informative, hand-written memoir was in turn donated to the museum by lorry driver Peter Coyle, on behalf of Phillips’s great-niece, Mrs Bell.
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS, 1888
Fiction far outweighs fact in the volume of words used to describe the crimes, motives and character of Jack the Ripper. The facts are few, almost as few as the five murders he is believed to have committed. The fictions stem from the fact – despite mountains of theory and speculation – that no one knows for certain who he was. No single writer, in the last seventy years, has been able to establish the identity of the ‘Whitechapel Murderer’, as he was originally called. Significantly, the first full-length work on the subject, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, was not published until more than a generation, forty-one years, after the murders. It was written by an Australian journalist, Leonard Matters. Since then, and despite confident claims by various writers that they have found The Answer, or The Final Solution, they have not. They fail to convince, to provide conclusive proof, their causes and case histories being spoiled by misconception, misreporting, error, and the perpetuation of earlier journalistic imaginings, assumptions and fancy unsupported by fact. The identity of the Whitechapel murderer is and will remain an enigma. He is not even definitely named in the so-called secret files of Scotland Yard.
Five murders are known to have been committed by the Ripper, but two others were once thought to have been his work as well. The first was of Emma Smith, an ageing prostitute, who lived at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She was attacked in Osborn Street in the early hours of 3 April 1888. Her face and ear were cut, and some instrument, not a knife, had been thrust violently up her vagina. She said she had been assaulted by four men, but could or would not identify them. She died the next day in the London Hospital of peritonitis. Four months later, at 3 am on 7 August, the body of Martha Tabram, aged thirty-five, was found on a staircase landing in George Yard Buildings in Commercial Street. Her throat and stomach had been stabbed or pierced thirty-nine times with something sharp like a bayonet. Earlier that night, she and another prostitute had been seen in the company of two soldiers, who were arrested and paraded with others in front of the second prostitute. But she failed or refused to identify either her own or the other woman’s partner.
It should be remembered that in 1888 the East End of London, a few square miles, was inhabited by about 900,000 people, virtual outcasts living in conditions of extreme depravity, poverty and filth. Fifty-five per cent of East End children died before they were five. Each squalid room in each rotting lodging house was occupied by between five and seven persons – men, women and children. In Whitechapel, about 8,500 people crammed into 233 lodging houses every night, paying as much as 4d for a bed. The parish of Whitechapel was infested with about 80,000 artisans, labourers and derelicts, of whom the better-off – the poor, as opposed to the very poor – earned about £1 a week. The more menial tasks yielded a shilling a day, women being paid less than men. People lived from day to day, earning or stealing what they could to eat and stay alive. Drunkenness and prostitution were rampant. The Metropolitan Police estimated that in October 1888 about 1,200 of the lowest sort of prostitute plied their trade in the dingy Whitechapel streets. Consequently, women were assaulted and injured every night. Some were killed.
Twenty-four days after the death of Martha Tabram there occurred the first of the accepted Ripper killings. At about 3.30 am on Friday, 31 August, Mary Ann Nichols, a forty-two-year-old prostitute, was murdered. She was found in Buck’s Row, lying on her back, her skirt pushed up above her knees; her eyes were open. Her throat had been slashed twice, from left to right, the second eight-inch-long cut almost severing the head. Blood from the cut had