Because she, Tabram and Smith were all murdered within 300 yards of each other and were prostitutes, a connection was made between them that now seems insubstantial. A man known to have ill-treated prostitutes and to have been seen with Nichols became a prime suspect. Known as Leather Apron, he was a Jewish bootmaker, John Pizer – also called Jack.
The next murder was eight days later. The body of Annie Chapman, aged forty-five, also known as Dark Annie, Annie Siffey or Sievey (she had lived with a man who made sieves), was found in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street at 6 am on Saturday, 8 September. She lay on her back beside steps leading from a passage into the yard. Her knees were wide apart and her dirty black skirt pushed up over them. Her face was swollen and her chin and jaw were bruised; her tongue protruded from her mouth. Two deep and savage cuts had practically separated her head from her body. Her stomach had been torn open and pulled apart; sections of skin from the stomach lay on her shoulder – on the right was another piece of skin and a mess of small intestines. It was later established that she had been disembowelled – her uterus, part of the vagina and the bladder had been carved out and taken away.
Slight bloodstains were discovered on the palings of a fence beside the body and specks of blood spattered the rear wall of the house above the prostrate corpse. Her rings were missing – they had been torn from her fingers. At her feet lay some pennies and two new farthings; a comb also lay by the body. Presumably this and the coins had been in the pocket under her skirt that had been ripped open. Other adjacent items, which probably had nothing to do with the murder, included part of an envelope stamped 28 August 1888 and bearing the crest of the Sussex Regiment on the back, as well as a piece of paper containing two pills – and a leather apron soaked with water and about two feet from a communal tap.
Annie Chapman was a small (5 ft), stout woman with dark hair, blue eyes, a thick nose and two teeth missing from her lower jaw. She had lodged at 35 Dorset Street, from where she had been evicted at 2 am because she lacked the few pennies for a bed. Drunk and ill, she had wandered off towards Brushfield Street. She was last seen alive at 5.30 am (a clock was striking the half-hour) by a park-keeper’s wife who was on her way to market. She saw Chapman standing outside 29 Hanbury Street, haggling with a foreign-looking man, aged about forty, who was shabbily but respectably dressed and wearing a deerstalker, probably brown. Number 29 was a lodging house, occupied by seventeen people, none of whom heard anything untoward. But the street was not quiet: carts and workers were already moving up and down on their way to work.
Several suspects were taken to Commercial Street police station for questioning on Sunday, 9 September, and in the early hours of Monday the 10th, John Pizer, Leather Apron, was found at 22 Mulberry Street and arrested. Witnesses said that two months earlier he had been ejected from 35 Dorset Street and that he wore a deerstalker hat. The police found five long-bladed knives in his lodgings, of a sort thought to have been used by the murderer. Pizer said that he used them in his boot-making trade. He protested his innocence, and his story that he had been in hiding in the Mulberry Street house for four days, since Thursday, was backed up by his stepmother and brother who lived there. He also had an alibi for the night Mary Ann Nichols was murdered – he was in a lodging house in Holloway Road.
At the inquest on Annie Chapman, the leather apron found in the back yard not far from her body was identified as the property of John Richardson, whose widowed mother lived in 29 Hanbury Street. She had washed the apron on Thursday, leaving it by the fence, where it was found on Saturday by the police. Richardson had actually visited the house about 4.45 am on his way to work, to check that his mother’s padlocked cellar, which had recently been robbed, was intact. In the dawn light, he saw that it was and that the yard was empty.
Another yard was the scene of the murder of Elizabeth Stride, a forty-four-year-old Swedish prostitute, also known as Long Liz. She was killed about 1 am on Sunday, 30 September, a wet and windy night. Her body was discovered by a hawker, Louis Diemschutz, who worked as a steward in a Jewish Socialist Club that backed onto the yard in Berner Street. As he drove into the yard in a pony and trap, the pony shied to the left, doing so twice and drawing the hawker’s attention to a heap of clothes on the ground. He poked at it with his whip and lit a match, which was snuffed out by the wind. But he had seen enough. He fetched help from the club, where the rowdy members were singing and dancing.
Long Liz lay on her muddy left side, her legs drawn up, right arm over her stomach, her left arm extended behind her back, the hand clutching a packet of cashew nuts. Her right hand was bloody, and her mouth was slightly open. The bow of a check silk scarf around her throat had pulled tight and had turned to the left of her neck. The scarf’s lower edge was frayed, as if by a very sharp knife, which had also slit her throat from left to right, severing the windpipe. Bruises on her shoulders and chest indicated that she had been seized and forced down onto the ground when her throat had been cut. Her body was still warm. Evidently the murderer had been frightened off by the returning pony and trap. There were no other injuries or mutilations. It was noted at the mortuary that the dead woman had no teeth in her left lower jaw.
Like Nichols and Chapman, Stride was married but separated from her husband. Like them, she was something of an alcoholic. She had lived in Fashion Street with a labourer called Michael Kidney, who had then moved to 35 Dorset Street. But on the Tuesday before her death she had walked out, lodging instead at 32 Flower and Dean Street. On the Saturday night she had been seen by a labourer, William Marshall, at about 11.45 pm in Berner Street, talking to a mild-voiced, middle-aged, stout and decently dressed man, wearing a cutaway coat. He had looked like a clerk to Marshall: he wore no gloves, carried no stick or anything else in his hands, and on his head was ‘a round cap with a small peak to it’ like a sailor’s hat. He kissed Long Liz and he said: ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ Then they walked down the street.
She was seen again in Berner Street at about 12.30 am by a policeman, PC Smith. He described Stride’s companion as they stood and talked together as ‘of respectable appearance … He had a newspaper parcel in his hand.’ The man was about 5 ft 7 in tall, wore an overcoat and dark trousers and had a dark, hard felt deerstalker on his head. Smith gave the man’s age as ‘about twenty-eight’. The Police Gazette later expanded this description to ‘complexion dark, small dark moustache; dress, black diagonal coat, hard felt hat, collar and tie’.
A third witness, a box-maker, James Brown, crossed Berner Street at about 12.45 am and noticed a couple standing by a wall. He heard the woman say: ‘Not tonight. Some other night’ A glance revealed to him that the man was wearing a long dark coat. The Gazette elaborated Brown’s description as follows: ‘Age about thirty, height 5 ft 5 ins; complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shoulders; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak.’
Are Smith and Brown describing the same man? And was he the man who killed Elizabeth Stride at about 1 am and on being disturbed by the pony and trap fled westwards towards Aldgate?
Just after 1.30 am and half a mile to the west in Duke Street, three Jews, one of whom was a Mr Lawende, saw a man talking to a woman in Church Passage, which led into Mitre Square. She was wearing a black jacket and bonnet and was about three or four inches shorter than the man. He was later described in the Police Gazette as: ‘Aged thirty, height 5 ft 7 ins, or 8 ins; complexion fair, moustache fair, medium build; dress: pepper and salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of some material, reddish neckerchief tied in knots; appearance of a sailor.’ The woman was Catherine Eddowes, aged forty-three. Less than ten minutes later she was dead.
She had been married to a man called Conway, but for seven years she had lived at 6 Fashion Street with another man, John Kelly, and accordingly called herself Kate