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I have quoted extensively in more than one thread recently from a long article published not long after the Kelly murder and I am posting the bulk of it below. It analyses each murder and decides whether or not they should be assigned to the Ripper's hand. Their decisions strike consonant a chord with the assigning of the murders to the same killer.
I have also appended a part of the same article regards Nicholaus Wassilyi.
Chris S
New York Sun
25 Nov 1888
From an article entitled
ASTOUNDING MURDERS
"Jack the Ripper" Not Alone in History.
The people of London flocked to see Mr. Mansfield's impersonation of Mr. Hyde largely with the belief that Whitechapel's mysterious murderer must be such a character as that. It is scarcely likely, however, for the man who has kept the police busy hunting him for nearly a year is not likely to prove at all grotesque or strikingly peculiar in appearance. It would seem more reasonable to believe him an ordinary looking man of ordinary intelligence, the victim of some dread monomania, by reason of which his murders not only satisfy his craze, but still his conscience, if he has one. But it must be remembered that murdering prostitutes is the safest form the propensity to kill can take. Their business, surroundings, and habits all render it easier to kill one and escape than to kill among almost any other sort of persons. In Whitechapel they ply their trade in narrow dark streets. Their neighbors are habituated not to look at what they do. It is the etiquette of all such regions for every one to mind his or her business, regardless of what goes on among their number. A man's coming and going to the room of one of these creatures or his behavior with one in the dark corners are not for the community to interest itself in, otherwise the community could not exist. Prostitutes have often been mysteriously murdered in this city, the killing of Carrie Watson in her bedroom in Prince Street being fresh in most New Yorkers' minds. A very similar murder of a member of the demi monde of the higher class in Thomas Street in the years when Madison Square was up in the country our fathers all remember.
WHITECHAPEL AND ITS FIEND.
It is difficult to describe the Whitechapel district or to explain to any one who has never seen London what its characteristics are. Whitechapel is a parish by itself, and contains the Tower of London and London Hospital, the greatest of all the English hospitals. The workhouse is also there. It is a very ancient part of the city, and lies next to what was the original walled city. Some of the famous docks, or basins, for shipping are in the district. The streets close to the docks are of the character that Cherry and Water Streets used to have, being full of sailors' retreats, dance houses, and a rabble of the lowest women known to civilization. But the houses are in the main only two stories high, and there is a degree and extent of drunkenness unknown to any part of New York. Here in Whitechapel are the gin distilleries, where nearly all the sweet gin in the world is made; the distilleries of silent spirits used for blending, many large breweries, and a host of great manufacturing establishments. Therefore if you could put twenty Cherry and Water Streets of a dozen years ago alongside the Williamsburgh district of Brooklyn you would gave something like the waterside region of Whitechapel, though on a very small scale.
But Whitechapel reaches far away from the river in a maze of crooked little streets, and without single solid block between any two of them. Alleys, lanes, and courts dissect and puncture every block. The great Whitechapel Road, one of the widest streets in London, pierces the district diagonally. It is a busy thoroughfare all night long. Upon it nearly all the country produce raised for the London marker is driven into town in farm wagons, bound for Covent Garden, Smithfield, Leadenhall Market, and the rest. This Whitechapel Road is very like our Bowery. It has horse cars upon it, and no end of gin palaces and theatres and concert halls. It is also lined with shops of all sorts, like our Bowery. On either side is the tangle of dark, crooked, narrow streets, in which the victims of Jack the Ripper live, a district of little two story houses, that rent for an average sum of $10 a month, huddled among factories, breweries, old churches, and public buildings. The police do not seem numerous. Some are on patrol and some are at what are called "fixed points." A trifle like the trade the women of that district carry on out of doors in the dark courts and alleys does not arouse a policeman to action. The mere shrieking of a woman with cries of murder does not interest him. Those women are drunk every night and are beaten and cry murder so frequently that the policeman could not attend to all that goes on in that way. On the larger streets the gin palaces are found on nearly every corner. The gin sellers of the better class will not sell gin to women. There are plenty who will, however, but there are more fine gin shops than forbidding looking ones; indeed, there is no such squalor in the major part of Whitechapel as most folks imagine. Its courts and alleys and streets are all kept clean, and though they are dark to our notion, because the electric light is not in use there, they are not dark from the London standpoint.
There is very little in humanity that is lower than the street women of that district, however. They are prostitutes who have almost reached the bottom of the slough of degradation. Drunk every night, the daughters and sisters of thieves, bloated, scarred, carrying often a black eye and a baby, ignorant, fighting, filthy in person and in speech, diseased and discouraged, they are the worst women known to man. They inhabit rooms in the little houses that rent altogether for only $10 a month, and they only go to their rooms to sleep off intoxication. They take men to them only for that purpose. Strange and incredible as it may seem, they carry on their calling in the courts and alleys. Whitechapel is not made up of such, however. There are many thousands of decent tradesmen and artisans there, and the Whitechapel Road is daily and nightly frequented by respectable folk shopping and walking there.
This "Jack the Ripper," who is committing these murders, is so called because after one of the more recent murders a newspaper in London received a letter from Belfast, dated Sept. 10, in which a man signed himself in that way and said he meant to kill ten more women. His first crime occurred nearly a year ago, in April. But little attention was paid to it and no description of it has ever been published here. A woman was found murdered in the streets and her mutilation was so peculiar that when the other crimes were added to this the similarity of the man's method of treating his victims called the first one to mind. This first victim was Emma Elizabeth Smith. She was found dead in open premises upon Osborn Street and the lower part of her abdomen was punctured as if by some large and rough implement. Jack the Ripper waited four months before he continued his work. Then he accosted a woman named Martha Tabram, and walked with her to her dwelling, 37 George Yard Buildings, a sort of tenement in which both respectable and disreputable families and persons live in single rooms and suites of three or four rooms. When the Ripper and the woman entered the hallway, it is quite likely that he hacked her against the wall or that she took such a position herself, and that he pressed his thumb upon her windpipe so that she could not utter a sound. The London police hold to the theory that his outdoor crimes are committed in this way. The habits of the women, the practicability of Jack's adopting this method, and the wounds in the women's abdomens, often made without cutting their clothes, all help out the theory. At all events, in Martha Tabram's case, he stopped all chance of her crying out, and stabbed her in thirty two places, apparently with a bayonet or weapon shaped like one.
But it was the third murder that was distinctively in the style of Jack the Ripper's work, and if he is ever caught and confesses his crimes it is more than likely he will disavow any hand in the first two, as he will in those others we will come to, one in the north of England and one vaguely referred to as taking place beside the Thames. This third murder was discovered in the morning of Aug. 31 by a constable patrolling Bucks Row in Whitechapel. He saw a bundle of womanhood on the pavement as he had thousands of times before, and, supposing it a case of drunkenness, tried to rouse the woman and get her to go home. He could not. She was the Ripper's victim. It seemed scarcely possible for murder to have been done, for he had passed that spot less than a quarter of an hour before, and, besides, there were men at work in a house opposite and they had not heard a sound. It was nearly 5 o'clock in the morning.
PROBABLY JACK'S FIRST MURDER.
Polly Nichols, a street walker, was the dead woman at the constable's feet. Her head was nearly severed from her neck, the cuts having been so savagely and strongly dealt that the spinal column was cut into. The Ripper had cut toward himself from one ear to the centre of the throat, and then from the other ear to the end of the first cut. He had then torn her skirts down from her waist and had ripped her abdomen open. He had knocked some of her teeth out and bruised her face, and there was every evidence that she had made him fight hard to kill her. But he had not allowed her to scream, and must have kept one hand or thumb on her throat while he carved it. All that has yet been found out about Polly's last hours on earth was that she had gone to a lodgings near by earlier in the night and had tried to get a bed. She was two or three pennies short in change, and was refused a lodging, so she went back into the streets to earn what she needed.
The next undoubted victim of Jack the Ripper's thirst for blood, or zeal in ridding the world of worthless women, was Annie Chapman. This woman was not originally of the class that most Whitechapel women are. She had been married to a respectable man, and had become a drunkard and been discarded by her husband, who gave her a few shillings weekly allowance as long as he lived. When this ceased she became a street walker. It was a week after his Bucks Row murder that Jack the Ripper met her. She took him back of the lodgings at 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, where families take suites of rooms and rent out what they can spare. The house is one in which each family or lodger locks theirs or his door, and the street is not over locked. There are many such houses in Whitechapel, and the street walkers who use the alleys and dark courts for their business also take men through such open houses into the yards behind. It is not always that they are too poor to go to lodgings. It is partly the custom of the class. They sell themselves for less money than will buy gin and leave a margin for room rent. It is a fact that twopence is sometimes all that they ask.
Annie Chapman took Jack the Ripper through this house and into the back yard behind it. One of the inmates of the house had occasion to go to the yard several times during the night. He went there at 5 o'clock and there was no one there. Some time after that Jack the Ripper was led there by the Chapman woman. He almost cut her head from her body. He tore out her bowels and hung part of them around her neck. He took her womb out and carried it off with him. His work with the knife was described by surgeons as that of a skilful and practised hand; but it is said that what he did is so horrible that the doctor begged not to be forced to go into all the details before the Coroner. At forty minutes past 5 o'clock the lodger went again to the yard and found the corpse. Jack had done his work in less than forty minutes and the woman had not uttered a groan. It is said that on the day of the discovery of Annie Chapman's body this legend was found written above where she fell:
"FIFTEEN BEFORE I SURRENDER."
The fifth murder, so called, it is fair to presume was not by jack the Ripper, but it is included in this country and in England in the list of his crimes because it was the killing of a courtesan and the murder was distinguished by butchery. It was on Sunday, Sept. 23, that a woman was murdered at Gateshead, near Newcastle, in Durham county in the north of England. The body was mutilated somewhat after the fashion of the cutting of Jack's victims, but that is the only reason for crediting him with the crime.
Jack the Ripper committed what were unquestionably his third and fourth murders on Sept. 30. They are called his sixth and seventh in the list of recent violent deaths of bawds in England. He met "Hippy Lip Annie" (whose real name was Elizabeth Stride) either in Berners (sic) Street or on some livelier thoroughfare, from which she led him to that quiet street. It is a dark, narrow street, populated by respectable folk in the main. There is a door in a stable gate there, and it forms a sort of niche in the side of the street. jack got the woman against this door, silenced her with his thumb on her throat, and then cut that member. It is suspected that he was then disturbed by the approach of some one, for he left her there, where she died. This stable was in the rear of a club house, and one of the members passed through that doorway where Stride was murdered only twenty minutes before the body was discovered.
While the police were carrying her body away jack the Ripper was butchering another woman only half a mile away. This was in Mitre Square, a little inner court, reached by several streets or lanes. It was reasonably well lighted by a couple of street lamps and the lights of a big building, in which several men were at work at the time. A policeman walked through the square just before Jack the Ripper got there with Catharine Eddowes, who was a kept woman, living with a peddler. When his business was slack she went upon the streets and picked up men. This was the case on this night. The Ripper got her into the square and went to work in a leisurely way. First he cut her throat, and then he thrust his knife into her abdomen below the breast bone and drew it all the way down. He took out her left kidney and her womb and carried them away. He cut off one ear and her nose, and slashed her face otherwise. How he escaped being drenched with blood when he cut the woman Stride's throat, and how he escaped after the second murder, all blood stained as he must have been, the whole civilized world waits to hear explained.
What is called Jack's eighth murder, which may not have been one of his at all, was that of a woman whose decomposed body was found in an open vault on the site of the proposed Grand Opera House, close to Scotland Yard and several large hotels. The woman's head and arms had been cut off and her abdomen ripped open. Then the body had been wrapped up and tied as in a parcel. This discovery was made on Oct. 2, but the woman had been dead a month.
For what is called his ninth crime, and what was undoubtedly his fifth one, Jack the Ripper waited until Lord Mayor's Day, an ancient holiday in London, when the people all turn out to see a glittering show of gilded chariots and fancy floats on wheels to mark the incoming of a new Mayor. Attention was all upon that, and for the moment Jack was forgotten, especially as this Mayor did away with part of the show and gave away food instead. It was early on that morning, Nov. 10 (sic), that Jack's latest murder was committed and discovered. That he acted with intelligence in this case is clear, from the fact that the police were drawn away from regular duty in great numbers in order to keep order along the route of the procession. Mary Jeanette Kelly was his victim. She was only 24 years of age, and so comely by comparison with the other wrecks around her that she went by the name of Fair Emma. She was born in Limerick, and married at 16 to a miner at Cardiff. He was killed in an explosion, and she became a strumpet. She went to France with the Captain of a merchantman, and came back with silks and feathers and good looks to set herself up as a courtesan in the West End, the fashionable part of town. She sank rapidly through drink, and soon went to Whitechapel. There she took up with a fellow named Kelly, but they quarrelled and when her day for death was close at hand she rented a room of John McCarthy in a filthy lodgings in Dorset Street, one of the filthiest, narrowest, darkest little alleys in the East End.
She spent the night before Lord Mayor's Day drinking in the gin palaces, and at about midnight she went home with a man who influenced her not to stop at the beer place nearest her home for her nightcap drink, as had ever been her custom while she lived there. Home she and the fiend of the century went. Both were seen to stop and laugh at a poster offering a reward for the noted murderer. Presently the door of her bare and wretched little room closed on her life as well as herself. She was heard singing "Sweet Violets" to jack the Ripper at 1 o'clock in the morning. After this Jack had ten hours between going in and the time the body was discovered. He probably only used half that time, for it is thought he left the house at daybreak.
Jack cut the woman's throat, gashed her face and cut her nose off. This he put on the table, which was one of the only three pieces of furniture in the place. He cut off both her breasts and laid them on the table. Then he opened her abdomen and disposed of her intestines in the same way. He cut off one leg and one arm, and opened the lower part of the trunk, slashing away the inner side of each thigh at the same time. Then he washed his face and hands and went away.
London is as much excited as one would imagine. Scores of arrests have been made and thousands of theories formed. An American doctor named Twomblety is now held because he is an erratic character, and because one theory is that some American medical institution wants specimens of the female uterus, which it happens that Jack the Ripper often takes from the bodies of his victims. It has been thought that Jack is a Greek sailor who is rumored to have said he meant to decimate the ranks of the prostitutes because one of them angered him once. He is thought to be the Russian student Wassilyi, of whom we herewith print all that is known. He is suspected of being a policeman, because the London populace is dissatisfied with the unavailing work of its constabulary in this case. The suspicions and suppositions are numberless, and even include the idea that the murderer is an ape, a woman, or a devil from another and much warmer world. We flatter ourselves that our police would unearth this criminal, but we do not sufficiently take into account the labyrinth of alleys and the swarming, drunken, irresponsible, squalid people among whom he works. They had an idea that bloodhounds would track the fiend, but the hounds could not carry the scent any considerable distance. The Chief Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was permitted to resign his command of the force, technically for writing about it in the public prints, but really because of the popular discontent with the work of the force in the Whitechapel case.
PARIS ONCE HAD A RIPPER.
On Nov. 12 an interesting if not important contribution to the guesses at the personality of the London murderer was cabled from Paris to the Staats-Zeitung of this city. We use the excellent translation that was at once published in The Evening Sun. The Staats-Zeitung's correspondent is M.H. D'Alona, and he begins his dispatch by saying that in a newspaper he had just read of the Whitechapel crimes. The despatch then goes on as follows:
"Involuntarily this newspaper notice brought my thoughts back to the time of my stay in Paris, years ago. At that time a series of most atrocious murders had filled all Paris with horror and indignation, and spurred the Parisian police on to feverish activity. The fiendish deeds at that time had an astonishing similarity to the brutal murder, the account of which I had just read. The horrid mutilation of the body in all cases was the same. I, however, soon forgot that fearful coincidence, and would not have thought of it more had not, some time afterward, the news of another horrible Whitechapel murder attracted my attention.
"Then, again, those fearful reminiscences came with force to my mind, and I remembered all the circumstances as they were impressed upon it fifteen years before. My memory did not retain the name of the murderer, who afterward, not through the ability of the police, but more through and accident, had been brought to trial; but I remember that the murderer did not pay with his life for the fiendish deed, and the possibility that the same men had now regained his liberty shot into my head.
"Was the same man who was called 'Sauveur des ames perdus' (Saver of Lost Souls) then by the people still living and at liberty? The conclusion was terribly logical that he had begun his bloody activity on the other side of the canal.
"So the first thing I wanted to know was whether this man had regained his liberty.
"In my inquiries I found out that his name was Nicholaus Wassilyi, and that the unfortunate had left the Russian city of Tiraspol, in the department of Chersan, where he had been imprisoned since the 1st of January of this year.
"The following facts are gathered from diligent researches from acts of the Palais de Justice in Paris, and from the private lunatic asylum in Bayonne:
"In the year 1872 there was a movement in the Orthodox Church of Russia against some sectarians, which caused a good deal of excitement. Some of the people who were menaced because of their religion, fled from the country. Most of them were peasants, who, without many pangs, could take leave of their homes, where suffering stared them in the face on all sides.
"Nicholaus Wassilyi only left a good home. His parents were quite wealthy. They had had him well educated, and had even sent him to the college at Odessa. But Nicholaus was a fanatic sectarian, and he soon assumed the role of leader among them. The chief belief of his sect was the renunciation of all earthly joys in order to secure immortal life in Paradise after death. Members of the sect, whether male or female, were strictly forbidden having anything to do with the opposite sex.
"Wassilyi fled to Paris. He was an excellent type of a Russian. He had a tall, elastic figure, a regular manly physiognomy, with burning, languishing eyes, and with a pale, waxen-like complexion. He soon avoided all contact with his countrymen. He took up a small lodging in the Quartier Mouffetard, where all the poor and miserable of Paris live. Here he soon became a riddle to his neighbors.
"He sued to stay all day long in his room studying some large books. At nightfall he went out and wandered aimlessly through the streets until the morning dawned. He was often seen talking with abandoned women in the street, and it soon became known that he followed a secret mission in doing so. That is why the voice of the people called him 'sauveur des ames perdus.'
"First he tried mild persuasion in speaking to then poor fallen creatures. By the light of the street lanterns he lectured them, telling them to return to the path of virtue and give up their life of shame. When mere words had no effect he went so far as to put premiums on virtue, and gave large sums to the cocottes on condition that they commenced a new life.
"Some of the women were really touched by his earnestness and promised to follow his advice. He could often be seen on the street corners preaching to gaudy nymphs, who bitterly shed tears. But his mission did not seem to be crowned with success. He often met girls, who had taken a holy oath that they would sin no more, again on the street.
"Then there was a change. He would approach a woman, speak to her in a kindly way, and would follow her home. Then, when alone with the helpless creature, he would take out a butcher knife, kneel on her prostrate body and force her to take a holy oath not to solicit again. He seemed to believe in these forced oaths and always went away seemingly happy.
"One evening the 'sauveur des ames perdus' as usual left his home. In the Rue de Richelieu he met a young woman. Not with that impertinent smile which leaves nobody in doubt about her vocation, but in a decent way, she crossed his path. She had an elflike, elegant figure and beautiful blue eyes.
"Wassilyi was armed against the glances of women, but this girl's look seemed to make a deep impression on him. He spoke to her - she was a lost one, too - but not with brutal force. With kind sympathy he touched her so deeply that she told him the whole story of her life, the story of a poor parentless girl, whom a rough fate had torn from happiness and splendor into a world of misery and shame.
"Wassilyi for the first time in his life fell in love with a woman. He procured her a place in a business house and paid liberally for her support, although he made her believe that she was supporting herself.
"For several weeks the girl, who had some regard for her protector, kept straight in the path of virtue. But one day when Wassilyi visited her home, a thing he seldom did, and then only when an old guardian of hers was present, he found that she was gone.
"She had left a letter to him, in which she said that, though thankful to him for all his kindness, her life was not too 'ennuyant' for her, and that she preferred to be left alone.
"Wassilyi was in a fearful mood after this. He wandered so restlessly through the streets as to awaken the attention of the constables. Eight weeks afterward he disappeared. At the same time Madeline, the woman whom he had supported, was found murdered in the quarter where she had formerly led a life of shame.
"Two days afterward, in a quiet side street of the Faubourg St. Germain, the corpse of another murdered woman was found. Three days afterward, a Phryne of the Quartier Mouffetard was butchered at night time. All the murders were perpetrated in the same horrible way as those in Whitechapel. Jewels and everything of value remained untouched. Five more victims were found butchered in the Arrondissement des Pantheon between the Boulevards St. Michel and de l'Hopital.
"Then, in the Rue de Lyon an attack was made on a street girl, who had the chance to cry for help before she was strangled. A throng gathered, the police arrived, and the would be murderer was captured. It was Nicholaus Wassilyi. The mob wanted to lynch him, but he was protected.
"When his trial was in progress his lawyer, Jules Glaunier, claimed that his client was insane. The jury decided that such was the case and Wassilyi was sent back to Russia, after a short stay in the private asylum of Bayonne. From Toraspol (sic) he was released on Jan. 1 of this year.
"This, in short, is the story I unearthed.
"Is Wassilyi the Whitechapel murderer?
"He is in the possession of considerable wealth."
I have also appended a part of the same article regards Nicholaus Wassilyi.
Chris S
New York Sun
25 Nov 1888
From an article entitled
ASTOUNDING MURDERS
"Jack the Ripper" Not Alone in History.
The people of London flocked to see Mr. Mansfield's impersonation of Mr. Hyde largely with the belief that Whitechapel's mysterious murderer must be such a character as that. It is scarcely likely, however, for the man who has kept the police busy hunting him for nearly a year is not likely to prove at all grotesque or strikingly peculiar in appearance. It would seem more reasonable to believe him an ordinary looking man of ordinary intelligence, the victim of some dread monomania, by reason of which his murders not only satisfy his craze, but still his conscience, if he has one. But it must be remembered that murdering prostitutes is the safest form the propensity to kill can take. Their business, surroundings, and habits all render it easier to kill one and escape than to kill among almost any other sort of persons. In Whitechapel they ply their trade in narrow dark streets. Their neighbors are habituated not to look at what they do. It is the etiquette of all such regions for every one to mind his or her business, regardless of what goes on among their number. A man's coming and going to the room of one of these creatures or his behavior with one in the dark corners are not for the community to interest itself in, otherwise the community could not exist. Prostitutes have often been mysteriously murdered in this city, the killing of Carrie Watson in her bedroom in Prince Street being fresh in most New Yorkers' minds. A very similar murder of a member of the demi monde of the higher class in Thomas Street in the years when Madison Square was up in the country our fathers all remember.
WHITECHAPEL AND ITS FIEND.
It is difficult to describe the Whitechapel district or to explain to any one who has never seen London what its characteristics are. Whitechapel is a parish by itself, and contains the Tower of London and London Hospital, the greatest of all the English hospitals. The workhouse is also there. It is a very ancient part of the city, and lies next to what was the original walled city. Some of the famous docks, or basins, for shipping are in the district. The streets close to the docks are of the character that Cherry and Water Streets used to have, being full of sailors' retreats, dance houses, and a rabble of the lowest women known to civilization. But the houses are in the main only two stories high, and there is a degree and extent of drunkenness unknown to any part of New York. Here in Whitechapel are the gin distilleries, where nearly all the sweet gin in the world is made; the distilleries of silent spirits used for blending, many large breweries, and a host of great manufacturing establishments. Therefore if you could put twenty Cherry and Water Streets of a dozen years ago alongside the Williamsburgh district of Brooklyn you would gave something like the waterside region of Whitechapel, though on a very small scale.
But Whitechapel reaches far away from the river in a maze of crooked little streets, and without single solid block between any two of them. Alleys, lanes, and courts dissect and puncture every block. The great Whitechapel Road, one of the widest streets in London, pierces the district diagonally. It is a busy thoroughfare all night long. Upon it nearly all the country produce raised for the London marker is driven into town in farm wagons, bound for Covent Garden, Smithfield, Leadenhall Market, and the rest. This Whitechapel Road is very like our Bowery. It has horse cars upon it, and no end of gin palaces and theatres and concert halls. It is also lined with shops of all sorts, like our Bowery. On either side is the tangle of dark, crooked, narrow streets, in which the victims of Jack the Ripper live, a district of little two story houses, that rent for an average sum of $10 a month, huddled among factories, breweries, old churches, and public buildings. The police do not seem numerous. Some are on patrol and some are at what are called "fixed points." A trifle like the trade the women of that district carry on out of doors in the dark courts and alleys does not arouse a policeman to action. The mere shrieking of a woman with cries of murder does not interest him. Those women are drunk every night and are beaten and cry murder so frequently that the policeman could not attend to all that goes on in that way. On the larger streets the gin palaces are found on nearly every corner. The gin sellers of the better class will not sell gin to women. There are plenty who will, however, but there are more fine gin shops than forbidding looking ones; indeed, there is no such squalor in the major part of Whitechapel as most folks imagine. Its courts and alleys and streets are all kept clean, and though they are dark to our notion, because the electric light is not in use there, they are not dark from the London standpoint.
There is very little in humanity that is lower than the street women of that district, however. They are prostitutes who have almost reached the bottom of the slough of degradation. Drunk every night, the daughters and sisters of thieves, bloated, scarred, carrying often a black eye and a baby, ignorant, fighting, filthy in person and in speech, diseased and discouraged, they are the worst women known to man. They inhabit rooms in the little houses that rent altogether for only $10 a month, and they only go to their rooms to sleep off intoxication. They take men to them only for that purpose. Strange and incredible as it may seem, they carry on their calling in the courts and alleys. Whitechapel is not made up of such, however. There are many thousands of decent tradesmen and artisans there, and the Whitechapel Road is daily and nightly frequented by respectable folk shopping and walking there.
This "Jack the Ripper," who is committing these murders, is so called because after one of the more recent murders a newspaper in London received a letter from Belfast, dated Sept. 10, in which a man signed himself in that way and said he meant to kill ten more women. His first crime occurred nearly a year ago, in April. But little attention was paid to it and no description of it has ever been published here. A woman was found murdered in the streets and her mutilation was so peculiar that when the other crimes were added to this the similarity of the man's method of treating his victims called the first one to mind. This first victim was Emma Elizabeth Smith. She was found dead in open premises upon Osborn Street and the lower part of her abdomen was punctured as if by some large and rough implement. Jack the Ripper waited four months before he continued his work. Then he accosted a woman named Martha Tabram, and walked with her to her dwelling, 37 George Yard Buildings, a sort of tenement in which both respectable and disreputable families and persons live in single rooms and suites of three or four rooms. When the Ripper and the woman entered the hallway, it is quite likely that he hacked her against the wall or that she took such a position herself, and that he pressed his thumb upon her windpipe so that she could not utter a sound. The London police hold to the theory that his outdoor crimes are committed in this way. The habits of the women, the practicability of Jack's adopting this method, and the wounds in the women's abdomens, often made without cutting their clothes, all help out the theory. At all events, in Martha Tabram's case, he stopped all chance of her crying out, and stabbed her in thirty two places, apparently with a bayonet or weapon shaped like one.
But it was the third murder that was distinctively in the style of Jack the Ripper's work, and if he is ever caught and confesses his crimes it is more than likely he will disavow any hand in the first two, as he will in those others we will come to, one in the north of England and one vaguely referred to as taking place beside the Thames. This third murder was discovered in the morning of Aug. 31 by a constable patrolling Bucks Row in Whitechapel. He saw a bundle of womanhood on the pavement as he had thousands of times before, and, supposing it a case of drunkenness, tried to rouse the woman and get her to go home. He could not. She was the Ripper's victim. It seemed scarcely possible for murder to have been done, for he had passed that spot less than a quarter of an hour before, and, besides, there were men at work in a house opposite and they had not heard a sound. It was nearly 5 o'clock in the morning.
PROBABLY JACK'S FIRST MURDER.
Polly Nichols, a street walker, was the dead woman at the constable's feet. Her head was nearly severed from her neck, the cuts having been so savagely and strongly dealt that the spinal column was cut into. The Ripper had cut toward himself from one ear to the centre of the throat, and then from the other ear to the end of the first cut. He had then torn her skirts down from her waist and had ripped her abdomen open. He had knocked some of her teeth out and bruised her face, and there was every evidence that she had made him fight hard to kill her. But he had not allowed her to scream, and must have kept one hand or thumb on her throat while he carved it. All that has yet been found out about Polly's last hours on earth was that she had gone to a lodgings near by earlier in the night and had tried to get a bed. She was two or three pennies short in change, and was refused a lodging, so she went back into the streets to earn what she needed.
The next undoubted victim of Jack the Ripper's thirst for blood, or zeal in ridding the world of worthless women, was Annie Chapman. This woman was not originally of the class that most Whitechapel women are. She had been married to a respectable man, and had become a drunkard and been discarded by her husband, who gave her a few shillings weekly allowance as long as he lived. When this ceased she became a street walker. It was a week after his Bucks Row murder that Jack the Ripper met her. She took him back of the lodgings at 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, where families take suites of rooms and rent out what they can spare. The house is one in which each family or lodger locks theirs or his door, and the street is not over locked. There are many such houses in Whitechapel, and the street walkers who use the alleys and dark courts for their business also take men through such open houses into the yards behind. It is not always that they are too poor to go to lodgings. It is partly the custom of the class. They sell themselves for less money than will buy gin and leave a margin for room rent. It is a fact that twopence is sometimes all that they ask.
Annie Chapman took Jack the Ripper through this house and into the back yard behind it. One of the inmates of the house had occasion to go to the yard several times during the night. He went there at 5 o'clock and there was no one there. Some time after that Jack the Ripper was led there by the Chapman woman. He almost cut her head from her body. He tore out her bowels and hung part of them around her neck. He took her womb out and carried it off with him. His work with the knife was described by surgeons as that of a skilful and practised hand; but it is said that what he did is so horrible that the doctor begged not to be forced to go into all the details before the Coroner. At forty minutes past 5 o'clock the lodger went again to the yard and found the corpse. Jack had done his work in less than forty minutes and the woman had not uttered a groan. It is said that on the day of the discovery of Annie Chapman's body this legend was found written above where she fell:
"FIFTEEN BEFORE I SURRENDER."
The fifth murder, so called, it is fair to presume was not by jack the Ripper, but it is included in this country and in England in the list of his crimes because it was the killing of a courtesan and the murder was distinguished by butchery. It was on Sunday, Sept. 23, that a woman was murdered at Gateshead, near Newcastle, in Durham county in the north of England. The body was mutilated somewhat after the fashion of the cutting of Jack's victims, but that is the only reason for crediting him with the crime.
Jack the Ripper committed what were unquestionably his third and fourth murders on Sept. 30. They are called his sixth and seventh in the list of recent violent deaths of bawds in England. He met "Hippy Lip Annie" (whose real name was Elizabeth Stride) either in Berners (sic) Street or on some livelier thoroughfare, from which she led him to that quiet street. It is a dark, narrow street, populated by respectable folk in the main. There is a door in a stable gate there, and it forms a sort of niche in the side of the street. jack got the woman against this door, silenced her with his thumb on her throat, and then cut that member. It is suspected that he was then disturbed by the approach of some one, for he left her there, where she died. This stable was in the rear of a club house, and one of the members passed through that doorway where Stride was murdered only twenty minutes before the body was discovered.
While the police were carrying her body away jack the Ripper was butchering another woman only half a mile away. This was in Mitre Square, a little inner court, reached by several streets or lanes. It was reasonably well lighted by a couple of street lamps and the lights of a big building, in which several men were at work at the time. A policeman walked through the square just before Jack the Ripper got there with Catharine Eddowes, who was a kept woman, living with a peddler. When his business was slack she went upon the streets and picked up men. This was the case on this night. The Ripper got her into the square and went to work in a leisurely way. First he cut her throat, and then he thrust his knife into her abdomen below the breast bone and drew it all the way down. He took out her left kidney and her womb and carried them away. He cut off one ear and her nose, and slashed her face otherwise. How he escaped being drenched with blood when he cut the woman Stride's throat, and how he escaped after the second murder, all blood stained as he must have been, the whole civilized world waits to hear explained.
What is called Jack's eighth murder, which may not have been one of his at all, was that of a woman whose decomposed body was found in an open vault on the site of the proposed Grand Opera House, close to Scotland Yard and several large hotels. The woman's head and arms had been cut off and her abdomen ripped open. Then the body had been wrapped up and tied as in a parcel. This discovery was made on Oct. 2, but the woman had been dead a month.
For what is called his ninth crime, and what was undoubtedly his fifth one, Jack the Ripper waited until Lord Mayor's Day, an ancient holiday in London, when the people all turn out to see a glittering show of gilded chariots and fancy floats on wheels to mark the incoming of a new Mayor. Attention was all upon that, and for the moment Jack was forgotten, especially as this Mayor did away with part of the show and gave away food instead. It was early on that morning, Nov. 10 (sic), that Jack's latest murder was committed and discovered. That he acted with intelligence in this case is clear, from the fact that the police were drawn away from regular duty in great numbers in order to keep order along the route of the procession. Mary Jeanette Kelly was his victim. She was only 24 years of age, and so comely by comparison with the other wrecks around her that she went by the name of Fair Emma. She was born in Limerick, and married at 16 to a miner at Cardiff. He was killed in an explosion, and she became a strumpet. She went to France with the Captain of a merchantman, and came back with silks and feathers and good looks to set herself up as a courtesan in the West End, the fashionable part of town. She sank rapidly through drink, and soon went to Whitechapel. There she took up with a fellow named Kelly, but they quarrelled and when her day for death was close at hand she rented a room of John McCarthy in a filthy lodgings in Dorset Street, one of the filthiest, narrowest, darkest little alleys in the East End.
She spent the night before Lord Mayor's Day drinking in the gin palaces, and at about midnight she went home with a man who influenced her not to stop at the beer place nearest her home for her nightcap drink, as had ever been her custom while she lived there. Home she and the fiend of the century went. Both were seen to stop and laugh at a poster offering a reward for the noted murderer. Presently the door of her bare and wretched little room closed on her life as well as herself. She was heard singing "Sweet Violets" to jack the Ripper at 1 o'clock in the morning. After this Jack had ten hours between going in and the time the body was discovered. He probably only used half that time, for it is thought he left the house at daybreak.
Jack cut the woman's throat, gashed her face and cut her nose off. This he put on the table, which was one of the only three pieces of furniture in the place. He cut off both her breasts and laid them on the table. Then he opened her abdomen and disposed of her intestines in the same way. He cut off one leg and one arm, and opened the lower part of the trunk, slashing away the inner side of each thigh at the same time. Then he washed his face and hands and went away.
London is as much excited as one would imagine. Scores of arrests have been made and thousands of theories formed. An American doctor named Twomblety is now held because he is an erratic character, and because one theory is that some American medical institution wants specimens of the female uterus, which it happens that Jack the Ripper often takes from the bodies of his victims. It has been thought that Jack is a Greek sailor who is rumored to have said he meant to decimate the ranks of the prostitutes because one of them angered him once. He is thought to be the Russian student Wassilyi, of whom we herewith print all that is known. He is suspected of being a policeman, because the London populace is dissatisfied with the unavailing work of its constabulary in this case. The suspicions and suppositions are numberless, and even include the idea that the murderer is an ape, a woman, or a devil from another and much warmer world. We flatter ourselves that our police would unearth this criminal, but we do not sufficiently take into account the labyrinth of alleys and the swarming, drunken, irresponsible, squalid people among whom he works. They had an idea that bloodhounds would track the fiend, but the hounds could not carry the scent any considerable distance. The Chief Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was permitted to resign his command of the force, technically for writing about it in the public prints, but really because of the popular discontent with the work of the force in the Whitechapel case.
PARIS ONCE HAD A RIPPER.
On Nov. 12 an interesting if not important contribution to the guesses at the personality of the London murderer was cabled from Paris to the Staats-Zeitung of this city. We use the excellent translation that was at once published in The Evening Sun. The Staats-Zeitung's correspondent is M.H. D'Alona, and he begins his dispatch by saying that in a newspaper he had just read of the Whitechapel crimes. The despatch then goes on as follows:
"Involuntarily this newspaper notice brought my thoughts back to the time of my stay in Paris, years ago. At that time a series of most atrocious murders had filled all Paris with horror and indignation, and spurred the Parisian police on to feverish activity. The fiendish deeds at that time had an astonishing similarity to the brutal murder, the account of which I had just read. The horrid mutilation of the body in all cases was the same. I, however, soon forgot that fearful coincidence, and would not have thought of it more had not, some time afterward, the news of another horrible Whitechapel murder attracted my attention.
"Then, again, those fearful reminiscences came with force to my mind, and I remembered all the circumstances as they were impressed upon it fifteen years before. My memory did not retain the name of the murderer, who afterward, not through the ability of the police, but more through and accident, had been brought to trial; but I remember that the murderer did not pay with his life for the fiendish deed, and the possibility that the same men had now regained his liberty shot into my head.
"Was the same man who was called 'Sauveur des ames perdus' (Saver of Lost Souls) then by the people still living and at liberty? The conclusion was terribly logical that he had begun his bloody activity on the other side of the canal.
"So the first thing I wanted to know was whether this man had regained his liberty.
"In my inquiries I found out that his name was Nicholaus Wassilyi, and that the unfortunate had left the Russian city of Tiraspol, in the department of Chersan, where he had been imprisoned since the 1st of January of this year.
"The following facts are gathered from diligent researches from acts of the Palais de Justice in Paris, and from the private lunatic asylum in Bayonne:
"In the year 1872 there was a movement in the Orthodox Church of Russia against some sectarians, which caused a good deal of excitement. Some of the people who were menaced because of their religion, fled from the country. Most of them were peasants, who, without many pangs, could take leave of their homes, where suffering stared them in the face on all sides.
"Nicholaus Wassilyi only left a good home. His parents were quite wealthy. They had had him well educated, and had even sent him to the college at Odessa. But Nicholaus was a fanatic sectarian, and he soon assumed the role of leader among them. The chief belief of his sect was the renunciation of all earthly joys in order to secure immortal life in Paradise after death. Members of the sect, whether male or female, were strictly forbidden having anything to do with the opposite sex.
"Wassilyi fled to Paris. He was an excellent type of a Russian. He had a tall, elastic figure, a regular manly physiognomy, with burning, languishing eyes, and with a pale, waxen-like complexion. He soon avoided all contact with his countrymen. He took up a small lodging in the Quartier Mouffetard, where all the poor and miserable of Paris live. Here he soon became a riddle to his neighbors.
"He sued to stay all day long in his room studying some large books. At nightfall he went out and wandered aimlessly through the streets until the morning dawned. He was often seen talking with abandoned women in the street, and it soon became known that he followed a secret mission in doing so. That is why the voice of the people called him 'sauveur des ames perdus.'
"First he tried mild persuasion in speaking to then poor fallen creatures. By the light of the street lanterns he lectured them, telling them to return to the path of virtue and give up their life of shame. When mere words had no effect he went so far as to put premiums on virtue, and gave large sums to the cocottes on condition that they commenced a new life.
"Some of the women were really touched by his earnestness and promised to follow his advice. He could often be seen on the street corners preaching to gaudy nymphs, who bitterly shed tears. But his mission did not seem to be crowned with success. He often met girls, who had taken a holy oath that they would sin no more, again on the street.
"Then there was a change. He would approach a woman, speak to her in a kindly way, and would follow her home. Then, when alone with the helpless creature, he would take out a butcher knife, kneel on her prostrate body and force her to take a holy oath not to solicit again. He seemed to believe in these forced oaths and always went away seemingly happy.
"One evening the 'sauveur des ames perdus' as usual left his home. In the Rue de Richelieu he met a young woman. Not with that impertinent smile which leaves nobody in doubt about her vocation, but in a decent way, she crossed his path. She had an elflike, elegant figure and beautiful blue eyes.
"Wassilyi was armed against the glances of women, but this girl's look seemed to make a deep impression on him. He spoke to her - she was a lost one, too - but not with brutal force. With kind sympathy he touched her so deeply that she told him the whole story of her life, the story of a poor parentless girl, whom a rough fate had torn from happiness and splendor into a world of misery and shame.
"Wassilyi for the first time in his life fell in love with a woman. He procured her a place in a business house and paid liberally for her support, although he made her believe that she was supporting herself.
"For several weeks the girl, who had some regard for her protector, kept straight in the path of virtue. But one day when Wassilyi visited her home, a thing he seldom did, and then only when an old guardian of hers was present, he found that she was gone.
"She had left a letter to him, in which she said that, though thankful to him for all his kindness, her life was not too 'ennuyant' for her, and that she preferred to be left alone.
"Wassilyi was in a fearful mood after this. He wandered so restlessly through the streets as to awaken the attention of the constables. Eight weeks afterward he disappeared. At the same time Madeline, the woman whom he had supported, was found murdered in the quarter where she had formerly led a life of shame.
"Two days afterward, in a quiet side street of the Faubourg St. Germain, the corpse of another murdered woman was found. Three days afterward, a Phryne of the Quartier Mouffetard was butchered at night time. All the murders were perpetrated in the same horrible way as those in Whitechapel. Jewels and everything of value remained untouched. Five more victims were found butchered in the Arrondissement des Pantheon between the Boulevards St. Michel and de l'Hopital.
"Then, in the Rue de Lyon an attack was made on a street girl, who had the chance to cry for help before she was strangled. A throng gathered, the police arrived, and the would be murderer was captured. It was Nicholaus Wassilyi. The mob wanted to lynch him, but he was protected.
"When his trial was in progress his lawyer, Jules Glaunier, claimed that his client was insane. The jury decided that such was the case and Wassilyi was sent back to Russia, after a short stay in the private asylum of Bayonne. From Toraspol (sic) he was released on Jan. 1 of this year.
"This, in short, is the story I unearthed.
"Is Wassilyi the Whitechapel murderer?
"He is in the possession of considerable wealth."
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