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It was just after midnight on Berner Street when Israel Schwartz turned a corner and, for the briefest of moments, looked straight at Jack the Ripper. He didn’t know it then. He only saw a man scuffling with a woman, another standing with a clay pipe, and then the sudden turn of a head, the hiss of a threat, and footsteps coming after him. He ran. Behind him, Elizabeth Stride was left to die.
On the night of 30 September 1888, Israel Schwartz turned into Berner Street and walked directly into history. His police statement, given to Inspector Abberline, is among the most vivid of all the witness accounts, and yet also one of the most misunderstood. He told how he saw a man stop and speak to a woman standing in the gateway of Dutfield’s Yard. The man suddenly seized her and tried to pull her into the street. Schwartz crossed to the other side of the road. He noticed another man standing nearby, described simply as smoking a pipe. Then, as if sensing Schwartz’s presence, the second man moved, uttered a threat, and began to follow. Schwartz panicked, broke into a run, and the pipe-smoking figure pursued him. The first man and the woman remained behind. Later the woman was identified as Elizabeth Stride, the Ripper’s third canonical victim, her body soon discovered with her throat cut.
From that night has grown a persistent debate: who was the “Pipeman,” and what role did he play? Some have argued that the Berner Street incident implies the Ripper had an accomplice. Others claim Pipeman was merely a bystander. But there is a third reading — the one that carries the greatest weight. Pipeman was not an accomplice, nor a bystander, nor a phantom conjured by confusion. Pipeman was Jack the Ripper himself, and the man Schwartz glimpsed in the shadows was none other than Francis Thompson.
The description Schwartz gave was spare but telling: a man of medium build, fair complexion, dark hair, a small moustache. He was smoking a clay pipe. He moved toward Schwartz with enough menace to send him fleeing. What leaps out immediately is the pipe. Francis Thompson was notorious for his pipe — not just any pipe, but the long clay stem that had become, in John Walsh’s words, his “inseparable companion.” Neighbours remembered him as a slight, frail man, often muttering to himself, shoelaces dragging, clutching his clay pipe as if it were an extension of his own hand. It was so distinctive that children nicknamed him “Elasticlegs,” partly for his jerky gait and partly for the odd silhouette he cut, pipe jutting forward like punctuation in the fog.
Consider the coincidence: Schwartz, in the very heart of Whitechapel, in the precise hour of a Ripper killing, observes a man whose most notable detail is that he is smoking a clay pipe. How many men in Whitechapel that night might have been smoking? Doubtless many. But how many fit the fuller description? Frail figure, muttering, moustached, pipe always in hand. When combined with the simple fact that Thompson, by 1888, was living rough in East London refuges within walking distance of Berner Street, the alignment becomes more than chance. The “Pipeman” of Berner Street and the Francis Thompson of Walsh’s biography are one and the same.
But what of the argument that Schwartz described two men — one attacking Stride, the other threatening Schwartz? Doesn’t this imply that the Ripper worked with an accomplice? The idea is seductive, but it collapses under scrutiny. Serial killers do not share. The Ripper murders bear every hallmark of a solitary obsession: the personal fury, the surgical focus, the ritual mutilation. To divide that fury between two men would be to dilute it, to risk betrayal, to surrender control. No, the Ripper operated alone. Which means that Schwartz did not witness two conspirators at work, but one killer and one victim, with his own frightened perspective splitting the moment into fragments.
Look closely at what Schwartz said: he saw the first man scuffling with Stride. He saw a second man with a pipe. Then the second man threatened him. But is it possible that Schwartz’s frightened glance misread one man as two? Darkness, distance, a struggle in the shadows — the brain seizes on movement and multiplies it. When Pipeman stepped forward, Schwartz thought him distinct. In fact, he was the same figure who had moments before grappled with Stride. The Ripper was both attacker and pursuer, switching roles in the space of a few seconds. The “two men” were one, and that one was Francis Thompson.
There is another layer. Schwartz himself was a Hungarian Jew and an actor by trade. He was trained to notice gesture, expression, performance. He remarked that the man with the pipe looked “Jewish,” but this perception may have been influenced by context: the East End was rife with tension, and Schwartz, sensitive to the politics of identity, may have interpreted a Gentile man adopting Jewish mannerisms. Thompson, immersed in theater and mimicry, could easily slip into such a guise. His poetry shows constant shifting of voices, adopting personae, imitating biblical cadences. It would have been nothing to him to hunch his shoulders, narrow his eyes, and mutter in a way that suggested a Jewish street figure. Schwartz, acutely aware, felt the menace immediately.
Why is this important? Because it reveals Thompson’s tactical intelligence. He understood how to disguise himself in plain sight, to pass as local, to appear like “unknown man of the streets.” To Schwartz, that night, Pipeman seemed like any other Whitechapel denizen. Only in retrospect does the truth emerge: he was a highly educated ex-medical student, trained at Owens College under Julius Dreschfeld, steeped in Virchow’s anatomical methods, and carrying his own dissecting scalpel — the very man who could execute the mutilations that baffled police surgeons. Schwartz saw him not as a poet or a scholar but as a pipe-smoking loiterer. The mask had worked.
There is another reason why Pipeman must be understood as the Ripper himself. Consider the psychology. Schwartz is the only witness ever pursued by a suspect. Why would an accomplice chase a passer-by while the killer remained behind with the victim? That division makes no sense. The only logical reading is that the killer, startled by Schwartz’s appearance, broke off from Stride long enough to threaten and follow the witness. His priority was to drive the intruder away, to ensure no one lingered who might later testify. Once Schwartz fled, the killer returned to his work. Stride’s throat was cut minutes later. That sequence explains the evidence: a brief altercation witnessed, a frightened witness chased off, a victim slain. All by one man.
It is important, too, to dismantle the claim that Stride’s murder shows a different hand because her body was not mutilated like the others. The explanation is simple. The Ripper was interrupted. Schwartz’s sudden arrival disrupted the ritual. With danger close, Thompson cut short his ritual and cut only the throat. The pattern resumes with Catherine Eddowes, slain the same night with full mutilations, once the killer had regained control. Far from undermining the case, Stride’s “lesser” injuries confirm the sequence. Schwartz’s intrusion saved Stride from further desecration. Pipeman’s pursuit of him was the Ripper buying the few minutes he needed to escape detection.
And so we return to Thompson himself. Walsh’s biography paints the picture: the muttered soliloquies, the erratic gait, the frail figure, the clay pipe always in his grasp. The neighbours called him “Elasticlegs.” Children mocked his shuffling steps. Yet within that fragile exterior lay a furnace of obsession He wrote of women as ulcers, of love as disease, of prostitutes as blasphemies against nature. His hatred was not abstract. It was visceral. He confessed, in his prose, to thoughts of blood, of knives, of retribution. Combine this pathology with the scene Schwartz witnessed, and the fit is exact. Pipeman is no longer a cipher; he is Thompson, the vagrant poet with a scalpel and a vendetta.
It is telling, too, that Schwartz was never called to testify at an inquest. Why was his account sidelined? Some say his testimony was unreliable, or that it risked inflaming anti-Semitic riots. But another possibility lingers. If the authorities suspected that Pipeman was someone of higher standing than a faceless local — if whispers of Thompson, the educated son of a doctor, had reached them — then burying Schwartz’s account would serve to obscure a scandal. After all, Thompson went on to be rescued by the Catholic literary circle of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, lionized as a saintly poet, praised by G.K. Chesterton, admired by Tolkien. To connect him with the image of Pipeman would shatter reputations. Better, perhaps, to let the account fade.
But history remembers. And when we line up the fragments, the silhouette comes into focus. The clay pipe glows in the night air. The fair complexion, the moustache, the frail frame, the muttered soliloquy — all match Thompson. The pursuit of Schwartz is consistent with the killer’s need to clear witnesses. The interruption explains Stride’s lesser wounds. The lone modus operandi fits serial psychology. The disguise as a local Jew explains Schwartz’s impression. And the probability of another man in Whitechapel that night fitting all these details is astronomically small. The ink blot resolves into a portrait.
This is why Pipeman matters. For decades, the Ripper mystery has been clouded by names thrown into the fire: Lechmere, Bury, Maybrick, Sickert, Druitt. Each carries a scrap of possibility, a coincidence, a suspicion. But Pipeman is different because he was seen, described, recorded. And the man who matches him — in habit, in appearance, in psychology, in geography — is Francis Thompson. It is not conjecture. It is convergence.
Schwartz glimpsed the Ripper that night. He did not know it, but he had stood within feet of the killer. He saw the clay pipe, the frail figure, the menace in the eyes. He ran, and in running he lived. Behind him, Stride fell. And in that moment the mask slipped. Pipeman was no shadow, no accomplice, no anonymous loiterer. Pipeman was the Ripper, and the Ripper was Francis Thompson.
On the night of 30 September 1888, Israel Schwartz turned into Berner Street and walked directly into history. His police statement, given to Inspector Abberline, is among the most vivid of all the witness accounts, and yet also one of the most misunderstood. He told how he saw a man stop and speak to a woman standing in the gateway of Dutfield’s Yard. The man suddenly seized her and tried to pull her into the street. Schwartz crossed to the other side of the road. He noticed another man standing nearby, described simply as smoking a pipe. Then, as if sensing Schwartz’s presence, the second man moved, uttered a threat, and began to follow. Schwartz panicked, broke into a run, and the pipe-smoking figure pursued him. The first man and the woman remained behind. Later the woman was identified as Elizabeth Stride, the Ripper’s third canonical victim, her body soon discovered with her throat cut.
From that night has grown a persistent debate: who was the “Pipeman,” and what role did he play? Some have argued that the Berner Street incident implies the Ripper had an accomplice. Others claim Pipeman was merely a bystander. But there is a third reading — the one that carries the greatest weight. Pipeman was not an accomplice, nor a bystander, nor a phantom conjured by confusion. Pipeman was Jack the Ripper himself, and the man Schwartz glimpsed in the shadows was none other than Francis Thompson.
The description Schwartz gave was spare but telling: a man of medium build, fair complexion, dark hair, a small moustache. He was smoking a clay pipe. He moved toward Schwartz with enough menace to send him fleeing. What leaps out immediately is the pipe. Francis Thompson was notorious for his pipe — not just any pipe, but the long clay stem that had become, in John Walsh’s words, his “inseparable companion.” Neighbours remembered him as a slight, frail man, often muttering to himself, shoelaces dragging, clutching his clay pipe as if it were an extension of his own hand. It was so distinctive that children nicknamed him “Elasticlegs,” partly for his jerky gait and partly for the odd silhouette he cut, pipe jutting forward like punctuation in the fog.
Consider the coincidence: Schwartz, in the very heart of Whitechapel, in the precise hour of a Ripper killing, observes a man whose most notable detail is that he is smoking a clay pipe. How many men in Whitechapel that night might have been smoking? Doubtless many. But how many fit the fuller description? Frail figure, muttering, moustached, pipe always in hand. When combined with the simple fact that Thompson, by 1888, was living rough in East London refuges within walking distance of Berner Street, the alignment becomes more than chance. The “Pipeman” of Berner Street and the Francis Thompson of Walsh’s biography are one and the same.
But what of the argument that Schwartz described two men — one attacking Stride, the other threatening Schwartz? Doesn’t this imply that the Ripper worked with an accomplice? The idea is seductive, but it collapses under scrutiny. Serial killers do not share. The Ripper murders bear every hallmark of a solitary obsession: the personal fury, the surgical focus, the ritual mutilation. To divide that fury between two men would be to dilute it, to risk betrayal, to surrender control. No, the Ripper operated alone. Which means that Schwartz did not witness two conspirators at work, but one killer and one victim, with his own frightened perspective splitting the moment into fragments.
Look closely at what Schwartz said: he saw the first man scuffling with Stride. He saw a second man with a pipe. Then the second man threatened him. But is it possible that Schwartz’s frightened glance misread one man as two? Darkness, distance, a struggle in the shadows — the brain seizes on movement and multiplies it. When Pipeman stepped forward, Schwartz thought him distinct. In fact, he was the same figure who had moments before grappled with Stride. The Ripper was both attacker and pursuer, switching roles in the space of a few seconds. The “two men” were one, and that one was Francis Thompson.
There is another layer. Schwartz himself was a Hungarian Jew and an actor by trade. He was trained to notice gesture, expression, performance. He remarked that the man with the pipe looked “Jewish,” but this perception may have been influenced by context: the East End was rife with tension, and Schwartz, sensitive to the politics of identity, may have interpreted a Gentile man adopting Jewish mannerisms. Thompson, immersed in theater and mimicry, could easily slip into such a guise. His poetry shows constant shifting of voices, adopting personae, imitating biblical cadences. It would have been nothing to him to hunch his shoulders, narrow his eyes, and mutter in a way that suggested a Jewish street figure. Schwartz, acutely aware, felt the menace immediately.
Why is this important? Because it reveals Thompson’s tactical intelligence. He understood how to disguise himself in plain sight, to pass as local, to appear like “unknown man of the streets.” To Schwartz, that night, Pipeman seemed like any other Whitechapel denizen. Only in retrospect does the truth emerge: he was a highly educated ex-medical student, trained at Owens College under Julius Dreschfeld, steeped in Virchow’s anatomical methods, and carrying his own dissecting scalpel — the very man who could execute the mutilations that baffled police surgeons. Schwartz saw him not as a poet or a scholar but as a pipe-smoking loiterer. The mask had worked.
There is another reason why Pipeman must be understood as the Ripper himself. Consider the psychology. Schwartz is the only witness ever pursued by a suspect. Why would an accomplice chase a passer-by while the killer remained behind with the victim? That division makes no sense. The only logical reading is that the killer, startled by Schwartz’s appearance, broke off from Stride long enough to threaten and follow the witness. His priority was to drive the intruder away, to ensure no one lingered who might later testify. Once Schwartz fled, the killer returned to his work. Stride’s throat was cut minutes later. That sequence explains the evidence: a brief altercation witnessed, a frightened witness chased off, a victim slain. All by one man.
It is important, too, to dismantle the claim that Stride’s murder shows a different hand because her body was not mutilated like the others. The explanation is simple. The Ripper was interrupted. Schwartz’s sudden arrival disrupted the ritual. With danger close, Thompson cut short his ritual and cut only the throat. The pattern resumes with Catherine Eddowes, slain the same night with full mutilations, once the killer had regained control. Far from undermining the case, Stride’s “lesser” injuries confirm the sequence. Schwartz’s intrusion saved Stride from further desecration. Pipeman’s pursuit of him was the Ripper buying the few minutes he needed to escape detection.
And so we return to Thompson himself. Walsh’s biography paints the picture: the muttered soliloquies, the erratic gait, the frail figure, the clay pipe always in his grasp. The neighbours called him “Elasticlegs.” Children mocked his shuffling steps. Yet within that fragile exterior lay a furnace of obsession He wrote of women as ulcers, of love as disease, of prostitutes as blasphemies against nature. His hatred was not abstract. It was visceral. He confessed, in his prose, to thoughts of blood, of knives, of retribution. Combine this pathology with the scene Schwartz witnessed, and the fit is exact. Pipeman is no longer a cipher; he is Thompson, the vagrant poet with a scalpel and a vendetta.
It is telling, too, that Schwartz was never called to testify at an inquest. Why was his account sidelined? Some say his testimony was unreliable, or that it risked inflaming anti-Semitic riots. But another possibility lingers. If the authorities suspected that Pipeman was someone of higher standing than a faceless local — if whispers of Thompson, the educated son of a doctor, had reached them — then burying Schwartz’s account would serve to obscure a scandal. After all, Thompson went on to be rescued by the Catholic literary circle of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, lionized as a saintly poet, praised by G.K. Chesterton, admired by Tolkien. To connect him with the image of Pipeman would shatter reputations. Better, perhaps, to let the account fade.
But history remembers. And when we line up the fragments, the silhouette comes into focus. The clay pipe glows in the night air. The fair complexion, the moustache, the frail frame, the muttered soliloquy — all match Thompson. The pursuit of Schwartz is consistent with the killer’s need to clear witnesses. The interruption explains Stride’s lesser wounds. The lone modus operandi fits serial psychology. The disguise as a local Jew explains Schwartz’s impression. And the probability of another man in Whitechapel that night fitting all these details is astronomically small. The ink blot resolves into a portrait.
This is why Pipeman matters. For decades, the Ripper mystery has been clouded by names thrown into the fire: Lechmere, Bury, Maybrick, Sickert, Druitt. Each carries a scrap of possibility, a coincidence, a suspicion. But Pipeman is different because he was seen, described, recorded. And the man who matches him — in habit, in appearance, in psychology, in geography — is Francis Thompson. It is not conjecture. It is convergence.
Schwartz glimpsed the Ripper that night. He did not know it, but he had stood within feet of the killer. He saw the clay pipe, the frail figure, the menace in the eyes. He ran, and in running he lived. Behind him, Stride fell. And in that moment the mask slipped. Pipeman was no shadow, no accomplice, no anonymous loiterer. Pipeman was the Ripper, and the Ripper was Francis Thompson.
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