S3 – 4: Synthetical Turn

on Hanbury Street. It had been one day since a woman had been found in the yard behind number twenty nine, but the word had already gotten out throughout all of London. When the papers reported on it, they would say the greatest excitement prevailed in Whitechapel, and crowds thronged Hanbury Streets

and adjoining thoroughfares. By Sunday evening. The neighbors around twenty nine Hanbury Street were charging in mission to come inside and peek out the windows at the spot next door where the killing was done and the body was found. Not that there was much to see, just a dark patch on the ground. Even so, on paper at least said that hundreds paid the neighbors to spy over the fence and try to see the bloodstain of the Hanbury

Street murder. Like the sketches showing policemen battling through crowds to move the body of the latest victim to the mortuary. Illustrations were published of the Sunday morning crowd as well, decked out and dapper, ready to parade by the site where an impoverished woman had her throat cut. To our modern eyes, it may even feel like a grotesque contrast, One historian goes so far as to say that the Whitechapel murders made the neighborhood the epicenter of elite fantasies

about sexual and social disorder. Can't say it's any better than that. And if there's one thing we do know about the epicenter of disasters, well, they attract a crowd. Some of them, of course, did this out of a sense of altruism or a desire to learn. They said they wanted to see for themselves. They wanted to understand the suffering of the poor in order to offer them support. But when that suffering becomes a spectacle that can be bought and sold by the wealthy and their guides, we

can only imagine that for many of the tourists. Part of what they were paying for was a sense of satisfaction, satisfaction that they didn't live in the same kinds of misery and squalor that affected their fellow Londoners. They had made it, and wasn't that nice to feel? And the Hanbury Street murder wasn't the only story offering Londoners that chill up the spine. You see, it had been two years since Robert Louis Stevenson had published his novella The

Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. If Henry James calling London a modern Babylon and Charles Dickens overrunning the streets with pickpockets wasn't enough to make readers afraid, the immense popularity of Jacquelin Hyde would drive it home. In the story, London is a dismal, foggy and muddy place, submerged in darkness, broken only by flickering lamps and Stevenson's words, It's poor neighborhoods are like a district of some city

in a night there. In fact, Stevenson wrote the story after reading the reports of the maiden Tribute of modern Babylon. He got them in a letter from a friend with a note wondering who could be the hero of the girls trapped in London's sex trafficking, and who was the monster, the minotaur, the devourer of all these girls at five

pounds of pence. Because of all of that, Stevenson's fiction proved to be as popular as the Pall Mall Gazette's reporting was powerful, and of course, in Jacqueline Hyde, London is the haunt of a brutal killer, a respectable and friendly man who mutates into a monster and indulges his

lust and cruelty. It was a story about a man as two faced and terrifying as the city of London itself, a city whose front doors and new streets were grandiose, but whose back alleys and poor neighborhoods were the stage for violence and vice. And in the summer of the Nightmare London of Jacqueline Hyde did take to the stage. An actor in stage producer named Richard Mansfield had opened his theatrical production of Jacqueline Hyde at the Lyceum on

August four. Born in London, Mansfield had tested out his production in New York the year before. It got a reputation for horrifying and terrifying audiences, and it brought him back to his birthplace and the home of English theater. The papers across London trumpeted the murder scene at the end of Act one as the most powerful and horrible thing ever seen on the modern stage. The Star proclaimed the show's Mr Hyde an odious monster, with brutality in

every line and look and gesture. By the time a woman in the real London was actually killed in the yard behind twenty nine Hanbury Street, the play had been drawing London crowds for a month, getting people out of their homes for a night of voyeuristic pleasure. And when the papers turned around and started reporting on a real murderer in the same terms, well it started to blur

the lines between fiction and reality. And if the killings were, in a sense jackal and hide brought to life, well why shouldn't eager thrill seekers flocked to that scene as well? It was our first glimpse of a pastime that would endure all the way to modern times. Ripper tourism had begun.

This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Some visitors didn't come to the East End to condemn violence, they came to indulge it because the East End Well, it had a reputation for offering whatever a wandering sightseer could want, especially if they had had a little money in their pocket. When it came to touring the homes and haunts of

the poor well, there was lights to behold. There were even guide books that offered walking routes to the wealthy who wanted to take a tour of their poor neighbors homes. If Dickens and Stevenson sprinkled a little fairy dust on the streets of the East End Well, a reader with some spending money could book a trip to that exotic

locale right across town. Here's dr at Louise ra. What people like to do who had read these sensationalist, dramatic tales of the Darkest East was to go and visit it, often with a couple of policemen who were paid to accompany them, and they would go around and stare at the pool. Basically so they would go into the slums, into the tenements and look at how they lived. And it was supposed to be I suppose sometimes somewhat philanthropic, Oh dear, They could exclaim about, oh, dear, how terrible.

You know, I do at least understand the conditions of the pool, because I've bothered to go and see it. But then there were a lot of push young ladies and gentlemen who just thought it was a laugh really, and it was a freak show. But of course wealthy visitors didn't just want to see. They wanted to taste and to touch, and the East End well over the course of the eighteen hundreds it also gathered a reputation as a place where it was cheap to feed lust.

If you already know anything about the Whitechapel murders, that might not be a surprise. Maybe you already know the reputation of Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols and others that the targets of the murderer were sex workers. But if that's the story, you know, it might be worth a minute or two to consider the rest of London. You see, for all that these stories have made the East End into one snarled nest of vices, it was not the busiest red light district in London for most of the century.

That honor would have gone to Granby Street, south of the River Thames. That's where the rail line coming from the south met the edge of London, bringing thousands to the city laborers, visitors and shoppers with money to spend. In fact, Granby Street was so notorious that in the eighteen sixties, when the rail company was buying up the street to expand Waterloo Station, they went so far as to rename the street. But historians are quick to assure

us that Granby, well, it wasn't alone. For decades, London's theaters were known as the place to go, not just for stage performances, but for more intimate shows as well. In eighteen forty seven, theater managers were required to ban sex workers from the lobbies and balconies of theaters. Before that, though, there were travelers and writers who made a point of condemning the London theaters for the sex work they witnessed inside. At one point, the Metropolitan Police estimated there were eight

thousand prostitutes in London. Ministers and evangelists estimated even more, some eighty thousand women. They said, But if sex work wasn't centered in the East End, then where was it? Did? I say? Granby Streets make that Haymarket with its argyle rooms where varieties of aristocrats took their pleasures, though the

rooms were closed in eight seventy eight. As London grew over the course of the century and new buildings like train stations and sweeping viaducts were cutting through old neighborhoods, it wasn't just the homes of the poor that were pushed out in the city's remodeling. It was also home to what Londoners were happy to condemn as vice. If a few theaters and streets in the city center were a dry well, the suburbs were happy to resupply just a short train ride away. So if the Argyle rooms

were closed, not to worry. There was still St John's Wood, all too literal the title, it seems, Pimlico held just as many pleasures, and there were plenty of transport hubs for coming to and going from. If you were looking for pornographic books, the place to go was Hollywell Street in the strand. Just in case you thought I was finally taking a tour of London without mentioning Regent's Park, Yes, the outer circle of the new development had its own

small hotels used as accommodation houses. And here's the thing. Historians have collected accounts and they found thriving sex work in Holloway, Camberwell, Waltham Green, Haggerston and many many more. By now, I think you get the point. In Victoria's city, the largest in the world, sex work was commonplace, as

it was before and has been since. All that was new about the time was that newly emboldened journalists willing to dig up stories throughout the city, and the new technologies of power and speed gathering people around train stations and in the suburbs. The merchants and bankers growing rich on these profit machines, expected to buy themselves pleasures with

the rewards. Of course, just because the hotspots of London sex trade were elsewhere doesn't mean that wealthy men weren't tramping into the East End looking to pay for sex. And when they weren't setting off on foot, they were making their journeys by rail. The East End did have a reputation for vice, and it had its own well known hunts. Angel Alley in Whitechapel has been a staple of storytelling about the murders. But the thing is, it's

just not that unusual. There was something unusual about the East End, though, something that attracted the Victorian eye and the Victorian imagination. The East End was a place where most of the residents, and in particular most of the women, didn't have the luxury of living at ease. For instance, take the women we followed in episode one who were employed in the Bryant and May's match factory. Over five

thousand women worked there. Every one of them was subject to the sense that they just didn't live up to standards. Standards that is set by comfortable, middle class women who didn't have to work for a living. Let's return to Dr Louise raw for just a minute to really help us get a sense of what that was like. You see this incredible judgmental and very sexualized by the way narrative.

Even in labor reports of the period, there was one mining commission, you know, who knows what working life is like, you would think, and yet he looks at the terrible conditions down mines, where you've got girls, women, boys, men crawling through tunnels all day on their hands and knees, you know, naked to the waist with chains around their ways, pulling carts of coal. Absolutely horrific. Imagine that he imagined the difficulty in breathing. Imagine the physical horror of that.

But he looks at that and doesn't say, well, yes, conditions are pretty awful. He writes about it as if it's some sort of orgy going on, because the women are partly dressed, partially dressed as you would be in those conditions. You're not gonna wear your best dress, are to crawl on your hands and knees through a coal shaft. And he says the conditions that the site, the spectacle of these women at work was absolutely revolting, disgusting. It

was obscene. No brothel can beat it. And firstly you think, well, Mr Mining commission you seem a bit well versed and exactly what a brothel is like. I wonder what Mrs Mining Commissioner might have had to say about that one. But also how bizarre, how bizarre, and how sort of pervy really and slightly fetishistic do you have to be to look at children in those awful conditions and say, oh, good grief, they're partially closed or they must all be having you know, it must be all be having sex

with each other. Disgraceful and disgusting, as if these people I must have thought, well, a chance to be a fine thing. You know, these people are exhausted, they're absolutely exhausted, and they're starving. And yet that is what we see. We look at a factor and we see women working alongside men and we say, well, she's clearly no better than she should be. But again, that's a lovely way to do humanized people. It's a lovely way to stigmatize them and blame them. Well, you no wonder you're Paul.

Look at the way you're carrying on. It's absolutely disgraceful. So the poverty of the East End unfairly made it a target of anti vice campaigners. Preachers, evangelists and charity organizations flooded into East and neighborhoods like White Chapel not just to alleviate suffering, but also to attempt to correct the people who lived there. Sex tourists made the trip on the reputation alone, hoping they would find something there that wasn't on offer in the streets closer to home.

And when women started to die, well, that brought a whole new set of urban explorers who saw their neighbors homes as sites to see. After all, writers both famous and anonymous, kept pumping out stories that made White Chapel

and the surrounding streets sound like a foreign country. And that might sound unfair, but fairness never kept a writer with dramatic flair from spilling some dirt whenever there was dirt to be found, and in Victorian London, the writers as well as their readers knew that one could always find dirt in White Chapel. The Star wasn't finished, In fact, it was just getting started. After all, the Hanbury Street

murder had been just what they were waiting for. There had even been a leather apron at the scene, and one of their writers was in the crowd on Hanbury Street that Saturday afternoon, watching the first wave of tourists pay for their peep show. The evening edition hit with the splash Horror upon horror, read the headline London lies

today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless, reprobate, half beast, half man is at large who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenseless classes. Even if London wasn't actually under a spell of terror, well, the Star was doing its best to change that, and there was no shortage of self congratulatory crowing. It nearly blasted off the page. There is no shadow of a

doubt now that our original theory is correct. A strange sentiment to introduced the story of a murdered woman, But it didn't stop there. If nothing else, the star writer was certainly working hard. He interviewed Mrs Richardson, the woman who lived in the room of twenty Hanbury that looked out over the backyard. Her description of the victim's body was even printed in the paper, and the victim's name

was too, Annie Chapman. A lodger in the house at thirty five Dorset Street where Chapman stayed, was able to identify her body that morning. That set journalists on a trail of everyone who ever knew her. Oh, and that leather apron that was in the yard where Annie Chapman was killed. They certainly didn't forget to mention that either. They might have been disappointed, though, because their investigation also

turned up the apron's owner. It belonged to Mrs Richardson's son, and she left it out in the yard to dry after scrubbing away some mold. As they searched for details to fill in the story of Annie Chapman's life. The Star also searched for clues about who might have killed her, and for that they found plenty of people willing to talk. For instance, one woman said that at seven in the morning, a man came into her husband's bar, a man whose

rough look gave her a sense of inarticulate fear. She said he was wearing a stiff brown hat, and under his dark overcoat he had on no waistcoat, and his shirt was torn, and what was more, there were spots of blood on the back of his hand. She served him one glass of ale. It was gone with a gulp, and then so was he. A woman across the street from the pub added to the story and filled in the picture. Yes, his shirt was torn and it was a light blue check. There was blood not just between

his fingers, but also smeared under his right ear. A third witness said that he had seen the same man, dark coat, salt and pepper, trousers and overall a shabby, genteel look. He pinched his coat together as he went by in the streets. The witness said the man looked

like a foreigner. It was everything the paper needed, even with the leather apron accounted for the confidence that they were on the trail of the kill are oozed from the pages, as did the certainty that the police were far behind, and the Star knew where to place the blame at the feet of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner himself,

Charles Warren. Warren had brought in a military system, they wrote, Perhaps good enough for large ranks of officers charging down poor people marching in the streets, but was he any good at solving crimes? The Star argued that Warren had collared his own detective department and put them on a short leash. The officers of his Scotland yard hardly even knew the streets of Whitechapel where Paully Nichols and Annie

Chapman had been killed. Warren had centralized control over his police, and that meant his inspectors were paralyzed waiting for instructions to come down the military style chain of command. At least that was the Stars idea, and there was some truth to it. Here's more on that from Dr Drew Gray. I think his military backgrounds in many respects defines his time as Commissioner of the met He didn't really get detection.

He didn't get planes clothed, so he clashed with some I d And he didn't get on with his boss, who was the Home Secretary, Matthews. So he wasn't well served by his relationships. Probably I imagine it was quite

a prickly upstanding military guide. If Warren's military approach helped him draft up a force of bobbies on the beat, then the tension in his relationship with a criminal investigation department was already clear at the beginning of As the previous year ended and Warren was bashing heads in Trafalgar Square, he got a note from the head of Scotland Yard saying that the detective department of the police was overworked.

They wanted more men in their ranks. In particular, the current head of the Criminal Investigation Department, James Monroe, asked for a new post to be created in his office, Assistant Chief Constable, and Monroe also knew exactly who he wanted for the job. You see, Monroe had lived in India for a long time and there was a man there who had managed his family least tea plantations, a

man named Melville McNaughton. Just as the Home Secretary had chosen Charles Warren when they wanted a police commissioner to squash restlessness among London's poor. The head of Scotland Yard wanted someone with the experience of managing a foreign country. In his recommendation, he said that McNaughton had a way

of managing men that was impressive to him. In fact, he said he had seen him deal firmly and justly with and I quote turbulent natives in India, so he thought it was just the thing for managing crime in another foreign place, the poor neighborhoods of London. So Charles Warren took a look at the man's record and he decided not to do the Head of Scotland Yard any favors because Warren saw something he didn't like. He noticed that at one point Melville McNaughton had been attacked in

India and beaten. So Warren came back with a condescending remark that McNaughton was the one man in India who had been beaten by the Hindus. To Warren, he wasn't good enough at imposing imperial control, so he wasn't good enough for the police force. Monroe, the head of Scotland Yard was enraged and embarrassed too. He had already told

Melville McNaughton that he would get the job. After a few more months of haggling with Warren, their relationship getting worse all the time, Monroe simply resigned his replacement to lead the detective apartment. Took his new post on September one, the day after Polly Nichols was killed. So when a second murder arrived two weeks later, The Star wasn't the only paper beginning to count the bodies of the murdered

women and thinking Warren's police might be losing. A week later, the East London Adviser would publish a piece blasting Charles Warren in similar terms. We are militarizing our police, their article read, but we do not seem to be able to make either good detectives of them or good local guardians of our lives and property. They blamed Charles Warren for choosing to skip the hiring of more detectives in favor of simply building up the ranks of the ordinary

police from military units. He was replacing local constables with men whose only value was a few years of military service, but no other qualification in the old system. According to The Advisor, constables were men appointed by their neighbors to look after their lives and property, a member of the community that he served in and who knew it well. And nothing they said was more characteristic of the hunt after the Whitechapel murderer than the lack of local knowledge

displayed by Charles Warren's officers. But if the Advisors shared the opinion that Charles Warren was failing at his post, they hadn't seemed interested in doing their own speculation about the identity of the killer when the Star was whipping up anti Semitic hatred against foreigners. The September eighth edition of The Adviser was simply republishing stories that they had heard about gang violence in Whitechapel. There is a strong belief current, they wrote, that there is more than one

person concerned in the outrage. One woman on Cambridge Road had given her account of being old into an alley by a gang of bullies. They ripped off her purse, ear rings, necklace and brooch. One of the gang held a knife to her throats and growled, we will serve you as we did the others. It was the kind of event that was all too common in London at the time, and it was the kind of suspicion the

police had been following up to that point. After all, it had been a violent gang that had committed the Regent's Park murder, and it was a gang of men who had killed Emma Smith in Whitechapel that April. No clues yet had been found to identify the killers of Martha Tabrom and Polly Nichols, But alongside the suggestion that there was a lone murderer on the hunt, the police had also been following the suspicion that it was one or many of London's gangs that had killed the women.

After all, high rip gangs had been known to bully and extort sex workers throughout the city and the East Ends undeserved reputation as the pinnacle of London prostitution was just as well known to the police as to anyone else. Without anything to go on, it was the default assumption that when sex workers were in attacked, it was likely to be a high rip gang scooping up their earnings and threatening them for more. But the police read the

papers too, and despite the criticism of the detectives. The stars theory was filtering into the offices at Scotland Yard, not to mention that the string of killings was already challenging the assumptions of the inspectors. And of course there was another theory developing two inside the office of the surgeon,

who was mulling over Annie Chapman's deadly wounds. So in the days after Annie was killed in Hanbury Street, constables stepped up their efforts to capture White Chapel's leather Apron, and the Scotland Yard detectives put their heads together with corner Wind Baxter to see what could be gleaned about the shabby madman who still remained on the loose. Every arrest led to an uproar. The constables in White Champel were still making their ordinary arrest for brawling, for burglary

or disorder, but the neighborhood was buzzing with fear. They were waiting for the arrest of the killer. The papers reported crowds gathering around every confrontation with police and chasing after arrests, yelling they've got leather Apron. But sometimes it didn't even take an arrest. One constable broke through an angry crowd and short ditch to see that they had surrounded a drunk cabinet maker. They were calling him leather Apron and threatening to give him a taste of London justice.

After all, he looked just like the picture of leather Apron that had been printed in the papers. But now the police had their man. On Monday, September t leather Apron was in custody. A police sergeant collared him at his home on Mulberry Streets in Whitechapel. They dragged him to the police station and gave him a squeeze. After all, they were feeling the pressure too. Things were getting out of hand and they needed to make an arrest. The

thing is, leather Apron isn't all that mysterious. The sergeant who arrested him made that clear when he talked to the papers. I've known him for years, he said. He's been in hiding, and it's my opinion his friends have been screening him. He's not been in lodging houses. He's too well known there. It was till the early hours of this morning. I was told where I could put my hands on him. The man's name was John Piser. His nickname leather Apron had simply been his calling card.

Here's historian Paul Beg. Unfortunately for him, it turned out that there was a man in the Eastern with the nickname of leather Apron. John Piser was the son of a Polish immigrant, and he was a slipper maker by trade, and he wore a leather apron, which was the usual attire for someone in his line of business, and for some reason it had also won him the nickname leather Apron, probably because he walked to work and came home and

everything wearing the apron. We don't really know an awful lot about it for certain, except that his health was poor that a police sergeant for some reason thought it likely that he was the man allegedly spoken about by the local prostitutes to the start, and so he was arrested and hauled in. In fact, this wasn't John Pyser's first arrest that year. The other reason the sergeant would have known Pyser is that he was booked just a month before, on August four. That arrest was for attacking

a woman in Whitechapel. The charge was indecent assault, and if the rumors that sparked. The stars reporting are true. It's likely that Pyser was a cruel and violent man who took out his anger on sex workers all around London. But when the police worked him over, John Pyser had very little to offer them. He had alibis for the night of each murder. And what didn't make the police work any easier was that word got out Pyser had

been arrested soon enough. Not only was the police sergeant learning that the leather Apron lead was a dead end, but he was also protecting the man he had arrested from a gathering crowd, one that was now shouting threats, a crowd ready to enact some mob vengeance on the Jewish immigrant they had been told to fear. It was exactly the sort of reaction that the Jewish community in White Chapel knew to expect. No wonder they helped John Pyser to hide when words started to go around that

leather Apron was the White Chapel killer. It wasn't the end of Pyser's involvement, though, because when when Baxter opened the inquest into Annie Chapman's death on that same Monday, September ten, he called John Pyser to testify. It would take a few days before the notorious leather Apron would appear. In the meantime, the familiar surroundings of the Working Lads Institute brought the corner a parade of constables who could

describe the scene of Annie Chapman's death. It brought in a few of her companions from the cheap lodging houses of Whitechapel, who described the last times they had seen her, the last conversations they'd had. The people who knew Annie the longest knew she wasn't always an east Ender. In fact, she wasn't always a poor woman. Her father had been a respectable soldier, serving in the second Regiment of the Lifeguards, and when he was pensioned, he took a job as

a ballot. Annie herself had married another man of respectable service, a coachman named John Chapman. As a coachman, John had scored a couple of good jobs, first for a nobleman in West London, and then a position in a village out in Windsor Forest. For a while, Annie was living there with her husband and three children, in what might seem to be the expected path for working class victorians

of good station. But as Annie's brother would later write, she was given to drink, and when she was drunk, she would wander the wealthy neighborhood around Windsor. Forest took note of that behavior. For Annie and for John, it was an embarrassment and maybe even more, John could potentially lose his position. The family made Annie sign a pledge to oh sober. After all, they said, she was married and in a good position, but over and over again

she was tempted and fell. The family mustered its resources and rallied around her. She went to a home for the Cure of the intemperance, where they paid for her to live for a full year, and it seemed that she had kicked it. But one night John had to work despite having a severe cold. To fortify himself, Annie's sister wrote, he took a glass of hot whiskey. He took his shot when Annie was in a different room

because he was afraid of tempting her. But then he gave her a kiss on his way out the door. All the old cravings came back, Annie's sister wrote, and after that day she couldn't stay sober. The family living around London, didn't know exactly where Annie went after that. She would visit them sometimes and they would do their best to help her. John would send money, but his health was failing and he died in six when he

was just forty five. It may be that Annie didn't tell her family where she was living because that embarrassment, that shame still followed her. After all, she ended up in lodging houses in spittle Fields and Whitechapel. She made friends though. In fact, for a while she had a partner, Jack Civy, and when he left London, she reconnected with an acquaintance from her time in Windsor, a man named Edward, who would spend his weekends with her. They would meet

up on Dorset Street in spittle Fields. Other lodgers said that she was friendly, even helpful, steady going. They even knew her as a sober woman. It seems she really did try to hold to her pledge, though. In the week before she died, she had gotten into a spat with another lodger when she had seen them stealing from a drunk companion. Annie stood up for the victim, but the fight left her with bruises on her head and chest. These bruises were noted down when her body was examined

in the mortuary. It wasn't until that Thursday September that the surgeon would provide his testimony at Win Baxter's inquest. That's when Dr Phillips laid out his conclusions. Whatever knife made the cuts on Annie Chapman's body, there wasn't a bayonet or even a sword bayonet. The knives used in the leather trade weren't long enough either. What it might have been, though, was such an instrument as a medical

man used for post mortem purposes. It could have been a slaughterman's knife, he said, well ground down, but at the very least there were indications of anatomical knowledge. And what's more, he told when Baxter and so the press as well about the missing portions of the body. When the Times published their report on the inquest the next day, Dr phillips theory was at large and it brought in a swift response to Win Baxter. That is, he got a startling letter in the mail from a curator of

a medical schools pathology museum. He said he had information that might help with the case. So when Baxter paid the man a visit, the curator had read Dr phillips testimony in the paper, and he had seen that Annie Chapman's uterus was missing, and that had jogged his memory. A few months earlier, an American doctor had come to the medical school with a strange offer. He said that he was looking to buy organs and he would pay twenty pounds for a uterus as long as it was

preserved in glycerin. Other news reports would later fill in the details that the doctor was a surgeon from Philadelphia, and then he had passed along the same offer at both Middlesex Hospital and at King's College. The American doctor was apparently writing a book, the report said, and he wanted specimens to go along with them. Whether or not this convinced the coroner right away. It was an extra push through a door thrown open by the speculations of

Dr Phillips. It got Baxter wondering, even if the killer wasn't a doctor, was there a chance that he was killing women in the hopes of cashing in on their organs. After all, the days of broken hair were passed, but body snatching and trading in corpses was never truly out of fashion. So if the killer wasn't a member of a gang. Perhaps he was even more desperate and violent, and more willing to do horrible deeds for a pocket

full of coin. And so, when Baxter was left to wonder could the killer be the kind of person who would sell his own neighbors for parts, Warren was winding his watch. Monroe had just resigned from leading the detectives at Scotland Yard. His replacement had been selected. But here's the thing. He took the role on September one, the day that Polly Nichols was found dead, the day after Annie Chapman was murdered. Well, he went on vacation. In fact,

it was more like medical leave than vacation. Charles Warren had agreed with him that all the officers were a bit overworked, and he more than most. Plus he had a nagging throat infection that just wouldn't go away. Warren told him to spend the month of September in Switzerland. Warren's instructions actually came by letter because he was in northwest France taking his own kind of working holiday. And you may remember that the inspector assigned to White Chapel

at the time was also gone. That's why they had called in Frederick Aberline from the Central Office to help with Polly Nichols case, and when Baxter brought him back again for Anti Chapman's inquest. Before his police work, Aberleine had been a clocksmith, coming to grips with how all the intricate weights and gears pulled together to follow the flow of time. That was his specialty. Now Aberline was

on the case in Whitechapel and he was ticking. In his later years, Aberleine would remember that he fell down the rabbit hole. He told the pall Mall Gazette in nineteen o three that his interest in the case was especially deep. He had been an inspector in Whitechapel for fourteen years, and now he was being called back into service there. I went back to the East End just

before an each atman was found, he said. And many a time, instead of going home when I was off duty, I used to patrol the district until four or five o'clock in the morning. And as he patrolled the streets, he kept his eyes open looking for clues. He saw a few killers, but he saw many women like Paully Nichols and Annie Chapman, women with no money, even to

pay for the cheapest lodging houses in the neighborhood. Many a time I gave homeless women fourpence or sixpence for a shelter, he said, to get them away from the streets and out of harm's way. But if Aberleine was making all night patrols, watching Whitechapel minute by minute, Charles Warren knew that he needed someone higher up to tell the hours, someone from Scotland Yard who knew Aberline and his work, and who could coordinate with the detective on

the ground. And so from his perch in France, Warren decided it was finally time to bring Chief Inspector Donald Swanson onto the case. He had solved the Brighton railway murder and caught the prints. He had risen through the ranks and now had a bird's eye view of the city from the Scotland Yard offices at Whitehall. He had worked side by side with Aberline since the early days when they had broken up the illegal playhouse for the vices they needed to stop. Now we're much more grave.

On September a letter from Warren circulated among the top officers in the Scotland Yard Central office. It opened with what can only be called an arrogant note from Warren. I am convinced that the Whitechapel murder cases one which can be successfully grappled with if it is systematically taken in hand. I go so far as to say that I could myself, in a few days unraveled the mystery,

provided I could spare the time. Perhaps not the most auspicious beginning, but he went on, I feel, therefore the utmost importance to be attached to putting the whole Central Office work in this case in the hands of one man, who will have nothing else to concern himself with. I therefore put it in the hands of Chief Inspector Swanson, who must be acquainted with every detail. I look upon him for the time being as the eyes and ears of the Commissioner. In this particular case. He must be

consulted on every subject. I give him the whole responsibility. And so, despite the absences among the leadership, the team of detectives who would truly hunt the Whitechappel killer was now on the case. Here's historian Adam Wood when Warren wrote that memorandum appointing Swanson to the overall rule charge at Scotland Yard. He made he made a comment saying that I found a most important letter was sent to Division yesterday without his seeing it. This is quite an error.

Should not happen again. And all the papers in Central Office on the subject of the murder must be kept in his room and immediately from that and in fact back dating some of the reports. Every every import and telegram on the investigation was submitted to Swanson at Scotland Yard.

So you can mention he's spent a good few weeks reading and nodgesting all the reports that had been generated um before his appointment and came right back to m Smith and Martha Taboram before the murder of Polly Nichols, all the reports that had come from H Division in Whitechapel and J Division of bethanal Green who had been involved in the Mary and Nichols investigation. And it was only really once you've done this you could identify the

potential links and loans investigation. So a monumental task now faced Swanson. Melville McNaughton might not have taken the role among Charles Warren's detectives, but that didn't keep him from respecting the men who were there and McNaughton called Donald Swanson a very capable officer with a synthetical turn of mind. Swanson was just the right climber for the mountain before him.

All of this, though, was happening behind the scenes. On the streets of Whitechapel, the same confusion and chaos still reigned, and although that had its effect on every resident of Whitechapel, it's business owners felt that they were particularly unlucky at how things were being handled. After they had been told that no reward would be issued for the murderer, about seventy men gathered together. They agreed that they were seeing a drop in income. People weren't coming around their shops.

When the afternoons began to get dark, the crowds of visitors vanished and the streets emptied out. So they put their heads together and made a decision. If the police weren't protecting their streets, then they would do it themselves. The business leaders and shop owners of Whitechapel formed what the Star called vigilance committees. They would make their own street patrols alongside whatever constables the Metropolitan Police assigned to

their neighborhoods, and they attracted some attention too. They put together a statement that reached The Times on September twelve. They declared that our police force is inadequate to discover the authors of the late atrocities, and that because the government would not offer a reward, they would pool their

resources and offer one themselves. They weren't completely alone, though the Jewish Member of Parliament elected from Whitechapel, Samuel Montague, added his own reward of one hundred pounds to the offer made by the Vigilance Committee. No one knew better that without leads, the accusations were falling hard on the

Jewish community in the East End. He even wrote a letter directly to Charles Warren saying that the Home Secretary's opinion that the murders required nothing but the usual procedures was not in accordance with the general feeling on the subject, and opened a somewhat tense exchange on the government's choice of not offering incentives for information on the killer. But incentives or no. Letters began coming in offers from across

England suggesting methods of catching the killer. The Times would later remark that it is almost needless to say that none of the communications help in any way and honestly, if solving the murders came down to sorting through numerous reports, confusing documents, and unhelpful advice from people who weren't there. That Donald Swanson's synthetical frame of mind was going to come in handy because things we're about to become much more complicated. The killer confessed that is the killer in

Jacquelin Hide. The story ends with a long section called Henry Jekyl's Full Statement of the Case, a letter written by Jekyl explaining everything. He lays it all out there for the hero of the story so that by the last page the picture is clear and wouldn't that be nice? Well, at the end of September, something surprising did happen in London, and it means we have one more letter to explore.

Londoners were eagerly glued to the papers, looking for something, anything, that would bring things to a close, or that would at least move the investigation forward, and then out of the blue, someone decided to give it to them. On September. As the investigation stretched on, one press office at a company called the Central News Agency received a strange postcard. At first, they thought the letter was a joke. For a couple of days. They passed it around the office,

reading it, discussing it, maybe even laughing at it. After all, there were plenty of opinions to be published on the murders, but maybe someone in the office thought of Jacqueline Hide. Maybe one of them just couldn't shake the feeling that if what they were reading was true, they had to do something about it. So on September twenty nine, the note was forwarded to Scotland Yard and it must have landed on Donald Swanson's desk. But for reasons that are

about to become clear, he wasn't laughing. In fact, it was the letter that would coin the name we know today. It opened like this, Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I am down on whors and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. After that, more mockery of the victims

and the police followed. A PostScript even read they say I am a doctor now with a mocking laugh. The writer said that he had saved some blood in a ginger beer bottle to write with, but it went thick, so he chose red ink instead, and yes, the letter was written in red. When he signed off, the writer put down, keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp. I want to get to work

right away if I get a chance. Good luck, and then he wrote the name yours truly, Jack the Ripper. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. On the night after Martha Tabron was murdered, Elizabeth Stride was in court. She had been dragged in for a drunkenness and for using obscene language. She was told that she would be locked up for five days or she could pay a five shilling fine.

At the time, Liz Stride had the money, so she paid the fine and walked away. And it wasn't the first time. She had been fined two shillings and sixpence on Valentine's Day the year before, when she was arrested on the same charges by now, though, I'm sure you know where Liz stride story goes, because in the early morning hours of September, Liz Stride found herself doing something few people had the courage to do that autumn, walking

alone through the dark of Whitechapel. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thayne in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at History unobscured dot com and until next time,

thanks for listening. Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit i heeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.