S3 – 6: Mismatch

her to her front door. She stood there for a while and took in the night air for what she guessed was a half hour. The night was damp and the stones and walls around her were wet. And then someone else came walking by, and she watched him pass. There were a few things she noticed about the man. First,

he was carrying a shiny black bag. Second, he was moving quickly, and as he moved along the street, Missus Mortimer noticed that he glanced at the Jewish socialist club that stood four doors down from her home on Burner Street, the club at Dutfield Yard. It was nearly one in the morning, so Mrs Mortimer went back inside and prepared for bed. That would have been when the steward of the Socialist Club rattled by in his cart pulled by

a donkey. He was on his way back to the club, and he tugged the reins to turn the cart through the gates and into the yard, and that's when his donkey bucked and shied away. He was trying to get the animal to turn into Dutfield Yard so he could unload his belongings from the market, but something was on the ground in the shadows, blocking the way. He couldn't see what it was, so he climbed down and got a closer look. He pulled a box of matches from

his pocket and struck a light. In the flickering flame, he could see the shape was the body of a woman, Liz Stride. Israel Schwartz had fled the scene just minutes before. He rushed into the club, where people were still dancing and drinking together and where his wife was chatting with the guests. When a few of them came out to help the steward check on the woman, they found that she was dead. A long cut cross Liz Stride's throats under the scarf that had been frayed by the edge

of the knife that killed her. The resulting commotion brought Mrs Mortimer out of her house and others too, even in the early morning hours. The steward then went for the police. When constables arrived, they shut the gate and locked down the club. Clothes hands and the rooms in the club were examined for blood. The toilets in the yard were checked. The neighboring contages too, along with the neighbors. White Chapels Inspector Reid was back from his holiday and

he was on the scene soon after. There was nothing ordinary about the horrible murder that was coming to light under the Steward's match, but by now all of London knew the pattern. Soon enough, Liz Stride would be added to the list of names women who had been killed in the dark hours of the night, Taken to the White Chapel mortuary, examined by a police surgeon, with an

inquest carried out by Wind Baxter. The first doctor to examine the body arrived on the scene at one a m. He was followed ten minutes later by Dr Phillips, the Urgin who had observed Annie Chapman's body on Hanbury Street. His influence had already been felt in the investigation when he suggested to Win Baxter that the killer could be a surgeon or maybe a butcher. Dr Phillips had come to his conclusion because of the massive wounds to Annie Chapman.

But there was only one cut for doctors to examine on Liz Stride, the one that crossed her neck. There was no doubt it was a vicious murder. But this challenge the speculations Dr Phillips had put forward before. If the killer was attempting to collect organs from the women he murdered, and Stride was killed by the same hand,

why hadn't the murderer done the same to her? But if that struck the Burner Street neighborhood or the police as unusual, it would hardly be the most startling thing to happen that night, because on September the murderer would kill twice. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. There were more witnesses. The rain falling on Aldgates had kept the three men inside the Imperial Club late into the night. It was a Jewish club open just the year before to provide a space to meet and talk. Across the

street was the Great Synagogue, which made sense. They were on the inner edge of East London's Jewish neighborhoods. On the twenty nine September. The Imperial Club had among its visitors a White Chapel furniture dealer, a butcher who lived in the neighborhood, and Joseph Lavenda, who worked as a traveling cigarette salesman. When they finally stepped out into the rain, Joseph looked at the club clock and chucked it against his watch. It was even later than he thought, just

after one thirty in the morning. By now, Joseph was a few steps behind the others, so he wasn't wrapped up in conversation, and that meant that he had his eyes open. As they stepped into the drizzle, Joseph looked at the synagogue across the street, and he noticed something. As they passed by the synagogue, his eyes moved to the narrow passage running towards Miter Street. That's where a

couple stood talking together, a man and a woman. The woman had her back to him, but even in the dim light, he said, he noticed her clothes, a black jacket and a black bonnet. Her hand was on the chest of the man she was talking to. If there was restraint in the woman's dress, the man's clothing sounded much more like something wind Baxter might wear, a loose salt and pepper jacket, a red neckerchief, and a gray

cloth cap with a peak. To the eyes of the traveling salesman, he had the appearance of a sailor, of course, a sailor talking with a woman in a dark passage. That was nothing unusual for a London night, and they all thought they knew what a couple like that was up to. The butcher made a disgruntled mark about the

prostitutes in the city, and they all moved on. As they walked, Joseph and the others probably passed by a policeman at some point, because every few minutes a constable's patrol route took him through Miters Square behind the synagogue, and that was no accident. An order had gone out for more constables to be in the streets every night. There were special instructions that patrolman should keep close observation

on any women they thought were prostitutes. They should watch them going in and out of pubs, they should watch them walking in the streets. In fact, it wasn't just the White Chapel Vigilance Committee that was bringing more watchful eyes to the alleys and passages. The police also sent extra men in playing clothes to surveil the neighborhoods where the killings took place, not just in Whitechapel, but closer to the city center as well, in places like Aldgates,

in places like Miter Square. The three men walked on, and maybe Joseph would have forgotten that quick glance at the couple of people in the passage next to the synagogue, except for what happened next in Miter Square, when the officer patrolling that night, a man named Edward Watkins, would write his name into history. Most of watkins beat was unremarkable. In the words of his later account, nothing excited my attention.

His circuit took him about fifteen minutes to walk, and he had been at it for three and a half hours. The lantern on his belt was on, and the swinging light illuminated the various passages that he peeked into as he went by. At one thirty in the morning, he came through Miters Square and saw no one, and no one, he emphasized, could have been in the square without him noticing. Four large warehouses loomed over the wide space, and it was lit by three lamps. There was really only one

dark corner. Just fifteen minutes later, as he walked through the square again, Constable Watkins did what he had done before. He passed his light over the one dark corner in the square, the back of a framing shop, where during the day the sound of work constructing picture frames would

have reached the street behind. In the stillness of the night, though, Watkins flashed his light across the building's coal shoot, lifting the darkness there, and he saw the crumpled shape of a woman on the ground, her feet stretched out towards the square. As he stepped forward, his light revealed her whole body. Her clothes were pushed above her waist, and she was lying in a pool of blood. The killer had mutilated her body even more than any chapman's. What

he saw was horrible. Cuts crossed the woman's face as well as her abdomen. The shape of an upside down V was carved into each cheek, and slices crossed her lower eyelids. Her nose had been cut off, and her intestines had been pulled out and draped around her. Joseph Lavenda had passed by just a few minutes before. Now, somehow, in such a short span of time, Katherine Eddoes was dead, her body cut to pieces, and Constable Watkins was running

for help. Here's Paul Beg. Two of the men walking past would later identify the woman by her clothing as Katherine Eddoes, and one of those men was the man that I mentioned earlier, Joseph Lavender. But it is equally likely that the woman was not Katherine Eddoes, or even if it was Edos, that the man had just been accosted by her when the three men walked by, and had disengaged himself and walked on, leaving Edos to meet

Jack Arrippa. So again, as with all of these cases, there are lots of variable So they did see a woman, they did recognize her and identify her by a fairly distinctive clothing as being Edos, So they probably did see Eddos with somebody. But there was a small margin of time during which the man that they saw could have left her, and if she had wandered into the shadows of Leiter Square, then she might well have encounter Jack the ripper lurking there, listening to the thing that had

gone home. Whether or not the man in the peaked cap spotted by Joseph Lavenda was the man who killed Katherine Edtos, there was no doubt about the case in the minds of the police. The Whitechapel murderer had killed again,

this time much closer to the city center. Constables and inspectors gathered with a surgeon around the body once more, and once again the police officers fanned out throughout the streets, looking for any sign of a killer fleeing the scene, anything they could follow in killing after killing, so far, this had given them nothing. When Martha Tabram had been killed in George Yard, nothing was found in the neighborhood around her that would help the police identify the killer.

When Polly Nichols was killed on Buck's Row, the sweep led to the discovery of her identity, but nothing else. And when Annie Chapman was killed behind twenty nine Hanbury Street, the discovery of the leather apron in the yard beside her gave fodder for racist speculation, but little more. And even as Katherine Edto's body was found in Minor Square, police were still searching for clues around Duttfield Yard, where

Liz Stride had been killed just an hour before. They also found nothing to put them on the trail of the murderer. Things would be different in the case of Katherine Edtos, though, because when police fanned out from the place where her body lay, some of them went back toward Whitechapel. Previous searches around the body of the victims had come up empty handed. This time what they found would become the very center of the hunt for the killer.

For years, Katherine Edtos had been a storyteller, or at least she had been in the storytelling trade, because for a long time she had traveled with her partner Thomas, selling pamphlets town to town and pub to pub. Not that her life started out that way though. She was born to a cook and tinplate worker in Wolverhampton, just a few miles northwest of Birmingham, and Catherine was part of a large family. When I say large, I mean

she had eleven siblings. But Catherine was never one to stay in one place for long, often because tragedy pushed her on. As a child, she moved with her large family to London, but both of her parents died while she was just a teenager, and that event split up the children. Some went to the workhouses, some went to an industrial school where they would be raised and trained

for more work. Katherine's relatives back in Wolverhampton brought her home and helped her find a job at the tin works There, work, it seems, was eternal, but the arrangement was temporary. Caught stealing, Katherine was on the road again, this time to Birmingham to live with an uncle. In his younger days, he had been a boxer, but now set himself to making boots and shoes. Katherine found work as a metal polisher, but she had better things in mind. She had stories to live out, and so she fell

in with a dashing man named Thomas Conway. Thomas was Irish, and like many other young irishmen, he had joined the British Army. For two years. He had served to uphold the Imperial order in India across the places that the Imperial administrators called Bombay and Madras now Mumbai and Schennai. But like Catherine polishing metal trays, Thomas's heart wasn't in the work. In fact, he was sent back to England

with a diagnosis of heart disease. In eighteen sixty one, he was discharged from the army at the age of just twenty four. When Catherine's aunt found her romantically involved with the young irishman on an army pension who made his money selling chat books and penny ballads at the local pubs, well she turned Catherine out. Soon Thomas and Catherine were back in Birmingham and they were in business together, the story business, and to keep their business afloat, they

turned to true crime and true punishment. They sold copy after copy of wild, gruesome and shocking stories. Not least among them were the pamphlets about the execution of criminals. In fact, that chat books telling the stories of hangings and other criminal executions were popular, whether you were someone who couldn't make it to the gallows on hanging day or if you did witness the and wanted to keepsake.

And that was true going back quite a ways. By the end of the seventeen hundreds, every town had printers that were turning out pamphlets with stories, ballads and gruesome illustrations of corpses hanging on the gallows. One pamphlet telling the story of a shocking murder was printed in London's Seven Dials to the tune of half a million copies. Today, we know that printing and binding chap books was often

done by hand on a manual press. Even if a chat bookseller paid someone else to print the sheets, they would still usually fold so and trim the pages themselves, all by hand. So it's easy to imagine Catherine and Thomas sitting side by side doing the work together. These pamphlets would be sold for just a penny alongside the growing list of tales of adventure and terror for a

younger audience of readers. The penny dreadful. The more unique the stories, the better it went for the chapman selling them, and Thomas was known for spinning them up himself. Like many other itinerant storytellers, he was the self published author of his day, and he turned every life experience into something worth selling. Like one of the chat books that Catherine and Thomas sold, That was their own eyewitness account. It happened in January of eighteen sixty six when a

man was hanged in Wolverhampton for murdering his lover. Thomas and Catherine were there to see that hanging. Along with a crowd of four thousand others, there was an irresistible

gathering for someone with the story to distribute. Here's Paul Beg once again Eddo's and the man that she was living with at the time, he was, as far as we can tell, the one who apparently wrote these little books, and that they were cheap almost sort of pamphlets really that described events that had happened in very often in rhyme of some sort, and the as you said, gallows ballads. And they had gone to witness this execution, and they

had produced one of the ballads. By all accounts, they already had the story of the hanging printed and ready to sell on a day it took place, and they've made enough money that they were able to order another four hundred copies from the printer. Not to mention that Katherine was able to buy a new hat. There's just one dark twist on that story though. The man who

had been executed was Katherine's cousin. As Thomas and Catherine tramped from town to town, making pennies and spending them together, they formed a strong bond. Katherine even had his initials tattooed on her arm in blue Ink. After they had their first child together, they made their way to London, and things were going well enough that they set up shop in Westminster, where their second and third children were born.

But if the relationship was on firm ground for a while, it was one of the few things they had to hold onto hands. Selling penny pamphlets wasn't lucrative business, not to mention that the new penny dreadfuls were overshadowing chap books in their popularity. Thomas added other kinds of work when and where he could find it, but it came

and fits and starts. In that way. He was like many of the other Irish laborers in London who picked up shifts on the dock when ships came in and otherwise just struggled to find a business to hire them. And by all accounts, Thomas was a violent man. The black eyes and bruises that Catherine often displayed communicated as much to her sister to her own life. Catherine added

heavy drinking. Eventually, Thomas's violence shattered their marriage. In eighteen eighty, Catherine left him and her two sons behind, but her addiction bore her down, and her other relationships too, she pushed her daughter away. The last time she saw one of her sisters was in eighteen seventy seven. By eighteen eighty one, she was in Spittle Fields in the East End. Her life there looked very much like Liz Strides or Annie Chapman's. She would clean in the Jewish homes when

there was work for her. She would sometimes take up sex work to pay for lodging houses, and later she met a man named John Kelly and struck up a partnership with him, making their way through the world as best they could. She was remembered for trekking out to Kent every summer with John to pick hops in the fields there, along with thousands of Londoners who relied the seasonal work. In fact, in eight she made enough money to buy herself a new pair of boots and a

new jacket before her return to London. But, as John would later recount, by the time they were back in the East End in late September, the money they made on the hop harvest was already gone. All of a sudden, their future was in question. Bad days, it seems we're headed their way. Sadly, though they had no idea just how bad it would get there was no justice in it. Women like Liz Stride and Katherine Eddos had already suffered

so much. They had fought back from their losses. They had worked for something more, scraped, saved, built, and lost again. Even in their deaths, the stories of women like Liz Stride and Katherine Eddos would be told, would be used in ways they never imagined. What their lives meant to themselves was one thing, but it's become clear as we followed the history of eight eight so far what their lives meant to others was out of their hands and

out of their control. Even the stories we tell about them now, what we know about their lives comes to us because of what they suffered. Their names were written into the historical record, not by themselves, but by the killer. So this is probably the right point to take a step back, because it's an important part of the story

of Jack the Ripper and the White Chapel murders. The version of events that we have repeated for over a hundred years makes the East end of London out to be the place explored in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a place where the sum total of women's lives are the threats and violence that come their way, where they

are disrespected and cast aside at every turn. As we've seen, it's the same story that London writers were telling at the time, and it might be fair to say that no one bought into that story more than the killer. And let's not be coy about it. The brutality of the things we're talking about are undeniable. But I hope that as we've come this far into our story, we can tell that each of these women, Martha Tabram, Pauline Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Katherine Ettos were so much

more than just the victims they became. The Whitechapel murders in London's East End are a terrible story and cruel violence against vulnerable women is at its heart. There's not an honest way to tell the story without creating that list of terrible things that were done to vulnerable women. But it's not the only story that women in the East End of London were part of in eighteen eighty eight,

because East End women weren't just victims. They were so much more than that, and there were world shaking events in the East End that year. For that bigger picture. We returned to the Match factory on Bow Road because that's where poor and working women decided they had suffered enough and the story of their lives was something quite different. We saw the way they fumed against the underhanded dealing of Theodore Bryant when he called their wages to pay

for his Statue of Gladstone. In eight the smoldering conflict between bosses and workers finally burst into flames. One spark that set things going was an article published at the end of June in a socialist journal called The Link. Like the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon Reports, it was a piece that set out to expose injustice with a sensational list title. It ran under the headline white Slavery in London, and it set its sites on the Bryant

and May Match Factory. The author of the article, Annie Bessant, had heard about the working conditions in the factory at a socialist meeting Match workers had attended and testified to their treatments. Annie had also heard about the enormous profits the Bryants were making on their merchandise and the dividends they were paying out to their shareholders, so she set out to investigate. What she found was even worse than

she had feared. Not only were the women and girls working in the factory being paid barely starvation wages, they were also suffering a condition known as Fossey jaw because the Brian's in May match factory was making their matches with white phosphorus. Here's Dr Louise Rat to tell us more.

If it caught hold of your teeth, as the women said, if it got into your jaw bone often threw holes in your teeth because you couldn't afford the dentist in those days, it would start to rot and decay your bone. So you're alive, but you've got this horrible, separating, stinking abscesses. Sorry, I thing was just eaten in your gun and pieces of bone, your own bone. You're spitting them out there,

working their way out through these abscesses. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, Brian and May constantly made it worse. And one of the reasons they made it was was they should have provided a separate dining room so that women could eat out of the fumes, eat their own food. By the way, Branton May weren't going to provide them with a single crumb, but perhaps their own bit of stale bread if they were lucky that

they brought him for home. So they would set it on their work bench until it was time to eat, and then crammicked out as quickly as they could when they could. And if you imagine, the phosphorus pass coals in the air have settled now on your lunch, so you've got deadly seasoning, and so it's immediately in your mouth, and it's got away into your guns. Did Bryant and May try to take care of the workers who developed

this condition. Far from it. It's true that they didn't want their workers to have fossy jaw, but they had a way to brush the problem under the rug. Instead of changing their ways, they simply change their workers. If one of the managers saw a woman showing symptoms, that worker was simply turned out on the street. And Bryant and May could continue to say, there is no fossy jaw here. But of course the women who worked in

their factory weren't blind to any of this. They saw it happening over and over, and they got angrier and angrier. When Annie Bessent came around and started asking questions. Some of them were only too happy to tell her all about it. When her article hit the paper, Annie made sure that Bryant and May themselves got a copy. She sent them a telegram saying that they would be very interested in the day's news. Her goal, it seems, was

to provoke them into suing her for libel. Annie had been hoping that, like the maid in Tribute story, this would somehow find its way into court. Then she could stand and testify before the magistrates and the public about the plight of the London poor. But there were two things that she didn't count on. One was the cruelty of the factory bosses, and the other was the courage of the women Under their thumb. They started with threats.

The word went out throughout the matchworks. The Bryants wanted to know who had talked. They thought that if they could figure out who was telling Annie Bessent about the conditions of their factory, they could put the problem to rest. Fire those women scare the rest into silence that would keep the matches going out and the money coming in. They didn't care enough about Annie Bessont to sue her

for libel, and as she was fond of remarking. They knew that they wouldn't win, Plus she wasn't under their power, so they decided their best course of action was to take it out on their employees. But if you're getting to understand the spirit of the match women, you know they wouldn't take that quietly. They kept talking. In fact, they told Annie Besson about the efforts to shut them up, and she published that too, so a real crackdown began.

Even as the Bryants were telling the press that the news was lies and that the unrest in their factory was the result of outside agitators like Annie Bessant upsetting their happy employees. They went about identifying the women inside the factories who they thought were truly to blame. They made a list of so called troublemakers, and they started to freeze them out, sending them home day after day, telling them that there wasn't enough work for them to do.

But they knew that they had to do more than that. They might not be ready to win a able suit against Annie Bessent, but they certainly had a public relations battle on their hands, so they drafted up a statement for the match women to sign. Here's dr Louise Ra once again. What they do is to gather together the workers give them preprinted statesments which are laid around in every work for him by the foreman, which pre prepared, and they say, you know, we love working for Brian

to May. They're wonderful employers. We don't mind about the FOSSi. Jordan didn't actually say that, but this is the idea they're supposed to say. This journalist has lied. Nothing she said is true. We couldn't be happier. And they know they'll be sacked if they don't sign those papers, and they need their jobs, they need them desperately, but they refuse. Every single one of these women are so proud of them,

refuses to sign. And when the foreman come back into the room, there are these blank sheets of paper and they are absolutely lived. That's when they decided to make an example of one men on a pretext. She was fired. The managers hoped that this would bring the rest of them in line, but the plan backfired as one the women laid down their tools, wipe their hands on their aprons, and stream out of these imposing gates of the fair Field Works Match factory onto the Fairfield Road and onto

the Bow Road. They swung into action. They had an election there at the gates, and they elected six women from all the major significant workshops within the factory, one from each to go back in and put their demands. So instantly they walked back in and they confront the directors. I can just imagine how this went down, and said, right, we'll come back, but only if you let us form a union. Belove me. They were not bright and they were not expecting that, and they made their demands clear.

They wanted better hey, they wanted a separate dining room for their food. They wanted to live decent lives for the work they were doing. Seeing only six women before them, the directors of the match factory scoffed, but the strike was on. As each new wave of women finished their shifts at the factory, they were met outside by the strike leaders. One of them was Mary Driscoll, who we met last time. She was clever enough to find a way for her family to get help from the Salvation Army.

Now she was putting her clever thinking to use by finding a way for the working women to help themselves. By the end of the day, over one thousand women were on strike, Bryant and May had more on their hands than they had bargained for. The striking women marched through the East End like a salvation army band, singing at the top of their lungs. East Enders, with a little cash despair started pooling their money to support them for their days without wages. It took some time for

outside support to reach them. Even Annie Bessent lagged behind. At first. She was still waiting for a notice of a libel suit to acquire her appearance in court. Appearing in the streets of the East End beside a column of marching women was not what she expected, but soon enough,

the column of marching women came for her. She was working in the upstairs room of her office on Fleet Streets in central London when a voice called out to her there were some women who wanted to meet her, and those some women turned out to be a group of one hundred, with Mary Driscoll and the other strike leaders at their head. It was the first Annie had heard of a strike that had begun two days before, but she was ready to turn her pen into support

for them once again. Annie Bessant wasn't the only one writing for their cause, though, soon enough, the Star was publishing a series of reports and interviews with the matchwomen. They organized meetings with guest speakers who would cheer on their efforts and suggest what to do next. The organizer of the local Jewish tailor's union thundered so forcefully that he was arrested for agitating. Word of the strike reached as high as the halls of Parliament, where the Bryant's

ordinarily expected their interests to be served. Soon enough, though, Mary Driscoll and a committee of fifty match women marched into appear before that hallowed assembly and make their case. Here's Dr Louise Raw once more. The women march to Parliament and this is where people are so shocked to see these poor girls out of their area that they get shouted at. You know, can't stop in the street. Things are thrown at them, what on earth are you doing?

Get back to the East End. But they won't. They hold their heads high and when they're finally in with the MPs again, this fascinating clash of classes. The MP's are probably never sat and talked to an Eastern woman on an equal basis, or a working class women, so this really hits them where they live. These MPs have invested in Brian and May. This is all rather embarrassing, isn't it. Liberal MPs who were supposed to support the poor,

and yet they're profiting off this. They tell them about for Seguel, and the MPs are impressed that they're so intelligent and so eloquent. They call for an independent investigation into conditions at the factory. And this investigation shows that, or any bestness, that wasn't quite right, because actually conditions are worse. The company fought back, though they fought in the press. They fought in the back rooms and the dining rooms where they were accustomed to making their deals.

But with the women campaigning across the city and in those same halls of government, the playing field was finally just a little closer to level. And with the reports of a commission in hand and their stock prices plummeting, there was little Bryant could do but concede. They gave in to the demand for a safer workspace. They gave into the demand to share more profits with the women

who did the work. The Matchwomen's Union was formed and the strike was one in many ways, the achievement of Mary Driskell and the other striking match Women was overshadowed by the events of the next few months. Reporters turned their creative energies to chronicling the violence of a killer and telling the stories of the East End women he targeted.

But Mary driscoll story was far from over, and, as will soon see, the threat of Jack the Ripper was headed toward the Matchwomen, who were finally laying claim to their neighborhood and making their workplace their own. But their meeting wouldn't be a happy one. Instead, it would be a collision. The match Women had won their fight. It wasn't an easy battle, but it showed what was possible when the working women of the East End stood together

and stood up for themselves. But if they're struggled to have some say over their workplace had them going head to head with the factory bosses. It wasn't the only territorial battle with major implications for the East End because the murder in Miter Square brought the City of London police into the murder investigation. Now, if you're not a Londoner and already familiar with the ins and outs of

the city, here's the confusing part. The City of London Police is not the same thing as the London Metropolitan Police. The Metropolitan Forces are the police we've already met the officers patrolling Whitechapel under the command of Charles Warren. They answered to the Home Office, as did Warren himself. They were the force organized by Robert Peel in eighteen twenty nine, but Peel had left the center of the city out of his new force. It was a political move and

it worked. It got his bill passed. The City of London Police was formed ten years later. It used Peel's model to organize the force, but kept it entirely separate. It was funded and run by the City of London, and it had its own commissioner and operated under the authority of London's Lord Mayor. It had no obligation, at least according to the law, to report to the Home Office or share information with the Metropolitan Police. So you

can imagine what sort of trouble this caused. Right from the very start in the eighteen thirties, investigators, judges and London citizens recognized that the two jurisdictions were played against each other. Someone set on committing a crime could carry out their plan and then slip across the border, moving from jurisdiction of one force into the territory of another.

Not that this always worked. One was no more aware of the challenges presented by this arrangement than the two police departments themselves, and when Donald Swanson would later report on the investigation, he would say that the efforts of the City Police merged with his own investigation quite easily, with each force cordially communicating to the other daily. But that's not what it looked like. In the early morning hours of September. Constable Edward Watkins was a City of

London police officer. The backup he called for was the same. When they spread out to begin chasing evidence of Katherine Etto's killer. They went into Whitechapel, crossing into the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Forces. One detective, who had been out in playing clothes, took Wentworth Street to Golston Street, but didn't see anything of notes and turned back. He joined the doctors examining Catherine's body and belonging, and as he did he realized that the apron she had been wearing

was cut a piece of it was missing. It was now almost three in the morning, and a Metropolitan constable was patrolling Galston Street, where the detective had been a half hour before. In the light of his lamp, he spotted something that his previous rounds had not turned up. At the opening of some model dwellings, a scrap of apron lay on the ground, covered in blood, and above it, on the wall in white chalk, where scrawled the words the Jews are the men that will not be blamed

for nothing. It was strange enough that the constable reported it. He called for backup to guard the writing, and he took the piece of apron to the police station, where he handed it to Dr Phillips, the surgeon who had been examining Liz Stride for a moment. Word passed swiftly. Soon enough, the city police detectives were on their way to confirm that the scrap of bloody cloth was taken from Catherine's clothes, but the chalk writing was something altogether.

City detectives arrived at the spot where the scrap of apron was found, and they saw the writing on the wall. They thought that it should be photographed, so one of them sent for their superintendent. When he heard he immediately gave the order to photograph the scene, but word had also gone up through the Metropolitan ranks. Charles Warren, himself, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was at the nearest police station, where he was being briefed on the events of the night.

Word came to him that two clues had been found on Galston Street, so he set out to see it for himself. He arrived before the Superintendent of the City Police and he consulted with his officers. Liz Stride had been killed outside a Jewish socialist club. Katherine Eddoes had been accosted and murdered behind the Great Synagogue on Miter Street.

Now this message was scrawled on the wall. As Warren would later write, it seemed obvious to him that it was written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews. After all, the neighborhood was always crowded on Sunday mornings by Jewish vendors and Christian shoppers from all for London. Charles Warren's officers were standing by with a sponge. They worried that if the graffiti became publicly known, the racist fury already stirred up by the star might

be unleashed, so Warren gave the order. By the time the city police returned with instructions to photograph the message, the writing on the wall at Gulston Street had been scrubbed away. 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. The irony wasn't lost on London journalists that the commissioner who had muzzled the dogs of London was now trying to use those

dogs to solve a crime. But the journalist who had witnessed the trial didn't have any of that criticism, only hope in what might come next, and that hope made it into the papers that the murderer's cunning will not avail him against the your hounds that will be laid on his track, and soon, they claimed, London would ring

with the news of his capture. It was one of the few hopeful voices in a storm of confusion and righteous anger at the police of London who had failed for months to catch a killer who seemed to be slaughtering with impunity. But as you might guess, those hopes we're false. Lon Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane

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 Minkey.

For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit i heeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H