Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

Berners, blood, boat

Another road on my morning walk to work is chock full of ghosts, despite a century’s concerted effort to exorcise them.

Henriques Street is a short, nondescript little street that used to run all the way from Commercial Road down to the railway lines that border Cable Street, but which now stops halfway down as it runs smack into a thirties housing estate.

It has a school on it, and some shops, but nothing remains of the buildings that lined this street back when it had a different name: Berners Street. It was in a dark square off this street, Dutfield’s Yard, that Elizabeth Stride was found with her throat slit at around 1am on Sunday 30 September 1888.

Elizabeth is commonly considered one of the five ‘canonical’ victims of the Whitechapel murderer, more commonly known as Jack The Ripper. Her death, more than any other, is responsible for the ongoing fascination with the case, because Elizabeth forms the first half of the so-called double event.

The theory goes that the Ripper had just begun his grisly work when he was disturbed. Unable to complete his task, he fled, leaving Lizzie with only one cut to the throat instead of his signature two. He then walked the short distance to Mitre Square, frustrated and impatient to complete his ‘ritual’.

Here, ironically in a far less remote spot, he chose another victim, Catherine Eddowes, and was able to work uninterrupted. Poor Catherine received the full gruesome treatment and was discovered an hour after Lizzie.

The fact that there had been two murders in one night and the police still had not so much as a prime suspect, kicked the panic up a notch. The brazenness of the killings, more even than their brutality, caused a wave of panic that led to disturbances in Berners Street the next day as terrified locals’ fear turned to violence and riot.

But, and here’s the problem, not everyone is convinced Lizzie was a Ripper victim.

Her death is germane to the panic that followed, and thus is a vital part of the Ripper story and legend. But her killing really bears none of the hallmarks of the Ripper. And if he was interrupted in the act, why did the man who found the body, Diemschutz, presumably the man who interrupted the killer, not see or hear the Ripper leaving the scene? After all it was an enclosed yard, not an open street or square – the killer, if interrupted, would have had to flee past the man who was doing the interrupting.

Is it not more likely that her death was a co-incidence, a domestic row gone awfully wrong, the truth of it lost in the panic that surrounded the higher profile Ripper killings that had gripped the public imagination?

I’m not a Ripperologist, but there are obsessives by the shedload who will bend your ear for hours about the canonicity or otherwise of Lizzie Stride. Myself, I don’t think she was a Ripper victim. Occam’s razor and this essay convinced me of that, along with the possibility that Lizzie’s murderer was right handed whereas the Ripper was a southpaw.

But the fact remains that a woman died on this street, one of hundreds to die violently in London that year, and by the strange vagaries of history she is remembered while all the other are forgotten. Indeed, Martha Tabram, far more likely to have been a Ripper victim yet somehow not one of the canonical five since she was perhaps killed while the Ripper was still developing his ‘signature’, is hardly remembered at all outside of Ripperologist circles.

I’ll be blogging more Ripperologist stuff, as I work smack in the middle of his hunting grounds, and plan to visit the crime scenes during my lunch hours.

But to keep you busy in the meantime, here’s some homework: go look up the Whitehall Mystery and marvel at the fact that there was another serial killer at work in Whitechapel at the exact same time; one whose victims were never identified and whose crimes were, if anything, more brutal than the Ripper’s and which led to some stomach churningly grotesque attempts at early forensic reconstruction; a killer whose characteristics were weirdly similar to the Ripper’s (and the Ice Truck killer’s) and yet who is almost forgotten, his crimes uncommemorated and effectively lost to history.

A killer who, it’s not hard to believe, would almost certainly have passed the Ripper one day in the narrow, bustlingWhitechapel streets.

One wonders what would have happened if their eyes had met, even briefly. Would they have recognised each other for what they were? And what conversation would have ensued, if they had?

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If this kind of thing floats your boat – and who doesn’t love a good unsolved mystery, even if it is as awful as the Whitechapel murders, which, let’s not forget, were real and bloody and terrible – then ITVs current Whitechapel thriller should sate your thirst.

It’s quite good, if necessarily a little gorier than I like my telly to be, and features a sterling performance by Rupert Penry-Jones, playing somewhat against type and making a good fist of it as an obsessive compulsive desk-jockey copper who finds himself with an impossible case to solve as a modern copycat sets about recreating the Ripper crimes.

Of course, I reckoned I’d divined the premise even before the first episode aired, but I won’t know if I’m right ‘til ep three goes out.