Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

This anger began to coagulate at their commission. We of Fleet Street were no help at all. One of our reporters – not the famous Jeb but the Yank calling himself Harry Dam, whom I didn’t know except by name, as, recall, his absence “with a floozy” had gotten me into this game in the first place – had reported even the week before Annie’s death that a fellow named “Leather Apron” was a suspect. That was, by the way, what many called Jewish butchers. That a leather apron was found soaking in a tub in the yard of 29 Hanbury (yes, I had missed it, as had the clomping coppers for quite some time) didn’t help matters, even if it was soon proved to have nothing to do with the case. Still, the Leather Apron whisper would not go away.

Harry played up the Jewish characteristics of this beast Leather Apron, intimating mystical use for the blood and certain body parts of poor Polly. And the killer hadn’t even taken any body parts! One day Mr. O’Connor, who knew a replate story if ever there was one, ran the headline LEATHER APRON: ONLY NAME LINKED TO WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. I suppose I didn’t approve, but I was hoping to be taken on permanent-like, so who was I to go against the great man’s judgment?

Then the Manchester Guardian wrote, “It is believed that (Scotland Yard) attention is directed to a notorious character named ‘Leather Apron.’ … all are united in the belief that (the killer) is a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being of a marked Jewish type.”

You could feel a fever building. I was part of it but had no tool by which to stop it. I also had no will to, being largely agnostic on the issue and knowing no Jews and feeling a little suspicious of them myself. That indifference, plus my customary greed and ambition, got the best of my low character; I had signed on to ride the train as far as it would take me, and damnation to all crushed beneath its progress. I had no idea how far that would be.

The mobs responded to this campaign as mobs do: violently. Crews of young toughs roamed Whitechapel and roughed up individual Jews. The coppers seemed to pick up anybody with a Jewish name and bring him in for hard questioning: among the arrestees, Jacob Isenschmid and Friedrich Shumacher.

Finally, a Jewish slipper maker, actually nicknamed Leather Apron, was arrested and interrogated. It turned out he had knocked a Judy or two about, but that was all, and he was in no way affiliated with knives or the sort of carnage our fellow had made twice. He had well-proven alibis and was let go.

But the Jewish fear grew. On several occasions, mobs formed outside the Spitalfields police station where this Leather Apron (John Pizer, by name) was incarcerated. Anti-Jewish graffiti began to appear mysteriously on tenement walls and storefronts. A very uncomfortable tension, palpable and unsettling, began to course through the lower orders – I love them in principle, but I was to learn on this adventure that they can be reprehensible louts in ungoverned mobs and need stern leadership to harness their rage – and violence was in the air. If our killer was a Jew, killing on some kind of twisted religious grounds, I had no idea what mischief might be released. For that and that alone, I began to hope that early suspicions of a doctor or a surgeon played out, for if it were an upper-class nob, it’s unlikely that a mob would head into Kensington with torches and pitchforks. For one thing, the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards would stop them with Gatling guns before they got across the street, just like the black-skinned ugga-buggas, and that would be a bloody day for old London.

Among all these voices, one was not heard from. The killer’s. His weekly schedule was not kept, and he did not strike again for two weeks after Annie. What was he doing?

September 10, 1888

Dear Mum,

I never heard from you after the last letter, but maybe that’s because I didn’t send it. Ha-ha! Maybe when they catch this fellow, I’ll send it and this one and you and Da can have a good laugh about how your bad daughter survived what all about is calling “the autumn of the knife.”

You know the fellow is back and he cut up another girl. He even stole her wedding rings! It’s been in all the papers, so I know you heard about it, and you’ll be worrying because this time it’s so close by me. Well, I am writing to tell you don’t be worried! Nothing’s going to happen to me. I have a guardian angel now!

I have a fellow, a nice man, he doesn’t beat me or try and shove me about to be a certain way. He lets me be, and what more can a girl ask, plus he brings in a good penny as he works as a porter at the Billingsgate fish market, where there’s a lot of packing and loading and ice chipping to do, so when he gets home, he’s a tired fellow and we’ll have a glass of beer at the pub. He wants me to stop with what I do bringing in the money, and maybe that’s in the cards, who can read the future? But I’ll tell you, he won’t let no other fellow on to me, well, on to me to hurt me. As I said, see, it’s different down here, all of us are so close to going under that it’s more forgiving of certain things. There’s no high and mighty. Nobody’s high, nobody’s mighty, you do what you has to, and you helps out them what needs it and in turn, when you’re down, they’ll help you back. The girls is all so nice, not like some I’ve known.

The other thing is that poor Annie, that’s what the newspapers say was her name, she was again a lone gal on a dark street, with nobody about to see or stop nothing. He fooled her into taking him into a backyard where it was even darker than the street, and that’s where he ripped her up, and you must have heard, as I have, it’s in all the papers, this time he did a job on the ripping.

I don’t know what makes a fellow want to do that. We girls never hurt nobody, and only a few of us gets involved in any bully game, and then only when a boyfriend threatens with a whipping or worse. But mostly we get along with each other, with the blue bottles, as we call coppers, and with the boyos who come down here for their bit of dirty.

See, Mum, I’m always with other girls, and we’ll be walking round and round and keeping an eye out for each other. And we’ll only go with a gentleman if he’s nicely dressed and polite and don’t smell too bad. It’s said this fellow is a Jew called Leather Apron, as all the Jew butchers seem to wear such a thing. One of our better coppers, called Johnny Upright for his good and fair ways, done arrested him, and for a time, it seemed there’d be no more cutting. Johnny Upright got his man! Too bad, ain’t it so, that this Leather Apron wasn’t the true bad bloke, only someone the papers said was bad. They had to let him go. But Johnny Upright’s still on the case and you can bet on that one.

Sometimes you do see the Jews down here, but usually they stick to their own section, which ain’t far, but almost always they’re doing some business, they’re always buying for three and somehow turning it about to sell for four, so I’m not one who thinks it is a Jewish fellow. They’re too busy counting their gold, ha-ha! More like a sailor or a soldier, they can be brutes and want what they want. I don’t like soldiers; hurting is what they does.

But as I say, even after the job he done on poor Annie and the ripping they say was horrible, and even though it was but a few blocks down, I know it’ll be all swell. Johnny Upright will save us, and then my man’s always on guard and won’t let nobody touch me. Well, ha-ha, “touch” me. Now I know I won’t send this letter to you, Mum, because you wouldn’t find it so funny ha-ha at all.

But still it makes me feel so close to you and to all that I miss so bad. I keep hoping that someday I’ll wake up and the thirst will be gone and I can go back to having a nice life like everybody else. I hope that so bad and I love you so much.