Chapter 1: How did Jack the Ripper manage to strike twice in one night?
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In the long history of power, Hive helps you finally know yours. Head to hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability. Hive app compatible with selected technology. Paid for surplus requires SEG tariff. An old woman, who was known by the soubriquet of Mother Crackham, rather startled me by rushing up as I stood at the fireplace and demanded to know if I was Jack the Ripper.
The awkwardness of answering this question I was happily relieved of by the old dame herself assuring me that she did not think I was. I know you ain't him, she said.
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Chapter 2: What chilling clues did the police discover after the murders?
The ripper has been cheated of the thing that he really, you know, the killing is now not enough to give him the high that he wants. It is actually the process of ripping which is becoming more and more extreme and more horrific every time. And that's why he feels the need to strike again. Now, this first crime, there are a couple of really intriguing witnesses.
So first of all, there's a guy called P.C. William Smith. He was patrolling near Burner Street at about 12.30 on the night of the murder, and he saw a man and a woman with a red rose talking across the street from where the body was discovered.
And he described the man as about 28 years old, dark complexion, a small dark moustache, wearing a black cutaway coat, wearing a hard felt deerstalker hat, and carrying a parcel in newspaper. Because the man seen talking to Annie Chapman had been wearing a deerstalker hat, hadn't he? Exactly. So deer stalker hats, they're not uncommon. Of course, Sherlock Holmes is famously portrayed with one.
So, you know, it could be a different man, but it's telling that the hat keeps reappearing in all the witness statements.
I mean, just to think, I mean, a deer stalker, you wear it because you're stalking deer. And when you capture a deer, you rip it open and disembowel it. I'm just wondering if perhaps there's a... Maybe. I mean, maybe I hadn't thought of that, Tom.
I don't know. So there's another way in this. See what you think of this one. This guy is called Israel Schwartz. Now, he is a Jewish immigrant, and he's probably from Galicia in Austria-Hungary. At about 12.45, he is walking past Duffield's yard when, as Chief Inspector Swanson describes in his notes, he saw a man stop and speak to a woman who was standing in the gateway.
The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned around and threw her down on the footway, and the woman screamed three times, but not very loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man standing lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road, Lipski, and then Schwartz walked away.
But finding that he was followed by the second man, he ran as far as the railway arch, but the man did not follow so far. Tantalizing. It is. It's mysterious, Tom. It's intriguing. Anyway, the police take this bloke, Schwartz, to the mortuary. And he says, this is the woman. Elizabeth Stride is the woman I saw. And they say, well, what do the men look like?
And he says, basically, the men were in their early 30s. They had mustaches and they wore dark coats. And the first man, he says, was about five foot five and wore a kind of peaked cap, a little bit like a deerstalker. That tallies with a third witness who's a labourer called William Marshall.
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