Free London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D. Gray Page B

enjoying a discussion entitled `Judaism and Socialism'.63 The club's steward, Lewis Diemschutz, had been out that evening and when he returned to the yard with his barrow from Crystal Palace, his pony shied at an object in the yard. On striking a match he was able to make out the body of a woman. At first he feared it was his wife, passed out drunk from carousing while he had been at work, and he ignored it. But on closer examination he realized that the woman's throat had been cut - probably only moments before. In the opinion of Dr Phillips, who examined her at 1.16 a.m., she had been `seized by the shoulders and placed on the ground and that the perpetrator of the deed was on her right side when he inflicted the cut'.64 The body was still warm and the doctor believed she had probably been attacked at about 12.45-12.55 a.m. and so Diemschutz must have come very close to disturbing the killer. We can be quite clear about this because, once again, there were witnesses who saw Liz just before her death. Indeed the killer may well have had to hide himself when Diemschutz arrived unannounced.
    On the night of Stride's murder Israel Schwartz turned into Berner Street from Commercial Road at 12.45 a.m. When he reached the gateway to Dutfield's yard (where Liz's body was discovered) he saw a man stop and speak to a woman. The man then attacked her and threw her down. On seeing Schwartz the attacker shouted at him, calling out `Lipski!' (The word `Lipski' was derogatory slang for a Jew, referring as it did to a Jewish murderer hanged in 1887.) There was another person in the street at the time, a man in a hat who was lighting a pipe. According to Inspector Abberline, who interviewed him, Schwartz spoke little or no English. The man that shouted at him evidently alarmed him and he ran off, only for the `pipe' man to follow him.65 Abberline was not clear from his interview with this witness whether the two men were working together or if the man with the pipe was equally unnerved by the attack on the woman and just ran away in the same direction as Schwartz. No other witnesses could be found in Berner Street despite house to house enquiries.
    Schwartz later identified Stride's body as that of the woman he had seen in the gateway. The man he described was about 30 years old, 5 ft. 5 in. tall, with a fair complexion, small brown moustache and brown hair, and was dressed in dark clothes with a black cap that had a peak. The other man was taller, about 5 ft. 11 in. and had a brown moustache and wide brim felt hat. Schwartz did not give evidence at the inquest, and it is not clear why. What is likely is that he saw the killer, but whether it was the man attacking the woman or the man watching while smoking his pipe, or two men working together we cannot be sure. Again the killer had escaped arrest by a whisker and his luck held.
    Elizabeth Stride's story was a similar one to the other Ripper victims. Despite her claim that her family had been drowned in a well-documented shipping tragedy (the loss of the Princess Alice that she told people she had survived) her tale was more mundane. Stride was a Swedish woman who had married an Englishman in 1869. The couple separated in 1884 because of Liz's drinking and her husband died two years later. Another curious piece of evidence emerged from the police inquiry. On the night of her death Liz had bought some grapes from Matthew Packer's shop at 44 Berner Street. Packer had shut up shop at 12.30 that night since it was raining and `it was no good for me to keep open '66 Neither he nor his wife saw anything suspicious that night. At the mortuary Packer identified Stride as the woman he had served and said that she had been joined by a man shortly afterwards. This was at about midnight.67
    Liz's body had not been mutilated leading some researchers to suggest that she was not a Ripper victim. The third letter the Central News Agency had received also denied that she was killed by the same hand.