Richard's favourite london walks take you to the site of the fourth murder in whitechapel
JACK THE RIPPER WALK.
THE FOURTH OF THE VICTIMS OF JACK THE RIPPER
DIRECTIONS TO THE MURDER OF CATHERINE EDDOWES
Go right onto Fairclough Street, right again onto Back Church Lane, left along Commercial Road, and upon arrival at the Castle Pub, bear left down Goodman’s Stile. Keep ahead into Aile Street, follow it over Leman Street at the traffic lights, then just after the White Swan pub, go right into half Moon Passage. Turn left into Braham Street, cross Mansell Street via the pedestrian crossing, go left then first right Little Somerset Street. At its conclusion turn left along Aldgate High Street, head past Aldgate Underground, and a little further along pause outside the looming bulk of St Botolph’s Aldgate.
PROSTITUTE ISLAND In 1888 the police offered the local prostitutes immunity from arrest if they confined their soliciting to the island on which the church stands. As a result the area surrounding the church became name as “Prostitute Island.” CATHERINE EDDOWES IS ARRESTED Nearby at around 8.30pm on September 29th 1888 PC Louis Robinson of the City of London Police had arrested local prostitute Catherine Eddowes for being drunk and disorderly and had taken her into police custody at Bishopsgate police station. By midnight she had sobered up and at 1am, just as the body of Elizabeth Stride was being discovered, Catherine was being released from Bishopsgate Police Station. As she left the building she turned to a police officer and spoke her last recorded words. “Good night old cock” she called and went off into the night. JACK THE RIPPER TOURS DIRECTIONS
Continue to the traffic lights and bear right over the two crossing onto Dukes Place.
ANOTHER WITNESS SEES JACK THE RIPPER A little after 1.30am three Jewish gentlemen, Joseph Lawende, Joseph Levy and Harry Harris left the Imperial Club on Dukes Place. They noticed a man and a woman standing on a nearby corner. “I don’t like going home by myself when I see those characters about,” Levy observed to Harris. Lawende meanwhile was walking slightly apart from the others, and being closer to the couple observed a little more. He was later emphatic that the woman he had seen was Catherine Eddowes. The man with her was aged about 30. His height was between 5’7 and 8. He had a fair complexion and a fair moustache. He was of medium build and had the appearance of a sailor. But since the couple seemed to be just chatting quietly and there was nothing noteworthy about them, the three men continued on their way.
It is entirely possible that Joseph Lawende may well have seen the face of the Ripper but he only got a very brief glance at the man. LONDON WALKS DIRECTIONS
Keep ahead along Dukes place passing the Sir John Cass School, after which go left into St James’s Passage to walk into Mitre Square and cross to the flower bed on the opposite side.
JACK THE RIPPER WALKING TOUR
CATHERINE EDDOWES.
THE FOURTH OF THE VICTIMS OF JACK THE RIPPER.  At 1.45 in the morning PC Watkins of the City Police walked his beat here into Mitre Square. The only sound that he heard was the sound of his own footsteps. He’d passed this way fifteen minutes earlier and found the square to be quite deserted. Little seemed to have changed as began to shine his lantern into the square’s dark recesses. But as the beam fell upon the spot in the square’s south corner it illuminated a gruesome and horrific sight. The mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes.
 Watkins would would later state “I have been in the force for a long while but I never saw such a sight. The body had been ripped open, like a pig in the market.” If the killer had been denied his satisfaction of mutilating the body of Elizabeth Stride, his appetite had been more than sated on the unfortunate Catharine Eddowes. Her body lay on its back, head turned toward the left shoulder. The throat had been cut back to the spine; the lobe of the right ear was cut through; a V had been cut into her cheeks and eyelids; the tip of the nose was detached; her abdomen had been laid open; the intestines tugged out and laid over her shoulder, while missing from the body were the uterus and left kidney.
 But in Mitre Square the murderer had crossed the boundary and struck in the City of London, the financial square mile, and this meant that another police force, the City of London Police, would now become officially involved in the investigation.
Although the previous murders had taken place on Metropolitan Police territory, the City Police were already active in the hunt for the killer. Major Henry Smith the acting City Police Commissioner had given instructions that extra plainclothes detectives were to patrol the City’s eastern fringe where it bordered with the East End. And at the very moment when Catherine Eddowes was being murdered in Mitre Square, three City detectives were searching passageways just a few streets away. Yet the killer had succeeded in striking right under their noses and then slipping silently away.
But in fairness to the police of both forces the murderer was greatly aided by the lay out of the area. In early September Inspector Henry Moore of the Metropolitan Police’s ‘H’ Division had given an interview to an American journalist and had explained how the murderer’s apparently miraculous escapes from the scenes of his crimes were, infact, greatly assisted by the warren like complexity of the Whitechapel streets and alleyways.
"My men formed a circle around the spot where one of the murders took place guarding, they thought, every entrance and approach, and within a few minutes they found fifty people inside the lines. They had come in through two passageways which my men could not find."
But now, with the trail from Mitre Square apparently still fresh, the City Police set off in pursuit. And this night we know exactly which direction the killer went, because on this night the Whitechapel murderer left a clue.
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