TOWER OF BABBEL - ONE

I offer proof here that there is no such thing as useless information, as illustrated by the fate of the 600 elite German paratroopers who floated down or thudded in rough glider landings on a dirt air field on the island of Crete, at about eight on the Tuesday morning of 20 May, 1941. 

Six short hours later 400 of them were dead, killed by poorly armed, badly disorganized and under strength New Zealand infantry. And what largely killed those confident well trained, well armed Teutonic warriors was information uncovered forty years earlier and sixty miles to the east, written 4,000 years before men could fly.

The second imperial palace built at Knossos (above) on bronze age Crete was so large visitors got lost in its labyrinthine corridors. It had been built for King Minos, and was occupied for over 400 years. It had hot showers, and flush toilets, and gardens. 

Its walls were adorned with colorful frescoes of sacred bulls, graceful women, and brave men. Its gold came 300 miles from Egypt, its olive oil 100 miles from Greece, its ceder throne, 400 miles from Lebanon. And then about 1375 B.C., this kingdom simply disappeared. Time eventually even wiped out its memory. For most of human history, people had no idea the acrobats of Crete were cartwheeling over the horns of bulls before Moses challenged Pharaoh. Then a British archaeologist went looking for a new meaning in his life.

Little Arthur Evans (above)  - he stood just five feet two inches tall - had always been fascinated with ancient history, but only ancient history. He almost failed his final exams at Oxford because he knew nothing which had happened after Richard the Lion Heart died in 1199 A.D. Evans spent half his life as a dilettante archaeologist, digging about the edges of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. 

When his wife Margaret (above, left) died in the spring of 1893, the heartbroken 43 year old Evans (above, right) went digging with a new purpose. He used his inheritance to buy land already identified as a palace three miles south of the port of Heraklion on Crete.

Beginning in the year 1900, Evans spent six years unearthing the great palace at Knossos. Its murals were so exuberant, its architecture so confident, its wealth so obvious, that Evans was certain it had been the center of a great empire which rose and fell while the ancient Greeks were still barbarians. 

The record of its achievements and soul were right at hand, in the thousand or so mostly broken clay tablets scattered about the palace. But they were written in what seemed to be two unknown languages, younger by a millennium than the cuneiform tablets of Sumer and Babylon, but older by a century than the oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Evans labeled the languages Linear A and B. His obvious choice was to attack Linear B (above) first, since the majority of the tablets were in that language. But the best brains in England, working at Evan's behest,  were unable to read the words. After more than a decade of study the only thing Evans was certain of, was that neither one was Greek. 

After World War One more tablets with the same mysterious pictographic languages were unearthed in the palaces at Pylos, Thebes, Corinth and Mycenae, on mainland Greece. As the number of uncovered tablet shards approached 3,000, the best brains in the world were still unable to read them. How could you decipher an unknown language, once the authors and speakers, and everyone who ever read or spoke the language, was long dead?

For 1,500 years the most insightful method to decipher coded messages and unknown languages was the one invented by the Syrian mathematician Al-Kindi - frequency analysis.  You had to trust this guy. He wrote 262 books. And his method for decoding unknown writing was to reduce it a math problem, by first figuring out what was the most common letter in the language. In English that is "E", and then filling in the blanks. 

 But none of the symbols used in Linear B appeared in any statistically significant variation. The diligent mathematicians Evan's hired simply did not have the resources to crack the puzzle of Linear B. But the effort did provide a good testing ground for new theories, just in time to deal with an ambitious electrical engineer who came up with a great way to get very rich.

His name was Arthur Scherbius, and in 1918 he marketed his new mechanical rotor device under the name “Enigma”. Pushing the letter “e” on Scherbius's keyboard turned a mechanical rotor (above) one spot forward.  There were twenty-six spots on each rotor, so when you entered any letter into the rotor,  the letter produced by that  rotor would be a  totally random letter from the one input, determined only by the original position of that rotor. 

Putting the rotors in sequence (originally three, each translating the input from the rotor before ) would make the code practically impossible to break, unless you knew the starting setting for each rotor. And those could be changed either randomly or according to a schedule.  In 1926 Scherbius sold his machine to the German Navy, and the following year to the German Army, who thought the Enigma codes would be unbreakable.

And they might have been, but in 1928 a minor bureaucrat on the Army General Staff did something stupid. Instead of sending their new Enigma machine (above) to their embassy in Warsaw, Poland in a diplomatic pouch, he sent it by mail. When it failed to promptly arrive, the ranking German officer in Warsaw panicked, and asked the Poles to please look for the package. Intrigued, the Polish postal workers searched for, found and opened the box, and got their first look at the new Enigma machine. Polish intelligence service spent a long weekend disassembling it and building a duplicate machine. Then they carefully repackaged the original and delivered it to the relived German embassy staff.

The Germans had little reason to worry even if they had known. With eight rotors wired in sequence, Scherbius had figured it would take 1,000 technicians using frequency analysis, 900 million years to try every possible combination of keys and rotor settings just to read a single message. And he was right. The Polish code breakers struggled with the machine for a decade, but came up with nothing. Finally in 1939, facing an impending German invasion, the Poles shared their duplicate Enigma machine with British Intelligence. And in 1941, a brilliant English mathematician named Arthur Turing, built his own electro-mechanical machine (above) which could try each of the millions of possible mechanical rotor settings on Enigma in a matter of hours. With that, it became possible to break the unbreakable German codes.

The first use of this British “Ultra Secret” was on 28 April 1941, when their commander on Crete was given details of the coming German invasion. General Freyberg was not certain he could trust this new source, and divided his troops between the sea coast and the air bases, where Ultra said the attack would come. 

But enough men were guarding Maleme airfield on 20 May 1941 to slaughter the German units as they landed. British Prime Minster Winston Churchill pointed out that “"At no moment in the war was our intelligence so truly and precisely informed.” 

In the end it did not save Crete, because the German air force prevented General Freyberg from bringing reinforcements back from the coast. Eventually German air dropped reinforcements swamped the New Zealanders and forced the British to evacuate the island.. The battle cost the British 3,990 dead and 17,000 captured. But it cost the Germans 6,698 dead, and 370 aircraft destroyed. Their decimated parachute battalions never made another large combat drop.

A little over two months before the fall of Crete, little Arthur Evans (above) died in England, still convinced that Linear B was an as yet unknown language. And through the multiplying effect of tenure and graduate students, he was able to reach out from beyond the grave to influence the effort to decode his tablets for another generation. 

The solution, it turned out, had been offered by the 13^th century Franciscan monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, from his study atop Folly Bridge (above). It was in that small room where Bacon had written,  “Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae”, or “Half the answer is asking the right question.”

                                     - 30 - 

BLOODY JACK Chapter Eighteen

 

I guess the kindest thing I can say about 36 year old Dr. Fredrick William Blackwell (above), is that he was awakened from a dead sleep by his assistant,  Edward Johnson,  not ten minutes before he examined the body outside the International Workers Educational Institute. By his own watch Dr. Blackwell arrived at the scene at 1:16 a.m., Sunday, 30 September, 1888. And he immediately went to work. But adrenalin can only get you so far, and I fear Dr. Blackwell was pushed faster and farther than he could handle.

He immediately recognized that the victim was dead – her head had been “nearly severed from her body” - and that she had been killed recently – by his first estimate “not more than 20 minutes” earlier, although he gets points for hedging that to up to 30 minutes to match the witness testimony. But that very night Dr. Blackwell also felt compelled to tell The London Star, “...it does not follow that the murderer would be be spattered with blood, for, as he is sufficiently cunning in other things, he could contrive to avoid coming in contact with the blood..."

So, from almost the instant the woman's body on Berner Street was found, it was assumed she was another victim of the clever madman responsible for the escalating murders of Martha Tabem, Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman. But the good doctor assumed a great deal more than that. He also told the Star, “The woman did not appear to be a Jewess, but more like an Irishwoman”  In fact her birth name was Elizabeth Gustafsdotter – she was Swedish – and had been known in London for twenty years as Elizabeth Stride (above). So much for racial profiling.

Dr. Blackwell's description of her wounds was interesting. “In the neck,” he told the inquest on Monday, “there was a long incision...(which) commenced on the left side, 2 inches below the angle of the jaw...nearly severing the vessels on that side, cutting the wind pipe...completely in two, and terminating on the opposite side 1 inch below the angle of the right jaw, but without severing the vessels on that side.” There were no wounds below the shoulders. By separating the windpipe, the killer silenced Elizabeth. By cutting only one side of her jugular veins and arteries he produced unconsciousness in 1- 3 minutes, with death shortly there after.  But even that was longer than the agony of previous victims.

So Liz Stride's neck had been cut from right to left in one stroke – not two - indicating the killer was either right handed or had attacked Elizabeth from behind. All three of those points strongly hint that Liz Stride had not been killed by the same man who had murdered the previous three women, who was probably left handed, and had cut the throat twice.. And this murder was committed outside a social club with two dozen people inside, and less than fifty feet from the small “The Lord Nelson” public house at 46 Berner Street, with people still coming and going to and from those two establishments. The victim on the unlit stairwell in Georg's Yard, the victim shielded by the fence of 29 Hanbury Street, and the dead woman left on the dark stretch of Buck's Row were all isolated places. The first goal of con men and premeditated killers is to isolate their victims. Liz Stride was not isolated.

But what truly defines a victim of Jack the Ripper was his method for killing. To quote from the “Case Book” – http://www.casebook.org/intro.html, - “The Whitechapel murderer and his victim stood facing each other. When she lifted her skirts, the...Ripper seized the women by their throats and strangled them until they were unconscious if not dead....The Ripper then lowered his victims...He cut the throats when the women were on the ground...The Ripper then committed the mutilations.” The first step, manual strangulation takes no more than 10 seconds to produce unconsciousness and silence. If the throat is not cut the victim recovers in a few moments. So the victims were chocked to render them compliant. Once on the ground they were then murdered, allowing the killer to feel safe before releasing his pent up rage on the reproductive organs. But, as the casebook points out, “No sign of intercourse was ever detected.”

There should have been lots of questions about who had murdered this woman.  And about ten minutes after Dr. Blackwell arrived on the scene, there was a brief ray of hope. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (above), the man who had investigated Martha Tabem's death,  was back from vacation and he arrived on the scene about 1:30 a.m. 

This time the body stayed right where it was, until Dr. George Bagster Phillips (above),  the Whitechapel Division Police Surgeon, arrived 15 minutes later. At last a doctor could compare a previous victim's condition and wounds with the latest victim's.

Inspector Reid was already interviewing the 28 people in the Educational Institute. Each had to give their name and address, a full account of what and who they saw that night, and a rough time line for the evening. And they were all forced to turn out their pockets. Houses on both sides of Berner Street were searched. All the residents were interviewed. This took time, and it was not until about 4:30 a.m. that Inspector Reid returned to the scene of the murder in Duitfield's Yard.

By now a large moribund crowd had gathered outside the closed gates, talking about the murders, inventing and spreading rumors. They were forced to part so the ambulance cart carrying the body could be wheeled away. Dr. Phillips had already left, and about 5:00am, Inspector Reid  returned to the Leman Street station, to begin writing up his report. It was about 5:30 that morning, when PC Collins oversaw the washing down of the murder scene. All the blood spatter was scrubbed off the walls and the pooled blood was washed into the gutter, along with anything the victim and killer might have dropped. So much for hope.

This time the body did not go to the Montague Street mortuary, to be “mishandled” by the Workhouse inmates. Instead the as yet unidentified body was loaded on a police ambulance cart and pushed south to...

...the Ratcliff Street Chapel and Mortuary in the south east corner behind the the Baroque St. George in the East Church (above), on Cannon Street south of Cable Street in Wapping   Just two blocks north of the Tobacco Docks, the mortuary was a small utilitarian brick building, built in 1876, to give the working poor a choice over keeping the decaying corpse of a deceased loved one at home - usually in one of those 8' by 8' rooms – until they could afford a grave and funeral.

Because of the public fear of grave-robbers, these chapel mortuaries were under-used. And in truth, before refrigeration, they had no better facilities than the Montague Street mortuary. But the workhouse inmates were convenient scapegoats for the officials' failure to catch the murderer. And the events on that Sunday morning, 30 September, 1888, on Berner Street, and in the dark corners of Mitre Square 45 minutes later, would increase the pressure on the police and the doctors who worked with them.

It was respected Police Constable Edward Watkins who discovered the second horror of that night. He was a 17 year veteran of the London Police Force – separate from the Metropolitan force, so the government would always have direct authority over the governmental and banking centers. The City of London ended where the city walls once stood, and Constable Watkin's beat was near the eastern edge, within sight at Aldgate. 

He started in Duke Street (above, left) where it joined St. James Place, aka Gowers Walk. Walking at the prescribed 2 ½ miles an hour he headed through Heneage Lane to Bury Street, Creechurch Lane, down Leadenhall Street to Mitre Street and Mitre Square, then to King Street to Gowers Street back to Duke Street. Each round was carefully timed out and took 14 to 16 minutes to complete.

Just about 1:45 that chilly Sunday morning, PC Watkins entered the “small and dirty” cobblestone Mitre Square for the 15^th time that night. The square had only two gas lights (X's above) -  and one of of those was weak And it had two exits.

 On the north west corner of the square (above), between two Kearley and Tongue warehouses, was  a narrow covered passage to St. James Place and King Street.  

The second exit was Church Lane,  on the northeastern corner of Mitre Square, between the Horner and Company warehouse and a larger K and T warehouse. Church Lane connected with Duke Street, next to the Great Synagogue.. 

Because those two corners had lights, Constable Watkins entered the square (above) and turned right, into the darkest corner of Mitre Square. 

He walked east past the rear of a framing  shop and three abandoned buildings (above)

He was now facing the closed wooden gate of Heydemann & Company warehouse, the darkest corner of the square, and it was here that his bulls eye lantern threw its light upon the body of a woman lying on her back, where the curb met the cobbles. And she had not been there 15 minutes earlier, when Constable Watkins last stood here.

“The clothes were pushed up to her breast, and the stomach was laid bare,” Watkins testified, “with a dreadful gash from the pit of the stomach to the breast. 

"On examining the body I found the entrails cut and laid around the throat, which had an awful gash in it, extending ear to ear. In fact the head was nearly severed from the body. Blood was everywhere to be seen." 

And there was something new, a new injury. "It was difficult to discern the injuries to the face for the quantity of blood which covered it...the murderer had inserted the knife just under the left eye, and drawing it under it under the nose, cut the nose completely from the face, at the same time inflicting a dreadful gash down the right cheek to the angle of the jawbone. The nose was laid over on the cheek. A more dreadful sight I never saw. It quite knocked me over.”

And this barbarous murder, together with the earlier murder on Bernier Street,  had the same effect upon the entire city of London.

- 30 -

BLOODY JACK Chapter Seventeen

 

I believe the first challenge to Dr. George B. Phillips' opinions about the murder of Annie Chapman appeared when the inquest reconvened on Wednesday, 12 September, 1888. And the first witness to do so was John Richardson, eldest son of Mrs. Amelia Richardson. Between 4:45 am and 4:50 am on Saturday, 8 September, before reporting to his job as a porter at the Spitafields market,... 

...John stopped by his mother's residence at 29 Hanbury Street (above) to check on her basement workshop, from which tools had been stolen weeks earlier. The first light of dawn had appeared just after 4:50 that morning - sunrise would be at 5:23 am. And standing on the threshold of the back door, John could clearly see the padlock on the basement door six feet away was still snapped shut, and the door secure. He did not need to move closer. But then John did something crucial.

He sat on the top step, with his feet resting in the yard, and struggled to cut some leather off his shoes, which were crimping his toes. He sat on the step, John estimated, for “two minutes at most”. But it was a crucial two minutes. It was light enough, John said, that he could see the entire back yard clearly. And with his head down, he could certainly see 6 inches.

He insisted, “I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there, then.” And if she was not there, then - within 6 inches of John Richardson - then Dr. Phillips was wrong when he said Dark Annie died between 3:30 and 4:30 that morning,

John's mother, Amelia Richardson, then testified that the leather apron found in the back yard belonged to her younger son. She had washed it under the backyard tap on Thursday and left out to dry. It was still lying there on Saturday morning, and had nothing to do with the murder, despite lurid press reports the killer had left it behind.. This supported the next witness, John Pizer, a shoemaker from Mulberry Street. 

He'd been arrested for his own safety by Detective Inspector Sargent William Thicke (above)  – who earned his nickname when a prostitute greeted him, "“Why fuck me, if it isn't Johnny Upright!”. The terrified cobbler was well known about Whitechapel as “Leather Apron”, and he was  known for threatening the prostitutes he frequented by telling them, "I'll rip you".  But after following him for days the police had cleared Mr. Pizer. And D.I. "Johnny Upright" Thicke had brought Pizer before the jury to discourage the vigilante street gangs which had been threatening to cut his throat. The jury heard no testimony about John Pizer's predilections, instead only recorded his attempt to “vindicate my character to the world at large”  With that public service out of the way, the inquest moved on to what did happen on the morning of 8 September, 1888. 

As the clock atop the Black Eagle Brewery struck 5:30 a.m. - 7 minutes after sunrise - Mrs. Elizabeth Long was walking south on Brick Lane. She then turned west on Hanbury Street, heading to the Spitsfield Market, on Commercial Street. Just before reaching Number 29 Hanbury,  Elizabeth passed a man and woman in loud conversation on the building side of the sidewalk (above). They were facing each other and Mrs. Long had a good look at the woman's face.  After viewing the body in the morgue, Elizabeth had positively identified her as Annie Chapman.

The man had his back to Mrs. Long, but she described him as not much more than 5 feet tall (Annie Chapman was just 5 feet), about 40 years old, wearing a dark overcoat and a brown deerstalker hat. He was, she thought,  foreign looking with a dark complexion and a “shabby genteel” appearance. She distinctly heard the man say -  in a “foreign accent” -  “Will you?” To which she heard Dark Annie respond, “Yes.” Elizabeth took little notice of the two. Later, when news of the murder spread like wildfire through the market, Elizabeth Long realized what she had seen and heard might be important

That same morning, carpenter Albert Cadoche was hurrying to the privy in the back yard of 27 Hanbury Street. He was suffering from a a urinary tract infection, and a few painful moments later he was returning to the building's back door when he distinctly heard a woman say, “No”. Albert also took little notice, and was not even certain which direction the voice had come from. But UTI's being what they are,  within a few minutes Albert was making the same round trip again. This time, on his way to the outhouse, he heard something thud against the 5 foot high fence dividing the back yard of number 27 from the yard of number 29. 

A few moments later, as Albert was walking down Fournier street (above), he saw the clock atop the Christ's Church Spitafields tower (below). He said it read 5:32 am. 

The times did not match up perfectly, but if Elizabeth Long did see Annie Chapman and her killer reaching a business arraignment closer to 5:15 a.m....And if Albert Cadoche heard the thud against the fence about 5:25 a.m....And if the Christ's Church clock (above) actually read closer to 5:42 a.m...Then Annie Chapman died about 5:30 a.m.. And that would have left the murderer 15 to 20 minutes to mutilate the body and leave the house with his bloody trophy before John Davis discovered the dead woman. Could both these witnesses be that far off in their timing?

Before the second half of the 20^th century all clocks were mechanical, and effected by wear, temperature, humidity, maintenance, and their purpose. The clock in the Spitafields Church was a call to prayer. The Black Eagle Brewery clock (above, right)  was designed to make the name ubiquitous in Whitechapel. Neither clock was meant to be accurate, in the modern meaning of that word. And the witnesses did not carry their own watches. The important thing about all three stories is not the exact time they occurred, but the place in which they occurred.

The back yard of 29 Hanbury Street (above) was empty when John Richardson left about 5 or 10 minutes before 5:00 a.m.  While he was there Annie Chapman was still alive - at least half an hour after Dr. Phillips said she must already be dead.  But she must have been within half a mile of the spot, because she was found there,  dead, just before 6:00 am. And...

...either the killer left the yard by climbing over the 5 foot high fence and then running between yards (above)  – odd enough behavior to attract attention in a crime ridden area...or, the strangler walked out the front door, something which would attract no more notice at Number 29 Hanbury Street then a figure sleeping on the stairs of a building in George Yard.

So it is likely Annie Chapman entered the backyard of number 29 Hanbury Street (above) between 5:00 am and 5:30 am - which roughly supports both John Richardson's and Elizabeth Long's stories. Dark Annie was found dead in the yard between 5:30 and 6:00 am, which roughly fits Albert Cadoche's time line. But none of the witnesses support Dr. Phillip's estimate.

Coroner Wayne Baxter (above) would later say at the inquest, “It is true that Dr. Phillips thinks that when he saw the body at 6.30  the deceased had been dead at least two hours, but he admits that the coldness of the morning and the great loss of blood may affect his opinion; and if the evidence of the other witnesses be correct, Dr. Phillips has miscalculated the effect of those forces...”  In fact, the good doctor had been recalled on Wednesday, 19 September. He was pressed to provide more details about the mutilations, and resisted until all women and children had left the room – children? At a grisly murder inquest? And did the Victorian doctor think women were unaware of the existence of such organs within their own bodies?

It is understandable  that Dr. George Phillips (above) might be trying to protect evidence only the killer would know, but the jury wanted to know, and Dr. Phillips was forced to reply. 

The details of the cuts to the vagina and bladder went on the record - and in the newspapers.  But he was able to protect that the womb had been removed, saying only, “One of the organs was entirely absent from the body”.  And then Dr. Phillips added, “The appearance of the cut surfaces indicated that the instrument used must have been very sharp, and showed a certain amount of anatomical knowledge.”

Combined with his testimony of Monday, 10 September (above) - “Obviously the work was that of an expert...” - and his belief the weapon was “...a doctor's knife, or the kind of knife used in a slaughter house or by a butcher”,  makes Dr. Phillips the  “ad fontem” - the original source - of Jack the Ripper as a professional man, someone – pardon the expression – a cut above the mass of Whitechapel's uneducated working poor.

And from this bit of Victorian bias was born the century long industry of the killer as a doctor, an actor, a painter, an intellectual, a detective or even a member of royalty. It made a lot of money for a lot of people, most as yet unborn in 1888.  But it disguised the killer who moved about Whitechapel as only a resident of Whitechapel could - unseen because he was unremarkable in that time and place.

And Dr. Phillips offered yet another misdirection to the mystery. When asked by Coroner Wayne Baxter how long it would have taken to have performed the mutilations, Dr. Phillips said, “I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, even without a struggle, under a quarter of an hour.  If I had done it in the deliberate manner usual with a surgeon, it would probably have taken me the best part of an hour." ”

It added to the mystery. It enforced the image of the killer as a calculating fiend. It insisted the mutilations had taken considerable time. But was it not more likely the killer, as a child,  had experimented on small animals? Then he would not be a doctor fiend, or a slaughterhouse mad man, but rather just a mad man, what modern criminology would call a disorganized serial killer,  who left his psychological diagnosis on display at the murder scene.

At the final session of the inquest into the death of the second victim, Polly Nichols...and after 4 days of testimony in the still open inquest of Annie Chapman's murder....and with the case of Martha Tabaum still unsolved, Coroner Baxter seemed to sense the horror that was yet  to come.  “I suggest,” he told the jury in the Nichol's case , “...these... women may have been murdered by the same man with the same object...and having failed in the open street he tries again, within a week...in a more secluded place....the audacity and daring is equal to its maniacal fanaticism and abhorrent wickedness...but one thing is very clear - that a murder of a most atrocious character has been committed.” 

And would be committed again, and again, and again.

- 30 -