Chris Watts: Truth or Lies?

Four months after the death of Emma Smith, another woman was murdered in Whitechapel. Her name was Martha Tabram. And although her murder would later become tangled up in the story of Jack the Ripper, I want to resist doing what history so often does with these women: reducing them to a name on a list. Before Martha became a murder victim, she’d already lived quite a life. Martha Martha was born in Southwark on 10th May 1849, the youngest of five children. In 1869, she married Henry Samuel Tabram, a furniture warehouse foreman. They went on to have two sons: Frederick, born in 1871, and Charles the following year. But the marriage wasn’t a happy one. Martha drank heavily and, by 1875, Henry refused to continue living with her. For several years he continued to give her money, but their relationship deteriorated. Eventually, when Martha began living with another man, Henry stopped supporting her altogether. That other man was William Turner. Martha lived with Turner on and off for around nine years but, again, alcohol caused problems. William later told the inquest into Martha’s murder that whenever he gave her money, she spent it on drink. He said they would continually split up and get back together again until, around three weeks before Martha died, they broke up for the final time. By August 1888, Martha was living at a common lodging house, 19 George Street in Spitalfields. She tried to make money selling trinkets and other small items on the street. For women living as Martha was, there was often no single way of making an income. She needed money for drink, for food and, crucially, for somewhere to sleep. When selling stuff wasn’t enough, prostitution could be another way of finding the few pence needed to get through the night. Martha was five feet three inches tall, with dark hair and a dark complexion. She was 39 years old when she died. On Monday 6th August 1888, Martha went out into Whitechapel. It was Bank Holiday Monday. And it would be the last night of her life. The Murder Much of what we know about Martha’s final hours comes from another woman, Mary Ann Connelly, who was more commonly known as Pearly Poll. According to Pearly Poll, she had known Martha for around four or five months, and the pair would sometimes go out together looking for men willing to pay them for sex. That evening, she said they met two soldiers. One was a corporal and the other was a private. From around ten o’clock until shortly before midnight, the four drank together in several pubs around Whitechapel. Their final stop was the White Swan. At around 11.45 p.m., they separated. Pearly Poll went off with the corporal, while Martha went with the younger soldier. That was the last time she was seen alive. It’s worth keeping one thing in mind here. Pearly Poll’s account became central to the police investigation, but it was never independently verified. Detectives later visited the pubs where she claimed the group had been drinking but couldn’t find anyone who remembered seeing them together. Martha’s sister-in-law did remember seeing Martha going into the White Swan, but said she appeared to be alone. That doesn’t mean Pearly Poll was lying. The soldiers may already have been inside. But it does mean we should be careful about treating her account as fact. What we do know is that sometime during the early hours of Tuesday morning, Martha ended up inside George Yard Buildings, a large block of cheap rented rooms and home to dozens of working-class families and lodgers. At around 1.40 a.m., Elizabeth Mahoney returned home to Geroge Yard Buildings with her husband. Shortly afterwards she went back downstairs to buy some food. She noticed nothing unusual. At around two o’clock, PC Thomas Barrett was nearby when he saw a soldier. Barrett asked what he was doing and he told him he was waiting for a friend who had gone off with a girl. That may be important. Or it may have had absolutely nothing to do with Martha. At around 3.30 a.m., another resid

Mention the Yorkshire Ripper investigation to almost anyone and several things will come to mind. Most will think first of the murders. The crimes were truly abhorrent. Others will remember the mistakes made during the investigation. But for me, as someone who investigated murders years after Sutcliffe was caught, I find myself thinking about something very different. Not what happened during the investigation. But what happened because of it. In the early hours of 30th October 1975, detectives were called to Scott Hall Road, Leeds, after the body of a woman was discovered on waste ground beside the carriageway. She had been struck repeatedly to the head before being stabbed numerous times. At that stage, there was nothing to suggest the investigation would become one of the largest murder enquiries in British history. The victim was identified as 28-year-old Wilma McCann. As detectives began building a picture of Wilma’s life, they established she was a mother of four young children who lived just a short distance away. In fact, her home could almost be seen from where her body was found. Their enquiries revealed that Wilma occasionally engaged in sex work to make ends meet. When she failed to return home, her eldest child took the younger children out to look for her. A neighbour later found them cold and distressed at a nearby bus stop. Detectives had very little forensic evidence to work with, as DNA profiling was still years away. Standing beside Wilma McCann’s body, detectives had no reason to believe they were investigating anything other than a single, brutal murder. But as further attacks occurred, detectives began to recognise disturbing similarities. The victims were attacked at night, often after being alone with the killer. He typically struck them from behind with a hammer before using a knife, and many of the women were known to engage in sex work. The consistency of the attacks left detectives in little doubt they were dealing with a serial killer. Serial murder is rare in the UK. When it does happen, it attracts enormous media attention. As the investigation grew, the media gave the unknown killer a name. Drawing comparisons with the Whitechapel murders a century earlier, they dubbed him the Yorkshire Ripper. That name, combined with the way many of the victims were portrayed in the media as sex workers, made the attacks seem as though they were happening to ‘other people’. But in June 1977, that belief was shattered. The next victim was 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald, a shop assistant who had spent the evening with friends before beginning the walk home. She never made it. Like the women before her, she was attacked from behind with a hammer before being stabbed. Her body was found the following morning in a playground. She became the seventh victim of the Yorkshire Ripper. As detectives, we often talk about public confidence and public fear. Jayne’s murder had a huge impact on both. Until then, many people believed the killer was targeting a particular group of women. That changed almost overnight. Suddenly, nobody felt quite as safe as they had before. For detectives, the similarities to the earlier murders were obvious. But there was one crucial difference. Jayne wasn’t involved in sex work. That was a significant development in the investigation. When police investigate a serial killer, they’re not just trying to catch them. They’re also trying to prevent the next murder. An apparent change in the killer’s choice of victim meant the measures already in place had to be reassessed. Over the next three years, a further six women were murdered, bringing the total number of victims to thirteen. Some were involved in sex work, others not. There were also attacks where the victim survived. These women became an invaluable source of information that might help identify the killer. How he spoke. The words he used. How he approached his victims. How he escaped. Even what he smelled like, whether he smoked, or whether

Jack the Ripper is probably the most famous unidentified murderer in history. More than 130 years after his crimes, books are still being written about him. Documentaries are still being made. And people still walk the streets of Whitechapel trying to work out who he was. But that’s not where I want to start. Before we get anywhere near suspects, I want to look at the crimes. That’s how I approached murder investigations during my career. The crime scene came before the suspect, not the other way around. So, over this series, I’m going to take you through the murders associated with Jack the Ripper. What happened. What the witnesses said. What the police knew. And what I make of the evidence. Who he may have been. Then you can make your own mind up. And our story doesn’t begin with one of the five women most commonly associated with Jack the Ripper. It begins four months earlier. With a woman named Emma Smith. Whitechapel To understand what happened to Emma, and the women who followed her, you first need to understand Whitechapel. In 1888, London was the most populated city in the world and the capital of the British Empire, but those living in Whitechapel saw little benefit from that. Sitting immediately to the east of the old City of London, it was one of the poorest parts of the capital. There was a lack of housing, severe overcrowding and high unemployment. Those fortunate enough to find regular employment could expect long working days for little money. For others, work was casual. You might earn something that day, you might not. And without money, finding somewhere to sleep became another problem. For a few pence, a common lodging house provided somewhere to spend the night. Conditions varied, but at the bottom end that could mean little more than a filthy mattress, packed into a room with dozens of others. If you couldn’t afford that, there was the workhouse. Or the street. Poverty brought with it all the problems you might expect. Crime. Alcohol. Violence. Prostitution. The population was also changing. Large numbers of immigrants had settled in the East End, including Jewish families fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. The Whitechapel of 1888 was a hard place to live. And for women like Emma Smith, it could be an incredibly dangerous one. Whitechapel is also an area I know well. Before I joined the murder teams, I spent several years policing this part of London. And although more than a century had passed, in many ways the Whitechapel I knew still had echoes of the place these women lived in. Poverty. Overcrowding. Crime. Addiction. Prostitution. I saw all of them first-hand. I also led teams investigating robberies and later rapes in the area, so I got to see a side of Whitechapel that most people never do. That experience matters when I look at these murders. I know the streets. I know the area. And I know that many of the problems we associate with Victorian Whitechapel didn’t simply disappear with time. Emma Smith We don’t know a great deal about Emma. She was over forty and described herself as a widow. She had two children, a son and a daughter, who were living in the Finsbury Park area of London. Even those who knew Emma seem to have known little about the life she’d had before Whitechapel. She told friends that more than ten years earlier she’d left her husband and broken away from her previous life. When asked why, she apparently said that the people she’d left behind wouldn’t understand. Whatever had happened, by the spring of 1888 Emma was living at 18 George Street, a common lodging house in Whitechapel. On the evening of Easter Monday, 2 April, Emma went out. For most of that night, we don’t know where she went or what she did, but shortly after midnight, another woman from the lodging house saw her. Her name was Margaret Hayes, who saw Emma talking to a man. Margaret didn’t know who he was. All she could later say was that he was of medium height, dressed in dark clothing and wearing a white sca

I investigated many murders during my career, more than I can count. But very few sent ripples much further than the communities in which they took place. Occasionally, though, I found myself at the centre of the country’s biggest news story. When your investigation dominates the headlines, the pressure is unreal. Every decision is scrutinised. Every delay criticised. Every mistake magnified. That attention ratchets up another level when a killer is identified and the manhunt becomes public. Suddenly, you’re not just trying to solve a murder and bring a killer to justice. You’re in a very public race against time. Every hour that passes without an arrest, fuels more speculation, more criticism and more questions about whether you’ll ever catch the person responsible. But it isn’t the criticism itself that keeps you awake at night. Throughout my career, the people I always felt most accountable to weren’t senior officers, politicians or journalists. They were the victim’s family. They had placed their trust in us at the darkest time of their lives. What you fear is that the constant public scrutiny begins to erode that trust. That they start to wonder whether the criticism they’re reading or hearing might be true. If that relationship begins to suffer, that’s when the pressure really hits. As I read about Walter Dew’s hunt for Dr Crippen, I couldn’t help wondering whether he felt that same burden of responsibility. The more I learned about his investigation, the greater the sense of kinship I felt with him. More than a century after Dew pursued Crippen, I found myself leading an international manhunt under remarkably similar circumstances. A celebrity reported missing. Murdered by her partner. The suspect fled abroad before the full picture emerged. The most heartbreaking difference was that my investigation also involved her two young sons. In almost every other aspect, the parallels were remarkable. In January 1910, American-born music hall singer, Cora Crippen, disappeared. A friend raised her concerns with the police, but initially not much appeared to have been done to locate her. But in July of that year, after the intervention of a police superintendent who had been contacted by friends of Cora, Chief Inspector Walter Dew visited the marital home and spoke with Cora’s husband, Dr Hawley Crippen. Just over a century later, concerns around the controlling behaviour by the partner of former Eastenders actress, Sian Blake, were raised by her family. As a result, police officers visited her home and spoke with her partner, Arthur Simpson-Kent. Both men gave seemingly plausible explanations as to their partner’s whereabouts. Crippen told Dew that Cora had left him for another man and travelled to America. Simpson-Kent said Sian had taken their two sons to visit a friend in Cambridge. Both homes were searched. Neither search revealed evidence to raise suspicion that either woman had come to any harm. For Walter Dew, verifying Cora’s whereabouts would have been extremely difficult, given the technology available in 1910. In Sian’s case, nobody could contact her after a text message was sent to her sister purportedly from Sian explaining that she needed to get away from everything. Sian was then officially reported as a missing person, along with her two sons, Zachary aged 8 and Amon aged 4. An investigation that was initially conducted by local police. Several weeks later, in the first week of January, her case was referred to us as the on-call murder team. A local superintendent feared serious harm may have come to them. Sadly, he was proven to be right. As detectives, you are taught to continually question the narrative. To never become fixed on one theory. What seems certain one day can change completely the next. Although Dew had accepted the explanation given to him, something about the story seemed to bother him. However, when he returned to make further enquiries with Crippen, the man had vanished. Whatever doubts Dew ha

As I sat there on the sofa, sitting across from me was what I could only describe as a broken family. Two parents who moments before had their whole world come crashing down around them. It was the message no parent ever expects to hear. I’m so sorry to tell you this but your son has died as the result of an assault. Murdered. Not even out of his teenage years. Less than an hour after he left the house saying he would see them later. Then my fellow murder detective and I rock up, telling them he wouldn’t be coming home. Ever. No matter how many times you deliver that message, it never gets easier. In fact, it probably gets harder because you know the impact those words are going to have. You’ve seen the devastation they cause. And there was no doubt those words had caused complete devastation. As a detective I had developed ways of dealing with most of what I saw in my career. The side that I found most difficult was witnessing the trauma of parents who have lost a child through murder. It was probably from being a parent myself. Some part of me wondering how I would cope in that situation (I’m not sure I could). It was that empathy I put down to what happened next. As I sat there, looking at this distraught couple, caught up in their emotions, I said something I had no place in saying. Out of nowhere I told them we would get them. That we would catch the people responsible for killing their son. You see, the thing is, how could I possibly promise that? How could I guarantee that would happen. Yes, we solve most murders, but there are those we don’t. I knew as soon as I said the words I shouldn’t have, and I regretted it straight away. If one of my detectives had said that I’d have had a go at them. You can’t promise something that isn’t in their gift. Thankfully, we did go on to catch his killers. And convict them. But at that time, I had no way of knowing that would happen. It was the only time I ever did that. But it was proof to me what I always knew. Being a family liaison officer wasn’t for me. It’s an unfortunate fact that some of the most important advances in policing come from the mistakes of the past. It often takes high-profile failings to adopt a better way of working. Which is how family liaison officers, or FLOs, came about. In 1992, one of the Metropolitan Police’s darkest moments occurred when 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in Eltham, South-East London. The subsequent investigation into Stephen’s murder came under immense criticism, resulting in a public inquiry, chaired by Sir William Macpherson, that shone a light on numerous failings. One of those was the way in which investigators treated Stephen’s family. Up until then, how detectives engaged with bereaved relatives was far less structured than it is today. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry became a catalyst for change. The Macpherson report made a number of recommendations about how police should work with bereaved families, including the use of designated and trained family liaison officers. Family liaison developed significantly in the years that followed and has since become a central part of murder investigations. So, that’s how the role developed, but what do they actually do? Well, let me dispel one myth straight away. A myth not only held by people outside of the police, but also many on the inside. They’re not there to look after the family. They’re most definitely not counsellors. They’re investigators. Detectives from the investigation team, whose role is to gather information that can assist the investigation. And for me, that’s at the heart of what makes this such an incredibly difficult role. But rather than me explain why, I want to try and put you in their place. Imagine you’re a detective on a murder team that has just taken on a new investigation. The victim is a 15-year-old who was stabbed and killed less than two hours ago. You have been allocated the role of lead family liaison officer. You will be assisted by