After an absence of several weeks in September, 1888, the Whitechapel murderer suddenly and brutally returned to the streets of the East End of London in the early hours of Sunday the 30th of September, and claimed the lives of two more victims in the space of an hour.
TWO MORE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
At 1am that morning the body of Elizabeth Stride was found in Berner Street, off Commercial Road. Forty-five minutes later, Catherine Eddowes was found dead in Mitre Square on the eastern fringe of the City of London, by beat officer Constable Watkins.
TERROR AND PANIC
Terror and panic quickly returned to the streets of, not just Whitechapel but the whole of the Victorian metropolis, and newspaper reporters headed to the district to find out all they could about what had happened, and the majority of them struggled to find a motive for the heinous crimes.
THE FIEND HAS RETURNED
The next day, on Monday the first of October, The Dundee Courier, reported on the mood in the streets in the aftermath of these two latest atrocities:-
London, Sunday Night.
“The Whitechapel fiend has emerged from his lair in which he has lain concealed for three weeks, and his track is marked by two more murders.
There can no doubt that they are by the same hand, though one of the two is of a commonplace character.
The second, however, is distinguished, and, fact, individualised by repetition of the atrocious complements which marked off the of the month.
SIR CHARLES WARREN AT THE SCENE
The police are without a clue to the assassin, and are quite baffled, though the interest of Scotland Yard was shown with an unusual form by the arrival at the scene of the tragedy of Sir Charles Warren himself, not, however, that our sirdar of police was able, or so far as I have learnt, has been able to offer any practicable or productive advice.
WHITECHAPEL IN A FRENZY
As your readers may imagine this extraordinary recrudescence of crime in their neighbourhood has driven the inhabitants of Whitechapel into frenzy of horror and alarm.
In fact, the entire Metropolis shares tonight the indignation which prevails throughout the East.
THE WORK OF A MADMAN
Philosophy is helpless. There is still an utter absence of conventional motive for the crime.
We are consequently driven back to the old theory that the butcheries are the work of a madman with homicidal propensities.
HE WAS ALMOST CAUGHT
In this latest case the murderer was within an ace of detection, as he is known to have despatched his second victim during a fifteen minutes’ beat of the policeman, who almost immediately afterwards came upon the woman.
The scene which presented itself to the eye of that policeman appears to have since incapacitated him for duty.
THE POLICE IN FEAR
The immediate consequence of the renewal of the Whitechapel horrors, this, I may remark, being the sixth murder committed within a half-mile radius, has been to arouse popular feeling against the foreign inhabitants of the parish; and the police, as I learn officially, fear an outbreak against the Jews in particular, and are actually providing precautionary measures accordingly.”