Sergeant Stephen White (1854 – 1919) was one of the police officers who investigated the Whitechapel murders in 1888. A member of the Metropilitan Polices H-Division, he was the officer who was tasked with interviewing Matthew Packer, the shopkeeper who claimed that he had sold grapes to Elizabeth Stride shortly before her murder had taken place on the 30th September 1888.
Following White’s death, in 1919, and intriguing article appeared in the People’s Journal – under the claimed byline of “A Scotland Yard Man” – claimed that White was the only officer in the investigation who had had the dubious honour of coming face to face with Jack the Ripper. Indeed, the article went on to make the claim that “White’s description of the suspected murderer was widely circulated and used by the police at the time, but the man was never seen.”
“It was,” so the article claimed, ” White’s description that gave the late Sir Robert Anderson his conviction that the murderer was a Jewish medical student, who had taken this method of avenging himself on women of the class to which his victims belonged.”
It should be noted that, although Anderson evidently did believe that the murder was Jewish, there is no record that he ever stated, or for that matter believed, that he was a medical student. Hover, the article is interesting from the perspective that it gives us an intriguing glimpse of another of the police men who was tasked with hunting down the ripper.
So here is the full article:-
