Every Mistake That Let Jack The Ripper Escape

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]The wall. The killer left them a message in his own hand. Within 3 hours, they erased it with a wet sponge. It was just before 3:00 in the morning on September 30th, 1888. Constable Alfred Long was walking his beat down Goulston Street.

[00:00:15]In a doorway at 108 Wentworth Model Dwellings, he found a piece of blood-stained fabric on the ground used to wipe a blade. It was torn from the apron Catherine Eddowes had been wearing an hour earlier when Jack the Ripper cut her throat in Mitre Square. Then Long looked up. On the black brick wall above the apron, written in white chalk, was a single sentence. The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing. It was the only piece of writing Jack the Ripper would ever leave behind. The only handwriting, the only trace of his mind.

[00:00:47]By 5:30 that morning, it was gone. Sir Charles Warren arrived before sunrise.

[00:00:52]He was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He didn't photograph the message. He didn't trace it. He didn't wait for daylight. His own officers begged him to preserve it.

[00:01:02]Detective Daniel Halse proposed erasing only the top line. Warren refused. He ordered a constable to wipe the message off the wall. His reasoning? He was afraid the word Jews might spark a riot against the Jews. The riot never came.

[00:01:16]The killer was never caught. And the only words Jack the Ripper ever left for the world to read were washed off a wall by the man in charge of catching him.

[00:01:25]The double night. Jack the Ripper killed at 1:00 in the morning. He killed again at a quarter to two. It was September 30th, 1888. Louis Diemschutz turned his pony cart into Dutfield's Yard off Berner Street. His horse shied to the left, refusing to go any further.

[00:01:42]Diemschutz climbed down and struck a match. Elizabeth Stride was lying on the ground. Her throat had just been cut.

[00:01:49]Her body was still warm, and the blood was still flowing. He had walked into a murder while it was happening. The killer was still there, hidden in the darkness of the yard a few feet away.

[00:02:00]Police would later conclude that if Deemshutz had raised the alarm in that moment, Jack the Ripper would have been caught red-handed. Instead, Deemshutz went inside the club to find his wife.

[00:02:10]The killer slipped out of the yard and disappeared into the streets of Whitechapel. He had been interrupted before he could mutilate her, and he was still hungry. 44 minutes later, 3/4 of a mile away, PC Edward Watkins walked his beat through Mitre Square. His route took 15 minutes. At 1:30 a.m., the square was empty. At 1:44 a.m., he had come back. Catherine Eddowes was lying in the southwest corner with her throat cut, her face mutilated, her intestines pulled over her shoulder, her left kidney missing. She had been dead less than 10 minutes. The city police had three detectives patrolling the area that night. The Metropolitan Police had constables walking timed beats every 15 minutes. Two separate forces, hundreds of officers, a killer they knew was on the loose, and he walked between them and killed a second woman in under an hour.

[00:03:03]The bloodhounds. The dogs that might have caught Jack the Ripper were sent back over a money dispute. Hours later, he killed again. By October of 1888, Sir Charles Warren was desperate. Four women were dead. The press was tearing him apart. It was at this moment that he decided to bring in the dogs. Their names were Burgo and Barnaby, two champion bloodhounds, the finest in all of England. Warren had them tested in Hyde Park at 4:00 in the morning. He acted as the hunted man himself. The dogs found him within minutes. Warren was convinced. He gave the order that in the event of another murder, nothing was to be touched until the bloodhounds arrived to track the killer's scent. But then, he refused to pay for them. Their owner asked for a simple guarantee, compensation if the dogs were injured or killed while hunting Jack the Ripper, Warren said the police had no funds. So, the dogs were taken back. One was sent to a dog show in Brighton, the other returned to Scarborough. On the morning of November 9th, 1888, Mary Jane Kelly's mutilated body was discovered through the window of 13 Miller's Court.

[00:04:09]Inspector Abberline gave the order that the room must not be entered until the bloodhounds arrived. The police waited outside the door for 2 hours.

[00:04:17]Eventually, someone told them the truth.

[00:04:20]The dogs were no longer in London. By the time they finally broke down the door, any trail Jack the Ripper might have left was long cold. Sir Charles Warren resigned the day before.

[00:04:31]The witness. A man saw Jack the Ripper attack a woman. The police believed him.

[00:04:36]They never put him on the stand. It was 12:45 a.m. on September 30th, 1888, 15 minutes before Elizabeth Stride's body would be found in Dutfield's Yard.

[00:04:47]Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew who spoke no English, turned onto Berner Street and saw a man attacking a woman in front of the gates of the International Working Men's Club. The man grabbed her, tried to pull her into the street, then spun her around and threw her to the ground. The woman screamed three times. Not loudly, just three short cries. Schwartz crossed the street to avoid getting involved. As he did, the attacker turned and shouted a single word at him, "Lipski." It was an anti-Jewish slur. Schwartz ran. Minutes later, in that same gateway, Elizabeth Stride was found with her throat cut.

[00:05:23]Her body was still warm. Schwartz went to the police. Through an interpreter, he gave them everything. The man's height, his age, his dark hair, his small brown mustache, the way he had thrown Stride to the ground in the exact spot where she would die. Chief Inspector Swanson read the statement and believed it. He wrote that Schwartz's account was credible. The Metropolitan Police included it in the official Home Office files. Then, they buried it.

[00:05:49]Schwartz was never called to testify at the inquest. His name was never mentioned in court. The most important eyewitness in the entire Ripper investigation, a man who had seen the killer attacking a victim minutes before her death, was kept off of the record.

[00:06:04]No one knows exactly why. The files don't explain it. Whoever Israel Schwartz saw that night took his face to the grave.

[00:06:12]The letter. The name Jack the Ripper wasn't created by the killer. It was created by the police. On September 27th, 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter written in red ink. It mocked the police. It promised more killings. It threatened to clip a victim's ears off. It was signed Jack the Ripper. The police believed it was a hoax, but then, on September 30th, Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square with her right ear lobe sliced off. The threat had come true. The police panicked. On October 1st, they released the letter to the press. They printed it on posters across London.

[00:06:49]They asked the public to recognize the handwriting. Within 48 hours, the name Jack the Ripper was on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The killer had been baptized. And then, the letters started coming. Hundreds of them. Then, thousands. From Bradford, from Glasgow, from children, from housewives, from board clerks. All signed Jack the Ripper. All demanding investigation. All swamping the few detectives actually trying to catch the killer. Years later, Robert Anderson, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, admitted the truth in his memoirs. The original letter had been written by a London journalist. He knew the man's name. He never said it out loud. The Metropolitan Police had taken a hoax, broadcast it to the world, and given the killer a legend that would outlive every officer who ever hunted him. Jack the Ripper was a name invented by a reporter to sell newspapers. The police printed it.

[00:07:44]The doctor. Scotland Yard had Jack the Ripper in custody. They let him post bail. He fled the country and was never caught. His name was Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American Indian herb doctor who had made a fortune selling fake medicine across the United States. He was a known misogynist. He had once hosted a dinner party in Washington D.C. where he proudly displayed a collection of preserved human wombs, taken, he said, from every class of woman. In the summer of 1888, Francis Tumblety was in London.

[00:08:14]He was tall with an enormous mustache and a long overcoat. He had a documented hatred of prostitutes. He had been arrested years earlier in connection with the death of a patient. On November 7th, 1888, two days before Mary Kelly was butchered in Miller's Court, Scotland Yard arrested Tumblety on charges of gross indecency. While they had him in custody, detectives quietly began investigating him for the Whitechapel murders. Then, they let him out on bail. Tumblety immediately fled to France. From there, he boarded a steamer to New York. By the time Scotland Yard realized what had happened, he was on the other side of the Atlantic. The Metropolitan Police asked the New York Police to extradite him. They refused. The crime he had been charged with in London was not extraditable. Tumblety lived another 15 years as a free man. When he died in 1903, his possessions included a collection of preserved human organs. 25 years after the murders, Chief Inspector John Littlechild of Scotland Yard wrote a private letter naming Tumblety as the most likely suspect in the entire investigation. He was the man they had held in a cell, the man they had questioned, the man they had let walk out the door. Jack the Ripper was never caught because he had already been released. Eight mistakes, one killer, and a name that outlived every officer who ever tried to stop him.