The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

throwing Liz Stride to the ground. He crossed the street, at which point the man shouted “Lipski!” at him, an anti-Semitic epithet referring to a Jewish murderer who had recently been hanged. Schwartz said he noticed another man nearby lighting his pipe and, fearful of being mugged, ran away. He gave a complete account to the police, and when he was taken to Stride’s body in the mortuary, he also identified her as the woman he had seen.
    It was only about fifteen minutes after Schwartz’s encounter that Louis Diemschutz encountered the body in approximately the same place. Was it, in fact, Elizabeth Stride that Schwartz had seen? If so, was she killed by the man who threw her down? Or did she get away from him only to be fatally attacked by another? Could this person have been the second man Schwartz saw lighting his pipe? Perhaps that man and the one who threw Liz down had nothing to do with each other. In any event, neither of them matched the description of the man in the couple Constable Smith had seen fifteen minutes earlier.
    When you can’t resolve conflicting witness statements—and it happens with great regularity—you try to put them all in the back of your mind and move on with other evidence, forensic or behavioral, that seems more solid and reliable. Then, if any other lead opens up, you can go back to what the witnesses thought they saw and see if any of it fits in.
    The Mitre Square victim was identified with less difficulty than Elizabeth Stride. She was wearing and carrying all of her worldly possessions, and among them was a mustard tin containing two pawn tickets. One of them was in the name of Anne Kelly, close to the name Mary Anne Kelly given by a woman who had been picked up drunk on the pavement at eight-thirty Saturday night and taken to Bishopsgate police station to sleep it off. The following Tuesday, an unemployed market porter named John Kelly went to the police, fearing that the pawn tickets belonged to his common-law wife, Catherine Kelly, also known as Catherine Conway, whose first husband had been a soldier named Thomas Conway. The victim turned out to be the woman Kelly feared, though the name she was most commonly known by was her nickname Kate and her own maiden name, Eddowes. In a pathetic replay of earlier victims, Conway had left her eight years before over her drinking. She and Kelly, though desperately poor, apparently got on well together.
    They had just gotten back on Thursday from a trip to Kent where they had been paid for picking hops, something like migrant farm labor. This was a common activity for East Enders. It got them out into the fresh air while giving them a little money for their efforts. When Kate and Kelly had returned, still nearly broke, they spent a night together at the Shoe Lane Workhouse, where she was well-known. On Friday, Kate gave Kelly a few pennies to stay at a doss-house on Flower and Dean Street while she went to the Mile End Workhouse to try to squeeze out another night before they’d put her to work. On Saturday, she met Kelly back at Shoe Lane and took a pair of his boots to pawn, receiving two shillings and sixpence.
    The couple used the money to buy groceries and have breakfast, and then, broke again, Kate went to try to find her daughter to borrow money, but couldn’t find her. The next time she was accounted for was that evening, when City Police Constable Louis Robinson found her lying drunk on the pavement. When she couldn’t stand up on her own, that’s how she ended up at Bishopsgate police station.
    She woke up about half past midnight and asked to be released. Constable George Hutt promised to let her go when she was “capable,” finally opening the door for her at 1 A.M., when he thought it would be too late for her to get any more to drink.
    “I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home,” she said, testifying to the domestic violence that was rampant then.
    At about 1:35 A.M., Joseph Lawende, a cigarette salesman,