It was thought on Tuesday that the Whitechapel murderer had
been at his work again. A constable, passing through Pinchin Street in that district, found in the railway-arch the trunk of a woman, naked, except for a torn piece of linen, and with the head and legs cut off. She had been dead, according to the surgeons, at least three days. The figure was that of a young woman, brown-haired, well nourished, and in health, but without any marks which might help to identification. The trunk had been mutilated in a way which suggested previous murders, and the butchery, as in those cases, had been per- formed by a left-handed man. It is now, however, doubted whether the murder is due to the Whitechapel miscreant, whose work is less scientifically perfect, who always left his victim immediately on the completion of his crime, and who had no motive whatever for preventing her identification by so risky a process as carrying off the head. The police incline to the theory that the murderer is the same man—probably a surgeon engaged in illegal operations—who cut up a woman found at Westminster, if not also another found at Rainham, and that he conveyed the body to Whitechapel in order to divert suspicion from himself to the well-known murderer. One main objection to that theory is the difficulty of convey- ing a human body through a district specially policed at that early hour without attracting notice, and then disappearing suddenly into space. Another difficulty is, that to dispose of a body in Whitechapel is to attract attention, not to divert it. It turns a whole population into detectives.
