THE OTHER LONDON RIPPER THE WEST HAM VANISHINGS

The criminal history of London in the late 19th century was dominated by the Jack the Ripper killings. But he may not have been the only serial killer walking the streets of London.

A series of young girls and young adults disappeared from West Ham in London’s East End, during the 1880s and 1890s. The crimes have never been solved, and it’s not clear whether they were the victims of one person, or of several killers.

All of the victims were snatched off the street, most while doing tasks for their parents. In a lot of the cases, suspicious persons were seen in the area of the abduction. In a couple of the cases, this included a woman.

In April 1881, 14-year-old Mary Seward disappeared while out looking for her missing nephew in West Ham. Newspaper reports of the time claimed a man described as ‘well dressed but having common, coarse features’ had made several attempts to abduct children in the area. The following year, Eliza Carter, aged 10, vanished from the area and was never seen again. In 1898, five-year-old Mary Voller disappeared while on a shopping errand in Barking to buy linseed oil. She was stabbed several times and her body was found in a flooded ditch.

The high-profile case among the ‘West Ham Vanishings’ was the murder of Amelia Jeffs. This 15-year-old girl disappeared on January 31, 1890, and was found murdered and raped in an empty house in the Portway two weeks later. 15-year-old Amelia was kidnapped on her way to buy fish and chips on West Road. She was raped and strangled before her body was dumped in a cupboard of a newly built unoccupied house.

At the coroner’s inquest, there was suspicion against Joseph Roberts, the builder who had constructed the row of houses in the Portway, and against Josephs father Samuel Roberts, who worked as a night watchman on the building project. But Joseph Roberts felt certain that the girl had been murdered elsewhere. There had been carpenters working in the empty houses, he assured. The coroner suspected Robert’s father had something to hide and shared police’s suspicions against the Roberts family. A verdict of murder was returned against a person or persons unknown. There was not enough evidence for the son or the father to be charged with the girls murder.

Like Amelia, most of the other victims went missing from the streets and were never seen again. There were plenty stories of gangs luring children and young adults away for lives of slavery in other large cities and abroad. It seems highly improbable this spate of crimes will ever be solved or explained.

The West Ham killings are probably to be the deed of a serial killer with a depraved liking for young girls, or maybe two killers from the same family. But while Jack the Ripper has become a household name for his horrendous crimes in Whitechapel, his West Ham equivalent has remained an obscure figure.

The house where Amelia Jeffs’s body was found is still standing and remains something of a gruesome local landmark. Other than the house, the West Ham murders have been forgotten about, with the Jack the Ripper killings taking all the attention and limelight.

The West Ham cases which remain unsolved are as follows:

April 1881: Mary Seward, 14, (lived in West Road)

January 1882: Eliza Carter, 12 (lived in Church Lane, ten doors from Mary Seward)

August 1882: Clara Sutton (Salisbury Square; friend of Mary Seward)

January 1890: Amelia “Millie” Jeffs, 14, (found murdered 2 weeks later in the upper floor of a newly built house near her home, lived on the same street as Mary Seward).