For five nights we had been watching a certain alley ( author's note: possibly the the 88ft long passage on the NW of Mitre Sq leading to St James Place but this point has never been 100% confirmed - see my note later)) just behind the Whitechapel Road. It could only be entered from where we had two men posted in hiding, and persons entering the alley were under observation by the two men.

It was a bitterly cold night when I arrived at the scene to take the report of the two men in hiding. I was turning away when I saw a man coming out of the alley. He was walking quickly but noiselessly, apparently wearing rubber shoes, which were rather rare in those days. I stood aside to let the man pass, and as he came under the wall lamp I got a good look at him. He was about five feet ten inches in height, and was dressed rather shabbily, though it was obvious that the material of his clothes was good. Evidently a man who had seen better days, I thought, but men who have seen better days are common enough down East, and that of itself was not sufficient to justify me in stopping him.

His face was long and thin, nostrils rather delicate, and his hair was jet black. His complexion was inclined to be sallow, and altogether the man was foreign in appearance. The most striking thing about him, however, was the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes. They looked like two very luminous glow worms coming through the darkness. The man was slightly bent at the shoulders, though he was obviously quite young about 33 at the most and gave one the idea of having been a student or professional man. His hands were snow white, and the fingers long and tapering.

As he passed me at the lamp I had an uneasy feeling that there was something more than usually sinister about him, and I was strongly moved to find some pretext for detaining him, but the more I thought it over, the more I was forced to the conclusion that it was not in keeping with British police methods that I should do so. My only excuse for interfering with the passage pf this man would have been his association with the man we we were looking for , and I had no grounds for connecting him with the murder. It is true I had a sort of intuition that the man was not quite right. Still if one acted on intuition in the police force, there would be more frequent outcries about interference with the liberty of the subject, and at the time the police were criticised enough to make it undesirable to take risks.

The man stumbled a few feet away from me, and I made that an excuse for engaging him in conversation. He turned sharply at the sound of my voice, and scowled at me in surly fashion, but he said "Good night" and agreed with me that it was cold. His voice was a surprise to me. It was soft and musical, with just a tinge of melancholy in it, and it was the voice of a man of culture - a voice altogether out of keeping with the squalid surroundings of the East End. As he turned away, one of the police officers came out of the house he had been in, and walked a few paces into the darkness of tyhe alley, "Hello! What is this?' he cried, and then he called in startled tones for me to come along. The policeman who raised the alarm after the murder of Catharine Eddowes was PC Watkins.

In the East End we are used to shocking sights but the sight I saw made the blood in my veins turn to ice. At the end of the cul de sac huddled against the wall, there was the body of a woman, and a pool of blood was streaming along the gutter from her body. It was clearly another of those terrible murders. I remembered the man I had seen, and I started after him as fast as I could run, but he was lost to sight in the dark labyrinth of East End mean streets.