At five years old, Lenora Cohn was used to running errands for her mother. She was not required to leave the tenement that housed her family, except on rare occasions, and her chores were never rigorous, but she was learning to rely upon herself. The lesson would have served her well, had she survived. At 7:30 on the evening of March 19, 1915, Lenora's mother sent her for a pail of milk. It was a simple task -- she merely had to run downstairs -- and neighbors saw her toiling homeward with a brimming pail ten minutes later. She was nearly home, already climbing toward the third-floor landing and her own apartment, when she passed out of their sight. At 7:45, Augusta Johnson heard an infant's cry outside her door, directly opposite the stairwell. Peering out, she saw a small child lying on her face, apparently the victim of a fall. Concerned, Miss Johnson rushed to help. The child was cradled in her arms before she saw the dark blood welling out of ragged knife wounds, soaking through the tiny dress. Police were summoned to the tenement, along Third Avenue, but they found little in the way of clues. Lenora's pail of milk was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, where she was found, and not a drop had spilled. Detectives scouring the tenement found drops of blood on two steps of another staircase, on the far side of the house, but their significance remains obscure. Lenora's left hand clenched a tuft of short, gray hair, and bruises on her throat reflected violent contact with a larger-than-average hand. She had apparently been choked unconscious, stabbed and mutilated afterward with something like a leather worker's knife. As if the nightmare of a murdered child were not enough, Lenora's mother soon became the target of sadistic letters, written by an individual who claimed to be the killer. Picking up on garish headlines in the press, the author signed his letters "Jack the Ripper," after London's gaslight ghoul of 1888. The notes were handed over to police, who passed them on to United States postal inspectors. On April 29, a 27-year-old Austrian named Edward Richman was arrested in connection with the mailings, quickly cleared of actual involvement in the homicide. But the arrest of Richman did not stop the letters. One day after he was jailed, another note was posted to Lenora's mother. It read: Dear Mrs. Cohn: Just a line to let you know that the person that is accused of writing letters to you is innocent. I am the fellow that wrote you the letters, and as I said before a man that keeps his ears open and mouth shut will always get along and never get caught. Some day thats if I get the chair I may confess . But as long as I am out they can never get me. Kindly give the enclosed letter to the police and tell them I wrote it. From H.B. RICHMOND, Jack-the-Ripper Enclosed with the letter was a second envelope, marked "Give this to the police." Inside was a letter that read: Why don't you drop this case? You know that man can't get me in 100 years from now so its no youse in sirchen for me. I am a wise guy you know but wise guys never get caught. You may think that I am a fool to write you But I am writing just to show that I aint afraid. Mr. Richmond is innocent of the letter which you accuse him of writing to Mrs. Cohn. I am the one that wrote all of them. As I told you in one of my letters that is going to be the biggest murders to be committed in N.Y. that was ever known. Now do you see I am true. H.B. RICHMOND JACK-THE-RIPPER Police initially suspected Edward Richman of attempting to divert suspicion from himself, and visitors who called on him in jail were shadowed as potential cohorts, but no link between the suspect and the final "Ripper" letters was established. Officers intent on tracing "H.B. Richmond" came up empty-handed, still concerned about the recent note's allusion to the possibility of further slayings. On May 3, the threat was realized. Charles %ÀÈ ÿÿÿÿAŽÈ Murray, four years old, did not respond when members of his family called him in from play at 7:30 in the evening. A hasty search was organized, uncovering his mutilated body tucked beneath a staircase in the family's First Avenue tenement. Police responding to the call announced that Murray's killer "very likely" was the same man who had slashed Lenora Cohn on March 19. The victim's sister, Mamie, offered a description of the killer, but police eventually dismissed it as the product of a child's imagination. Meanwhile, homicide detectives and patrolmen fanned out through the neighborhood in search of clues. Five doors up the street, they met the frantic parents of Louisa Niedig, six, who had apparently escaped the killer's clutches moments earlier. While playing on the street outside a bakery, waiting for her aunt to get off work, Louisa was approached by a neatly-dressed man, wearing a black derby hat and sporting a dark mustache. When she refused to speak with him, he grabbed her arm and dragged Louisa through an open doorway, but her screams brought neighbors on the run and her attacker fled before she suffered any harm. At 47th Street and Third, Patrolman Curry was approached by several girls, aged eight to twelve, who said two men were chasing them with knives. Just then, the suspects came around a corner, stopping short at sight of Curry's badge. When Curry ordered them to halt, they rushed him, drawing blades and slashing him across the hand before he battered one assailant to the ground. The other fled, abandoning a stunned James Daly to his fate, but no connection was established with the Ripper crimes. Reports kept pouring in, but all of them were vague, and none contained the crucial information that would crack the case. At Stuyvesant Park, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls informed detectives that a stranger with a dark mustache and Van Dyke beard had been "annoying" them for several months. Inspector Joseph Faurot informed reporters that "the ripper type... is one of the shrewdest and most elusive of criminals," an opinion seconded by Coroner Israel Feinberg. More murders were expected, Feinberg said, unless the killer could be found "within ten days." The panic spread. On May 8, fifty men and boys attacked a Ripper suspect after two small boys accused him of "suspicious" actions. Rescued by police, the bloodied victim proved to be a Polish shoemaker, visiting friends on the street where he once had his shop. On Sunday, May 9, two neighborhood housewives found crude, penciled notes on their doormats, signed "The Ripper Jack." In each, the author threatened death to children of the target families; they would be killed on Monday afternoon, the letters said, or kidnapped from their homes that night if all else failed. There were no incidents on Monday, and on May 12 officers secured confessions from two girls who wrote the notes ''for fun." That afternoon, another "Ripper" note was traced to its author, an eighteen-year-old, who had threatened her employer's children out of spite. Exposure of such childish hoaxes did not ease the local atmosphere of tension. On the evening of May 15, six-year-old Anna Lombardi was lured into a basement by a man who raped her there. A mob went looking for the suspect, but police -- who claimed to know his name -- denied a link between the rape and murders Two days later, when patrolmen arrested Stephen Lukovich for beating his wife and child, rumors spread that "a ripper" was in custody, drawing 1,000 outraged vigilantes to the street outside the precinct house. Nor was the Ripper scare confined to New York City. On June 22, Inspector Faurot visited Philadelphia, where a man in custody had recently confessed to murdering a child "on 15th Street." Detectives had no knowledge of the crime, but young Charles Murray had been slain near 16th Street, and so the suspect warranted an interview. Faurot found his man confined in the mental ward of a local hospital, coming away from the interrogation convinced of his innocence in the Ripper crimes. In August, Lieutenant Patrick Gildea was dispatched to Baltimore, where Ripper suspect Edward Jones was being held on charges of defrauding his landlady. Informant Grace Elliott had denounced her common-law husband as the slayer, and while the woman's own behavior seemed erratic, irresponsible, New York authorities were notified. It was revealed that Jones and Elliott had lived in New York City when the homicides occurred, but there was nothing to connect them with the crimes. Interrogated by Gildea, Grace Elliott withdrew her charges, denying earlier statements that Jones had "confessed" the murders in her presence. Rather, she decided, he was simply interested in reading articles about the crimes. The trail grew cold, and local panic faded over time. Despite assignment of 100 homicide detectives to the case, interrogation of innumerable "witnesses" and suspects, no solution was forthcoming in the case. As with Atlanta's Ripper -- and his several predecessors of the 19th century -- the New York crimes remain unsolved.