Warren ran the PEF's Jerusalem excavations from 1867 to 1870, sinking shafts along the Temple Mount walls and mapping the ancient water system now called Warren's Shaft; his fifty-sheet Warren Atlas appeared in 1884. In 1869 he surveyed the Roman temples of Hermon, recovering the Qasr Antar stele now in the British Museum. In 1884 he took the warrant of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076 as first Master, delayed by his Bechuanaland command until the lodge's consecration on 12 January 1886; the lodge founded what is still called the authentic school of evidence-based Masonic research.
Recalled to London in March 1886 as Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Warren presided over the force during the Whitechapel murders of 1888. When a message in chalk, the Goulston Street graffito about the Juwes, was found near a victim's discarded apron piece, he ordered it erased before daylight to prevent a riot, a decision argued about ever since. In November 1888, after clashes with the Home Secretary, he resigned; the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon's biographical note dates the resignation to the very day the last canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was found.
In 1976 Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution cast Warren as a Masonic fixer erasing evidence to protect a royal conspiracy, welding the graffito to the lodge. The theory's chain collapsed: its key witness testimony was retracted, its documents failed examination, and no evidence ties Warren's lodge to the crimes. The theory requires the man who invented evidence-based Masonic history to be an evidence-destroyer by conviction, which is the one thing his whole career argues against.
How does one man end up standing guard over both the holiest and the most infamous ground in the empire?