by Colin Wilson
In the words of the chronicler J. W. von Archenholtz, he committed “nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamt of.” These nameless crimes amounted to creeping up behind fashionably dressed women and slashing at their clothing with a sharp knife, which occasionally caused painful wounds; it was also alleged that he would hold out a nosegay to young ladies, and as they bent to sniff it, would jab them in the face with a “sharp pointed instrument” hidden among the flowers. He was also known to jab bosoms.
During the months he was attacking women, the London Monster created a reign of terror: rewards were offered for his capture and walls covered in posters describing his activities.
It seems that he became obsessed with the pretty daughter of a tavern keeper, Anne Porter, and followed her in Saint James’s Park, making obscene suggestions. On the night of January 18, 1790, when she was returning from a ball with her two sisters, he came up behind her, and she felt a slashing blow on her right buttock. Indoors, she discovered that she had a nine-inch-wide knife wound that was four inches deep in the center. Six months later, out walking with a gentleman named Coleman, Anne recognized the Monster in the park. Coleman followed the man to a nearby house, accused him of being the attacker, and made a kind of “citizen’s arrest.” The man adamantly denied being the Monster, but Anne fainted when she saw him.
The Monster proved to be a slightly built man young man named Renwick Williams, twenty-three, a maker of artificial flowers. It seemed that Williams was from Wales, had received some education, and come to London under the auspices of a gentleman who was a patron of the theater. Williams was hoping to become an actor or dancer, but proved to lack the talent and application. Instead he dressed “above his station” and aspired to become a ladies’ man, drinking rather too much. So the picture we form of him is of an introspective “wannabe,” dreaming of fame, and sexually stimulated by fashionable young ladies, whose bare arms and half-covered bosoms must have struck a country-bred youth as wickedly exciting. Slashing these provocative garments—and penetrating the body underneath—probably induced a sexual climax.
At his trial, Williams insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity; and even offered an alibi. The jury chose to disbelieve him, however, and he was sentenced to six years in prison for “damaging clothes.” The prosecuting counsel talked of “a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible.” All of which demonstrates that the eighteenth century was very far from any comprehension of sex crime.
That is understandable because, for all practical purposes, the nineteenth century saw the real beginning of the “age of sex crime.” Before that, a majority of crime was motivated by profit. But already, by 1790, Renwick Williams was becoming so excited by the provocatively clad ladies of London that he became the first “sadistic piqueur.”
In 1807 and 1808, Andrew Bichel a peasant in Regensdorf, Bavaria, murdered two young women, apparently for their clothes, then dismembered their bodies and buried them in his woodshed. He later tried unsuccessfully to lure other women to his cottage. It is not clear whether, as did the London Monster, he had a fetish for female dress, but when dogs sniffed out the women’s remains, Bichel was tried for murder and beheaded.
In 1867, as noted earlier, the clerk Frederick Baker, murdered eight-year-old Fanny Adams in Alton, Hampshire, and wrote in his diary: “Killed a young girl yesterday—it was fine and hot.”
In 1871, a French youth, Eusebius Pieydagnelle, begged the jury to sentence him to death for four murders of girls, and explained to them that he had become fascinated by the smell of blood from the butcher’s shop opposite his home in Vinuville, and persuaded his middle-class father to allow him to become an apprentice there. In the slaughterhouse, he drank blood and secretly wounded the animals. When his father removed him and apprenticed him to a lawyer, he went into deep depression, and began killing people, including a fifteen-year-old girl and his former employer.
In April 1880, twenty-year-old Louis Menesclou admitted to murdering four-year-old Louise Dreux and sleeping with the body before he attempted to burn it; he was executed.
But it was the five Jack the Ripper murders, which happened between August and November 1888, that achieved worldwide notoriety, and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new kind of problem: a killer who struck at random.
The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning of August 31, with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disemboweled. The next victim, another prostitute, Annie Chapman, was found spread-eagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disemboweled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner—a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many serial killers.
The two murders engendered nationwide shock and outrage—nothing of the sort had been known before—and this was increased when, on the morning of September 30, 1888, the killer murdered two pickups in one night. A letter signed “Jack the Ripper,” boasting of the “double event,” was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders. When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the killer, there was unprecedented public hysteria. As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far. A twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disemboweled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours. Then the murders ceased—the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home.
From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.
Robert Ressler wrote in I Have Lived in the Monster: “Sexual satisfaction for Jack the Ripper, and others of his ilk, derives from seeing the victim’s blood spilt” and pointed out that cutting out uteruses and opening the vagina with his knife leaves no doubt that the crimes were sexual (by which, presumably, he means that they were accompanied by orgasm).
In 1988, a century after the Ripper murders, a television company in the United States decided to do a two-hour live special on the case, and asked John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood to participate. Their provocative conclusions are described in Dark Dreams by Hazelwood and Michaud.
To begin with, Douglas and Hazelwood were interested to learn of the vast amount of evidence that would be available to them, from coroner’s reports, witnesses’ statements, and police files; there were even photographs. In addition, they were presented with a list of five favorite suspects, which included Queen Victoria’s physician Sir William Gull; the heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor; Roslyn Donston, a Satanist and occultist who lived in Whitechapel; Montague Druitt, a melancholic schoolmaster who drowned himself soon after the last murder; and a psychotic Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. The latter two were listed as leading suspects in a private memorandum by Sir Melville Macnaghten, who had been assistant chief constable at Scotland Yard soon after the murders. Most of these suspects were dismissed on various grounds—for example, Sir William Gull had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side a year before the murders and would have been in no condition to prowl the streets, while Prince Albert Victor had solid alibis.
But the most interesting part of the program was the analysis presented by the profilers:
[John] explained that Jack was like a predatory animal who would be out nightly looking for weak and susceptible victims for his grotesque sexual fantasies. Douglas told the TV audience that with such a killer, you do not expect to see a definite time pattern because he kills as opportunity presents itself. He added that such killers return to the scenes of their successful crimes.
He surmised that Jack was a white male in h
is mid-to-late-twenties and of average intelligence. John and I agreed that Jack the Ripper wasn’t nearly as clever as he was lucky. I then said that we thought Jack was single, never married, and probably did not socialize with women at all. He would have had a great deal of difficulty interacting appropriately with anyone, but particularly women.
I said Jack lived very close to the crime scenes because we know that such offenders generally start killing within very close proximity to their homes. If Jack was employed, it would have been at menial work requiring little or no contact with others.
I went on to say that, as a child, Jack probably set fires and abused animals and that as an adult his erratic behavior would have brought him to the attention of the police at some point.
John added that Jack seemed to have come from a broken home and was raised by a dominant female who physically abused him, possibly even sexually abused him. Jack would have internalized this abuse rather than act it out toward those closest to him.
John described Jack as socially withdrawn, a loner, having poor personal hygiene, and a disheveled appearance. Such characteristics are hallmarks of this type of offender. He said that people who know this type of person often report he is nocturnal, preferring the hours of darkness to daytime. When he is out at night, he typically covers great distances on foot.
I said that Jack simultaneously hated and feared women. They intimidated him, and his feeling of inadequacy was evident in the way he killed. I noted that the Ripper had subdued and murdered his victims quickly. There was no evidence that he savored this part of his crime; he didn’t torture the women or prolong their deaths. He attacked suddenly and without warning, quickly cutting their throats.
The psychosexually pleasurable part came for him in the acts following death. By displacing or removing his victims’ sexual parts and organs, Jack was neutering or de-sexing them so that they were no longer women to be feared.
I find this profile convincing and impressive. It sounds, of course, oddly like Ramirez, the Night Stalker. The skill of Douglas and Hazelwood in profiling killers has been so fully demonstrated in this book, it seems to me probable that this is as accurate a profile of the Ripper as we shall ever get.
It should be noted that the profilers do not feel that it is likely that Jack the Ripper was a “gentleman,” as so many theorists have suggested since the time of the murders. They see him as working class.
That also rules out the suspect suggested by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell—that the Ripper was the artist Walter Sickert. I would also rule out Sickert on other grounds. This kind of murder is an explosion of frustration—this is why we so often say that a killer is a “walking time bomb.” No artist or creative person is likely to experience this degree of mental stress and frustration. In fact, I have pointed out in A Criminal History of Mankind that no creative artist has ever committed a murder. A few have killed in the course of quarrels or duels, such as Ben Jonson and Caravaggio, or to revenge honor, like the composer Gesualdo, but never a premeditated crime of violence.
The only remaining Ripper suspect of the five named above is Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish hairdresser who came to England in 1882 in his late teens, and who spent a number of periods in an insane asylum. He died in 1919.
This is not to suggest that Kosminski has to be Jack the Ripper. There are a number of other candidates, including a homicidal Russian doctor named Michael Ostrog, also on Sir Melvile Macnaghten’s list. And there may be some so-far unknown who fits the FBI profile even better. But it probably does mean that we should not be looking for suspects who do not qualify as “gentlemen.”
From the end of the Victorian age until the beginning of World War II there were no British serial killers. In London in early 1942, a member of the Royal Air Force named Gordon Cummins became known as the Blackout Ripper when he took advantage of the London blackout to murder four women. Although the motive seems to have been primarily robbery, there was also a sadistic sexual element in that he mutilated one woman with a can opener and two with razor blades. He was arrested on February 15 after a passer-by interrupted an attack, and he fled, leaving his gas mask with his service number on it. He was later hanged.
Another airman, Neville Heath, would undoubtedly have gone on to become a serial killer if he hadn’t been caught after his second murder in July 1946. On June 21, 1946, he had escorted a model named Margery Gardner to a London hotel; Gardner had masochistic tendencies and Heath had a taste for flogging women. But he seems to have become over-excited and left her dead and mutilated. Two weeks later, staying in a hotel in Bournemouth, he insisted on accompanying twenty-one-year-old Doreen Marshall back to her hotel. He then murdered and mutilated her in a wooded gorge. He was arrested, and a jeweler identified him as the man who had sold him Doreen Marshall’s watch; Heath was hanged at Pentonville Prison on October 16, 1946.
Despite royal conspiracy theorists claims, and a number of books that name him as a plausible suspect, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was not Jack the Ripper. Reputable historians and most “Ripperologists” discount these theories as highly unlikely, if not downright preposterous.
Britain’s first true serial killer since Jack the Ripper was the middle-aged John Reginald Halliday Christie, who committed eight sex murders in London’s Notting Hill between 1943 and 1953. To his neighbors, the most irritating thing about Christie was his authoritarian personality. As a special reserve constable during World War II, he became notorious for his officiousness—he enjoyed reporting people for minor blackout offences.
A sexually frustrated loner who suffered from bouts of impotence, his solution was to persuade women to inhale a nasal decongestant called Friar’s Balsam, which is added to boiling water, and then breathed in with a towel covering the head. Christie would then introduce a rubber pipe attached to the gas supply, which quickly induced unconsciousness, after which the women were strangled as he raped them. This is the method he employed with his first two victims, an Austrian part-time prostitute named Ruth Fuerst, twenty-one, strangled in September 1943, and a fellow-employee at a radio factory, Muriel Eady, thirty-one, killed three months later. In his confession, Christie would declare that after killing her, “I felt that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.”
On both occasions his wife, Ethel, was away in Sheffield visiting her family.
Christie’s next murder, in 1949, was that of Beryl Evans, twenty-two, the wife of a Welsh laborer, Timothy Evans, twenty-seven, who lived in the upper floor of the slum terrace house at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. The Evanses had a year-old baby, Geraldine. Lack of money caused frequent quarrels, and when Beryl found she was pregnant again, she decided to have an abortion. Christie claimed to be a skilled abortionist. On the morning of November 8, 1949, Christie went up to her flat, and told her to lie on a quilt in front on the fire, and take a few sniffs of gas to anaesthetize her. Then he strangled her and almost certainly raped her.
When her husband came home from work, Christie told him that this wife had died during the attempted abortion, and said they would both face criminal charges when her death was discovered. Evans was of subnormal intelligence, and the likeliest scenario is that Christie somehow persuaded him to kill baby Geraldine. Then both bodies were concealed in the outside washhouse. Somehow, Evans was convinced that he had to sell his furniture and flee to Wales. There he went to the police station and confessed to “disposing of” his wife, and to strangling her and his daughter. By the time he was tried for their murder, he had changed his mind and accused Christie of strangling his wife and child, but the jury did not believe him, and he was hanged. Christie was a witness against him and was commended by the judge.
Ethel Christie had a strong suspicion, amounting to a certainty, that her husband was somehow involved in the murders—she had noticed his extreme nervousness at the time. She confided her belief to a neighbor, and when Christie came in and caught them discussing the case, he flew into a rage. This could explain why, on December
14, 1952, he strangled Ethel in bed. It could also have been that he experienced a compulsion to commit more sex crimes, and that Ethel stood in his way. Christie told her family in Sheffield that she was unable to write because she had rheumatism in her fingers.
In mid-January 1953 Christie picked up a prostitute called Kathleen Maloney in a pub in Paddington, and invited her back to his flat. As she sat in a deckchair in the kitchen, he placed the gas pipe under the chair; she was too drunk to notice. When she was unconscious, he raped and strangled her and put her in the closet
The next victim, Rita Nelson, was six months pregnant; Christie may have lured her back with the offer of an abortion. She also ended in the cupboard—the second body.
About a month later, Christie met a girl called Hectorina Maclennan, who told him she was looking for a flat. She and her boyfriend actually spent three nights in Christie’s flat, now devoid of furniture (Christie had sold it). On March 5, Hectorina made the mistake of going back to the flat alone. She grew nervous when she saw Christie toying with a gas-pipe and tried to leave; Christie killed her and raped her. When her boyfriend came to inquire about her, she was in the cupboard, and Christie claimed not to have seen her. As Christie gave him tea, the boyfriend noticed “a very nasty smell,” but had no suspicion he was sitting within feet of her corpse.
During the next few months, the squalid little flat was allowed to become filthy and untidy. Christie had no job and made no attempt to find one. A week later, he sublet the flat to another couple, collected £7 13s. for rent in advance, and wandered off, leaving the decomposing bodies in the closet that was now disguised by a layer of wallpaper. The owner of the house, finding the flat sublet, ordered the new tenants to leave, and looked into the closet. In spite of the hue and cry that followed, Christie made no attempt to escape from London, even registering at a cheap doss house under his own name. He walked around, becoming increasingly dirty and unshaven, until a policeman recognized him on Putney Bridge. What happened to him in those last weeks of freedom? It is tempting to suppose that he ceased to be responsible for his actions. Yet he continued to plan and calculate: even when on the run, he met a pregnant young woman in a café, and told her he was a medical man who could perform an operation . . .
