Legacy of the Ripper

by kindels

  Meanwhile, under a series of intense interrogations over the next twenty four hours, Jack Reid revealed his amazing, (though preposterous, so the police believed) story. He told of his receiving the strange package bequeathed by his Uncle, Robert Cavendish on his eighteenth birthday, and of how the journal that he found contained within that package and the letters from his uncle and those of his ancestors that accompanied the journal proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the pages had been written by none other than Jack the Ripper himself. Further, Jack explained, reading the journal had brought about some kind of mental aberration in his mind and he'd set out to discover why and how. He related the story of the untimely death of his uncle and his search for Robert's brother, Mark, in the hope of discovering more about the circumstances of his uncle's death and the events leading up to it. Finally, he'd told of his chance meeting with Michael, of slowly realising he was being drugged against his will and of his meeting with the man at the house on Abbotsford Road and his revelation that Jack was himself a descendant of The Ripper himself and as such, had inherited the genes of the killer and was somehow carrying out the killings in Brighton without being aware of the fact.

  The police found all of this quite ludicrous but set about checking the young man's story. Surely, thought Mike Holland, verification of the details surrounding the man named Michael and the man in the house on Abbotsford Road would be simple enough, but that was when the problems began to mount both for the police and for Jack.

  First, the address he'd given them for Michael turned out to be a squat, with no official records as to its lawful inhabitant. Of Michael there was no sign and neighbours informed the police that they hadn't seen him for some time. The unlocked flat lay bare and deserted, no clothes, personal belongings or anything to indicate that it had been lived in at all in recent weeks. Despite the police showing a picture of Jack to them, none of the people in the neighbouring flats could ever remember seeing him with Michael, even less remember him actually living there. The only suspicious fact that the police ascertained was that the flat was devoid of fingerprints. It had been wiped clean by its previous inhabitant, giving them no means of establishing whether there was any truth in Jack's story of having stayed there for a number of weeks. In itself, it wasn't enough to corroborate Jack's story, a fact made worse by the police's visit to the house on Abbotsford Road.

  Like Michael's flat the house was deserted. Jack had described the appearance of the room in which he'd talked with the man as best he could, allowing for the darkness and the bright lights that shone in his eyes. However, all the police found was a dusty, uninhabited sprawl of a house with a 'For Let' sign standing at a crooked angle in the front garden.

  A phone call to the local Estate Agent's office gave them the information that the house had been unoccupied for six months since its owners had left to live abroad, and that they'd had trouble finding a tenant due to the high rent being demanded by the owners, allied with the general dilapidation of the property. Holland even went so far as to have the Electricity Company check to see if any power had been expended in the house in the recent past. Nothing! There had been no electricity used in the house for six months.

  Jack's story, weak in the first place, began to look even weaker when the police demanded to see the journal he'd mentioned. Jack reiterated that 'the man' had taken it and that they should get it back from him as it would prove what he'd been telling them. As Holland pointed out to Jack, the fact that 'the man' seemed not to exist lent credence to his own view that the journal was also a figment of Jack's imagination.

  As the effects of the drugs wore off, Jack began to think a little more clearly and demanded that he be provided with a solicitor before he said anything further. Mike Holland, fully aware of Jack's rights under the law, had no choice but to suspend his questioning until legal representation could be found for the young man. A short time later, the duty solicitor was found and his first instruction to Jack was to tell his client not to say another word to the police. He would need time and a series of interviews with Jack before he would allow the police to question him further. For now, every question would be met with the same response; "No Comment."

  The first piece of good news for Jack came with the arrival of his parents. Tom and Jennifer were at least able to confirm that Jack had indeed received some form of package from his late uncle and that he appeared to have been greatly disturbed by whatever it contained. Sadly, they were unable to confirm the contents of that package, having been prevented from seeing whatever was within the package by Jack himself. Unfortunately, they also had little choice but to reveal Jack's troubled childhood, his fixation with blood and his sporadic outbursts of violence towards other children.

  Very slowly the police began to weave together a tapestry of evidence that would show Jack Reid to be a highly disturbed young man with a history of mental illness and a fixation with blood that led in their opinion to the terrible and vicious series of murders that had eventually been perpetrated in Brighton. The fact that he'd appeared to have lied, (or at least fantasised) about Michael and the man in the house on Abbotsford Road only lent further weight to the police theory.

  The longer the police inquiry went on the less Jack's story held up. Not one of the so-called 'facts' he'd related to the police could be sufficiently corroborated. Apart from the death of his Uncle Robert and some wild ideas about Robert Cavendish having had nightmares about Jack the Ripper while he lay in a coma some time before his death, confirmed by the man's widow Sarah Cavendish, there was nothing else whatsoever that the police could learn that could confirm any other part of Jack Reid's story. Sarah Cavendish did inform the police that her husband had become susceptible to nightmarish hallucinations in the months leading up to his death, but that information just gave the police more evidence of a degree of insanity or at least some form of mental illness being carried by the Cavendish family, a fact hotly disputed by Tom Reid but nevertheless accepted by those involved in the inquiry.

  The one thing that did, however, leave a niggling doubt in the minds of Holland and Wright was the information that Jack provided to them about his Uncle Mark Cavendish, Robert's brother. He'd told them that the mysterious man in the house on Abbotsford Road had told him about the suicide of his uncle in Malta. Police checks wit their counterparts on the Mediterranean island confirmed that fact. How could Jack have known that piece of information? The answer came from the Maltese police inspector who'd handled the investigation into Cavendish's death. Some time before the murders in England had begun, a young man calling himself Jack Reid had telephoned the local police in Valetta, the capital of Malta seeking information on the whereabouts of his uncle. The police officer who took the call had checked the local police records and then informed the young man of the tragic death of his uncle.

  Holland was satisfied that they'd got their man, though Carl Wright reserved the right to a niggling doubt, a belief that maybe, just maybe, they'd missed something of importance in the strange and tragic case of 'The Brighton Ripper'.

  Following a series of psychological evaluations, a whole battery of further interviews with his solicitor present and no further corroboration of anything in Jack Reid's story, he was committed for trial on the charge of murder, three counts, his trial to commence three months from the date of his arraignment.

  Tom and Jennifer Reid hired the best barrister they could afford, Simon Allingham, to represent Jack at his trial, but despite Allingham's best efforts it proved impossible to obtain bail for his client and Jack Reid found himself held in custody until his case came to court. When it did, it would prove to be a short and very decisive affair.

  Chapter 31

  Trial and Retribution

  Just three short months passed before Jack Reid faced the judge and jury at house Crown Court in Brighton's neighbouring town of Hove, in East Sussex. Security was tight on the opening day of the trial and the public gallery filled to overflowing with those who sought a glimpse of the man
whom the denizens of the Press had already dubbed 'The Brighton Ripper'. Official opinion of the young man's state of mind had been divided in the run up to the trial. There appeared to have been a fifty-fifty split in the estimations of those learned members of the psychiatric profession, with half of those who'd examined Jack finding him to be a highly disturbed and potentially psychotic individual, the other half reporting that he was as sane as the next man, though with possible homicidal tendencies. Consequently, the defence's submission that he be deemed 'unfit to plead' and automatically detained in a secure psychiatric unit was denied.

  Meanwhile, to their credit, Mike Holland and Carl Wright had continued their investigation, under pressure from Wright, in whatever time they could spare to do so. As far as their superiors were concerned they had their man and the case was effectively closed, barring the trial itself. Wright, however, had continued to plead with Holland to delve further into Jack's claims regarding the mystery man and his young accomplice, as something about Jack's tale rang true to the detective sergeant. Holland, not one to ignore the gut feelings of his sergeant had agreed to do whatever they could to try and substantiate or disprove Jack's story completely. Unfortunately, there appeared to be so many holes and inconsistencies in Jack's statement and in his personal recollections of the weeks leading up to his arrest that the two policemen had been forced to abandon any hopes of revealing any fresh evidence before the trial.

  So it was that with just three weeks to go to Christmas Day, Jack Reid found himself in the dock. The trial commenced at ten a.m. on one of the coldest December days in recent history. A thick frost had descended upon the south of England that night. White tentacles of ice hung from the branches of trees, decorated bushes and hung from the window ledges of the courthouse itself as Jack was driven to court in a sealed van, and led up the rear steps of the building, to be held in a cell below the court until the time came for him to ascend to the courtroom proper where he would stand in the dock and face his accusers.

  Chief amongst those accusers was the Queen's Counsel appointed to prosecute the case on behalf of the The Crown. Ingrid Hewitt Q.C. was in her early forties and rapidly building a reputation as an able and tenacious prosecutor. The Crown Prosecution Service had viewed her as ideal to carry out the prosecution of the Reid trial, as to them it appeared very much an open and shut case, with little chance of an acquittal. No need to wheel out the real 'heavies' then.

  Unfortunately for Hewitt and the prosecution case in general, apart from the evidence linking Reid with the murder of Mandy Clark, there was no forensic evidence and certainly no witness evidence to place him at the scenes of the first two murders, a fact that Jack's own barrister Simon Allingham made much of in his attempts to deflect the jury from over emphasis on the Clark murder. This was, said Allingham, in his address to the jury;

  "A case where the prosecution would have you believe that the young man who stands before you in the dock committed not one, not two, but three horrific murders. Where, I must ask them is the evidence that might even suggest that Jack Reid carried out the first two killings? There is none. Not one scrap of forensic or other evidence can be presented to link my client with those murders. Why? Because I submit that such evidence cannot exist because Jack Reid did not commit those murders. Also, in the case of the murder of Mandy Clark it is an undisputed fact that Jack was discovered walking along Hastings Close with the victim's blood upon him and that the murder weapon, once discovered, contained his fingerprints. That does not however make him the killer of that young girl. Could he not have been at the house, under the influence of drugs as has been confirmed by the police and the doctors who examined him after his arrest and merely woken to find the girl dead in the house and perhaps panicked when he saw the knife, picked it up and thrown it in the rubbish bin in his haste to depart the scene?"

  It was an unlikely scenario and Allingham knew it, but it was his intent to do everything in his power to help Jack Reid. He was good at his job and though his case was weak, almost non-existent in fact, he believed that the prosecution case was equally weak, though of course the evidence such as it was tended to stack up in favour of the prosecution.

  The trial itself was short by modern standards, lasting a mere four days. During that time, Jack's parents were called to the witness stand, where they were forced to confirm Jack's history of psychiatric problems as a child, and his strange behaviour upon receiving the odd legacy from his late uncle, Robert Cavendish. Of that legacy, the so-called journal of Jack the Ripper as Jack had described it, and which he'd insisted had caused his latest mental imbalance, no trace had been found, despite extensive police inquiries. Giles Morris appeared on behalf of the family solicitors, Knight, Morris and Campbell, to testify that at no time was any member of the legal firm privy to the contents of the package which had been let in their care until the coming of age of its intended recipient. Under questioning from Ingrid Hewitt he was forced to concede that the package may have contained nothing more disturbing than a family history, or a collection of letters from his uncle, or some such innocent content. Faithful to his clients as always, Morris countered his admission by stating, much to Simon Allingham's relief and no little amusement, that by the same token Miss Hewitt had no proof that the package did not indeed contain the very thing that Jack Reid said it had done. Giles Morris not only saved Allingham from having to ask that very question of him during cross-examination, but in arguing professionally and politely against Hewitt's accusation in the way he did from the witness box, he gave the defence a much-needed assist in their case. The prosecution had traced the girl who Jack had persuaded to impersonate the private investigator in order to try and trace Mark Cavendish. Hewitt made much of the fact that Jack could easily have made such inquiries himself and that the girl, Christine Carter had been an unwitting accomplice in his plan to avoid being identified by the family solicitors in his desire to trace his uncle. The prosecution, however, were unable to explain why, if Jack's tale were false, he would be looking for his uncle. Despite Simon Allingham labouring this point, the jury appeared to ignore the significance of this anomaly completely.

  The defence called Sarah Cavendish, who confirmed that her late husband Robert had received a package himself sometime after his father's death, but she was also unable to substantiate what it contained. As for Jack the Ripper, she admitted that her husband had become obsessed with the serial killer after having experienced disturbing dreams and hallucinations during his time in hospital following the car crash that killed his father and that Robert had continued to have nightmares in the time leading up to his death. She had no idea what Robert had left to Jack, much less could she hazard a guess as to what such a legacy might have been. Her evidence, unfortunately, did little to support Jack's case and Hewitt was able to turn much of her statement against Jack by insisting that his uncle's own troubled mind showed the family propensity for mental instability, a fact that seemed to swing the jury towards the prosecution case.

  Allingham also made the point that in the first two murders the police had found evidence to suggest that the killer had worn rubber gloves in order not to leave fingerprints at the scene. Why, he asked would Jack Reid, if he was indeed the killer have suddenly dispensed with such a precaution and left his fingerprints not only on the murder weapon, but all over the house as well? The prosecution merely countered this by suggesting successfully to the jury that Jack was so influenced by the cocktail of narcotics in his bloodstream that he'd been sloppy in his execution of his latest crime and the jury, only too willing to come down hard on the issue of drug abuse linked with murder, agreed with Hewitt's surmise.

  In the end, Jack Reid's case foundered on the fact that no corroboration could be found for any part of his story save one. Carl Wright had traced the taxi driver who had dropped Jack and Michael off at the house on Abbotsford Road. At least, the driver testified that he dropped them off somewhere on Abbotsford Road and he couldn't describe the other man who had been in th
e cab. To him, they both looked like a pair of junkies and he took little notice of them apart from ensuring that he received his fare before they 'did a runner' as he put it. He had no idea where they went when they departed from his cab and the defence were unable to prove that Jack ever entered the house or that the man with him was the mysterious 'Michael' who had simply disappeared from his residence in town. Police inquiries had led them to believe that he'd left town some time before the murder of Mandy Clark and they'd managed to find nothing to connect him to Jack Reid, another fact which hampered Allingham's attempt to defend the young man in the dock.

  Finally, the inability of the police to identify or even to substantiate the existence of 'The Man' as Jack called him weighed heavily against the defence. Simon Allingham was able to force a leading psychiatrist to admit that, if this man was figment of Jack's imagination it could be taken as a sign that he was indeed suffering from a psychotic illness whereby his mind had created an 'alter-ego' a fictional other-self on whom his rational mind could cast blame for his crimes on to.

  It was perhaps due to that final admission from the psychiatrist that the jury, when they retired took little over an hour to return with their verdict. Jack Reid was guilty, but they considered him to be insane at the time of the killings and the judge, Chief Justice David Skinner had no choice but to commit Jack to a secure psychiatric unit, a 'special hospital' at Her Majesty's Pleasure. In other words, the young man who stood in the dock would be committed for the rest of his days, or until he was at least no longer considered a threat to society. From what the judge said in his summing up, that time would have appeared a long way off, if at all, to Jack Reid. Thus it was that Jack Reid received his just retribution from the law. His reign of terror was over and the people of Brighton could sleep sound in their beds once more.