by Colin Wilson
At 10:45 the next morning a rent collector knocked on her door but received no reply. He put his hand through a broken pane of glass in the window and pulled aside the curtain. What he saw sent him rushing for a policeman.
Jack the Ripper had surpassed himself. The body lay on the bed, and the mutilations must have taken a long time – an hour or more. One of the hands lay in the open stomach. The head had been virtually removed and was hanging on only by a piece of skin, as was the left arm. The breasts and nose had been removed and the skin from the legs stripped off. The heart lay on the pillow, and some of the intestines were draped around a picture. The remains of a fire burned in the grate, as if the Ripper had used it to provide himself with light. But this time, medical examination revealed that the Ripper had taken away none of the internal organs; his lengthy exercise in mutilation had apparently satisfied his peculiar sadistic fever.
This murder caused the greatest sensation of all. The police chief finally resigned. Public clamour became louder than ever; even Queen Victoria made suggestions on how to catch the murderer. Yet the slaughter of Mary Kelly proved to be the last of the crimes of Jack the Ripper. The police, hardly able to believe their luck as weeks and months went by without further atrocities, reached the conclusion that the Ripper had either committed suicide or been confined in a mental home. A body taken from the river early the following January was identified as that of a doctor who had committed suicide, and Scotland Yard detectives told themselves that this was almost certainly Jack the Ripper. But their claims have never been confirmed.
There have, of course, been many fascinating theories. Forty years after the murders, an Australian journalist named Leonard Matters wrote the first full-length book on Jack the Ripper. He ended by telling an extraordinary story: how a surgeon in Buenos Aires was called to the bedside of a dying Englishman, whom he recognized as the brilliant surgeon Dr Stanley, under whom he had studied. Stanley told him a horrifying story. In 1888 his son Herbert had died of syphilis contracted from a prostitute two years before; her name had been Mary Jeanette Kelly. Dr Stanley swore to avenge Herbert’s death and prowled the East End of London looking for the woman. He would pick up prostitutes, question them about Mary Kelly, then kill them to make sure they made no attempt to warn her. Finally, he found the woman he was seeking and took his revenge. Then he left for Argentina.
Matters admitted that his own search of the records of the British Medical Association had revealed no Dr Stanley nor anyone who even resembled him. But there are other reasons for regarding the Stanley story as fiction. If Dr Stanley was only trying to silence his first four or five victims, why did he disembowel them? In any case, syphilis is unlikely to kill a man in two years – ten is a more likely period. But the most conclusive piece of evidence against the Dr Stanley theory is that Mary Kelly was not suffering from syphilis.
Ten years later an artist named William Stewart published Jack the Ripper: A New Theory. Stewart had studied the inquest report on Mary Kelly and discovered that she was pregnant at the time of her death. He produced the remarkable theory that Jack the Ripper was a woman – a midwife who had gone to the room in Miller’s Court to perform an abortion. After killing Mary Kelly in a sadistic frenzy, she had dressed up in her spare clothes and left, after burning her own bloody garments in the grate. The immediate objection to this theory is that Mary Kelly had no spare clothes – she was too poor. But the major objection is that there has never yet been a case of sadistic mutilation murder in which the killer was a woman. Stewart’s “Jill the Ripper” is a psychological improbability.
In 1959 the journalist Donald McCormick revived a theory that dated to the 1920s. A journalist named William LeQueux described in a book called Things I Know how, after the Russian revolution, the Kerensky government had allowed him to see a manuscript written in French by the “mad monk” Rasputin and found in a safe in the basement of Rasputin’s house. It was called Great Russian Criminals, and it declared that Jack the Ripper was a sadistic maniac named Alexander Pedachenko, who was sent to England by the Russian secret police to embarrass the British police force. Pedachenko, said LeQueux, was later arrested after he tried to kill a woman in Tver (Kalinin). In fact, LeQueux wrote three books about Rasputin, all full of cynical invention. And although they were written before Things I Know, they all fail to mention this extraordinary theory. But the strongest objection to the Rasputin-Pedachenko theory is that Rasputin did not speak a word of French and that he lived in a flat on the third floor, in a house with no cellar.
In the same year that McCormick’s book was published, Daniel Farson investigated the Ripper murders for a television program and succeeded in securing an extraordinary scoop. Sir Melville Macnaghten had hinted strongly in his memoirs that he knew the identity of Jack the Ripper and spoke of three suspects, although he finally dismissed two of these. Farson succeeded in getting hold of Macnaghten’s original notes and learned the name of this chief suspect: an unsuccessful barrister named Montague John Druitt – the man whose body was found in the Thames in early January 1889. Farson did some remarkable detective work and learned a great deal about Druitt’s life and death.
Alas, when Macnaghten’s comments are examined closely, it becomes very clear that he knew little or nothing about Druitt. He calls him a doctor when he was a barrister. He says he believes Druitt lived with his family, when in fact he lived in chambers, like most lawyers. He says he believes Druitt’s mind snapped after his “glut” in Miller’s Court and that he committed suicide the following day. We know that Druitt killed himself three weeks later and that he did so because he was depressed after going to see his mother, who had become insane – he was afraid that the same thing was happening to him. In fact, Macnaghten joined the police force six months after the Ripper murders came to an end, and it is obvious that his Druitt theory was pure wishful thinking, without a shred of supporting evidence.
When, in 1960, I published a series of articles entitled “My Search for Jack the Ripper” in the London Evening Standard, I was asked to lunch by an old surgeon named Thomas Stowell, who told me his own astonishing theory about the Ripper’s identity: that it was Queen Victoria’s grandson – the heir to the throne – the Duke of Clarence, who died during the flu epidemic in 1892. Sowell told me that he had seen the private papers of Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, and that Gull had dropped mysterious hints about Clarence and Jack the Ripper, as well as mentioning that Clarence had syphilis, from which he died. When, subsequently, I asked Stowell if I could write about his theory, he said no. “It might upset Her Majesty”. But in 1970 he decided to publish it himself in a magazine called The Criminologist. Admittedly, he did not name his suspect – he called him S – but he dropped dozens of hints that it was Clarence. Journalists took up the story and it caused a worldwide sensation. Stowell was so shaken by all the publicity that he died a week later, trying to repair the damage by claiming that his suspect was not the Duke of Clarence.
A writer named Michael Harrison, working on a biography of Clarence, carefully reread Stowell’s article and realized that there were many discrepancies between the career of S and that of the Duke of Clarence. He concluded that Sir William Gull had indeed referred to a suspect as S but that it was not the Duke of Clarence, but someone who was closely acquainted with him. Studying Clarence’s acquaintances, he discovered the ideal suspect: James Kenneth Stephen, a poet, lawyer, and man-about-town who had become distinctly odd after being struck on the head by the vane of a windmill and who, like Clarence, had died – in a mental home – in 1892. Harrison had no trouble in disposing of Clarence as a suspect, pointing out that at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, Clarence was celebrating his father’s birthday at Sandringham. But he was far less successful in finding even a grain of evidence to connect Stephen with the crimes. It is almost impossible to imagine the intellectual young aesthete, author of a great deal of published verse, stalking prostitutes with a knife.
The next majo
r book on Jack the Ripper was optimistically entitled Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976) and was written by a young journalist named Stephen Knight; he was following up a story propounded in a BBC television series called “The Ripper File”, which in turn was based on an astounding story told by Joseph “Hobo” Sickert, son of the famous Victorian painter Walter Sickert. This story also involved the Duke of Clarence – although not, this time, as the murderer.
According to Hobo Sickert, his father and the heir to the throne were close friends, and the Duke often went slumming with the bohemian painter. In Sickert’s studio in Cleveland Street, Soho, Clarence met an attractive young artist’s model named Annie Crook. She became his mistress and in 1885 gave birth to a baby girl they named Alice Margaret. Then, according to Sickert, Clarence and his mistress got married in a private ceremony.
The story becomes more preposterous. When the secret marriage reached the ear of Queen Victoria, she was horrified. Annie was not only a commoner but a Catholic. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, gave orders that Annie and the baby were to be kidnapped. A carriage drove up to the house at 6 Cleveland Street, and Annie and her baby daughter were hustled into a carriage and taken off to a mental home; there Sir William Gull performed a sinister brain operation on Annie to make her lose her memory. (This, incidentally, is virtually impossible; even nowadays scientists are uncertain where the source of memory lies, and in 1888 ignorance was total.)
The child, Alice, was handed over to a nanny in the East End of London – one Mary Kelly. Eventually, Alice found her way back to Walter Sickert and became his mistress. Joseph “Hobo” Sickert was the outcome of this union.
But Mary Kelly made the mistake of deciding to blackmail the royal family. She had taken a number of fellow prostitutes into her confidence, and the Prime Minister decided they all had to be killed. The task was given to Sir William Gull, who had sadistic tendencies anyway. His method was complicated but original; he would drive around the streets of Whitechapel in a coach until he saw his prospective victim, who would then be lured inside and disemboweled. His coachman, a man named Netley, was an accomplice. (A more recent theory suggests that Netley himself was Jack the Ripper.) And since Gull was also a Freemason, he left various clues in the form of hints of masonic ritual, such as the objects arranged so carefully around Annie Chapman and the misspelling of Jews as Juwes. Mary Kelly, of course, was the final victim.
It is not clear whether Knight believed this incredible farrago of nonsense. He probably did not. He knew that Gull had suffered a stroke in 1887 and would have been incapable of the murders. And a fellow investigator named Simon Wood had uncovered Annie Crook’s rent book and discovered that she left the Cleveland Street address in 1886, a year before she is supposed to have been kidnapped. Moreover, the records show that she was living a perfectly normal life until 1920, when she died in a workhouse. Her religion was Church of England, not Roman Catholic. Simon Wood told Knight all of this soon after publication of The Final Solution, but Knight made no attempt to correct his “facts” in the paperback edition. Since his book had become something of a bestseller, it was not in his interests to admit that he had been deceived by Hobo Sickert.
It was, in fact, Hobo Sickert himself who pulled the rug out from under Knight by publicly admitting that the Jack the Ripper part of his story was pure invention. He insisted, however, that the story of Annie Crook giving birth to the Duke of Clarence’s daughter – and the daughter becoming his own mother – was true. And in this he was probably being truthful. The most convincing part of Knight’s book is his description of the various “clues” to the affair that Sickert slipped into his paintings.
In fact, this part of the story was confirmed – or at least strongly supported – in a book entitled Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (1990) by Jean Overton Fuller. It also demonstrates that Hobo Sickert did not invent his Jack the Ripper story out of whole cloth; it looks as if a remarkable coincidence led him to believe that there was some connection between the Duke of Clarence and the Ripper murders.
Jean Overton Fuller’s mother had a friend named Florence Pash, an artist who was also an intimate of Walter Sickert. Florence had told Mrs Fuller that Sickert knew the identity of Jack the Ripper and that he had carried some sinister secret around with him for the rest of his days – a secret that, at times, made him fear for his life. Florence Pash also confirmed that Mary Kelly had worked for Sickert as a nursemaid before the murders. We know that Sickert was obsessed by the Ripper murders and that he painted several pictures based on them.
All this, according to Jean Fuller, proves that Sickert was himself Jack the Ripper and that his motive was to kill the blackmailing prostitutes who knew the secret of Annie Crook.
This is obviously absurd. Why should Sickert go around murdering prostitutes because they knew that the Duke of Clarence had fathered an illegitimate child? Protecting his royal friend’s good name is obviously an insufficient motive. Besides, Jack the Ripper was a sadist who enjoyed disemboweling women. Walter Sickert seems to have been one of the nastiest and most spoiled men who ever lived, but as far as we know, he was not a sadist.
What the Florence Pash evidence does seem to prove is that the Duke really fathered an illegitimate daughter, who became the mother of Joseph Sickert. It also confirms the unlikeliest part of Hobo Sickert’s story: that Mary Kelly acted as a nursemaid to the baby. She may even have tried to blackmail Sickert. But even without the blackmail motif, we can understand why Sickert thought he was the custodian of a frightening secret. When Mary Kelly became – almost certainly by pure chance – the Ripper’s final victim, he must have felt certain that the long arm of Buckingham Palace was involved. And when Hobo Sickert, the child of Walter Sickert and Annie Crook, came to hear of this tale of a royal love affair followed by murder, he understandably came to believe that the Palace was somehow involved in the murders. At least Fuller’s book enables us to understand how the whole silly story came to be invented.
But that leaves us with the question: Who was the Ripper? In 1988, the centenary of the murders, half a dozen books propounded new theories – or old theories with a new twist.
Martin Fido’s Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper returned to Macnaghten’s original notes, which listed three men as the chief Ripper suspects: Druitt (whom we have already dismissed), an insane Russian doctor named Ostrog (the origin of “Pedachenko”), and an insane Polish Jew named Kosminski, who was committed to an asylum in 1889. Sir Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, is on record as remarking that the Ripper was a Polish Jew. Fido looked through the records of insane asylums and found a man named Aaron Kozminski, who died in 1891; but he was suffering from paranoid delusions and obviously lacked the cunning and intelligence to be the Ripper. A further search, however, uncovered a Nathan Kaminsky, treated for syphilis in March 1888, but about whom nothing more is known. Fido identifies him with David Cohen, another Polish Jew, who was committed to an asylum in December 1888 and died in the following year; Cohen was too violent to associate with his fellow patients. Fido speculates that a man who mumbled his name as “Nathan Kamin” might have been misheard as saying “David Cohen”. This is true; it is also true that Cohen might have been Jack the Ripper. But there is not a shred of real evidence that he was.
Paul Begg, another “Ripperologist”, points out in Jack the Ripper: Uncensored Facts that a close associate of Anderson, D. S. Swanson, wrote in the margin of Anderson’s autobiography the comment that the Polish Jew died in “the Seaside Home”. This would seem to rule out Kaminsky-Cohen as the Ripper.
In The Ripper Legacy, Martin Howells and Keith Skinner describe their fruitless investigation into an “Australian connection” mentioned by Daniel Farson: the notion that Druitt’s cousin Lionel moved to Australia and wrote a pamphlet entitled “Jack the Ripper – I Knew Him”. This trail led nowhere. Nevertheless, Howells and Skinner endorse Farson’s conclusion that Druitt was Jack the Ripper and suggest that his “sui
cide” in the Thames was actually murder – that former associates from his Cambridge days, a society called The Apostles, learned that he was the Ripper and killed him in order to prevent a scandal. The book reveals their remarkable tenacity as researchers, but their theory contains as many “ifs” as Martin Fido’s.
The “black magician” Aleister Crowley was convinced that the Ripper was another “magician” by the name of Roslyn D’Onston Stevenson (who preferred to be called “D’Onston”), who committed the murders as part of a ritual to gain supreme magical powers. Crowley tells a preposterous story about how D’Onston ate parts of the bodies at the scene of the crime and in so doing stained his ties with blood. The bloodstained ties were then found in a tin box under D’Onston’s bed by his lesbian landlady.
In fact, D’Onston wrote a letter to Scotland Yard claiming to know the identity of Jack the Ripper: a doctor named Morgan Davies. His grounds for this belief were that he had heard Davies describing the murders to some fellow doctors and enacting the crimes with a gruesome realism that convinced D’Onston that Davies had actually committed them. The police seem to have treated it as yet another crank letter. In A Casebook on Jack the Ripper (1976), criminologist Richard Whittington-Egan went into the D’Onston theory at length but concluded that D’Onston was a fantasist and something of a con man.
Whittington-Egan’s friend Melvin Harris decided to investigate D’Onston and discovered that Whittington-Egan had been less than just. Many of D’Onston’s “fantasies” about his service in India and fighting under Garibaldi turned out to be true. Harris’s Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth is an impressive piece of research. But it utterly fails to explain why a man who went to the police alleging that someone else was Jack the Ripper (on grounds that cannot be taken seriously) should himself have been the Whitechapel murderer.
