The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Another brilliant piece of investigation was carried out by a Norwich accountant named Steward Hicks, who searched through the lunacy records for 1888 and came upon the name of a doctor named John Hewitt, who had been a patient in Coton Hill, an asylum in Staffordshire. Walter Sickert once described how he had taken a room near Camden Town and how his landlady was convinced that one of her previous lodgers, a student vet named John Hewitt, was Jack the Ripper – Hewitt had burned all his clothes in the grate (presumably to destroy bloodstains) and often stayed out all night. Hewitt’s mother had finally removed him to Bournemouth, where he died of tuberculosis.

  Could it be, wondered Hicks, that Hewitt’s mother had actually realized he was Jack the Ripper and had had him committed to an asylum in Staffordshire? His research revealed that Hewitt had died of “general paralysis of the insane” in 1892, so he could be the Ripper. Hicks approached me with his theory, and I was able to help him gain access to the records of Coton Hill asylum, which had now been removed to the Staffordshire asylum. Alas, they revealed that Hewitt had committed himself to the asylum before the murders began. There was, however, still a slim hope for Mr Hicks’s theory. Since Hewitt had committed himself voluntarily to the asylum, he was allowed to go in and out as he pleased. If he had been away on the dates of the Whitechapel murders, that would constitute almost overwhelming circumstantial evidence that he was the Ripper. Regrettably, when Hicks finally gained full access to the papers in the Public Records Office, they made it clear that the dates when Hewitt was absent from the asylum were not the dates of the murders. Hicks tells me that, in spite of this, he still believes he may find evidence to show that Hewitt could have been Jack the Ripper. I wish him luck but cannot share his optimism.

  Other theories that surfaced around the time of the Ripper centenary are that the killer was Frank Miles, a homosexual artist who was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s (and who died insane), and that he was Joseph Barnett, the man who had lived with Mary Kelly until shortly before her murder. The Frank Miles theory – advocated by Mr Thomas Toughill – is open to the same objection as Harrison’s Stephen theory: that highly educated, “aesthetic” young poets (or artists) are not likely to turn to disemboweling. Bruce Paley, author of the Joseph Barnett theory, has a stronger case, in that whoever killed Mary Kelly locked the door behind him – yet the key is known to have been missing for some time. Barnett could easily have had the key. On the other hand, it may simply have turned up again before Mary Kelly was killed. And since Barnett is known to have been a mild little man, the theory that he killed five women because he was madly in love with Mary and disapproved of her habit of selling her favours is, to say the least, unlikely.

  Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict, by myself and Robin Odell, also appeared during the centenary. In Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction (1965), Robin Odell had suggested that Jack the Ripper was a Jewish shochet, or ritual slaughterer, whose sadistic tendencies were stimulated by his profession until he began killing women. This is conceivable – except that it is hard to see why a sadist whose job involved slaughtering cattle by cutting their throats should have felt the need to kill women. And since all the records that might have enabled Odell to identify his slaughterer were destroyed during the Second World War, it seems that we must regard his theory as one more interesting might-have-been.

  Since the early 1980s the phenomenon of serial murder has seized the public imagination, and careful psychological studies – particularly by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia – have thrown some important new light on the phenomenon.13 What can they tell us about Jack the Ripper? To begin with, the great majority of serial killers have emerged from working-class backgrounds. The middle- or upper-class serial killer is virtually unknown – presumably because the kind of frustrations that lead to multiple murder tend to spring from childhood poverty and ill treatment. This means that we can fairly confidently dismiss all the theories that involve an upper-class Ripper (or even a middle-class doctor like Matters’s Dr Stanley or D’Onston’s Morgan Davies).

  We must also recognize that part of the fascination of the Ripper murders lies in the mistaken notion that the murderer must have been a master criminal, a kind of Dracula who preferred to mutilate his victims rather than drink their blood. In fact, the surprising thing about most serial killers is that they tend to be ordinary, nondescript individuals. In many cases, they seem so gentle and polite that their acquaintances find it impossible to believe they were capable of murder. The Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, falls into this category; so does Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf sadist, and Earl Nelson, the Gorilla Murderer – a charming young man who liked to discuss the Bible.

  In many cases, the killer himself is totally unable to understand the urges that drive him to kill, and criminologists admit to being equally baffled. In September 1980 four black men were shot with a .22 rifle in Buffalo and Niagara Falls; in October two black cab drivers were stabbed to death and their hearts cut out. The killer had opened the ribcages and seemed to possess some medical skill. In December 1980 four black men were stabbed to death in New York by a man who simply approached them in the street.

  The following January an eighteen-year-old army private named Joseph C. Christopher – a white – attacked a black soldier with a potato knife and then tried to emasculate himself. In custody, Christopher confessed to being the “Buffalo Slasher” as well as the .22 killer and the knife-wielding maniac of New York. People who had known Christopher in Buffalo were astounded; he was a quiet, ordinary teenager who was not known as a racist or a homosexual. (All the victims were male.) He had been raised in an Italian neighbourhood by a dominant father and a passive mother – in that respect he resembled the Boston Strangler – and had adored his father, who had taught him to shoot. Christopher had been much affected by his father’s death, which had occurred in 1976, when he was fourteen. He himself seemed to have no idea of why he had killed. As a “monster”, Joe Christopher is a total disappointment. Yet he provides us with a more realistic image of the serial killer than the notion of a raving maniac.

  The probability is that Jack the Ripper was as “ordinary” and as nondescript as Christopher. He was probably not even insane, like “Pedachenko”, or violent, like Kaminsky-Cohen. So there is almost certainly no hope of establishing his identity more than a century after the murders. He was a “nobody”.

  Yet, oddly enough, there is a suspect who fits this description of a “murderous nobody”. After Daniel Farson had presented his television program on Jack the Ripper in 1959, he received a letter from a man who signed himself G.W.B. and who explained that he was a seventy-seven-year-old who lived in Melbourne, Australia. He wrote:

  When I was a nipper, about 1889, I was playing in the streets about 9.00 P.M. when my mother called, “Come in Georgie or JTR [Jack the Ripper] will get you”. That night a man patted me on the head and said, “Don’t worry, Georgie. You would be the last person JTR would touch”. [This man was apparently Georgie’s own father, who was born in 1850 and so would have been thirty-eight at the time of the murders.] My father was a terrible drunkard and night after night he would come home and kick my mother and us kids about something cruelly. About the year 1902 I was taught boxing, and after feeling proficient to hold my own, I threatened my father that if he laid a hand on my mother or brothers I would thrash him. He never did after that, but we lived in the same house and never spoke to each other. Later, I emigrated to Australia. I was booked to depart with three days’ notice, and my mother asked me to say goodbye to my father. It was then he told his foul history and why he did those terrible murders, and advised me to change my name because he would confess before he died. Once settled in Melbourne I assumed another name. However, my father died in 1912 and I was watching the papers carefully, expecting a sensational announcement.

  This, of course, never came. Georgie’s explanation for his father’s heavy drinking is that he had always wanted a daughter but that his first ch
ild – a female – was an imbecile; later children were all boys. “During the confession of those awful murders, he explained that he did not know what he was doing but his ambition was to get drunk and an urge to kill every prostitute that accosted him”.

  His father, Georgie explained, was a dung collector, and on one occasion, after killing a woman, he had removed his outer pair of trousers, which were saturated with blood, and hidden them in the manure. Later, while his partner went to have a meal of sausage and mash, Jack (this was the father’s name) buried himself in the manure to keep warm and upon hearing a policeman asking questions about Jack the Ripper felt “scared to death”.

  Many sadistic killers commit their crimes only after they have been drinking heavily, and “Georgie’s” account of his father rings psychologically true. A highly dominant individual, a bully who beat his wife and probably felt a contempt for all women, might well have experienced a kind of homicidal rage when accosted by prostitutes. It is also hard to imagine why a seventy-seven-year-old man should bother to write an anonymous letter from Melbourne with a completely false story. And, assuming his story to be true, it is equally hard to see why his father should have invented the story about being Jack the Ripper.

  It is possible that, even at this distance in time, a check of the records of ships bound for Australia in 1902 could reveal the identity of “G.W.B”. and that this in turn might lead to uncovering the identity of a man called Jack (surname probably beginning with a B) who was born in 1850, died in 1912, and was a manure collector in Whitechapel in 1888. We would have no means of being certain that this man was Jack the Ripper; but he would seem to me far and away the likeliest candidate.

  Postscript to Jack the Ripper

  In 1993, a new – and highly plausible – candidate was added to the list when a book called The Diary of Jack the Ripper was published. The author of the Diary (found scrawled in an old notebook) was James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, whose young wife Florence was accused of poisoning him. Florence was found guilty and sentenced to death, but later reprieved. The Diary revealed that Maybrick was an ‘arsenic eater’ (in small quantities arsenic is a powerful stimulant), and that he was driven to a frenzy of jealousy by his young wife’s infidelities. Maybrick spent a great deal of time in Whitechapel on business and, according to the Diary, vented his fury against Florence by murdering prostitutes.

  Although the authenticity of the Diary has been widely questioned, powerful internal evidence suggests that it was written by James Maybrick, and that Maybrick was Jack the Ripper.

  28

  Did Joan of Arc Return from the Dead?

  On 30 May 1431 Joan of Arc was burnt as a heretic by the English; she was only nineteen years old. She regarded herself as a messenger from Heaven, sent to save the French from their enemies the English (who were in league with the Burgundians who captured her). At the age of thirteen Joan began to hear voices, which she later identified as those of St Gabriel, St Michael, St Marguerite and St Catherine. When the news of the encirclement of Orleans reached her little village in Lorraine, Domremy, her voices told her to go to lift the siege. Her military career was brief but spectacular: in a year she won many remarkable victories, and saw Charles VII crowned at Rheims. Then she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English for ten thousand francs, tried as a witch, and burnt alive.

  But that, oddly enough, was not quite the end of “the Maid”. “Now one month after Paris had returned to her allegiance to King Charles”, writes Anatole France, “there appeared in Lorraine a certain damsel. She was about twenty-five years old. Hitherto she had been called Claude; but now she made herself known to divers lord of the town of Metz as being Jeanne the Maid”. This was in May 1436, five years after Joan had died at the stake.

  It sounds very obviously as if some imposter had decided to pose as Joan the Maid. But there is some astonishing evidence that suggests that this is not so. Joan’s two younger brothers, Petit-Jean and Pierre, were still serving in the army, and they had no doubt whatever that their sister had been burnt at Rouen. So when they heard that a woman claiming to be Joan was at Metz, and that she had expressed a wish to meet them, the brothers hastened to Metz – Petit-Jean was not far away, being the provost of Vaucouleurs. One chronicler describes how the brothers went to the village of La-Grange-aux-Ormes, two and a half miles south of Metz, where a tournament was being held. A knight in armour was galloping around an obstacle course and pulling stakes expertly out of the ground; this was the person who claimed to be their sister. The brothers rode out on to the field, prepared to challenge the impostor. But when Petit-Jean demanded, “Who are you”?, the “impostor” raised her visor, and both brothers gaped in astonishment as they recognized their sister Joan.

  In fact Joan was surrounded by various people who had known her during her spectacular year fighting the English, including Nicole Lowe, the king’s chamberlain. If she was in fact an impostor, it seems absurd that she should go to a place where she would be sure to be recognized. (John of Metz was one of her first and most loyal supporters.) And the next day her brothers took her to Vaucouleurs, where she spent a week, apparently accepted by many people who had seen her there seven years earlier, when she had gone to see the local squire Robert de Baudricourt, to ask him to send her to see the Dauphin, the heir to the throne. After this she spent three weeks at a small town called Marville, then went on a pilgrimage to see the Black Virgin called Notre Dame de Liance, between Laon and Rheims. Then she went to stay with Elizabeth, Duchess of Luxembourg, at Arlon. Meanwhile her brother Petit-Jean went to see the king and announced that his sister Joan was still alive. We do not know the king’s reaction, but he ordered his treasurer to give Petit-Jean a hundred francs. An entry in the treasury accounts of Orléans for 9 August 1436 states that the council authorized payment of a courier who had brought letters from “Jeanne la Pucelle” (Joan the Maid).

  The records of these events are to be found in the basic standard work on Joan of Arc, Jules Quicherat’s five-volume Trial and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc (1841), which contains all the original documents. One of these documents states that on 24 June 1437 Joan’s miraculous powers returned to her. By then she had become something of a protégée of Count Ulrich of Württemberg, who took her to Cologne. There she became involved in a clash between two churchmen who were rivals for the diocese; one had been appointed by the chapter, the other by the pope. Count Ulrich favoured one called Udalric, and Joan apparently also pronounced in his favour. But her intervention did no good; the Council of Basle considered Udalric a usurper, and the pope’s nominee was appointed. The Inquisitor general of Cologne became curious about the count’s guest (remember that this was at the height of the “witchcraft craze”), and was apparently shocked to learn that she practised magic, and that she danced with men and ate and drank more than she ought. (The magic sounds more like conjuring: she tore a tablecloth and restored it to its original state, and did the same with a glass which she broke against a wall.) He summoned her before him, but she refused to appear; when men were sent to fetch her the count hid her in his house, then smuggled her out of the town. The inquisitor excommunicated her. Back at Arlon, staying with the Duchess of Luxembourg, she met a nobleman named Robert des Armoires and – no doubt to the astonishment of her followers – married him. (The original Joan had sworn a vow of perpetual chastity under a “fairy tree” at Domremy.) Then they moved to Metz, where Robert had a house, and during the next three years she gave birth to two children.

  Two years later, in the summer of 1439, the “Dame des Armoires” went to Orléans, whose magistrates gave her a banquet and presented her with 210 livres by way of thanking her for her services to the town during the siege. Oddly enough, these same burgesses had paid for Masses in memory of the Maid’s death three months earlier; presumably they must have changed their minds in the meantime. After 1439 the Masses ceased.

  After two weeks she left Orléans in rather a hurry, according to one chronic
ler, and went to Tours, where she sent a letter to the king via the Baillie of Touraine, Guillaume Bellier, who had been the Maid’s host ten years earlier. Moreover, she soon afterwards went to Poitou, where she seems to have been given the nominal command of a place called Mans – presumably by the king she had enthroned. Then the king transferred this command to Joan’s ex-comrade in arms, Gilles de Rais. Since the days when he had fought beside Joan before the walls of Paris, Gilles had begun to practise black magic – in an attempt to repair his fortunes, drained by his excesses – and had become a sadistic killer of children. In the following year, 1440, Gilles would be tried and condemned to be hanged and burned. Meanwhile – assuming he met the Dame des Armoises (which seems practically certain, since she had to hand over her command to him) – he seems to have accepted her as his former comrade-in-arms. He also placed her in authority over the men-at-arms.

  In 1440 Joan finally went to Paris and met the king. And for the first time she received a setback; after the meeting the king declared her an impostor. It may be significant that he did so after the interview. Surely if he could see she was a fraud he would have said so at the time? He even attempted to practise on her the same trick he had tried at their first meeting eleven years earlier, concealing himself and asking one of his men to impersonate him. But as on the previous occasion Joan was not to be deceived; she walked straight up to the king and knelt at his feet, whereupon the king said: “Pucelle, my dear, you are welcome back in the name of God”. It seems, to say the least of it, strange that he should then have decided she was an impostor.

  And now, according to the journal “of a Bourgeois of Paris”, Joan was arrested, tried and publicly exhibited as a malefactor. A sermon was preached against her, and she was forced to confess publicly that she was an imposter. Her story, according to the “Bourgeois of Paris”, was that she had gone to Rome about 1433 to seek absolution for striking her mother. She had, she said, engaged as a soldier in war in the service of the Holy Father Eugenius, and worn man’s apparel. This, presumably, gave her the idea of pretending to be the Maid . . .