The Big Book of Jack the Ripper
Page 12
11. Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described he would probably be solitary and eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear of trouble or notoriety, whereas if there were a prospect of reward it might overcome their scruples.
THE “RIPPER LETTERS”
The police and the authorities in the East End received thousands of letters during the course of the Whitechapel murders: letters helpful, letters suggestive, letters malicious, and letters plain loopy. Everyone, it seems, had a theory as to who the murderer might be (one insistently posited a giant eagle), how he gulled or soothed his victims, what trade he might pursue. From this huge number of documents, two, though almost certainly by a hand unrelated to the killer’s, were instrumental in the creation of the legend of Jack the Ripper. One—the “From Hell” letter to George Lusk, accompanying part of a kidney—may well come from the Whitechapel Murderer. The latest discovery, dated 17 September 1888, has just about everything wrong with it and is almost certainly spurious.
The “Dear Boss” letter below was received on 27 September 1888 at the Central News Agency. Originally dismissed as one of many hoaxes, the double murder three days later caused the police to examine the letter a little more closely, particularly when they learned that part of Eddowes’s earlobe had been cut from the body (probably, in fact, accidentally in the process of slitting her throat).
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha.ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Dont mind me giving the trade name
[PS] Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha
The “Saucy Jacky” postcard was received on 1 October 1888, again at the Central News Agency. It may be by the same hand as the “Dear Boss” letter, which was published on the same day. Certainly it makes reference both to the earlier letter and to the double event of the previous night. For all that we have improved information technology, however, the post was considerably faster in Victorian London, and a hoaxer could have seen both the details of the letter and the murders in an early edition of the papers.
I wasnt codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. You’ll hear about Saucy Jackys work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. Had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
The “From Hell” letter arrived on 16 October in a three-inch-square cardboard box delivered to George Lusk, president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Also inside the box was half a human kidney. This letter, with its apparently natural errors (and its indications of Irishness in “Sor” and “presarved”?) has none of the polished, slangy jauntiness of its predecessors, and is plainly in a different hand.
Emily Marsh, whose father traded in hides at 218, Jubilee Street, was minding the shop on 15 October when a man came in and requested Lusk’s address, which she read to him from a newspaper. The man was around 45, 6 feet tall, and slim. He had a dark beard and moustache and he spoke with “what was taken to be an Irish accent.” Could this have been the sender of the kidney? It may also be worth noting that, in October, Lusk lived in fear of a sinister bearded man watching his house, and even asked for police protection.
From hell.
Mr. Lusk,
Sor
I send you half the Kidne I took from one women, prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer
signed
Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk
London’s Ghastly Mystery
ANONYMOUS
An unknown reporter in Chicago wrote a feature that was published in New York City’s Daily Graphic in October 1888 while Jack the Ripper was still active in London’s East End. The story quotes Dr. J. G. Kiernan, an alienist (psychologist) and the editor of the Medical Standard, who was firmly convinced that the murderer is a cannibal, and warns that insane people on the streets of Chicago are “fully capable of committing Whitechapel murders.”
Dr. Kiernan had previously written (in the July 1881 issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease) that quinine can cause insanity. Quinine, he averred, “may give rise to psychoses in hereditarily predisposed individuals.” These psychoses, he continued, may present themselves in two forms. The first is a form of acute mania with aural hallucinations; the second is extreme dementia.
Just as he posits that cannibalism is rare among Anglo-Saxons but not uncommon in Russia, Germany, Bohemia, and France, with what may be regarded as scant evidence to support his theory, Dr. Kiernan admits that, apart from his recent discovery of the effects of quinine, he had never heard of a previous case of insanity caused by the medicine.
As a prominent voice in Chicago on numerous subjects, Dr. Kiernan also wrote that forced confessions, acquired from prisoners in “a sweatbox,” had no validity, comparing them to the worthless confessions given at the Salem witch trials, and that a rash of deaths among young women attributed to “dying of love” were, in fact, due to poor diet and hygiene. “Cut out the ice cream and the candies: eat sensibly and enough of that which is nourishing and digestible; keep clean,” were his nuggets of wisdom.
“London’s Ghastly Mystery” was first published in the October 3, 1888, issue of the Daily Graphic.
LONDON’S GHASTLY MYSTERY
Anonymous
NO CLUE YET OBTAINED TO THE PERPETRATOR OF THE MURDERS.
A Chicago Medical Writer’s Theory of the Shocking Crime—the Work of a Lunatic of the “Sexual Pervert” Type—His Remedy.
London, October 3.—No further arrests have been made in connection with the Whitechapel murder, and the police have discovered no clues to throw any light on the mystery.
A Chicago Medical Writer’s Theory.
Chicago, October 3.—Dr. J. G. Kiernan of this city, editor of the Medical Standard, says that the Whitechapel murderer is a cannibal pure and simple. The Doctor added: “The Whitechapel murders are clearly the work of a lunatic of the so-called ‘sexual pervert’ type, fortunately rare in Anglo-Saxon lands, but not infrequently met with in Russia, Germany, Bohemia, and France. In these lunatics there is return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races. Cannibalism is shown in a thirst for blood, and these animal passions come to the surface when the checks imposed by centuries of civilization are removed by disease or by the defects inherited from degenerate parents. The most noted of these cases was that of Giles Be Rets,* the original Blue Beard of the reign of Louis XV, who slaughtered two hundred female children in the same way as the Whitechapel butcher. The mutilations were very similar.
“A number of similar cases are on record in which the murderer devoured the mutilated parts. It
was only a few years ago, in 1883, that all Westphalia, in Germany, was roused by several mysterious murders of females of the same type as those of Whitechapel. The vampireism of the middle ages, extending down through the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and early nineteenth century, was a phase of this form of insanity.
“As to the remedy,” continued Dr. Kiernan, “shut up the harmless, logical lunatics and release fewer so-called ‘sane’ men by legal procedures from the State insane hospitals and crimes of all types by the insane will cease. No lunatic should be at large unless some reliable person is pecuniarily responsible for his acts. The philanthropists who release ‘sane’ people from the insane hospitals always decline pecuniary responsibility. There are lunatics now at large in Chicago released as sane from insane hospitals who under certain conditions are fully capable of committing Whitechapel murders.”
* * *
* Gilles de Rais. —Editor.
The East End Murders: Detailed Lessons
ANONYMOUS
The psychological power of the Ripper murders may be evidenced by the fact that seemingly everyone had something to say on the subject. Politicians, journalists, social activists, doctors, members of the legal community—anyone with a platform from which to offer an opinion—were eager to provide theories and advice.
The most common reason advanced for the heinous crimes was poverty, with a commensurate call for funds to make life in the East End slums better for its inhabitants. The fact that the killer was unknown and, according to the preponderance of theories about his identity, someone wealthy enough that he did not live in the immediate neighborhood and thus was unlikely to carry the burden of impoverishment with him, did not deter those calling for social reform.
Even The British Medical Journal, a well-established periodical that had as its two prime objectives the advancement of the medical profession and the dissemination of medical knowledge, felt compelled to weigh in, calling for funds to clean up the area and laying the blame for killings on the general public for its indifference to the plight of the poor, on the municipal authorities for not providing better light and cleaner pavements, and on the police for failing to be stricter on their nightly patrols.
Established on October 3, 1840, as The Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal, it later changed its name to The British Medical Journal and still publishes under the title The BMJ; it is regarded as one of the most prominent medical journals in the world.
“The East End Murders: Detailed Lessons” was first published in the October 6, 1888, issue of The British Medical Journal.
THE EAST END MURDERS: DETAILED LESSONS
Anonymous
The lesson of the Whitechapel murders does not lie on the surface, and, as usually happens, the most important considerations arising out of this series of night tragedies are the least sensational, and those which are most apt to make the least impression on the public mind. The first thought which arises in the average brain, and perhaps the most natural, is that which finds expression in the formula, Whom shall we hang?—an impulse of anger and an effort to ease responsibility by an act of vengeance which gets rid of the idea of reparation.
To deal first with the personal questions involved, we may say that the theory started by the coroner—not altogether without justification on the information conveyed to him—that the work of the assassin was carried out under the impulse of pseudo-scientific mania, is exploded by the first attempt at serious investigation. It is true that inquiries were made at one or two medical schools early last year by a foreign physician, who was spending some time in London, as to the possibility of securing certain parts of the body for the purpose of scientific investigation. No large sum, however, was offered. The person in question was a physician of the highest respectability and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities in his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real foundation for the hypothesis, and the information communicated, which was not at all of the nature which the public has been led to believe, was due to the erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard, and to which a negative reply was given. This theory may be at once dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained even by its author. The discovery of the assassin cannot, we believe, long be delayed. He is undoubtedly insane, and, although insane proclivities of this kind are often concealed with great cunning, and are compatible for a time at least with high intelligence, and the discharge of the ordinary duties of life in a manner which does not excite suspicion, yet the attendant conditions of mind and the ultimate sequence of mental disease do not fail eventually to produce conditions leading to discovery. Judges, statesmen, and lawyers, subject to overwhelming impulses of a cognate kind, have discharged the duties of their various stations for a considerable time, while conscious of an almost overwhelming impulse which they have either concealed or secretly confessed. Ordinarily, the remorse and horror which attend the recognition in lucid intervals of the frightful character of these delusions and impulses lead to early confession and to voluntary precautions taken by such unfortunate persons at the instance of their medical advisers.
The acts of butchery which have so shocked and alarmed our population will probably be found to add another terrible chapter to the records of homicidal insanity. It would, however, be most lamentable if this anxious period of mental disturbances, horror, and grief should pass away, leaving behind it only the records of an unprecedented series of crimes, committed under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. There is a much deeper lesson in the story. We do not echo the vague outcry of blame against highly-placed officials which usually arises under such circumstances. The true lesson of this catastrophe has been written by the Rev. S. A. Barnett, the vicar of Whitechapel, whose life has been well spent in combatting with marvellous success the terrible conditions of social degradation and public indifference of which these murders are in one sense the outcome and the evidence.
What we have to do then as inhabitants of a great city greatly disgraced is to seek out the true causes and apply the true remedy. The main features of all these cases may be summed up in very few words. We have here the heavy fringe of a vast population packed into dark places, festering in ignorance, in dirt, in moral degradation, accustomed to violence and crime, born and bred within touch of habitual immorality and coarse obscenity. That is no news to the inhabitants of London. But the great bulk of the inhabitants content themselves with the consideration that they are not their “brother’s keeper”; and so, notwithstanding the vast and successful efforts which Mr. Barnett and men like him have made in rebuilding the habitations of the poor, in cleansing the physical filth of the alleys and courts, in leavening the hideous mass with the ferment of unwearying kindness, brotherly solicitude, and personal service, and in illuminating many of the darkest corners of the East End with gleams of light from the higher life of religion, of reason, of literature, and of recreation, there remains the great residuum untouched and unpurified. But the case is not hopeless; it is not even beyond the means of any considerable number of intelligent, benevolent, and right-minded persons. Even the efforts of single individuals to do away with the abominable system of farming out wretched tenements to the criminal and degraded classes at high rents, without any inquiry or care for the use to which they are put, have produced vast effects.
To Lord Shaftesbury, to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, to the Rothschilds, to Mr. Peabody, Miss Octavia Hill, Mr. Ruskin, to Mr. Barnett himself and his coadjutors, too numerous to mention and yet far too few to suffice, we owe the sweeping away of nests of crime, filth, and degradation, hotbeds of every social evil, and the substitution of light, cleanliness, purity, and the basis of physical and moral regeneration. No one cognisant of the condition of the East End of London during the last twenty years but must be aware of the enormous physical and moral reformation which has been worked in the habitations and in the minds of the people. But much remains to be do
ne. First, we need to recognise that the remaining centres of crime and of misery and of unspeakable degradation must be swept away, and in their place decent habitations provided under supervision such as that which prevails throughout a large part of Mr. Barnett’s parish of Whitechapel, which provides the means of contact with the poor by persons of intelligence, of just aspirations, of kindly sentiments, desirous and capable of holding friendly communion with their poorer neighbours, and of turning it to good purpose. This means, then, the devotion of some considerable sums of money to rebuilding the worst parts of East London, and it means also the assistance of a much larger number of persons added to the not inconsiderable army of workers whose lives have been blessed of late years in the East End by doing good works quietly and with little encouragement, but with vast effect. Their numbers need recruiting by many hundreds, nay, by some thousands; and it is strange indeed if London, with its millions of inhabitants and its untold wealth, cannot be roused now from the apathy which has smitten it to a sense of public duty and individual responsibility. It is more than a scandal, it is a crime, that there should exist, not in the East End only, but in other quarters of London, dark, unlighted places, the known resort of crime and of vice, and which are left, as it were, as a playground for the worst passions, the most bestial impulses; a sort of assumed safety valve on which it would be dangerous to sit. More light then, physical and moral, is the second need; and with this quickening sense of social duty should come, and will come of necessity, a very different interpretation by the police of their duties to the community. It is no secret to many that the lowest neighbourhoods and the darkest spots of some parts of the East End have been habitually patrolled by persons anxious to seek out and to heal some of the worst ulcers of civilisation, and these patrols have been increased in number and in frequency during the last few weeks. The stories which they have to tell are of saddening uniformity—uncontrollable brutality; women turned into the streets, and shivering on the stones at night, fleeing from the execrations and the violence of drunken men; men stabbed and bleeding; tragedies and horrors of public obscenity treated by the police as the ordinary incidents of dark alleys, unlighted courts, and low neighbourhoods. The policeman is only human, and not always, of course, the best specimen of humanity. Obscenity and brutality and violence are to him customary incidents on certain night-beats, and the punishment or the judicial judgment of such conduct mainly the business of the sufferers, so that such offences only require to be dealt with when the sufferer determines to make a charge. When such a charge is made the policeman who has been all night on duty has to appear next morning in court; he loses his rest, he gets no compensation in money and gets no credit, the charge—perhaps for the thirtieth time—of some drunken woman or man, with an act of brutality or of public obscenity, is a piece of mournful routine of which he would fain be relieved. What the neighbourhood tolerates, and what the individual does not insist on resenting, the policeman accordingly passes over in silence, and feels that he ought rather to be congratulated for his tact than condemned for his indifference.