The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

by The Big Book of Jack the Ripper (retail) (epub)

  All the anomalies have been accommodated: No blood has been driven to spatter, none has fallen to the front, none has gotten to him, as his arms and hands are well clear of the ruptured zone.

  He gets on with it. But what happens next is of little concern to her or to us: the point is that she has died exactly as he needed her to do so, without fuss or noise, without scream or turbulence, and without a lot of blood spilled, with little of it on him. He has accomplished the first part of the double task that makes Jack Jack.

  THE CUT

  Let us examine this blow. What does it tell us about Jack, other than the obvious, that he was a murderer and very lucky? Unlike the other possible blows evoked, this one arrives freighted with information and, moreover, it leads somewhere, explicitly.

  The first thing it tells us is that Jack had extraordinary eyesight; he saw where others—most others—would not have. He saw in darkness with far more efficiency than a normal fellow. He was able to pin his eyesight exactly on the small part of her anatomy between jawbone and collarbone beneath the ear, for only in riveting it with such intent gaze could he guide his hand to it. As any coach tells any boy, “You’ve got to keep your eye on the ball,” for the coach knows, and Jack knows, that in the visual cue is the access to the brain’s inner program that solves angles of deflection, adjusts for movement of target, and encourages such good habits as keeping the head down and following through. Moreover, such vision is really not a skill that can be learned. It is strictly biomechanical. One has it—fighter pilots, .300 hitters, great shooters, for example—or one doesn’t, and one can’t learn it or pick it up from a mentor. As we shall see, Jack’s unusual vision paid other benefits as well.

  Second, he has great hand-speed and strength. They are not the same, as a fast man may be weak or a strong man slow. But a gifted man has them both, and he was so gifted he was able to power his hand to extraordinary swiftness as it traced its arc through the Whitechapel night. His strength is manifested in the firmness by which he holds the blade; when he makes contact with the flesh, it is so clamped it does not deviate from the necessary ninety-degree katana cutting angle, the vibrations of its travel through the neck do not loosen it, it does not wobble or yaw, thereby losing velocity and power. It is held so firm that it achieves the maximum efficiency, penetrating as far as its strength can drive it and thereby not nicking or even ripping the carotid and jugular but sundering them totally.

  —

  It should also be noted here that vision and hand-strength (as well as suppleness) feature in an attribute of Jack’s not usually explained. That is his penchant for removing interior parts of his victims while mutilating them in his post-murder frenzy. His motive for such action remains, shall we say, obscure; nevertheless, it was clearly on his agenda. Many have found the missing parts an indication of surgical or at least medical knowledge. But regardless of the impossibility to understand whether he did or did not know enough with or without a medical education to remove those parts, it is incontrovertible that extremely good eyesight and unusually strong, dexterous hands were absolutely necessary to bring such desecrations off, particularly in the short time frame during which he worked on the bodies. These bits cannot have been easy to see in dark circumstances and manipulating them to achieve their removal demanded strength. His powerful eyes and his strong hands were the key. Again, it’s a case of none-but-the-extraordinary need apply.

  —

  And since the subject of Jack’s organ-snatching has come up, it’s a nice spot to address that subject in a larger context. As I stated before it is impossible, in my view, to infer from the evidence whether or not Jack was surgically or medically trained; as well, one cannot conclude that he was a butcher, a veterinarian, a Jewish kosher slaughterer, a samurai, or a Waziri tribal assassin. One can conclude, in fact, nothing. However, one must still conclude that it is indisputable that any education in anatomy was certainly helpful to Jack. Surgeon or not, butcher or not, whatever or not, if he knew the reality of cutting into the body and encountering and overcoming the shock of exposure to blood and the slippery, slithery innards of all mammals, that would go a long way in his chosen profession of murdering, then mutilating, prostitutes. It may have even been what lured him into the game in the first place, and thus acquaintanceship with these intimacies in any form, no matter how vague or incidental, cannot be discounted.

  Back to the blow. Implied by the previous attributes, it is finally clear that Jack possesses unusually high hand-eye coordination. He is able to perform complex, even refined, physical movements at speed upon demand. His system—the strength, the accuracy, the sureness—are overall governed by a kind of physical genius by which what he envisions he can perform without much mental effort.

  And the final implication here and the facilitator for what has happened before is that Jack is confident. This is not an experiment, it is a destiny. He knows his powers and what must be done to get maximum use of them. He is able to focus on a tiny, poorly (if at all) illuminated, essentially a 1" by 2" rectangle that represents neck and is guarded above by jawbone and below by collarbone, launch a sweeping blow at full strength and strike dead center, four times running. A vulgar comparison would be to a golf swing. It looks so easy; it is so hard. To do such requires great physical skill, but also experience. Clearly he has performed such a strike before, perhaps in moments of urgency, exhaustion, high drama, desperate straits.

  THE ESCAPES

  Five times he murdered, always in the heart of the city. Though it was late at night, he was never far from concentrations of population. Polly Nichols was sent over on a public street, with bobbies converging on the spot within minutes; sleeping civilians were but feet from him on either side of the street. Annie Chapman was done in the backyard of an apartment house at 29 Hanbury Street, really up against that building. On either side loomed other apartment buildings and in all three buildings people slept, dreamed, dozed, and masturbated, some few of them with windows open. Only one witness, an Albert Cadoche, heard someone say “No,” on the other side of the fence at 29 Hanbury and then heard a loud thump against the fence. But no one else heard or suspected a thing until, within an hour or so, enough sun had risen so that an early awakener could see the body. The yard in question was seemingly sealed off by stout five-foot-five-inch fences, requiring him to escape down a hallway to Hanbury Street, itself not far from well-lit Brick Lane. Liz Stride got hers inside the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard, just off Berner Street. The yard abutted and had an entrance for the Berner Street (“Anarchist’s”) club, which was at the time occupied by leftover acolytes from the evening’s revolutionary meeting. Moreover, on the other side of the gateway, dwellings housed sleeping workers. Later that same evening, he obliterated Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square, a few hundred feet off Aldgate Road, close by the Whitechapel (Aldgate) Road–Commercial Street intersection, literally in the front yard of one and near to other occupied dwellings, close to a warehouse with an alert night watchman and in a zone well patrolled by and about to be penetrated from two directions by bobbies. Finally, his last and most grotesque crime took place in Mary Jane Kelly’s rented room, which lay in the heart of Miller’s Court, just down from the Ten Bells and off Dorset Street, and was accessible only by a narrow walkway between buildings which opened to a sort of crevice in the slum architecture. The crevice fronted thirteen apartments on two levels, all of them occupied.

  —

  Was he lucky? Certainly; his near misses with bobbies and bystanders, like Mr. Diemschutz, the pony-cartman who entered the open gate to Dutfield’s while Jack was beginning his work on Liz Stride, testify to luck, while also advancing the truism that fortune favors the bold. Was he brilliant? There seems to be little evidence of that, for the sites weren’t particularly well chosen and if anything they represent not cunning but his confidence that he could improvise his way out of anything. There’s no evidence, further, that he planned or reconnoitered them; his locations seem random, presented to him not
by logic but by the whimsy of the game he was hunting. He can have done no research or scouting as to the locations and patterns of the bobbies, for he came so close to falling into their net so many times. But he had one thing few killers have, as we have already seen it in play in the killings themselves—that is an uncanny strength, vision, and balance.

  At the site of the first murder, that of Polly Nichols on the night of August 31, maps show that not far from the street side location of the crime on Buck’s Row, a bridge crossed the wide furrow that contained the East London Railway tracks which had just emerged from their tunnel and ran into the Whitechapel Station on Whitechapel High Street, a block to the east. It would have to be at least twenty-five or thirty feet from Buck’s Row to the track beds, too far for a free jump without risk of shattering ankles. Moreover, as photos show, usually high, perhaps six- or seven-foot brick walls guard access to those track beds, forbidding passage to nearly all. Still, it was but seconds from the murder site. A man of power could have climbed over the wall by hoisting himself on sheer arm and chest strength high enough to get a leg up for leverage and by that method, pulled himself over. The leap from the wall atop the bridge would have been suicidal but while no illustrations of the bridge seem to exist, it was the fashion of Victorian bricklayers to embellish. Thus one can presume certain elements of decor—anything from generic bas-relief of heroic or inspirational nature to geometric shapes as simple as rectangles within rectangles or perhaps even an array of round shapes like crop circles—to have been inscribed on the exterior of the bridge walls. Though such cuts would not allow any normal man enough purchase to secure himself, an extraordinary one, gifted with great balance as well as incredible hand-strength, could have eased his way down via the edges of the bas-relief or blooming flower until he hung fully extended from the lower part of the bridge. The drop then is halved, from thirty feet to fifteen feet. Down he goes, breaking his fall with a roll. Then he escapes by moving quickly along the track beds toward the west, and finds another fence or wall over which to disappear, or dips into the deserted (because no trains were running) tunnel and thence reaches a station and hides in the loo until the morning crowds. Because the walls make the track bed all but invisible to the bobbies who arrive in minutes when the body is discovered, they search only on ground level; it never occurs to them (or anybody) that he has descended beneath ground level.

  The death of Annie Chapman at 29 Hanbury in the next month provides similar opportunities. The passageway through that building was a known rutting spot for prostitutes, and she presumably took him down it for the act. He talked her—or brutalized her, explaining the lack of neatness at this murder site alone—into continuing through it, which deposited them into the backyard. There, he finished her and had his butcher’s fun against the building.

  —

  His exit has always been problematic. The yard was on all sides fenced by stout, five-foot-five-inch barriers. Getting over them would have been awkward if not impossible for any save the most gifted man. But for Jack as I see him, a gymnastic vault of some sort, a support of upper body by strong arms and shoulders and a pendulum swing of paralleled legs gets him over in seconds; after the more challenging ordeal at Buck’s Row it might have even seemed easy. He perhaps travels from yard to yard in this fashion, sticking close to the buildings so as to be invisible from any upper-story watchers, just a flash to any at ground level. That certainly would have been preferable to an exit back out the 29 Hanbury passageway to Hanbury Street, for he has no idea who is out there and it’s on a well-known bobby patrol route. Additionally, late-night sensualists may be using it to cross from Whitechapel High Street to Brick Lane for a commercial hookup, as both were known avenues of temptation. Why would he risk encountering someone that way, giving a witness a good description, perhaps even being apprehended by an alert copper?

  But the most compelling evidence of Jack’s legerdemain as an escapist comes next, on September 30, the night of the famous double event. This was the killing (of Elizabeth Stride) interrupted by Mr. Diemschutz and his pony, opening the gate to Dutfield’s Yard off Berner Street at the inopportune moment after Jack has slain but before he has started to mutilate. Jack almost certainly cottoned to the upcoming interruption when he heard the clip-clop of the pony arriving to the gate as it turned off Berner Street. On that signal, unless he was a fool, he retreated back into the dark yard, finding a place in the shadows to crouch. Meanwhile Mr. Diemschutz noticed something lying at the edge of the building just inside the gate. Climbing down from his cart and then striking a match, he saw that it was a body, screamed when he saw the blood in the light of a match, then hastened past it and entered the club, where a batch of kibitzing leftovers from the night’s meeting still remained, to raise an alarm.

  Consider Jack’s dilemma. He has seen Diemschutz go for help and knows it will soon be there. Alas, his only portal of escape would seem to be that same gate. He would have to race to it, slither by the pony cart which partially blocks the passageway, praying that he does not agitate or cause a ruckus on the part of the horse. He is worried that men will pour out of the club. Even if they don’t, and having made it to the gate, he will find himself on Berner Street and from his angle in the yard has no idea who or what awaits him there. Perhaps bobbies swarm in his direction from a nearby station, or the workers are streaming out of the Berner Street Club or lights have gone on and people peer out of windows on Berner across from the club. In any event, it seems a risky passage.

  —

  And another factor must be added, that of time. For we know that not forty-five minutes later, having successfully escaped from Dutfield’s, Jack has found, killed, and wretchedly mutilated Catherine Eddowes at Mitre Square 1,750 paces (I’ve counted them) away. So whatever he did, he did swiftly and surely and without second thought.

  Was there some kind of tunnel exit? No investigation ever suggested, much less found, one. However, there was, or so it seems to me, another way out—for Jack at least. The one reasonably contemporary photo of Dutfield’s in the configuration which Jack found it that night—it was taken in 1900 and is displayed like a trophy in Philip Hutchinson’s The Jack the Ripper Location Photographs—shows in reality what many maps describe schematically. That is, directly back from the gate to Dutfield’s Yard, there’s a two-story bungalow containing the Hindley and Co. cabinet factory with a stairway up to a second-story entrance which is fronted by a kind of balcony or porch. The roof is low to the porch and appears to be covered in arched pottery stones, giving much traction. Does no one except me see how easy it would have been for a climber of Jack’s natural aptitude, with his strength, balance, and superior night vision, to climb those stairs, go to railing and from railing by his strength hoist himself to roof, and via balance and vision navigate the roof as a kind of stroll to escape? I certainly couldn’t do it, and I doubt anyone reading these pages could either, but the Jack I believe defined by his attributes as I have identified them, could do so easily, quickly, and decisively, thus making the meeting with unfortunate Mrs. Eddowes with time to spare.

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  Of the last two murders, neither offers such obvious candidates for orang-escape as do the first three. However, the two—at Mitre Square and, November 9, 1888, then at Miller’s Court—do have in common narrow passages into and out. I do not do so, but one making this argument less responsibly but more wittily could argue that, particularly at Mitre Square, where the coppers were just seconds away, Super Jack could have crab-walked up the narrow passageway—hands braced against one wall, boots against the other, advancing skyward a step at a time—and sustained himself in such a position and in such darkness that he avoided a copper who passed underneath. It’s a little too Batman-like to seem feasible, but it is not impossible by any law of physics or strength. Any Hollywood stuntman of the ’30s could have done so.

  At Miller’s Court, entry into the nest of rooms and apartments was also gained by a narrow brick passageway that ran in from Do
rset Street, but it had a low roof above it and so I do not contemplate any Batman-gymnastics there. However, the passageway which allows him entrance on the way out offers the same tactical disadvantages of several others: he has no idea who or what awaits at its end, when he reaches Dorset Street that rainy Friday morning. Coppers, pilgrims, a squad of angry unfortunates, a Jewish chicken merchant headed toward Goulston Street poultry market, sharp-eyed workers aimed toward the foundries and mills? All are possible, all, with a good visual ID, could spell doom. Yes, fortune favors the bold but it does not favor the stupid and so he possibly avoided the problem altogether.

  —

  Descriptions of Miller’s Court as well as maps describe a place best seen as all crammed up with stuff. A lot of small rooms crowd into very little area with the “court” a minimal opening in the structure to give frontage and access to the nest of dwellings. No details survive, but given that, and given the height of only two stories, it does not seem impossible at all that my Jack, wisely shunning the passageway to Dorset Street, might easily find a sequence of handholds—sills, railings, gutter pipes, shutter hinges—by which he boosted himself to roof level and crossed to another building on another street. From that vantage point, he could easily see if witnesses abounded and if so wait until they had left the area and pick a time to descend unseen.

  Does this begin to seem silly? Jack as gymnastic superhero, climbing and creeping his way out of tight spots on the fly while bobbies search for him only on ground level. I suppose it does. But at least it goes coherently to one and only one conclusion. That is, whatever he was and whatever he was not, this man we seek was an expression of power, grace, coordination, vision, balance, and most of all, confidence. In other words: he was an athlete.