The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  It seemed to many readers that Stowell had identified His Royal Highness Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, as Jack the Ripper. Stowell himself denied this in a letter that was published the day after his death, and his son then burned his papers so there was no proof either way, but the damage was done. The 1970s opened with an accusation of a man who had born heir to the British throne and the question of whether or not “Eddy” was indeed the Ripper or otherwise involved with the Ripper murders continued long past the end of the decade.

  Naming “S”

  In 1972, Michael Harrison wrote the first book to respond to Stowell’s article and gave it the evocative title of Clarence: Was He Jack the Ripper? The short answer, falling in line with Stowell’s own protestations, is no. According to Harrison, Eddy had nothing to do with the murders. He simply happened to be tutored by the man who committed them.

  Harrison’s argument is that “S” could not have been Eddy, not only because the events Stowell describes in his biography of the killer do not match those of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, but also because Eddy’s name is not at all related to the letter S. Later authors point out that Stowell used “S” because his editor had requested something beyond the usual “X” and had thus chosen his own initial. In 1972, however, Harrison does not consider this option and instead fixates on James Kenneth Stephen, the prince’s tutor.

  Since the bulk of the text is devoted to the prince’s biography—and indeed seems to focus more on his mother, Princess Alix, than the prince himself—very little space is devoted to the identity of the Ripper. The biography is meant to show how Eddy could not have been the Ripper, not only because his life does not match up with the life described by Stowell, but also because of who Eddy was as a person. Indeed, Harrison chooses not to discuss the crimes themselves at all, suggesting that readers consult the main works of the previous decades in order to acquaint themselves with those “ghastly details.”1 Harrison chooses not to write about the murders at all.

  The oddity, perhaps, is that Harrison does not discuss the women’s deaths even to show how Stephen would have been capable of causing them. He does not concern himself with their wounds and whether or not Stephen exhibited the appropriate anatomical knowledge, or whether Stephen’s schedule shows him to have been available on the given dates. In fact, the victims—the women without whom there would have been no Jack the Ripper—barely exist at all.

  He does acknowledge their profession, if only to make the argument that it was indeed believable that no one would have noticed any of them talking to a strange man, but this is only to explain why J. K. Stephen was never identified or brought under suspicion. Harrison cites Stephen’s own poetry and love of misogynistic pub songs as suggestions of why he might have chosen women from this specific class without giving further information about the individual women themselves. To Harrison they are a group bound by their deaths—at Stephen’s hand, no less—and not worthy of individual scrutiny. Perhaps he agrees with Matters and his lack of detail is a more convincing argument that, to him, these women are all the same. Harrison does not even engage in the customary separation of Mary Jane Kelly from the others.

  It is, perhaps, merely a reflection of what Harrison meant his book to be. He poses a question in the title, follows the life of the accused prince, and is able to give an answer without delving into the sordid details. Indeed, if Eddy can be proven to have not been able to be in Whitechapel on the given dates, then there is no need to go into the details of the Ripper murders at all. He never crossed paths with Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, or Mary Jane, and thus they have no role in a biography of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale.

  What is out of the ordinary, however, is the fact that Harrison does indeed turn his attention to accusing a man of being the Ripper, but manages to do so without recalling the crimes themselves. Perhaps he only anticipated readers who were already familiar with the Ripper story, or perhaps he had entered into a deal with previous authors such as Odell, Cullen, and McCormick in an attempt to boost sales of their own works. In a narrative that accuses a man of murder, even one that attributes this to a head injury that exacerbated his history of mental instability, it seems odd to brush off the telling of those murders while attempting to make this accusation stick. Harrison’s main purpose, it would seem, was to clear the name of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale once and for all—naming another possible suspect was purely secondary.

  Ripperologists, however, were far from done with Eddy.

  Victims of Conspiracy

  Stephen Knight did not go so far as to accuse Eddy himself of being Jack the Ripper, but, unlike Harrison, he did not remove the Duke from all semblance of blame. Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976) lays the groundwork for numerous conspiracy theories to follow, many of them including the Freemasons, although the main cast of characters—and the assignment of guilt—fluctuates over time. Although Knight reports the narrative as it was told to him by a man calling himself Joseph Sickert, Knight even changes the situation from what Sickert told him.

  Joseph Sickert, claiming to be the illegitimate son of artist Walter Sickert, first related his tale during a segment of the British documentary Jack the Ripper, aired in 1973. After many meetings with Sickert, Knight is able to piece together the story in chronological order, and even to fill in the gaps he found to be missing. Sickert’s story is the one his own father told to him, one that Knight thereafter investigated. This begins a long tradition of accepting Sickert’s tale as mostly intact and mostly truthful.

  Apparently the painter Walter Sickert was asked to be a companion for Eddy, who needed both to be removed from public life and to nurture his artistic side. Thus the Duke of Clarence would change carriages and his clothing for romps with the older man in the area around Cleveland Street, where he met a shopkeeper whose name was either Annie Crook or Annie Cook. Sadly, Annie happened to be Catholic at a time when the crown could only find a spouse among the Anglicans, but the heir did not let that bother him. She was soon pregnant, and the couple married in secret after the birth of their daughter. Whether or not this marriage would have stood up to legal questioning is in doubt.

  The couple employed a nannie to look after their daughter, a young woman named Marie Kelly, and even took her to France with them on a trip. When the marriage was discovered, the daughter was with her nanny and thus was not removed from the family’s room at the time when Eddy and Annie were forcibly separated. He had to return to his princely life; she was sadly relegated to asylums and workhouses for the rest of her life, at first under observance of the queen’s own physician, William Gull. They had to ensure that Catholic Annie would not spread the rumors that she had married the heir to the throne.

  Although the child was not considered to be a threat, the nanny, Marie, certainly was—or made herself to be. Knight declares that she is “no hapless harlot who happened to run into Jack the Ripper”2 and that the only woman undeserving of the Ripper’s knife was Kate Eddowes. Marie, having known about the affair and the child and having witnessed the marriage, knew that the Duke of Clarence had taken a bride and was thus in possession of knowledge that might, perhaps, topple the crown. Silly thing that she was, she even took three other women into her confidence. When Marie related this story to Polly, Annie, and Liz, they encouraged her to blackmail the crown. William Gull, a coachman named Netley, and a third mystery figure—Knight puts the blame on Walter Sickert himself—all conspire to murder the meddling women in order to keep them quiet.

  As factually questionable as the narrative may be, it is of interest that Knight presents an explanation not only for why the murders stopped after Marie Kelly, but also why she was the most horrifically mutilated. Instead of speculating that it was because she had her own room and thus the Ripper could take his time without fear of being spotted, Knight deals concretely with the question of blame. Had Marie kept her mouth shut and told no one of what she had witnessed, she would not have been talked into usin
g what she knew. Had she not attempted to use this information as blackmail, she, her co-conspirators, and Kate Eddowes would not have been killed.

  Interestingly Knight makes it clear that this blackmail was indeed the idea of the women Marie shared this story with and not Marie’s alone. His presentation of Marie is indeed almost sympathetic, especially as he recounts her early life and the reason she ended up in London. Knight recounts her marriage and descent into widowhood, accompanied by the lack of money that put her at her low point and drove her to London in the first place. This Marie, unlike most previous iterations, does not immediately resort to prostitution in order to support herself. She seeks shelter in a convent and then finds her position as a shopkeeper in Cleveland Street, where she met Annie and then Eddy and Walter Sickert.

  When Marie is finally presented as a prostitute, it is after the raid that separated Eddy and Annie. Marie is said to have fled from Cleveland Street to the East End, although she did manage to return the child to Walter Sickert by some means Knight does not explain. Even though she herself is living a terrible life in the East End, she does not drag her friends’ daughter into it. When Marie does resort to prostitution, Knight tells us that it is only because she would starve without the profits, which makes her situation sound quite desperate. It is perhaps then not much of a stretch to imagine that a woman in her position would think of blackmail, or apparently allow others to persuade her into considering it.

  Knight adds to this sympathetic portrayal when he explains the discrepancy in her name, telling the tale of how, when Walter Sickert was looking after Annie and the girl, their nanny went with them to France. Knight explains that Kelly developed a fondness for the language, and “laughingly insisted ever after”3 upon being addressed as Marie Jeanette instead of her given name of Mary Jane. This is an aspect of Marie/Mary that is often presented in a negative light, as though she were putting on airs and separating herself from the women around her to make herself look better. This tactic is generally used by authors attempting to explain Marie’s difference as a victim by investigating the small known facets of her life, and usually by authors who make sure to emphasize her youth and beauty. None of the other victims went around asking people to call them foreign versions of their names—their nicknames were simpler.

  Knight, though, presents his readers with a Marie Kelly who fought against the misfortune of being a widow before age twenty and who may have been unable to resist the siren call of London, but managed to keep herself off the street. She is a respectable shop assistant who turns nanny when her friend needs her and is not above accepting a holiday in France when it is offered to her. Further, she adopts the name she is buried under as a bit of a joke, something that makes her laugh. This Marie, it seems, does not take herself too seriously.

  All of this is related within the first two chapters of the book, before Knight moves on to discuss the crimes themselves. Readers are given that single sentence condemning Marie and giving her responsibility for the deaths that will follow before being taken through the rather positive biography of Marie up until the start of the murders. Knight seems torn between placing the blame firmly on her shoulders and wanting to keep her as a lighthearted young woman making the best of her situation, someone who is indeed better than her surroundings, not yet done in by drink and prostitution. This is a Marie whose death is not described, since Walter Sickert had known her, and “even after so long the memory was too painful for him”4 to relate to his son. It is also a Marie who stands in distinct contrast with her fellow conspirators and fellow victims.

  It is not that the other women’s biographies are less kindly worded than Marie’s, but that they do not exist within the text. Reports of their deaths, written at the time of the murders, are printed so that readers may experience the discovery of their bodies and read the description of the injuries done to their corpses, but otherwise information about the women who talked Marie into blackmail and unwittingly signed their own death warrants is scarce. Mary Ann Nichols is given a name, the title of first victim, and a location of death. Annie is not identified in Knight’s text at all, and given the identified of “the widow of a coachman named Chapman”5 in a report written by Inspector Abberline. Long Liz is simply “a gangling Swede”6 but Kate is presented with a comparative wealth of information: she is “a pathetic little woman”7 who looked more than fifteen years older than her actual age, and who was reported as having a rather cheerful disposition despite her lot in life.

  There is a distinct dearth of information about the women who plotted the downfall of the crown. Kate, who receives the attention of two complete sentences, was not one of them—since she had given the false name of Mary Kelly upon her arrest the evening before her death, she was presumed to be the Mary Kelly that the murderous trio was looking for. Kate is therefore the only murdered innocent, at least of this crime—in a parenthetical whisper she is later revealed to have been an alcoholic.

  Liz was also drunk, and therefore she was a difficult victim. Gull is meant to have invited the women into his enclosed carriage and fed them drugged grapes before committing the murders, at which point his coachman, the faithful Netley, would drive to the proper location and arrange the body. Knight suggests that Liz, being drunk, was immune to the “appeal to her vanity”8 that Gull had made to the other women with more success. Apparently being invited into a fine coach, the likes of which would have seemed out of place in Whitechapel, would have made the women grateful to be treated like human beings instead of arousing their suspicions. These women died, then, not solely because of their blackmail scheme, but because they were so flattered that they could not resist a carriage ride and a treat of grapes.

  The blame, then, is multifaceted: Marie is at fault because she could not keep her mouth shut. Mary Ann, Annie, and Liz are at fault because they encouraged her to make use of her secret knowledge. Mary Ann, Annie, and Kate are at fault because they willingly got into the carriage of a strange man and ate the grapes—although this is rather weakened by the fact that Liz refused but was murdered all the same. And finally, Marie is at fault for having been drunk enough to invite Netley into her room, where she was then murdered.

  But what of Eddy and Annie Crook, who made the possibility of blackmail in the first place? Under the “care” of William Gull, Annie was certified as insane and subjected to treatment that changed her personality. Although her daughter was conceived and born out of wedlock, she did indeed marry her child’s father and was never recorded as working as a prostitute. Annie is therefore presented kindly enough, a woman whose daughter and husband were taken from her. And Eddy himself? The Duke of Clarence and Avondale is a victim of love and circumstance, a tragic romantic figure who was prevented from rescuing either his wife or his daughter, helplessly caught up in the consequences.

  Victims of the Crown

  There is one more book from the 1970s to focus completely on the question of whether or not the Duke of Clarence and Avondale was involved in any way with the murders, and Frank Spiering’s Prince Jack: The True Story of Jack the Ripper (1978) comes to a very different conclusion than Harrison’s earlier text. Perhaps the title makes it clear why the book was published in America but not in England, since Spiering leaps wholeheartedly to the same conclusion as Stowell’s readers had at the start of the decade. For Spiering, Jack the Ripper is also known as Eddy.

  This Eddy is not a very likable man. In fact, his own family has very nearly abandoned him, leaving him without parental influence or approval. J. K. Stephen is not just his tutor but his lover, with no room for misinterpretation of a close friendship, although Stephen did participate by writing the various Ripper letters. Eddy’s victims are chosen simply because of their occupation, since this version of the heir to the throne has contracted syphilis from his dealings with prostitutes and wishes to seek revenge. This is helped along by the fact that his syphilis is quite advanced and is thus affecting his brain.

  Spiering’s Eddy thus does not s
pecifically seek out Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, Marie Jeanette, and sixth victim Frances Coles specifically. There is no conspiracy theory among the women, who may in fact not even know each other. They have not bought and paid for their gruesome fates the way Knight’s conniving band of prostitutes did, but Spiering shows them to be responsible for their own deaths all the same.

  Even though there is no underling thread of conspiracy, he takes more time with the individual women than Knight did. There is an air of fancy about his narrative, which, after all, is “a reconstruction of what I feel did happen”9 and not necessarily a reproduction of contemporary reports. In taking his time to set the scene before each murder takes place, Spiering outlines each woman’s history to show how she managed to end up on the street in the middle of the night, crossing paths with his syphilitic killer.

  Instead of Mary Ann Nichols, nicknamed Polly, Spiering introduces his first victim as Polly Ann Nicholls, utilizing one of the many spellings of her name put forth in contemporary papers. The reader comes upon her drunk and penniless, shortly to be denied entrance the lodging house in which she had been staying, not trusted for credit. He declares that “[p]overty and gin had marred any attractiveness she might once have had,”10 painting the picture of a short woman aging poorly. Spiering is almost sympathetic to Polly, saying she began to drink due to loneliness even in her marriage. When he reports that her husband blamed her for desertion, it is formed as a claim and not a statement of fact. This Polly may have been alone even when she was surrounded by family.

  It is a mark against her that, when she left, she abandoned her children as well as her husband, but perhaps Polly was unfit to be a mother. This escape certainly seemed to help her in the right direction, since she found employment and the time to write of it to her father, but this situation, like her marriage, did not last. Once again Polly escaped an arrangement that was not to her liking, and Spiering indicates that, in this case, the problem was the fact that her employers were teetotalers. Certainly Polly appears drunk on the last night of her life, having apparently spent all of her doss money on drink before earning it again and losing it the same way.