The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Although it may have begun in 1888, this grouping and dismissal of the victims remains in recent texts. Robert Keller’s 2016 The Devil in Whitechapel: The Untold Story of Jack the Ripper declares it bluntly: “Prostitutes make easy victims. They were simply unfortunate enough to cross the Ripper’s path while he was hunting.”30 If it hadn’t been Polly, Annie, Long Liz, Catherine, and Mary, it would have been other women. These five were not the only sad, broken-down, alcoholic prostitutes in the East End, after all, and if they had not been murdered they would have simply been part of the larger statistic of numbers of prostitutes and the homeless in the East End. Once again there is the suggestion that these women might have been lucky to have been murdered, since it means their names and a few facts about their lives are indeed known. Yes, they might have been fairly typical prostitutes, not unique in any way, but it is still their lives that have captured public attention—or, at least, their deaths. Just how little their lives honestly seem to matter in the Ripper narrative is taken up in 2015 by Bruce Robinson.

  Thirty-Five Minutes

  They All Love Jack (2015) by Bruce Robinson is an education not only in all that he feels has gone wrong with Ripper investigations of the past, but in casual British swearing. Robinson works to set himself apart from those that have gone before, not only in the fact that he holds the truth to the Ripper’s identity—Michael Maybrick—but also in his language choice. In his preface Robinson firmly takes up his stance about the figure of the Ripper himself when he states that many Ripper authors present the murderer “as though he were someone special, rather than the epitome of all that is cruel, and a God-damned repugnance.”31 Further reading reveals that Robinson’s frustrations appear to be directed more at past researchers, who have made mistakes and repeated false information than at the Ripper and his cronies.

  Robinson’s blunt style results in his saying outright what many authors have enacted but few have stated. “As far as this narrative is concerned,” he confesses glibly, “Catherine Eddowes’ life lasted about thirty-five minutes: from the time she left the police lock-up to the time the Ripper killed her.”32 There is no apology offered. As far as Robinson is concerned, Catherine was forty-six years old and a drunk, and that is all that is relevant outside of her autopsy reports.

  All the same, despite this dismissal of the living Catherine Eddowes, Robinson mocks the treatment she has been given when he reflects on the contemporary assessment that “Catherine Eddowes was complicit in the loss of her ear, kidney and womb. She shouldn’t have been walking around flaunting such stuff at a murderer.”33 He takes the idea of vulnerability presented by the above authors and dismisses the declaration that either her occupation or her fondness for alcohol was at fault for her death. Ears, kidneys, and wombs are not usually among the list of what murder victims are meant to have flaunted at their killers, and any killer whose murderous streak is aroused by any of these three would have been confronted with them everywhere. It was not how Catherine was dressed or her level of sobriety that resulted in her death, but, rather amazingly, something beyond her control. Could it be, perhaps, that Jack the Ripper was the one solely responsible for the murders and it wasn’t the women he killed who brought it on themselves?

  It would seem that Robinson’s remark about the interesting length of Catherine Eddowes’ life has more to do with making a blunt statement about the way in which the murdered women are generally treated in a text and not so much that he, personally, feels the need to dismiss the women’s lives that easily. More often he dismisses the usual dismissals, such as when he mocks Coroner Wynn Baxter’s claim that Annie Chapman was murdered because of a request for wombs. Each specimen would be well paid for, of course, and Robinson rejects the idea that a woman would have been murdered for the price of a single body part—even such a ridiculous price. “Mrs. Chapman was the victim of a commercial enterprise,”34 he marvels, as though Baxter might honestly have thought murder might have been performed for a few coins. True, Robinson’s main point is that Baxter was a Mason, and the Masons were heavily involved with the Ripper murders, but when he picks at common elements of the Ripper narrative, some of these do involve the traditional representations of the murdered women.

  Although Robinson does not concern himself greatly with the biographies of these women, when he groups them into a single category, it is once again to critique. Just as these women should have known better than to flaunt common body parts at a prospective murderer, that same murderer need no longer actually go on the hunt for his next target. Instead, “it is the victims who ‘prowl,’ making themselves targets for the perfectly reasonable attentions of a psychopath with his knife.”35 This sentiment has, after all, been stated before, although the fact that the Ripper’s desire to murder is “reasonable” is usually left unsaid. By taking the assumed and making it obvious, Robinson’s attacks on previous authors have to do not only with the lamentable state of their research, but their continued parroting of cultural values without considering their full implications. After all, telling a woman to make herself less of a target is asking her to ensure that the predator kills someone else instead.

  Although Robinson’s style—and his word choice—might put readers off because they are so different from previous authors, and his dismissal of so many respected names in the field might make his actual audience even smaller, readers who do wade through his more than 700 pages will stumble across these gems. The direction of his critique does not point him to a close study the victims, and, as we have seen, he freely admits this. Once again stating baldly what many have done but not admitted, Robinson owns up to this lack instead of ignoring it, and takes the time at other places in his book to indicate how nonsensical past representation of these women has been. His casual and slang-filled approach might count against him among more “serious” works, but Robinson certainly attempts to uproot more than the Ripper’s identity.

  Pushing the Boundaries

  Although these books tended to continue along the same narrative lines as those that preceded them, it can still be seen that they adopted their own individual approaches to the Ripper narrative. The same handful of facts about each woman was available for selection, and authors picked and chose in the way that best suited their own arguments. When the women have very little to do with the story outside of their own deaths, the discussion of each woman shows it. At other times the approach to the murdered women betrays personal or public opinion about them, be it an opinion that was held in the Victorian era, in the twenty-first century, or perhaps one that has seen little change. With so many books now written about Jack the Ripper it is unsurprising that many have adopted the same approaches to their subject, since they are expected and perhaps even anticipated by readers and fellow authors.

  Alongside the more commonly expected authors and narratives there emerged others with more varied backgrounds that allowed them access to modern uses of police work and technology. This particular knowledge allowed them to approach the Ripper mystery with their own specialties in mind. Much in the same way that authors made use of the FBI’s behavioral profiling in the 1980s and 1990s, these individuals relied on their own experiences with modern police techniques of their knowledge of—or access to—DNA technology. The Ripper mystery could once again be scrutinized in a new light and with new methods, this time related to twenty-first century technologies not accessible to the general public.

  • EIGHT •

  Enter DNA

  Victim Descriptions in Light of 21st Century Uses of Technology in Ripper Theories

  A common lament about the Ripper crimes is that, even with full access to the coroner’s reports and the rest of what was kept in the sealed files, very little new information was actually discovered. This is not simply because the files have been picked over or lost through the years, or because much of the information surrounding the crimes had already been printed in various newspapers. The details surrounding the Ripper case seem minimal today because the p
olice and doctors had little access to forensic knowledge that seems so prevalent even to the average citizen in the twenty-first century.

  Between the true crime boom of the 1980s and forensics-heavy television shows of the twenty-first century like, CSI:, including its variants and knockoffs, the average viewing and reading public has been exposed to ideas involving fingerprints, DNA, and young, hip scientists in a dramatically lit lab able to tease clues almost out of thin air. Profilers, professional and amateur, attempt to suss out the killer’s identity before the characters manage it, relying on popular representations of crime and criminals in order to do so. The prevalence of this knowledge is shown through “the CSI effect” in which jurors have an overinflated expectation of both the abilities of forensic science and the proceedings within a courtroom based on the fast-paced, easy to follow through-lines of these types of shows. In the rare cases when the criminal is not caught, with full proof, by the end of the episode, it is likely to be part of an arc about a serial killer who return next sweeps week to once again boost the ratings.

  “The CSI effect” not only leads amateur detectives to believe that science borders on the magical, but also that every killer will be caught. It is rare even for texts that fall under true crime instead of crime fiction to be about unsolved cases, although Jack the Ripper is, of course, the most famous exception. By the twenty-first century the Ripper himself is clearly no longer a threat—even if he was not one of the identified suspects, with a death date, enough time has passed that he cannot possibly still alive. The safety readers feel of not being a prostitute, especially not one in the East End, is therefore further compounded by the passage of time.

  The same passage of time that leads to feelings of safety also saw developments in technologies and techniques that were not present in 1888. Even if twenty-first century detectives, armchair or professional, wish to cast an eye over the crimes, they find themselves limited. Although morgue photographs were taken of the victims, only Mary Kelly’s corpse was photographed where it was found. Catherine Eddowes’ location and position in Mitre Square was sketched, but none of the previous crime scenes were given such attention. The only clues toward the positioning of the women’s bodies came through the written descriptions.

  Fingerprinting would not come into practice for another few years, and DNA matching was a century away. Although doctors were called to the scenes of the crimes, it was generally to pronounce death and then return to bed until it was time for the autopsy. The bodies were removed in carts to the nearest mortuary before being undressed and washed, at times without supervision from the doctors or police and even without permission. Those doing the work were often inmates of the workhouse attached to the mortuary and thus not specifically trained. Even the physicians who consulted on the case were working with minimal training and often disagreed with each other. There were no sterile theaters or labs for testing.

  In the face of these deficiencies, from a twenty-first century perspective, the Victorian police force and armchair detectives, perhaps imagining themselves to be Sherlock Holmes, engaged in pseudo-scientific practices. One was handwriting analysis, feeding off the many letters sent to both the newspapers and the police claiming responsibility for the crimes. Due to the amount of letters, this analysis was generally used to determine which, of any, were likely to be from the “real” Ripper, or at least which had probably been written by the same person. The handwriting and spelling were inspected to inform opinions about the letter writer’s level of education. Another pseudo scientific practice came from piecing together the evidence uncovered at coroners’ reports. Much of this came from witness testimony, and these armchair detectives were able to engage in the process of constructing an image of the Ripper himself. Some newspapers took this literally at the time, printing sketches born of the verbal portraits of men supposedly seen with the murdered women shortly before their deaths.

  If the police in 1888 had had access to modern techniques and technology, it is frequently argued that they would have solved the case and named Jack the Ripper once and for all. The common lament seems to be one of “if only.” If only they had known about fingerprinting. If only the doctors had recorded more exact information during the autopsy. If only suspicious characters had been subjected to much more vigorous inquiry. In an attempt to combat the lingering feeling of “if only,” modern Ripper authors have taken multiple approaches to apply updated procedures and technologies to the Ripper murder mystery.

  The Ripper for a Modern Era

  In 1998, John Plimmer published his book The Whitechapel Murders Solved? and his question mark is indeed apt. Plimmer’s focus was not so much on the Ripper case itself but how modern procedures would have approached the murders. He intermingles fact and fiction, allowing investigators to find clues that were not actually presented, appointing a media liaison, and giving Chief Inspector Fredrick Abberline a press conference complete with video cameras. Although the microphones might strike the casual reader as anachronistic and be a clue that Plimmer’s scenarios are indeed only imagined, discussions of blood spatter and footprints might not be so obvious. Plimmer’s narrative is a clear mix of fact and supposition, ending with a transcription of a fictionalized interview with the killer.

  Plimmer includes little information about the murdered women, prefacing his narrative with the argument that “[t]he circumstances of the murders have been well documented.”1 Although Plimmer does not introduce the idea of DNA evidence into his fiction, he apparently also does not need to further investigate the biographies of these women in order to profile the murderer. Despite his short descriptions, Plimmer still introduces tidbits about the lives of these women, even if some of it is in contrast with information presented by other authors.

  His Mary Nichols, for example, parted from her husband due to drunken brawls in which her husband was the beaten party. He does not indicate which half of the marital pair was drunk, but it is clearly Mary who became violent. Further, this Mary is not ejected from her lodging house for being penniless, but is instead accosted on her way to her lodging house. Apparently she was in possession of the money necessary for her bed, having had two clients and not spent that money elsewhere. Likely this Mary did not need to spend it elsewhere, since “poor wretched Mary was extremely drunk”2 already and apparently not in need of food. However miserable her life may have been—or may not have been—she was still able to secure multiple clients in a day and keep herself in drink and shelter.

  Plimmer does take a moment in his description of the police response to the murder to point out that modern police activity would include a much closer look at Mary’s history than was undertaken at the time. This comes in relation to the criminal profiling introduced and made popular in the 1980s in which the victims’ biographies would be examined in order to determine what sort of person would undertake the risk of murdering them. The fact that Mary is clearly identified as a prostitute both widens her circle of acquaintances and places her at greater risk for stranger violence. Plimmer gives no indication that any of Mary’s family members would have come under suspicion over her death.

  Like many other authors, Plimmer presents his Annie May Chapman as a largely sympathetic figure. Instead of the negative physical descriptions, she is “an attractive, well-proportioned woman”3 who, unlike Mary, does not seem to have a drinking problem. The end to Annie’s marriage has blame placed equally on husband and wife with the suggestion that they each fell on hard times, perhaps through no fault of their own, and this—along with the fact that their son needed care in a home for cripples—seems to be a rational reason why two people would agree to go their separate ways.

  This Annie clearly has access to money, since she pays extra at her usual lodging in order to have a double bed that she does not have to share. Doss houses that had double beds were the only ones in which men and women were allowed to sleep together, and the more usual scenario involved a man paying for the bed and allowing a woman to join him
in exchange for favors. Considering how many women were forced to walk the streets all night, even at the height of the Ripper murders, the fact that Annie could afford twice what the other women lacked indicates that her income was steady and perhaps almost extravagant for the area.

  It is therefore much more of a shock for this Annie when she is forced to leave her usual lodging for not having any money, although the rules had not changed and lodgers were fully expected to pay in advance. This Annie becomes “disillusioned”4 when she is turned out. Despite the fact that she had parted from her husband and her children and had been living in the East End for years, it is only now that Annie suffered disillusionment. Somehow her double bed and the income that allowed her to pay for that bed meant that her life was not nearly as terrible may have been suspected. Perhaps this Annie was used to being on the receiving end of human kindness, and being ejected from the place where she was known and usually accepted proved to be the defining moment of her predicament.

  Once Annie is murdered, however, she loses all vestiges of humanity and empathy. In his description of her injuries, Plimmer reduces her to a genderless body. She transitions from “Annie May Chapman” to the body, the corpse, the dead woman, and the victim. All of these indicate not Annie herself but the effects of Jack the Ripper’s intervention in her life. The term “victim” especially indicates her relationship to another person, presupposing an enactor of the crime. She is also a victim who was unable to react in the expected manner of self-defense, since later it is revealed that she was already quite ill and therefore could not have been able to defend herself. This attractive woman, somehow untouched by the ravages of the East End, was finally disillusioned and this, on top of her physical ailments, led directly to her death.