In his preface Ladwig foregrounds his focus on the idea of victims, this time specifically directing attention toward those mentioned in his book, declaring that “[t]he public, and certainly the families of the victims, deserve the answers that will give them closure.”24 In this sentence the interests of the public come before the interests of the family members, although—considering Holmes was executed in 1896—any family members alive to read Ladwig’s words would only know their ancestors the same way Williams and Alexander do: as names on the family tree and not as a personal loss. Over a century after the murders perhaps the public and the family are indeed comparable, being so far removed from the individuals whose lives were ended, although the curiosity of the general public seems to supersede any desire the family might have for a resolution. It would seem, however, that the family members most in need of closure would be the ones who had personally known the murdered women and had lived through not only their lives, but also their deaths.
Unlike many authors, Ladwig does fully acknowledge that his fascination lies in a direction other than the victims. He insists that he has no empathy for the murder, but confesses that “there has piqued in me a certain amount of interest and curiosity”25 about Holmes and the sort of person he must have been in order to commit all of these crimes. That curiosity outweighs any repulsion or disgust Ladwig might feel, since he does indeed explore the personality and biography of Holmes, both to prove that Holmes could have been Jack the Ripper and in an attempt to discover how Holmes could have turned into a murderer in the first place. For Ladwig the murdered women are just part of the narrative, and not even the most torturous aspect. Holmes’ life holds its own horrors.
The Whitechapel murders are confined to only a handful of pages. Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Kelly are presented as names and dates only, all on the same page. They are simply part of Ladwig’s timeline for Holmes. The only woman who has any indication of a biography is Mary Nichols—whom he later refers to as “Ann Nichols”26—who “sacrificed her marriage and five children for her addiction to alcohol.”27 If readers were only familiar with Ladwig, it would seem that Mary Nichols was the only woman who drank. Otherwise Ladwig reproduces the original Scotland Yard reports of the murders, as difficult as the handwriting might be for twenty-first century eyes to read. These copies take up seventy pages, offering readers the chance to acquaint themselves with the opinions and observations that were made at the time.
It is only later, after the original reports, that Ladwig offers some more information about the Whitechapel women, treating them as a homogeneous group and listing their similarities instead of any individual characteristics: they were prostitutes who had drinking problems and scrounged pennies for a bed. They kept to themselves—perhaps an explanation for why there are no individual characteristics—and they “were all estranged from their families.”28 There is no indication of whether this means from parents and siblings or from husbands and children, or if there might be a difference depending on the woman in question. Apparently none of this information seems relevant to Ladwig’s piqued interest in Holmes, since the Whitechapel women were victims of opportunity who found themselves crossing the killer’s path at the wrong moment. The closure he seeks for the public and the families lies in identifying their killer and not in a deeper exploration of their lives.
Ladwig does bring things back around full circle, returning to the victims at the end of his narrative and echoing the sentiments from his dedication and preface. As a partial admission that it cannot be proven that Holmes was also the Whitechapel murderer, Ladwig’s writes that “the victims of Jack the Ripper may remain un-vindicated for all of eternity,”29 a prospect that threatens Ladwig’s goal of closure. The question, however, is which definition of “vindicate” he intended: to be cleared of blame, or to be proven to be right? His presentation of the murdered women places blame upon them only as much as any author blames a prostitute for risking her life daily in her profession, since Ladwig does not present any conspiracy or relationships that would direct the blame otherwise. If Ladwig wishes them to be proven right, there is the question of what has been presented that makes them wrong in the first place. True, many authors have approached the idea that these women engaged in prostitution as being wrong, as tough they could have made other, more moral, life choices, but Ladwig does not argue either way about their occupations. It would seem that Ladwig is perhaps more concerned about the victims being un-avenged, considering his earlier concerns for unsolved mysteries and closure.
The shifting of the Ripper’s origins to make him American therefore also assists in the shift away from attention on the murdered women. Evans and Gainey set themselves the task of suggesting a suspect who had not previously been explored at such depth, while Ladwig chose one whose already explored biography offered up many more victims and many more points of interest. Because neither case involved a personal motive for the crimes, the murdered women only matter inasmuch as whether the timing and method of their deaths could be used to disprove the identity of the chosen suspect. As long as Tumblety or Holmes could have been in Whitechapel on the given dates, and could be imagined to be the sort of man to inflict such brutality, then no more information about the victims is necessary.
Confessor Jack
Although the controversy of the Maybrick diary was largely left behind after the 1990s, the twenty-first century still has room for volumes supposedly written by the Ripper himself. David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne present one of them in their 2010 book Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession: The Hidden Testimony of Britain’s First Serial Killer. They resurrect the autobiography of a man known only as “Walter,” making the claim that, in the middle of his explicit confessions of sexual perversion, “it is quite possible to identify some of the victims of Jack the Ripper.”30 Despite this claim—and the extensively quoted, originally banned and often pornographic text—“Walter’s” description of the murders is nowhere to be found. Instead the authors reproduce his reminiscences of spying on women as a child and his sexual exploits with women and many children once he had moved past the voyeur stage. Indeed, the fact that Jack the Ripper is mentioned in the title seems to be largely so that this reproduced narrative of raping minors and paying for virgins will sell.
Interspersed with the reproduced text that seems to have nothing to do with the Ripper murders are the authors’ descriptions of the crimes. The price of an East End prostitute is equated with a glass of gin but less than a bed at a doss house, so this Mary Nichols needs to find two clients in order to pay for the night. Her new bonnet is questioned, since she has no money, and the fact that she was found in possession of a clean handkerchief is likewise brought up as being odd. Why would a prostitute who was fond of drink have spent her hard-earned money on either or a bonnet or a handkerchief, which would not have been clean for long? The authors suggest that “Walter” was fond of giving women both bonnets and handkerchiefs, explaining their provenance. The fact that Mary’s hands were bruised, “showing that she had been involved in a ferocious struggle for her life,”31 is mentioned and then just as quickly dismissed. Her killer had no sympathy for her and did not care about the details of the life he was ending, and neither the struggle nor her death is discussed. Mary is simply a puzzle because of the items not expected to have been found on a prostitute from Whitechapel.
Annie Chapman is also likely to have spent her money on drink before she would have purchased anything else, although Monaghan and Cawthorne draw another comparison between Annie and Mary: the fact that each had daughters “who might follow them into their trade.”32 This is important to their argument because “Walter” confesses to paying for access to young girls and gives full descriptions of the acts he performed on them. The suggestion seems to be that Mary and Annie may have caught “Walter’s” attention because of their daughters, as though each woman could routinely be seen wandering the streets with a child in tow. The fact that neither woman took he
r children with her when she left her marriage makes this statement all the more confusing, since it seems difficult to see how their daughters might be similarly tempted if the rest of the family meant to keep them away from their mothers. Outside of being an alcoholic and a mother, there is nothing of interest about Annie.
Liz Stride, on the other hand, is no one’s mother—despite the once again repeated Princess Alice story—and had been attempting to improve her situation at the time of her death. Although her life had gone downhill since the days in which she had helped out at her husband’s coffee shop, Liz is shown making steps toward respectability once more. There had been no steady improvement in her situation, and her encounter with “Walter” removed any possibility of success.
There is little enough to be added about Kate or Mary, although Monaghan and Cawthorne confirm that each was in a relationship. Kate had her common-law husband,33 John Kelly, while Mary had a boyfriend, Joe Barnett, even though he “had been out of her life—or at least her room—for over a month.”34 The presence of a steady man does nothing to influence their fate, however, since each was looking for money on the last day of her life. Although a common-law husband might be more respectable than a boyfriend, Kate was still an alcoholic and thus not raised to the hopeful level of Liz Stride. Even Mary, so often separated from the others, is mentioned and quickly dismissed.
In a near reversal of Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession, 2013’s The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper discusses the murdered women solely in the text of James Carnac’s supposed confession, with no outside information about them. Paul Begg wrote an introduction to the reproduction of the text, but his discussion is merely of its provenance and, in a later chapter, whether or not this confession might be believed. The representation of the murdered women within this narrative, then, is supposedly from the point of view of the Ripper himself and limited only to their final moments. The fact that he describes meeting “the woman whose name I afterward learned was Mrs. Stride”35 drives home the lack of information the Ripper himself possessed. It is only because Carnac was writing this text after the murders were committed—and thus after he had read about them in the paper—that he is able to provide this much information, and Stride is the only woman given a name.
Otherwise Carnac writes of his encounters with the women, describing their appearances—Polly is “slightly less degraded”36 than the other women in the area, for example, while Kate is both “elderly” and “pathetic”37—and presenting Annie as an incredibly chatty woman. He writes her monologue with a heavy cockney accent, apparently recalling each and every word she said to him despite the passage of time. Carnac even belittles Kate for being so bold as to accompany him to Mitre Square despite the murders, and Mary Kelly for taking him to her room and undressing as she, too, chatted away, apparently without any concern. Throughout he does not use their names, instead referring to the women as subjects or, when he is on the lookout for his next victim, a possible subject. They are clearly not individuals in Carnac’s mind and, outside of the chatter, there is little to distinguish one from another.
Once again, with the shift in focus from the murder narrative itself—this time to first person confessions—these books have little to say about the murdered women. Monaghan and Cawthorne must present this information on their own, since they do not reproduce any of their chosen confession that would show why, exactly, they have decided that “Walter” makes a viable suspect. It is therefore unclear what “Walter” himself thought of them, or even why he resorted to murder when the rest of his confession deals with other sexually deviant exploits that center on children bought and paid for, often at extravagant rates. The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper, on the other hand, is clearly meant for readers who already have knowledge of the Ripper case, since its purpose is to present the original confession written by a man who knew less about the women he killed than was printed in the newspapers. These books are clearly moving away from recounting the murder narrative as a whole in order to focus on an aspect that the authors believe has been ignored or simply undiscovered and, in these cases particularly, this means that the murdered women are once again relegated to the position of placeholders in the face of other, more important, information.
Minding the Gaps
Perhaps because of the emphasis on the retelling of the original Ripper crime narrative, with adjustments and additions based on newly discovered information or newly proposed suspects, the twenty-first century has seen a number of books devoted to a specific facet of the Ripper crimes and not to the entire narrative. In many of these cases, that facet shifts focus away from the murders themselves and thus the victims almost completely.
Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner chose to focus on the various missives received by the press and the police in their 2001 book Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell. The book offers reproductions of many of these letters and transcribes the text, as well, to aid in reading the various handwritings. The book opens with a description of the murder discoveries but otherwise refers to the murders only to compare that information with details found in a letter. The discussion centers on whether the letters could be proven to only have been able to be written by the killer or whether anyone with access to a newspaper might have been able to compose them. Throughout the book, the murders themselves are often identified based on the location of the murder, and not the name of the woman killed.
In 2003 R. Michael Gordon presented readers with The American Murders of Jack the Ripper, focusing on a series of murders that happened in that country after the Whitechapel murders had ceased. Gordon suggests that his suspect, George Chapman, did not simply stop murdering but instead moved and thus changed the location of the murders. The Whitechapel murders are listed together in the preface, but the main focus of the book follows the women listed in Gordon’s dedication: Carrie, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Mary.38 Of the four, Carrie Brown, also known as “Old Shakespeare,” receives the most attention and most detailed biographical treatment. They, and not the Whitechapel women, are the focus of this text.
In 2006 Robin Odell set out to summarize the body of works written about Jack the Ripper in his book Ripperology. In his preface he provides readers with a summary of the murders, “intended to remind readers of the essential features of each murder without going into excessive detail.”39 Presumably anyone interested in a review of the literature composed about these murders would already be familiar with the details of the murder narrative itself. Odell traces the discovery and introduction of new information—as well as pointing out the dissemination of facts now known to be untrue—with a focus on Ripper suspects. Odell does not set forth to make the case for any specific suspect of his own, but evaluates the arguments put forward and allows the books he discusses to be in conversation with each other.
The Victims of Jack the Ripper (2007) by Neal Stubbings Sheldon focuses solely on the facts known about the canonical five victims, although nearly half of the short volume is devoted to photographs, mainly of the murdered women’s descendants. Each chapter is devoted to a single woman, although those chapters also contain the continuation of her family tree, if known. Sheldon’s focus is indeed on the murdered women, although he limits himself to reporting confirmable facts. Although it has become tradition, or perhaps expected, to take scarce facts and turn them into a narrative for a Ripper suspect, the same has not been done with the facts surrounding his victims. In Sheldon’s short book, the women are presented as a gathering of facts, more extensive than many authors offer, but there is no attempt to take these pieces and reanimate them into people with personalities. Since no attempt had been previously made, the simple fact that Sheldon produced a text devoted solely to the murdered women and not to discovering the identity of their murderer is, in and of itself, a notable goal. Sheldon chooses to focus on the canonical five, much in the same way that all Ripper authors must mention them, if no one else.
Jack the Ripper: The Forgotten Victims (2013) by Paul Begg and
John Bennett instead broadens the definition of “victims” to include not only the women the Ripper may have personally murdered, but all of those living at the time whose lives were impacted. Begg and Bennett go beyond the canonical five or even the expanded number of women murdered in Whitechapel alone to include women who died of fright or because of copycat killers who might not have been inspired to murder had they not read about the Ripper. Their main argument is that the canonical five victims “live on”40 through the already published works about the Ripper, with their lives and families trees having already been subjected to extensive research, while this wider net of victims has remained nameless, unrecognized, and forgotten.
For Begg and Bennett, the canonical five are bound together through their murders, since they are “women of whom we never would have heard”41 and women “who would otherwise be unknown to history”42 if they had not met such violent ends. We have only heard of them, and their names have only been recorded in history and our collective consciousness, because of the man who murdered them. It is through no action of their own—and indeed, no reason other than an attempt to discover their murderer’s identity—that all of this recognition has come about. Begg and Bennett wish to argue that the attention these five women have received has allowed them “to be remembered, and not just as victims,”43 but even they themselves cannot mention them without that victim status. The horrific extent of the Ripper’s crimes means that their identities will always be as his victims first, and anything else—if anything else is deemed worthy of mention—second. The fact that their graves are marked and their names, according to the authors, known and recognized around the world is meant to elevate them somehow above any woman who falls outside the canonical five. Although the names of the canonical five have indeed been mentioned over and over in nearly every retelling of the Ripper narrative—which is, of course, the reason this very book has chosen to focus on them—there is certainly not the trend of viewing them as women instead of victims or bodies.
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