by kindels
But if the clothes that had been burned in the fire – a woman’s felt hat, a dark brown skirt and a black velvet cape – were not Mary Kelly’s clothes, and Kelly was not known to own a hat, they could have been the blood-stained clothes of the murderer. If the murderer then dressed in Kelly’s clean outer clothes in order to escape, this might explain how Caroline Maxwell believed that she had encountered Mary Kelly.
What all this means is that over 120 years of traditional thinking has to be set aside. The persistent, single-minded belief that the Whitechapel murders were committed by a man must now be replaced by the possibility that the murderer known as Jack the Ripper could actually have been a woman.
CHAPTER 2
There are several, generally held misconceptions about the Whitechapel murders. One is that the victims were all hacked to death with a knife. They weren’t. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, ‘Polly’, was throttled to death before her throat was cut. Another is that the bodies of the five victims were ripped to pieces. Again, they weren’t. The third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut, but no further mutilations were inflicted on her body. Yet another supposition is that all the victims were murdered under cover of darkness. Wrong again. The estimated time of death of the second victim, Annie Chapman, was 5.30 a.m., more than forty minutes after dawn and five minutes after sunrise. The most important misconception of all, however, is that Jack the Ripper must have been a man.
The hypothesis that the Whitechapel murderer may have been a woman is not new. Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline had briefly discussed the prospect with a colleague, Dr Thomas Dutton, after the murder of Mary Kelly, and it was Abberline himself who suggested that the killer might indeed have been a woman. Dutton considered the notion unlikely, but suggested that if it were a woman, the only kind of person capable of committing such horrendous crimes would have to be a midwife, and a mad midwife at that.
The idea had some merit. A midwife would possess the anatomical knowledge necessary to locate the uterus and other organs in the female body; she would have easy access to surgical knives, and the very nature of her profession would enable her to explain away any blood on her clothing and to account for the late hours when she was out and about on the streets. An element of madness thrown in for good measure would provide a valid reason why she had been driven to murder and maim in the first place.
But it seemed to my father and me that madness was too convenient an excuse. When an explanation cannot be found for some form of irrational behaviour, then describing it as an act of madness provides a neat answer – the easy way out, because no further explanation or answer is required to be given. The assumption was that madness explained everything. Or at least it might have done were it not for the fact that the Whitechapel murders raised so many questions that not even the charge of madness could explain. Abberline must have thought so too, because he doesn’t appear to have pursued his Mad Midwife theory any further.
The only woman mentioned as a possible suspect for the Whitechapel murders, though some two years later, was a Mary Pearcey from Kentish Town in north London.
Mary Pearcey, born in 1866, was the daughter of Thomas Wheeler, a convicted murderer, who was hanged on 29 November 1880. She was said, in contemporary newspaper reports, to have been an attractive woman with “lovely russet-coloured hair and pale blue eyes”. After a relationship with a carpenter – John Pearcey – from whom she took her surname, broke down, she moved in with a furniture remover, Frank Hogg, who was already involved in a relationship with a Phoebe Styles. Styles became pregnant by Hogg, and Mary Pearcey persuaded Hogg to marry Styles. Mary Pearcey and Phoebe Hogg became the best of friends, and Pearcey doted on Hogg’s baby, also named Phoebe.
On 24 October 1890, Phoebe Hogg went to Pearcey’s home with her baby. At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the neighbours heard shouting and loud screams. That evening, Hogg’s corpse was found on a rubbish heap in Hampstead, bearing the marks of a vicious assault. Her skull had been smashed and her throat cut so savagely that her head was almost severed from her body. It was eerily reminiscent of the assault on Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, whose throat had also been slashed to the spine. A mile away from Mary Pearcey’s home, a baby’s pram was found abandoned, its cushions wet with blood. The body of Hogg’s eighteen-month-old baby was later found dead at a house in Finchley. She appeared to have been smothered.
A blood-stained carving knife and a poker were found at Mary Pearcey’s home; blood spatters in one of the rooms suggested that the murder had taken place there, and the body removed to the Hampstead rubbish heap some time afterwards. If Pearcey had been responsible for the Whitechapel murders, this latest killing in Hampstead would have represented a sharp change in the murderer’s modus operandi since all the previous victims had been slaughtered where their bodies were discovered. Furthermore, Hogg’s body showed no sign of mutilation – a complete contrast to four of the Whitechapel murder victims.
Mary Pearcey was charged with Phoebe Hogg’s murder, and, despite her protestations of innocence, she was found guilty and hanged at Newgate prison on 23 December 1890. She was just 24 years old.
While it seems unlikely that Pearcey was responsible for the Whitechapel murders, the idea that they might have been committed by a woman was at least seriously considered by detectives from Scotland Yard in late 1890.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes, also expressed his opinion that the murderer might have disguised himself as a woman, both to avoid capture and to allow him to meet with women without arousing their suspicions. Sir Arthur also thought that the murderer might have been a midwife.
Ten days after the murder of Annie Chapman, the Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, a perceptive and regular contributor to The Times who used the acronym S.G.O., wrote in the newspaper’s letter columns that he thought he could detect the hand of a woman in the murders. The analogy he drew appeared to suggest that jealousy between two women living together (perhaps in a lesbian relationship, though Osborne was unclear on the point) had led to violence, and therefore jealousy might have been the motive for the murders. It was Osborne’s belief “that one or both of these Whitechapel murders [Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman] may have been committed by female hands” (The Times, 18 September 1888). This premise was almost explored further in Tom Cullen’s Autumn of Terror: Jack the Ripper, His Crimes and Times (1965).
Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly’s former lover, hinted in his statement to the police that Kelly was a lesbian. He had enjoyed an 18-month relationship with Mary Kelly which ended ten days before her murder. He implied that Kelly was involved in a sexual relationship with Maria Harvey, a laundress, who lived in nearby New Court off Dorset Street. Earlier that week, on the nights of 4 and 5 November, Harvey had stayed with Kelly in her room. They had also spent the afternoon on the day before the murder in each other’s company. Harvey left Kelly that evening when Barnett arrived, and even though Harvey knew that Barnett could be troublesome, she told the police in her statement that she was unconcerned about leaving the two of them alone together, and she departed.
Many think that it should have been Tom Cullen’s proposition that Harvey returned to Miller’s Court early the following morning, and murdered Kelly in a fit of jealous rage. But Cullen veered away from the idea and proposed instead Montague Druitt, a failed barrister, who committed suicide a month after the murder of Mary Kelly; Inspector Abberline cleared him as a murder suspect, later describing it as ‘another idle story’. It was a missed opportunity to consider a woman as a suspect for the crime, and there was even a plausible motive. However, there was not a single shred of evidence connecting Maria Harvey with Mary Kelly’s death, or for that matter, the four previous killings, and Abberline never considered Harvey as a suspect.
On 29 September, exactly three weeks after the murder of Annie Chapman, the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter was delivered to Scotland Yard. It had be
en received by the Central News Agency two days before, but had been considered a hoax and the Agency delayed passing it on to the police. At first, it appeared to be just another one of the many hundreds of letters that Scotland Yard had received about the Whitechapel murders up to that time. The authors of some of these letters taunted the police in their efforts to capture the murderer. Others berated them for not having done so, while even more claimed the dark and dubious distinction of being the actual murderer. All these letters had to be investigated, which took up valuable police time and resources, and a handful of hoaxers were arrested and charged, including two women. But what was different about this particular letter, the text reproduced here in full, was not that its author claimed to be the murderer, but that it appeared to be spattered with blood, and the disturbing name signed at its end.
25 Sept 1888
Dear Boss
I keep on hearing the police
have caught me but they won’t 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 shall do I shall clip
the lady’s 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 is so nice
and sharp. I want to get to work
right away if I get a chance.
Good luck.
Yours truly
Don’t mind me giving the trade name
Written on the bottom of the letter at right angles to the main body of the text was:
wasn’t 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
Jack the Ripper
The ‘name genie’ had escaped from the bottle, never to be returned, and that was part of the problem. Up until this time, the murderer had acquired the androgynous title ‘The Whitechapel Murderer’ and, as such, could have been either male or female. Jack the Ripper, however, was specifically male and the name now became synonymous with the Whitechapel murders. But a forensic investigation and comparison of handwriting samples carried out by Dr Andrew Cook, in Jack the Ripper: Case Closed (2009), proved beyond reasonable doubt that the letter was written by Frederick Best, a journalist. He was employed by Thomas P. O’Connor, journalist, politician and editor of the London Star newspaper, founded the previous year, and which published its first edition on 3 May 1888. It was, no doubt, a deliberate ploy – or conspiracy – by O’Connor and Best to increase circulation figures, in which event it was hugely successful. The day after the murder of Mary Kelly, 300,000 copies of the Star were sold, more than any other evening newspaper. The fact that the letter was a hoax was neither here nor there. The nickname sank deep into the public’s psyche and, from that moment on, it became almost impossible for anyone to consider that the murderer could have been anyone other than a man.
Early on in our investigation I realised just how hard it was going to be to overturn such deeply held and ingrained beliefs. When I briefly mentioned our hypothesis to my sister, her initial reaction was “It couldn’t have been a woman, because everyone knows that Jack the Ripper was a man.” In fact virtually nothing is known about the Ripper, including the question of his or her sex.
When writing his memoirs during his retirement in 1938, fifty years after the murders, Walter Dew, the young inspector in the CID who was involved in the investigation, expressed what was probably the view of the entire Metropolitan and City Police forces when he said: “I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes, I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then by the man’s [my italics] amazing elusiveness.” Speaking of efforts made by the police to discourage further attacks before the double murder, Dew expressed his amazement that “the Ripper, or any other human being, could have penetrated that area and got away again…. It seemed as though the fiend set out deliberately to prove that he could defeat every effort to capture him [my italics].” Recalling the search for the murderer, Dew said, “One of the strongest inferences to be deduced from the crimes was that the man [my italics] we were hunting was probably a sexual maniac. This angle of the investigation was pursued relentlessly.”
These were incredible beliefs for the police department to hold, assuming that they were the views of the police as a whole – although it seems likely that they were – bearing in mind that there was never any solid evidence to support the contention that the perpetrator of the crimes was a man. It also goes some way to explaining the ‘invisibility’ claims made by earlier writers; that the murderer simply and mysteriously vanished after committing each and every crime.
As for the murderer being a sexual maniac, there was no medical evidence to prove that any of the victims was raped, had had recent intercourse, or even that any sexual interest was shown in them. In short, there was no evidence whatever to indicate that the crimes were sexually motivated.
Writing in The Independent, on 18 May 2006, under the headline ‘Was Jack the Ripper a woman?’, Kathy Marks in Sydney, Australia reported that an Australian scientist, Ian Findlay, a professor of molecular and forensic diagnostics, had “developed a profiling technique enabling him to extract DNA from a single cell or strand of hair up to 160 years old”. He had taken swabs from the gum used to seal some of the envelopes that had contained the anonymous letters sent to Scotland Yard, and what were believed to be samples of blood spattered on the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, and had subjected them to his analysis. While the results were inconclusive, Findlay managed to construct a partial profile and concluded that “It’s possible the Ripper could be female” – in fact, all he had managed to achieve was the discovery that whoever had sealed the envelopes might have been a woman, and the blood might have been a woman’s blood.
Stephen Knight ignored the possibility that the murderer might have been a woman in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, almost certainly because it would have undermined his conspiracy theory. It was his contention that Sir William Gull and his co-conspirators, John Netley, who became Prince Albert Victor’s coach driver when travelling incognito, and the flamboyant artist Walter Sickert, whom Princess Alexandra had asked to act as mentor to Prince Albert, or Eddy as he was known to his family, her immature son and heir apparent to the throne, had enticed Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes – on different nights – into a carriage. There, Gull swiftly despatched them by cutting their throats, then mutilated their bodies. Netley, assisted by Sickert, had then dumped the bodies where they were found soon afterwards. Stride was murdered outside the coach, and then Netley had thrown her body into a yard through an open gateway in Berner Street as Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, acted in the most unlikely guise of a look-out and fourth conspirator.
Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s next victim within the hour, Knight claimed, had been murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly. Her body was deposited in Mitre Square, which, Knight maintained, held great significance for Freemasons. The mitre is an instrument
used in architecture and consists of two straight pieces, usually made of wood, both bevelled at 45 degrees, where they are joined to form a right angle. It is also one of the two principal instruments of Freemasonry (the other being the compass) and is used in Masonic ceremonies.
It was, Knight suggested, the murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square that gave the Ripper a reputation for having supernatural powers, and he referred to the suggestion of an ‘invisible man’, which he said had been made by earlier writers. In other words, Knight suggested, “the sort of person whose presence on the streets would not have been noticed; like a policeman.” He could as easily have added ‘or a woman’, since such an obvious possibility must surely have presented itself to him.
