They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  The Artists had originally met at the Argyle Rooms, Piccadilly, then moved to one of Maybrick’s clubs, the Arts in Hanover Square, which in 1884 he listed as his London address. A few records miraculously survive. According to the muster roll, Maybrick joined the battalion on 6 February 1886, declaring his profession as ‘Musician’. His age is recorded as forty (which was incorrect – he was forty-five), his chest measurement as forty-one inches, and his height as six feet and one half inches in his socks.13

  Extrapolating from these statistics and his description in the Musical World, we get a picture of a powerful and athletic man, forty-seven years old at the time of the murders, but retaining ‘the full vigour of youth’, and ‘braced with air’ from the Isle of Wight.

  Maybrick’s commanding officer was an architect and fellow Freemason of high distinction, Colonel Robert W. Edis, and it was his task (after a brief occupancy at Fitzroy Square) to seek finances for more permanent headquarters for the Artists. ‘The first thing our Colonel did,’ says the official history, ‘was to form a strong committee of soldiers (including Bro General Wolseley) and artists of every kind.’

  Edis and his committee were successful, and the new headquarters were formally opened by the Prince of Wales and his wife Princess Alexandra on 25 March 1889. It was a ‘splendid success’, with Maybrick second on the bill, shouting Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Sentry Song’ from Iolanthe. At the end of it all the Prince got to his feet and gave them the pleasure of a few words. It must have been a particularly gratifying earful to Maybrick, who had put the show together, and whose name appears on the cover of the programme.

  Sharing the credit is Captain W.H. Thomas, who with Maybrick was Musical Director of the Artists B Company. In civilian mode Thomas was a prominent conductor and benefactor who taught music at St Jude’s University Campus, Toynbee Hall, less than a minute’s walk from the infamous wall at Goulston Street.

  As an inhabitant of this superior world, Michael Maybrick seems a most unlikely candidate for Jack the Ripper. ‘A very handsome man’, according to his publisher John Boosey, he was talented, intelligent, successful and rich – not exactly the qualities one immediately associates with a serial killer. In fact, he was just about the last man in London you’d finger as the Ripper. Murder is ugly. When the assassin remains a ‘mystery’ we see only his debris, the blood and the fatal misery, the hideousness of the victim in death. Murder shocks, and in the case of the Ripper it utterly degrades. Sexual ugliness is its trademark.

  We don’t associate violent homicide with a handsome face. In our revulsion we automatically associate it with the face of the dead. There was actually a law in the Middle Ages: if two people were suspected of a crime but only one could be guilty, they would hang the uglier one.14 In this book I have consciously avoided descriptions of the East End. Those dripping alleys, flickering gaslights and the rest of it tend to subliminally describe the murderer, and it’s just around the corner from this kind of stuff that we get the obligatory ‘lair’. The Ripper almost certainly arrived in Whitechapel by the underground railway.15

  The 1970s American serial killer Ted Bundy is in the same category of psychopath. Robert Ressler describes Bundy, ‘the most celebrated killer of his time’, as a serial murderer ‘at the other end of the scale’: ‘Perhaps because he was so photogenic and articulate that many people concluded he could not have committed the crimes … a handsome, intelligent young man who seemed to some people to have considerable sex appeal, a student at law, respected, a former Mr Nice Guy.’16

  ‘Ted’s path was straight-upward,’ wrote his friend the journalist Anne Rule, ‘excelling at everything he put his hand to, superbly educated, socially adept.’ He was an ideal citizen. He even drew a commendation from the Seattle Police Department when he ran down a purse-snatcher and returned the stolen bag to its owner. In the summer of 1970, it was Ted Bundy who saved a three-and-a-half-year-old toddler from drowning in Green Lake in Seattle’s North End. No one had seen the child wander away from her parents – no one but Ted – and he dashed into the water to save the youngster.’17

  But saving a youngster wasn’t the reason the state of Florida put Ted Bundy to death in January 1989. ‘Far from being the Rudolph Valentino of the serial-killer world,’ writes Ressler, ‘Ted Bundy was a brutal, sadistic, perverted man. By his verbal skills Bundy would habitually lure girls and young women into positions of vulnerability, then bludgeon them with a short crowbar … He’d kill them by strangulation … mutilate and dismember them, sometimes committing necrophilic acts, for instance ejaculating into the mouth of a disembodied head … This man was an animal … [it is] estimated by the FBI that he murdered between thirty-five and sixty women in different states.’18

  All this with a handsome, intelligent face. The horrendous Bundy and the Whitechapel nightmare have not a little in common. Ted was charming, and I suspect Jack was too. They shared the gift of the gab, able to put their marks at ease, most notably, in Jack’s case, in the dialogue preceding the attacks on Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. I believe these unfortunate women were on the alert for a police-inspired cliché, ‘a short man with a rough voice’, when what they got was six feet of charm from a well-spoken, educated West End gent, military tones and all – ‘a loud, sharp sort of voice, and a quick commanding way with him’, as Matthew Packer put it. Both Bundy and Jack strangled their victims, indulging in postmortem mutilation, orientated around their respective perversions. And most important of all, both appeared to be, and indeed were, completely sane.

  There is another derivation of the term ‘Double Event’ that may well have appealed to my candidate. It comes from the concert stage, and means two performances on a given night.

  I don’t know if this is the source of the Ripper’s pun, but I don’t think it can be discounted either. I think Maybrick – ‘that charming singer and composer’, as the artist Tennyson Cole remembered him19 – was very like Bundy, an engaging veneer camouflaging what I believe was a mortal disease of the ego. Jack suffered from no undue modesty in this department. It was ego that countenanced the risks he took at his crime scenes and the correspondence with which he taunted the police. He fuelled his narcissism through the destruction of his victims. He owned them, and took parts of them away, like a hunter. He was the apogee of homicidal vanity. In our search for a plausible candidate, it seems to me that we’re looking for an ego – a man like Bundy who believed he was cleverer than all the rest of them put together, a man who felt he was, in Ressler’s phrase, ‘walking with God’.

  Michael Maybrick had an ego the size of a house. We have an indication of it in the recollections of Florence Aunspaugh, the daughter of one of his brother James’s closest friends: ‘Michael had the idea, especially after he wrote “The Holy City”, that he was floating on the celestial plains and did not belong to earth. He thought he should be classed with Shakespeare, Byron, Milton and Tennyson.’ The family joke, from his younger brother Edwin, was that ‘he had already engaged a tomb in Westminster Abbey’.20

  If not walking with God, he was certainly strolling in that direction. It wasn’t only Scotland Yard that was trying to shut Matthew Packer up. The sketches based on his description of the Ripper appeared in the Telegraph on 6 October, and postmarked that same date, someone signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ mailed him a warning.

  6 Oct 1888

  You though yourself very clever I reckon when you informed the police But you made a mistake, if you though I dident see you Now I know you know me and I see your little game, and I mean to finish you and send your ears to your wife if you show this to the police or help them if you do I will finish you. It no use your trying to get out of my way Because I have you when you dont expect it and I keep my word as you soon see and rip you up Yours truly

  Jack the Ripper

  Letters from Jack were almost always proactive (he described what he was going to do), but this one was decidedly reactive. ‘Now I know you know me’, he wrote, and I sugges
t this could only have been written in response to a genuine recognition of himself.

  On the left is the man Packer claims he saw, the man who bought the grapes; and on the right is my candidate, Michael Maybrick.

  It would seem that two people in London became alarmed by the publication of this sketch. One was Warren, and the other Jack the Ripper. Rage, and perhaps even panic, may have been the catalyst for the immediate dispatch of a threat to Packer, anxiety possibly causing this uncharacteristic postal indiscretion. The letter was mailed in the London NW district, which included Clarence Gate, Regent’s Park, where Michael Maybrick lived.

  Written vertically down the side of the letter are the words ‘You see I know your address.’ I don’t think Packer would have been in any hurry to get his grapes out. He took the letter to the police, who dismissed it as they had dismissed Packer himself. It was a ‘hoax’ they said, which in my view was unlikely. Why would a hoaxer ignore the press descriptions and instead conclude that a fruit-seller, rejected by the police, had come up with a description that produced a sketch that looked like Jack?

  Although we have the Met’s file number confirming the postal district, the envelope is missing (either by accident or design). Was the letter therefore addressed to Packer? In certain quarters of Ripperology I’ve seen attempts to ascribe the recipient of this threat as ‘Schwartz’.

  This is nothing if not ridiculous. On 6 October the name ‘Schwartz’ was still an unconstituted fantasy in Shifty’s inkwell. So who is the ‘hoaxer’ going to address his envelope to? ‘You see I know your address.’ The Hungarian’s address was never given to the press,21 while Packer’s at 44 Berner Street was. Plus, Packer did not claim to have seen a woman thrown to the ground, or a knife-wielding man with a red moustache – who didn’t exist until Swanson invented him on 19 October 1888.

  The writer was looking at a sketch in the paper, and also demonstrating a remarkable similarity of signature with the author of ‘Dear Boss’.

  Packer was Jack’s target, and future letters refer to him again. On 8 November (the day before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly), Warren got this:

  Old Packer the man I bought the grapes off saw me the other night but was too frightened to say anything to the police he must have been a fool when there is such a reward offered never mind the reward will not be given.

  Even the Ripper knows Packer hasn’t sought reward. It’s only in the febrile imaginings of Ripperology that he has. Moreover, it’s curious that despite all the official dismissal of the fruit-seller and his grapes, this so-called ‘hoaxer’ does not dismiss them. It’s Scotland Yard that takes another shot at it: ‘It is earnestly desired by the police that the newspapers will refrain from publishing any portraits or descriptions of the supposed perpetrators of the Whitechapel murders. The purely imaginary portraits which have hitherto been published have had the effect of depriving the police of all assistance from the public, whose scrutiny was directed towards a single object, the lineaments of a man who did not exist.’22

  In reality, it wasn’t Packer and his portraits that alienated the public, it was the Metropolitan Police. The people were sick past indifference of the chicanery, sick of the lies, and sick of being misled. The Ripper didn’t have to shut Packer up, the coppers were doing it for him. Warren and his occult chums were now accessories to murder, before, during and after the fact.

  Just over a week after the receipt of the disturbing threat to Packer, another postal nightmare was in progress. Shortly after one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 15 October a ‘tall man’ walked into a leather dealer’s shop in Jubilee Street, Whitechapel. Miss Emily Marsh was minding the shop in her father’s absence when ‘a stranger dressed in clerical costume entered, and referring to the reward bill in the window, asked for the address of Mr Lusk, described therein as the President of the Vigilance Committee’.23

  Miss Marsh suggested the cleric should visit the Treasurer of the Vigilantes, a Mr Aarons, who lived only thirty yards away. But the iffy vicar didn’t want any truck with Aarons; he wanted Lusk. With escalating suspicion, Miss Marsh found a newspaper in which Mr Lusk’s address was given as Alderny Road, although there was no street number. She offered the stranger the paper so he could read it for himself, but his preference was for her to ‘read it out’ while he copied it into a pocketbook.

  Despite his religious costume, or perhaps because of it, by the time the man left the shop his demeanour had so alarmed Miss Marsh that she sent her shop boy after him to see ‘that all was right’. Young John Cormac followed him out, coincidentally running into his employer, Mr Marsh, who happened to be coming along on the pavement outside. Thus three witnesses – Emily Marsh, John Cormac and Mr Marsh – were able to give a full description of the man, which was published in the Telegraph on 20 October: ‘The stranger is described as a man of some forty-five years of age, fully six feet in height and slimly built. He wore a soft felt black hat, drawn over his forehead … His face was of a sallow type, and he had a dark beard and moustache. The man spoke with what was taken to be an Irish accent.’

  I think we’re looking at Joseph Lawende’s withheld description. Packer’s portrait looked like Michael Maybrick, and this one sounds like him. Glancing back over Maybrick’s army record, he’s described as forty-five years of age, and fully six feet in height. He also wore a black moustache, and (if it wasn’t fake) could easily have put on a bit of precautionary ‘dark beard’ post-Packer.

  Here was a broad-daylight description from three alert and respectable witnesses of an unusual man, considered suspicious by Miss Marsh to the point of alarm. You might have thought the police would have shown a bit of interest – maybe sent Sergeant White round with his ‘special book’. After all, it suddenly looked as if Warren’s speculations were on the money. Here was a highly suspicious ‘Irishman’, precisely the nationality of the man he’d proposed as the author of the writing on the wall. For a cop on a murder hunt, he could hardly have it better. However, there’s nothing in the record about this sinister Mick, nor any statement from Mr Marsh, Emily, or John Cormac.

  Now this is a curious circumstance, because the next evening Mr George Lusk got a parcel through the post containing half a human kidney. What was doubly curious was that the address on the box it came in lacked any street number, suggesting a potent symbiosis between the iffy vicar and the information about the address that Emily Marsh was unable to give. Moreover, the letter accompanying the body part claimed that the writer had fried the other half and eaten it, and that it was ‘very nise’.

  By no means a usual note. Given the fact that they were hunting a homicidal joker who’d just hacked a woman to bits and burgled her left kidney, it’s perhaps no wonder that the Met dismissed it as a hoax. The kidney could have belonged to a dog, they mused. But it didn’t.

  Mr Sugden gives a logically presented assessment of the Lusk kidney. His premise is: ‘If the kidney really was Kate’s [Catherine Eddowes’], the accompanying letter was written by her murderer.’ I couldn’t agree more, but I would add: ‘If the accompanying letter was written by her murderer, suspect one becomes the man who asked for Lusk’s address in Marsh’s shop.’

  Lusk got his kidney on the evening of Tuesday, 16 October,24 and we can only imagine the moment. It arrived in a box about three and a half inches square. It was cut laterally, a stub of renal artery still hanging off, and there was the accompanying letter.

  From Hell

  Mr Lusk

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

  Signed

  Catch me when you can

  Mishter Lusk

  Before approaching the text, there’s plenty to consider. Let’s assume the absurd – that the tall man in Marsh’s shop and the man who sent this kidney and the letter are independent actors. Of one, we have a comprehensive description:
a six-foot, forty-five-year-old vicar with an ‘Irish accent’. The other is unknown, but had to procure a human kidney. According to police propaganda, he’s an ‘Insane Medical Student’ with a nasty sense of fun.

  Fans of the medical student run into immediate problems. How could he know the nationality of the ‘Tall Vicar’? The vicar had an ‘Irish accent’, and so does the Lusk letter. It has ‘Sor’ for ‘Sir’. Even The A to Z says of it, ‘The authors note that “Sor” and “Mishter” are two normal nineteenth-century transcriptions indicating a stage Irish accent.’

  The kidney and its accompanying letter were received on 16 October, but the suspicious ‘Irish Vicar’ remained unreported until the Telegraph picked it up four days later, on the 20th. Nobody had yet read the word ‘Irish’ in connection with this latest communication. So the medical student is not only insane, he’s a clairvoyant of startling talent.

  It was the arrival of the Lusk kidney that initiated the Marsh press interview, Miss Marsh concluding that perhaps the kidney and ‘the Tall Man’ were connected, a deduction far beyond the intellectual capabilities of anyone at Scotland Yard.

  You’d have thought the police would have been all over Marsh’s shop. How real was the beard? How real was the accent? Are you certain you didn’t give this man the street number?