They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  We’ve either run into the most incredible coincidence of two unconnected actors pretending to be Irish, or a confirmation that ‘the Vicar’ and ‘the Medical Student’ are one and the same.

  Experts have been at work on this letter, and have determined that it was written by a ‘semi-literate person’ with a particular pen; and from this I determine that they are experts at bugger-all. Nobody writes ‘Sor’, even if their mother was a leprechaun. Americans say ‘erbs’ for ‘herbs’, but they don’t spell it like that. Irrespective of their dialect, they write ‘herbs’, from Alaska to Tennessee. A Texan may say ‘Surr’, but he writes it as ‘Sir’, just as does an Irishman cutting peat in Donegal.

  This letter screeches theatre: the rage is real, the presentation as phoney as it gets. The question here is not its literacy, but why Lusk? These ‘hoaxers’ were primarily targeting Charlie Warren, so why send a masterwork (the kidney) – proof, if you like – to a painter and decorator in the East End? I think the answer lies in precisely what happened next.

  Lusk was angry with the authorities. They didn’t want to know about his reward or his Vigilance Committee – he was no more getting through than Jack himself. What both of them needed was some limelight, and when Lusk got it, he did exactly what the Ripper wanted him to do.

  Had the kidney gone to Warren, it would have disappeared, like Eddowes’ ear, into the bafflement. Jack didn’t want to get caught, but by Christ he wanted the fame. This kidney is asking, what else do you need to know me by?

  Lusk first informed Joseph Aarons of the kidney at a meeting of the Vigilance Committee. Aarons is reported as saying that Lusk was in a state of considerable excitement. He thought Aarons might laugh, and apparently he did, but Lusk said, ‘It’s no laughing matter to me.’ The question everyone must have been asking was exactly the question Scotland Yard would go out of its way to avoid. Was this body part anything to do with Catherine Eddowes?

  It wasn’t long before the members of the Committee were on their way to a local doctor’s surgery. Dr Wilas was out, but his assistant F.S. Reed took a look, and accurately stated that the kidney was human, and had been preserved in spirits of wine. For specialist confirmation Reed carted it off, submitting it to Dr Thomas Horrocks Openshaw, surgeon and curator of the Pathological Museum at the London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road.

  According to Openshaw (via Aarons), the organ was a portion of human kidney, a ‘ginny kidney’ – that is to say, one that belonged to a person who drank heavily. He was further of the opinion that it was the organ of a woman of about forty-five years of age (again, spot on) and had been taken from the body within the last three weeks.

  Although this information proved to be utterly accurate, Openshaw later denied ever saying it, reducing his prognosis to little more than that the kidney was a left-hander, and was dead. But his denial can’t compete with his original statement, given on 19 October, because it got into the press before the denial, which came the following day. If Aarons had made it up, he was an augur of phenomenal precision, because his fib was to be corroborated by one of England’s leading kidney specialists, and an autopsy report nobody could possibly have seen.

  Of Catherine Eddowes, Dr Gordon Brown had written that her abdominal lining was ‘cut through on the left side, and the left kidney carefully taken out and removed. The left renal artery was cut through.’ It’s important to remember how Brown describes this artery: ‘cut through’, and not cut out, meaning that a portion of it must have been left in the body. Dr Brown then turned his attention to the remaining kidney: ‘Right kidney pale, bloodless, with slight congestion at the base of the pyramids.’

  This description probably means little more to you than it did to me. But a practising surgeon with an interest in Whitechapel matters, Mr Nick Warren, has confirmed that these symptoms unquestionably point to what used to be called ‘Bright’s Disease’ (chronic glomerulonephritis) – a pathological condition known colloquially in Victorian medicine as ‘ginny kidney’.25

  Why Openshaw would repudiate something he’d publicly said only twenty-four hours before is a question. I was reminded of another doctor, Bro Bagster Phillips at the Chapman inquest. I wondered if in Openshaw we were seeing a replication of those occult ‘interests of justice’ that never saw justice done. Had someone had a word in Openshaw’s ear? I have no idea. What I do know is that, like Dr Bagster Phillips and Dr Gordon Brown, Dr Horrocks Openshaw was a Freemason, and that none of the ‘mystery’ surrounding this kidney can reasonably be looked at without bearing that in mind.26

  Next stop in the kidney’s journey was Leman Street police station, where it came into the possession of one of the most experienced detectives in London. Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline’s reaction is indicative of where he thought this organ was at. Viewing the kidney as potentially important, he immediately forwarded it to the City of London Police. By handing it to Commissioner Smith, Abberline was explicitly connecting the kidney with the murder of Catherine Eddowes. He would be the first and last man in the Metropolitan Police to do so.

  Following consultation, Smith had no reservations about what he was looking at. ‘The renal artery is about three inches long,’ he wrote; ‘two inches remained in the corpse, one inch attached to the kidney.’ Moreover, ‘the kidney left in the corpse was in an advanced stage of Bright’s Disease; the kidney sent to me was in exactly similar state’. As far as Smith was concerned, this was Catherine Eddowes’ missing left kidney, and he went about the business of confirming it. ‘I made the kidney over to the police surgeon,’ he writes, ‘instructing him to consult with the most eminent men in the profession and send a report without delay.’27

  Dr Gordon Brown was once again in charge and as instructed he consulted with the man. He was Mr Henry Sutton, a senior surgeon, also of the London Hospital, and according to Smith ‘one of the greatest authorities living on the kidney and its disease’. Sutton agreed with Brown’s autopsy and the original assessment of Openshaw, adding, ‘He would pledge his reputation that the kidney submitted to them had been put in spirits within a few hours of its removal from the body.’28

  If this is correct, it substantially ups the ante in favour of the kidney coming from Eddowes. ‘The body of anyone done to death by violence,’ wrote Smith, ‘is not taken to the dissecting room, but must await an inquest, never held before the following day at the soonest.’ This was electric stuff for Commissioner Smith, Sutton’s conclusions ‘effectively disposing of all hoaxes in connection with it’.

  A very different point of view was brewing up in another part of town, and the City & Met were once again in conflict. The last thing Warren wanted was for the kidney to belong to Eddowes, because if it did, Scotland Yard would be forced to take cognisance of ‘the Tall Man’ in Mr Marsh’s shop. It was one thing to try to manipulate the press after Goulston Street, but in this instance the Telegraph had got there first: ‘The suspicious circumstance of the tall, clerical-looking individual who called at the shop of Miss Emily Marsh, 218 Jubilee St Mile End Road, has not been properly accounted for.’29

  Too late for Scotland Yard to do anything about that except keep its head down and pray the newspapers dropped it. The Yard had maintained an absolute silence in respect of this ‘Tall Man’. Warren was going to have to concoct a bit of shifty paperwork to cover himself, and we discover it slipped into a report addressed to the Home Office on 6 November 1888. A majority of this document is the usual disingenuous casuistry, attempting to resurrect ‘Leather Apron’ and his Hebrew vulnerability, here repackaged as one of Warren’s humanitarian motives for washing off the wall. But it is the Lusk kidney that attracts the important agricultural. Bro Swanson writes: ‘On 18 October, Mr Lusk brought a parcel which had been addressed to him to Leman Street. The parcel contained what appeared to be a portion of a kidney. He received it on 15 October.’30

  And it is at that date we skid to a halt. Lusk did not receive the kidney on 15 October, but the following evening of 16 October
. Shifty is shifting dates. By pulling the date forward a day, Scotland Yard has effectively, and officially, written out the possibility of ‘the Tall Man’ having anything to do with the kidney. If it had arrived on 15 October, the tall Irish cleric couldn’t have posted it.

  Apologists, and there are many, might argue that this was an Anderson-like ‘slip of the pen’, but the tone of careful deceit in the rest of this document argues the opposite. The Yard, as always, are completely baffled. They’ve got a murdered woman with no kidney, and a kidney that might have been sent by her murderer. Faced with so insuperable a ‘mystery’, they chuck in the towel, can’t make head nor tail of it. ‘The result of combined medical opinion’, opined Shifty, ‘is it is the kidney of a human adult, not charged with fluid, as it would have been in the case of a body handed over for purposes of dissection in a hospital, but rather as it would be in a case where it was taken from a body so destined. In other words similar kidneys might and could be obtained from any dead person upon whom a postmortem had been made from any cause by students or a dissecting room porter.’31

  Or, come to think of it, it might have come from a murdered woman. Wasn’t there some sort of dead person out there with a cut throat and her kidney missing? Did not the fact that Lusk’s kidney was ‘not charged with fluid’ virtually guarantee that it had not come from a dissecting room?

  Far from bothering themselves with such baffling trivialities, the police instead added a deranged ‘Hospital Porter’ to their cast list. This was useful. Did they interview all hospital porters, as they attempted to track down the ‘Insane Medical Student’ and the rest of their ludicrous non-starters? Even a drudge at the Home Office had written in the margin of Swanson’s document: ‘Was any such postmortem made within a week in the E., or E.C. districts?’

  Scotland Yard had resorted to these phantom walk-ons so often that a London correspondent of the New York Herald decided to investigate. Under the strapline ‘The Medical Student is Knocked on the Head’, he reported his findings, gleaned at one or two hospitals and their attendant medical schools.

  ‘The Anatomy Act is one of the most stringent there is,’ said a source at one school. ‘Besides, the bodies are injected with preserving fluid, and everyone could detect the presence of arsenic. There is a gentleman in charge of the room from the time it opens until it closes. No one can pass in or out without his knowledge. And so strict are the rules that even if a part is left in an untidy state, the Demonstrator at once brings it to the Warden’s notice. The laws regarding the dissection of bodies are exceedingly strict. There is an Inspector of Anatomy, who is responsible to the Home Secretary for every body obtained.’

  Given the clamour generated by these murders and the subsequent arrival of the kidney, had any hospital declared a kidney missing? I don’t think so. I don’t think so because the Met would’ve flung themselves upon it like heaven-sent vindication.

  But let us suppose our hoaxer had managed to swipe a kidney, as Swanson suggests. Unlikely, but not impossible. It only becomes impossible when you factor in the rest of the hoaxer’s dilemma. Obtaining a kidney is the least of it. He’s got to procure a kidney with credentials.

  Nobody had mentioned that Catherine Eddowes was suffering from any disease, let alone specified it, until Dr Openshaw examined the kidney on 18 October. Yet here is our ‘hoaxer’ consigning his kidney to the post on 15 October. Not only did he manage to steal a diseased kidney, but he got the specific malady right, pre-empting Openshaw and Sutton by a minimum of three days. Forget uraemia, forget cancer – he wanted one with glomerulonephritis. This hoaxing medical student was apparently able to diagnose the pathological condition of a murdered body he’d never seen, accurately corroborating a police autopsy that was indisputably unavailable to him.

  According to Commissioner Smith, ‘two inches [of the renal artery] remained in the corpse, one inch attached to the kidney’.32 His description is confirmed by an account in the Telegraph on 20 October: ‘Only a small portion of the renal artery adheres to the kidney, while in the case of the Mitre Square victim a large portion of this artery adhered to the body.’ Full marks again to the ‘hoaxer’ and his attention to detail. With more artery in the body than attached to the kidney, he’s even managed to get his respective measurements right.

  Prepare for entry into the house of mirrors.

  Following the above report in the Telegraph, a reporter from The Times called on Dr Gordon Brown that same night. ‘So far as I could form an opinion,’ said Brown, ‘I do not see any substantial reason why this portion of kidney should not be the portion of the one taken from the murdered woman.’ In the same interview he says, ‘The probability is slight of it being a portion of the murdered woman.’ Put another way, it is likely to be Eddowes’ kidney, but it is also likely not to be.33

  These contradictions constitute the beginning and the end of Brown’s interview with The Times. The Bro doc is therefore either inexplicably confused, or suffering a dose of Bagster Phillips’s disease. More confusing is what Brown has to say about the renal artery. Contradicting Smith, he says, ‘as has been stated, there is no portion of the renal artery adhering to it’.

  Stated by whom? Only a dozen hours before, the Telegraph had stated precisely the opposite. Who had ‘unstated’ it? Whoever this anonymous intermediary was, Brown confirmed their unstatement that there was no renal artery, ‘it having been trimmed up, so, consequently, there could be no correspondence established between the portion of the body from which it was cut’.

  Commissioner Smith was therefore hallucinating? He was, after all, prone to such ‘turns’, foolishly imagining, for example, that some writing on a wall was ‘evidence’ rather than criticism of a lousy bootmaker, ha ha. What does Brown mean by there being no ‘correspondence’ between the Lusk and Eddowes kidney? What about the left and right kidneys suffering from the same malady? ‘It is symmetrical, both organs being alike involved.’34 Bright’s Disease isn’t mentioned, and is apparently no longer of consequence. Mirroring Bro Openshaw, Bro Brown is now coy about the presence of kidney disease as established in his own autopsy.

  What we have here is two doctors telling the truth, and two Freemasons lying. Either they or City Commissioner Smith are manipulating reality. But let us return to another Freemason, Bro Swanson, and his bucketful of Victorian whitewash: ‘The postmarks on the parcel are so indistinct that it cannot be said whether the parcel was posted in the E. or E.C. districts, and there is no envelope with the letter, and the City Police are therefore unable to prosecute any enquiries upon it.’35

  I beg your pardon? What’s an envelope got to do with it? Did not the kidney come to Lusk in a package, and was not this package addressed in handwriting exactly as any envelope would have been? So what relevance has a non-existent envelope?

  In his report of 27 October, Inspector McWilliam of the City Police had correctly written that Lusk received the kidney on 16 October, and that ‘every effort is being made to trace the sender’,36 a statement converted by Swanson into ‘the City Police are therefore unable to prosecute any enquiries’.

  The problem with many of these MEPO reports is that they are the literary equivalent of jet-lag, glazed eyes being inadequate to deal with this volume of deceit. This package is infinitely more valuable than Swanson’s smokescreen around a non-existent envelope.

  Being too large for a normal postbox, the size of the package had already restricted it to a small number of post offices. How was it wrapped and secured – with glue, string, sealing wax? Did the way it was packed suggest intelligence, or the efforts of an oaf? Was the handwriting on the box the same as the barmy scrawl inside, or was it more considered, to help it through the mails? Swanson refers to ‘postmarks’, although there could only have been one. There were eight choices in London in 1888:

  There were twelve deliveries daily in the EC district, a fact that would have been of extreme importance to any honest detective. Had the time of posting been shortly after the enquiries
made by ‘the Tall Man’ in Marsh’s shop, it would have put a noose around his neck. But that’s why the ‘postmarks’, in the plural, were ‘indistinct’.

  On 22 October a letter from a postal worker was published in the Evening News:

  I would beg to offer a few suggestions with regard to tracing the origin of the revolting package stated to have been received by parcels post to Mr Lusk. It may not generally be known, but if the box in question was sent by parcels post, it must have been handed in at a post office by someone, and the printed label of that office would be affixed thereto. The necessary postage in stamps would most probably be attached by the sender, it being against the regulations for the poster to do so himself. Doubtless, if application were made to the Secretary of the General Post Office, he would furnish the police authorities with the time of handing in.

  I’m afraid this would require a policeman with a brain bigger than a pea. But even he could ask if the package had been handed in by a tall man dressed as a vicar. With or without a distinct postmark, ink comparisons could have been made with stamp pads at various post offices. Out of the question, of course. Like the writing on the wall, the Lusk package had got the Swanson ‘smudge’, and was therefore beyond baffling. Any detective, any schoolboy, could have isolated this package to a specific area and time of posting. But the E and EC district was obviously a little too close for ‘Tall Man’ comfort.

  On 19 October the Telegraph and the Star were the first to publish the abbreviated text of the letter, captioned ‘From Hell’, that had accompanied Lusk’s receipt of the kidney: ‘Enclosed in the box with it was a letter worded in revolting terms, the writer stating that he had eaten “tother piece”, and threatened to send Mr Lusk the “knif that took it if you only wate a whil longer”. The letter was dated “From Hell”, E.4 and signed “Catch me when you can.”’

  That’s it for the quotes. There was no mention of the spelling of the word ‘kidney’. However, on the same day, someone from the pool of ‘hoaxers’ wrote, ‘I wonder how Mr Lusk liked the half of a kidne I sent him Last Monday [15 October].’ Thus, even the Ripper confirms Swanson was manipulating the date of postage.