They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  THE CENTRAL NEWS LIMITED

  5 New Bridge Street

  London Oct 5 1888

  Dear Mr Williamson

  At 5 minutes to 9 o’clock tonight we received the following letter the envelope of which I enclose by which you will see it is in the same handwriting as the previous communications

  “5 October 1888

  Dear Friend

  In the name of God hear me I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore god will bless the hand that slew her, for the women of Moab and Midian shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit forever. Do as I do and the light of glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes yes three must be ripped, will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke, well well Jacky’s a very practical joker ha ha ha Keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat

  Yours truly

  Jack the Ripper”

  Yours truly

  T J Bulling

  At the top of his letter Bulling says he encloses the envelope, ‘by which you will see it is in the same handwriting as the previous communications’. Thanks for that, and I’m quite sure they could see it. But why then could they not see the letter? It can’t be lost, or it couldn’t be copied. Jack swears he’s got nothing to do with the Scotland Yard murder, but who’s accusing him? Certainly not the police. They’re doing everything they can to disassociate him from it, and this, of course, is part of their effort. No other Ripper letter was transcribed, so what’s the deal with this one? Why did the police not demand the document itself? Warren and his team of barcodes had just stuck posters up all over East London reproducing the first two communications – ‘Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station.’ So why so coy about Jack’s latest bleat of triumph?

  The answer, of course, is because the text had been manipulated to satisfy police requirements, and leaked in part to the press, which explains why the original has never been seen. Its author (or rather, the pen that translated him) is anxious to disassociate himself from the Whitehall torso, offering even to do the detective work for them: ‘I will hunt down and destroy her murderer’.

  Well, thank you for the sentiment, Jack, but anyone of an enquiring mind might imagine this is more an expression of police paranoia than anything as absurd as the Ripper’s code of ethics. This was a man who was to cut out Mary Kelly’s cunt, and I think we’re justified in treating any declarations of his ‘honour’ with all due caution. I also think we’re entitled to treat this transparently prompted fakery out of Bulling with the greatest contempt. It reeks of the sidewinding chicanery of Swanson, who invented his own history and knew nothing of Warren’s. So anxious were the ‘eyes and ears’ to camouflage this West End outing, they overlooked the very element that gives it away.

  Just as Jack chose Conduit Street out of 28,000 streets in London, so here he chooses ‘Moab’ out of 3,237 names in the Bible. Bro Swanson was too hypnotised to realise it, but both had intimate connections with his boss. The words ‘Moab’ and ‘Midian’ do not appear by accident. They are not the average patter of a murderer, and most particularly not in the context of this torso secreted in the style of a sawn-in-half Moabite ‘foundation sacrifice’ at New Scotland Yard.

  It was all part of the ‘Funny Little Game’, coordinated to embarrass ‘the biggest fool in London’. Putting aside the rueful episode of the Moabite Stone, Warren’s sojourn in the lands of Moab and Midian was amongst the most uncomfortable memories of his life. It was there he put a murderer to death; it was there he indulged his passion for ‘Biblical diggings’, turning up foundations where sawn-in-half girls were not entirely uncommon. Just as a chill of sickening nostalgia was in wait on an East End wall, so too in the foundations of his own new buildings was this homicidal/Biblical joke from his past.

  The Ripper was on Warren’s case, and Warren was playing by the Ripper’s rules. Get into Warren’s history and that’s where the Ripper was, persecuting him with Masonic esoterica and cod Biblical vernacular that could have been lifted right out of the Old Testament. Jack will ‘bless the hand that slew her’, and ‘their blood shall mingle with the dust’. It is not I, but the Metropolitan Police, that gave this letter its credibility, ‘Do as I do and the light of glory shall shine upon you.’ Ha ha …

  This text, with its Americanism ‘quit forever’, is as revealing of the Ripper as it is of Warren himself. His tormentor was holding up a mirror, and if Bro Charlie had had the balls, he could have seen the Ripper’s face. He dared not look. He couldn’t sponge this one away, so he stayed away from Scotland Yard, hoping to gull the public into believing that an entirely different killer was abroad in the metropolis. (No one bought into it but the authors of The A to Z.)

  Two weeks later Jack wrote again, and this missive too was withheld. But without Bulling’s accommodation in calligraphics, it presented a more credible scenario. No denials here: the Ripper was claiming the torso as his own work. ‘One of the two women I told you about was a Chelsea girl [almost certainly Lilly Vass] and the other a Battersea girl. I had to overcome great difficulties in bringing the bodies [sic] where I hid them. I am now in Battersea.’39

  Was there another body in the foundations of New Scotland Yard? It is quite possible. As will soon become apparent, the police had barely troubled to search the place. Covering up for a criminal had assumed more importance than his crimes, and on every conceivable level Warren was inhibiting the process of detection.

  Warren was indeed a ‘Masonic stooge’, rushing around like a headless chicken. He was constantly in denial. ‘Juwes’ had to be denied, grapes had to be denied, Packer’s man with the ‘educated voice’ and the sketches that went with him had to be denied, and the torso screeching provenance was denied along with them.

  It wasn’t always thus. Paradoxically, it was in the lands of Moab that (the then Captain) Warren had shown the wherewithal of a policeman. In 1882 a team of his archaeological associates, led by Professor Edward Palmer and Lieutenant William Gill of the Palestine Exploration Fund, had been slaughtered by Bedouins. Warren got up a posse that tracked down and captured the perpetrators, ‘avenging’ their crime by ‘promptly executing the murderers’.40 But he dared show no such vengeful initiative in 1888.

  Without it yet having been revealed who had done it, the scandalous mopping-up at Goulston Street was beginning to leak, and on 8 October the Evening News headlined the ‘STUPIDITY OF A POLICE OFFICER’. Two days later the truth was out, and condemnation avalanched on the ‘worthless’ Commissioner: ‘It is clear the Detective Department at Scotland Yard is in an utterly worthless and hopeless condition. That were there a capable Director of Criminal Investigation, the scandalous exhibition of stupidity and ineptitude revealed in the East End inquests, and immunity enjoyed by criminals, murder after murder, would not have angered and disgusted public feeling as it has undoubtedly done.’ Telling it like it was from the Telegraph. And where was this incapable Director of Criminal Investigation, ‘Andy Handy’? Why, he was ordering another café au lait up the nearest rue in Paris.

  W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette didn’t have a lot of time for the preposterous encumbrance either: ‘The Chief official who is responsible for the detection of the murderer is as invisible to Londoners as the murderer himself. You may seek Dr Anderson at Scotland Yard, you may look for him in Whitehall Place, but you will not find him.’ And why, at the height of the most febrile crisis in the history of British criminal investigation, was that? Because Robert Anderson was ‘taking a pleasant holiday in Switzerland’. (In reality he was in Paris on behalf of Salisbury’s government, colluding with The Times in the expectation of destroying Charles Parnell.*)

&n
bsp; Meanwhile the warped house of cards was in imminent danger of collapse. Warren was drowning. His inclination must have been to run, and on 10 October 1888, that’s exactly what he did.

  Less than a week before, Henry Matthews had written to his private secretary, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, recommending that it ‘is essential that some visible evidence of effort – of ingenuity – of vigorous & intelligent exertion should be on record’. Without it, continued Matthews, ‘Sir C.W. will not save himself’. What was needed was a bit of high-profile spin, ‘some visible evidence of effort’, and just such an asinine diversion took place four days later. Thirteen thousand coppers had ‘not a shadow of a clue’, so Warren decided to hand the case over to animals. He threatened to buy a puppy, train it up and have it ready for next March (a prospect that must have filled the Purger with dread). In the meantime he hired a couple of bloodhounds, whose names I’ve withheld to protect the innocent.41

  Future plans involved tracking the Fiend from a crime scene to his ‘lair’, and to that end a test was organised wherein Charlie would assume the role of Jack, and the dogs would sniff along as a pair of manhunters. Considering that Warren himself had declared the Ripper ‘left no clue’, we can only wonder what it was they were expected to follow. Presumably they were supposed to smell something, but as even Dr Bagster Phillips had pointed out, they were more likely to want to smell the victim than the murderer. That didn’t deter Warren, who’d probably offered the hounds a whiff of his strap.

  To ensure that the exercise was representative, he selected an area with the closest topographical similarity he could find to Whitechapel, i.e. Hyde Park. Three hundred and eighty-eight resplendent acres of boating lake and flowerbeds up the road from Kensington Palace was just the ticket. The dogs were probably told that Rotten Row (rue du Roi, where fashionable people made their promenade) was a bit like Buck’s Row, EC; and with your nose on the deck, what’s the difference?

  Anyway, at 7 a.m. on 10 October, off they all took, the Commissioner sporting a pair of knickerbockers in ingenious replication of the outfit in which the Fiend was known to commute through East London. The hounds gave desultory chase, and Warren was last seen rushing up the Serpentine and vanishing around the back of the tea rooms. Everyone had a good laugh, apart from the authorities. Doggerel from the journalist George Sims gave a flavour of the pantomime.

  The brow of Sir Charles it was gloomy and sad,

  He was slapped by the Tory and kicked by the Rad;

  The populace clamoured without in the yard

  For Matthews, Home Sec, to be feathered and tarred;

  ‘Do something – do something!’ Lord Salisbury cried,

  ‘We’ve done all we can!’ worried Warren replied:

  ‘We keep on arresting as fast as we can,

  And hope soon or late we shall get the right man.’

  Then, goaded by taunts to the depths of despair,

  The poor First Commissioner tore at his hair,

  And fell upon Matthews’ breast with a sob.

  But the Whitechapel vampire was still on the job!

  At last when the city was maddened with fears,

  And the force had dissolved into impotent tears,

  They brought him of bloodhounds the best to be found,

  And the ‘tecs’ and the dogs sought the murderer’s ground;

  Then the bow-wows were loosened with noses to earth,

  They trotted away mid the bystanders’ mirth.

  The bloodhounds ran north and the bloodhounds ran south,

  While Matthews looked on with a wide-open mouth.

  ‘Good heavens!’ he cried, ‘Are you dotty, Sir Charles?

  Is it possible you, with your stern common sense,

  Believe in this melodramatic pretence?’

  Warren had nothing to offer but ‘melodramatic pretence’. The hysteria in government must have been incredible, featuring interdepartmental hallucinations of the headlines ‘RIPPER CAUGHT – PROMINENT FREEMASON – THE YARD HAD COVERED HIM UP’.

  Nobody in their right mind was interested in arresting that, any more than they had been inspired to imprison regal buggers abusing boys at Cleveland Street. The machine’s job was to keep this scandal up East, and providing nobody panicked, between manipulation and bluster they believed they could get away with this, brazen a way through; and, as history is my witness, they did.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy, because Jack had a surprise for them in the vaults. While Warren twiddled time away in humiliating make-believe, proposing to buy a puppy for fifteen quid and train it, another dog was already on the case.

  The dog’s name was ‘Smoker’. It belonged to a journalist called Jasper Waring, and within two minutes they were to expose the ‘meticulous search’ of the new police buildings as a charade.42

  ‘The police have had another discovery forced upon them,’ mocked the Evening News. ‘A gentleman who had great faith in the scenting powers of his Spitzbergen Terrier offered its services to the police at Westminster, but the offer was declined without thanks.’ Ignoring the ‘tailor’s dummies’, Waring obtained consent from the works contractor at New Scotland Yard, a Mr Grover. ‘The dog was placed in the dark vaulted recesses where the body was found,’ continued the News, ‘and the animal at once made it apparent that it had the scent of something underground. The earth was removed, and at a little more than half a foot depth, the dog seized something, which turned out to be a human leg. The police eventually made themselves useful, by wrapping the leg carefully in brown paper and taking it to the mortuary.’ The News added as an acid codicil: ‘Anybody is at liberty to make his own comment.’43

  I don’t know what these comments might have been, but I suspect they may have been influenced by the now universal public disgust felt for Warren’s police force. If its entranced Commissioner hoped to draw attention away from New Scotland Yard by hauling his silly arse around Hyde Park, he had most singularly failed. I imagine the public were asking why he didn’t take his bloodhounds into the foundations of his own building – Warren didn’t visit the vaults until 19 October – and further, why the Metropolitan Police had consistently deceived the public it purported to serve.44

  ‘The police would make a thorough search [and] this would occupy some considerable time’ (the Echo, 3 October). ‘The grounds where the remains were found were yesterday subject to rigid examination’ (The Times, 4 October). ‘The police are searching in all directions for the missing portions of the body’ (Lloyd’s, 7 October) – but not, apparently, even six inches into the dirt underneath the spot where the torso was found.

  ‘Smoker’ had tossed a potentially disastrous spanner in the works. Dr Bond was on his way, and when he got there he pronounced the leg to be human, and estimated that it ‘had been buried at least six weeks’.

  Oh dear. Did this ever put the police in Shit Street. Detective Dog had changed everything. Reality was swept aside, and suddenly the authorities were obliged to insist that the torso had been there all the time, because if the workmen were right, and the body hadn’t been there when the leg was buried, it meant that Jack had visited the vaults at New Scotland Yard twice.

  ‘The statement of the workmen,’ wrote The Times, ‘that the body found a fortnight ago had only been in place from the Saturday until the Tuesday, is a matter of the greatest difficulty to those who have investigation of the mystery.’45 We might reasonably consider this an understatement. Jack must have been there once, on or about 24 August, to bury the leg, and again on or about 29 September, to secrete the torso. Bond couldn’t yet say whether the leg belonged to the body, but that was irrelevant to the matter of public deception.

  This wasn’t some East End nut trying to hide a body, but a psychopath with a plan; and the plan looked as if it had something to do with Charlie Warren. Jack had tossed the arm in the river, and had he wished, he could just as easily have tossed the leg in too. But he didn’t wish anything of the sort, and instead on two separate occasions suffere
d the enormous hassle of bringing his body parts to New Scotland Yard.

  A ‘lack of clues’ simply wouldn’t do to explain it, because this was a clue, and by Jack’s oath on the ‘women of Moab and Midian’, let no one try to pretend the police didn’t understand it. It was they who took the letter seriously, they who selectively leaked from it, and they who ultimately withheld it. The choice of Warren’s new building wasn’t trivial – it was clearly targeted. And if such a reality became public, some very uncomfortable questions might get asked.

  Various newspapers were already speculating along these lines: ‘Perhaps this “fiendish assassin” was taunting Warren?’46 Oh dear, oh dear, that was at the very nub of it. At all costs the workmen had to be proved wrong – made to see what they hadn’t seen. And if they wouldn’t see it, then the authorities had other means at their disposal.

  John Troutbeck reconvened his coroner’s court on the morning of Monday, 22 October. The ground for his proceedings was prepared. Since the discovery of the leg the press had been the conduit for diversionary tosh, such as this from The Times, on 19 October:

  The opinion is confirmed that the body must have lain there more than the days declared by the men. It is to be remembered that when it was discovered it was not by the smell, for that was altogether unnoticed, and it is easy to account for the non-observance of any smell by the workmen when it is brought to mind that in such places deserted and starved animals frequently crawl to die, and moreover, in the excavations of old foundations like those about Westminster there are frequently cesspools which are all taken as a matter of course. A board leaning across the angle in the wall in which the body was found would have effectively concealed the parcel altogether, and it would not now have been brought to light but for the fact that some lost clothes were thought to have been discovered by accidental survey of the dark recess. Thus the men may have given honest testimony, to the best of their belief, in saying that the parcel was not there on the last Friday and Saturday in September, the fact being that they had not observed it, and anyone who has seen the place can bear testimony that it would be easy to overlook anything hidden in that darkest recess of a dark vault.