A finger as a surrogate prick, ejaculating hate:
my finger stabed them
my nails cut them in pieces
It must not be forgotten that the McKenzie letter was received fifteen days before Bond revealed evidence of this wound, unequivocally proving that the writer was aware of something so extraordinarily specific as a ‘stab’ upon McKenzie’s vagina with a fingernail. In respect of these wounds Bond wrote, ‘the murderer must have raised the clothes with his left hand and inflicted the injuries with his right’. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that this was another Ripper hit: ‘I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the Whitechapel Murders, viz: sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully and resolutely cut, with subsequent mutilation. Each mutilation indicating sexual thoughts and a desire to mutilate the abdomen and sexual regions. I am of the opinion that the murder was committed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel Murders.’34
This was bad news for Phillips and the boys, and Bond’s conclusions were therefore not made public. He refers to ‘mutilation’, a word of somewhat less discretion than the ‘marks’ selected for dissemination by Bro Phillips. Bond had blown the gaff, and Phillips was now obliged to include fingernails in his evidence – or, I hazard, Dr Bond might have wanted to know why he had not. Bro Phillips must thus dissemble, once again perverting the course of justice.
‘There were some marks on the abdomen which he didn’t mention before,’ he admitted at the 14 August inquest. The vicious stab to McKenzie’s vagina was presented as: ‘The small one was exceptional, which was typical of a finger-nail mark.’ Nothing specified, and nothing in context. The average punter reading this would think McKenzie had a flea bite. It’s no wonder the press thought these mutilations were the marks of an amateur’s blade. Misinformation was Phillips’s intention. At all costs he had to try to dismiss any relationship between this atrocity and the series preceding it. To tell the truth was to tell the world that Jack the Ripper was still alive, well, and active.
Dr Bond was not a Freemason, and nor was Charles Warren’s replacement as Met Commissioner James Monro. Both were convinced the Ripper was responsible for the death in Castle Alley. Unless there were two Freemasons cutting throats in Whitechapel, then the Ripper killed Alice McKenzie.
By ignoring the murder of Johnnie Gill at Bradford in December 1888, the police had created an eight-month gap between the slaying of Mary Kelly and that of Alice McKenzie. The hiatus is utterly artificial, but nevertheless did its job, giving substance to fantasies of ‘incarceration’ (Anderson) and ‘suicide’ (for liars like Macnaghten).
Without Bro Dr Phillips, Macnaghten is a dead duck. If the Ripper killed McKenzie (which would require explaining away the 30 July letter if he didn’t) then Messrs Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog are bullshit, and his famous ‘memoranda’ nothing more than the paper to wrap it up in.
1) Kosminski: A non-starter from day one. According to Macnaghten himself, Kosminski was ‘removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889’, so he couldn’t have killed McKenzie (McKenzie is marginalised by Freemasologists for precisely this reason). Plus, Phillips said of McKenzie’s mutilations, ‘They were caused by a broad hand,’ and as we’ve heard from Bond, ‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength.’ Ergo, we’ve got a powerful man with big hands. Kosminski was a five-foot squirt with hands the size of a child’s. Goodbye.
2) Michael Ostrog: It is proved the McKenzie letter could have been written by nobody but her murderer. Only a Masonic assassin could have written it. If Ostrog was a Freemason and Macnaghten knew it, he should have included that fact in his ‘memoranda’, and given it a little credibility. If he wasn’t a Freemason, then he wasn’t Jack the Ripper, but simply a half-witted con artist whose timely disappearance in 1888 facilitated the kind of candidacy you could have found from any name on a toilet wall. In respect of Ostrog, Mr Paul Begg writes of recent evidence suggesting that he was probably imprisoned in France: ‘This discovery has naturally shed doubt upon the real value of the “Macnaghten Memorandum”.’ He adds: ‘Why should someone [Ostrog] whose whereabouts were unknown, who therefore wasn’t even known to be in London, let alone Whitechapel, be listed among the top three suspects?’ A very good question. ‘Sadly,’ continues Mr Begg, ‘the answer is that we don’t know and it seems futile to guess.’ No guessing is necessary. Macnaghten made it up.
3) Montague Druitt: Druitt was dead and buried, and therefore would have had difficulty murdering Alice McKenzie.
The ‘Macnaghten Memoranda’, Bro ‘Swanson’s Marginalia’ and the rest of the twaddle are a waste of ink, best left to ‘respectable historians’. Insemination of these fictions has perverted research for over fifty years, and coupled with Bro Stowell’s garbage about the Duke of Clarence, almost destroyed it.
‘Patrolled by policemen, who cannot see, hear or think’, was the judgement of the New York Herald in respect of events in Whitechapel.35 This was echoed by the New York Tribune: Jack was murdering ‘without fear of interference from the London police’, who were ‘blind, stupid, blundering, and of impregnable apathy’.36
None of the players in this ugly saga did what they did – whether washing evidence off a wall, or nominating Kosminski – by accident. Their deafness to the pleas of Henrietta Barnett and their blindness to the psychopath laughing in their face wasn’t by accident. Warren, Anderson, Macnaghten and a host of others enmeshed themselves in this enduring corruption known as ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’, to avoid the telling of it.
I’ve a certain sympathy for those who performed the bit parts, but little for the major players. They were wretches, in a wretched deceit, unworthy of the mercy of the years. We are on the shore of a great scandal, and a greater tragedy, and have barely set our sail.
14
‘Orpheus’
One man’s wickedness may easily become all men’s curse.
Publilius Syrus, 100 BC
The unluckiest day of Florence Chandler’s life was the day of her introduction to James Maybrick. It happened in March 1880, aboard the SS Baltic out of New York heading for his home town of Liverpool. She was seventeen and he was forty-one. During the 150 hours of this benighted voyage they became inseparable; it was what the mags call a ‘lightning romance’. Florence was pretty and bright and educated; plus, there was no shortage of money. She wore French dresses and her expensive shoes clattered delightfully on the iron stairways. First-class deck-chairs looked back at America, a charming Englishman escorted her into one of them, and this is what she told him.
She was born in Mobile, Alabama, of the Southern aristocracy, and was a frequent visitor to Europe, having been at school for a while in Germany. She and her mother, with whom she was travelling, were on their way to Paris, where her elder brother Halbrook was studying medicine. Her mother was a Baroness, the title coming from her third, now defunct, marriage to a Prussian cavalry officer, Baron Adolph von Roques. Her first husband, William Chandler, a banker and Florie’s dad, had died before Florie was born, and there was obviously a ‘daddy’ thing in her attraction to the charming and dependable-looking Maybrick.
Here’s what he told her. One of five surviving brothers, he was born on 24 October 1838. His father was a printer of undistinguished origin – but don’t let that put you off. Shipping slaves out of Africa and tobacco and cotton back home had made Liverpool one of the richest cities on earth, and James was riding the tide. He was a cotton broker, dividing his time between his company’s head offices in Tithebarn Street and its American branch in Norfolk, Virginia. Although he probably exaggerated his wealth to Florence, he was successful, becoming director of the Norfolk Cotton Exchange in 1881.
He would have told her about his famous musical brother Michael, climbing the bills with Charles Santley and about to overtake him as a star. He probably also told her about his other brothers – Thomas, in business in Manchester, and handsome young Edwin, also in the cotton bu
siness, who was later to become Florie’s lover. Meanwhile there was flattery for the Baroness and her command of languages, ditto for her daughter’s radiant blonde hair. They drank champagne in the opulence of the Baltic’s saloon, watched the moon rise over the Atlantic – and Christ, was a nightmare assembling.
This is what he didn’t tell her. He didn’t tell her that he was a ‘seducer, an adulterer, and a debauchee’. Plus, he had a serious drug problem. At some time in the 1870s he’d contracted malaria, and arsenic had been prescribed for the fever. Maybrick continued to self-prescribe it for the rest of his life.
I don’t know what the buzz is from this deadly toxin, but its use wasn’t entirely uncommon amongst certain gents in the nineteenth century. In controlled doses it was credited as a kind of predecessor of Viagra, and if that was true Maybrick must have had a permanent hard-on, because his consumption was enormous. ‘He used constantly to come to me for medications,’ deposed his local pharmacist, ‘usually for liquor arsenicles [which] he would sometimes take as often as five times a day.’1 There were one or two other little details of his life that James doubtless withheld, not least of which was that he may already have been married – at least, he had fathered five kids with a woman called Sarah Ann Robertson. A Bible belonging to her was recently discovered with a dedication from James: ‘To my Darling Piggy, from her Affectionate Husband J.M.’2 Whether they were actually married or not is unknown, but when she died in 1927 she evidently thought she was: her death certificate refers to ‘Sarah Ann Maybrick, otherwise Robertson’.3
Obviously in starry-eyed innocence of the arsenic and the adultery, Florence had apparently consented to become Mrs Maybrick by the time the Baltic docked at Liverpool.
The couple married in St James Church, Piccadilly, London, on 21 July 1881. Michael was James’s best man, and he most decidedly didn’t like the look of his brother’s bride. Years later, in a house as sick as Maybrick himself, a tearful Florence would confide in one of the few friends she had, Mrs Humphreys, the Maybricks’ cook. ‘This is all through Michael Maybrick,’ she said, claiming that ‘he had always had a spite against her since her marriage’.4 That was something of an understatement. Michael hated her, as his actions in the latter part of this narrative will prove. Perhaps she attracted him in some way, and he hated her for that?
After the wedding there was a quick honeymoon in Bournemouth before the pair returned to America. For the next few years they would commute between Virginia and Liverpool, where they finally settled in 1884. Early in 1888 they moved to a grand house opposite Liverpool Cricket Club in the upmarket suburb of Aigburth. It was an impressive residence called Battlecrease House, with a complement of servants, and peacocks strutting in its five or six acres. By now the Maybricks had two children, Gladys and James, nicknamed ‘Bobo’, who their parents doted on.
It might have looked the perfect picture of Victorian family bliss. But it wasn’t. James’s business wasn’t going well, and what with her Parisian frocks and classy lifestyle, Florence was living beyond her husband’s means. Uncomfortable elements of his past were also seeping through. Adultery was back on the agenda, possibly with Sarah Robertson, or maybe another woman, but either way, Florence had become aware of it, and the couple slept in separate rooms.5
A generation younger than her husband, Florie also took lovers. She fell in love with one of his associates at the Cotton Exchange, a handsome young bachelor called Alfred Brierley; and when she wasn’t kissing him she was kissing Edwin, James’s younger brother. Florence was a sexual butterfly, and James an arsenic-ridden old moth out of money. By mid-1888 she had run up some atrocious debts behind his back – silk dresses, handmade boots – and was becoming frightened of a knock on the door. She was borrowing money from wherever she could, including loan sharks in London and her brother-in-law Michael. ‘She has come to me time and again for money,’ he was to say, ‘and she always got it.’6 She borrowed £100 from Michael, although this would be carefully manipulated at her ‘trial’ to become a loan from an acquaintance called Matilda Briggs. But Mrs Briggs was of no inclination to lend Florence so much as a handkerchief to blow her nose in, and perjured the best part of her arse off in the witness box.
Michael lent Florence the money, but deeply resented it. He hated her, with her expensive airs and graces and indiscreet sexual favours, selling it like a lady when she was worth no more than wreckage you could fuck in Whitechapel for fourpence.
That’s what I think he thought, and that’s what I think Jack the Ripper thought too. The man who chose Whitechapel as the focus for his revenge bore a similar resentment over £100 loaned and never repaid. ‘I suppose you would like to know why I am killing so many women?’ posits Jack in a letter dated 23 October 1888. Together with all the usual hints and teases, he converts Florence Elizabeth Maybrick into ‘three women’, and her American identity is hinted at by a reference to ‘San Francisco’.
… the answer is simply this. When I was in San Francisco in July 1888, I lent three women from London about 100 pounds sterling to pay some debts they had got into, promising to pay me back in a months time, and seeing that they had a ladylike look I lent the money. Well, when the month passed by I asked for my money, but I found that they had sneaked off to London. I swore that i would have my revenge, the revenge was this. That I would go to London and kill as many women as possible. I’ve killed 9 as yet. you’ve not found all the corpses yet. Ha. Ha. I’ve told Sir C. Warren that in a letter of 22nd inst [unknown]. In the last woman I killed I cut out the kidneys and eat them. you’ll find the body in one of the sewers in the East End. The [leg] you found at Whitehall does not belong to the trunk you found there. The police alias po-lice, think themselves devilish clever I suppose. they’ill never catch me at this rate you donkeys, you double faced asses, you had better take the blood hounds away or I will kill them. I’m on the scent of those women who swindled me so basely, living like well to do ladies on the money they sneaked from me, never mind that, I’ll have em yet, afore I’m done, damn em. To tell you the truth you ought to be obliged to me for killing such a deuced lot of virmin, why they are ten times worse than men.
He signs himself from the London suburb where Lilly Vass had apparently gone into service before her supposed trip to the Isle of Wight:
I remain etc
Jack the Ripper
alias
H.J.C. Battersea
I think this text is about as near to a confession of motive as we’re ever going to get. Knowing what this aberrant brain had in store for Florence, it’s dispiriting to read. Money owed, and these ‘three women’, gnaw into Jack’s disease. ‘Three women done me wrong in Whitechapel,’ declares another letter:
I will cut
out There
Abdomen I dare say you
Know what
That means
I am Jack the Ripper
Whitechapel
Three women done me
wrong in Whitechapel
so I will kill every
woman there.
because of them
‘The mind has mountains’, wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and we’re poised to move into the psychopathic heights of Michael Maybrick’s thinking. Every facet of these terrible crimes, from the butchery in the East End streets to the murder of James Maybrick in an exclusive Liverpool suburb, was carefully planned by the same remarkable mind. Michael was possessed of a catastrophic ego of limitless wickedness, and must have considered himself one of the smartest bastards alive, a genius no doubt, especially as the extermination of his brother was but a stepping stone to his dream target, the little whore, ‘the mother of abominations’, as she’s described in Masonry’s oracle, the Book of Revelation.
Jack’s generosity with his Masonic clues was no accident. It was stage-managed, and it was this flagrant debris that panicked the executive and sustained the Ripper’s immunity. It was reasonably assumed that anyone who left such incriminating junk in his wake must have
been mad, and thus Charles Warren et al. took the view that the Ripper was an insane Freemason, and the psychopath’s intention was precisely that.
James Maybrick was an active Freemason until the day of his death on 11 May 1889. As an immutable fact, his Freemasonry is the most important element to understand before anybody can hope to get traction on ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’. Hence James Maybrick’s posthumous Masonic wipe-out. His association with Freemasonry has been as comprehensively and vigorously stripped from his being as has Freemasonry from the Ripper himself. The monumental falsehood that neither was a Freemason is propagated by the wheezing outfit I call ‘Freemasology’, and it keeps up its mirrors around this single nefarious root.
Ripper correspondence abounds with references to Liverpool and the USA, Americanisms appearing frequently: ‘quit’, ‘buckled’, ‘side-walk’, ‘so long’. The first letter – or at least one of the first – known as ‘Dear Boss’, is redolent of an American or someone with American connections, and many people at the time, including Arthur Conan Doyle, thought the assassin might be a Yank. Michael Maybrick was laying what’s known in screenwriting as ‘pipe’. The intention is to bury elements in a narrative that will come together as an inevitable outcome when they are eventually revealed. In terms of fiction, Alfred Hitchcock was a master. In terms of fact, so was Jack the Ripper. He was laying pipe to point a plausible finger of accusation at the man and woman he’d elected to destroy.
From a Scotland Yard perspective of 1888 (had there been a Commissioner of Integrity), a thumbnail sketch of the Ripper would have indicated a powerful and intelligent man, subject to intermittent homicidal mania. A Freemason, or a man who knew a lot about Freemasonry. A man who killed only at weekends, and therefore possibly commuted to London to do it. Moreover, a man who might be an American, or who at least had connections to the USA.
They All Love Jack Page 52
