They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  I remain Dear

  old Boss

  Jack the ripper

  To dismiss this letter as a ‘hoax’ is to understand just about nothing of the Whitechapel Murderer. It was written no more than twenty-four hours before, as he put it in his letter of 19 October, he cut Kelly’s ‘prat right out’,1 mutilating her so severely that the doctors at first could barely tell what sex she was.

  This letter is truly shocking, its offensive power in no way diminished to this day. Its text is a dynamic of hate, a gloating pornography of violence towards women and denigration of the power of Warren. Everything about him is comprehensively trashed. His monarch, who knighted him, is herself deconstructed into an old whore with sperm up her backside – ‘sponk’, he calls it, and didn’t it make him laugh?

  The choice of icon is indicative of the duality of the killer’s thinking, his targets Warren and Women, authority and sex. Victoria is the ‘Mother of the Nation’, but also a woman, and therefore a whore. He brags of sodomising the Queen and cutting out the ‘kidney and cunt’ of his next victim, associating Victoria and Mary Kelly as one, then spits his hooligan venom at Warren, ‘so that you can see where my prick has been up’. It is the rage of a repugnant child.

  On the night of Thursday, 8 November Mary Kelly had been drinking heavily. At about 2 a.m. she was seen in the company of a gentleman whose description was later supplied by a witness called George Hutchinson. He lived just around the corner from Kelly in Commercial Street, and was unemployed. His ‘statement’ is worthless, but necessary to explore the chicanery of the police.

  According to Hutchinson he met Kelly in the street at about 2 a.m. She asked if he could lend her sixpence, and getting a negative, walked off saying, ‘I must go and find some money.’ On her way towards Thrawl Street a man coming in the opposite direction tapped her on the shoulder and said something, and ‘they both burst out laughing’. The man then placed his right hand around her shoulders. He ‘also had a small parcel in his left hand, with a kind of strap round it’. Hutchinson stood against the lamp of the Queen’s Head public house and watched them as they passed. ‘The man hung down his head with his hat over his eyes. I stooped down and looked him in the face. He looked at me real stern’2 – and who wouldn’t, with a stranger stooping down to peer at you for no apparent reason at two o’clock in the morning?

  Attached to Hutchinson’s statement was an addendum of creative writing courtesy of the Metropolitan Police.

  Description, age about 34 or 35, height 5 foot 6, complexion pale. Dark eyes and eyelashes. Slight moustache curled up at each end and dark hair. Very surly looking. Dress, long dark coat, collar and cuffs trimmed astrakan and a dark jacket under, light waistcoat, dark trousers, dark felt hat turned down in the middle, button boots and gaiters with white buttons, wore a very thick gold chain with linen collar, black tie with horse shoe pin, respectable appearance, walked very sharp, Jewish appearance. Can be identified.

  For a dismal night with intermittent drizzle and barely a street lamp, Hutchinson has done well. The only things missing are the inside-leg measurement and the suspect’s probable blood group.

  Except he wasn’t a suspect, he was simply a pick-up for a girl in need of money, which puts a question mark after Hutchinson’s inordinate interest in Kelly and her prospective bedfellow.

  They both went into Dorset Street. I followed them. They both stood at the corner of the court for about 3 minutes. He said something to her. She said alright my dear come along you will be comfortable. He then placed his arm on her shoulder and [she] gave him a kiss. She said she had lost her handkerchief, he then pulled his handkerchief a red one and gave it to her. They both went up the Court together. I then went to the court to see if I could see them but I could not. I stood there for about three quarters of an hour to see if they came out. They did not so I went away.3

  Twelve hours later Kelly’s room was full of doctors and cops, and we’re supposed to believe that Hutchinson was somehow indifferent to it? The police said he gave his statement three days later, on 12 November – and I get a red light. It’s only necessary to glance at the contemporary press to know that Whitechapel was incensed after Kelly’s murder. Crowds ‘hooted’ Commissioner Smith (mistaking him for Warren) at the Lord Mayor’s Parade.4 Every mouth in Whitechapel was talking about Kelly, yet for three days Hutchinson stays silent? He had stood staring up Miller’s Court for forty-five minutes, demonstrating a meticulous interest in Kelly before her death, yet is apparently insouciant after it? I simply don’t believe it. What I do believe is that Hutchinson went to the police earlier, but they dismissed his statement because like everyone else in the locality they knew Kelly had been seen alive at about 8.30 the following morning.

  Hutchinson had not seen Kelly with her killer, but the police wanted the public to believe he had. They needed a distraction from the illegality of their coroner’s court, and a mirror in front of the crime scene. Don’t look in there, Ladies and Gents, look out for the neckless Israelite. Compare Hutchinson’s statement with that of Matthew Packer. The cops went out of their way to crush the fruit-seller and the drawings he confirmed, but avidly promoted Hutchinson’s concoction, right down to the buttons on the spats.

  ‘The very exactitude of his description,’ wrote the Graphic, ‘engenders a feeling of scepticism. The witness admits that at the time he saw him he did not suspect the person of being the Whitechapel Assassin; yet at two o’clock in the morning, in a badly lighted thoroughfare he observed more than most of us would observe in broad daylight.’5

  George Hutchinson is another diversion in the tradition of ‘Israel Schwartz’, a ‘witness’ initially dismissed by the police, then wheeled out and championed when it became expedient.

  The man Hutchinson saw, with the obligatory red handkerchief, may well have been a punter, but he was long gone before daybreak, and had absolutely nothing to do with Jack the Ripper.

  ‘Dorset Street,’ thumbnailed a reporter, ‘consists of a nest of courts, most of the houses of which are let off in furnished rooms. Miller’s Court, Dorset St, runs westward out of Commercial Street, within a hundred yards of Toynbee Hall.’6

  The alarm came at 10.45 that same morning of 9 November. Kelly was late with her rent, and a servant of her landlord, Thomas Bowyer, was dispatched to collect it. He got no answer at the door, and turned his attention to the nearest window, a pane of which was broken. Mr Bowyer was able to push a curtain aside, and saw ‘two lumps of flesh lying on the table’.

  The cops arrived at about eleven. In the ensuing hours almost every Metropolitan policeman named in this book turned up, including Sir Charles Warren.7 According to subsequent disinformation, Warren had resigned the previous day, 8 November, because of some ill-advised forays into journalism. Irrespective of that, he was telegraphed, and the first officer on the scene, Inspector Walter Beck, sent word for Inspectors Reid and Abberline.

  A variety of uniforms and plain-clothes were quickly outside 29 Dorset Street. The Telegraph takes up the tale: ‘Meanwhile the street was as far as possible closed to traffic, a cordon of constables being drawn across each end and the police took possession of Miller’s Court, refusing access to all comers in the expectation blood-hounds would be used.’8 (Please remember the impossibility of shutting off a humble doorway at Goulston Street.) ‘Acting upon orders, the detectives and inspectors declined to furnish any information of what had occurred, and refused permission to the press to inspect the place.’9

  This refusal was extended to the police themselves by Dr Bagster Phillips. Having shoved his head through the window, he concluded that ‘the mutilated corpse lying on the bed was not in any need of immediate attention’, and therefore instructed Abberline ‘not to force the door’, but to wait for the dogs.

  Why a medical doctor should be giving a senior policeman instructions at a crime scene isn’t readily clear. What is clear is that Bro Phillips was pulling a fast one. Whatever he was waiting for, it wasn’t for dogs. We know
this because not a month before, someone of some importance had determined that doggies were entirely useless in such an environment. That eminent opinion had come from Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. ‘I gave my opinion that the operation would be useless,’ he said at Annie Chapman’s inquest. ‘I think the blood of the murdered woman would be more likely to be traced than the murderer.’10

  For the next two hours they all hung around pretending to wait for the bloodhounds. Apparently nobody had bothered to tell anybody in H Division, including senior detectives Abberline and Reid, what everybody else could read in the newspapers. On 11 October, the owner of the animals that had rushed up the Serpentine after Warren wrote to the editor of The Times: ‘Sir, there is one statement in your otherwise excellent account of the trials of Bloodhounds in Hyde Park, which I shall be glad to be allowed to correct. My Hounds have not been purchased by Sir Charles Warren for use of the police.’11

  No dogs. But in terms of detection, something equally useless turned up. Robert Anderson arrived in a cab ‘at ten minutes to two o’clock, and he remained some time’, every minute of it unquestionably devoted to working out how none of this evidence could ever become part of a murder investigation.12

  By now of course the door had been forced. But it wasn’t until Warren’s laundryman, Thomas Arnold, pitched up at 1.30 with the startling news of no bloodhounds that entry was effected. ‘A most horrifying spectacle was presented to the officer’s gaze,’ broadcast the Telegraph, ‘exceeding in ghastliness anything which the imagination can picture. The body of the woman was stretched on the bed, fearfully mutilated. Nose and ears had been cut off, and, although there had been no dismemberment [incorrect] the flesh had been stripped off, leaving the skeleton. The nature of the other injuries were of a character to indicate that they had been perpetrated by the author of the antecedent crimes in the same district; and it is believed once more there are portions of the organs missing.’

  An American newspaper got a whiff of some ‘writing on the wall’ of the room, and there is evidence of this in blood, but since Arnold was inexplicably absent at the inquest, we’ll never know if his sponge had been busy in there. At the ‘inquest’, the following was just about all Phillips said:

  On the door being opened the table I found close to the left hand side of the bedstead and the bedstead was close up against the wooden partition, the mutilated remains of a female were lying two thirds over towards the edge of the bedstead, nearest to the door of entry she had only her linen garment on her, and from my subsequent examination I am sure the body had been removed subsequent to the injury which caused her death from that side of the bedstead which was nearest to the wooden partition, the large quantity of blood under the bedstead, and saturated condition of the paliasse, pillow, sheet, and that top corner nearest the partition leads me to the conclusion that the severance of the right carotid artery which was the immediate cause of her death was inflicted while the deceased was lying at the right side of the bedstead and her head and neck in the top right hand corner.

  There are about 160 words here, and maybe a dozen of them refer to the actual corpse. Phillips didn’t want to talk about the nature of Kelly’s injuries, or what may have caused them. As a matter of fact he’d written to the coroner, Dr Roderick MacDonald, asking if his presence in court would be required.13 After the débâcle of ‘the Womb-Collector’, he obviously didn’t fancy it. The coroner replied that ‘he thought it would be well that Phillips should attend, but need not go into details’. And he didn’t, and that was about it from the medical contingent. Although four other physicians worked the room, Drs Bond, Brown, Duke and Gabe, none was put upon to give any evidence at the ‘inquest’.

  But surely there was more to it than that? Half Kelly’s guts went out the door like meat. Were any organs missing? What was the supposed weapon and the presumed time of death?

  MacDonald didn’t want to know, and we’re left to investigate these questions for ourselves. Meanwhile, bring on Abberline, who announced himself as ‘in charge of this case’, which makes one wonder why he waited for Arnold and took orders from Dr Phillips. Abberline was the last of the ‘witnesses’ to speak:

  I have heard the doctor’s evidence and confirm what he says. I have taken an inventory [never produced] of what was in the room, there had been a large fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle I have since gone through the ashes in the grate and found nothing of consequence except that articles of a woman’s clothing had been burnt which I presume was for the purpose of light as there was only one piece of candle in the room.

  Kelly didn’t boil her kettle by setting fire to her clothes. There must have been coal. It wasn’t until the following day that Abberline sieved the ashes, so probably the fire had still been burning, or at least the ashes were still hot – a report in the Standard quotes the police as saying the room was ‘quite warm’. Abberline doesn’t mention that Kelly’s clothes were neatly folded at the side of the bed, or that he found anything curious in clothing being burnt ‘for the purpose of light’14 when there was half a candle available, or why anyone seeking light would slam a kettle on top of it? Various witnesses insist that they saw Kelly alive at 8.30 a.m. on 9 November. If she was killed that morning, no candle or fire would have been necessary, because the room would have been in daylight. In my view, that’s why Jack didn’t light the candle. We might therefore look at alternative explanations for a blaze ‘so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. Abberline wasn’t a fool, and this melted kettle wasn’t the result of some previous blaze; he knew what he was looking at, and was specific about it. So why the enormous fire? It wasn’t until Warren and his Masonic scholarship arrived at a quarter to two that anyone knew what the furnace was for.15 Sir Charles was able to read the runes of what had gone down in this charnel house as if it was written in a book.

  It was.

  Needless to say, Warren wasn’t called to give evidence at the inquest. However, reported the Yorkshire Post, ‘The Commissioner remained on the spot until the completion of the post mortem examination at a quarter to four, and then returned to Scotland Yard taking Dr Bond with him.’16 The rest of the witness statements, from Kelly’s landlord and neighbours, subsequently heard before a bent coroner, were primarily judicial padding, recorded so the court could look as if it was investigating something. Deposition from Kelly’s ex-common-law husband confirmed that she was into booze and was a part-time hooker, had a father in Caernarvon, and blah blah. A woman called Prater said she was woken by her cat at about 3 a.m., heard a cry of ‘Oh murder,’ and went back to sleep.17 Such hollers in the night were apparently common in Miller’s Court. Her evidence sums up the relevance of most of the other witnesses: all had ‘heard’ something rather than ‘seen’ anything.

  The exception was the ‘Deputy of the Commercial Lodging House’, Mrs Caroline Maxwell, who lived directly opposite Miller’s Court at 14 Dorset Street. ‘I have known the murdered woman well for the past six months,’ she said. ‘Yesterday morning [9 November] as nearly as possible about half past eight o’clock, I saw Mary Jane standing outside in the court. I said, “what brings you out so early?” and she answered, “I feel very queer; I cannot sleep; I have the horrors of drink upon me.”’ Having doubtless been drinking all night while intermittently fucking the man with the spats, she had a crucifying hangover. Maxwell suggested a glass of ale. ‘I already did,’ said Kelly, ‘and I brought it up.’ Maxwell further stated that she went to Bishopsgate and on her return saw Kelly again, ‘talking to a short stout man at the top of the court’. Asked how she could so accurately fix the time, Maxwell said, ‘Because I went to the milk shop, and had not been there for a long time, and she [Kelly] was wearing a woollen crossover that I had not seen her wear for some considerable time.’ ‘On enquiries being made at the milk shop, her statement was found to be correct, and the cross-over was also found in Kelly’s room.’ The Times report continues with reference to another witness ‘whose name is known’, and who has �
��informed the police that she was positive that she saw Kelly between half past eight o’clock and a quarter to nine on Friday morning’.18

  This second sighting was substantiated by yet a third. A tailor named Maurice Lewis says he was gambling (pitch and toss) in Miller’s Court when he saw Kelly ‘return and leave with a jug of milk’, precisely corroborating Mrs Maxwell.19

  That’s three independent witnesses positive about the same time, and two with the same milk. Had Lewis, or the unnamed witness, been called to the coroner’s court, George Hutchinson’s suspect would have been exposed as worthless, spat buttons and all. Dr Phillips originally believed that Kelly had been dead for about eight hours, then extended it to twelve.20 Modern forensics reduces this considerably, determining the time of Kelly’s death in synchronicity with the witnesses.21

  The logistics were something like this: Kelly left home about 8.30, shared her inebriated woes with Mrs Maxwell, bought some milk and returned to her hovel. She then went out again to the nearest pub, the Britannia, for another hair of the dog, heading home after nine, where she ran into J.T.R.

  ‘I promised Kelly 2/6 [two shillings and sixpence] to have a fuck,’ gloats a Ripper letter received by the police on 12 November; ‘she gave a little scream but I act quickly by putting a chop in neck.’22