They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Poor Whitechapel Fiend. Although everyone else in Bradford was convinced he was the culprit, at least he could rely on Her Majesty’s helmets. But the real news here is that Barrit, being a man of ‘strong animal passions’, is supposed to have sodomised Johnnie before killing him with the bread knife. ‘The police also assert that it is impossible that the crime was the work of a stranger in the district, pointing out with unanswerable logic that if this had been the case, there could be no possible motive for running the risks inseparable from the removal of the body from the place where the crime was committed.’74

  Withers had hypnotised himself into believing that this was Barrit’s stable at Back Belle Vue. In they all went looking for blood, with no better success than had been achieved with the knife. Paving stones were lifted and they dug up a drain, finding nothing but some hairs that belonged to a horse. A broadening of enquiries led to the discovery of an insomniac in a nearby property who’d heard ‘sawing’ in the dead of night. ‘Such was the feeling of uneasiness which it caused her that she sat up in bed.’ That clinched it for Withers, and no blood was swapped for a sound of sawing. Nobody but Barrit had a key to get into the place, and thus it could only have been him. ‘Yesterday evening,’ reported the Bradford Telegraph, ‘the Chief Constable informed our representative that the case was closing around Barrit.’

  Apparently nobody had bothered to tell the fucking idiot that there was no evidence whatsoever of a saw being used in the process of Johnnie’s dismemberment. ‘The legs had been hacked off’, reported the Bradford Observer, quoting Dr Lodge. ‘The amputation was evidently the work of somebody who was quite inexperienced in an operation of this kind, for the flesh of the thighs was very much cut as if the murderer had had to search for the joints.’

  Fortunately, more details were emerging in the press, and it became possible for Barrit’s defence to assemble a reasonably accurate picture of the terrors endured by the little boy.

  There was a gash in the front of the body extending from the bottom of the abdomen to the chest. The heart had been cut out, and was placed under the chin. Both ears had been cut off in an unskillful fashion and thrust into the gash in the abdomen. The face and neck were quite uninjured, and we believe the medical gentlemen who are concerned in the matter have not yet formed a definite opinion as to the extent to which the boy’s suffering was prolonged. The condition of the clothing places beyond doubt the fact that the boy had been stripped before he was murdered, for there was not a spot of blood upon any of his clothing except his collar, which, strangely enough, in view of the entire absence of injury to the neck, was saturated with blood. There was no stain of blood upon the body, it evidently having been well cleansed before its removal to the yard where it was found. The legs, arms, and body had been bound together in a compact parcel with the unfortunate boy’s braces.

  Although the stable was a write-off to everyone but Withers, it was irrefutable that Johnnie had been killed in a secure place. In this respect the crime echoes the Kelly murder, clothes neatly folded and carried out indoors at Jack’s leisure. But in a variety of ways the signature is more readily identifiable with the Scotland Yard Trunk. In both instances the corpse had been tied in a bundle and carried from the crime scene for deposit. In both, fragments of newspaper were discovered inside the body cavity, and both bodies had been comprehensively drained of blood.

  In Johnnie’s case, seventy-two ounces had been bled out of him. He was ‘blanched’, as the doctors put it, Lodge having difficulty finding enough blood even to take a sample. Thereafter the press speculated on the obvious: ‘It is suggested that the boy was decoyed into a bathroom.’75 As there was no bathroom and no blood in the stables, it would have been wise for the police to check empty houses. But they weren’t wise, they were puppets of London, sharing wilful blindness with the Metropolitan Police.

  All will trust that this case will not lead to a lamentable miscarriage of justice, nor yet into one of those unsolved mysteries which of late have become far too numerous in the records of great crimes. Not to mention the Whitechapel atrocities, to which the Bradford murder bears such a close resemblance.76

  Out of the darkness and from that very same Whitechapel came a fraternal radiance to put their minds at ease. ‘At the instance of the Metropolitan Police authorities, and with the sanction of the Home Secretary’, Bro Dr Bagster Phillips pitched up from London on the overnight express, bearing a letter from the Home Secretary to Dr Lodge.77

  It wasn’t the first time Matthews had written to friendly gents in Bradford. In the previous (Jubilee) year, he’d forwarded Her Majesty’s gratitude to the city’s Freemasons, thanking them for their supplications of loyalty, and he had Freemasons to thank now.78 The charade of Barrit’s prosecution was orchestrated by Bradford’s most eminent Mason, its Town Clerk, Bro William McGowan,79 with assistance from his Treasurer to the magistrates, Bro Walter Firth, himself a member of the Golden Dawn.80

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of his arrival, and in company with Dr Major, Mr Miall, Dr Lodge and his son, Dr Lodge Jnr (but excluding Drs Roberts and Hime for the defence), Bro Dr Bagster Phillips was escorted to the mortuary, where he made ‘a most careful and complete examination’ of the body. It took him three hours, after which ‘Phillips proceeded with Dr Lodge to the stable where it is supposed the body was cut up’.81 The goon Withers then arrived, ‘with whom he had a long conversation’, and he subsequently wedged in a ‘confidential chat with Chief Detective Inspector Dobson’, an individual previously recorded in the equally confidential ‘Bradford City Police Disciplinary Book’ on 26 March 1888, ‘for making a false charge and receiving cash, which he ought not to have received’.

  Dobson’s attraction to fiction seemed to enamour Phillips, who expressed ‘a strong feeling of satisfaction at the manner in which the police are proceeding with their very onerous investigations’.82 And he had fictions of his own. Predictably, as co-creator of ‘the Womb-Collector’, he now affirmed his conviction that this murder ‘had no connection whatever with the series of fiendish crimes which have been perpetrated in the East End of London’. ‘It is understood that he will make a full report of his examinations and observations to the London Police Authorities,’ and that Withers would receive a copy ‘within the next few days’.83 Although Anderson would have read it, Withers did not, and 130 years later it still hasn’t arrived.

  Phillips’s report remains a mystery. But irrespective of that, it’s possible (as Barrit’s defence surely did) to hazard an analysis of it. Before beginning his autopsy, Phillips would have learned something about the body’s discovery. He would have examined police photographs (also suppressed) and read the doctor’s notes. The child was propped face upwards, his heart under his chin, on top of his neatly folded clothes. The bundle was strapped with his braces, which included a sack imprinted with ‘MASON – DERBY ROAD – LIVERPOOL’.84

  Unarguably the Ripper had brought this sack with him, as he had furnished other teasing accessories that we will come to by and by. ‘MASON’ and ‘LIVERPOOL’ were evidently words of interest to Jack, and the coppers had originally hoped they would ‘serve as a clue’.

  How about a ‘brother in trade’, a Masonic drug-fiend resident of Liverpool, cuckolded by a slut-bitch of an American wife, whose whoring would drive any man to insanity?

  Jack was motivated by grotesque hatred, and was intent on incriminating his Mason brother from Liverpool as similarly possessed. It’s the reason he decorated his crime scenes with Masonic symbols, vandalising the Kelly and Gill corpses with ceremonious insults and laughing at Warren as he did it. ‘Regretting you’ve been compelled to retire,’ he sniggered at Charlie in a November scrawl – but never mind, he would still get his ‘Christmas Box’.

  Withers had ignored the abandoned house at Walmer Villas, where a ‘blood stained bucket’ was discovered some weeks later,85 but it was almost certainly in the bathroom of this now demolished property that Johnnie was murdered. The press surmis
ed that he was ‘decoyed into a bathroom’,86 and that may well have been the case. A convivial smile followed by total physical control was Jack’s game. Once inside and under his dominance, Johnnie was made to undress, or it was his murderer who stripped him. There was not the slightest evidence (shirt collar apart) of blood on his clothes, and no gash in his coat or shirt to match the wounds on his chest, where the boy had twice been stabbed. Once naked, he was raped, his assailant exalting in his victim’s anguish. When he was finished, the time had come to kill him. Probably standing in the bath, he was carefully cut and bled like veal, still alive to facilitate the haemorrhage. ‘The police have never supposed for a moment that the murder was the work of the same hand as the Whitechapel horrors; therefore they have never gone “on the wrong scent” in that direction. There’s nothing in common with the Thorncliff Road affair and those in London.’

  This house is full of godforsaken ghosts. Bro Warren is there, his face turned away, but he must turn back and look. He said he needed a ‘scream’ to catch this arsehole. Can he hear the screaming now? Can he hear this hysterical child screaming for his mother? Freemasonic Jack should have been arrested within days of the ‘Double Event’. But you, you rotten little ghost, affected to be blind. I don’t care what fancy-dress oath you ever swore, Warren, you belong with your monster in hell.

  Subsequent to Gill’s death, everything the Ripper did to his corpse was meticulously thought through. He cut him open from the lower abdomen to just below the chin. The left lung, heart and liver were removed, the ears cut off, and the arms and legs crudely hacked away. ‘I am trying my hand at disjointing,’ he had written on 4 December. The entire body was then washed inside and out, the liver also being washed before it was packed back into the carcass together with the lung, ears and boots. The whole hideous bundle was then secured with the child’s braces.

  Barrit was not only accused of the blood-letting and parcelling up, but by definition also of recreating esoteric details of a crime he’d probably never even heard of. Fragments of newspaper were found in the Scotland Yard Trunk, just as scraps of ‘peculiarly shaped newspaper’ were found in the entrails of Johnnie Gill. Moreover, the Homicidal Milkman must also have studied the psychological side of his supposed idol, because he was able to convincingly duplicate the Joker’s style of humour.

  It’s established that the newspapers had made a song and dance over the redoubtable coppers being hindered by ‘Red Tape’. If it wasn’t for the red tape, they chorused, the Met would be standing tall. This horseshit amused the Fiend, and he decided to give them a bit more of it, coiling a length of red tape around Johnnie’s intestines. This was inadvertently revealed in a coroner’s court by Dr Lodge, who had got himself into a bit of a fluster during cross-examination by Barrit’s counsel.

  Craven had never heard about ‘Red Tape’ before, and demanded to see the notes from which Lodge was unwittingly reading. The coroner replied: ‘You are not entitled to them.’ A brittle exchange followed. It was clear that Lodge was quoting from very different notes to those previously put before the court. ‘Are these the first and original notes which you took?’ asked Craven. They were, and the ‘red tape’ was meant to have remained a secret. The floundering doctor shoved the notes in his pocket and produced a different set that didn’t impress Mr Craven.

  ‘Then you have not previously been reading from the original notes you took?’

  Clearly not.

  ‘Now tell me which it is,’ pressured Craven. ‘Your pocket book, or the notes you have put into your pocket?’

  ‘My pocket book.’

  ‘Are these notes that you have put into your pocket [the red-tape notes] those which you used on a former occasion when you gave evidence on oath?’

  ‘Yes, but I had not them with me, unfortunately.’

  ‘Well, then, how could you use them?’

  ‘Well,’ flustered the Doc, ‘I was taken suddenly, and I was very much interrupted.’

  ‘Have you given on this occasion,’ asked an icy Craven, ‘very different evidence?’

  ‘That I cannot allow,’ said the coroner.

  If Craven wanted the original notes he could apply for them. ‘I cannot, sir,’ snapped Craven. ‘I have done my utmost to get that deposition, and I cannot get it.’87

  Redirecting his frustration at Lodge, he said, ‘Doctor, you have mentioned today that “red tape” was found in the remains?’

  ‘Yes, didn’t I say so before?’

  ‘I will ask you,’ insisted Craven, ‘have you ever mentioned that before?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know. It was in my notes.’

  Eyes detouring to the coroner, Craven said, ‘I am going to put it very seriously to Mr Lodge, that he is giving a very different statement.’88

  In this he wasn’t unique. Everybody involved in the milkman’s prosecution was giving a very different statement to the truth. Craven repeatedly complained of the ‘determination of the police to make the crime fit the man’,89 and that anything that didn’t do this was concealed. Suppression of ‘red tape’ and other essential evidence meant the authorities knew perfectly well that Barrit hadn’t killed this boy, and perfectly bloody well who had.

  ‘Mr Withers strives to be the Bench, Solicitor, and Jury,’ quipped the Yorkshireman, sharing the opinion of an increasing variety of newspapers. ‘Various parties,’ wrote the Bradford Telegraph, ‘have transgressed the bounds set by law.’90 As Craven had consistently reiterated, ‘The charge against Barrit was groundless,’ adding that ‘If the police had at the time of his arrest made the enquiries demanded in the interests of justice, they could easily have obtained proof of his absolute innocence.’91

  But justice isn’t what these boys were about. A Masonic oath was apparently inviolate, while an oath given in a court of law was not. Just as Jack was protected, Barrit was persecuted. At this point it’s as well to explore what else these stooges covered up, these coroners and coppers, doctors and town clerks. What they were desperate to hide was the Freemasonry.

  The Ripper’s contempt for Johnnie Gill’s body was manifest in an eclectic mix of Freemasonic, Rosicrucian and Golden Dawn symbolism. All the organs detached from the boy’s corpse were replaced and accounted for except for his penis, which was taken away by the killer. This act had more significance than the collection of a trophy, as does the fact that he was sodomised.

  I’ve explained my reasons for believing it was MacGregor Mathers’ Horus Temple that brought the Ripper to Bradford. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats had the misfortune to briefly fall under Mathers’ spell, although he later dismissed him, accurately, as ‘half knave and half mad’.92 Here he is in an anonymous and mocking caricature, perched in Horus mode under his occult umbrella:

  In the mythology of Ancient Egypt, Horus was pre-eminent. He was god of the sky, his divine being represented by a falcon.

  Horus was born to the goddess Isis, protector of the dead. It was a somewhat dysfunctional family. His father was the noble god Osiris, whose brother, Seth, was the personification of evil. Mythology has it that Seth clawed his way out of the womb. Sporting red hair and gnashing teeth, he’s represented as having the features of ‘a fantastic beast, with a curved snout, and stiff forked tail’. A disciple of Satan, if not a pre-Christian equivalent of Satan himself, he was uncle to saintly Horus.

  He was also an inspiration to the Whitechapel Fiend. Just as Kelly was murdered according to the strictures of Ezekiel, so the legend of Horus was adapted to suit a new narrative of hate.

  Seth subjected Horus to a violent homosexual attack, raping him while he was still a child. He visited a plague of iniquities upon the boy, including the cutting off of his hands. Horus’s mother used her magic to restore them, and Horus then took revenge by castrating Seth. With no sorcery forthcoming to reinstate his nuts, and intoxicated with wickedness, Seth then murdered his brother, Osiris, dismembering his body and dumping his remains in a swamp. Isis was crazy with grief, but following the lucky
discovery of the body parts she was able to reassemble him and restore him to life. Every limb and organ was accounted for except the penis, which was never seen again.

  I don’t know if my candidate was an active homosexual, but my guess is that he wasn’t averse to the occasional bit of buggery. Jack sodomised a little boy and cut him to pieces (Seth), then reassembled his body (Isis) but stole his penis (Osiris). Thus, with Mathers in mind, an improvised rendition of the Horus myth was re-enacted, just as an improvised version of the Fifth Libation was enacted at the Cahills’ earlier that same morning.

  Much later, when Craven and his doctors were at last granted access to the original notes (but not the photographs), and Roberts and Hime were allowed access to Johnnie’s body, the Bradford Observer of 13 March 1889 reported Craven as saying that certain undisclosed evidence ‘would have astonished the public’.93

  What exactly would have astonished them? The public knew that the boy had been sodomised, brutally murdered, disembowelled, had his arms, legs and ears cut off, and his penis taken away by his killer. They knew his heart had been propped under his chin, his boots stuffed into his abdomen, and that he’d been drained to his last drop of blood. So what else was there to be ‘astonished’ about?

  The answer presents itself in the original reports of witnesses. ‘The legs were lying on top of the body,’ wrote Lodge, before he was corrected, ‘with the thighs protruding at either side of the head.’ What he was looking at was an extension of the ritual at the Cahills’ house, where the only element missing was the skull and crossed bones. The Libation is a Knights Templar rite, and Jack had turned the boy into its most enduring symbol.