Crimes of Jack the Ripper

by Paul Roland

  THE CRIMES OF JACK THE RIPPER

  Paul Roland

  This edition published in 2012 by Arcturus Publishing Limited

  26/27 Bickels Yard, 151–153 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3HA

  Copyright © 2012 Arcturus Publishing Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person or persons who do any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Picture Credits

  Images courtesy of Getty, Mary Evans, National Archive, Rex, Topfoto and Ullstein. For more information contact info@arcturuspublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-84858-953-7

  AD002432EN

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Myth of Jack the Ripper

  Chapter One

  The Ripper’s World

  Chapter Two

  The Murder Casebook

  Chapter Three

  Forensic Files

  Chapter Four

  The Usual Suspects

  Chapter Five

  The Devil Made Him Do It

  Chapter Six

  The Scotland Yard Files

  Chapter Seven

  Summing Up: A New Suspect

  Introduction: The Myth of Jack the Ripper

  On the gloomy afternoon of Tuesday, 2 October 1888, carpenter Frederick Wildborn entered a dank, dark cellar in the new Metropolitan Police headquarters which was then under construction on the Thames Embankment and discovered a large brown paper parcel tied with string. When it was opened it was found to contain the dismembered, decomposing torso of an unidentified female whose severed arm had been fished out of the Thames a few weeks earlier. Her head and the remaining limbs were never recovered. This gruesome discovery was the first in a series of macabre ‘torso murders’ which were to haunt the recently formed Criminal Investigation Department (CID) over the next 12 months.

  At first the police suspected they might be the work of Jack the Ripper, the Whitechapel murderer, who had apparently and inexplicably gone to ground after committing a number of brutal murders earlier that autumn, but the nature of the mutilations suggested otherwise. Evidently there was more than one psychopath stalking the streets of London, despatching his victims with impunity under the very noses of Scotland Yard.

  Incredibly, neither the Ripper nor the torso murderer were ever identified, arrested or charged. But while the latter remains a footnote in the history of crime, his evil twin continues to exert a macabre fascination more than a century later. And it’s all in the name – a sobriquet created by an unscrupulous but enterprising journalist to keep the killings on the front page and raise the stakes in a cut-throat circulation war. Thanks to this macabre appellation, Jack the Ripper is now lodged in the popular imagination as the personification of the debauched Victorian gentleman, a real-life Mr Hyde freed from the subconscious of respectable society to embody its repressed sexuality. And yet, the reality was very different. The evidence presented in the following pages clearly contradicts the popular image of the top-hatted and cloaked aristocrat cutting through the swirling London fog with a small black bag, hell-bent on ridding the streets of sin.

  Hoaxes and wild theories

  Unfortunately, any effort to identify the Ripper is made more difficult by the fog of confusion generated by those keen to advance their spurious speculations and fanciful conspiracy theories involving secret societies, eminent surgeons, Satanists and even members of the royal family – occasionally all four – whom we are asked to believe happily came together in a convoluted conspiracy to save England and the Establishment.

  Some of the theories that have been put forward are more plausible than others, but nothing pertaining to the Whitechapel murders can be taken at face value. In addition to the ‘Dear Boss’ letters, which gave birth to the name Jack the Ripper and which are now considered to have been a hoax, there have been more recent attempts to promote seemingly forged documents as genuine artefacts of the period, the notorious Maybrick ‘Ripper Diary’ being a case in point. More recently an aggressive publicity campaign by crime writer Patricia Cornwell to prove the case against her favoured suspect, the painter Walter Sickert, has only served to add more misinformation to the mix.

  In contrast, this book has arisen from a thorough and impartial investigation focusing on a re-examination of the facts as contained in the official Scotland Yard files, the original post-mortem reports and contemporary witness statements as well as the private correspondence of detectives and police officials who had been assigned to, or had overseen, the case.

  I have aimed to strip away decades of myth and misconception to reveal which, if any, of the usual suspects has a case to answer, while remaining aware that the murders may not have been the work of a single individual.

  If these crimes were being investigated today, what would the authorities consider to be the vital clues? How would their profilers describe England’s first serial killer and which of the usual suspects would they be looking to convict?

  Paul Roland

  Chapter 1: The Ripper’s World

  In 1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee with much pomp and pageantry. Since her accession, the British Empire had swallowed up colonies as far apart as Canada and the Caribbean, India and Australia, Africa and Asia and was now so extensive that it was said the sun never set upon it.

  Britannia not only ruled the waves, but through the notable Christian virtues of self-discipline, enterprise and ‘honourable’ conquest she also possessed one quarter of the surface of the earth, its people and their wealth. The dour, white-haired mother of the nation now presided over the largest and most prosperous empire the world had ever seen. Britain’s industrialists had capitalized on the Empire’s formidable resources in both manpower and material, so that by 1870 the United Kingdom could boast foreign trade figures four times greater than those of the United States.

  Industrial marvels

  London, the jewel in this imperial crown, had been linked to all of Britain’s major cities by a rapidly expanding rail network in a formidable undertaking to rival that of the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Passengers could now travel to and from the metropolis in comfort on journeys that took hours instead of days and traders could transport both raw materials and finished goods to a reliable timetable, making the erratic stagecoach and canal system almost redundant at a stroke. The project had been overseen by the great architect of Victorian regeneration, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. But though Brunel had the vision, the laborious task was realized by a largely immigrant workforce who cut through the countryside with pick and shovel to lay 25,000 km (15,530 miles) of track, each length of rail having to be manhandled into position and every spike driven in by hand. Not even nature was permitted to impede the progress of this grand imperial project. Hills were dynamited, forests were flattened and the river Avon was spanned by Brunel’s iron suspension bridge which was duly declared a marvel of 19th-century engineering.

  Productivity had not slackened since the Queen had opened the Great Exhibition in the vast glass-covered People’s Palace (later Crystal Palace) in 1851 to display the best of British ingenuity and enterprise. British goods and raw materials were being exported around the world in British-built ships, earning the country the title ‘the workshop of the world’, although many unscrupulous employers seized on this appellation as an entitlement to exploit their underpaid female workers and to ignore child labour laws. />
  Family expectations

  Victoria, who had nine children and 37 great-grandchildren, was fiercely proud of her image as the widowed mother of the nation and she expected Britain’s middle- and upper-class daughters to be as dutiful and unselfish as she had been. They were to be unquestioningly obedient to their fathers while they lived at home and subservient to their husbands after their marriage. Denied the vote and equal rights, they were also to forgo any intellectual aspirations and instead devote themselves to their husbands’ happiness. As for their physical needs, they were expected to repress their own sexuality, which meant squeezing themselves into tortuously tight corsets and shapeless dresses which coyly covered every inch of flesh, rendering them as sexless as a tea cosy. Some inhibited individuals went so far as to cover the legs of their pianos to avoid embarrassment.

  The pressures of maintaining a prim and proper façade meant that displays of emotion were frowned upon. Sadness was safely channelled into the cloying sentimentality of popular songs, ‘difficult’ spiritual questions were given glib reassurances by orthodox religion and grief was acknowledged by the ritual practices of mourning. Death became a morbid preoccupation for many people and sex was stifled with taboos. Wives were instructed to ‘lie back and think of England’ when their husbands demanded their conjugal rights. In respectable society it was considered wrong for a woman to enjoy sex and those who sought their own pleasure were considered shameless and sinful. They were judged as being no better than the harlots who walked the streets of Whitechapel and were condemned from the pulpits as whores of Babylon.

  An unequal society

  Though women were labelled the ‘weaker sex’ they were expected to behave with delicacy and decorum, suffering in silence if need be in order to repress their natural instincts, whereas men were allowed a certain latitude as it was thought that they were less able to control ‘the passions’. For this reason prostitution was reluctantly tolerated, despite the fact that by the 1880s the problem was endemic, with an estimated 80,000-plus women plying their trade on the streets of the capital.

  Women of the lower classes could redeem themselves by going into domestic service or into gainful employment in the factories and sweatshops. Those who were unable, or unwilling, to do so had only themselves to blame if they met a violent end. These ‘fallen’ or ‘unfortunate’ women, as they were euphemistically called, served a social need, relieving respectable women of their marital duties. But they were an underclass, thought no more deserving of society’s consideration than India’s ‘untouchables’.

  The repression of emotions and the denial of natural desires inevitably led to a proliferation of brothels in side streets across the capital and a marked increase in domestic violence. In the autumn of 1888 the symptoms of this social disease could no longer be contained and erupted in a frenzied orgy of bloodlust. Ironically, it appears that the man responsible for this terrible catharsis may not in fact have been an Englishman.

  The high cost of living

  In Victoria’s England there were 12 pennies (d) to the shilling and 20 shillings (s) to the pound (£). An inexperienced factory girl could expect to be paid as little as 4s a week, piece workers who did menial skilled tasks at home might be lucky to clear 16s a week, while a skilled labourer would consider himself very fortunate if he took home £3 a week. Reasonable lodgings in a poor working-class neighbourhood could be secured for less than 5s a week, but the most common choice of accommodation in the East End was a bed in a hostel for as little as 4d provided you were prepared to share the room with up to 60 other people. Eight pence would buy more peace and privacy and less chance of being robbed in your sleep.

  A family breakfast cooked at home would set you back 1s 4d, a pint of milk being 2d, six eggs for 6d and a pound of bacon for 8d. Other necessities included a box of candles (6d), a newspaper (a halfpenny upwards), a pint of beer (2d) and a packet of cheap cigarettes (2d). The average bus or tram ride within London cost 6d and 2d would buy a ticket to the music hall.

  Sweated labour

  Period dramas, films and novels tend to romanticize 19th-century London as a quaint backdrop of gas-lit streets, swirling fog and lurid local colour, but the fog was not atmospheric; it was an irritant and contributed significantly to the increase in respiratory ailments which claimed more lives in the latter half of the 19th century than any other illness. And there was certainly nothing romantic about the deplorable conditions in which the inhabitants of the East End were forced to live.

  Of the 900,000 inhabitants of the East End, more than 76,000 were concentrated in Whitechapel. Almost half of these were officially classed as living in poverty. Many thousands more eked out a meagre living in factories and sweatshops for 10–18 hours a day in arduous and dangerous conditions for exploitative employers who fined their workforce for every infraction of their draconian regulations. The 1,400 female workers employed by match manufacturers Bryant & May in Bow, for example, were fined half a day’s pay for being late and 3d for having dirty feet or an untidy workbench. As they very seldom earned more than 4s a week, they could be left with little to live on if they were unfortunate enough to work under a foreman who took a dislike to their appearance or their demeanour.

  Privation and exploitation

  In addition to the poor pay and long hours the match girls risked a debilitating condition known as ‘phossy jaw’, brought on by the constant inhalation of noxious phosphorous fumes. Those who succumbed were summarily dismissed. It was only after their case had been highlighted by social reformer Annie Besant in an article entitled ‘White Slavery In London’ that a public outcry forced the employers to offer certain concessions. But even after the implementation of the reforms (including the formation of a union), life remained harsh for the match girls and their fellow factory workers. Under such circumstances many were tempted to take their chances on the street. Anything was better than admitting themselves into the care of the public workhouse, which was not much better than a prison.

  Piece workers suffered privation and exploitation to a similar degree, although they had the advantage of working from home which meant that they could enlist members of their family to increase their productivity and thereby their earnings. For this reason many children were denied a basic education, even though attendance had been made compulsory by the 1870 Education Act. Garment workers could earn as much as one shilling a day; a shirt finisher, for example, was paid 3d per dozen shirts for which she would have to sew on the linings, make the buttonholes and sew on the buttons. But home workers were often no better off than sweated labour. Fur pickers, for example, risked respiratory disorders from breathing in the fine fibres which they were surrounded by night and day.

  A London fog

  ‘As the east wind brings up the exhalations of the Essex and Kentish marshes, and as the damp-laden winter air prevents the dispersion of the partly consumed carbon from hundreds of thousands of chimneys, the strangest atmospheric compound known to science fills the valley of the Thames . . . Not only does a strange and worse than Cimmerian darkness hide familiar landmarks from the sights, but the taste and sense of smell are offended by the unhallowed compound of flavours, and all things become greasy and clammy to the touch . . . It is almost unnecessary to add that the dangers of the streets, great at all times, are immeasurably increased in foggy weather; and that the advantages of being able to dive into that unnatural darkness after a successful robbery are thoroughly appreciated by the predatory classes.’

  (Dickens’ Dictionary Of London

  by Charles Dickens, 1883)

  Sin or starve

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll live much longer and that’s another thing that pleases me.’

  (Anonymous Whitechapel prostitute)

  In Victorian England even the prostitutes were divided by class. In the West End the more audacious streetwalkers strolled proudly among the theatre and concert hall crowds wearing red bandanas and carrying a short cane. The youngest and most attractive c
ould demand several pounds from their wealthy clients and lived in comparative comfort.

  But the East End was another world. There, business was conducted down dark alleyways, in the shelter of a doorway and in backyards which were always open to the street. Nobody bothered to lock their front doors for the simple reason they had nothing worth stealing. If the customer wanted privacy there were common lodging houses and brothels on almost every corner which offered a maze of filthy boxrooms for hire by the hour. The bedding was rarely changed, but the clients didn’t complain. They were not inclined to wash themselves either.

  Contemporary social commentator John Binny sketched a vibrant picture of the wretched women he observed during his explorations of the East End: ‘They live in the greatest poverty, covered with rags and filth, and many of them covered with horrid sores, and eruptions on their body, arms and legs, presenting in many cases a revolting appearance. Many of them have not the delicacy of females and live as pigs in a sty . . . In the middle of the day they sometimes wash their skirt, the only decent garment many of them have – their underclothing being a tissue of rags.’

  Frequently prostitution was a means to a more reprehensible end. It was not unknown for a woman to team up with a ruffian who would rob the customer while he was unable to defend himself, beating him senseless so that he couldn’t identify his attacker.

  A squalid scene

  To police the labyrinth of dark alleys, passageways, backyards, courts and closes in the square mile where the murders by Jack the Ripper would take place would have required a force far in excess of the number of officers the Met and City Police could have assembled. Besides, prostitution was not illegal in England at that time, although self-styled ‘purity’ groups were actively campaigning to drive the sex trade off the streets. They had succeeded in shaming Parliament into raising the age of consent from 13 to 16, and in the summer of 1887 Sir Charles Warren had been pressured into ordering the closure of 200 brothels in the East End to appease the reformers who considered them a stain on the conscience of a Christian nation.