Dr Neill Cream is a known murderer who may have the Ripper murders added to his CV. Cream’s career as an arsonist, abortionist and murderer was brought to an end in 1892, when he was convicted of the murders of four London prostitutes. He had picked them up in the boroughs of Walworth and Lambeth and poisoned them with strychnine. It is said that on the scaffold he exclaimed at the last moment, ‘I am Jack the – ‘ just as he dropped. Unfortunately, as well as the hangman, who swore that this happened, there were others present, including Sir Henry Smith, who later boasted that nobody knew more about Jack the Ripper than he did, and he did not mention this key information. Actually, even if Cream had claimed at that crucial moment that he was the Ripper, it could have been a ruse to gain a stay of execution. If he had owned up to being Jack the Ripper, surely those with him on the scaffold would have wanted to hear more?
In fact, regardless of what Neill Cream shouted, or whether he shouted, Cream could not have committed the Ripper murders. From November 1881 until July 1891 he was serving a life sentence for murder in Illinois.
George Chapman is another convicted murderer often brought forward as a suspect for the Ripper murders. He was born in Poland in 1865 as Severin Klososwski. He was hanged in 1903 for the murder by arsenic poisoning of three women, Maud Marsh, Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor. He is linked to the Ripper cases by being, according to one source, in Whitechapel at the right time. He is said to have run a hairdresser’s business at George Yard, which is where Martha Turner was murdered. Inspector Abberline, who led the Ripper enquiries, came to believe in his retirement that George Chapman was the Ripper. Abberline presumably suspected Chapman because he was living in the area (but a lot of other people were living in Whitechapel, which must have them suspects, too) and he fitted the description of the man seen with Mary Kelly on the night of her murder. But the nature of the Ripper killings is totally different from that of the Chapman killings. One murderer used a knife; the other used poison. They could not have been more different.
Some writers have proposed that the Duke of Clarence was the murderer, on the grounds that the Duke was mentally unstable and keen on London low-life, and was confined after the Ripper murders. The Duke’s sexual proclivities seem to have lain elsewhere, though, and it is difficult to see how he could have been involved in slaying female prostitutes. Many other people have been named as Ripper suspects, including the painter Walter Sickert, though none carry real conviction. The Jack the Ripper murders seem destined to remain the great unsolved murder mystery of modern times.
A recent re-examination of the Whitechapel murders returns to the idea that we began with: that more than one murderer was at work. There were significant differences between the Emma Smith and Martha Turner murders and the series that came afterwards. In fact there were enough differences for us to be fairly sure that there was more than one prostitute-killer on the rampage. Before she died, Emma Smith was able to say that she had been attacked by four men, so we know from that one incident that there were at least four men who were killing prostitutes.
There were also variations between the later killings, again enough for it to be possible that more than one killer was involved. We have tended to treat the Mary Kelly murder as a grand climax to the earlier street killings, but the very fact that it happened indoors, in Mary Kelly’s lodging, makes it a different crime from the others. It was also much more extreme. Mary Kelly was cut to pieces. This may point to the Mary Kelly murder as having been committed by a different killer. The case for there being several Rippers is convincing, especially since the copycat effect is well known in highly publicized and sensationalized crimes. It would also help to explain the widely differing descriptions of the killer that were given by witnesses.
On the other hand, the five classic Ripper murders happened within quite a short time span and there were many points in common. Until there is firm proof that more than one murderer carried out the killings, we should assume the simplest scenario – that just one maniac was responsible.
Who was he? At least we know what he looked like, because of one or two sightings of him immediately after the murders. The best description is the one given by a detective, Steve White, who saw a lone figure moving away from the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square – a lone figure who was about to melt away into the night. This is his memorable, yet often overlooked, description of Jack the Ripper:
I saw a man coming out of the alley [where the body was found two minutes later]. He was walking quickly but noiselessly, apparently wearing rubber shoes, which were rather rare in those days.
He was about five feet ten inches in height, and was dressed rather shabbily, though it was obvious that the material of his clothes was good. Evidently a man who had seen better days, I thought. His face was long and thin, nostrils rather delicate and his hair was jet black. His complexion was inclined to be sallow and altogether the man was foreign in appearance. The most striking thing about him was the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes. The man was slightly bent at the shoulders, though he was obviously quite young – about thirty-three at the most – and gave one the idea of having been a student or professional man. His hands were snow white, and the fingers long and tapering. As the man passed me at the lamp, I had an uneasy feeling that there was something more than usually sinister about him, and I was strongly moved to find some pretext for detaining him; but it was not in keeping with British police methods that I should do so . . . I had a sort of intuition that the man was not quite right. The man stumbled a few feet away from me, and I made that an excuse for engaging him in conversation. He turned sharply at the sound of my voice, and scowled at me in surly fashion, but he said ‘Good-night’ and agreed with me that it was cold.
His voice was a surprise to me. It was soft and musical, with a touch of melancholy in it, and it was the voice of a man of culture – a voice altogether out of keeping with the squalid surroundings of the East End.
When Steve White’s vivid description is compared with Montagu Druitt’s photograph, there is not much doubt that the two are strikingly similar. White got Druitt’s socio-economic class right. He even got Druitt’s age right. The rubber-soled plimsolls were consistent with Druitt’s sporting activity. Immediately after the detective’s encounter with Jack the Ripper, he was called urgently by one of the other officers to ‘come along’ and look at the body of a woman he had just found in the alley. Steve White went and looked, remembered the man he had just seen and ran back after him as fast as he could.
But of course he didn’t catch him. Nobody ever did catch Jack the Ripper.
Gave Her Mother Forty Whacks? The Lizzie Borden Case
Lizzie Borden was born on 19 July 1860 in Fall River, Massachusetts, into a seriously dysfunctional family. When Lizzie was only two, her mother Sarah died, leaving her father Andrew to care for Lizzie and her elder sister Emma. The big trouble started when Lizzie was five years old – and Andrew Borden remarried.
The new wife, Abby Durfee, was a short, heavy and rather withdrawn and reclusive woman. Local rumour had it that this was a marriage of convenience, and that all Andrew wanted from Abby was the services of a maid and childminder. Nevertheless, the rumour may have been wrong and Andrew Borden seems to have cared for his new wife, who was one of life’s non-starters. It is also possible that Andrew Borden may not have had many alternatives to choose from; he was not a likable character.
The problems arose from the poor relationship that developed between the two girls and their new stepmother. Emma hated Abby, and she was justified in fearing that Abby would rob her of her inheritance. As the two girls grew older, things got steadily worse and they refused to eat meals with Abby, pointedly calling her ‘Mrs Borden’. In a particularly nasty and revealing incident, Lizzie decapitated Abby’s cat after it annoyed her.
Andrew Borden, who was now seventy, had become wealthy as a result of his investments but, in spite of being one of the richest men in town, he and his family lived
frugally in a small house in an unfashionable district of Fall River. In fact, the unnecessary frugality may have been one of the sources of Lizzie’s simmering anger.
Another problem was the narrow focus of Lizzie’s life. At the age of thirty-two, she still had no job, no husband, no love life, nothing to distract her from the long-simmering grievance against her father and his second wife. She did some voluntary work and taught Sunday school, but these were not enough to distract her from the frustrations that were intensifying in her mind.
In 1892, her feud with her parents erupted into physical action. On one occasion when Andrew returned from an outing, Lizzie reported that Abby’s bedroom had been broken into and ransacked by a thief who had stolen a watch and jewellery. Mr Borden called the police, then dismissed them halfway through their investigation once he realized that Lizzie herself was the culprit. After that he kept his and Abby’s bedroom door locked. In the same year, the Borden’s barn was broken into – twice. Andrew Borden again assumed that Lizzie was behind the petty crime. He retaliated by cutting the heads off Lizzie’s pigeons, probably as a reminder of what Lizzie had done to Abby’s cat. It is not known how Lizzie reacted to this vicious and spiteful punishment, but the Bordens tended to sit around fuming in silent malevolence for days after domestic incidents like these. Probably Andrew Borden’s fate was already sealed, but the double murder of Lizzie’s parents did not come until the following summer.
Lizzie Borden was known to have ‘funny spells’. There were days when she behaved totally unpredictably, and those days became more frequent during the unusually hot year of 1892, when all New England steamed and suffocated. The local drugstore noticed that Lizzie was regularly buying small doses of prussic acid, which was well known as a lethal poison. By the end of July, the entire Borden household was afflicted with stomach upsets. These were probably nothing to with prussic acid, but more likely to do with the fact that fresh food was going off faster than normal in the high temperatures.
Abby Borden was still convinced that she had been poisoned after she suffered a long bout of vomiting. She made one of her rare trips out, to see the doctor who lived over the road. When she came back she was told off by her husband for her nonsensical behaviour. The doctor pointed out that the whole family was retching, including the maid. Lizzie’s hatred grew; so did Abby’s apprehension; so did Andrew’s irritation. In the afternoon of
3 August, Uncle John Morse arrived without any luggage. He was ostensibly there just to borrow a bed for the night so that he could visit friends across town the next morning; at least that was the reason he gave for being there. In the evening of 3 August, the evening before the death of her parents, Lizzie Borden visited her friend Alice Russell. Alice described Lizzie as agitated. She was worried about some threat to her father, concerned that something was about to happen. When Lizzie returned home at about nine o’clock, she could hear Uncle John and her parents talking loudly (by implication arguing) in the sitting room. Because the front stairs ran straight up from the hallway inside the front door, Lizzie was able to go upstairs to her room without speaking to any of them.
The hot summer’s day of 4 August 1892 began like any other, only hotter. It was the hottest day of that whole summer. By mid-morning Andrew and Abby Borden would be dead. Exactly what happened in between is still not known. It is uncertain whether Lizzie committed the murders – and some investigators have suggested other culprits, such as a discontented employee, or the maid Bridget – but such evidence as there is points directly to Lizzie.
Luckily for her, Lizzie’s sister Emma was out of town, or she too might have died. In the wake of a blazing row with their father over his gifting of the family property, both Emma and Lizzie had gone away on extended holidays to cool off; Lizzie had returned first. Uncle John was up first that fateful morning, at about six o’clock. The maid, Bridget Sullivan, followed him down to start her chores, but she had to stop to be sick: the effects of the food poisoning. By half past seven, Abby and Andrew were dressed and sitting at breakfast with Uncle John. Just over an hour later, Uncle John went into town to see his friends. Lizzie came down for a light breakfast, Bridget went outside to clean the windows and Abby got on with some dusting.
One peculiarity of the day was the heavy involvement of Dr Seabury Bowen. He was naturally called when Andrew Borden’s body was discovered, and after that he prescribed a tranquillizer for Lizzie and assisted in the autopsies. But he had already visited the Borden household earlier in the morning, to treat everyone for food poisoning. Abby Borden had been in a distressed and fearful state when she had been to see him the previous day, 3 August, claiming that she and Andrew were being poisoned. Bowen put her symptoms down to food poisoning. Given what happened twenty-four hours later, her fears were well-founded; somebody did have it in mind to kill her. The high profile of Dr Bowen on the day of the murders has led some investigators to see him as in some way complicit in the murders, but there is really no reason to see his behaviour as suspicious; he was simply a conscientious GP.
At about nine o’clock in the morning, a youth called with a note and Andrew Borden went into town. He visited the bank, where he was a stockholder, and then visited a shop that he owned. He was having it remodelled and he wanted to check on the progress the carpenters were making. He left there at twenty to eleven and arrived home perhaps five minutes after that. While Andrew Borden was out, a second young man arrived and hung about outside the Borden house. He seemed agitated, then he disappeared. He was never identified. It is possible that was a sighting of the murderer and that when he disappeared he disappeared into the Borden house with the intention of killing Andrew Borden.
Inside Number 92 Second Street nasty things had already begun to happen. At half past nine someone had crept up behind Abby Borden while she was dusting the guest room and brought a hatchet crashing down on her head. She was killed instantly, but the attacker, whoever he or she was, carried on raining blows on her. There was no noise, at least not enough sound to alert anyone else in the house that anything untoward was happening. It was well after that, at about a quarter to eleven, that Andrew Borden arrived at the front door, hot and tired after his walk back from town. The door was locked from the inside, with three locks, and Bridget had to let Mr Borden in. As she was fumbling with the locks, she heard Lizzie laughing from the upstairs landing. Laughing? At a maid having difficulty unlocking a door? At a father who had become fanatical about security after the two mock-burglaries she had staged? Or laughing with elation because the much hated Abby was lying dead on the bedroom floor a few feet behind her? Lizzie characteristically told the police a completely contradictory story – that she had been in the kitchen when her father came home.
Andrew Borden went into the sitting room and took the key to his bedroom off the mantelpiece and went up the back stairs to his room. Since the burglary a year earlier, Andrew Borden had systematically kept the door to his (and Abby’s) bedroom locked. Lizzie set up the ironing board and started ironing. Bridget went back to washing windows, but stopped at five minutes to eleven to go upstairs to lie down. At that time Andrew came down to the sitting room and settled himself for a rest on the sofa. Lizzie was self-incriminatingly vague about what she was doing and where during these moments leading to her father’s death. She was in the yard, or the barn or the barn loft – and she was there, according to her own testimony, for twenty minutes or so before returning.
The temperature had soared to 86°F (30°C), though it was not yet midday. Andrew Borden was too exhausted by the heat to take off his heavy morning coat. He slumped back diagonally on the mohair-covered sofa, carefully keeping his boots on the floor so that the upholstery would not be spoilt. His head was very close to the door into an adjacent room. He dozed in the heat, unaware that his wife lay on the floor upstairs, and had already been dead for an hour and a half. As he dozed, he too was brutally hit over the head by an unseen hand, from behind, from through the doorway.
At ten past eleve
n Lizzie ‘found’ the body of her father sprawled on the sofa in the sitting room. Half of his head was shorn away by blows from an axe, and blood was still trickling down from his wounds. From the back door, Lizzie called Bridget down the back stairs and sent her to get the doctor. One of the neighbours, Mrs Adelaide Churchill, could see from the disturbance that something distressing was happening and called across to Lizzie to ask if anything was wrong. Lizzie called back, ‘Oh, Mrs Churchill, please come over! Someone has killed Father!’ Mrs Churchill asked where her mother was and Lizzie replied that she did not know; she said her mother had had a note asking her to go and visit a sick person, so she did not know where Mrs Borden was. That was odd, because Abby very seldom went out – and where was the note? Later, when questioned, she said she might have inadvertently burnt it. She told Mrs Churchill that Bridget could not find Dr Bowen, so Mrs Churchill offered to send her handyman to find a doctor; the handyman would also telephone the police. The police got his call for help at a quarter past eleven. So Lizzie had not delayed; she had taken every appropriate action from the moment she found her father’s body.
Even when the police and the doctor arrived, the body of Abby Borden remained undetected upstairs. Then Lizzie ‘remembered that she thought she had heard Abby coming back from town’ and a curious neighbour went upstairs to look. It was only then that the body of Abby Borden was found on the floor beside the bed in the guest room. Dr Bowen found that Andrew Borden had been killed probably with a hatchet, where he lay on the sofa. He had suffered eleven axe blows to the head, delivered from above and behind. Abby had similarly been attacked from behind as she cleaned the bedroom. The much-hated Abby received eighteen blows to the head. She had probably died at about half past nine, Andrew at eleven.
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 22
