The whole subject is now a minefield to the unwary. Even true crime experts venture there at their peril. ‘No new books will tell us anything more than we already know’. This was the confident claim of Brian Marriner, reviewing the Ripper case in his valuable book, A Century of Sex Killers. Unfortunately, Marriner’s account of the murders, brief as it is, proceeds to repeat a number of old canards.3 And where an author as knowledgeable as this stumbles, one is tempted to caution the general reader, approaching the groaning shelf of Ripper books for dependable information, with those famous words from Dante: ‘Abandon hope, ye who enter here!’
There are several reasons for the lamentable state of Ripper studies.
One has been the tendency of writers to draw the bulk of their primary source material from newspaper reports and later reminiscences of police officers and others. This practice should not have survived the 1970s, when police and Home Office records on the Ripper case were first opened to the public, but it continues because of the relative accessibility of newspapers and memoirs. Every sizeable library has its microfilm backfile of The Times, and published memoirs are readily available through interlibrary loan services. Unfortunately, as sources of factual information on the crimes and police investigations, they are simply not reliable.
At the time of Jack the Ripper it was not the policy of the CID to disclose to the press details about unsolved crimes or their inquiries respecting them. Reporters were not even permitted to enter premises in which such a crime had been committed. Naturally, they resented it. ‘The police authorities observe a reticence which has now apparently become systematic, and any information procured is obtained in spite of them,’ carped one. ‘However much or little they know, the police devote themselves energetically to the task of preventing other people from knowing anything,’ fumed another.4
The purpose of the police precautions will be discussed later. Primarily it was to prevent villains being forewarned as to what the CID knew and might do. But at present the rationale behind the policy concerns us less than the effects of its application upon newsmen. It placed them in an impossible predicament. For they were confronted at the height of the Ripper scare by a massive public clamour for information and possessed few legitimate means of satisfying it.
Gathering news at that time was a particularly frustrating business. Sometimes, by following detectives or hanging about police stations, reporters were able to identify and interview important witnesses. We will have cause to thank them when we encounter Israel Schwartz and George Hutchinson. But more often press reports were cobbled together out of hearsay, rumour and gossip, picked up at street corners and in pubs or lodging houses.
There seems to have been no shortage of informants. A Star reporter, investigating the Miller’s Court murder in November 1888, found the locals basking in their new-found importance, anxious to please and ready to regale him with ‘a hundred highly circumstantial stories’, most of which, upon inquiry, proved ‘totally devoid of truth’. Even true anecdotes might be passed from mouth to mouth until they became unrecognizable. Sarah Lewis, who stayed in Miller’s Court on the fatal night, had heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ By the time the Star’s man got to the scene of the crime her story had got round and ‘half a dozen women were retailing it as their own personal experience’, a circumstance which may explain why Sarah’s story is sometimes credited, in aberrant forms, to a Mrs Kennedy in the press.5
Inevitably much of the press coverage was fiction. Inevitably, too, the press were happy to blame the police. ‘We were compelled in our later editions of yesterday,’ observed the Star after the Hanbury Street murder, ‘to contradict many of the reports which found admittance to our columns and to those of all our contemporaries earlier in the day. For this the senseless, the endless prevarications of the police were to blame.’6 But journalists themselves, determined to exploit the astonishing runs on the papers after each murder, were more than usually willing to invent copy of their own.
Perhaps the most important myth created by the press was Fairy Fay.
The first trace of her appeared in a verse broadsheet, Lines on the Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel, printed at the beginning of September 1888. This referred vaguely to an early and unnamed victim of the murderer, killed ‘twelve months ago’, i.e. in 1887. However, it was the Daily Telegraph that really got the ball rolling. In its issues of 10 and 11 September 1888 it stated that the first victim of the Whitechapel murderer had been slain in the vicinity of Osborn and Wentworth Streets at Christmas 1887. A stick or iron instrument had been thrust into her body. She had never been identified. The story was repeated again and again – in newspapers and broadsheets, in a parliamentary question of November 1888, and in Dr L. Forbes Winslow’s widely read memoir, Recollections of Forty Years, published in 1910. Terence Robertson, writing for Reynold’s News in 1950, embroidered the tale still further. He gave the unknown woman a name – Fairy Fay – and said that she was killed on Boxing Night 1887, when she was taking a short cut home from a pub in Mitre Square.
No such event occurred. There is no reference to it in police records. No mention of it can be found in the local or national press for December 1887 or January 1888. And a search of registered deaths at St Catherine’s House reveals no woman named Fay or anything like that murdered in Whitechapel during the relevant period. There is no doubt that the Telegraph story was a confused memory of the known murder of Emma Smith in the spring of 1888. Emma was attacked in Osborn Street and a blunt instrument, perhaps a stick, was savagely thrust into her. She died the next day in the London Hospital. Obviously the Telegraph’s writer recalled this incident very hazily. He remembered, for example, that it had occurred on a public holiday and opted for Christmas 1887. The correct date was the night of Easter Monday, 2–3 April 1888.7
Today writers still regularly list both Fairy Fay and Emma Smith as possible victims of Jack the Ripper. But Fairy Fay is a phantom, born of sloppy journalism back in 1888.
The deficiencies of newspaper files cannot be redressed from reminiscent evidence, whether memoirs of retired policemen or interviews with aged East End residents. These sources, although often readily accessible, have special problems of their own.
Over time our memories deteriorate more profoundly than many people inexperienced in the use of historical evidence realize, and reminiscences recorded long after the event are characteristically confused on chronology and detail. There is a very human tendency, too, for us to ‘improve’ upon our memories, to make a better story, to explain away past mistakes, or simply to claim for ourselves a more impressive role in past dramas than we have acted in life.
In 1959 a ninety-year-old Mr Wright could still show broadcaster Dan Farson the spot in Buck’s Row where one of the murders took place. He had lived in Buck’s Row as a boy, he explained, and it was he who had washed the blood from the pavement. Contemporary records reveal that there was, in fact, very little blood and that what there was was washed down by a son of Emma Green, who lived adjacent to the murder site.
At the time of the murders a greengrocer called Matthew Packer told police that on the night Liz Stride was killed in Berner Street he had sold grapes to her killer. More than seventy years later an aged Annie Tapper remembered the story and retold it for Tom Cullen. She insisted, however, that as a girl of nine she had sold the grapes to Jack the Ripper and, of course, she remembered him perfectly. ‘I’ll tell you what he looked like as sure as this is Friday,’ she said. But her murderer was a fantasy, disguised in a black, pointed beard and togged out in a bobtail coat and striped trousers.
At a more exalted level Sir Robert Anderson, head of CID in 1888, made the preposterous suggestion in his memoirs that his policy of withdrawing police protection from prostitutes drove them from the streets and thereby put an end to street murders in the Ripper series. Not true. Contemporary evidence demonstrates that the policy was never implemented and could not have worked.
In producing reminiscences there is also a tende
ncy for our memories to become contaminated by later stories and influences. A case in point is Mary Cox. Mrs Cox lived in Miller’s Court in 1888. She knew Mary Jane Kelly, usually regarded as the Ripper’s last victim, and saw her with a man only hours before she was murdered. Many years later Dan Farson interviewed Mrs Cox’s niece at her home off the Hackney Road. According to the niece’s story, Mrs Cox remembered the man as a gentleman, a real toff: ‘He was a fine looking man, wore an overcoat with a cape, high hat . . . and Gladstone bag.’ Now this is very like the classic villain in Victorian melodrama. And by then that is precisely how East Enders had come to think of Jack the Ripper. But it is poles apart from the man Mrs Cox really saw, the one she described before detectives and at the inquest back in 1888. Then she spoke of a short, stout man, a man with a carroty moustache and blotchy face, a man who dressed shabbily and carried only a quart can of beer.8
‘I can remember it now as though it were yesterday.’ Such protestations are common enough in reminiscent accounts. I urge my readers not to be fooled. Rather, take to heart the words of John Still: ‘The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.’
Sadly, the misinformation propagated in books today is not simply a product of reliance upon untrustworthy sources. For, as far as most Ripperologists are concerned, the truth runs a very poor second to selling a pet theory on the identity of the killer. This means that evidence in conflict with the theory is liable to be suppressed or perverted, that fiction is frequently dressed up as fact, and that evidence in support of the theory is sometimes completely invented. There is a long history of dishonesty and fraud in Ripper research.
We have had some notable cock-and-bull stories in recent years.
Many readers will remember Stephen Knight’s bestseller, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, published in 1976. In Knight’s complex tale, Mary Jane Kelly witnesses the secret marriage of Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson and Heir Presumptive to the throne, to a shop-assistant called Annie Elizabeth Crook, and then bands together with a group of fellow East End whores to blackmail the government. Salisbury, the Prime Minister, is alarmed. Annie Crook is a Catholic. And anti-Catholic sentiment is rife amongst the population at large. So if it comes out that the prince has taken a Catholic bride the very future of the monarchy itself might be endangered! Without further ado Salisbury hands the problem to Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, and Gull, assisted by Walter Sickert, the artist, and John Netley, a sinister coachman, promptly tracks down and slices up the blackmailers.
The falsehoods and absurdities in this yarn have been exposed in many books and there is no need to repeat them here. Even Joseph Sickert, who told Knight the story in the first place, denounced the Jack the Ripper part of it ‘a hoax . . . a whopping fib’ in 1978. What is disconcerting about the whole episode, however, is the attitude of Stephen Knight himself. His research is now known to have uncovered evidence which proved that the story was untrue. Yet he shamelessly chose to suppress it.
Later Joseph Sickert retracted his confession and supplied further material to Melvyn Fairclough, who used it in his book The Ripper and the Royals. It included three diaries supposedly written by Inspector Frederick George Abberline between 1892 and 1915 and given by him to Walter Sickert in 1928. Abberline is well known to students of the Ripper case. In 1888 he co-ordinated the hunt for the murderer in Whitechapel and he died in Bournemouth in 1929. I do not know whether the diaries have been subjected to competent forensic examination. I do know they are not true bill. The diaries, which incriminate a galaxy of public figures, including Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir William Gull and James K. Stephen, Prince Albert Victor’s tutor at Cambridge, conflict with Abberline’s known views on the identity of Jack the Ripper. On one page, reproduced by Fairclough, the detective’s name is incorrectly signed ‘G. F. Abberline.’ Still more telling, biographical notes on four of the murder victims, set down in the diaries, supposedly by Abberline, appear to have been cribbed, sometimes almost word for word, from a research article published in True Detective in 1989!9
It is in this context that we must view the recent ‘discovery’ of the alleged Jack the Ripper diary.
This document is a black-and-gilt calf-bound volume containing sixty-three handwritten pages. It is signed ‘Jack the Ripper’.
The owner of the diary is Mike Barrett, a one-time scrap-metal dealer who lives in Liverpool. It was Barrett who brought the diary to the offices of Rupert Crew Ltd., a London literary agency, in April 1992. Its commercial potential was obvious. The publishing rights were snapped up by Smith Gryphon Ltd and on 7 October 1993 the diary hit the bookshelves amidst a blaze of hype. ‘7 October 1993,’ ran the pre-launch publicity, ‘the day the world’s greatest murder mystery will be solved.’
Unfortunately, it isn’t solved. And the diary is an impudent fake.
Forensic examination of the diary is as yet inconclusive. There seems no doubt that the volume itself is genuinely Victorian. This, of course, proves nothing. Family and business archives contain many used and partly used Victorian diaries, ledgers and notebooks. They frequently come on the market and can be bought at market stalls and from antiquarian book dealers. Significantly, the first forty-eight pages of the Ripper diary are missing, apparently cut out with a knife. Rectangular stains on the flysheet suggest that the volume was originally used for mounting photographs.
Tests on the ink have been made. It should be noted, however, that there is little difference between Victorian iron-gall blue-black ink and modern permanent blue-black ink and that comprehensive and diverse tests are necessary to distinguish the two. In any case it is not difficult to age ink artificially. Amalia and Rosa Panvini, the forgers of the Mussolini diaries in 1967, used modern ink. Nevertheless, they fooled the experts by baking the diaries at low heat in a kitchen oven for half an hour, a process which aged the ink so perfectly that no scientific test was able to fault it. The evaluation of the Ripper diary will doubtless continue. But at least two out of three experts who have already made tests on the ink have concluded that it is of later than Victorian age.
The diary has no pedigree before May 1991. Mike Barrett says that it was given to him at that time by a friend, a retired printer called Tony Devereux, and that Devereux refused to account for its history or explain how he came by it. Devereux died a few months later. His family insist that he never mentioned the diary to them.
All this raises a crucial question. If the diary is genuine where has it been for the last century? No one knows. It purports to be the diary of James Maybrick, a wealthy cotton merchant, and identifies Maybrick as the Ripper. Maybrick will already be familiar to devotees of true crime. He died at Battlecrease House in Aigburth, a suburb of Liverpool, in May 1889, and his wife Florence was accused of poisoning him with arsenic extracted from flypapers. Florence was convicted and sentenced to death but her sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life. She was released in 1904 and died in the United States in 1941. Battlecrease House still stands. It has been speculated that the diary may have been found under the floorboards during rewiring work in 1990 or 1991. But neither the present owner of the property nor the electricians involved have any knowledge of such a discovery.
The diary itself contains nothing to persuade me that it was written by the Whitechapel murderer. Like most charlatans, its author gives little substantive information to check. What there is is scarcely impressive.
The diarist repeats, for example, the myth that the murderer left two farthings with the body of Annie Chapman. He makes several errors in recounting the murder of Mary Kelly in her lodging at 13 Miller’s Court. We are told that the various parts of her body were strewn ‘all over the room’, that her severed breasts were placed on the bedside table and that the killer took the key of the room away with him. None of these statements are true. They are errors that were published in the Victorian press and have been repeated in books many times since. But the real murderer would have kn
own better. The diarist’s claim to have penned the famous ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter and postcard sent to the Central News in 1888 does nothing for his credibility. As I will demonstrate in this book, there is no reason whatever to suppose that these communications were written by the murderer. Besides, the handwriting of the letter and postcard does not match that of the Maybrick diary.
Presumably the hoaxer pitched upon Maybrick because his death in 1889 would neatly explain the mysterious cessation of the Ripper crimes. In other ways, though, he is an unlikely choice. Contemporary evidence suggests that the Whitechapel murderer was a man in his twenties or thirties, a man who lived in the East End of London and possessed some degree of anatomical knowledge. None of this fits Maybrick. He was a fifty-year-old cotton merchant and lived at Battlecrease House at the period of the murders. Yes, he may have made regular visits to Whitechapel, but there is no evidence of it.
There is a further difficulty. If Maybrick wrote the diary, why does the handwriting in this volume not conform to that in known examples of his hand? Sue Iremonger, a forensic handwriting examiner, was unable to match the diary with the handwriting and signature in Maybrick’s will or with the signature on his marriage certificate.10
By now it should be obvious that we are dealing with a transparent hoax. The unacceptable provenance of the diary, the missing front pages, the factual inaccuracies and the implausibility of Maybrick as a Ripper suspect – even without forensic tests we have learned enough to set a whole belfry of warning bells ringing. A reading of the diary still leaves me baffled as to how any intelligent and reasonably informed student of the Ripper case could possibly have taken it seriously. There were those well versed in the subject, men like Nick Warren, Tom Cullen and Melvin Harris, who saw through the hoax from the beginning. Yet it is astonishing how many experts were fooled and allowed their names to be used in the promotional literature. They remain there, preserved like flies in amber, warnings to the complacent and the credulous.
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 4
