Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Inside was one half of a kidney, divided longitudinally. It stank. There was also a letter:

  From hell

  Mr Lusk

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

  signed

  Catch me when

  you can

  Mishter Lusk5

  Aarons felt sure he was not looking at a sheep’s kidney and he proposed that they take it to the surgery of Dr Frederick Wiles at 56 Mile End Road. The doctor wasn’t in but his assistant, Mr F. S. Reed, was. Reed opined that the kidney was human and had been preserved in spirits of wine. But, to make sure, he popped over to the London Hospital and submitted the kidney to Dr Thomas Horrocks Openshaw, Curator of the Pathological Museum, for examination under the microscope.

  Openshaw’s alleged findings have influenced everyone who has ever written about the kidney. According to Aarons, when Reed returned he told them that Openshaw had said that the kidney ‘belonged to a female, that it was part of the left kidney, and that the woman had been in the habit of drinking. He should think that the person had died about the same time the Mitre Square murder was committed.’ This account is generally supported by a Press Association report, compiled from ‘inquiries made at Mile End’ and published on 19 October. Openshaw pronounced the kidney, it said, to be ‘a portion of a human kidney – a “ginny” kidney – that is to say, one that had belonged to a person who had drunk heavily. He was further of opinion that it was the organ of a woman of about forty-five years of age, and that it had been taken from the body within the last three weeks.’ Interviewed the same day for the Star, though, Openshaw himself repudiated most of what had been published: ‘Dr Openshaw told a Star reporter today that after having examined the piece of kidney under the microscope he was of opinion that it was half of a left human kidney. He couldn’t say, however, whether it was that of a woman, nor how long ago it had been removed from the body, as it had been preserved in spirits.’6

  Whatever Lusk’s party were given to understand about Openshaw’s views they heard enough to convince them that the police had to be told. Without further ado they took the parcel to Leman Street and placed it in the hands of Inspector Abberline. The Metropolitan Police, in their turn, sent it to their City colleagues and the kidney was examined by Dr Gordon Brown, the City Police surgeon. His report, although crucial to any assessment of the importance of Mr Lusk’s parcel, has not survived and all we know of it comes secondhand or worse from Chief Inspector Swanson and Major Smith.

  Swanson’s information probably came from Inspector McWilliam. On 6 November he told the Home Office that ‘the result of the combined medical opinion they [the City Police] have taken upon it, is, that it is the kidney of a human adult, not charged with a fluid, as it would have been in the case of a body handed over for purposes of dissection to an hospital, but rather as it would be in a case where it was taken from the body not so destined.’7

  Smith’s account was published more than twenty years later: ‘I made over the kidney to the police surgeon, instructing him to consult with the most eminent men in the profession, and send me a report without delay. I give the substance of it. The renal artery is about three inches long. Two inches remained in the corpse, one inch was attached to the kidney. The kidney left in the corpse was in an advanced stage of Bright’s Disease; the kidney sent me was in an exactly similar state. But what was of far more importance, Mr Sutton, one of the senior surgeons of the London Hospital, whom Gordon Brown asked to meet him and another practitioner in consultation, and who was one of the greatest authorities living on the kidney and its diseases, said he would pledge his reputation that the kidney submitted to them had been put in spirits within a few hours of its removal from the body – thus effectually disposing of all hoaxes in connection with it. The body of anyone done to death by violence is not taken direct to the dissecting-room, but must await an inquest, never held before the following day at the soonest.’8

  The wrapping in which the parcel had arrived bore two penny stamps and a postmark. Except for the letters OND (a vestige of ‘LONDON’) the postmark was too indistinct to be read. Nevertheless, the Post Office is said to have expressed an opinion that the package was posted in the Eastern or the East Central district.9 There were arguments in favour of both. Items travelling from one district to another usually bore the postmark of both districts. Lusk’s package, however, had only been franked once and this indicated that it had been posted in the district in which it had been received, i.e. the Eastern district. On the other hand, the package was too large to have been dropped into an ordinary post-box. It was thus suggested that it had been posted at the Lombard or Gracechurch Street office, in the East Central district, for there the receptacles were of unusually wide dimensions.

  A possible lead on the sender of the parcel came from Miss Emily Marsh, whose father traded in leather at 218 Jubilee Street, Mile End Road.

  Shortly after one on Monday, 15 October, she was minding her father’s shop when a tall man dressed in clerical costume came in. He referred to a vigilance committee reward bill posted up in the window and asked Emily for the address of Mr Lusk, mentioned in the bill as the president of the committee. Emily advised him to see Mr Aarons, the treasurer, who lived at the corner of Jubilee Street and Mile End Road, just thirty yards away, but the man said he did not want to go there. She then produced a newspaper. It gave Mr Lusk’s address as Alderney Road, Globe Road, and she offered it to the stranger. But he declined to take it. Instead he told Emily to ‘read it out’ and proceeded to write in his pocket-book, all the time keeping his head down. Later, after thanking her for the information, he left the shop. Something about the stranger’s furtive manner and appearance worried Emily so much that she sent John Cormack, the shop boy, after him to see that all was right.

  A description of the man, apparently based upon the observations of Emily, John Cormack and Mr Marsh, who turned up in time to encounter him on the pavement outside the shop, was published by the Telegraph: ‘The stranger is described as a man of some forty-five years of age, fully six feet in height, and slimly built. He wore a soft felt black hat, drawn over his forehead, a stand-up collar, and a very long black single-breasted overcoat, with a Prussian or clerical collar partly turned up. His face was of a sallow type, and he had a dark beard and moustache. The man spoke with what was taken to be an Irish accent.’10

  Was this the man who posted the kidney? Well, he inquired after Lusk’s address on the 15th, the day before the kidney was delivered. Emily’s newspaper, moreover, printed the address simply as Alderney Road, Globe Road. No number in Alderney Road was given. And the address on the parcel Lusk received likewise contained no house number. The spelling of some of the words in the letter, too, is interesting. For the rendition of ‘Sir’ as ‘Sor’, of ‘er’ as ‘ar’ in ‘prasarved’ and of ‘s’ as ‘sh’ in ‘Mishter’ could suggest a writer with an Irish accent. It is thus possible that Lusk’s correspondent and Emily’s tall stranger were identical. But the fact that Lusk had been the recipient of several hoax letters obliges us to regard it as no more than a possibility.

  The important question is whether any one of the three communications we have noticed was actually written by the murderer. The first two – the letter and postcard signed Jack the Ripper – were in the same handwriting and should be considered together.

  Leonard Matters and William Stewart, the first modern Ripperologists, both dismissed these documents as hoaxes. But Donald McCormick, writing in 1959, thought differently. He drew attention to the letter writer’s promise, on 25 September, to clip the victim’s ears off ‘the next job I do’ and interpreted the injuries to Stride’s left and Eddowes’ right ear as abortive attempts to redeem that promise. McCormick also assumed that the postcard was written and posted on 30 September. This, as he pointed out, was a Sunday an
d no report of the murders would appear in the dailies until the next morning. Yet the writer of the postcard not only knew of the ‘double event’ but, in McCormick’s view, mentioned details only the murderer could have known. ‘Unless Jack the Ripper was the killer,’ he asked, ‘how could he have known that Elizabeth Stride had ‘squealed a bit’ . . . or that an attempt had been made to clip off the ears?’11

  McCormick’s view of the matter held sway for more than fifteen years. During that time every major writer on the case – Odell, Cullen, Farson and Rumbelow – lent their weight to the belief that the murderer had penned the communications to the Central News and had thereby coined his own nom de guerre. Then, in 1975, Richard Whittington-Egan and Stephen Knight sowed seeds of doubt. Whittington-Egan did not believe that the postcard had shown any foreknowledge of the double murder at all. It was, he reminded his readers, postmarked 1 October, which meant that it could have been posted on the Monday, after details of the murders had been splashed across the columns of the morning papers. Knight, after checking with the records department of the Post Office, endorsed this conclusion. He revealed that there were Sunday collections from post-boxes in 1888 and that any letter collected on a Sunday would have been stamped with that date. The Jack the Ripper postcard, however, was franked ‘OC 1’, not ‘SP 30’, and that proved, as far as Knight was concerned, that it had to have been posted on the Monday.12

  The ranks of the Ripperologists have since been in total disarray on the subject. Some, like Colin Wilson, Robin Odell and Paul Harrison, have continued to identify the Central News Agency’s correspondent with the murderer. Others, notably Martin Fido, Melvin Harris and Paul Begg, have followed Whittington-Egan and Knight in denouncing him as a fraud.

  At this date it is not possible to establish the exact date on which the postcard was mailed. For even if further research into Post Office procedures could verify Stephen Knight’s findings they would not preclude a Sunday posting after the last collection time. My own feeling is that the postcard was written and posted on Sunday, 30 September, the day of the murders. The wording of the card certainly suggests that this was the case: ‘Youll hear about saucy Jackys work tomorrow [i.e. in Monday morning’s papers].’ And a Sunday posting would seem consistent with the understanding of the press that the card was delivered with the first post on Monday morning.13

  The argument over posting dates, however, rests upon an entirely false assumption – that if the card was mailed on Sunday 30th it displayed some foreknowledge of the details of the double murder. In truth neither card nor preceding letter contain anything whatsoever to justify a belief that they were written by the murderer. This conclusion holds good whether the card was posted on Sunday or Monday and the preoccupation with the date is a red herring that has diverted attention from the critical study of the content of the communications for far too long.

  All three claims usually made on behalf of the Jack the Ripper letter and postcard are easily refuted.

  First, the matter of the ears. ‘The next job I do,’ boasted the letter writer, ‘I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly.’ The threat was not carried out and after the double murder the postcard explained: ‘had not time to get ears for police.’ Now, it has been alleged that attempts were indeed made to remove the ears of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes, and this ‘fact’ has been repeatedly adduced to authenticate the correspondence. Unfortunately for the argument the medical records tell a different story. Dr Gordon Brown, examining Kate’s body in Mitre Square, did discover that the lobe of her right ear had been severed. But one detached ear lobe does not constitute evidence of an attempt to remove both ears and, given the extensive mutilation to Kate’s face and head, can scarcely be deemed significant. If the murderer had really wanted to cut off Kate’s ears he would have done so. There was certainly time enough, as the intricate cuts to her eyelids and cheeks attest. In the case of Liz Stride the murderer inflicted no injury whatsoever to the victim’s ears. There was, it is true, a tear on the lower lobe of her left ear. But this was not a recent injury. It was, as Dr Phillips made clear at the inquest, an old wound, apparently caused by the forcible removal of an ear-ring, and now healed.

  The second claim is that the postcard displayed foreknowledge of the Stride and Eddowes killings by referring to a “double event’ in advance of Monday’s press reports. Even if we suppose that the postcard was written on Sunday 30th, this contention is, quite frankly, absurd. Innumerable people knew of the murders on the Sunday and could have alluded to them in conversation or correspondence. Within hours of the discovery of the bodies the news was being circulated by word of mouth throughout the district. Even some editions of the Sunday papers managed to catch the story. ‘Successive editions of the Sunday papers were getting a marvellous sale yesterday,’ commented Monday morning’s Daily News, ‘and the contents were being devoured with the utmost eagerness.’ The Telegraph described the state of ‘almost frantic excitement’ that prevailed throughout the East End on the fatal Sunday. ‘Thousands of people visited both Mitre Square and Berner Street, and journals containing details of the crimes were bought up by crowds of men and women in Whitechapel, Stepney, and Spitalfields.’14 Curiously, despite the scrutiny to which the postmark has been subjected, no one seems to have pointed out that the card was posted in the Eastern district, where the double murder was common knowledge on Sunday as well as Monday. Pressmen swarmed around the murder sites throughout Sunday. Trawling for copy for next morning’s papers, they, in particular, would have acquired a detailed knowledge of the crimes, a fact which, as we will see, might not be without significance.

  Finally, it is regularly claimed that the postcard’s statement that ‘number one [Stride] squealed a bit’ is proof of the killer’s authorship because only the murderer could have known such a detail. This argument, of course, assumes that the information given about Stride was correct. We cannot be certain that it was. There were several witnesses in and about Dutfield’s Yard at the time of the murder. Only one (Israel Schwartz) swore to hearing screams. Others, like Morris Eagle, Mrs Diemschutz and Mrs Mortimer, were close enough to the scene of the crime to hear cries but heard nothing. Perhaps Elizabeth did ‘squeal a bit’. Perhaps her screams were drowned in the singing from the International Working Men’s Club. But even if this were so it is the kind of detail a hoaxer could easily have invented and stood a good chance of getting right. It might also have been possible for the postcard writer, if he were a pressman, to have learned the detail from Schwartz. We know for certain that one journalist successfully tracked him down to his lodgings in Backchurch Lane, either on Sunday evening or Monday morning, and procured an interview from him. This interview was published too late to influence the postcard15 and, in any case, did not mention Elizabeth’s screams, but since one newshound found Schwartz it was clearly possible for others to do so.

  In short there is no reason to believe that the Jack the Ripper letter and postcard were anything more than hoaxes. This was Warren’s view at the time. ‘At present,’ he told Lushington on 10 October 1888, ‘I think the whole thing a hoax but we are bound to try and ascertain the writer in any case.’ Many years later some detectives even insisted that they knew the identity of the hoaxer. Anderson categorically asserted in 1910 that the letter was the creation of an ‘enterprising London journalist’. He was tempted, he added, to reveal his name, provided his publishers would accept responsibility in the event of a libel action, but demurred because ‘no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer.’ In annotating his copy of Anderson’s book, Ex-Chief Inspector Swanson also maintained that ‘head officers of CID’ at Scotland Yard knew the identity of the journalist.16

  Unfortunately the claims of Anderson and Swanson are probably unjustified. I do not doubt that they had a specific name in mind. But Anderson’s concern over a possible libel suit suggests that he knew very well that he could not substantiate his a
llegation at law and new evidence from the Metropolitan Police case papers casts further doubt upon it.

  On 14 October 1896, eight years after the first letters, a fresh Jack the Ripper letter was received through the post at Commercial Street Police Station. ‘Dear Boss,’ it began, ‘you will be surprised to find that this comes from yours as of old Jack the Ripper. Ha Ha. If my old friend Mr Warren is dead you can read it. You might remember me if you try and think a little. Ha Ha . . .’ Much in the same vein followed, liberally sprinkled with words and phrases cribbed from the original communications but not in the same handwriting. The writer explained that he had just come back from abroad and was ready to resume his work, and he concluded with an enigmatic reference to the writing found in Goulston Street: ‘“The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing.” Ha Ha. have you heard this before.’ It was signed ‘yours truly, Jack the Ripper.’

  One of many crude imitations of the original, the letter concerns us less than the police reaction to it. From Commercial Street it was forwarded to Scotland Yard. There, on 15 October, Melville Macnaghten, then Chief Constable, minuted the covering note: ‘This is not, I think, the handwriting of our original correspondent – but it is not a bad imitation. Will you get out the old letters & compare?’

  Chief Inspector Henry Moore undertook the comparison. His report, dated 18 October, has not been published before:

  I beg to report having carefully perused all the old ‘Jack the Ripper’ letters and fail to find any similarity of handwriting in any of them, with the exception of the two well remembered communications which were sent to the ‘Central News’ Office; one a letter, dated 25th September 1888, and the other a postcard, bearing the postmark 1st October 1888 . . .

  On comparing the handwriting of the present letter with [the] handwriting of that document, I find many similarities in the formation of letters. For instance the y’s, t’s, and w’s are very much the same. Then there are several words which appear in both documents; viz:– Dear Boss; ha ha (although in the present letter the capital H is used instead of the small one); and in speaking of the murders he describes them as his ‘work’ or the last ‘job’; and if I get a (or the) chance; then there are the words ‘yours truly’ and – the Ripper (the latter on postcard) are very much alike. Besides there are the finger smears.