Considering the lapse of time, it would be interesting to know how the present writer was able to use the words ‘The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing’; as it will be remembered that they are practically the same words that were written in chalk, undoubtedly by the murderer, on the wall at Goulston St., Whitechapel, on the night of 30th September, 1888, after the murders of Mrs Stride and Mrs Eddows; and the word Jews was spelt on that occasion precisely as it is now.
Although these similarities strangely exist between the documents, I am of opinion that the present writer is not the original correspondent who prepared the letters to the Central News; as if it had been I should have thought he would have again addressed it to the same Press Agency; and not to Commercial Street Police Station.
In conclusion I beg to observe that I do not attach any importance to this communication.
Swanson wrote a capital A in the margin against Moore’s last sentence. Then he endorsed the report: ‘In my opinion the handwritings are not the same. I agree as at A.’17
These documents prove that, eight years after the original enquiry, the CID still did not know who had written the original Jack the Ripper letter and postcard. For had they possessed such information Moore’s exercise would have been quite pointless. As late as 1914, furthermore, Sir Melville Macnaghten, freshly retired from ten years as the head of the CID, would only own to a suspicion as to the hoaxer: ‘In this ghastly production I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist – indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author! But whoever did pen the gruesome stuff, it is certain to my mind that it was not the mad miscreant who had committed the murders.’18
In asserting a conclusive identification of the hoaxer Anderson’s memoirs went beyond the truth. This should caution us as to their worth as historical evidence. And later, when we come to consider Sir Robert’s extraordinary claims in relation to one of the major murder suspects, we will need to read them with a generous pinch of salt.
Nevertheless, police intuition that the letter and postcard had been penned by an irresponsible journalist was probably correct. Telltale signs pointing to such a conclusion abound in the communications themselves. Although all question-marks and most apostrophes are omitted in the letter the overall impression it conveys is that it was the work of an educated man trying to appear less so. The handwriting and general layout are neat and careful. Capital letters and full stops are properly employed. And, despite the presence of words that would sorely have tested a semi-literate man19, there is not one spelling mistake. The fact that the communications were sent, not to Scotland Yard, but to the Central News, suggests, moreover, that the hoaxer knew exactly where to go in order to achieve maximum publicity for his creations. Lastly we come back to the postmarks. It may be significant that the letter was posted in the East Central district. For it embraced the Fleet Street/Farringdon Road area, where many of the main newspaper offices were situated. The postcard bore an Eastern district postmark and could easily have been written and mailed by a young reporter investigating the double murder. In 1966 a writer in Crime and Detection claimed that in 1931 an ex-Star reporter named Best confessed to him that he and a provincial colleague had written all the Jack the Ripper letters using a pen known as a ‘Waverley Nib’, deliberately battered to achieve an impression of semi-literacy and ‘National School’ training.20 Best’s claim to have written all the letters is ridiculous. That he wrote some, to ‘keep the business alive’ as he said, is possible but assertions made so long after the event must be treated with extreme caution.
The ‘From hell’ letter sent to George Lusk, backed by Openshaw’s and Brown’s findings on the kidney, has been accepted as authentic by most students of the Whitechapel murders. It could have been written by the killer. But the case is by no means conclusive.
In the first place the results of Openshaw’s examination of the kidney on 18 October were obviously misreported. On average a woman’s kidney is smaller and lighter than a man’s but the difference is small and it would have been extremely difficult for him to have determined from a portion of kidney whether the organ had been extracted from a man or a woman.
Bright’s Disease was originally thought to have been caused by overindulgence in ‘ardent spirits’ such as gin. However, the term ‘ginny kidney’, attributed to Openshaw, is now known to be meaningless since the kidneys are not injured by alcohol.
The first accounts of Openshaw’s findings come to us through so many intermediaries that it would, indeed, be surprising if they were reliable. When directly interviewed by representatives of the press on 19 October the doctor repudiated almost every pronouncement that had been attributed to him.21 He did reiterate his belief that the organ was part of a left human kidney. But that is about the only view we can confidently ascribe to him.
It is enough to set up an intriguing poser. The left kidney was cut out of Kate Eddowes’ body in Mitre Square on 30 September. So was the kidney received by George Lusk sixteen days later, also a portion of a left human kidney, sent by the murderer? Or did someone else, learning from the inquest revelations of 4 October that Kate’s left kidney was missing, perpetrate a disgusting hoax? Contemporary opinion was divided. Dr Saunders, the City’s Public Analyst, thought the Lusk kidney a practical joke, a ‘student’s antic’. Major Smith did not.
Let us consider the facts.
Openshaw decided that the postal kidney was part of a left human kidney, Brown that it was the kidney of a human adult. These claims are not unreasonable. As Nick Warren has recently explained, it should have been possible in 1888 for professional medical men to distinguish a human kidney from those of common domestic animals on morphological grounds. And since a kidney may shrink by up to 1 cm. in length between the ages of thirty and seventy, it may also have been possible for them to have determined whether the kidney had been taken from an adult. It should be noted, however, that kidneys afflicted by Bright’s Disease, as this is said to have been, are pathologically contracted anyway.
Could the kidney have been sent by a medical student as a prank? Perhaps it could. But there is an important objection to this theory. Bodies delivered to hospitals for dissection were charged with preserving fluid (formalin). The organ received by Lusk had not been treated in this way. It had been preserved in spirit.
Major Smith mentions two circumstances which seem to link the postal kidney specifically with Kate’s murder. The right renal artery is generally about three inches long, the left a little less but not shorter than two and a half inches. Now, Smith tells us that about two inches of left renal artery remained in Kate’s body and that only about one inch was attached to the postal kidney. Moreover, according to Smith, the right kidney left in Kate’s body had been found in an advanced stage of Bright’s Disease and the left kidney sent to Lusk was in ‘an exactly similar state’.
One hesitates to take Smith at his word. His book, written so long after the event, is inevitably unreliable. And a press statement by Dr Brown, discovered by Stewart Evans, casts real doubt upon his account of the kidney. In his statement Brown would not confirm that the postal kidney was part of a left kidney and contended that it had not been immersed in spirit for more than a week. Furthermore, he asserted that no portion of renal artery adhered to the postal kidney because the organ had been ‘trimmed up’.
If accurately reported this statement effectively refutes Smith. But therein lies the rub. Is it accurately reported? Contemporary newspapers are frequently as misleading as later police memoirs. And it is certainly possible to find press support for Smith. A Daily Telegraph report of 20 October 1888, for example, says: ‘it is asserted that only a small portion of the renal artery adheres to the kidney, while in the case of the Mitre Square victim a large portion of this artery adhered to the body.’
On the matter of Bright’s Disease time has vindicated Smith. Dr Sedgwick Saunders, quoted by the Evening News in October 1888, flatly contradicts him in s
aying that ‘the right kidney of the woman Eddowes was perfectly normal in its structure and healthy, and by parity of reasoning, you would not get much disease in the left.’ But Dr Brown’s recently discovered inquest deposition proves that Smith was right and Saunders wrong. Brown told the inquest that Kate’s right kidney was ‘pale, bloodless, with slight congestion of the base of the pyramids’. These symptoms, as Nick Warren points out, unquestionably do indicate Bright’s Disease.22
In the end the evidence fails to persuade either way. The postal kidney could have been genuine. On the other hand we cannot prove that it had not been extracted from some other person recently autopsied. Experts continue to disagree and the jury is still out.
If the kidney really was Kate’s the accompanying letter was written by her murderer. Yet, although the subject of several amusing exercises in graphology, it has inspired only one detailed study by a serious handwriting expert – that by Thomas Mann, a charter member of the World Association of Document Examiners.23
Mann’s most important conclusion is that the author of the Lusk letter was a semi-literate person. The script exhibits a cramped style of writing – vertical strokes are retraced, letters are crowded together, often very little space separates one word from another. It is a product of finger movement rather than forearm or whole-arm movement. With finger movement letters are formed almost entirely by the action of the thumb and the first and second fingers. It is a method of writing that permits only slight lateral freedom and is characteristic of the semi-literate, of those who have not the assured command of the pen and easy arm motion of the practised penman. Other telltale signs indicate a semi-literate author. Numerous ink blots attest to someone little concerned with legibility and clarity and relatively unskilled in the use of his writing instrument. There is no punctuation. ‘Kidne’, occurring in the middle of a sentence, is capitalized while ‘it’, beginning the sentence ‘it was very nise’, is not. Separate ideas are run together ungrammatically. The sentence ‘prasarved it for you’ is incomplete. ‘Catch me when you can’ should probably be ‘Catch me if you can.’ And more than one seventh of the words in the letter are spelled incorrectly.
There are, admittedly, some indications of rudimentary learning. By no means all the spelling errors are phonetic. The words ‘knif’ and ‘whil’ prove that the writer had sufficient education to know of the silent k and h. And conversely, he could not phonetically have arrived at the correct spelling of a word like ‘piece’. The setting out of the letter, too, suggests some formal training in writing because it generally follows the correct form as taught in copybooks of the period. Notwithstanding such indications, however, Mann does not believe that the writer was an educated person disguising his handwriting so as to appear semi-literate.
Disguised writing is necessarily slowly drawn. Only by writing so slowly that one is consciously in control of each stroke of the pen is it possible to prevent one’s natural, idiosyncratic characteristics from appearing in the script. But, Mann tells us, such conscious attention to the process of writing is almost always detectable: ‘The strokes of slowly drawn writing become tremulous in appearance; they lose the clean-cut edges of quickly written lines. Furthermore, a stroke normally produced by one quick motion may, in drawn writing, be composed of several distinct movement impulses – i.e., minute changes of direction will be noticeable in a stroke which could appear firm if it were written with normal speed.’ After a careful examination of the Lusk script, Mann believes that it was written more slowly than average handwriting. Difficulty in moving the pen is not surprising in finger movement and the generally heavy pressure exerted by the writer of the Lusk letter may also indicate a relatively slow speed. However, apart from a few exceptions (for example, in the tails of ‘hell’ and ‘nise’), the pen strokes do not, in Mann’s judgement, exhibit the halting or hesitating quality characteristic of deliberate disguise. Occasionally, indeed, the writing displays evidence of having been so rapid that the ink track failed to register, as in the e of ‘Kidne’ and the L, u and s of ‘Lusk’ at the end of the letter. A disguised hand, finally, is almost certain to be inconsistent with itself in its features or qualities. This is not true of the Lusk script. Throughout it exhibits many subtle idiosyncrasies which are habitually repeated. Mann details no less than twenty-six of them. ‘All elements considered,’ he writes, ‘the indices of speed and internal consistency in the script do not support the hypothesis of generally disguised handwriting; and, on the other hand, these indications do accord with the hypothesis of a semi-literate penman.’
So much for the handwriting. What about nationality and dialect? Well, it is certainly worthy of note, given the debate about whether the murderer was a foreigner or not, that the author of the Lusk letter was probably of British origin. The abbreviation ‘Mr’, written with the r raised above the line, is a peculiarity of English handwriting, and ‘tother’, used as a contraction of ‘the other’, was common to Scotland, Ireland, England and America. More specifically, the words ‘prasarved’ and ‘Mishter’ may reflect a Cockney dialect because William Matthews, in his study Cockney Past and Present, produces evidence to show that in Cockney speech ‘er’ was commonly pronounced ‘ar’ as in ‘clerk’ until late in the 19th century and that ‘sh’ was widely substituted for ‘s’. The possibility of an Irish author has already been mooted.24
The Lusk letter may have been written by the murderer, it may not. Given our present state of knowledge we can only keep an open mind on the subject.
Sue Iremonger, a member of the World Association of Document Examiners, is at present engaged in a fresh study of the Ripper letters. She believes a communication of 6 October to be in the same hand as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and does not think either of them could have been produced by Best’s flattened Waverley nib. The results of her research will be fascinating. However, despite some published claims to the contrary25 it should be remembered that only the Lusk letter can be directly linked – and that but tenuously – to the murderer. For this reason comparisons between the handwriting in the Ripper correspondence and that of some suspect or other are almost invariably futile. Yet Ripperologists, eager to invest their fantasies with a veneer of credibility, will continue to make them. Besides which the idea of the Ripper brazenly taunting his enemies with insolent jibes and lines of sleazy doggerel is just too good for fictioneers to relinquish. At the beginning of its second century the myth of the murderer-scribe is probably too firmly entrenched in popular legend to be touched by anything written here. As Arthur Koestler, the wise Hungarian writer and essayist, understood only too well, ‘nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.’
14
In the Shadow of the Ripper
‘WE HEAR STARTLING NEWS of abounding sin in this great city. Oh God, put an end to this, and grant that we may hear no more of such deeds. Let Thy gospel permeate the city, and let not monsters in human shape escape Thee.’1 Such was the earnest prayer of Mr Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle on the morning of Sunday, 30 September 1888, only hours after the bodies of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes had been found in the East End.
The news of the double killing was already sweeping through the metropolis. By eleven that same morning, one reporter tells us, it seemed ‘as if the entire population of the East End was out of doors.’2 Both murder sites had been cordoned off by police but thousands of ghoulish sightseers choked the approaches to Mitre Square and congregated outside Dutfield’s Yard. At one time Berner Street resembled a sea of heads from end to end. Windows overlooking the sites were thrown open and seats at them openly sold and eagerly sought. On the fringes of the crowds costermongers, selling edibles from bread and fish to fruit, sweets and nuts, and newsvendors, proclaiming the latest particulars, did spectacular trade. And because many East Enders were illiterate or unable to understand English fascinated audiences clustered round anyone fortunate enough to have procured a paper and willing to read aloud the news of the hour.
Mitre Squar
e and Berner Street continued to attract crowds for several days. The same hysterical scenes that had been witnessed after Dark Annie’s murder were re-enacted and, as the excitement subsided, the same terrors were re-awakened. In the East End, after dark, they emptied all but the most illuminated and populous thoroughfares. It is probable that, given the circumstances, some lodging house deputies allowed regular customers to stay even if they did not possess their doss money. But many women were, as was the custom, mercilessly turned out into the streets. Some of these fled westwards to better-lit quarters of the metropolis. Others sought shelter in the casual wards and both in the City and throughout the East End boards of guardians noted substantial increases in female admissions during the first two weeks in October. But even on the first few nights after the double murder, when the panic was at its height and temperatures plummeted to freezing, groups of these miserable and forlorn-looking creatures might still be seen in the darkness and cold, touting at street corners or under the glare of lamps, or huddling in doorways to screen their ill-clad bodies from the biting wind. Their plight was summed up by one of their number, rebuked after accosting a rescue officer near Shoreditch Church: ‘Good heavens! What are we to do? At one o’clock last night Mother Morris came down into the kitchen, and she says, “Now then, you girls who haven’t got your doss money – out you go,” and all of them as hadn’t got enough was forced to turn out and go into the streets shuddering at every shadow, and expecting every minute to be murdered. What are we to do?’ Some of these women, more spirited than their comrades, were determined to go down fighting. ‘Afraid? No. I’m armed. Look here,’ one told a reporter, pulling a knife out of her pocket. ‘I’m not the only one armed. There’s plenty more carry knives now.’3
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 37
