Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  So how many women did Jack the Ripper strike down? There is no simple answer. In a sentence: at least four, probably six, just possibly eight.

  It is unlikely, though, that the career of Jack the Ripper was launched in George Yard Buildings or Buck’s Row. Earlier attacks by the same man almost certainly occurred. Two such possibilities are documented in this book – the non-fatal knife attacks on Annie Millwood and Ada Wilson in the spring of 1888.

  The attack on Ada Wilson seems to have been the outcome of a robbery which badly misfired and took place at Mile End, well to the east of the Ripper’s known range. It is best discounted. That on Annie Millwood is a different proposition entirely. Annie lived in White’s Row, very close to George Yard, and since she was a widow may well have been supporting herself by prostitution. Apparently she was the victim of an unprovoked attack by a stranger and sustained ‘numerous’ stab wounds in the legs and lower body. This incident, like many of the Ripper’s known atrocities, took place on a weekend.

  If Annie was attacked by the George Yard murderer, and there is every chance that she was, we may, at last, be beginning to document the evolution of Jack the Ripper: a casual, botched attack on Annie Millwood in Spitalfields in February, the ferocious but disorganized slaying of Martha Tabram in George Yard in August and, finally, the emergence of the killer’s mature modus operandi, that which would earn him his terrible sobriquet, in Buck’s Row three weeks later.

  We know much more about the victims today than the police did at the time. They were not the broken-down harridans, mostly in their forties but looking ‘nearer sixty’, of popular legend. Two, Mary Kelly and Frances Coles, were attractive young women in their mid-twenties. The rest were middle-aged but few looked their years. Indeed, it is interesting that police and press estimates of age, based on appearance, consistently misjudged their ages by making them younger than they are now known to have been. In some cases the difference was considerable. A reporter who saw the body of Polly Nichols said that her features were those of ‘a woman of about thirty or thirty-five years.’5 She was forty-three. The official police description of Kate Eddowes described her as about forty. She was well over forty-six.

  Children of decent working-class parents, virtually all the women had slipped into destitution through failed marriages and drink.

  The inquest testimony respecting them is frequently misleading. Time and time again we are told that they were quiet and inoffensive, sober and industrious, that they kept regular hours and did not walk the streets. We are entitled to take such protestations with a pinch of salt.

  The men who cohabited with these women did not wish to be accused of living from the fruits of prostitution. Lodging house keepers could scarcely admit that their tenants were other than models of propriety without incurring charges of running disorderly houses and having their licenses revoked. And no one, at that time of popular outrage over the murders, could have found it easy to speak ill of the dead. Charity was the mood of the hour and the women of the streets knew it. ‘The people speak so kind and sympathisin’ about the women he has killed,’ one told the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘and I’d not object to being ripped up by him to be talked about so nice after I’m dead.’6

  In a district of low incomes, unemployment and housing shortages, women bereft of male support fared badly. For the types of work commonly offered – charring, washing and hawking – supply far exceeded demand. Inevitably, prostitution became an instrument of survival. All the Ripper’s victims were regular or casual prostitutes. In the awesome surroundings of the coroner’s court their friends felt constrained to suppress the fact. But in the kitchens of the lodging houses it was another matter. Here, amidst communities which pirouetted regularly on the edge of disaster, the prostitute incurred little opprobrium. As Thomas Bates, the watchman, said of Liz Stride: ‘Lor’ bless you, when she could get no work she had to do the best she could for her living, but a neater and a cleaner woman never lived!’7

  Stephen Knight, in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, argued that the Ripper victims knew each other. If this were true it would suggest that the murderer was known to them also, that the killings were not random.

  Knight pointed out that although the bodies were discovered in different parts of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Aldgate, the women all lived in one tiny part of Spitalfields.8

  His data are by no means always valid. He tells us, for example, that Liz Stride and Michael Kidney lived at 35 Dorset Street, where Annie Chapman is known to have stayed, but this is not correct. When Liz was with Kidney they were living at 35 Devonshire Street, off Commercial Road. Still, Knight’s observation was basically sound. At the times of their deaths all the victims were living in the small cluster of squalid streets about Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Three were in Flower and Dean Street itself, Liz Stride at No. 32, Kate Eddowes at No. 55, and Polly Nichols either at No. 55 or No. 56. Another two were in nearby Dorset Street. Annie Chapman regularly stayed at No. 35. And Mary Kelly lodged at 13 Miller’s Court, which was part of No. 26. The other victims lived in lodging houses in George Street (Tabram), Gun Street (McKenzie) and White’s Row (Coles).

  Unfortunately, we cannot infer any personal relationships from these addresses. The fact is that the Flower and Dean Street area was notorious throughout the East End as the lodging house quarter. Its cheap beds attracted the indigent from all parts of East London. In 1888 a report of the London City Mission claimed that there were forty lodging houses in the area accommodating some 4000 souls.9

  The history of the victim is usually crucial in a murder case. This is because the killer nearly always turns out to be a relative, friend or acquaintance of the deceased. But our research into the lives of the Whitechapel murder victims has uncovered no link between a major suspect and any of the dead women. Nor has it suggested any convincing new suspect. At present there is nothing to indicate that Jack the Ripper was anything but that most elusive of criminals, the murderer of strangers.

  A great deal of printer’s ink has been spilled in speculation about the Ripper’s modus operandi. The evidence assembled in this book enables us to reconstruct its mature form with some confidence.

  It is probable that the victims accosted or were accosted by the murderer in thoroughfares like Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, and that they then conducted him themselves to the secluded spots where they were slain. This was certainly the case with Mary Kelly, who died in her own room in Miller’s Court. And it was probably true of the others. Martha Tabram is known to have serviced another client in George Yard just three hours before she was killed there. Annie Chapman met her death in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street and there is reason to believe that she led her killer there. The house is known to have been a resort of prostitutes, it was within a few hundred yards of Annie’s lodging house at 35 Dorset Street and 29 was also the number of Annie’s regular bed in the lodging house. Buck’s Row, Dutfield’s Yard and the dark corner of Mitre Square were also frequently used by prostitutes.

  In these wet and muddy streets sexual intercourse would normally have been performed against a wall or fence. Alone with her client in a dark and sheltered spot, the woman stood with her back to the wall and raised her skirts. In such a place and such a position she was completely vulnerable to attack. And before she could utter a cry, the Ripper seized her by the throat. He strangled her, at least into insensibility, and lowered her to the ground with her head towards his left.

  A number of circumstances indicate that the murderer strangled his victims before resorting to the knife. In most cases no screams were heard. We also know that the women were lying on their backs when their throats were cut and that there was relatively little spillage of blood. The wounds bled out on the ground beside or under the neck, much of the blood accumulating beneath the body and being soaked up by the back of the clothes. Then, in some cases, direct evidence of strangulation was recorded of the bodies. Martha Tabram was found with her hands clenched and he
r face swollen and distorted. Polly Nichols had a bruise on one side of the neck and an abrasion on the other. Her face was discoloured and her tongue slightly lacerated. Annie Chapman’s face was livid and swollen, her tongue swollen and protruding. She, too, had marks on the neck, a bruise on the right side and several scratches in the corresponding position on the left. They were, thought Dr Phillips, the impressions of the murderer’s right thumb and fingers.

  The throats of the prostrate women were severed from left to right down to the spinal column. Typically the Ripper worked from the right side of the victim. In at least four cases (Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes) the close proximity of the left side to a gate, fence or wall probably precluded any attack from that quarter. But by kneeling to the right of the victim’s head while cutting the throat the Ripper also ensured that the flow of blood from the left carotid artery was directed away from himself.

  The abdominal mutilations were inflicted after death. In 1903 Inspector Reid insisted that the Ripper never took away any bodily parts from his victims.10 But this is a good example of how grievously our memories can deceive us. In truth three women were served thus. Annie Chapman’s uterus, together with parts of her vagina and bladder, were carried off by the murderer. In the case of Kate Eddowes it was the uterus and left kidney. And Mary Kelly’s heart was cut out and never recovered.

  In no case did the murderer leave a weapon or other clue at the scene of the crime.

  Sitting quietly in retirement at his home on the Sussex coast, Walter Dew often reflected on these most gruesome murders. What puzzled the old detective most was the Ripper’s ability to evade vigilant police patrols. ‘I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes,’ he reminds us in his memoirs. ‘I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then by the man’s amazing elusiveness.’11

  Dew and his colleagues were blamed and denigrated for their failure at the time. The charges are still thoughtlessly bandied about by amateur criminologists today. But it is a harsh judgement. If all the historical circumstances are taken into account it is not difficult to understand why the Ripper remained uncaught.

  By retiring with the Ripper into secluded byways where they were unlikely to be seen the victims themselves greatly facilitated his crimes. Even at the height of the panic, when prostitutes fled the district or sought shelter in casual wards, the most desperate of their kind might still be seen soliciting for the price of a doss or a drink. A fatalism born of despair possessed such women. Detective Inspector Moore, interviewed in 1889, understood their plight only too well: ‘I tell many of them to go home, but they say they have no home, and when I try to frighten them and speak of the danger they run they’ll laugh and say, “Oh, I know what you mean. I ain’t afraid of him. It’s the Ripper or the bridge with me. What’s the odds?” And it’s true; that’s the worst of it.’12

  The Ripper’s escapes from the scenes of his crimes are surprising but not inexplicable. No one knew what he looked like. And although he may well have been bloodstained there is no reason to depict him scuttling through the streets in clothes that were saturated with blood. In fact, his modus operandi suggests otherwise. We know that the Ripper severed the throats of his victims from the opposite side of the head to the first escape of arterial blood. It is probable, too, that the victims were first strangled. Certainly the abdominal mutilations were inflicted after death. These circumstances all point to the likelihood of the killer remaining very little bloodstained. Then the character of the district worked to his advantage. A warren of dark, evil-smelling courts, alleys and yards, it was impossibly complex for any police force to patrol adequately. The murderer may even have effected escapes through private houses. For, as we learned in the case of Hanbury Street, many tenements in the area were never locked. Any fugitive could duck in by the front door and leave by the back.

  The police investigation ultimately failed because the Victorian CID were simply not equipped to deal with ‘motiveless’ murders of this kind. Inquiries into the histories of the victims afforded no clues. Traditional methods of detection, resting heavily upon rewards and informants, were almost useless in a hunt for a lone killer. Even in our own day, with all the advantages of fingerprinting, the biochemical analysis of blood, DNA fingerprinting and psychological profiling, the capture of such offenders is often a matter of luck. Back in 1888 the luck always ran with the Ripper.

  Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, in their Jack the Ripper A to Z, one of relatively few sane books on the case, contend that the police investigation was ‘professional and competent’.13 Bearing in mind that we must judge the police by the standards of their own time, not by those of our own day, I would not wish to dissent from that view. Indeed, the dedication and diligence of the investigation on the ground is worthy of admiration.

  Nevertheless, in one respect the criticisms of the Victorian press were probably justified. The Telegraph spoke at the time of a lack of imagination in the detective department, and a study of the Whitechapel crimes certainly does suggest a want of innovative spirit at the Yard. For detectives not only failed to exploit fully the advantages of photography, the one important aid to detection then available, but they evinced no disposition, in the midst of the most important murder hunt of the century, to explore new methods of criminal investigation.

  The potential of the popular press, then beginning to come into its own on the strength of Education Acts of 1870, 1876 and 1880, went largely unrecognized. CID policy on the press has already been explained. It rested upon some sound principles. But there can be little doubt that, on balance, the possibilities of this increasingly influential institution were undervalued. Opportunities were lost. To take just one example, although police rightly repudiated the sketches Richardson showed to Packer and published after the double murder, why was it beyond them to couple a professional artist with one or more reliable witnesses of their own in order to produce a more accurate impression of the murderer?

  Most telling is the absence of any reference to fingerprinting in the Whitechapel murder files, even though the pioneers of this technique had been trying to promote their discoveries for over a decade. Herschel, who had employed fingerprinting as a means of identification in India, had advocated its use in a letter to the Registrar General as early as 1877, and Faulds, who had discussed fingerprint classification in Nature in 1880, had been trying to interest a suspicious Scotland Yard in the method since 1886. The subject came up again in the midst of the Ripper hunt. Learning that the Jack the Ripper postcard bore a bloody thumbprint, Mr Frederick Jago, a correspondent of the Times, observed that the ‘surface markings on no two thumbs are alike’ and urged that the thumbs of suspects be compared through a microscope with the print on the card.14

  One might reasonably have expected this most baffling of murder mysteries to have called forth advances in the techniques of criminal detection. 1888 did prompt some police soul-searching. Standing Orders on the discovery of murdered bodies were tightened up after the Nichols murder and post-mortem examinations were conducted in the presence of more than one surgeon after that of Annie Chapman. But there was little genuine reappraisal of police methods. And what there was looked back, to tracker dogs, pardons and rewards, not ahead, to photography and fingerprinting.

  What of the Ripper himself? Well, historical records tell us a good deal about him.

  First, are we dealing with one man or two?

  Cases of folie à deux, a madness shared by two people, are relatively uncommon in the annals of serial murder but they do occur. Perhaps the most notable recent examples were Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, the ‘Hillside Stranglers’ who raped and murdered a dozen girls in California in the late 1970s.

  The only tangible evidence that Jack the Ripper had an accomplice comes from Israel Schwartz. As he told it, the man he saw attacking Liz Stride in Berner Street called out ‘Lipski!’, apparently to a second man across the way, who then s
aw Schwartz off. Unfortunately, although the substance of this story may well be true the correct interpretation of the facts observed is greatly in doubt. Did the murderer call out to the second man, for example, or to Schwartz himself? And was the second man really an accomplice? Or was he, like Schwartz, a scared bystander who hurriedly left the scene to escape involvement? Under interrogation even Schwartz was not certain.

  No other witness is known to have seen a murder victim in the company of more than one man immediately preceding the crime. The nearest to it is Sarah Lewis. She saw a man loitering outside Miller’s Court on the night Mary Kelly was killed. A short, stout man, who wore a black wideawake hat and was looking up the court ‘as if waiting for someone to come out.’ This man may, of course, have been an accomplice, on watch outside while his confederate slew Mary in No. 13. However, there is nothing conclusive to connect him with the murder. And a more reasonable explanation is that he was George Hutchinson, the labourer, for by his own account Hutchinson was waiting outside Miller’s Court at precisely this time.

  Certainly the Ripper may have had an accomplice, someone whose function it was to stand at a distance and warn him of impending danger. But, intriguing as the ‘two man’ theory of the murders undoubtedly is, it must at present be set aside. Typically this type of offender works alone and the evidence for the second man in the case is altogether too flimsy.

  Our study of the facts enables us to tear away at least part of the murderer’s mask.

  Three out of the six probable Ripper murders, those of Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes, took place at weekends. Another two occurred on public holidays. Martha Tabram died on the night of August Bank Holiday, Mary Kelly on the morning of the Lord Mayor’s Show. All six were committed between the hours of midnight and six a.m. We can infer, then, that the murderer was probably in regular work and free of family accountability, i.e., that he was single.