Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  The statements of witnesses who gave descriptions of men seen with one or other of the victims are invaluable but must be used with care. Some, like Mrs Long, were good witnesses but only had a partial view of the suspect. Others, like Packer, appear to have been dishonest. Several reported sightings too far ahead of the crime for us to presume a likelihood that they saw the murderer.

  A study of the best (Long, Smith, Schwartz, Lawende, Levy and Hutchinson) suggests that the murderer was a white male of average or below average height in his twenties or thirties. The man Lawende saw with Kate Eddowes was reportedly ‘rather rough and shabby’. But three witnesses – Mrs Long, PC Smith and Israel Schwartz – described men of ‘shabby-genteel’ or ‘respectable’ appearance. And Hutchinson’s suspect looked positively affluent. John Douglas of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit has suggested that the killer may have intentionally dressed up to persuade potential victims that he had money and thus relieve himself of the task of initiating contact with them.15 Whatever, the evidence is that we will not find our man amongst the labouring classes or indigent poor.

  Two of the six victims (Tabram and Nichols) were killed in Whitechapel, two (Chapman and Kelly) in Spitalfields, one (Stride) in St George’s-in-the-East and one (Eddowes) in the City. But all of the murder sites are within a single square mile.

  This close grouping of the killings, together with the killer’s apparent familiarity with the district, undoubtedly suggests that he was a local man. Can we, then, as Professor Canter suggests, plot the murder sites on a map and simply plump for some central spot within the area circumscribed by the sites as the likely location of his home?16 Frustratingly, we cannot.

  The Ripper’s earliest crimes are certainly likely to have been close to home. The trouble is that the historical data does not permit us to say what his earliest crimes were. As already noted, the Tabram murder was probably predated by other offences. These may have been rapes or unsuccessful attacks, or even crimes that were not sex-related. The point is that by the time the Ripper turned to murder he may already have become a relatively experienced and confident criminal, striking further afield to minimize the chances of being recognized. Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with their large populations of needy prostitutes, would have been rich hunting grounds for such a miscreant.

  I strongly believe that the Ripper lived in the East End but I would not wish to hazard any closer location than that. The only real information we have is that after killing Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square, at the western margin of the murder district, he doubled back into Whitechapel, leaving a portion of Kate’s apron in Goulston Street.

  The police made repeated inquiries at common lodging houses in the neighbourhood of the murders. This is understandable because every victim except Mary Kelly had lived in one of these places.

  It is not impossible that the murderer found boltholes in them. Very little notice was taken of men inquiring for beds during the night. At the Eddowes inquest Frederick Wilkinson, the deputy from 55 Flower and Dean Street, said that when men came for lodgings he entered the number of the bed in his book but not the man’s name. Pressed, he conceded that he sometimes lodged over 100 people at a time and that if the beds were paid for boarders were ‘asked no questions’.17 It may even have been possible for a bloodstained man to clean up in a common lodging house. It was the practice in these establishments for men to use a common washing place. Water, once used, was thrown down the sink by the lodger using it.

  It is unlikely, however, that a man of respectable appearance, a man in regular work, would have needed to resort to a common lodging house. In all probability the Ripper lived in private lodgings or with relatives. The police themselves eventually seem to have come to this conclusion. This is why, after the double murder, they distributed handbills to householders and made a house-to-house search of parts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. When he retired in 1892 Abberline commented that he did not think that the killer would be found lurking in a ‘dosser’s’ kitchen.18

  Modern writers frequently allege that the Ripper was left-handed or ambidextrous. Our best evidence indicates that neither statement is true. His modus operandi, as reconstructed from contemporary records and outlined in this chapter, implies that he was right-handed. Professor Cameron’s deductions in the case of Kate Eddowes confirm this conclusion.

  Did the murderer possess any anatomical knowledge or surgical skill? This question has been fiercely debated by Ripperologists for decades.

  The medical evidence given in police reports and inquest depositions has been fully set down in this book. From it we know that although the doctors and surgeons who examined one or more of the ‘canonical’ victims (Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly) disagreed about the extent of the murderer’s expertise almost all attested to some degree of knowledge or skill. The sole dissentient was Dr Bond. But even his attitude was ambivalent. Examining Mary Kelly’s injuries, he concluded that her killer had demonstrated no anatomical knowledge. Yet, only eight months later, he attributed Alice McKenzie’s death to the same man, partly on the grounds that her throat had been ‘skilfully & resolutely cut’. Doctors Phillips and Gordon Brown, in their post-mortem examinations of Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes respectively, thought they could detect a great deal of expertise, both anatomical knowledge and surgical skill, in the mutilations.

  Modern opinion has too often been the servant of pet identity theories. For many years Professor Francis Camps’ views have held sway amongst serious students of the case. The professor decided, largely on the strength of sketches and photographs of Kate Eddowes, that the Ripper possessed little if any medical expertise.19 However, this judgement was made at a time when Ripper research was in a very primitive state. Since then much detailed medical evidence relating to the murders has come to light. Camps ignored, too, the conditions in which the murderer had worked – at great speed, in poor light and in constant danger of detection.

  For an up-to-date view I turned to an acknowledged expert in the field – Nick Warren. As a practising surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of both England and Edinburgh, he is well qualified to assess the medical evidence, and as a keen criminologist and the editor of Ripperana, the specialist’s quarterly, he is conversant with all aspects of the case.

  Nick raises doubts about the validity of Dr Bond’s judgement. Bond had been instructed by the Home Office to investigate the ‘Thames Torso’ murders. From 1887 to 1889 the dismembered remains of four women were recovered along and near the Thames. Three of them were fully decapitated and the heads were never found. Now, the beheadings in these cases suggested to Bond that their perpetrator possessed anatomical skills. So when he considered the Ripper evidence and noted that the murderer had apparently tried and failed to decapitate two of his victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly, he put him down as an unskilled operator. Unfortunately, modern experience suggests that Bond’s assumption that only skeletal dismemberment required ‘anatomical skill’ is a false one.

  Nick believes that the Ripper’s attempt to separate the vertebrae of Annie Chapman’s neck and his pelvic dissection of this victim indicate anatomical knowledge. He believes, too, that the removal of the left kidney in the case of Kate Eddowes evidenced definite anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. For it required both to extract the organ, as the Ripper did, through the vascular pedicle from the front. It lay embedded in fat, behind the peritoneum and overlain by the stomach, spleen, colon and jejunum.20

  In a district of high immigration and rising social tension it was perhaps inevitable that the murders should be blamed upon a foreigner.

  It was a view even found at Whitehall. Godfrey Lushington, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, saw evidence of Jewish guilt in the message left by the murderer in Goulston Street on the night of the double murder. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote on 13 October, ‘that the last murder [Eddowes] was done by a Jew who boasted of it.’ Later, when he read a police report of Israel Schwartz’s statem
ent, he assumed that the man Schwartz saw had addressed an accomplice by his proper name of ‘Lipski’ and noted in the margin: ‘The use of “Lipski” increases my belief that the murderer was a Jew.’21

  It is not as simple as that. ‘Lipski!’ was a taunt commonly applied to Jews in the East End and it was Abberline’s belief that Schwartz’s suspect had used it against Schwartz himself. Even if he did address an accomplice by the name it is quite likely to have been a trick, designed to fool Schwartz into thinking that the murderers were Jews. Indeed, the evidence from the double event frequently suggests crude attempts to incriminate the Jews. The police certainly interpreted the Goulston Street graffito, left at the entrance of a tenement largely inhabited by Jews, as such. And the fact that Long Liz was murdered outside a club patronized by Jewish socialists suggests the same possibility.

  The only tangible evidence that the murderer was a foreigner came from Mrs Long and George Hutchinson. Mrs Long thought that the man she saw with Annie Chapman was a foreigner. However, her evidence doesn’t really count because she only saw the suspect’s back. Hutchinson’s does. He said that the man he saw going into Miller’s Court with Mary Kelly looked like a Jew. It persuaded Abberline. In 1903 he told a reporter that in his opinion the murderer was ‘a foreign-looking man’.22 But Hutchinson’s evidence is not above question. And it is always possible that Mary got rid of the man he saw and picked up another client shortly before her death.

  It may be significant that none of the other witnesses indicated that they had seen men of foreign appearance.23 Attempts to correlate the dates of the murders with sacred days in the Jewish calendar have also been unsuccessful.24

  Jack the Ripper may have been a foreigner. We must bear this possibility in mind. But the historical evidence is far too fragmentary and contradictory to prove it.

  On some aspects of the case the historical record tell us little. Perhaps the most important is motive. No significant link between the victims has been established. Robbery cannot explain the slaughter of destitutes. And we cannot even infer a grudge against prostitutes because these women were obvious and easy targets for anyone with murder and mutilation in mind. The Jack the Ripper crimes are now generally described as sex murders. Despite the tag sex does not seem to be the primary motivation for many such offenders. But the roots of their behaviour are complicated and contentious and this is no place to speculate upon them. Whether the Ripper was driven by fear and hatred of women, whether he suffered from ego-frustration and craved recognition and esteem, or whether he was simply a sexual sadist, these are matters upon which history cannot enlighten us.

  Equally mysterious is the killer’s disappearance.

  Serial killers rarely take their own lives. Yet many writers have found suicide a likely explanation for the termination of the Ripper crimes. It is usually buttressed by the assertion that they became progressively more ferocious, the inference being that the killer’s brain gave way altogether after Miller’s Court. This is misleading. Martha Tabram, the probable first victim, died in a frenzied attack. And the extent of the mutilations of the others reflected the time at the disposal of the murderer more than anything else. Nichols and Stride escaped relatively lightly because in their cases the killer seems to have been disturbed and driven off. Mary Kelly was the most extensively mutilated victim. But then she was killed in her own home, where the Ripper had the time and safety to indulge himself.

  There are other feasible solutions to the riddle. The murderer may have been imprisoned for an unconnected offence or confined in an asylum. He may have emigrated. Or, perhaps after a police interview, he may simply have stopped killing for fear of detection. Serial murderers do sometimes lie dormant for extended periods. After murdering thirteen women from June 1962 to January 1964, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston strangler, lost his compulsion to kill and reverted to simple rape. Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, in their book The Serial Killers, instance the further case of Il Mostro, the ‘Monster of Florence’, who killed sixteen people between 1968 and 1985. There was a gap of six years between his first double murder in 1968 and his second in 1974 and seven years between that event and the third double killing in 1981.25

  So who was Jack the Ripper?

  Previous writers have almost always tailored the facts to suit a theory. We will proceed from the opposite direction. It is time for us to reassess the main police suspects. But in doing so we must keep the historical facts ever before us.

  We are looking for a white male of average or less than average height in his twenties or thirties, a man of respectable appearance who lived in the neighbourhood of the crimes, probably in private lodgings or with relatives. The dates of the murders indicate that he was in regular work, the times that he was single. He was probably right-handed and possessed a degree of anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. He may have been a foreigner. I do not claim that a single one of these contentions is beyond challenge. I do believe that if the real killer is ever identified most of them will prove to have been correct.

  But enough, let’s get to the suspects!

  19

  Found in The Thames: Montague John Druitt

  ‘AS A CHILD I often thought that if some fairy offered me three wishes, the first thing I would ask would be the identity of Jack the Ripper; the thought that it might remain a mystery forever was intolerable.’1 So wrote Colin Wilson, bestselling author of The Outsider, but all of us who have ever been intrigued by this most baffling of mysteries will recognize the feeling. Driven by a strange, compelling need to know the truth, we find it hard to accept that written proof of the Ripper’s identity probably never existed.

  In that respect Tom Cullen, who wrote the first important book on the Ripper, was no different from the rest of us. Cullen endorsed Sir Melville Macnaghten’s identification of the killer with a man whose body was taken out of the Thames in December 1888. But he would not agree with Macnaghten that ‘the truth . . . will never be known, and did indeed, at one time lie at the bottom of the Thames.’ No, argued Cullen, ‘in all likelihood the truth is locked up in a steel filing cabinet at Scotland Yard; or perhaps it lies buried in some musty attic among letters that have long since been forgotten, photographs that have faded, the lock of hair that is mouldy with age.’2

  Stories surface fairly regularly to torment the ardent student of the crimes with visions of some final, conclusive proof, usually lost or irretrievable, and therefore just beyond his grasp. One of the latest comes from Christopher Monro, a grandson of James Monro, Warren’s successor as Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. According to Christopher, Monro set down his views on the Whitechapel murders in ‘highly private memoranda’ which passed, upon his death in 1920, to his eldest son Charles. Charles Monro died in his sixties about 1929. A year or two before his death, however, he confided to his brother Douglas (Christopher’s father) that he still had the papers but didn’t know whether he should destroy them or not. Monro’s theory about Jack the Ripper, said Charles, was a ‘very hot potato’ and Monro had kept it a close secret, even from his wife. Douglas, who died in 1958, made no attempt to learn from Charles the identity of Monro’s suspect. Instead, he urged him: ‘Burn the stuff, Charlie, burn it and try to forget it!’3

  In following up this intriguing story Martin Howells and Keith Skinner contacted several of Monro’s other living descendants. No one knew anything of the papers mentioned by Christopher but one of them did produce, from the back of a cupboard in an Edinburgh suburb, Monro’s handwritten memoirs, written for the benefit of his children in 1903. To serious students of police history this document must represent a veritable gem. But, as Howells and Skinner discovered when they were permitted to see it, it contains no reference to the murders.

  Despite this and other stories of documents once extant final, irrefutable proof of the murderer’s identity has consistently eluded us. The experience of Howells and Skinner is, indeed, very much par for the course in Ripper research. A similar fate befell Donald Rumbel
ow’s efforts to trace the surviving papers of Chief Inspector Abberline. His heart must have leaped when, in the records of the Hampshire Genealogical Society, he unearthed a scrapbook of the inspector’s press cuttings interspersed throughout with his handwritten notations. Once again, however, there was nothing, not even a press cutting, on the Ripper crimes.4

  Our century-old obsession with this case has wrung the reminiscences of senior police officers dry of every conceivable shade of meaning. It has repeatedly plundered the archives of Scotland Yard for relevant names. It has sucked into the quest living descendants of policemen and suspects alike. Sometimes, as in the instances we have noted, it has uncovered valuable incidental materials. But it has not put a name to Jack the Ripper. Where anything at all bearing upon the killer’s identity has come to light it has proved at best inconclusive, at worst downright fraudulent. In this context those who hunt the Ripper are vaguely reminiscent of the Spanish conquistadores, those foolhardy adventurers of four centuries ago who, driven by shimmering visions of El Dorado, Cibola or Quivira, cut their way through steaming jungles or toiled across burning deserts to find at their journey’s end, not the riches for which their souls longed, but clusters of dirt villages or desolate plains.

  Although no one was ever brought to trial for any of the Whitechapel crimes, claims that the identity of the killer was known, or at least strongly suspected, by the police are almost as old as the murders themselves. Unquestionably the best known story of this kind maintains that in the opinion of the CID the Ripper was a man who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames soon after the Miller’s Court murder. The person who did more than anyone else to broadcast this tale was the journalist and author George R. Sims.