Jack the Ripper
MIRIAM RIVETT & MARK WHITEHEAD
POCKET ESSENTIALS
This edition published in 2006 by Pocket Essentials P.O.Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ www.pocketessentials.com
© Mark Whitehead & Miriam Rivett, 2001, 2006
The right of Mark Whitehead & Miriam Rivett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publishers.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 10: 1 904048 69 2
ISBN 13: 978 1 904048 69 5
24681097531
Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks Printed and bound in Spain
Other books in this series by Mark Whitehead:
Slasher Movies
Roger Corman
Animation
For Ian and Joel, who put up with endless
Ripper discussions,
and for Meryl, who knew it all already.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Paul, Ion and David, for patience, encouragement and books (you all know which).We would also like to extend our thanks to Philip Sugden, Paul Begg, Martin Fido, Keith Skinner, Stewart P Evans, Donald Rumbelow and Ross Strachan, whose research and diligence aided our own work invaluably.
Contents
Introduction: The Trouble with Jack
1: In Hindsight
Were Emma Smith and Martha Tabram early victims of the Ripper?
2: ‘Watchman, Old Man, I Believe Somebody Is Murdered Down the Street’
Mary Ann Nichols is murdered in front of a stable yard on Buck’s Row
3: ‘Cool Impudence and Reckless Daring’
Annie Chapman dies in the backyard of 29, Hanbury Street
4: Interlude
Some contemporary suspects including Leather Apron, William Henry Pigott, Jacob Isenschmid and Charles Ludwig
5: Double Event
Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes are murdered on the same night
6: A Study in Terror
Mary Jane Kelly’s horrific death in 13, Miller’s Court and the vital evidence of George Hutchinson
7: Jack’s Back
Were Rose Mylett,Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles later victims of the Ripper?
8: The Suspects Assemble
A list of people named as being the Ripper
9: Ripping Yarns
Books, comics, films and television shows which have used the Ripper as a fictional character
10: Ripper Haunts
A list of major books and websites where you can begin your own research into the Ripper mystery
Introduction
The Trouble with Jack
‘I was killing when killing wasn’t cool’ Al Columbia
‘In this business no one knows anything’ William Goldman
You might not have heard of Amelia Dyer. In the late 1880s this ex-Salvation Army ‘soldier’ fostered orphaned infants. While she collected their boarding fees, she swiftly disposed of her charges by strangling and dumping them in the Thames. She was known as ‘The Reading Baby Farmer’.
Nor may you have heard of Herman Webster Mudgett (aka HH Holmes). Mudgett ran a hotel in Chicago which benefited in more ways than one from the 1893 World’s Fair. A gothic eyesore, the place was a massive killing jar, full of secret entrances, trapdoors and hidden rooms. By the time the police twigged, Holmes had fled. Estimates of the dead found range from twenty-seven to over two hundred.
Or Rhynwick Williams. In 1790, he was arrested and tried as the ‘London Monster’.With over fifty victims to his name, the Monster had been the terror of London women from 1788. He approached them with lascivious talk then slashed their buttocks with a knife.
Other names do stick in the mind. Brady and Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, Fred and Rose West.They remain in our collective consciousness, their memory sustained by tabloid hysteria and broadsheet pontificating. Their victims’ lives have been chronicled exhaustively through oral tradition, the media and by noted authors. The murderers’ lives continue to be scrutinised, each new event a source of outrage and discussion. All of it feeds our curiosity about Those Who Did What We Would Never Do.When Fred West committed suicide, it was a cause for populist, pun-filled celebration (‘Happy Noose Year!’ – The Sun, the day after West hanged himself in jail).
And that’s the real reason that they remain ever present. It’s not outrage or grieving over the victims that really shift units or fill column inches. No matter how liberal we try to be, one word remains (and it’s not ‘monster’). The word is: Why?
There is a desire to understand what motivates such crimes. There has to be a reason, there just has to be. The detective approaches the subject by deductive reasoning, by using the grey cells – whodunnits tell us this is so.They must know the motive to know the killer. The killer gets an opportunity to tie up any loose ends before they are led away. The motives are always there in a nebulous form: power, sex, boredom, money.These are universal things that tie us to Them. But it’s never the Reason. That’s personal, the collision of countless moments in time, emotions, desires, beliefs and the indefinable. Something We could never understand.
And still we search.
There’s another name that might just ring a bell. He remains in our collective consciousness, subject to occa-sional tabloid outbursts. His victims’ lives have been chronicled exhaustively over the past hundred-odd years. The murderer’s many, many possible lives continue to be scrutinised. Each new discovery about him is greeted with heated discussion. All of it feeds our curiosity about The One That Never Got Caught. Jack the Ripper. It is the perfect name for a villain. It is probably too perfect. The letters that gave him his name are most likely hoaxes perpetrated by a journalist wanting to boost sales, but the name remains. We know the name before we ever know anything about the case. It’s as if we’ve been born with that name in our heads, part of our common mythology. It’s all part of the trouble with Jack.
Jack, familiar name for John, a name of fairy tales and legends – Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and Jill, Jack-Be-Nimble... Jolly Jack Tar (well, the Ripper was often described as wearing a sailor’s hat). London, no stranger to crimes or legends, had already been visited by one malevolent Jack in the 1800s. Spring-Heeled Jack, a fire-breathing, metal-taloned monster capable of prodigious leaps, who attacked bewildered London suburb dwellers. His reign of terror from 1838 to around 1904 saw him enshrined in nursery folklore as a bogeyman and as a popular figure for the penny dreadfuls. Curiously, just as the new Jack moved into London, the old one was spotted in Liverpool.
The Ripper? Well, he certainly ripped up his victims, and several suspects were claimed to have threatened to rip up people. Late 19th-century slang already used the word to mean both ‘a first-rate man’ and ‘a person who behaves badly.’ So was the name meant as a clue? Or was it used because it sounded cool or frightening? That’s the trouble with Jack. Everything has been analysed to the nth degree, everyone knows too much and yet no one knows anything.
Each new theory pores over the same details, the same cold entrails, searching for meaning, for an identity to leap out. Princes are named, doctors, writers, sailors. A game of cherry stones would be an equally useful divining tool. The trouble with Jack is that we can only
build up his appearance through other people’s perceptions and experiences. What he did to his victims and the mixed descriptions of the sightings of men with the victims are continually cited. Everything is coloured by press reports, the public’s reactions, the police’s inability to find so much as a trace of him and the memoirs and theories that paint many different pictures. Even by Hollywood. A man of medium build with a curled-up moustache and a sailor’s hat. A top-hatted, caped toff with a little black bag sweeping through a pea-souper. The devil himself. Jack shifts and morphs in our imagination the more that we read. And that’s without his supposed diary.
The lies that surround him are enough to send anyone mad: He removed Kelly’s foetus (she wasn’t pregnant), he fed his victims poisoned grapes (greengrocer Matthew Packer, the only witness to this fact, changed his story every day), he left ritualistic patterns of the victims’ belongings near the corpses (nope), and so on and on. Stephen Knight quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an early 20th-century anti-Semitic hoax) as being Masonic oaths. Donald McCormick dramatises scenes, complete with Cockney sing-songs, but insists that the dialogue is authentic. Jonathan Goodman named ‘Peter J Harpick’ as a suspect, complete with background and history in his book Who He?
(1984). Although this was clearly an anagram, requests for further information about ‘Harpick’ over the years left Goodman with a low opinion of Ripper enthusiasts. AP Wolf starts by claiming Ripperologists’ infighting has obscured all truth behind the Ripper case and then savages Colin Wilson. Paul Feldman as good as invites anyone who doubts the veracity of Maybrick’s diary outside for a fight. The myth sucks you in. Each step you take pulls you harder, deeper. You fight your corner by whatever means necessary, because you, and you alone, have The Truth.
The truth? The incredible police investigation into the crimes derived not from sympathy for the victims but from politics. In 1876, corruption on a massive scale had been uncovered in the higher echelons of the CID. The Metropolitan Police, under Sir Charles Warren, were regarded as an increasingly militaristic force.The press, previously in favour of the forces of law and order cracking down on the unruly poor, suddenly began to support those they had vilified. The police in all areas had to be seen to prove themselves.
Jack was born just as the popular press was finding its feet and they helped each other immeasurably. He gave them murders to boost their circulation and they, in turn, made him into a legend. No detail was too titillating or unpleasant to be left unreported or undistorted. Researchers hoping to provide a correct history of the murders are left with the daunting task of sorting the lies from the truth through acres of print, reports, statements... The coroner, Wynne Baxter, held lengthy inquests into many of the victims. These supplied the press with every possible detail of the victims’ backgrounds, their murders, their mutilations. Gaudy posters advertising the latest reports from the press were pasted up around Whitechapel, saturating the people of the area in the deeds of the monster. Peter Turnbull in The Killer Who Never Was (1996) suggests that the Ripper was a product of such heightened awareness.The hysteria that greeted each crime, fuelled by so much information, created copycat killers, each of whom murdered another prostitute and further fanned the flames. One theory amongst hundreds. But it happens. The ‘Halifax Slasher’ of 1938 was the product of such increasing hysteria.Women were found to have slashed themselves and blamed a mystery assailant. It is entirely likely that the reign of The London Monster contains similar elements. But these were phantom crimes.The trouble with Jack is that there really were murders. Someone did it. Whether a legion of copycats or a single-minded individual, someone did it.We have the bodies, and the same constantly reproduced photographs to prove it. Tabram, Nichols, Chapman and Stride, just sleeping. Eddowes naked, bloody, propped up and sewn up, empty. Kelly at rest, Manet’s Olympia adapted by the Chapman Brothers.
So who was Jack? We have no more idea than you do. Pick a suspect. MJ Trow showed how easy it is to make anyone fit the Ripper’s clothes in his essay The Way to Hell (1999). Pick a name and then find the isolated incidents in his (or even her) life that you can bend to your theory. We have no new theories to propose and no new names to put forward.What you find here are the speculations of other, more qualified people, members of that driven breed, the Ripper researchers. We tip our hats to them. The facts contained in this book are, hopefully, the essentials – compared and distilled from their work to bring you an overview of the Ripper’s reign of terror and of the women that he murdered.
They did not die in vain. Jack is accredited with instigating social reform where others had failed.The highest in the land were regularly informed of the state of the poor. Even Queen Victoria sent letters to the police, offering suggestions as to how the killer might be traced.Whitechapel, the labyrinthine immigrant quarter so close to the City, home to 80,000 forgotten people, became front-page news. The reports drew attention to the neglected, the poor and, at the bottom of the social ladder, the extreme poor, forced to sleep in doorways, to beg or sell themselves for fourpence for their doss in one of the 233 overcrowded common lodging houses. Between them these houses accommodated around 8,500 people. Despite the frequent cries of ‘Murder!’ which most witnesses remarked on and ignored, and despite the brutality and violence which thrived in the area, not one of the 80 murders committed in London the previous year had occurred in Whitechapel. Jack’s victims, drawn from ‘the unfortunates’ (the polite euphemism for prostitutes), raised the profile of the area as no reformer had done before. George Bernard Shaw went so far as to acknowledge the Ripper as achieving what he and fellow socialists had failed to do.This said, Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1902), relating his time spent living amongst the extreme poor of the East End, revealed that little had been done to alleviate the suffering in the area fifteen years after the Whitechapel Murders.
Sexual maniac, proto-serial killer, social reformer, black humorist, man of a thousand faces... The trouble with Jack, ultimately, is that the more you read about him, the more his stature as a legendary figure grows. At some point the masks have to be removed. Not to reveal his identity. That bearpit remains. Stripped of his iconic veneer, Jack is just a murderer. Someone who found women who had no other option but to sell their bodies then strangled and mutilated them. Not a devil. Not a ghost. Not a black magician endowed with supernatural powers. An ordinary person, one of the crowd, like you or I. Someone who could pass without let or hindrance through the East End streets with no one noticing his presence as being out of the ordinary.
The trouble with Jack is getting people to realise that.
In Hindsight
‘Vice can afford to pay more than honesty, but its profits at last go to landlords.’ Reverend Samuel Barnett, letter to The Times, 19 September 1888.
Emma Smith
Sometime between 4 and 5am on 3 April 1888, Emma Smith returned to lodgings at 18, George Street, Spitalfields. She told the house’s deputy keeper, Mary Russell, that she had been assaulted and robbed in Osborn Street (about 300 yards away). Smith, a 45-year-old prostitute, had lived at George Street for 18 months and was known for returning at all hours, usually drunk. That night, she had been returning from a night’s soliciting at 1.30am when three men had attacked her outside Taylor Bros Cocoa factory near Brick Lane.
Russell and Annie Lee, a lodger, escorted her to London Hospital where she was attended by house surgeon Dr George Haslip. As well as bruising to her face and a torn right ear, Smith’s vagina had been penetrated by a blunt object so forcefully that it had ruptured her peritoneum. Peritonitis resulted. After slipping into a coma, she died at 9am on 4 April.
Despite probably passing several policemen during her journeys to and from George Street, Smith had not reported the incident, or asked for assistance. Officers on patrol that evening said that they hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. The police were not alerted to the attack on Smith until they were informed that a coroner’s inquest was to be hel
d on 7 April.
Wynne Baxter presided over the inquest at the London Hospital. Baxter would conduct inquests into six other Whitechapel murders associated with the Ripper. Known for his flashy dress and, later, his friction with the Metropolitan Police, Baxter had become coroner for East London and Tower of London in 1887 after a bitter election contest. At the inquest an anonymous witness testified to having seen Smith at around a quarter past midnight near Burdett Road (about two miles from where she was attacked), talking to ‘a man dressed in dark clothes with a white neckerchief’. The witness had been hurrying away from the area since she had been assaulted by two men a few minutes before she saw Smith. One man had asked her the time and the other had struck her in the mouth before both ran away. The witness didn’t think that the man talking to Smith had been one of these.
Also present at the inquest was Chief Inspector John West of H Division. West would become acting Superintendent during the murder investigations of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman, and be responsible for combining the enquiries into the Whitechapel murders under Inspector Abberline. At this point,West had no official information on the assault.
The jury’s verdict was ‘Wilful murder by some person or persons unknown’. Unofficially, it was believed that Smith had been killed by members of a band of street thugs from The Nichol, a slum area near Old Nichol Street at the top of Brick Lane. The gang’s preferred livelihood consisted of extracting protection money from East End prostitutes and it was possible that they’d brutalised Smith as a warning to other women to pay up or suffer similar treatment.
Martha Tabram
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