Jack The Ripper

by Mark Whitehead

  Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward (‘Prince Eddy’) (1864–92)

  Fingered by Phillippe Julien in Edouard VII (1962) and Dr Thomas Stowell in ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’ (Criminologist, November 1970). Stowell coyly identified the Ripper as ‘Mr S’ and later denied, despite obvious inferences in the article, that he had ever suggested Eddy was the Ripper. Cleared by Michael Harrison in Clarence:The Life of HRH The Duke of Clarence and Avondale 1864–1892 (1972)

  Grandson of Queen Victoria, Duke of Clarence and Avondale from 1891, Prince Eddy was rumoured to be the Ripper after syphilis destroyed his mental faculties. His experience as a deer hunter gave him the skill to eviscerate his victims (and may first have provided him with a sexual awakening). A cover-up concealed the facts from the public and thus saved the Royal family.

  What was not covered up were various Court Circulars and journals that placed him conclusively in Yorkshire, Scotland and Sandringham during the murders. Eddy died of pneumonia in 1892, unless Melvyn Fairclough was correct in his assertion in The Ripper and The Royals (1991) that he was held a deranged prisoner at Glamis Castle until the 1930s.

  Of course, you don’t have to be a public figure to be sus­pected of being Jack the Ripper, but it does seem to help. Those accused at different times include: George Gissing, author of New Grub Street; William Gladstone, whose attempts to help fallen women were renowned; Frank Miles, 1880s Turner Prize winner, known for paedophile leanings, who suffered from dementia from 1887; Dr Thomas Barnardo, who did meet Liz Stride and was rumoured to have kept a diary (hmm) in which the dates of murders were left blank; Lord Randolph Churchill (another of Joseph Gorman Sickert’s Rippers – see below); Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy; opium-addicted visionary poet Francis Thompson who may have committed the mur­ders in a frenzy of religious symbolism; and let’s not forget the sadistic harlot mutilator that was... Lewis Carroll.

  Sir William Withey Gull (1816–90)

  Fingered by Joseph Sickert in the BBC dramatised investiga­tion of the case Jack the Ripper (1973) and by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper:The Final Solution (1977)

  Gull was an eminent physician, an ardent vivisectionist and (according to Stephen Knight) a prominent Freemason (although the Masons have always denied it). In 1873 he identified and named anorexia nervosa. He became physi-cian-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1887.

  Thomas Stowell places Gull pursuing Eddy through Whitechapel in order to certify him insane, but this, accord­ing to Gorman Sickert, was not the true story. A brief sum­mary of the story he told to Knight, and Knight tells us: Prince Eddy secretly married a shop girl, Annie Elizabeth Crook (Sickert’s real grandmother), and she bore him a daughter, Alice Margaret Crook. When the relationship was discovered,Annie Crook was abducted by Crown agents and committed to an asylum. (In reality, she spent much of her later life in workhouses.) The daughter was saved by the artist, Walter Sickert, Joseph Sickert’s alleged grandfather and a close friend of Prince Eddy. Mary Kelly, an acquain­tance of Sickert’s, found out. Along with Liz Stride, Annie Chapman and Polly Nichols, she attempted to blackmail the Crown. Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, fearing that the revelations would lead to revolu­tion, sent Gull to rid them of the meddlesome whores. Gull enlisted the help of a coachman, John Netley, to aid his scheme. When it was finished, Gull was secretly committed by Salisbury and other members of his lodge. At the same time, his death was announced. Through complex machina­tions, Druitt was selected as a fall guy.

  The story told by Joseph Gorman Sickert to Stephen Knight is a rattling tale – royalty, sex, violence, and just when you think it can’t get any more preposterous, it does, bless it. Sickert stated that he was the offspring of Walter Sickert and Alice Margaret Crook, who began an affair after her husband, a man named Gorman, had proven impotent. Knight brought a wealth of Masonic theory and valuable Ripper research to the tale. This included a long-lost state­ment by Israel Schwartz. Schwartz’s testimony led to Knight’s conclusion that Walter Sickert had worked as Gull’s look-out man. Possibly because of this revelation, Gorman Sickert later publicly withdrew most of his story. Despite a rapturous reception from many quarters, Knight’s theory later fell out of favour. Although the fact that it was ever accepted as anything other than a rattling good pot-boiler suggests that Ripperology is not always the most rigorous of sciences.

  Knight died of an inoperable brain tumour in 1985, by which time he’d joined the Rajneesh cult and written a fur­ther exposé of Freemasonry, The Brotherhood (1983). Sickert continued to change and embroider his story for whoever was listening but it appears to have followed the law of diminishing returns. In 1981, after the arrest of the Yorkshire Ripper, Sickert claimed that Sutcliffe had once tried to run him down with his lorry.

  Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942)

  Fingered by Jean Overton Fuller in Sickert and The Ripper Crimes (1990) and Patricia Cornwell in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed (2002)

  Sickert was a renowned British artist, born in Munich. His work, and that of his followers, found a space between French impressionism and realism, drawing inspiration from London’s seedy music halls and down-at-heel lodging houses. Although not considered independently in the pre­vious edition, Sickert had already been unmasked by Fuller in 1990. Rightly or wrongly, what got him noticed as a sus­pect was Cornwell’s book. This situation seems to have occurred simply by virtue of being in the area and being famous.

  As noted under Sir William Gull’s entry above, Jean Overton Fuller writes in Sickert and the Ripper Crimes that the ‘royal baby story’ (Gull and all) was related to her mother, the artist Violet Overton Fuller, in 1948. She claimed to have heard it from Florence Pash, a fellow artist and close friend of Sickert. Supposedly, Ms Pash’s suspicions were aroused by Sickert’s claim to have seen the bodies and his detailed descriptions of the wounds. Yet this knowledge could be gained by following the case closely through the newspapers and Sickert was a voracious reader. That the Whitechapel Murders fascinated Sickert is without ques­tion. He frequently lunched out with the story of how he had rented a room previously occupied by a ‘pale veterinary student’ who was collected by his parents in the middle of the night shortly after Mary Kelly’s death.The landlady told Sickert that it was only after he left that she realised he was… Go on, guess.This tale became The Lodger after Marie Belloc Lowndes heard it from Sickert. Tales of murder fuelled Sickert’s creativity but reading about the Ripper isn’t the same as being the Ripper.

  Pash’s tale fits very neatly with Stephen Knight’s theory in The Final Solution. Perhaps a little too neatly, as Pash, Fuller claims, also relates the story of Lord Salisbury allegedly paying Sickert £500 for an inferior painting – clearly a bribe to buy Sickert’s secrecy. Knight and Pash both claimed that the prime minister was part of the Freemasons’ plot. Yet Lord Salisbury was never a freemason. Also, Sickert told the same story, but about another artist, A Vallon. Lord Salisbury had paid the painter off personally because he dis­liked the family portrait he had commissioned. This confu­sion suggests that Pash’s evidence may not be all it seems.

  On the subject of paintings, Fuller’s (and Pash’s) story includes the same detail about Sickert including a clue in one of his works. In at least one of the versions of ‘Ennui’ (Sickert painted five, possibly more) a painting on the wall behind the ennui-laden couple depicts a statue of Queen Victoria. Perched on its shoulder is a seagull… However, Jean Fuller insists that it is a bluff, a deliberately false lead placed there by Sickert to lead suspicion away from himself and put Gull in the frame. As Alan Moore points out in From Hell,given that Fuller’s favoured suspect was Sickert, why include Pash’s detail about the clue in the first place? Would it not have been simpler to find another ‘clue’ that points to Sickert?

  Patricia Cornwell does just that, and using another ver­sion of ‘Ennui’. In this version, the painting on the wall depicts a young woman. Cornwell notes that behind her ther
e appears to be a man lurking in the shadows, or what may be an ear, anyway.This is read as Sickert admitting to his guilt. As clues go, it is hardly the gold standard. If it can be said to be a clue at all.

  Far from being part of a royalist plot to cover up an ille­gitimate child, Sickert, insists Cornwell, was a remorseless scopophiliac psychopath who committed the murders alone. He was an amateur thespian, a continual self-reinventor, a lover of disguise (all which helped him slip through the crowds unrecognized). He was a tireless self-promoter and continually wrote freelance articles and letters to the edi­tors of many UK papers. He was also an appalling snob, profligate with money and an inveterate skirt-chaser. His restless intellect and prolific creativity meant that he was easily able to elude the police investigation and continually taunt them with letters in which he effortlessly disguised his handwriting while all the while dropping clues as to his identity and whereabouts. Clues that the police were too occupied to pick up on. Cornwell reckons that out of the many Ripper letters received by the authorities, the major­ity were penned by Sickert.

  Cornwell states that as a child Sickert had suffered several operations on his penis to correct a fistula which had left his penis brutally truncated and sexually useless. Thus disfig­ured, Sickert as an adult was probably mocked by a prosti­tute at some point and this proved to be the catalyst for the later murders. Unfortunately, there are no surviving med­ical records to prove that these operations ever actually took place, or that Sickert’s genitalia were ever disfigured. On the contrary, rumours abound that Sickert was very much a ladies’ man and fathered several illegitimate children.

  Portrait of a Killer proposes that Sickert began killing with Martha Tabram (called Tabran throughout) and didn’t stop after Mary Kelly. Instead he varied his methods, killing all of the Ripper’s proposed later victims (see Chapter 7) as well as being responsible for, among others, the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Newcastle (6 August 1889), ‘The Whitehall Mystery’ (3 October 1888) and human remains dumped in Middlesbrough docks (13 December 1889). He also killed prostitute Emily Dimmock in Camden in 1907 and depicted the subject afterwards in such paintings as ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom’. Cornwell makes no secret that it was her dislike of Sickert’s paintings that led her to suspect him in the first place.

  It is impossible to read Portrait of a Killer without becom­ing immediately aware of Cornwell’s personality. Her authorial voice continually intrudes on the (admittedly well-beaten) narrative as if she is trying to paper over the cracks in her theory. Sometimes this is to good effect and her side­bars on the actual methods of modern forensics would arguably have made a much better book. Her attempts to humanize the victims can only be applauded in an industry where they have become little more than bloody chess pieces. However, more often Cornwell adopts a hectoring tone that suggests you’re being harangued by a slightly-obsessed fan of CSI.

  While there is no doubt that Cornwell has unearthed some interesting links between Sickert and the Ripper, that final, conclusive link that merges the two personalities is a very long way off. Sickert, with his obsession with murder in general and the Ripper in particular, has partially suc­ceeded in weaving himself into Ripper mythology. When painting he would wear a red scarf, telling friends that it had belonged to one of Jack’s victims. Cornwell’s assertion that Sickert ‘identified’ with the Ripper may be cause for con­cern, but he was not alone in this. False confessors such as John Fitzgerald and Alfred Blanchard readily supplied details of ‘their’ crimes to any enquirers. The day Blanchard con­fessed, he spent all day in a pub, answering questions on the subject from his fellow drinkers. But identifying is not the same as actually being. Sickert had done some acting earlier in his life and there is no doubt that he never lost his sense of ‘The Great Dramatic Moment’.What could be more dra­matic than being inside the mind of the Ripper (except, per­haps, shocking one’s friends a little)?

  Sickert’s body was cremated, leaving no DNA against which to check possible saliva on Ripper envelopes and stamps. On a positive note, the rumours that Cornwell cut up several of Sickert’s paintings searching for DNA samples are not borne out in the book. Some of Sickert’s own letters are tested but, as Cornwell ruefully points out, the gum could well have been wet with a sponge. A result on mito­chondrial DNA reveals a connection between one of Sickert’s letters and one of the Ripper letters ‘specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population’. Sadly, she doesn’t mention the population of where, exactly. Perhaps this will be addressed in the proposed sequel.

  For a more detailed dissection of Cornwell’s theory, we suggest that you try ‘Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer’ by Stephen P Ryder on the inestimable Casebook website (see address below). Matthew Sturgis’s 2005 biog­raphy of Sickert (Walter Sickert:A Life) provides a more sober account of the artist’s life.

  Joseph Barnett (1858–1926)

  Fingered by Bruce Paley in Jack the Ripper – The Simple Truth (1996)

  Mary Jane Kelly’s lover, Barnett, was the fourth of five children. His father, a fish porter, died when he was six. His mother appears to have deserted the family soon afterwards. Barnett was brought up by his elder brothers, Daniel and Denis, and his sister Catherine. It is believed that becoming an orphan caused Barnett’s speech defect, echolalia, which caused him to compulsively repeat the last few words of anything said to him.

  Paley advances his theory cautiously but persuasively. He points out that, unlike most suspects, Barnett fits the description in the FBI profile. Barnett’s rationale for the killings is to stop Kelly continuing as a prostitute. His dislike of Kelly’s trade is certainly made clear in both his and others’ statements at Kelly’s inquest. Paley suggests that, after Kelly’s murder and the four-hour-long interrogation that Barnett underwent, he no longer had the motive or the nerve, to commit further murders.

  Two other men in Mary Kelly’s life have been put forward as possible Rippers: John McCarthy, her landlord, and Joseph Fleming, her old lover. Fleming is suspected because of the possibility that a Joseph Fleming who died in 1920 at Claybury Mental Hospital was the same man.

  James Kenneth Stephen (1859–92)

  Fingered in Michael Harrison’s Clarence (1972), David Abrahamsen’s Murder and Madness: The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper (1992) and John Wilding’s Jack the Ripper Revealed (1993)

  Prince Eddy’s tutor while at Cambridge, 1883, Stephen suffered a blow to the head in 1886 which would later cause brain damage and his subsequent death in 1892. A noted orator, Stephen never settled on one career, moving from don to journalist to lawyer. He returned to residence at Cambridge in 1890. There is no real evidence linking Stephen to the Ripper murders. Arguably, Harrison’s book names him merely because he was exonerating Prince Eddy and wanted to give his readers an alternative. He speculated that Eddy and Stephen became lovers while Eddy was at Cambridge. Once the relationship necessarily ceased, Stephen embarked on his murderous career, committing the crimes on dates that would taunt Eddy. Harrison notes signs of misogyny and sadism in Stephen’s poetry. Abrahamsen proposes that both Stephen and Eddy were the Ripper, clearly disagreeing with Harrison’s various alibis for Eddy. Wilding teams Stephen up with Druitt to no more convinc­ing effect.

  James Maybrick (1838–1889)

  Fingered by his own ‘diary’ and Shirley Harrison in The Diary of Jack the Ripper (1993/1998)

  A drug-addicted Liverpudlian cotton merchant, Maybrick hit the headlines after his death in 1889 when his wife Florence was arrested and tried for his murder. Maybrick had often used arsenic and toxins as stimulants and aphrodisiacs yet these facts were little considered during his wife’s trial. In one of many connections that the Ripper case seems to revel in, Florence Maybrick’s trial was presided over by Sir James Stephen, the father of JK Stephen. At that point Sir James was on the verge of insan­ity and did not grasp the importance of much of the trial evidence. Florence’s own admission of adultery certainly prejudiced the cas
e against her and she was found guilty. Fifteen years later she was reprieved.

  Maybrick’s association with the Ripper only began in 1991 when Michael Barrett was handed a journal by his friend Tony Devereaux. Beyond assuring him it was genuine, Devereaux told Barrett nothing. The journal consists of 63 handwritten pages in an old scrapbook. It was Barrett who identified the author as Maybrick and took it to Doreen Montgomery at literary agents Rupert Crew. Since then barrages of tests have been taken on the ink, the handwrit­ing and the details. Some have ‘proved’ its age, some have not. In June 1994, Barrett confessed to forging the diary, a statement withdrawn by his solicitors. They claimed that he was not in his right mind at the time of the admission. Comparisons with Maybrick’s handwriting suggest he didn’t write the diary. One cautiously advanced theory is that the writer knew him well, because of the inclusion of many per­sonal details of his life. But whether the purpose was to incriminate Maybrick, or merely to forge a legend, is unknown. The diary entries certainly contain factual errors concerning the murders, including the canard about objects arranged at Annie Chapman’s feet. They also contain a risi­ble amount of handwritten laughter. The discovery of a watch in 1993, which had scratched in its inner case Maybrick’s name, the phrase ‘I am Jack’ and the initials of the canonical victims has only created further factions in Ripperology. The carvings have apparently tested as histori­cally correct. The books supporting Maybrick as the Ripper adopt a worrying hectoring tone which emphasise the rifts in this grisly ‘science’. A documentary, The Diary of Jack the Ripper, was made in 1993. Hosted by Michael Winner and featuring various ‘experts’, it draws no final conclusion about Maybrick’s other career.