Dr Frances Tumblety
Fingered by Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey in The Lodger (1995)
Born in Ireland, Tumblety’s family, including eleven children, emigrated to Rochester, New York State, during his childhood. He learned about medicine from a local doctor described as ‘disreputable’. In 1850,Tumblety set himself up as a herb doctor in Detroit. He remained financially secure until his death. Rumours of charlatanism were never far behind nor were those of his preference for young men and his ill-concealed misogyny. Tumblety was run out of Boston when a patient of his died and the coroner’s inquest marked this down to gross malpractice. He was arrested in London, on 7 November 1888 and charged with eight counts of gross indecency and indecent assault with force and arms against four men. Bailed on 16 November, he fled the country four days later. Calling himself Frank Townsend, he arrived in America just in time to find the newspapers heaving with suspicions that he was the Ripper. When Inspector Walter Andrews (who, along with Abberline, was seconded to the Whitechapel investigation) arrived in America, Tumblety fled again. He surfaced in 1893, living with his sister and died in St Louis in 1903. His height (5 feet 10 inches) and prodigious moustache would seem to rule him out of the Ripper race.
Another slight problem is the matter of his arrest on 7 November, which effectively puts him out of the way for Mary Kelly’s murder. Evans and Gainey suggest a solution. A rumour in the American press of the time was that Tumblety had first been arrested on charges of being the Ripper. If this was the case then the police would have released him in time to kill Mary Kelly. Only ten days later did they place him under a ‘holding charge’ of indecent assault. After Tumblety’s death, a collection of preserved uteruses was found amongst his possessions.
Many other medical men have fallen under suspicion. Dr John Hewitt, who was confined to Coton Hill Asylum during 1888, was considered, in 1995, to be Sickert’s unnamed veterinary student (see above). Although Hewitt was released from the asylum several times during 1888, it was proven that no occasions match the dates of the murders. Dr William Thomas of Anglesey was the Ripper according to continued local oral tradition. He practised about three-quarters of a mile from Buck’s Row, and supposedly returned home to Aberffraw unexpectedly after each murder. He suffered a breakdown and poisoned himself in 1889. Dr William Westcott was outed as a suspect in 1992 mainly because he was a founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn and the authors detected ritualism in the murders. Dr Rosalyn D’Onston (real name Robert Onston Stephenson) started out as a Ripper-hunter, tracking his suspect, one Dr Morgan Davies, but then turned hunted when he was reported to the police by his assistant and, much later, fingered by Melvin Harris in The True Face of Jack the Ripper (1994) and later still by Ivor Edwards in Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals (2003).The most recent doctor to come under scrutiny is:
Dr John Williams (1840–1926)
Fingered by Tony Williams with Humphrey Price in Uncle Jack (2005)
Or ‘The John Williams?’ as someone asks the author at one point in his narrative. By this they mean another one of several doctors to the royal family and the driving force behind the National Library of Wales. Just in case you thought they were talking about the composer of the music for Jaws, which would be outlandish even by Ripper-theory standards.
This John Williams was an obstetrician. His outspokenness and his arrogance did little to endear him to colleagues or to slow his career’s progress at University College Hospital. His unlikable character led to rumours of nepotism, although these may have been engendered partly by jealousy over his financial success. He rose through the medical ranks to be eventually appointed surgeon accoucher to Princess Beatrice. He was the doctor who delivered ‘The Lost Prince’. The mention that he became a Freemason is a blind as far as Ripper theories go.
The author, having uncovered the truth in a dismayingly large font size, seems a little uncomfortable at pointing the finger at such a distinguished ancestor (Uncle Jack was in fact his grandmother’s great-great-uncle, but that many ‘greats’ on a book-jacket may invite disrespectful comparison with the material inside).This perhaps explains his focus on the medical research aspect of the doctor’s crimes.While not exactly downplaying the murders themselves, the book is one of a handful that does not carry the depressingly-familiar mortuary photographs of the victims.
At the National Library of Wales, Williams the author stumbled across a cache of his ancestor’s papers. A notebook provides Williams the doctor’s records of his patients. Among them is an entry about performing an abortion on ‘Mary Anne Nichols’ in 1885. Passing over that ‘e’, the author begins to wonder… According to his theory, Williams the doctor was trapped in a loveless marriage with a barren wife. At some point he took a mistress. Called ‘Mary’ according to family tradition, the author suspects it was Mary Kelly, who certainly lived in Wales for a time. When the doctor moved to London, he installed her in a flat near Cleveland Street. Later, he had a change of heart and returned his attentions to his wife, leaving Kelly to fend for herself.
The murders are said to have been committed in the doctor’s quest for greater understanding of the workings of the female reproductive organs which he believed would help him to solve the problem of female infertility. This, in turn, would make his name and help his wife to bear children. Williams sought out victims. These he found among the prostitutes he’d treated at a workhouse infirmary in Whitechapel where he did charitable work (the author makes several leaps to explain the lack of records recording the doctor’s attendance there, despite existing attendance records for the period showing otherwise). Needless to say, Kelly’s death is again the conclusion of his crimes. Into this butchery the author inserts his theory’s only Masonic reading, tying in two passages from Leviticus concerning making a ‘trespass sacrifice’ for ‘his sin which he hath sinned’. After this holocaust, Williams turned his back on London and returned to Wales, attempting to ensure his reputation survived untarnished by founding the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
A surgical knife discovered along with the doctor’s papers is claimed to match the weapon dimensions estimated during the autopsies. DNA tests are mooted but, as with Sickert, the question remains: to compare against what, exactly?
A Policeman
Fingered by Simon Whitechapel in ‘Guts ‘N’ Roses – Jack the Ripper, Heliogabalus and Meteorites’ (2001) Published in Fortean Studies Volume 7
…or at the least, someone disguised as a policeman. Whitechapel’s (sic) esoteric theory, involving a dark sacrificial ritual to destroy the world, concludes by suggesting the possibility of the Ripper hiding in plain sight. Appearing to be a policeman, the Ripper could approach his victims and could be bloodspattered without attracting suspicion. The more police were drafted into the area, the easier it was for such a disguised Ripper to operate.
There are, of course, many other theories. If you haven’t got enough to choose from already, what about the escaped gorilla theory? Or the Fenian seeking to destabilise the government? There are Ripper theories to suit every taste, no matter how strange. There are probably even stranger ones still waiting to be realised. For all the versions of the truth that are flying around out there one question remains: Would we know the absolute truth if we saw it?
Ripping Yarns
“I stopped being interested in Jack the Ripper when it became a cottage industry.” Tom Cullen, author of Autumn of Terror
Books
There continues to be a steady stream of theories and factual histories of the Ripper murders – many of these have been listed along with their suspects, or in the bibliography. A similar unstinting flow issues from the fiction market.To list all the titles would be a task beyond the length of this book, so we hope that this brief overview will be of some help.
Ripper historians, however sensationalist, were no slouches when it came to getting into print. G Purkess’ The Whitechapel Murders: Or The Mysteries of the East End was the fir
st into print, published before Mary Kelly had even been murdered, and was billed as ‘a thrilling romance story’. Although the four-page broadsheet ‘Jack the Ripper at Work Again’ published on 9 November 1888 soon brought the readers up to date.
Not to be outdone, fictional accounts of the Ripper began to appear with equal speed. John Francis Brown’s The Curse Upon Mitre Square AD 1520–1888 was followed hot on the heels by Anon’s ‘In the Slaughteryard’ (a chapter in The Adventures of The Adventurers’ Club) in which the Ripper turned cop-killer. There were also policeman’s reveries, such as those written by ‘Detective Warren’ and George Pinkerton, founder of the detective agency, both published in 1889. While Ripper texts continued to be produced, readers had to wait until 1911 for the first truly popular novel based on the case. Inspired by Walter Sickert’s tale (see above) Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger was first published in short-story form in McClure’s Magazine, and later the same year in novel form. It continues to be reprinted to this day. Simply told, the mysterious Mr Sleuth rents a room from the Buntings. The Buntings begin to suspect their lodger’s nightly outings and fear that he might be the Ripper…
Ripper theory had died down noticeably by the early 1900s with Carl Muusmann (1908) and Leonard Matters (1928) the honourable exceptions. It wasn’t really until Donald McCormick’s The Identity of Jack the Ripper, along with Daniel Farson’s BBC documentary in 1959, that the post-war Ripper theory industry got under way. In the fictional world, however, the Ripper flourished. In pulp novels such as Death Walks In Eastrepps by Francis Beeding (1931) and short stories like Thomas Burke’s grisly ‘The Hands of Mr Ottermole’, Jack haunted readers throughout the war.
1945 saw the publication of Robert Bloch’s ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ – a tale of Jack living in Chicago in the 1940s. First published in the king of pulp magazines Weird Tales, this story is Bloch at his best – economical, surprising and never without that streak of sardonic humour that marked much of his better work. Adaptations, for comics, radio and television, followed and the story remains one of the most widely-anthologised of Bloch’s work.
Robert Bloch remains somewhat of a touchstone when considering the Ripper’s fictional career. He wrote The Will to Kill (1954) in which the protagonist believes that he is responsible for a series of crimes that echo the Whitechapel Murders. In 1967 he contributed the Ripper-in-the-future story ‘A Toy for Juliette’ to Harlan Ellison’s monumental science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions, which tells of a sadistic young woman’s responsibility for many of the notable disappearances throughout history. Unfortunately, the year 1888 means nothing to her and she comes to a satisfactory end. Bloch’s last work on the Ripper was set in 1888. The Night of the Ripper (1984) follows a young doctor and a dyspeptic Inspector Abberline as they attempt to track Jack. They eventually find him to be Dr Pedachenko and a female assistant. One of the least satisfying of Bloch’s psychological thrillers, it has occasional flashes of wit and reasonable pacing, but cannot hold a candle to his short stories. That said, his ear for Cockney dialogue is still better than the Dick-van-Dyke-isms trotted out in Donald McCormick’s The Identity of Jack the Ripper.
Outside of the penny dreadfuls capitalising on the Ripper crimes, there have been plenty of fictional attempts to explore the Autumn of Terror. Theodora Benson’s In the Fourth Ward chillingly relates the real-life killing in Manhattan of the prostitute known as ‘Old Shakespeare’. Ray Russell’s excellent Sagittarius (1962) proposes the Ripper crimes to be perpetrated by Edward Hyde. Hyde in turn has sired a son, who might be responsible for even worse.There was the romance novel Nine Bucks Row (1973, aka Susannah Beware) by TE Huff, in which a young woman suspects the man she is falling in love with is none other than Jack. Anne Perry’s Pentecost Alley (1996) had her protagonist wracked with guilt over the possibility that the wrong man was hanged for being the Ripper, especially as he seems to have returned. Anthony Boucher’s A Kind of Madness (1972) proposes that the Ripper fell victim to the notorious French murderers Michael Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard, warming up for the murder of solicitor Marcel Gouffé that would bring them notoriety.
Other stories, such as Gardner Fox’s Terror over London (1957), John Brooks Barry’s The Michaelmas Girls (1975) and Richard Gordon’s The Private Life of Jack the Ripper (1980) contained fairly straightforward fictionalised retellings of the murders combined with surprise revelations, usually safely placed within the whodunnit formula. Richard Gordon, creator of the Doctor in the House series, built his novel upon solid research about Victorian medical practices. The plot itself is nothing special but there are salutary and disgusting revelations in the background.
The Ripper became the crime and horror writer’s equivalent of the dread ‘dead pet/living pet’ story in sitcoms: something reliable that you could turn to in times of creative hardship. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the countless crime titles in which a serial killer either kills in the same style as the Ripper or is gifted a similar nickname, from Edgar Lustgarten’s A Case to Answer (1947) to Martina Cole’s Ladykiller (1993), Rippers of one kind or another are everywhere.
Those of primary interest are Colin Wilson’s Ritual in the Dark (1960) and The Killer (1970). Both portray modern-day Jacks in Wilson’s densely-packed prose style and focus on his continuing fascination with the Ripper case. Another title worth tracking down is Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi (1949), where an alcoholic reporter is on the trail of a Ripper in Chicago who is killing off showgirls. It was limply filmed in 1958 by Gerd Oswald. However, it also formed the backbone of Dario Argento’s classic giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).
Although he offered occasional unsolicited advice on the Ripper murders, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never put his most famous creation to work in tracking Jack down. However, other authors have been only too keen to send Sherlock Holmes down murky East End streets. At a rough estimate, Holmes and the Ripper have crossed paths on at least twenty occasions. From Anon’s Jack El Destripador to Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), Holmes has deducted and deducted again, but they keep bringing him back to have another go. Ellery Queen teamed up with Sherlock in A Study in Terror (1966). Barry Roberts’ Sherlock Holmes and the Royal Flush (1998) matched Holmes against Dr Tumblety. John Sladek’s Black Aura (1974) suggested Jack was Dr Watson. He wasn’t alone – both Holmes and Conan Doyle have been implicated in other novels. And if Holmes’ solutions aren’t satisfactory then there have always been others to have a go. Mycroft Holmes, Professor Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade, Irene Adler and even Holmes’ ‘sister’, Charlotte, have all had their own Ripper-hunting stories told. In fact, the only character who doesn’t seem to have tracked the Ripper is Mrs Hudson... Now why would that be? Surely not...
Alternative views of the Ripper case have been rarer but often better. Harlan Ellison’s sequel to Robert Bloch’s ‘A Toy for Juliette’, ‘The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World’ (1967) not only offers another suspect for our consideration but throws our voyeurism back in our face as Jack, the eternal outsider, becomes both a sociological experiment and a cheap vicarious thrill for a future society. Ramsey Campbell’s hallucinatory Jack’s Little Friend (1975) proposes a symbiotic relationship that would give David Attenborough nightmares. Patrice Chaplin’s By Flower and Dean Street (1976) has Jack and Elizabeth Stride possess a modern-day couple who meet in the eponymous street. Peter Ackroyd’s atmospheric Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) features a similar run of crimes almost ten years before the Ripper with a disappointingly predictable ending. Jack headed out West in Richard Laymon’s Savage (1993), followed by a young boy. Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) tells, in Sinclair’s queasily elliptical style, of a group of seedy modern-day second-hand booksellers tracking the Ripper in his William Gull identity. Jack rubbed shoulders with the Vampire King in Kim Newman’s splendid Anno Dracula (1992) and again in Roger Zelazny’s experimental A Night in the Lonesome O
ctober (1993).
There have been books of poems, several plays and parodies about the Ripper crimes. Jack continues to surface in likely and unlikely places. He has met Doctor Who’s Doctor on at least two occasions: The Pit (1993) by Neil Penswick and Matrix (1998) by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker. In Philip José Farmer’s A Feast Unknown (1969) Lord Grandrith, a character not at all dissimilar to Tarzan, reveals that the Ripper was his father!
Comics
Graphic violence meets graphic art. Jack has sporadically appeared in comics. He has been the subject of one-off EC-style shockers in horror anthology comics such as Asylum, Creepy and The House of Mystery. He has had guest appearances in longer running series such as Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol (issues 23–34, [1989]), Dark Horse comics’ Predator Nemesis (1997 – spin-off from the Schwarzenegger movie) and DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer (the cheerfully seditious ‘Royal Blood’ 1992, issues 52–55). He has pitted his wits against Judge Dredd (‘Night of the Ripper!’) Batman (‘Gotham by Gaslight’, 1989),Wonder Woman (‘Amazonia’) and even the Justice League of America (‘Island of Doctor Moreau’) in the incarnation of an orang-utan (shades of Poe). In the four-part Blood of the Innocents (1986) by Rickey Shanklin, Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel, Jack is Prince Eddy, battling with both syphilis and the recently arrived Count Dracula.
The best Ripper comics by far are those by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, and Rick Geary. Rick Geary’s Jack the Ripper (1995) is part of his ongoing A Treasury of Victorian Murder series and tells the case from the viewpoint of a Victorian gentleman who relates the case as it was revealed through the press to the public. Geary’s slightly soft-looking people and off-kilter framing work wonders for the story and manage to make it feel quite fresh again. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell appeared sporadically between 1991 and 1998 in eleven issues published by Tundra and then Kitchen Sink Press. Adopting Stephen Knight’s theory from Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Moore and Campbell breathe new life into every aspect and character involved in the Ripper crimes. They use the Ripper case to explore every facet of Victorian society and ‘the man who was midwife to the 20th Century’, his slaughter ushering us into a new century of new horrors. From Hell’s final chapter, ‘Dance of the Gull-Catchers’, which dissects the whole history of Ripperology, should be set reading for anyone interested in the crimes or considering their own final solution.
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