Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper

by Peter Thurgood

  Yours truly

  Jack the Ripper

  Dont mind me giving the trade name

  PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha

  Five days later, on 1 October 1888, the Central News Agency received yet another communication signed with the name ‘Jack the Ripper’. This time it was a postcard, which became known as the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard.This in turn made direct reference to both the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the murders, which were to become known as the ‘Double Event’. The general consensus of opinion was that the postcard was genuine: it mentions the removal of Elizabeth Stride’s ear and the Double Event before it had been published by the press.

  The transcript of the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard is as follows:

  I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. ha not the time to get ears for police. thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

  Jack the Ripper

  The letter and the postcard had both happened so quickly that the press hardly had time to act upon them, and were still hard at work besmirching Abberline and his team’s efforts in failing to catch the killer, while at the same time increasingly taking up Lusk’s cause.

  8

  When Evidence is not to be had – Theories Abound

  H aving ascertained that the main investigating police officers in the Ripper case did not have a singular suspect in mind does not mean that there were no discernible suspects. As already pointed out, many arrests had been made over the course of the investigation. Following the murder of Annie Chapman on 8 September 1888, the Daily Telegraph reported: ‘More than one person was detained on suspicion; one at Limehouse, another at Bethnal-green, and a third at Deptford, but in each case no tangible result followed.’ The press reported many such stories throughout the years 1888–91, when various men were arrested on suspicion and later released. Very little, if anything, is known regarding the identity of these men, whom we can only assume to have been innocent with no connection to the murders.

  Whenever and wherever murders are committed, the publicity surrounding them nearly always inspires a series of twisted individuals cum publicity seekers to emerge from the woodwork and claim responsibility for the crime or crimes. The Whitechapel murders were no exception to this rule, and inspired numerous individuals to hold their hands up to being Jack the Ripper.

  ALFRED NAPIER BLANCHARD

  On 5 October 1888, Alfred Napier Blanchard was drinking at the Fox and Goose tavern at Aston (Greater Birmingham). As with most drunks, the more he drank, the louder he became, as his main aim was to get people listening and taking notice of him. He finally got his wish by confessing that he was none other than Jack the Ripper. The landlord of the pub reported him to the police, and Blanchard was arrested and remanded in custody while the police checked up on his story. The confession was eventually found to be completely made up so he was charged in court with being drunk and wasting police time, and was fined and dismissed by the local magistrate, with the words: ‘What a foolish man you have been.’

  On the same day that Blanchard was trying to establish a name for himself in the annals of notoriety, a young medical student named William Bull walked into Bishopsgate police station and confessed to the murder of Catherine Eddowes. His so-called confession was looked into by the police, and it was decided that, as with Blanchard, he could not have possibly committed the crime. He was released without charge.

  Other would-be Jack the Rippers included John Avery, William Wallace Brodie and George Payne who all confessed at various times, and as before, all were released without charges being brought against them, even though they had wasted valuable police time. Theophil Hanhart, however, was not so lucky. After confessing to the police that he was the Ripper, the police looked into his admission and decided, as with the others, that he could not possibly have been. They did, however, decide that Theophil Hanhart was of ‘unsound mind’, so instead of being charged with being the Ripper or wasting police time, he was incarcerated for an unspecified period in the nearest mental asylum.

  THOMAS NEILL CREAM

  In 1893 Thomas Neill Cream, a Scottish doctor, confessed to being the Ripper whilst standing on the platform of a scaffold, about to be hanged. He had been found guilty of murdering Matilda Clover on 15 November 1892. Just as the hangman released the lever to the trapdoor that Cream would plunge into, he was alleged to have uttered the words, ‘I am Jack’; his last words were cut short by the hangman’s noose. Whether he did utter these words or not, we will never know, but one fact that is known about Cream is that at the time of the Ripper murders, he was actually serving a prison sentence at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, from 1881–91.

  As well as the self-confessed killers popping up all over the place, there was also the popular press, who were more than eager to come forward with claims that they had unearthed the identity of Jack the Ripper. When Annie Chapman was murdered in September 1888 the press came out in force, in favour of John Pizer, a Jewish shoemaker with a criminal record and an apparent hatred of prostitutes, being the Ripper. Pizer was dubbed ‘Leather Apron’, a name that stuck in the public’s imagination. At the exact time that Annie Chapman was being murdered, Pizer was deep in conversation with a police officer. After suffering months of accusations and humiliation at the hands of the press, Pizer went to court and won a libel action and damages against the newspapers that had named him.

  THE FANATICAL ANARCHIST

  By late November, early December 1888, the newspapers were getting desperate to keep the Ripper story going, and so the ‘fanatical anarchist’ story was born. Nikolay Vasiliev was said to have gone on a killing spree, murdering four prostitutes within the space of a fortnight in Paris 1872. He was quickly caught and placed in a mental asylum where he underwent treatment. After being declared cured on 1 January 1888, he was released and made his way to London; which of course placed him in the frame during the period of the Ripper murders. If the facts surrounding Vasiliev are true, then he indeed would be a fairly strong suspect in the Ripper murders, but there is no written evidence anywhere to suggest that Vasiliev ever existed. The whole story appears to have been invented by the press.

  The Australian press published a story on 8 April 1892, with the Melbourne Evening Standard triumphantly stating in its headline: ‘Jack The Ripper: Deeming At Aldgate On The Night Of The Whitechapel murders.’

  Frederick Bailey Deeming had been arrested in Australia on 11 March 1892 on suspicion of murdering his wife, whose body had been discovered buried beneath the floor of the fireplace at their home in Melbourne. After the Australian police had interviewed him, they asked the English police to help by searching his former home at Rainhill in Liverpool. This search resulted in the discovery of the bodies of his previous wife and their four children buried under the floorboards. The decomposition of the bodies led the police to believe that they had been dead less than a year, which tied in perfectly with the time he left England and fled to Australia.

  Deeming was certainly in Australia in December 1887, as he was facing bankruptcy charges at the time. In order to escape the charges, he fled to South Africa in January 1888 and remained there until at least March of that year. His exact whereabouts from that time until his reappearance at Hull in October 1889 are uncertain. Deeming was without a doubt insane, but not to the extent that he didn’t make an attempt to hide his crimes by burying the bodies of his victims. This did not fit in at all with the known habits of Jack the Ripper, which once again begs the question: did the press exaggerate this story to fit in with a possible sales slump of their newspapers at the time?

  THOMAS CUTBUSH

  Six years after the last official Ripper murder, in 1894, The Sun newspaper published a headline-blazing article stating that they had une
arthed the identity of the Ripper. They named Thomas Cutbush, who had been arrested in April 1891 for maliciously wounding Florence Grace Johnson, and also attempting to wound Isabella Fraser Anderson at Kennington. Assistant Commissioner of Crime at Scotland Yard, Sir Melville Macnaghten, was dismissive of the notion that Cutbush could have been the killer. Macnaghten later noted: ‘It was found impossible to ascertain Cutbush’s movements on the nights of the Whitechapel murders.’

  Cutbush was declared insane and confined at Lambeth Infirmary. Although no evidence was ever found to incriminate Cutbush in regard to the Ripper murders, his profile of an individual then safely incarcerated in a mental asylum, fitted the public’s imagination perfectly at the time.

  Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on one’s point of view, naming Ripper suspects did not end in the 1890s. It continued, and is still continuing to this day.

  DOCTOR STANLEY

  In Leonard Matters’ 1928 book The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, Matters names a certain Doctor Stanley as being Jack the Ripper. According to this version, Doctor Stanley’s only son had caught syphilis from Mary Kelly, which led Stanley to seek revenge by killing the woman who was to blame for his son’s terrible disease. In doing so, Stanley killed four other prostitutes before he finally found his objective and duly slaughtered Mary Kelly.

  After completing his gory tasks, Stanley left the country and ended up in Buenos Aires, where he died in 1927. Before he died, however, he allegedly confessed his crimes to the author Leonard Matters. The Doctor Stanley story was widely publicised by Matters in the American press in 1927 and later appeared in the first full-length book in English on the subject, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper published in 1928.

  When Leonard Matters’ book was first published, it was accepted as factual evidence, but the truth was that Doctor Stanley and his deathbed confession only ever existed in Matters’ imagination. The basic concept, however, of a ‘demented doctor’ seeking revenge for some real or imaginary injury has become one of the most influential of the suggested solutions to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Leonard Matters’ concept of the Ripper being this mysterious mad doctor fits in perfectly with the many suggested theories that the murderer must have had some anatomical knowledge and skill with a knife to have carried out the type of mutilations and removal of organs from his victims as the Ripper did.

  SIR WILLIAM GULL

  The medical connection theory has survived well over the years, from fictitious characters suggested by Leonard Matters, to prominent men such as Sir William Gull, the Queen’s personal physician, who features heavily in what became known as the Royal Conspiracy Theory. One only has to delve into the factual evidence at the time to learn that Sir William Gull was in his seventies at the time of the murders, and most importantly, he was partially paralysed after suffering a stroke in 1887. He unfortunately suffered a number of other attacks following his stroke, and died on 29 January 1890 at the age of 73. Bearing in mind that the Ripper murders all happened in 1888, one year after his first attack and one year before his death, it hardly seems feasible that this man would have been chosen by his fellow conspirators to haunt the streets of the East End, looking for women to rip to pieces.

  JOSEPH BARNETT

  The next name on our list did not have anything to do with the medical profession, and he was named as a suspect from day one. Joseph Barnett was the lover of Mary Kelly, the last of the Ripper victims, who was murdered on 9 November 1888. Barnett was arrested by the police immediately following the murder. He was questioned for four hours and then released, with the police being apparently satisfied that he had no connection with her murder or indeed any of the previous crimes.

  Barnett may have been released without charge in 1888, but that hasn’t stopped various writers during the twentieth century from suggesting that he was indeed the Ripper. The author Bruce Paley wrote an article in True Crime magazine in 1982, where he named Barnett as the Ripper. He elaborated on this theme in his later book Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth in 1995.

  Another author, Paul Harrison, also argued that Barnett carried out the murders. In his book, Jack the Ripper: The Mystery Solved, in 1991, Harrison’s argument is based upon the theory that Barnett was so unhappy with the fact that Mary Kelly had turned to prostitution that he went on a murder spree, killing Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes in an attempt to frighten Kelly into abandoning her chosen profession. If there is any truth in this, it certainly did not work, as, in frustration and rage, Barnett turned up at Mary Kelly’s flat in Miller’s Court and slaughtered her. This, like so many other theories, could have been possible, but it could also have been entirely untrue, and just another theory in the long line that has surfaced since the anonymous killer struck, back in 1888.

  JAMES MAYBRICK

  As recently as 1993 we saw the publication of yet another exposé; this time it was the Jack the Ripper Diary, allegedly written by a Liverpool businessman named James Maybrick in which he confessed to being Jack the Ripper.

  The diary is littered with errors and of dubious provenance, and is now regarded internationally as a forgery. It was supposed to be the handwritten account of James Maybrick, but when the handwriting in the original diary was checked by a handwriting expert, alongside the handwriting in Maybrick’s last will and testament, it was proven without a doubt to have been written by a different hand.

  When this was discovered, the so-called finder of the diary, Michael Barrett, admitted that it was a fake, and that he had forged it. Since then, however, he has retracted that confession and subsequently re-confessed at regular intervals.

  The only fact linking Maybrick to the murders is that he was in London at that particular time, but so too were about 8 million other people; they couldn’t all be Ripper suspects could they? James Maybrick died in suspicious circumstances in May 1889. His wife Florence was tried and convicted of murder by poisoning him with arsenic. The evidence against her was very flimsy and she appealed against her conviction. In 1904 she was released from prison.

  CHARLES L. DODGSON

  One of the most improbable suggestions for Jack the Ripper, if not the most, in my opinion, is that which Richard Wallace put forward in his 1996 book, Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend.

  Wallace writes that Charles L. Dodgson and his friend Thomas Vere Bayne committed the Ripper murders. He bases this theory primarily on a number of anagrams derived from passages in two of Dodgson’s works. Wallace claims that the books contained hidden but detailed descriptions of the murders.

  Before we go any further, for those who do not know, Charles L. Dodgson wrote under the pen name of Lewis Carroll and the two books in question were The Nursery Alice, an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for younger readers, and from the first volume of Sylvie and Bruno.

  Lewis Carroll first published both works in 1889, which was a year after the Ripper murders, and was probably still working on them during the period of the murders. Wallace’s entire argument was based on his ability to take certain passages from Carroll’s work and, by re-arranging the letters, construct statements that incriminated the author; these were, of course, coded confessions deliberately inserted into his work for the enlightenment of those not sufficiently knowledgeable to decipher them in the first place.

  For a very short while, this theory gained enough attention to make Carroll a late but notable addition to the list of suspects, although not one that is taken very seriously, as this technique could be applied to almost any author’s work and end with very similar results.

  JAMES KELLY

  In 1997 The Secret Of Prisoner 1167 – Was This Man Jack The Ripper? was published. It was written by James Tully, who claimed in the book that James Kelly, no relation of the victim Mary Jane Kelly, was in fact Jack the Ripper.

  Kelly was perfect fodder for inclusion into the Ripper suspect files. He was married in his early twenties, and on 21 June 1883, aged just 23 years old, he stabbed his wife in the throat with a pocket
-knife while in the midst of a violent argument. She died three days later, on 24 June, and Kelly was charged with her murder. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to hang. His execution date was set for 20 August 1883, but doctors decided that he was insane, and was granted a reprieve and sent to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, as it was known at the time.

  Whilst in Broadmoor, he found a piece of metal one day, while working in the asylum’s kitchen garden, and fashioned a set of keys from it. On 23 January 1888 he put his keys to the test and subsequently escaped. A large search was organised for him throughout the country, but he was never found, until thirty-nine years later, on 11 February 1927, James Kelly, then aged 67, turned up at the gates of Broadmoor and gave himself up.

  Whether his mental health had deteriorated even more during his years on the run or if he expected some sort of celebrity status when he returned to Broadmoor, he didn’t seem to be too happy with his reception, whatever the circumstances were. Just two years later, in 1929, he made another escape attempt, but by this time security at Broadmoor had been much improved and his efforts were in vain. James Kelly died from double lobar pneumonia on 17 September 1929 at the age of 69.

  There was no real case against Kelly, apart from the fact that he murdered his wife with a knife and was declared insane. There doesn’t seem to be any records of witnesses picking him out as a Ripper suspect or even seeing him in the area at the time of the murders; in fact, his exact whereabouts for 1888 are unknown. James Tully’s book and evidence against James Kelly seem to be based entirely on Kelly killing his wife and then being incarcerated in Broadmoor. Records from Victorian asylums would no doubt reveal hundreds, if not thousands, of similar cases to James Kelly, men who had murdered their wives and been certified as insane. This ‘evidence’ does not qualify them all as Ripper suspects.