Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (15 page)

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.

W
ALTER
S
ICKERT

For some reason, the artist Walter Sickert has surfaced on no less than three separate occasions with relevance to the Ripper murders. Firstly, as has already been pointed out, in connection to the Royal Conspiracy Theory. Secondly, with the painter’s claim that he knew the identity of the Ripper because he occupied his former rooms.

Sickert was a member of a group of artists known as the Camden Town Group, and, as such, he took up lodgings in a house owned by an elderly couple in Mornington Crescent, Camden. This was several years after the Ripper killings, and the couple told him that the previous occupant of the rooms was Jack the Ripper. According to the couple, the mystery lodger was a veterinary student who would stay out all night and then rush out to buy the papers on the morning following the murders. He was also, they said, in the habit of burning his clothes. Eventually the lodger’s health began to fail and he returned to his mother’s house in Bournemouth where he died a short while after.

The couple told Sickert the lodger’s name, which he allegedly wrote down in the margin of a copy of
Casanova’s Memoirs
which he gave to fellow artist Harry Rutherford. Unfortunately, Rutherford could not decipher Sickert’s handwriting and the book was eventually lost in the London Blitz during the 1940s.

Two connections to the Ripper murders are twice as many as most suspects ever got, but Walter Sickert now has a third, and that is as a candidate for the Ripper himself. In 2002, the author Patricia Cornwell published
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed
, which was also publicised in a television documentary to coincide with the book.

In her book, Cornwell decides there is a definite link between Sickert and the Ripper on the grounds that she had forensic tests carried out on two separate letters; the first was an example of Sickert’s own correspondence, and the second was a letter allegedly sent by Jack the Ripper to Dr Thomas Horrocks Openshaw at the London Hospital on 29 October 1888. Dr Openshaw had recently analysed an item of human flesh, which George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee had received in the post on Tuesday, 16 October 1888. When Lusk first opened the package, he was shocked to discover this small piece of rancid flesh, which was later identified as part of a human kidney. Also enclosed was a note, which later became known as the ‘From Hell’ letter.

The tests showed a match of DNA profiles in the two pieces of evidence. Cornwell says that she is 100 per cent certain that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, and even goes so far as to stake her reputation upon this claim.

The Openshaw letter, however, is universally regarded as a hoax and had therefore no connection with the real killer. The DNA profiling might indeed show at best that Sickert was the author of one of the many hoax Ripper letters. The worst scenario, however, is that at some point in time, both sets of evidence were handled by two people who were in some way distantly related. Cornwell never managed to obtain a reference sample of Sickert’s own DNA, which means there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that any of the DNA samples were connected to the artist in the first place.

Last but not least, in this particular assertion, is that all the available evidence points to the fact that Walter Sickert was actually in France between August and October 1888, when the murders took place.

B
LACK
M
AGIC

When the press couldn’t find a new suspect to hang the Ripper name on, which wasn’t very often, they delved into the realms of fantasy and black magic, which were always a good ploy to sell a story. The Ripper murders were perfect for such scaremongering; even the very nature of the killings fitted in perfectly with the belief that there was something ritualistic about them, and that they were linked to black magic.

Believers in the occult have long held the belief that the ‘Hand of Glory’ or ‘Thief’s Candle’ was something that could empower the holder with special magical powers. The Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a man who has been hanged, often specified as being the left (Latin: sinister) hand, or else, if the man was hanged for murder, the hand that ‘did the deed’.

According to old European beliefs, a candle made of the fat from a malefactor who died on the gallows, virgin wax and Lapland sesame oil – lighted and placed (as if in a candlestick) in the Hand of Glory, which comes from the same man as the fat in the candle – would have rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented. The candle could only be put out with milk. In another version the hair of the dead man is used as a wick; also the candle is said to give light only to the holder. The Hand of Glory also purportedly had the power to unlock any door it came across. A Thief’s Candle is very similar, except that it does not necessarily have to come from a man.

In October 1888 the
East London Advertiser
suggested that the Ripper murders were carried out in order to obtain the necessary body parts to manufacture what they described as
Diebslichter,
which is German for a Thief’s Candle.

The following month the
Pall Mall Gazette
ran an article suggesting that the murders were being conducted in accordance with a medieval spell that would permit the murderer to attain ‘the supreme black magical power’.

In 2001 Ivor Edwards published his book
Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals
, in which he argues that each of the five murders were carried out at a specific location, in order to map out the shape of a sacred symbol known as the
Vesica Piscis
, as part of a black magic ritual. Edwards went on further to name the magician-killer in question as Robert Donston Stephenson (alias Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson), who was a journalist and writer interested in the occult and black magic. He admitted himself as a patient at the London Hospital in Whitechapel shortly before the Ripper murders started, and left shortly after they ceased. He authored a newspaper article which claimed that black magic was the motive for the killings.

This was not the first time that Robert Donston Stephenson had been named as the murderer. Aleister Crowley (known as the world’s wickedest man) had claimed that Stephenson was the killer based on information supposedly provided by his friend Baroness Vittoria Cremers. Crowley is hardly the most credible of witnesses to anything, and Stephenson’s interest in the occult was centred on his attempts to revive the worship of female deities, a point of view that seems rather at variance with the activities of Jack the Ripper.

Although Ivor Edwards provides us with a great deal of information concerning the magic symbols and their use throughout history, there is nothing that actually connects such symbols to the Ripper murders.

W
AS
J
ACK THE
R
IPPER A
W
OMAN
?

Not such a preposterous notion as it might seem upon first being presented with the idea. Most people automatically assume when hearing of a murder that the culprit is a man, and indeed most murders are carried out by men, but there is also a proportion that are carried out by women.

When Inspector Abberline was investigating the murder of Mary Kelly, he interviewed a number of witnesses, including Mrs Caroline Maxwell, who lived in the area. Mrs Maxwell testified that she had seen Mary Kelly twice on the morning of Friday 9 November 1888. The first occasion was between 8 a.m. and 8.30 a.m., at which time Mrs Maxwell claimed that Kelly looked quite ill as she stood near the entrance to Miller’s Court. Mrs Maxwell stated that she was sure of the time because her husband returned from work at around eight each morning. The second time Mrs Maxwell saw Kelly was an hour later, when Mrs Maxwell claims she saw her speaking with a man outside the Britannia public house.

These sightings do not appear to be strange or unusual in any way, until we take into account the medical evidence supplied by both the police doctor and the coroner, who both state that the time of death for Mary Kelly was estimated to be between 3.30 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Friday 9 November 1888. This time was estimated based on the medical evidence such as temperature of the body and stiffness of the joints.

If the medical evidence is accurate, and we have no reason to suppose otherwise, then it would have been impossible for Mrs Maxwell to have seen Kelly at these two later times, as by then she would have been dead for at least four hours!

Mrs Maxwell also vividly described the clothes she saw on the woman she believed to be Kelly that morning: ‘A dark shirt, velvet bodice and a maroon-coloured shawl.’ When asked if she had ever seen Kelly in this outfit before, she replied that she definitely remembered her wearing the shawl.

Abberline had no reason to distrust Mrs Maxwell as a witness, but maybe she had made a mistake with the times and clothing? Mrs Maxwell, however, was adamant that both the times and the clothing were as she had said. The problem definitely perplexed Abberline; so much so, in fact, that he allegedly approached a colleague about it, and asked if he thought that they should be looking elsewhere, as maybe it was a case not of Jack the Ripper at all, but of Jill the Ripper.

Abberline’s assertions were based upon the fact that it was possible that the killer dressed up in Kelly’s clothes in order to disguise herself, therefore accounting for Mrs Maxwell’s later sightings of Kelly that morning.

According to Donald McCormick, author of
The Identity of Jack the Ripper
, published in 1959, the colleague of Abberline whom he spoke to regarding this theory was a man he called Abberline’s mentor, Dr Thomas Dutton. McCormick goes on to say that Dutton answered that he believed it was doubtful, but that if it were a woman committing the crimes, the only kind of woman capable of doing so would be a midwife.

The main problem with Donald McCormick’s version of these events is that there doesn’t seem to be any record of Abberline knowing anyone named Dr Thomas Dutton, or being mentored by such a person.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that the theory of Jill the Ripper, as opposed to Jack the Ripper, is out of the question; in fact, there are several points which add credibility to the theory. Firstly is the fact that whilst all of London was searching for Jack the Ripper, his female counterpart would be free to walk the streets of Whitechapel with considerably less fear of capture or discovery than a man would. Secondly, if she was a midwife, as has been suggested, it would be a perfectly common sight to see her no matter what time of the day or night. Thirdly, based on the theory that the murderer must have a good knowledge of anatomy, a midwife would fit into this category perfectly.

Another writer, William Stewart, was one of the first to write about the possibility of Jill the Ripper in his book
Jack the Ripper: A New Theory
, published in 1939. Stewart’s theory, in following with the conversation between Abberline and Dutton over fifty years earlier, was that the killer had been a midwife, possibly an abortionist. He claims that it is perfectly feasible that ‘She might have been betrayed by a married woman whom she had tried to help, and sent to prison, and as a result, this was her way of revenging herself upon her own sex’.

Stewart also suggests that a midwife would have had the knowledge to have been able to produce a state of almost instant unconsciousness in a patient, and particularly in a person who had been drinking. This method was frequently used on patients in those days by midwives, and involved pushing on the pressure points until the patient, or possibly the victim, passed out.

Mary Kelly was three months pregnant at the time of her death, and according to Stewart, she could barely afford her lodgings, let alone a baby, so she decided to terminate her pregnancy by calling in an abortionist. The abortionist/midwife was admitted into the room by Kelly, which is why Kelly was found stripped naked, as she had taken her clothes off in readiness for the abortion.

The abortionist killed Kelly almost immediately, cutting and hacking at her body until hardly anything recognisable was left of her. When she had finished her grizzly work, she took off her bloodstained clothes and burnt them in the open fireplace. She then dressed herself in Kelly’s clothes, which had been neatly folded and left on a chair, and escaped the scene.

This could possibly explain the sighting by the witness, Mrs Maxwell, who said she saw Kelly at eight the next morning, and again about an hour later. We know she couldn’t have seen Kelly at these times, but she could have seen someone else, possibly the midwife/abortionist, dressed in Kelly’s shawl, which she said she was sure she had seen Kelly wearing on other occasions.

But why would the midwife/abortionist want to remove organs from her victims?