Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (28 page)

Sickert claimed that the murder of Catherine Eddowes had been a mistake. She often used the name Mary Kelly and the conspirators thought that she was the Mary Kelly they were looking for. When the mistake became apparent, they found the real Mary Kelly and viciously silenced her.

The conspirators did everything in their power to make the murders look as if they were the work of one lone madman, and a scapegoat was chosen to throw to the wolves if ever they felt detectives were getting too close. This is where the barrister Montague Druitt came into the picture. He was chosen to take the blame and possibly, according to Sickert, was murdered for it.

Annie Crook’s daughter, Alice Margaret, grew up in the care of the nuns, without knowing who her parents were. In an odd series of events, she later married Walter Sickert and gave birth to their son, Joseph.

It was announced that Sir William Gull had died shortly after the murders, but there were rumours that he had been committed to an insane asylum, where he died several years later. Annie Crook died insane in a workhouse in 1920. John Netley was chased by an angry mob after he unsuccessfully tried to run Alice Margaret over with his cab shortly after the murders. He went to ground shortly after this, and was believed to have drowned in the Thames.

Joseph Sickert said that his father was fascinated with the murders and often spoke of the great guilt he felt over them. Not that Walter Sickert admitted any responsibility for the murders themselves, but his guilt came from the fact that he had been the one who introduced Eddy to Annie and started the whole grisly game. For many years he held his tongue, saying as little as possible about his knowledge of the murders, but he did manage to alleviate his guilt somewhat by painting what many saw as clues into several of his most famous paintings.

There was never any real evidence to link Eddy to Annie Crook, or their supposed love nest in Cleveland Street. Everything was based on rumour and second-hand statements. The royal conspiracy theorists say this lack of evidence proves their theory because all the evidence was destroyed, which sounds like the most preposterous statement as to offering supposed proof of a case.

The theorist, however, wasn’t finished yet: Eddy was what Hollywood would today call ‘good box office’. Attach his royal name to the story, in any way, and sure enough it would attract attention. The accusations of Eddy actually being the Ripper had been spent and disproved to all reasonable doubt, as too had the Royal Conspiracy Theory.

Eddy’s name was next used by Michael Harrison, in his biography of the Prince, entitled
Clarence
, in which he was now relegated to a secondary role in the Ripper case. Harrison used two separate theories, the first involving Eddy’s old Cambridge tutor, James K. Stephen. According to this theory, Harrison had looked at Stowell’s article in great detail, and had come to the conclusion that the mysterious ‘S’ who Stowell accuses was not Eddy at all, but James K. Stephen. Harrison claimed that Stephen had committed the murders as some sort of crazed act of revenge on Eddy, whom he alleges had broken off a homosexual relationship between the two men.

In 1883, James Stephen had been Eddy’s tutor at Cambridge. His job was to try to bring Eddy’s intelligence up to ‘acceptable’ levels. One former tutor had described Eddy’s mind as ‘Abnormally dormant’. According to Harrison, it was while Stephen was tutoring Eddy that their sexual relationship began, which Harrison alleges to have resulted in a scandal. As with almost all the other allegations against Eddy, there is absolutely no proof of this. Their relationship supposedly ended when Eddy joined the 10th Hussars on 17 June 1885.

Two years later, Stephen had an accident, when a horse he was riding shied and backed him into the wooden vane of a windmill. The accident was quite serious, causing him considerable damage, but after a long period of medical care and rest, he eventually seemed to make a complete recovery. It was later discovered, however, that his brain had been permanently damaged from the accident and Stephen was slowly going mad.

Stephen’s behaviour became more erratic as time went on: he saw himself as a great artist, and even a swordsman; he would rush around town in a hansom cab, brandishing his sword and shouting insanely at passers-by.

In 1887 he became a patient of Sir William Gull, but it seems that even Gull could not do anything for him, as he had begun a rapid mental and physical decline. It was during this period that Stephen opted out of being a famous artist and decided instead that he was now a poet, and wrote two volumes of poetry that included extremely violent images against women. He was eventually committed to a mental hospital in 1891, and died there the following February.

Harrison’s theory was that the break up of the homosexual relationship with Eddy, combined with the accident, provoked Stephen to try to avenge himself upon Eddy, but he failed to sufficiently explain why Stephen would have allegedly picked such women as the Ripper murdered, and why he thought that would hurt Eddy in any way. Harrison argued his point in an elaborate and somewhat confusing scheme that included a blood sacrifice, a savage deity named the Great Mother and the Roman god Terminus. Harrison went on to state that the Ripper in fact murdered ten women, including Alice Mackenzie, Frances Coles, Mellett or Davis and Annie Farmer, who was not murdered at all. The ten women theory was important to Harrison, as he believed that Stephen was acting out one of his own poems, ‘Air Kaphoozelum’, in which the villain kills ten harlots.

Harrison made one last attempt to pinpoint Stephen as the Ripper by assimilating his handwriting with the Ripper letters ‘Dear Boss’ and ‘From Hell’. This attempt at connecting Stephen’s handwriting with the Ripper letters was rebutted outright in 1975 by Thomas J. Mann, a handwriting expert, in an article in the
Journal of the World Association of Document Examiners
. Mann stated that only the Lusk letter is likely to be genuine and that the connection between Stephen’s handwriting and that letter was minimal. He went on to say that the overwhelming evidence is that the two do not match, and if the author of the Lusk letter was indeed Jack the Ripper, then James K. Stephen was most definitely not that man.

Albert Victor’s intellect, sexuality, sanity and murderous intentions, if indeed there were such, have been the subject of much speculation. In fact, it was none other than Inspector Abberline himself who, in July 1889, a year after the Ripper murders had ceased, became the chief investigating officer in a case that became known as the Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel and, believe it or not, Eddy’s involvement in this.

The investigation into the Cleveland Street case was long and, at times, very tiresome, with witnesses fleeing the country, and rumour and innuendo being bandied about by all and sundry. Inspector Abberline, however, did not let up, and under his supervision the male prostitutes and pimps started revealing the names of their clients, who included Lord Arthur Somerset, an extra equerry to the Prince of Wales.

Homosexual acts between men were illegal at this time, and those found guilty of such faced social ostracism, prosecution and possibly two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. As the Cleveland Street scandal dragged on, it started to implicate other high-ranking figures. Rumours swept the upper echelons of London’s society of the involvement of a member of the royal family: Prince Albert Victor. Eddy’s name was dragged in even though the defendants in the case had not named him as ever being there. It was suggested that Somerset’s solicitor, Arthur Newton, fabricated and spread the rumours to take the heat off his client.

It later came to light that letters exchanged between the Treasury solicitor, Sir Augustus Stephenson, and his assistant, the Hon. Hamilton Cuffe, make coded reference to Newton’s threats to implicate Eddy. When the Prince of Wales heard about this, he personally intervened in the investigation, calling for an end to gossip and rumour. In the end none of the clients who had visited the brothel were ever prosecuted and no evidence implicating Eddy in any way was ever offered up.

As seems usual in such cases, and especially those involving Eddy, because there was no conclusive evidence for or against his involvement, or whether he even visited the brothel or not, certain biographers assumed that this lack of evidence must be some sort of cover-up. They also deduced from their ‘cover-up’ theory that he more than likely did visit the Cleveland Street brothel, and that he was possibly bisexual, not homosexual.

When questioned, Lord Arthur Somerset’s sister, Lady Waterford, denied that her brother knew anything at all about Eddy, insisting that as far as she knew, ‘The boy is as straight as a line’. She insisted that her brother knew absolutely nothing about how or where Eddy spent his time.

Many years later, when Harold Nicholson, the official biographer of King George V, was researching his book, he spoke to Lord Goddard, who was a 12-year-old schoolboy at the time of the scandal, and Goddard told him that Albert Victor had been involved in a male brothel scene, and that a solicitor had to commit perjury to clear him. The solicitor, he said, was struck off the rolls for his offence, but was later reinstated.

The rumours have unfortunately persisted, and are still damaging to Eddy’s reputation to this day. None of the lawyers in the case were convicted of perjury or struck off during the scandal. Somerset’s solicitor, Arthur Newton, was convicted of obstruction of justice for helping his clients escape abroad and was sentenced to six weeks in prison.

There is another fact, however, that although doesn’t implicate Eddy in any way, still tends to leave one thinking, and that is that Cleveland Street comes up twice in the allegations against him: firstly in the address where Annie Crook was alleged to have worked and later lived, which was 21 Cleveland Street, and secondly in the homosexual brothel scandal, which took place at 19 Cleveland Street. A coincidence? You must judge for yourself!

16

Another Ripper Suspect?

A
t exactly 3.45 a.m. on 31 August 1888, Robert Paul was on his way to Corbett’s Court, Spitalfields, where he worked as a car-man. It was still dark as he turned into Buck’s Row, but in the darkness he saw the figure of a man in a slightly crouching position just ahead of him. As he got nearer the figure it straightened up and started to approach him. At this point Paul could see something like a bundle, lying on the floor of a stable yard gateway, just a little way behind the man. His immediate thoughts were of any possible danger to himself, as he had heard of people being attacked and robbed in that vicinity during the hours of darkness. It was then that the man called to him, saying, ‘Quick, come over here and look at this, there’s a woman lying here’.

The man was Charles Cross, who indicated towards the body of the woman, who was later identified as Polly Nichols. She was lying on her back with her skirt lifted almost to her waist. Cross then lifted one of her hands, and turned again to Paul, saying, ‘She’s stone cold’. He then looked up at Paul, asking him to feel, but Paul declined. He declined again when Cross said they shouldn’t leave the woman lying uncovered like she was, and that they should help to cover her up before anyone else saw her.

Paul didn’t want to touch the victim in any way, and suggested that the best thing they could do was to go as quickly as possible to find a constable. Cross agreed and the two men left the scene together. Just minutes after Cross and Paul had left the scene, another constable, PC Neil, happened to enter Buck’s Row, completely independently, and saw the bundle lying on the pavement, and so the murder of Polly Nichols, Jack the Ripper’s first victim, was reported; within hours Inspector Abberline was seconded from Scotland Yard onto the case.

When the police first interviewed the witnesses, they spoke to both Paul and Cross, but for some reason they did not pay too much attention to Cross. They treated him as just another man on his way to work that morning. When Robert Paul walked into Buck’s Row on the morning of 31 August 1888, and saw Charles Cross crouching over the body of Polly Nichols, he may have been the first and only man to have disturbed Jack the Ripper in the course of his ghastly work.

Very little is known of Charles Cross apart from the fact that he lived in Doveton Street, Bethnal Green, and worked at the Pickfords’ depot in Broad Street (near Liverpool Street station). In his witness statement to the police, he said he was walking to work that morning, as he always did, which usually took him on average approximately forty minutes. The only other fact that is known about him is that he was the man Robert Paul found by the body of Polly Nichols.

There is no doubt that the wounds inflicted on Polly Nichols were savage and brutal to say the least, but they were far less so in comparison to later murders attributed to the Ripper, which involved even greater mutilation. With this in mind, the question that hangs over this murder is: had her killer completed his work or was he interrupted in the course of doing so? When Robert Paul walked into Buck’s Row that morning and saw Charles Cross stooping down by the body of Polly Nichols, had he in fact interrupted the Ripper while conducting his work?