Complete History of Jack the Ripper (48 page)

The Metropolitan Police, to whom both letter and postcard passed, now took them seriously enough to launch a determined attempt to trace the scribe. On this occasion the assistance of the public was speedily enlisted. Preparing facsimiles of letter and card, the police published them in a poster of 3 October requesting anyone who recognized the handwriting to contact them. It was placarded
outside every police station. At the same time facsimiles were sent to the press and on 4 October several papers published them in full or in part.

Perhaps the most important result of all this publicity was that it gave the murderer a name. From the Yard’s point of view the other results were disastrous. For although the publicity did nothing to unmask the the killer, or even the letter writer, it did inspire a host of imitative pranksters to deluge police and press in a tide of bogus Ripper letters. They all had to be read and, where possible, followed up, and they wasted a great deal of police time.

The much depleted Metropolitan Police case papers still contain hundreds of letters purportedly written by the Whitechapel murderer. Many, many others were sent to the City Police, to newspapers and to private businesses and individuals.
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A reading of those extant reveals only one that merits serious consideration along with the first letter and postcard. This was a very nasty little communication addressed to George Lusk of 1 Alderney Road, Mile End, the new chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee.
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On the evening of Tuesday, 16 October, Lusk received through the post a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. The next night he mentioned it at a meeting of the vigilance committee at the Crown in Mile End Road. Joseph Aarons, the treasurer, told the press how Lusk approached him in a ‘state of considerable excitement’. Aarons asked what the matter was. ‘I suppose you will laugh at what I am going to tell you,’ said Lusk, ‘but you must know that I had a little parcel come to me on Tuesday evening, and to my surprise it contains half a kidney and a letter from Jack the Ripper.’ Aarons did laugh. Someone, he told the chairman jocularly, was trying to frighten him. But Lusk was visibly shaken. ‘It is no laughing matter to me,’ he grumbled. It was already late. So Aarons suggested that they let the matter rest until the morning when he and some of the other members would call round to inspect the package.

At about 9.30 the next morning, 18 October, Aarons, together with Mr B. Harris, the secretary, and Messrs Reeves and Lawton, two of the committee members, called upon the chairman at his home in Alderney Road. Lusk opened his desk and took out a small cardboard box. It was about 3½ inches square. ‘Throw it away,’ he said, handing it to them, ‘I hate the sight of it!’ They opened the box.

Inside was one half of a kidney, divided longitudinally. It stank. There was also a letter:

Aarons felt sure he was not looking at a sheep’s kidney and he proposed that they take it to the surgery of Dr Frederick Wiles at 56 Mile End Road. The doctor wasn’t in but his assistant, Mr F. S. Reed, was. Reed opined that the kidney was human and had been preserved in spirits of wine. But, to make sure, he popped over to the London Hospital and submitted the kidney to Dr Thomas Horrocks Openshaw, Curator of the Pathological Museum, for examination under the microscope.

Openshaw’s alleged findings have influenced everyone who has ever written about the kidney. According to Aarons, when Reed returned he told them that Openshaw had said that the kidney ‘belonged to a female, that it was part of the left kidney, and that the woman had been in the habit of drinking. He should think that the person had died about the same time the Mitre Square murder was committed.’ This account is generally supported by a Press Association report, compiled from ‘inquiries made at Mile End’ and published on 19 October. Openshaw pronounced the kidney, it said, to be ‘a portion of a human kidney – a “ginny” kidney – that is to say, one that had belonged to a person who had drunk heavily. He was further of opinion that it was the organ of a woman of about forty-five years of age, and that it had been taken from the body within the last three weeks.’ Interviewed the same day for the
Star
, though, Openshaw himself repudiated most of what had been published: ‘Dr Openshaw told a
Star
reporter today
that after having examined the piece of kidney under the microscope he was of opinion that it was half of a left human kidney. He couldn’t say, however, whether it was that of a woman, nor how long ago it had been removed from the body, as it had been preserved in spirits.’
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Whatever Lusk’s party were given to understand about Openshaw’s views they heard enough to convince them that the police had to be told. Without further ado they took the parcel to Leman Street and placed it in the hands of Inspector Abberline. The Metropolitan Police, in their turn, sent it to their City colleagues and the kidney was examined by Dr Gordon Brown, the City Police surgeon. His report, although crucial to any assessment of the importance of Mr Lusk’s parcel, has not survived and all we know of it comes secondhand or worse from Chief Inspector Swanson and Major Smith.

Swanson’s information probably came from Inspector McWilliam. On 6 November he told the Home Office that ‘the result of the combined medical opinion they [the City Police] have taken upon it, is, that it is the kidney of a human adult, not charged with a fluid, as it would have been in the case of a body handed over for purposes of dissection to an hospital, but rather as it would be in a case where it was taken from the body not so destined.’
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Smith’s account was published more than twenty years later: ‘I made over the kidney to the police surgeon, instructing him to consult with the most eminent men in the profession, and send me a report without delay. I give the substance of it. The renal artery is about three inches long. Two inches remained in the corpse, one inch was attached to the kidney. The kidney left in the corpse was in an advanced stage of Bright’s Disease; the kidney sent me was in an exactly similar state. But what was of far more importance, Mr Sutton, one of the senior surgeons of the London Hospital, whom Gordon Brown asked to meet him and another practitioner in consultation, and who was one of the greatest authorities living on the kidney and its diseases, said he would pledge his reputation that the kidney submitted to them had been put in spirits within a few hours of its removal from the body – thus effectually disposing of all hoaxes in connection with it. The body of anyone done to death by violence is not taken direct to the dissecting-room, but must await an inquest, never held before the following day at the soonest.’
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The wrapping in which the parcel had arrived bore two penny stamps and a postmark. Except for the letters OND (a vestige of ‘LONDON’) the postmark was too indistinct to be read. Nevertheless,
the Post Office is said to have expressed an opinion that the package was posted in the Eastern or the East Central district.
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There were arguments in favour of both. Items travelling from one district to another usually bore the postmark of both districts. Lusk’s package, however, had only been franked once and this indicated that it had been posted in the district in which it had been received, i.e. the Eastern district. On the other hand, the package was too large to have been dropped into an ordinary post-box. It was thus suggested that it had been posted at the Lombard or Gracechurch Street office, in the East Central district, for there the receptacles were of unusually wide dimensions.

A possible lead on the sender of the parcel came from Miss Emily Marsh, whose father traded in leather at 218 Jubilee Street, Mile End Road.

Shortly after one on Monday, 15 October, she was minding her father’s shop when a tall man dressed in clerical costume came in. He referred to a vigilance committee reward bill posted up in the window and asked Emily for the address of Mr Lusk, mentioned in the bill as the president of the committee. Emily advised him to see Mr Aarons, the treasurer, who lived at the corner of Jubilee Street and Mile End Road, just thirty yards away, but the man said he did not want to go there. She then produced a newspaper. It gave Mr Lusk’s address as Alderney Road, Globe Road, and she offered it to the stranger. But he declined to take it. Instead he told Emily to ‘read it out’ and proceeded to write in his pocket-book, all the time keeping his head down. Later, after thanking her for the information, he left the shop. Something about the stranger’s furtive manner and appearance worried Emily so much that she sent John Cormack, the shop boy, after him to see that all was right.

A description of the man, apparently based upon the observations of Emily, John Cormack and Mr Marsh, who turned up in time to encounter him on the pavement outside the shop, was published by the
Telegraph
: ‘The stranger is described as a man of some forty-five years of age, fully six feet in height, and slimly built. He wore a soft felt black hat, drawn over his forehead, a stand-up collar, and a very long black single-breasted overcoat, with a Prussian or clerical collar partly turned up. His face was of a sallow type, and he had a dark beard and moustache. The man spoke with what was taken to be an Irish accent.’
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Was this the man who posted the kidney? Well, he inquired
after Lusk’s address on the 15th, the day before the kidney was delivered. Emily’s newspaper, moreover, printed the address simply as Alderney Road, Globe Road. No number in Alderney Road was given. And the address on the parcel Lusk received likewise contained no house number. The spelling of some of the words in the letter, too, is interesting. For the rendition of ‘Sir’ as ‘Sor’, of ‘er’ as ‘ar’ in ‘prasarved’ and of ‘s’ as ‘sh’ in ‘Mishter’ could suggest a writer with an Irish accent. It is thus possible that Lusk’s correspondent and Emily’s tall stranger
were
identical. But the fact that Lusk had been the recipient of several hoax letters obliges us to regard it as no more than a possibility.

The important question is whether any one of the three communications we have noticed was actually written by the murderer. The first two – the letter and postcard signed Jack the Ripper – were in the same handwriting and should be considered together.

Leonard Matters and William Stewart, the first modern Ripperologists, both dismissed these documents as hoaxes. But Donald McCormick, writing in 1959, thought differently. He drew attention to the letter writer’s promise, on 25 September, to clip the victim’s ears off ‘the next job I do’ and interpreted the injuries to Stride’s left and Eddowes’ right ear as abortive attempts to redeem that promise. McCormick also assumed that the postcard was written and posted on 30 September. This, as he pointed out, was a Sunday and no report of the murders would appear in the dailies until the next morning. Yet the writer of the postcard not only knew of the ‘double event’ but, in McCormick’s view, mentioned details only the murderer could have known. ‘Unless Jack the Ripper was the killer,’ he asked, ‘how could he have known that Elizabeth Stride had ‘squealed a bit’ . . . or that an attempt had been made to clip off the ears?’
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McCormick’s view of the matter held sway for more than fifteen years. During that time every major writer on the case – Odell, Cullen, Farson and Rumbelow – lent their weight to the belief that the murderer had penned the communications to the Central News and had thereby coined his own
nom de guerre
. Then, in 1975, Richard Whittington-Egan and Stephen Knight sowed seeds of doubt. Whittington-Egan did not believe that the postcard had shown any foreknowledge of the double murder at all. It was, he reminded his readers, postmarked 1 October, which meant that it could have been posted on the Monday, after details of the murders had been splashed across the columns of the morning papers. Knight, after checking with
the records department of the Post Office, endorsed this conclusion. He revealed that there were Sunday collections from post-boxes in 1888 and that any letter collected on a Sunday would have been stamped with that date. The Jack the Ripper postcard, however, was franked ‘OC 1’, not ‘SP 30’, and that proved, as far as Knight was concerned, that it had to have been posted on the Monday.
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The ranks of the Ripperologists have since been in total disarray on the subject. Some, like Colin Wilson, Robin Odell and Paul Harrison, have continued to identify the Central News Agency’s correspondent with the murderer. Others, notably Martin Fido, Melvin Harris and Paul Begg, have followed Whittington-Egan and Knight in denouncing him as a fraud.

At this date it is not possible to establish the exact date on which the postcard was mailed. For even if further research into Post Office procedures could verify Stephen Knight’s findings they would not preclude a Sunday posting after the last collection time. My own feeling is that the postcard
was
written and posted on Sunday, 30 September, the day of the murders. The wording of the card certainly suggests that this was the case: ‘Youll hear about saucy Jackys work tomorrow [i.e. in Monday morning’s papers].’ And a Sunday posting would seem consistent with the understanding of the press that the card was delivered with the first post on Monday morning.
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