Complete History of Jack the Ripper (49 page)

The argument over posting dates, however, rests upon an entirely false assumption – that if the card was mailed on Sunday 30th it displayed some foreknowledge of the details of the double murder. In truth neither card nor preceding letter contain anything whatsoever to justify a belief that they were written by the murderer. This conclusion holds good whether the card was posted on Sunday
or
Monday and the preoccupation with the date is a red herring that has diverted attention from the critical study of the content of the communications for far too long.

All three claims usually made on behalf of the Jack the Ripper letter and postcard are easily refuted.

First, the matter of the ears. ‘The next job I do,’ boasted the letter writer, ‘I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly.’ The threat was not carried out and after the double murder the postcard explained: ‘had not time to get ears for police.’ Now, it has been alleged that attempts were indeed made to remove the ears of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes, and this ‘fact’ has been repeatedly adduced to authenticate the correspondence. Unfortunately for the
argument the medical records tell a different story. Dr Gordon Brown, examining Kate’s body in Mitre Square, did discover that the lobe of her right ear had been severed. But one detached ear lobe does not constitute evidence of an attempt to remove both ears and, given the extensive mutilation to Kate’s face and head, can scarcely be deemed significant. If the murderer had really wanted to cut off Kate’s ears he would have done so. There was certainly time enough, as the intricate cuts to her eyelids and cheeks attest. In the case of Liz Stride the murderer inflicted no injury whatsoever to the victim’s ears. There was, it is true, a tear on the lower lobe of her left ear. But this was not a recent injury. It was, as Dr Phillips made clear at the inquest, an old wound, apparently caused by the forcible removal of an ear-ring, and now healed.

The second claim is that the postcard displayed foreknowledge of the Stride and Eddowes killings by referring to a “double event’ in advance of Monday’s press reports. Even if we suppose that the postcard
was
written on Sunday 30th, this contention is, quite frankly, absurd. Innumerable people knew of the murders on the Sunday and could have alluded to them in conversation or correspondence. Within hours of the discovery of the bodies the news was being circulated by word of mouth throughout the district. Even some editions of the Sunday papers managed to catch the story. ‘Successive editions of the Sunday papers were getting a marvellous sale yesterday,’ commented Monday morning’s
Daily News
, ‘and the contents were being devoured with the utmost eagerness.’ The
Telegraph
described the state of ‘almost frantic excitement’ that prevailed throughout the East End on the fatal Sunday. ‘Thousands of people visited both Mitre Square and Berner Street, and journals containing details of the crimes were bought up by crowds of men and women in Whitechapel, Stepney, and Spitalfields.’
¹⁴
Curiously, despite the scrutiny to which the postmark has been subjected, no one seems to have pointed out that the card was posted in the Eastern district, where the double murder was common knowledge on Sunday as well as Monday. Pressmen swarmed around the murder sites throughout Sunday. Trawling for copy for next morning’s papers, they, in particular, would have acquired a detailed knowledge of the crimes, a fact which, as we will see, might not be without significance.

Finally, it is regularly claimed that the postcard’s statement that ‘number one [Stride] squealed a bit’ is proof of the killer’s authorship because only the murderer could have known such a detail. This
argument, of course, assumes that the information given about Stride was correct. We cannot be certain that it was. There were several witnesses in and about Dutfield’s Yard at the time of the murder. Only one (Israel Schwartz) swore to hearing screams. Others, like Morris Eagle, Mrs Diemschutz and Mrs Mortimer, were close enough to the scene of the crime to hear cries but heard nothing. Perhaps Elizabeth did ‘squeal a bit’. Perhaps her screams were drowned in the singing from the International Working Men’s Club. But even if this were so it is the kind of detail a hoaxer could easily have invented and stood a good chance of getting right. It might also have been possible for the postcard writer, if he were a pressman, to have learned the detail from Schwartz. We know for certain that one journalist successfully tracked him down to his lodgings in Backchurch Lane, either on Sunday evening or Monday morning, and procured an interview from him. This interview was published too late to influence the postcard
¹⁵
and, in any case, did not mention Elizabeth’s screams, but since one newshound found Schwartz it was clearly possible for others to do so.

In short there is no reason to believe that the Jack the Ripper letter and postcard were anything more than hoaxes. This was Warren’s view at the time. ‘At present,’ he told Lushington on 10 October 1888, ‘I think the whole thing a hoax but we are bound to try and ascertain the writer in any case.’ Many years later some detectives even insisted that they knew the identity of the hoaxer. Anderson categorically asserted in 1910 that the letter was the creation of an ‘enterprising London journalist’. He was tempted, he added, to reveal his name, provided his publishers would accept responsibility in the event of a libel action, but demurred because ‘no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer.’ In annotating his copy of Anderson’s book, Ex-Chief Inspector Swanson also maintained that ‘
head
officers of CID’ at Scotland Yard knew the identity of the journalist.
¹⁶

Unfortunately the claims of Anderson and Swanson are probably unjustified. I do not doubt that they had a specific name in mind. But Anderson’s concern over a possible libel suit suggests that he knew very well that he could not substantiate his allegation at law and new evidence from the Metropolitan Police case papers casts further doubt upon it.

On 14 October 1896, eight years after the first letters, a fresh Jack the Ripper letter was received through the post at Commercial Street
Police Station. ‘Dear Boss,’ it began, ‘you will be surprised to find that this comes from yours as of old Jack the Ripper. Ha Ha. If my old friend Mr Warren is dead you can read it. You might remember me if you try and think a little. Ha Ha . . .’ Much in the same vein followed, liberally sprinkled with words and phrases cribbed from the original communications but not in the same handwriting. The writer explained that he had just come back from abroad and was ready to resume his work, and he concluded with an enigmatic reference to the writing found in Goulston Street: ‘“The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing.” Ha Ha. have you heard this before.’ It was signed ‘yours truly, Jack the Ripper.’

One of many crude imitations of the original, the letter concerns us less than the police reaction to it. From Commercial Street it was forwarded to Scotland Yard. There, on 15 October, Melville Macnaghten, then Chief Constable, minuted the covering note: ‘This is not, I think, the handwriting of our original correspondent – but it is not a bad imitation. Will you get out the old letters & compare?’

Chief Inspector Henry Moore undertook the comparison. His report, dated 18 October, has not been published before:

Swanson wrote a capital A in the margin against Moore’s last sentence. Then he endorsed the report: ‘In my opinion the handwritings are not the same. I agree as at A.’
¹⁷

These documents prove that, eight years after the original enquiry, the CID still did not know who had written the original Jack the Ripper letter and postcard. For had they possessed such information Moore’s exercise would have been quite pointless. As late as 1914, furthermore, Sir Melville Macnaghten, freshly retired from ten years as
the
head of the CID, would only own to a
suspicion
as to the hoaxer: ‘In this ghastly production I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist – indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author! But whoever did pen the gruesome stuff, it is certain to my mind that it was not the mad miscreant who had committed the murders.’
¹⁸

In asserting a conclusive identification of the hoaxer Anderson’s memoirs went beyond the truth. This should caution us as to their worth as historical evidence. And later, when we come to consider Sir Robert’s extraordinary claims in relation to one of the major murder suspects, we will need to read them with a generous pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, police intuition that the letter and postcard had been penned by an irresponsible journalist was probably correct. Telltale signs pointing to such a conclusion abound in the communications themselves. Although all question-marks and most apostrophes are omitted in the letter the overall impression it conveys is that it was the work of an educated man trying to appear less so. The handwriting and general layout are neat and careful. Capital letters and full stops are properly employed. And, despite the presence of words that would sorely have tested a semi-literate man
¹⁹
, there is not one spelling mistake. The fact that the communications were sent, not to Scotland
Yard, but to the Central News, suggests, moreover, that the hoaxer knew exactly where to go in order to achieve maximum publicity for his creations. Lastly we come back to the postmarks. It may be significant that the letter was posted in the East Central district. For it embraced the Fleet Street/Farringdon Road area, where many of the main newspaper offices were situated. The postcard bore an Eastern district postmark and could easily have been written and mailed by a young reporter investigating the double murder. In 1966 a writer in
Crime and Detection
claimed that in 1931 an ex-
Star
reporter named Best confessed to him that he and a provincial colleague had written all the Jack the Ripper letters using a pen known as a ‘Waverley Nib’, deliberately battered to achieve an impression of semi-literacy and ‘National School’ training.
²⁰
Best’s claim to have written all the letters is ridiculous. That he wrote some, to ‘keep the business alive’ as he said, is possible but assertions made so long after the event must be treated with extreme caution.

The ‘From hell’ letter sent to George Lusk, backed by Openshaw’s and Brown’s findings on the kidney, has been accepted as authentic by most students of the Whitechapel murders. It could have been written by the killer. But the case is by no means conclusive.

In the first place the results of Openshaw’s examination of the kidney on 18 October were obviously misreported. On average a woman’s kidney is smaller and lighter than a man’s but the difference is small and it would have been extremely difficult for him to have determined from a portion of kidney whether the organ had been extracted from a man or a woman.

Bright’s Disease was originally thought to have been caused by overindulgence in ‘ardent spirits’ such as gin. However, the term ‘ginny kidney’, attributed to Openshaw, is now known to be meaningless since the kidneys are not injured by alcohol.

The first accounts of Openshaw’s findings come to us through so many intermediaries that it would, indeed, be surprising if they
were
reliable. When directly interviewed by representatives of the press on 19 October the doctor repudiated almost every pronouncement that had been attributed to him.
²¹
He did reiterate his belief that the organ was part of a left human kidney. But that is about the only view we can confidently ascribe to him.

It is enough to set up an intriguing poser. The left kidney was cut out of Kate Eddowes’ body in Mitre Square on 30 September. So was the kidney received by George Lusk sixteen days later, also
a portion of a left human kidney, sent by the murderer? Or did someone else, learning from the inquest revelations of 4 October that Kate’s left kidney was missing, perpetrate a disgusting hoax? Contemporary opinion was divided. Dr Saunders, the City’s Public Analyst, thought the Lusk kidney a practical joke, a ‘student’s antic’. Major Smith did not.