Complete History of Jack the Ripper (5 page)

Those who hunted the Ripper, too, believed they were confronting a new and frightening phenomenon. ‘I look upon this series of murders as unique in the history of our country,’ Warren told Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, at the height of the scare. George Lusk, President of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, formed to assist the police, agreed. ‘The present series of murders,’ he assured the Home Office, ‘is absolutely unique in the annals of crime . . . and all ordinary means of detection have failed.’
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But none of this explains the Ripper’s continual hold on popular imagination, his most potent legacy to the world. Some would have it that those who read or write about the murders are misogynists. I am not a misogynist. Nor, for that matter, is any serious student of the case personally known to me. It should be obvious from the most cursory glance at the literature, moreover, that what really fascinates
people about the story is the question of the killer’s identity. After a series of horrific murders Jack the Ripper disappeared, as if ‘through a trapdoor in the earth’ as a contemporary put it, and left behind a mystery as impenetrable as the fog that forms part of his legend. He left us, in short, with the classic ‘whodunnit.’

It is this that lies at the root of our enduring fascination with the case. Good mysteries become obsessive. A century ago Percival Lowell spent a fortune in building the Lowell Observatory in Arizona specifically to find the canals of Mars. In the 1960s Tim Dinsdale, monster hunter extraordinaire, abandoned his career as an aeronautical engineer to search the waters of Loch Ness. And, driven by similar irresistible urges to know the truth, amateur sleuths in at least three continents still seek final proof of the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Since 1891, when the last victim widely attributed to the Ripper died, we have had an ever-growing mountain of books and a welter of theories. Looking at the size of that mountain and the dramatic finality of many of the titles that form it –
The Final Solution
,
The Mystery Solved
, etc. – the general reader might well ask: is there anything new to be said about Jack the Ripper? The answer, surprisingly, is an emphatic ‘Yes’! For the fact is that the conventional story of the murders, as passed down to us in these books, is shot through with errors and misconceptions and that, with very few exceptions, their authors have taken us, not towards, but away from the truth.

The whole subject is now a minefield to the unwary. Even true crime experts venture there at their peril. ‘No new books will tell us anything more than we already know’. This was the confident claim of Brian Marriner, reviewing the Ripper case in his valuable book,
A Century of Sex Killers.
Unfortunately, Marriner’s account of the murders, brief as it is, proceeds to repeat a number of old canards.
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And where an author as knowledgeable as this stumbles, one is tempted to caution the general reader, approaching the groaning shelf of Ripper books for dependable information, with those famous words from Dante: ‘Abandon hope, ye who enter here!’

There are several reasons for the lamentable state of Ripper studies.

One has been the tendency of writers to draw the bulk of their primary source material from newspaper reports and later reminiscences of police officers and others. This practice should not have survived the 1970s, when police and Home Office records on the Ripper case
were first opened to the public, but it continues because of the relative accessibility of newspapers and memoirs. Every sizeable library has its microfilm backfile of
The Times
, and published memoirs are readily available through interlibrary loan services. Unfortunately, as sources of factual information on the crimes and police investigations, they are simply not reliable.

At the time of Jack the Ripper it was not the policy of the CID to disclose to the press details about unsolved crimes or their inquiries respecting them. Reporters were not even permitted to enter premises in which such a crime had been committed. Naturally, they resented it. ‘The police authorities observe a reticence which has now apparently become systematic, and any information procured is obtained in spite of them,’ carped one. ‘However much or little they know, the police devote themselves energetically to the task of preventing other people from knowing anything,’ fumed another.
⁴

The purpose of the police precautions will be discussed later. Primarily it was to prevent villains being forewarned as to what the CID knew and might do. But at present the rationale behind the policy concerns us less than the effects of its application upon newsmen. It placed them in an impossible predicament. For they were confronted at the height of the Ripper scare by a massive public clamour for information and possessed few legitimate means of satisfying it.

Gathering news at that time was a particularly frustrating business. Sometimes, by following detectives or hanging about police stations, reporters were able to identify and interview important witnesses. We will have cause to thank them when we encounter Israel Schwartz and George Hutchinson. But more often press reports were cobbled together out of hearsay, rumour and gossip, picked up at street corners and in pubs or lodging houses.

There seems to have been no shortage of informants. A
Star
reporter, investigating the Miller’s Court murder in November 1888, found the locals basking in their new-found importance, anxious to please and ready to regale him with ‘a hundred highly circumstantial stories’, most of which, upon inquiry, proved ‘totally devoid of truth’. Even true anecdotes might be passed from mouth to mouth until they became unrecognizable. Sarah Lewis, who stayed in Miller’s Court on the fatal night, had heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ By the time the
Star
’s man got to the scene of the crime her story had got round and ‘half a dozen women were retailing it as their own personal experience’, a circumstance which may explain why Sarah’s story
is sometimes credited, in aberrant forms, to a Mrs Kennedy in the press.
⁵

Inevitably much of the press coverage was fiction. Inevitably, too, the press were happy to blame the police. ‘We were compelled in our later editions of yesterday,’ observed the
Star
after the Hanbury Street murder, ‘to contradict many of the reports which found admittance to our columns and to those of all our contemporaries earlier in the day. For this the senseless, the endless prevarications of the police were to blame.’
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But journalists themselves, determined to exploit the astonishing runs on the papers after each murder, were more than usually willing to invent copy of their own.

Perhaps the most important myth created by the press was Fairy Fay.

The first trace of her appeared in a verse broadsheet,
Lines on the Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel
, printed at the beginning of September 1888. This referred vaguely to an early and unnamed victim of the murderer, killed ‘twelve months ago’, i.e. in 1887. However, it was the
Daily Telegraph
that really got the ball rolling. In its issues of 10 and 11 September 1888 it stated that the first victim of the Whitechapel murderer had been slain in the vicinity of Osborn and Wentworth Streets at Christmas 1887. A stick or iron instrument had been thrust into her body. She had never been identified. The story was repeated again and again – in newspapers and broadsheets, in a parliamentary question of November 1888, and in Dr L. Forbes Winslow’s widely read memoir,
Recollections of Forty Years
, published in 1910. Terence Robertson, writing for
Reynold’s News
in 1950, embroidered the tale still further. He gave the unknown woman a name – Fairy Fay – and said that she was killed on Boxing Night 1887, when she was taking a short cut home from a pub in Mitre Square.

No such event occurred. There is no reference to it in police records. No mention of it can be found in the local or national press for December 1887 or January 1888. And a search of registered deaths at St Catherine’s House reveals no woman named Fay or anything like that murdered in Whitechapel during the relevant period. There is no doubt that the
Telegraph
story was a confused memory of the known murder of Emma Smith in the spring of 1888. Emma was attacked in Osborn Street and a blunt instrument, perhaps a stick, was savagely thrust into her. She died the next day in the London Hospital. Obviously the
Telegraph
’s writer recalled this incident very
hazily. He remembered, for example, that it had occurred on a public holiday and opted for Christmas 1887. The correct date was the night of Easter Monday, 2–3 April 1888.
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Today writers still regularly list both Fairy Fay
and
Emma Smith as possible victims of Jack the Ripper. But Fairy Fay is a phantom, born of sloppy journalism back in 1888.

The deficiencies of newspaper files cannot be redressed from reminiscent evidence, whether memoirs of retired policemen or interviews with aged East End residents. These sources, although often readily accessible, have special problems of their own.

Over time our memories deteriorate more profoundly than many people inexperienced in the use of historical evidence realize, and reminiscences recorded long after the event are characteristically confused on chronology and detail. There is a very human tendency, too, for us to ‘improve’ upon our memories, to make a better story, to explain away past mistakes, or simply to claim for ourselves a more impressive role in past dramas than we have acted in life.

In 1959 a ninety-year-old Mr Wright could still show broadcaster Dan Farson the spot in Buck’s Row where one of the murders took place. He had lived in Buck’s Row as a boy, he explained, and it was he who had washed the blood from the pavement. Contemporary records reveal that there was, in fact, very little blood and that what there was was washed down by a son of Emma Green, who lived adjacent to the murder site.

At the time of the murders a greengrocer called Matthew Packer told police that on the night Liz Stride was killed in Berner Street he had sold grapes to her killer. More than seventy years later an aged Annie Tapper remembered the story and retold it for Tom Cullen. She insisted, however, that as a girl of nine
she
had sold the grapes to Jack the Ripper and, of course, she remembered him perfectly. ‘I’ll tell you what he looked like as sure as this is Friday,’ she said. But her murderer was a fantasy, disguised in a black, pointed beard and togged out in a bobtail coat and striped trousers.

At a more exalted level Sir Robert Anderson, head of CID in 1888, made the preposterous suggestion in his memoirs that his policy of withdrawing police protection from prostitutes drove them from the streets and thereby put an end to street murders in the Ripper series. Not true. Contemporary evidence demonstrates that the policy was never implemented and could not have worked.

In producing reminiscences there is also a tendency for our memories
to become contaminated by later stories and influences. A case in point is Mary Cox. Mrs Cox lived in Miller’s Court in 1888. She knew Mary Jane Kelly, usually regarded as the Ripper’s last victim, and saw her with a man only hours before she was murdered. Many years later Dan Farson interviewed Mrs Cox’s niece at her home off the Hackney Road. According to the niece’s story, Mrs Cox remembered the man as a gentleman, a real toff: ‘He was a fine looking man, wore an overcoat with a cape, high hat . . . and Gladstone bag.’ Now this is very like the classic villain in Victorian melodrama. And by then that is precisely how East Enders had come to think of Jack the Ripper. But it is poles apart from the man Mrs Cox
really
saw, the one she described before detectives and at the inquest back in 1888. Then she spoke of a short, stout man, a man with a carroty moustache and blotchy face, a man who dressed shabbily and carried only a quart can of beer.
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‘I can remember it now as though it were yesterday.’ Such protestations are common enough in reminiscent accounts. I urge my readers not to be fooled. Rather, take to heart the words of John Still: ‘The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.’

Sadly, the misinformation propagated in books today is not simply a product of reliance upon untrustworthy sources. For, as far as most Ripperologists are concerned, the truth runs a very poor second to selling a pet theory on the identity of the killer. This means that evidence in conflict with the theory is liable to be suppressed or perverted, that fiction is frequently dressed up as fact, and that evidence in support of the theory is sometimes completely invented. There is a long history of dishonesty and fraud in Ripper research.

We have had some notable cock-and-bull stories in recent years.

Many readers will remember Stephen Knight’s bestseller,
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, published in 1976. In Knight’s complex tale, Mary Jane Kelly witnesses the secret marriage of Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson and Heir Presumptive to the throne, to a shop-assistant called Annie Elizabeth Crook, and then bands together with a group of fellow East End whores to blackmail the government. Salisbury, the Prime Minister, is alarmed. Annie Crook is a Catholic. And anti-Catholic sentiment is rife amongst the population at large. So if it comes out that the prince has taken a Catholic bride the very future of the monarchy itself might be endangered! Without further ado Salisbury hands the problem to Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, and Gull, assisted by Walter Sickert, the artist, and John Netley, a
sinister coachman, promptly tracks down and slices up the blackmailers.