Complete History of Jack the Ripper (66 page)

I strongly believe that the Ripper lived in the East End but I would not wish to hazard any closer location than that. The only real information we have is that after killing Kate Eddowes in
Mitre Square, at the western margin of the murder district, he doubled back into Whitechapel, leaving a portion of Kate’s apron in Goulston Street.

The police made repeated inquiries at common lodging houses in the neighbourhood of the murders. This is understandable because every victim except Mary Kelly had lived in one of these places.

It is not impossible that the murderer found boltholes in them. Very little notice was taken of men inquiring for beds during the night. At the Eddowes inquest Frederick Wilkinson, the deputy from 55 Flower and Dean Street, said that when men came for lodgings he entered the number of the bed in his book but not the man’s name. Pressed, he conceded that he sometimes lodged over 100 people at a time and that if the beds were paid for boarders were ‘asked no questions’.
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It may even have been possible for a bloodstained man to clean up in a common lodging house. It was the practice in these establishments for men to use a common washing place. Water, once used, was thrown down the sink by the lodger using it.

It is unlikely, however, that a man of respectable appearance, a man in regular work, would have needed to resort to a common lodging house. In all probability the Ripper lived in private lodgings or with relatives. The police themselves eventually seem to have come to this conclusion. This is why, after the double murder, they distributed handbills to householders and made a house-to-house search of parts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. When he retired in 1892 Abberline commented that he did not think that the killer would be found lurking in a ‘dosser’s’ kitchen.
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Modern writers frequently allege that the Ripper was left-handed or ambidextrous. Our best evidence indicates that neither statement is true. His modus operandi, as reconstructed from contemporary records and outlined in this chapter, implies that he was right-handed. Professor Cameron’s deductions in the case of Kate Eddowes confirm this conclusion.

Did the murderer possess any anatomical knowledge or surgical skill? This question has been fiercely debated by Ripperologists for decades.

The medical evidence given in police reports and inquest depositions has been fully set down in this book. From it we know that although the doctors and surgeons who examined one or more of the ‘canonical’ victims (Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly) disagreed about the
extent
of the murderer’s expertise almost all
attested to some degree of knowledge or skill. The sole dissentient was Dr Bond. But even his attitude was ambivalent. Examining Mary Kelly’s injuries, he concluded that her killer had demonstrated no anatomical knowledge. Yet, only eight months later, he attributed Alice McKenzie’s death to the same man, partly on the grounds that her throat had been ‘skilfully & resolutely cut’. Doctors Phillips and Gordon Brown, in their post-mortem examinations of Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes respectively, thought they could detect a great deal of expertise, both anatomical knowledge and surgical skill, in the mutilations.

Modern opinion has too often been the servant of pet identity theories. For many years Professor Francis Camps’ views have held sway amongst serious students of the case. The professor decided, largely on the strength of sketches and photographs of Kate Eddowes, that the Ripper possessed little if any medical expertise.
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However, this judgement was made at a time when Ripper research was in a very primitive state. Since then much detailed medical evidence relating to the murders has come to light. Camps ignored, too, the conditions in which the murderer had worked – at great speed, in poor light and in constant danger of detection.

For an up-to-date view I turned to an acknowledged expert in the field – Nick Warren. As a practising surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of both England and Edinburgh, he is well qualified to assess the medical evidence, and as a keen criminologist and the editor of
Ripperana
, the specialist’s quarterly, he is conversant with all aspects of the case.

Nick raises doubts about the validity of Dr Bond’s judgement. Bond had been instructed by the Home Office to investigate the ‘Thames Torso’ murders. From 1887 to 1889 the dismembered remains of four women were recovered along and near the Thames. Three of them were fully decapitated and the heads were never found. Now, the beheadings in these cases suggested to Bond that their perpetrator possessed anatomical skills. So when he considered the Ripper evidence and noted that the murderer had apparently tried and failed to decapitate two of his victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly, he put him down as an unskilled operator. Unfortunately, modern experience suggests that Bond’s assumption that only skeletal dismemberment required ‘anatomical skill’ is a false one.

Nick believes that the Ripper’s attempt to separate the vertebrae of Annie Chapman’s neck and his pelvic dissection of this victim
indicate anatomical knowledge. He believes, too, that the removal of the left kidney in the case of Kate Eddowes evidenced definite anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. For it required both to extract the organ, as the Ripper did, through the vascular pedicle from the front. It lay embedded in fat, behind the peritoneum and overlain by the stomach, spleen, colon and jejunum.
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In a district of high immigration and rising social tension it was perhaps inevitable that the murders should be blamed upon a foreigner.

It was a view even found at Whitehall. Godfrey Lushington, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, saw evidence of Jewish guilt in the message left by the murderer in Goulston Street on the night of the double murder. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote on 13 October, ‘that the last murder [Eddowes] was done by a Jew who boasted of it.’ Later, when he read a police report of Israel Schwartz’s statement, he assumed that the man Schwartz saw had addressed an accomplice by his proper name of ‘Lipski’ and noted in the margin: ‘The use of “Lipski” increases my belief that the murderer was a Jew.’
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It is not as simple as that. ‘Lipski!’ was a taunt commonly applied to Jews in the East End and it was Abberline’s belief that Schwartz’s suspect had used it against Schwartz himself. Even if he did address an accomplice by the name it is quite likely to have been a trick, designed to fool Schwartz into thinking that the murderers were Jews. Indeed, the evidence from the double event frequently suggests crude attempts to incriminate the Jews. The police certainly interpreted the Goulston Street graffito, left at the entrance of a tenement largely inhabited by Jews, as such. And the fact that Long Liz was murdered outside a club patronized by Jewish socialists suggests the same possibility.

The only tangible evidence that the murderer was a foreigner came from Mrs Long and George Hutchinson. Mrs Long thought that the man she saw with Annie Chapman was a foreigner. However, her evidence doesn’t really count because she only saw the suspect’s back. Hutchinson’s does. He said that the man he saw going into Miller’s Court with Mary Kelly looked like a Jew. It persuaded Abberline. In 1903 he told a reporter that in his opinion the murderer was ‘a foreign-looking man’.
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But Hutchinson’s evidence is not above question. And it is always possible that Mary got rid of the man he saw and picked up another client shortly before her death.

It may be significant that none of the other witnesses indicated that
they had seen men of foreign appearance.
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Attempts to correlate the dates of the murders with sacred days in the Jewish calendar have also been unsuccessful.
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Jack the Ripper may have been a foreigner. We must bear this possibility in mind. But the historical evidence is far too fragmentary and contradictory to prove it.

On some aspects of the case the historical record tell us little. Perhaps the most important is motive. No significant link between the victims has been established. Robbery cannot explain the slaughter of destitutes. And we cannot even infer a grudge against prostitutes because these women were obvious and easy targets for anyone with murder and mutilation in mind. The Jack the Ripper crimes are now generally described as sex murders. Despite the tag sex does not seem to be the primary motivation for many such offenders. But the roots of their behaviour are complicated and contentious and this is no place to speculate upon them. Whether the Ripper was driven by fear and hatred of women, whether he suffered from ego-frustration and craved recognition and esteem, or whether he was simply a sexual sadist, these are matters upon which history cannot enlighten us.

Equally mysterious is the killer’s disappearance.

Serial killers rarely take their own lives. Yet many writers have found suicide a likely explanation for the termination of the Ripper crimes. It is usually buttressed by the assertion that they became progressively more ferocious, the inference being that the killer’s brain gave way altogether after Miller’s Court. This is misleading. Martha Tabram, the probable
first
victim, died in a frenzied attack. And the extent of the mutilations of the others reflected the time at the disposal of the murderer more than anything else. Nichols and Stride escaped relatively lightly because in their cases the killer seems to have been disturbed and driven off. Mary Kelly was the most extensively mutilated victim. But then she was killed in her own home, where the Ripper had the time and safety to indulge himself.

There are other feasible solutions to the riddle. The murderer may have been imprisoned for an unconnected offence or confined in an asylum. He may have emigrated. Or, perhaps after a police interview, he may simply have stopped killing for fear of detection. Serial murderers do sometimes lie dormant for extended periods. After murdering thirteen women from June 1962 to January 1964, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston strangler, lost his compulsion to kill and reverted to simple rape. Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, in their
book
The Serial Killers
, instance the further case of
Il Mostro
, the ‘Monster of Florence’, who killed sixteen people between 1968 and 1985. There was a gap of six years between his first double murder in 1968 and his second in 1974 and seven years between that event and the third double killing in 1981.
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So who was Jack the Ripper?

Previous writers have almost always tailored the facts to suit a theory. We will proceed from the opposite direction. It is time for us to reassess the main police suspects. But in doing so we must keep the historical facts ever before us.

We are looking for a white male of average or less than average height in his twenties or thirties, a man of respectable appearance who lived in the neighbourhood of the crimes, probably in private lodgings or with relatives. The dates of the murders indicate that he was in regular work, the times that he was single. He was probably right-handed and possessed a degree of anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. He may have been a foreigner. I do not claim that a single one of these contentions is beyond challenge. I do believe that if the real killer is ever identified most of them will prove to have been correct.

But enough, let’s get to the suspects!

‘A
S A CHILD
I often thought that if some fairy offered me three wishes, the first thing I would ask would be the identity of Jack the Ripper; the thought that it might remain a mystery forever was intolerable.’
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So wrote Colin Wilson, bestselling author of
The Outsider
, but all of us who have ever been intrigued by this most baffling of mysteries will recognize the feeling. Driven by a strange, compelling need to know the truth, we find it hard to accept that written proof of the Ripper’s identity probably never existed.

In that respect Tom Cullen, who wrote the first important book on the Ripper, was no different from the rest of us. Cullen endorsed Sir Melville Macnaghten’s identification of the killer with a man whose body was taken out of the Thames in December 1888. But he would not agree with Macnaghten that ‘the truth . . . will never be known, and did indeed, at one time lie at the bottom of the Thames.’ No, argued Cullen, ‘in all likelihood the truth is locked up in a steel filing cabinet at Scotland Yard; or perhaps it lies buried in some musty attic among letters that have long since been forgotten, photographs that have faded, the lock of hair that is mouldy with age.’
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Stories surface fairly regularly to torment the ardent student of the crimes with visions of some final, conclusive proof, usually lost or irretrievable, and therefore just beyond his grasp. One of the latest comes from Christopher Monro, a grandson of James Monro, Warren’s successor as Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police. According to Christopher, Monro set down his views on the Whitechapel murders in ‘highly private memoranda’ which passed, upon his death in 1920, to his eldest son Charles. Charles Monro died in his sixties about 1929. A year or two before his death, however, he confided to his brother Douglas (Christopher’s father) that he still had the papers but didn’t know whether he should destroy them or not. Monro’s theory about Jack the Ripper, said Charles, was a ‘very hot potato’ and Monro had kept it a close secret, even from his wife. Douglas, who died in 1958, made no attempt to learn from Charles the identity of Monro’s suspect. Instead, he urged him: ‘Burn the stuff, Charlie, burn it and try to forget it!’
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