Complete History of Jack the Ripper (81 page)

His employers found him quiet, steady and industrious. The families of his victims were completely deceived. Having visited her son-in-law at the Monument, Bessie Taylor’s mother, for example, averred that she had ‘never seen a better husband’. Chapman’s ability
to allay suspicion is well illustrated in the case of Robert Marsh, father of Maud Marsh, the last victim.

On the day before Maud died, the worried father visited the Chapmans at the Crown.

‘I think my daughter will pull through now, George,’ he ventured hopefully.

Chapman prepared him for the worst: ‘She will never get up no more.’

Marsh had heard rumours about Bessie Taylor, the previous wife, and understandably they troubled him. He probed Chapman on the matter. ‘Have you seen anyone else like it?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Chapman.

‘Was your other wife like it?’

Chapman realized that any attempt to conceal the fact would simply undermine his credibility. Without batting an eyelid he replied: ‘Just about in the same way.’

All in all Marsh was impressed by his son-in-law. At the trial he testified that Chapman ‘always answered my inquiries about my daughter perfectly frankly. He used to come down sometimes to see me with Maud, and, as far as I could see, she was very happy with him. I thought he treated her very well.’
¹⁸

There were moments during the fatal illnesses of his wives when Chapman’s mask slipped and witnesses like Martha Doubleday and Elizabeth Waymark glimpsed the callous indifference beneath. But their testimony was greatly overborne by those who could only see in him the solicitous husband. He ministered to his victims’ needs, monitored their pulse and heart rates, prepared and administered their medicines and shed tears for their passing. Even Dr Stoker, who treated Bessie Taylor and Maud Marsh for the same symptoms, entertained no suspicion of foul play until after Grapel had alerted him to the possibility of poison.

Most remarkable of all Chapman retained the affection and trust of his victims. We have seen this in the case of Mary Spink and it is equally evident in that of Maud Marsh. At the trial Maud’s mother was asked if Maud had uttered one word to suggest that she had ever doubted her husband. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘she appeared perfectly happy and contented to the last.’
¹⁹

‘The tiger’s heart was masked by the most insinuating and snaky refinement.’ Such was de Quincey’s description of John Williams, the supposed Ratcliff Highway murderer.
²⁰
Recent research has tended
to exonerate Williams of those crimes but the quality noticed by de Quincey might realistically be surmised of the Ripper and it was undoubtedly true of Chapman.

There was one other respect in which Chapman’s personality may have replicated that of Jack the Ripper. If, as Mrs Long and George Hutchinson indicated, the Ripper was a foreigner, the chalk message – ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ – was a gesture of overweening arrogance. And self-incriminating braggadocio was not uncharacteristic of Chapman. On one occasion Louisa Morris, Maud Marsh’s sister, told him that it seemed strange that the doctor could not find out what was ailing Maud. ‘I could give her a bit like that,’ said Chapman snapping his fingers, ‘and fifty doctors could not find out.’
²¹

Why Abberline found Chapman such a compelling suspect should now be apparent. Here was a much more likely suspect than Macnaghten’s depressed Blackheath barrister or Anderson’s inoffensive scavenger of the streets. Here was a man who had the medical qualifications, the opportunity, the appearance, the cunning and the cruelty to have been Jack the Ripper.

At this point it would give me immense satisfaction to announce that we had unmasked the killer. Unfortunately I can’t. Because although Chapman is undoubtedly the best suspect on offer the case against him still contains serious flaws.

The absence of any direct evidence linking Chapman with the killings is the major weakness. Lucy Baderski’s statement that he was often out at night at the time of the murders will not bear scrutiny. Chapman met Lucy in a Polish club in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, and they were married on 29 October 1889. Now, according to the later testimony of Stanislaus Baderski, Lucy’s brother, their courtship was a rapid affair: ‘She met the accused at the Polish club, and they kept company together for four or five weeks, after which they got married.’
²²
Stanislaus was vague on chronology and dates. In his Central Criminal Court testimony, for example, he erroneously dated the marriage August Bank Holiday 1889. Nevertheless, the import of his statement is clear. Lucy cannot have met Chapman before the summer of 1889 and thus knew nothing about his movements during the previous autumn. The only Ripper-type murders upon which she might conceivably have been questioned were those of Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles in July 1889 and February 1891.

There are other difficulties in identifying Chapman with the Ripper.
Would an immigrant, unfamiliar with the locality as well as the English language, have been capable of the crimes? We do not know the extent of the Ripper’s command of English but some of our best witnesses – Long, Cadosch, Lawende and Hutchinson – attest to some ability to converse with English-speaking victims.

This is a difficult question to answer. Much depends upon how long Chapman had been resident in Britain. Arthur Neil, in the autobiography already referred to, tells us that he first came to this country in June 1887 but I have been unable to discover any corroboration of this statement. Papers in Russian and Polish, found in Chapman’s possession when he was arrested in 1902, closely document his early life in Poland. Their abrupt termination, in February 1887, suggests to me that he emigrated soon after that date. At the height of the Ripper scare, then, he may have been resident the best part of eighteen months in the East End, long enough one would think to acquire some local knowledge and sufficient conversational English to pick up a Whitechapel whore. Wolff Levisohn’s testimony on this point is inconclusive. He said that Chapman could only speak Polish and a little Yiddish when he met him in 1890. It should be remembered, however, that since Levisohn was himself a Russian Pole it would have been unnatural and unnecessary for Chapman to have attempted to communicate with him in English.

A much more serious objection to Chapman as a Whitechapel murder suspect is the dissimilarity in character between the Ripper-type slayer and the poisoner. For if Chapman was the Ripper we would have to accept that he abandoned the knife for fear of detection and adopted poison as a safer method of killing. Is this a credible scenario?

John Douglas of the FBI tells us: ‘Some criminologists and behavioural scientists have written that perpetrators maintain their modus operandi, and that this is what links so-called signature crimes. This conclusion is incorrect. Subjects will change their modus operandi as they gain experience. This is learned behaviour.’
²³
Point taken. It is also possible, as noted in an earlier chapter, to find examples of serial killers who lay dormant for extended periods or baffled police by changing their methods. But to exchange knife for hammer, gun or rope, weapons of violence all, is one thing. To forsake violence in favour of subterfuge, as is alleged of Chapman, quite another. I can think of
only one possible parallel – California’s still uncaught Zodiac killer.

In four horrific incidents in 1968–9 Zodiac shot or stabbed seven victims, five of them fatally. The attacks then ceased. But the murderer continued to taunt the police and press with letters until as late as 1978. He even boasted in his macabre correspondence of fresh killings. These later victims may have been figments of a perverted imagination. Yet it is also possible that they were real and that they had not been officially attributed to Zodiac because of differences of locale or technique. Indeed, in a letter of November 1969, Zodiac warned of just such an impending change in his modus operandi: ‘I shall no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders, they shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, and a few fake accidents, etc. The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them.’ Robert Graysmith, who studied the case, took Zodiac at his word and presented evidence to link him with various unsolved murders of hitchhikers in California, Washington and Oregon between 1969 and 1981. The victims were stabbed, poisoned, strangled, drowned or smothered. ‘The truly horrifying part to me,’ he wrote, ‘was that it seemed that someone was experimenting in different ways of killing people.’
²⁴

Whether Chapman was capable of such versatility in murder it is impossible now to say. ‘You don’t know what he is.’ Maud Marsh’s rejoinder to her sister might well serve as a caution to those eager to pontificate about what the Pole was or was not capable of doing. The fact is that he still remains very much an enigma. We do not even know why he poisoned three women. Apart from Mary Spink, with her £500 legacy, there were no substantial economic advantages in any of his ‘marriages’. Bessie Taylor was the favourite daughter of comparatively affluent parents but Chapman killed her before she could inherit. And Maud Marsh was the daughter of a labourer. Since Chapman did not legally marry any of his victims, moreover, he had no need to resort to murder in order to free himself of one so that he might live with another. George Elliott, defending Chapman at the Central Criminal Court, made an effective point out of this lack of tangible motive, a point to which Carson could but protest Chapman’s record of ‘unbridled, heartless and cruel lust’.

A restless adventurer, never staying long in one place, Chapman slipped easily into fantasy worlds of his own creation. He posed as an American, displaying the stars and stripes prominently in his
public houses, and boasted of his exploits at sea and in hunting big game. An American revolver, fully loaded, was found at the Crown after his arrest, but the most ferocious quarry he is known to have pursued with it were the rats he was accustomed to shoot in his cellar. Perhaps the lies served to mask a deep-rooted sense of inferiority. Whatever, despite his macho image and undoubted success with women, Chapman seems to have made no close male friends at all. Asked in the death cell whether he wanted to see any friends, he replied bitterly, ‘I have none!’

Poison was an obvious weapon for Chapman given his knowledge of medicine and his desire to murder his ‘wives’. And the fact that he was a poisoner in one set of circumstances does not, as Abberline intimated, preclude the possibility of his perpetrating different types of slayings in another. The Pole has a demonstrable record of physical violence against women and he is the only serious Ripper suspect who has. But perhaps it is stretching credibility too far to believe that the man who committed six horrific, often frenzied, knife murders in just three months in 1888 could have quietly gone into retirement and then re-emerged a decade later in the covert guise of domestic poisoner.

The case against Chapman would unquestionably look stronger if it could be shown that his movements correlated with other recorded sex murders or assaults. In this context the slayings of Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles and the alleged American attacks of 1890–92 are interesting.

The incident which inspired police references to American crimes was the murder of an aged prostitute in a room of the East River Hotel on the Manhattan waterfront of New York during the night of 23–24 April 1891.

The victim was Carrie Brown, known to locals as ‘Old Shakespeare’ because of her fondness for quoting the bard when she was tipsy. She checked into the hotel, a squalid lodging house on the southeast corner of Catherine Slip and Water Streets, between 10.30 and 11.00 at night with a man. Only Mary Miniter, the assistant housekeeper, saw her companion. She described him as ‘apparently about thirty-two years old, five feet eight inches in height, of slim build, with a long, sharp nose and a heavy moustache of light colour. He was clad in a dark-brown cutaway coat and black trousers, and wore an old black derby hat, the crown of which was much dented. He was evidently a foreigner, and the woman’s impression was that he was a German.’
The next morning the night clerk found Carrie lying dead on the bed in her room. She was naked from the armpits down and had been strangled and mutilated. The man had vanished.

Press notices of the autopsy suppressed the details of the injuries to the lower part of Carrie’s trunk but noted that there were cuts and stab wounds ‘all over it’. Dr Jenkins, who performed the autopsy, was reported as believing that the murderer had tried entirely to cut out his victim’s abdomen but that his fury and her struggles had prevented him. At the later trial of Ameer Ben Ali, an Algerian Arab, for the crime, however, Jenkins said that the woman had been strangled first and mutilated after death. A black-handled table-knife, the blade ground or broken to a sharp point, was found on the floor of the room. It was stained with blood.

Inevitably newspaper headlines raised the spectre of Jack the Ripper. Those in the
New York Times
proclaimed:

The police refused to comment but the press made the most of the possibility that the Ripper had come to New York. ‘There has not been a case in years that has called forth so much detective talent,’ piped the
New York Times
again. ‘Inspector Byrnes has said that it would be impossible for crimes such as Jack the Ripper committed in London to occur in New York and the murderer not be found. He has not forgotten his words on the subject. He also remembers that he has a photographed letter, sent by a person who signed himself Jack the Ripper, dated ‘Hell’, and received eighteen months ago.’