Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (4 page)

The hypothesis that the Whitechapel murderer may have been a woman is not new. Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline had briefly discussed the prospect with a colleague, Dr Thomas Dutton, after the murder of Mary Kelly, and it was Abberline himself who suggested that the killer might indeed have been a woman. Dutton considered the notion unlikely, but suggested that if it were a woman, the only kind of person capable of committing such horrendous crimes would have to be a midwife, and a mad midwife at that.

The idea had some merit. A midwife would possess the
anatomical
knowledge necessary to locate the uterus and other organs in the female body; she would have easy access to surgical knives, and the very nature of her profession would enable her to explain away any blood on her clothing and to account for the late hours when she was out and about on the streets. An element of
madness
thrown in for good measure would provide a valid reason why she had been driven to murder and maim in the first place.

But it seemed to my father and me that madness was too
convenient
an excuse. When an explanation cannot be found for some form of irrational behaviour, then describing it as an
act of madness
provides a neat answer – the easy way out, because no further explanation or answer is required to be given. The assumption was that madness explained everything. Or at least it might have done were it not for the fact that the Whitechapel murders raised so many questions that not even the charge of madness could explain. Abberline must have thought so too, because he doesn’t appear to have pursued his Mad Midwife theory any further.

The only woman mentioned as a possible suspect for the Whitechapel murders, though some two years later, was a Mary Pearcey from Kentish Town in north London.

Mary Pearcey, born in 1866, was the daughter of Thomas Wheeler, a convicted murderer, who was hanged on 29 November 1880. She was said, in contemporary newspaper reports, to have been an attractive woman with “lovely russet-coloured hair and pale blue eyes”. After a relationship with a carpenter – John Pearcey – from whom she took her surname, broke down, she moved in with a furniture remover, Frank Hogg, who was already involved in a relationship with a Phoebe Styles. Styles became pregnant by Hogg, and Mary Pearcey persuaded Hogg to marry Styles. Mary Pearcey and Phoebe Hogg became the best of friends, and Pearcey doted on Hogg’s baby, also named Phoebe.

On 24 October 1890, Phoebe Hogg went to Pearcey’s home with her baby. At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the neighbours heard shouting and loud screams. That evening, Hogg’s corpse was found on a rubbish heap in Hampstead, bearing the marks of a vicious assault. Her skull had been smashed and her throat cut so savagely that her head was almost severed from her body. It was eerily reminiscent of the assault on Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, whose throat had also been slashed to the spine. A mile away from Mary Pearcey’s home, a baby’s pram was found abandoned, its cushions wet with blood. The body of Hogg’s
eighteen
-month-old baby was later found dead at a house in Finchley. She appeared to have been smothered.

A blood-stained carving knife and a poker were found at Mary Pearcey’s home; blood spatters in one of the rooms suggested that the murder had taken place there, and the body removed to the Hampstead rubbish heap some time afterwards. If Pearcey had been responsible for the Whitechapel murders, this latest killing in Hampstead would have represented a sharp change in the murderer’s modus operandi since all the previous victims had been slaughtered where their bodies were discovered. Furthermore, Hogg’s body showed no sign of mutilation – a complete contrast to four of the Whitechapel murder victims.

Mary Pearcey was charged with Phoebe Hogg’s murder, and, despite her protestations of innocence, she was found guilty and hanged at Newgate prison on 23 December 1890. She was just 24 years old.

While it seems unlikely that Pearcey was responsible for the Whitechapel murders, the idea that they
might
have been committed by a woman was at least seriously considered by detectives from Scotland Yard in late 1890.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes, also expressed his opinion that the murderer might have disguised himself as a woman, both to avoid capture and to allow him to meet with women without arousing their
suspicions
. Sir Arthur also thought that the murderer might have been a midwife.

Ten days after the murder of Annie Chapman, the Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, a perceptive and regular contributor to
The Times
who used the acronym S.G.O., wrote in the
newspaper
’s letter columns that he thought he could detect the hand of a woman in the murders. The analogy he drew appeared to suggest that jealousy between two women living together (perhaps in a lesbian relationship, though Osborne was unclear on the point) had led to violence, and therefore
jealousy
might have been the motive for the murders. It was Osborne’s belief “that one or both of these Whitechapel murders [Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman] may have been committed by female hands” (
The Times
, 18 September 1888). This premise was almost explored further in Tom Cullen’s
Autumn of Terror: Jack the Ripper, His Crimes and Times
(1965).

Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly’s former lover, hinted in his
statement
to the police that Kelly was a lesbian. He had enjoyed an 18-month relationship with Mary Kelly which ended ten days before her murder. He implied that Kelly was involved in a sexual relationship with Maria Harvey, a laundress, who lived in nearby New Court off Dorset Street. Earlier that week, on the nights of 4 and 5 November, Harvey had stayed with Kelly in her room. They had also spent the afternoon on the day before the murder in each other’s company. Harvey left Kelly that evening when Barnett arrived, and even though Harvey knew that Barnett could be troublesome, she told the police in her statement that she was unconcerned about leaving the two of them alone together, and she departed.

Many think that it should have been Tom Cullen’s proposition that Harvey returned to Miller’s Court early the following morning, and murdered Kelly in a fit of jealous rage. But Cullen veered away from the idea and proposed instead Montague Druitt, a failed barrister, who committed suicide a month after the murder of Mary Kelly; Inspector Abberline cleared him as a murder suspect, later describing it as ‘another idle story’. It was a missed opportunity to consider a woman as a suspect for the crime, and there was even a plausible motive. However, there was not a single shred of evidence connecting Maria Harvey with Mary Kelly’s death, or for that matter, the four previous killings, and Abberline never considered Harvey as a suspect.

On 29 September, exactly three weeks after the murder of Annie Chapman, the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter was delivered to Scotland Yard. It had been received by the Central News Agency two days before, but had been considered a hoax and the Agency delayed passing it on to the police. At first, it appeared to be just another one of the many hundreds of letters that Scotland Yard had received about the Whitechapel murders up to that time. The authors of some of these letters taunted the police in their efforts to capture the murderer. Others berated them for not having done so, while even more claimed the dark and dubious distinction of being the actual murderer. All these letters had to be investigated, which took up valuable police time and resources, and a handful of hoaxers were arrested and charged, including two women. But what was different about this particular letter, the text reproduced here in full, was not that its author claimed to be the murderer, but that it appeared to be spattered with blood, and the disturbing name signed at its end.

Written on the bottom of the letter at right angles to the main body of the text was:

The ‘name genie’ had escaped from the bottle, never to be returned, and that was part of the problem. Up until this time, the murderer had acquired the androgynous title ‘The Whitechapel Murderer’ and, as such, could have been either male or female. Jack the Ripper, however, was specifically male and the name now became synonymous with the Whitechapel murders. But a forensic investigation and comparison of handwriting samples carried out by Dr Andrew Cook, in
Jack the Ripper: Case Closed
(2009), proved beyond reasonable doubt that the letter was written by Frederick Best, a journalist. He was employed by Thomas P. O’Connor, journalist, politician and editor of the London
Star
newspaper, founded the previous year, and which published its first edition on 3 May 1888. It was, no doubt, a deliberate ploy – or conspiracy – by O’Connor and Best to increase circulation figures, in which event it was hugely successful. The day after the murder of Mary Kelly, 300,000 copies of the
Star
were sold, more than any other evening newspaper. The fact that the letter was a hoax was neither here nor there. The nickname sank deep into the public’s psyche and, from that moment on, it became almost impossible for anyone to consider that the murderer could have been anyone other than a man.

Early on in our investigation I realised just how hard it was going to be to overturn such deeply held and ingrained beliefs. When I briefly mentioned our hypothesis to my sister, her initial reaction was “It couldn’t have been a woman, because everyone knows that Jack the Ripper was a man.” In fact virtually nothing is known about the Ripper,
including
the question of his or her sex.

When writing his memoirs during his retirement in 1938, fifty years after the murders, Walter Dew, the young inspector in the CID who was involved in the investigation, expressed what was probably the view of the entire Metropolitan and City Police forces when he said: “I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes, I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then by the
man’s
[my italics] amazing elusiveness.” Speaking of efforts made by the police to discourage further attacks before the double murder, Dew expressed his amazement that “the Ripper, or any other human being, could have penetrated that area and got away again…. It seemed as though the fiend set out deliberately to prove that
he
could defeat every effort to capture
him
[my italics].” Recalling the search for the murderer, Dew said, “One of the  strongest inferences to be deduced from the crimes was that the
man
[my italics] we were hunting was probably a sexual maniac. This angle of the investigation was pursued relentlessly.”

These were incredible beliefs for the police department to hold, assuming that they were the views of the police as a whole – although it seems likely that they were – bearing in mind that there was never any solid evidence to support the contention that the perpetrator of the crimes was a man. It also goes some way to explaining the ‘invisibility’ claims made by earlier writers; that the murderer simply and mysteriously vanished after committing each and every crime.

As for the murderer being a sexual maniac, there was no medical evidence to prove that any of the victims was raped, had had recent intercourse, or even that any sexual interest was shown in them. In short, there was no evidence whatever to indicate that the crimes were sexually motivated.