Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (25 page)

Charles Ludwig was another strange character mentioned in
the files. A highly volatile and violent German hairdresser, he had pulled a knife on a woman in a dark alley in
the Minories, just south of Aldgate, on 18 September 1888. Avoiding arrest, he then went to a coffee stall and promptly threatened an innocent bystander with the knife, and this time was caught and
held. He was still in custody on the night of the double murder, which ruled him out as a suspect. His landlord told the newspapers that he was:

The man was obviously mentally ill. The same could be said about Oswald Puckeridge who, apart from having a history of mental illness which saw him put away in asylums many
times, was declared as being ‘a danger to others’. He was described in the official files as ‘educated as a surgeon’ and at one point had threatened to ‘rip people up
with a long knife’.

There were loads of other suspects. Nikaner Benelius was a Swedish-born traveller who had recently come to England from America and who, despite having very little in the way of similarities to
the descriptions of men wanted for questioning, was nonetheless interrogated after the death of Elizabeth Stride. He was arrested again after behaving suspiciously in Buxton Street, Mile End, but
again was exonerated of all suspicion that he was Jack the Ripper.

Police time was wasted on a large manhunt following a suggestion that three medical students from the London Hospital, all believed to be mentally unwell, had gone
missing. Two were soon accounted for, but much time and legwork was taken up tracing the final missing student whose mother claimed that he had gone abroad.

The police were also plagued by timewasters, whose stories had to be checked out just in case. Another medical student at the London Hospital, William Bull, confessed to the murder of Catherine
Eddowes. He was drunk when he made the confession and it was soon established he was in bed at his family home when the murder happened. A whole slew of letters was sent to the police with
suggestions of how to improve the investigation, theories about how the killer got away and the names of suspicious individuals. Some were interesting, but some were plainly ridiculous, including
accusations that either Sgt William Thick or PC Edward Watkins was the Ripper. Some were malicious: people getting even with anyone they had a grudge against. Some writers claimed to have visions
of the killer or that the entire mystery could be solved if they were allowed to use their psychic abilities to assist the police. One woman wrote of her conviction that the murders were committed
by an escaped ape which, after committing his foul deed, would hide the murder weapon up a tree and then slink back to whichever private menagerie he had managed to sneak out from.

Some of the information was undoubtedly given in good faith, as in the case of suspect G. Wentworth Bell Smith who lodged with a couple in the Finsbury area of London and would apparently recite
religious tracts, espouse the evils of
prostitution, claiming that these women should be drowned and, rather alarmingly, would stay out all night and return home in a great
frenzy, foaming at the mouth. Again, sound alibis proved he was not the Ripper.

Robert D’Onston Stephenson, an eccentric journalist and occultist who was staying at the London Hospital at the time of the crimes, wrote to the police regarding his own theories, namely
that the Ripper was French and that the uterus of a prostitute was considered of some use to this Frenchman. Stephenson’s interest in the case turned him into a suspect himself years later,
accused of using the organs of the mutilated victims for arcane rituals and occult practices. Those who espouse the case of Stephenson as the Ripper note that, with the exception of Mary Kelly, the
murder locations make the sign of a (sacrificial) cross.

By the time the Whitechapel murders came to a sudden halt, many individuals had been either arrested and released, or accused without serious evidence. A list of all the suspects who were
considered by the police would have been very long. Hardly a day seemed to pass without some newspaper following up a suspect lead, but in the end, that is all they seemed to be: suspect.

There was no shortage of ideas: as Inspector Frederick Abberline told one newspaper in 1892, four years after the killing ended: ‘Theories! We were almost lost in theories; there were so
many of them.’

As time went on, and no culprit was found, the public fascination with the case deepened. In the years since the Ripper roamed the streets, many, many more names have been put forward. It seems
that after the passage of a certain amount of time, a good case can be made for almost anyone.

Author Leonard Matters claimed in 1929 that a ‘Dr Stanley’ was the Ripper, killing prostitutes out of revenge for the death of his beloved son who died after
contracting a sexually transmitted disease from a prostitute. The story hinged on an account of Dr Stanley’s own confession which Matters claimed he had seen in a journal published in South
America. There is no evidence that Dr Stanley actually existed, and this is also the case with a later ‘doctor’ suspect. In 1959 another author, Donald McCormick, named the murderer as
Dr Alexander Pedachenko, an insane doctor sent by the Ochrana (Tsarist secret police) in an effort to discredit the Metropolitan police.

One theory that gained quite a lot of support was that the murderer was a woman, Jill the Ripper, probably a midwife who, through performing illegal abortions, had access to the women of the
East End.

With the evolution of television and other mass media, a welter of other Ripper suspects have appeared, the more sensational the name the more coverage that can be guaranteed. At the top of the
suspect popularity pile must be Prince Albert Victor (or Prince Eddy), grandson of Queen Victoria. His candidacy as the Ripper has naturally captured the imagination of the public and media alike
for many years, and the popularity of this theory has never completely diminished.

Prince Eddy was first put forward in 1970 when Dr Thomas Stowell, a distinguished London physician, alluded to the Prince suffering from syphilis and claimed that the madness his illness induced
caused him to venture into the East End and murder prostitutes. Involved was Sir William Gull, the Queen’s physician, who was charged with following Eddy around and after the night of the
double event, Gull incarcerated Eddy, by now a deranged killer. Apparently the Prince escaped to
commit one last crime (Mary Kelly) before being taken out of
circulation.

Despite the historical record stating that Eddy died of influenza in 1892, theorists have concluded that it was actually syphilis that brought about his end: plausible, because the death
certificate of someone so close to the throne would have been written with care to avoid embarrassing the queen. But even though Buckingham Palace was able to supply his whereabouts on the nights
of the Ripper murders from court records – on the night of Mary Kelly’s murder, the Prince was celebrating his father’s birthday at Sandringham – it was such a far-out idea
that the media exposure was considerable. The combination of the biggest murder case ever and a member of the Royal Family was irresistible, and it struck a chord with the public, who love
conspiracy theories.

Within a few years, a new version of the royal hypothesis emerged, this time with the women being killed by Sir William Gull himself, in an attempt to prevent them from going public about a
potentially monarchy-damaging scandal that involved the Prince. According to this theory, Mary Kelly was witness to a marriage between Eddy and a Catholic commoner, Annie Crook, and became the
nanny to the couple’s secret daughter, Alice. Once the couple were separated on the orders of the Queen, Kelly supposedly exiled herself to the East End where she shared the story with
several other prostitutes. Mary Kelly, as the focus of the assassination plot, was the last and most horribly butchered.

Interwoven into the tale, as first told in a BBC TV series in 1973 and then in a bestselling book by Stephen Knight (
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, 1976), was Sir Robert Anderson,
Assistant Commissioner CID and willing collaborator,
Walter Sickert, the British impressionist artist, plus a generous helping of Masonic ritual and references. So popular
has this version of the case remained over the years, despite being roundly disproven, that it has spawned three feature films, including the Twentieth Century Fox blockbuster
From Hell
with Johnny Depp (the one that awakened my interest in the whole case) and a two-part television drama starring Michael Caine.

Walter Sickert himself became a suspect in his own right in a number of theories, the most well-known being that put forward by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who invested her time and a lot
of money in state-of-the-art forensic analysis in pursuing him as the Ripper.

The next big case to enthral the public was that of James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant who was allegedly the victim of murder in 1889 when he was apparently poisoned by his young
American wife Florence. Suddenly, Maybrick became a prime Ripper suspect when the so-called
Diary of Jack the Ripper
was released to the world in 1993. The diary, given to a man named Mike
Barrett by a friend in 1991 was, to all intents and purposes – if the content is anything to go by – written by Maybrick himself, detailing the murders and his reason for committing
them: a vengeful, arsenic-fuelled campaign against prostitutes in response to his wife’s perceived infidelities. Soon after the diary was discovered a watch appeared, inside which was
scratched the initials of the canonical five victims, Maybrick’s signature and the words ‘I am Jack’.

The ‘diary’ has been scrutinized and subjected to innumerable tests, as has the watch, with no firm conclusion and it is still hotly debated today. It could be a genuine diary
written by
Maybrick for his own reasons, or a modern hoax perpetrated around the Ripper centenary in 1988, or even a hoax made nearer the time of the murders themselves.
Maybrick is still a popular suspect who continues to capture the public imagination.

Mary Kelly’s former boyfriend Joseph Barnett has been put forward as the Ripper, killing prostitutes to deter Kelly from working on the streets. The plan failed and Barnett eventually
butchered her in her own squalid room as the only way he could stop her. Unbelievably, having destroyed the woman he had tried so hard to protect, he went on to live an unremarkable life in the
East End: not the usual pattern of a serial killer.

One of the last people to see Kelly alive, her friend George Hutchinson, has also been accused of her murder and the detailed description he gave after the Kelly inquest of the man he saw
accompanying her during the last hours of her life has been seen as a smokescreen to divert the investigation away from his own guilt. What was interesting about these two theories, Barnett and
Hutchinson, is that they reintroduced characters directly related to the original events. A criminal profile of the Ripper that was created by the FBI in the centenary year, 1988, showed that
Barnett seemed to fit many of the criteria and it signalled a new way of approaching the Ripper case, namely using modern forensic methods to treat the Whitechapel murders as a ‘cold
case’, which is what Patricia Cornwell subsequently did. This is the route that I have now pursued with, I believe, considerably more success than anyone else, thanks entirely to the
shawl.

There have been many bizarre suggestions for Ripper candidacy. Lewis Carroll, William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army), Arthur Conan Doyle, King Leopold of the Belgians and former prime
minister William Gladstone have had
their names dragged in. Joseph Merrick, the famous ‘Elephant Man’, was suggested by a contributor to an internet site who
attempted to make a good case, regardless of the pitfalls of naming such a distinctive character as the Ripper. Merrick resided at the London Hospital and thus would have access to surgical knives,
he resented women because his appearance prevented meaningful relations with them and he went about unrecognized because he wore a hood in public . . .

There are many more names, and many books detailing their credentials. But there are a few much more credible suspects, the ones the police who were working on the case at the time took
seriously. These are the main rivals to Aaron Kosminski as serious contenders, and they remain the most likely to rival him. They were the ones the police considered very carefully at the time, and
they have continued to be the preferred choices of most serious researchers. I had read about all of them before I spoke to Alan McCormack, and although at that time I favoured Deeming, I could
have been persuaded by the arguments in favour of any of them. I never gave any serious consideration to the wilder theories, but these are the names which topped the police list then and, to this
day, top the list of possible Rippers.

All of these suspects were mentioned by senior police officials with direct links to the Ripper case. They are: Montague Druitt; Francis Tumblety; George Chapman; Michael Ostrog and
‘Kosminski’ (my man).

George Chapman was mentioned by Inspector Abberline in a newspaper interview in 1903. This was the year that Chapman (real name Severin Klosowski) had been hanged as the
‘Borough Poisoner’ after cruelly killing three ‘wives’ in
succession, usually to get hold of their money. Chapman was a barber-surgeon from Poland
who had been living and working in Cable Street, Whitechapel in 1888. He later ran a barbershop from the cellar of the White Hart pub at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, where
Martha Tabram was murdered on 7 August 1888 (the pub proudly promotes its connection to the case, and is a feature of the Ripper tours). In the interview that Abberline gave around the time of
Chapman’s arrest and trial, he said: