Ripper (22 page)

Ah, New York.

Was Jack the Ripper a black magician?
DeClercq wondered, fleeing the urban hustle for the sanity of the park.
Assume Stephenson/D'Onston/Tautriadelta was the Ripper. As stated in his article "Who Is the Whitechapel Demon (By One Who Thinks He Knows)," Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes were killed to form a cross. That explains the
tau
part of his occult name, but how does the death of Mary Kelly fit the ritual? Unlike the others, she was butchered indoors. It must have something to do with the "three triangles" part of his name. Is Tautriadelta the formula for the ritual itself?

And what about Crowley's trunk?

It was Crowley who popularized the theory the Ripper was a magician. The passage from his
Confessions
quoted in
Jolly Roger
was expanded in an essay he wrote for
The Equinox,
later published in
Sothis,
the modern Crowleyan magazine, volume 1, number 4, 1975. The essay retells the story of Vittoria Cremers, Mabel Collins, and the bloody ties in more detail. Crowley identifies the Ripper as "Captain Donston," asserting the purpose of the murders was to extract organs at sites that ritually formed a cross. He confirms discussing his theory with Bernard O'Donnell, the "crime expert of the Empire News."

O'Donnell's interest in the Ripper was piqued in the 1920s when he interviewed both Cremers and Betty May, the woman whose husband died at Crowley's Abbey in Sicily. Baroness Vittoria Cremers, then in her late sixties, lived at 34 Marius Road, Balham, England. O'Donnell described her as a "diminutive figure with short-cropped grey hair and a pair of dark, quizzical eyes." The story she told him was:

In 1886, when she was in her twenties and married to Baron Louis Cremers of the Russian Embassy in Washington, she read and fell under the spell of Mabel Collins's
Light on the Path.
Collins was a follower of Madame Blavatsky, the occultist who cofounded Britain's Theosoph-ical Society. Bewitched by Collins's book, Cremers joined l he American branch.

Widowed by 1888, the baroness journeyed to London where she called on Madame Blavatsky in Holland Park. Cremers became the business manager of
Lucifer,
the Theosophical Society's magazine. Tall, slim, Titian-haired, and thirty-seven years old, Mabel Collins—ten years her senior—was associate editor. The two were soon in bed.

Vittoria Cremers returned to the States in 1889. March of 1890 saw her back in London, but Mabel Collins had moved to Southsea. Cremers arrived to find Collins living with Captain D'Onston. Fascinated by his article in
Pall Mall Gazette
describing how he defeated an African witch doctor with a talisman, Collins had written to him. D'Onston's reply from hospital said he was too ill to write, but would contact her on his release. "He's a marvellous man, Vittoria. A great magician who has wonderful magical secrets." The three set up house.

The snow was gone, but not the wind of the night before. Winter's breath had stripped the trees of leaves in Central Park, their crooked limbs skeletal against the iron sky. DeClercq stood on the terrace overlooking Wollman Rink. Below, a counterclockwise mingle of colors slipped around the ice, bodies bumping boards adding bass to the shrill squeals of children. A purple glove stuck on the picket of a nearby fence waved at him like a disembodied hand. The man beside him muttered today was the coldest day so far, while a sign above the city beyond advertised Hitachi. Steam curled from the terrace grates like fog. A skater below did a triple spin, drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd. The sound system paused between music for another annoying announcement. From Center Drive to one side and East Drive to the other, came the
clop-clop-clopping
of horses' hooves.

East End carriages.

No escaping Jack.

From his coat DeClercq withdrew a folded sheet of paper. He spread it to reveal the picture of Stephenson/D'Onston/ Tautriadelta he had photocopied at the library. . ..

D'Onston, Cremers told O'Donnell, was "a tall, fair-haired man of unassuming appearance. A man at whom one would not look twice." "Nil—absolutely nil" in personality, and "uncannily silent in all his movements," he gave the impression he "would remain calm in any crisis." "It was his eyes that impressed me most. They were pale blue, and there was not a vestige of life or sparkle in them. They were the eyes which one might expect to find set in the face of a patient in the anemic ward."

The perfect stalker. The perfect Ripper,
thought DeClercq.

From Southsea, D'Onston, Collins, and Cremers moved to London's Baker Street where they jointly opened the Pompadour Cosmetique Company. "Tautriadelta" wrote a piece for
Lucifer,
prompting Cremers to ask D'Onston what his pen name meant? "A strange signature," he agreed, "but one that means a devil of a lot." Explaining the symbols to her, he added, "There are lots of people who would be interested to know why I use that signature. In fact the knowledge would create quite a sensation. But they will never find out—never."

Collins's infatuation with him was replaced by fear. "I believe D'Onston is Jack the Ripper," she told Cremers. The reason was "something he said to me. Something he showed me." That's when Cremers entered D'Onston's first-floor rear bedroom adjoining the offices, and, finding a suitable key, picked the lock on his large black enameled deed-trunk. Inside, she found the bloodstained ties and "a few books." Describing the ties to O'Donnell forty years later, she recalled them as black, not white like Crowley wrote. Nor was D'Onston lured away by a fake telegram. She simply waited until he was out.

Early in 1891, the press began speculating the Ripper was back. Dismissing the rumor, D'Onston told Cremers, "There will be no more murders." Then he added, "Did I ever tell you that I knew Jack the Ripper?" He said they met at the hospital around the time Collins wrote to him. "He was one of the surgeons, and when he learned that I had also been a doctor we became very chummy. Naturally, we talked about the murders . . . One night he opened up and confessed that he was Jack the Ripper. At first I didn't believe him, but when he began to describe just how he had carried out the crimes I realized he was speaking from actual knowledge.

"At the inquests it was suggested that the women had been murdered by a left-handed man. All those doctors took it for granted that Jack the Ripper was standing in front of the women when he drew his knife across their throats. He wasn't. He was standing behind them. The doctors at the inquest made a point of mentioning that the women did not fall but appeared to have been laid down. This is about the only thing right about their evidence. Everybody was on the lookout for a man with bloodstained clothing, but, of course, killing the women from behind, my doctor friend avoided this. When he took away those missing organs, he tucked them in the space between his shirt and his ties. And he told me that he had always selected the spot where he intended to murder the woman for a very special reason. A reason which you would not understand."

O'Donnell tracked down Stephenson's only published book. To his surprise,
The Patristic Gospels
was an obsessive religious study of Christian revelation. Why would a man who had squandered his life embracing the black arts then spend eleven years writing about
The Bible!
He had collated the texts of 120 Greek and Latin "fathers" from the 2nd to the 10th centuries with 26 other 2nd-century Latin works, 24 Greek uncials and cursives, the vulgate, the Syriac, Egyptian and other versions, every Greek text from 1550 to 1881, and every English
Bible
from Wycliffe (1320-1384) to the American Baptists of 1883. His work was "one long fight against pain and paralysis," Stephenson claimed, "and nothing but the undeniable aid of the Holy Spirit" would have seen him through. After the
Gospels
were published by Grant Richards of London in 1904, Stephenson disappeared.

Atonement? Penance?
wondered DeClercq.

His ears were frozen and cold was infiltrating his parka, so Robert trudged uphill from the skating rink, past the Chess and Checkers House. Bags of raked leaves abandoned over lunch were being redistributed by the mischievous wind, swirling about the Gothic steeple of the churchlike Dairy. Away from the hubbub of all those skaters, he heard the jaunty organ of the Carousel.

Jane,
he thought.

During his first marriage, while Kate was onstage, DeClercq and his daughter had spent afternoons in the park. How the four-year-old had loved certain spots: the "doggie" commemorating canine heroics in 1925's Relief of Nome; the glockenspiel clock by the Children's Zoo, its band of animals marking the hour while monkeys on top hammered bells; the Ugly Duckling at Hans Christian Andersen's feet; and most of all, Alice.

DeClercq wandered north in search of her, while occult thoughts darkened his mind.

Crowley met Vittoria Cremers in 1912. "She was an intimate friend of Mabel Collins, authoress of
The Blossom and the Fruit,
the novel which has left so deep a mark upon my early ideas about Magick." That quote from his
Confessions
began
Jolly Roger.
"She professed the utmost devotion to me and proposed to come to England and put the work of the Order on a sound basis. I thought the idea was excellent, paid her passage to England and established her as manageress." It was Cremers who told him the identity of the Ripper.

O'Donnell spoke to Betty May in 1925. His interviews with her about Thelema Abbey were later published as
Tiger Woman: My Story.
She told O'Donnell her husband, a Crowley disciple, died in Sicily when he was forced to drink cat's blood during a botched ritual. Then, like Cremers, she told him about the mysterious trunk and ties. "One day I was going through one of the rooms in the abbey when I nearly fell over a small chest that was lying in the middle of it. I opened it and saw inside a number of men's ties. I pulled some of them out, and then dropped them, for they were stiff and stained with something. For the moment I thought it must be blood. Later I found the Mystic and asked him about the ties . . ."

"Jack the Ripper was before your time," Crowley said. "But I knew him . . . Jack the Ripper was a magician. He was one of the cleverest ever known and his crimes were the outcome of his magical studies. The crimes were always of the same nature, and they were obviously carried out by a surgeon of extreme skill . . . Whenever he was going to commit a new crime he put on a new tie . . . He attained the highest powers of magic . . . The ties that you found were those he gave to me, the only relics of the most amazing murders in the history of the world."

O'Donnell interviewed Crowley after the demise of his Abbey. Crowley was evasive on the subject of the Ripper, no doubt saving the story for his
Confessions
and essay. He told the reporter D'Onston died in 1912, and confirmed they once met. "He was just another magician . . . I didn't get on very well with him. He had no sense of humor." Then Crowley admitted he once owned a box "belonging to the Ripper."

So where did the Ripper's trunk end up?
wondered DeClercq.
In the hands of one of the Satanists who flocked to Thelema in the Twenties while Crowley was addled with drugs?

O'Donnell's investigations led to him writing a 372-page unpublished book:
Black Magic and Jack the Ripper, or This Man was Jack the Ripper.
In it, O'Donnell deciphered the
tria delta
of Stephenson's pen name. The pentagram is formed from three overlapping triangles:

From Pilgrim Hill the grass sloped down to the Conservatory Water. Drained for the winter, the pond was an oval of muddy leaves. Hans Christian Andersen sat beside it on a bench, the Ugly Duckling at his bronze feet. Janie's favorite spot was at the north end, where, shoulders hunched and shivering from more than the cold, DeClercq approached Jos6 de Creeft's masterpiece. Alice sat on a mushroom, nine feet tall, with the Cheshire Cat grinning in the tree behind, flanked by the White Rabbit with his watch and the loonie Mad Hatter. Etched around Wonderland were quotes from Lewis Carroll, one of which, unknown to DeClercq, was a prophesy:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

    Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

    Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

The mushroom beside Alice was a child's seat. There Janie had sat while he read her
Puddle Duck
and Dr. Seuss. Alice held one hand out to the child's seat, and for a moment, in his mind, DeClercq saw Janie grasp it. So many sticky fingers had touched that hand for so many years the dark bronze had worn pale.

DeClercq sat on the mushroom.

He sheepishly looked around.

The pond was deserted, just him and Janie's ghost.

Reaching for his daughter, he held the cold bronze hand.

Colorful kites dotted the sky above Sheep Meadow as DeClercq hurried to make his luncheon date. Beyond the trees bordering Central Park West loomed the turrets and oriels of the Dakota. Home to Boris Karloff and the set of
Rosemary's Baby,
that's where John Lennon was shot by a deranged fan. DeClercq hustled uphill to Strawberry Fields, where the shrubs and trees were alive with birds. The black-and-white mosaic at his feet read
IMAGINE.