The Annals of Unsolved Crime (16 page)

Then, on September 26, 1978, Paisley’s body bobbed up in the nearby Patuxent River. Strapped to the body, which had been disfigured beyond recognition by its immersion, were diving weights weighing thirty-eight pounds. The autopsy established that the cause of death was a gunshot wound behind the left ear. There were also rope burns on the neck. But since there was no evidence of anyone else aboard the
Brillig
, the death was ruled a suicide by Calvert County, Maryland coroner, Dr. George Weems. Since no weapon had been found on the ship, and there was no blood or brain tissue anywhere on deck, the theory of the Maryland State Police was that Paisley must have strapped thirty-eight pounds of weight on his chest, positioned himself in the water next to the boat, and then shot himself.

APPARENT SUICIDES OF INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES

This verdict raised eyebrows among his former colleagues at the CIA, since it was well known that Paisley was right-handed, so to shoot himself behind his left ear would be difficult. As a result of the unconvincing verdict, a number of theories have emerged to account for the death. First, there is the coroner’s theory that Paisley shot himself. Despite the convolutions he would have had to go through, it is possible that he shot himself behind the left ear while holding onto the boat.

Second, there is the “man-who-never-was” theory. In this version, the corpse that floated to the surface was not that of Paisley but a corpse dressed in his clothing. The basis for this theory, which has been advanced by investigative journalist Joseph Trento among others, is that the CIA’s office of security had focused its search for a possible mole in Paisley’s unit just before his retirement from the CIA in 1974. In this view, Paisley faked his own death to avoid being exposed as a KGB mole. The theory proceeds from the fact that the badly decomposed corpse had been cremated without being positively identified by any of Paisley’s family members. In addition, the skin on his fingers had been peeled back several layers, making fingerprint identification less than certain.

Finally, there is the theory that Paisley was killed by an unknown party. In these circumstances, murder is the only plausible alternative to suicide.

My assessment is that this was a case of a murder that did not go as planned. The evidence is that the corpse was Paisley’s. Not only was there one matching fingerprint, but Paisley’s own dentist identified the dental work (even though this identification had to be done from memory, since the dental X-rays had been lost when the dentist had moved offices). The suicide theory is not credible to me, because the fact that no weapon was found at the scene is not consistent with suicide. Nor are
the rope burns on the corpse’s neck or the bullet hole behind the left ear. It is also implausible that a man bent on suicide would both shoot and, by wearing weights, drown himself.

A far simpler explanation is that he was shot elsewhere, execution-style, behind the left ear, after he made the call to his friend. His body was then weighted down, possibly with even more weight than was found strapped to his chest, and then dropped in the water, with the expectation that the weights would keep the body from surfacing. The motive may well have been intelligence-related in light of the CIA documents on the boat. Graham Greene’s 1978 novel
The Human Factor
, which concerns the problem of eliminating a suspected mole in an intelligence service, may be illuminating here. In Greene’s spy story, a secret service discovers a mole but assesses that a court trial could compromise its secret operation. So it elects to use a non-judicial remedy by poisoning the mole with aflatoxin, which disguises the murder as an accidental death as the result of ingesting moldy peanuts. While this is fiction, intelligence services did have this capability in the late 1970s. If Paisley had been involved in some sort of double-game of spying, it is possible that one side disposed of him in a way that, if the body had not surfaced, would make the murder appear to be a disappearance as the result of a boating accident. In any case, as a large part of the evidence has been lost or destroyed, including even the fingerprint sample in CIA records, Paisley’s death remains an unsolved crime.

The intrigue that surrounds an intelligence operative in life does not necessarily end with his demise, even if his death is declared an apparent suicide or accidental death. This is especially true if the death is violent and there are no witnesses. For example, the demise of CIA liaison Frank Olson, who fell or was defenestrated from a tenth-floor window at the Hotel Pennsylvania on November 28, 1953, remained the subject of such intense speculation that more than four decades later,
after the body was exhumed and a second autopsy was performed, the district attorney in New York ordered a belated homicide investigation, though no charges were ever brought. Since spies are occupationally engaged in a life of deception, in which their biography is often rearranged into a legend to suit the requisites of national security, their deaths are not always accepted as what they appear to be.

PART THREE
COLD CASE FILE

CHAPTER 15
JACK THE RIPPER

Jack the Ripper may be the most celebrated serial killer in history. Not only has he been the subject of books, movies, television reenactments, and even an opera, but his name is commonly used by tabloid journalists as convenient shorthand to describe a depraved serial killer. The real mystery is whether “Jack The Ripper” actually existed or if he was a composite character used by the rising tabloid media to link a number of unrelated murders to sell newspapers and increase circulation. Prior to the emergence of Jack the Ripper in Victorian London in 1888, there had been a large number of attacks on prostitutes on the unlit streets and in the alleys of the Whitechapel district of London. Since there was much ethnic violence in these slums, the police paid little attention to the attacks. But the new tabloids—so named because the content was compressed like a pharmaceutical tablet into four pages—were in the midst of a take-no-prisoner circulation war for survival. The newest of them,
The Star
, which was close to going bankrupt, saw an opportunity in the prostitute murders. Since there was little interest in individual murders of prostitutes, it linked three together and attributed the killings to single serial murderer. The demonic name it gave him came from a letter of unknown provenance claiming authorship of the murders that was signed “Jack the Ripper.” The letter came through the mail on September 28, 1888, to the main provider of stories to
The Star
, the Central News Agency. The “Jack the Ripper” name
caught the public’s imagination and reversed
The Star
’s faltering circulation. To compete with it, the other tabloids had to outdo it in reporting Jack the Ripper’s deeds, and in less than six months, eleven separate deaths were attributed to the sinister killer.

What happened outside this circulation war is less clear. There was only one witness to the prostitute attacks, Emma Elizabeth Smith. Although fatally wounded by stabbing, she lived long enough to describe her attackers to the police. She said it was a gang of a few men and a teenager. This narrative of a gang contradicted the press’s version of a solitary “Jack the Ripper.” Such gang assaults were not uncommon in 1888. No other victim lived to identify her attacker, nor were there any other witnesses to the attacks. No weapons, clothing, or other telltale clues were found at any of the crime scenes. The police only had bodies, blood, and gore to go on. Without such forensic tools as fingerprint, hair, fiber, blood, or DNA analysis, it was not possible to tie the crimes to a single killer.

The police had only one means of linking any of the prostitute murders: a unique modus operandi. In a number of the crimes there were common features: necks were slashed, torsos were cut open, and organs removed. The problem here is that tabloids published enough of the gory anatomical details that another killer or killers could have imitated this modus operandi so that their crimes would be blamed on “Jack the Ripper.” In any case, the modus operandi did not fit all eleven cases in police files. In the first two cases, the murdered prostitutes, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, were stabbed, not slashed. They next four victims, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, were slashed and had organs removed. In one case, that of Elizabeth Stride, the victim was slashed but the organs were not removed. According to Sir Melville Macnaghten, the assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, only five
victims fit the pattern. He speculated that in the case of Elizabeth Stride, the murderer might have been interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. He wrote in his official report, “the Whitechapel murderer had five victims—and five victims only.” Dr. Percy Clark, the assistant to the examining pathologist, who closely examined all these victims, reduced the number further, saying that only three of the victims conformed to the same modus operandi. (Andrew Cook, a historian who reexamined all the police reports for his 2009 book
Jack the Ripper: Case Closed
, went even further, concluding that all the killings were unconnected.) In any case, according to the medical examiner and police closest to the case, most of the murders were not committed by the same predator. Indeed, according to those closest to the investigation, the killer’s profile only fits three of the murder cases.

But what of the letter and postcard, both in the same handwriting, signed “Jack the Ripper”? They created the tabloids’ killer. When the letter was forwarded to Scotland Yard, which had received dozens of other letters claiming credit for the killings, its Criminal Investigation Department handling the case concluded that the letter was a hoax. It further suspected that it was forged by someone inside the Central News Agency. That suspicion was based on the finding that on previous occasions the Central News Agency had fabricated stories to increase their clients’ circulation. In his memoirs, Sir Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard stated bluntly, “the ‘Jack-the-Ripper’s’ letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at Scotland Yard, is the creation of an enterprising London journalist.” Sir Melville Macnaghten also gave his appraisal of the “Jack the Ripper” letter, writing in his autobiography, “I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist—indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author.” (His suspect was Thomas J. Bulling, a deputy editor at the Central News Agency.)

If the letter was indeed a journalistic invention, it succeeded in creating international interest in the case, as the Central News Agency syndicated the story in two dozen countries, and in burnishing the specter of Jack the Ripper in the popular imagination for generations to come. It also helped spawn a wealth of theories about the case. These theories ran the gamut, enlisting ethnic groups, such as the Jewish butchers who worked in nearby slaughterhouses, and members of the British royal family. One author, Thomas Stowell, published an article in 1970 in
The Criminologist
theorizing that Prince Albert Victor, second in line to succession to the British throne, may have been the Jack the Ripper because he was driven insane by syphilis.

My assessment is that the concept of “Jack the Ripper” and much of the speculative finger-pointing surrounding the case is a construct of the media. The only pieces of evidence as to the existence of Jack the Ripper are a letter and postcard sent to news media, and the circumstances surrounding them strongly suggest to me that they were fabrications of one or more journalists interested in increasing circulation.