The Cases That Haunt Us (10 page)

If the suspect had been apprehended, I would have recommended interviewing him in the early-morning hours when he would have felt most relaxed and likely to talk or write about his motivation for killing women. He would not have been visibly shaken or upset if directly accused of the homicides because he believed they were justified in removing garbage from the streets. He would, however, have been psychologically and physiologically stressed if confronted with the fact that he became personally soiled by the victims’ blood. He would not have tried to outwit interrogators but might have become frustrated by their inability to understand why he took the actions he did.

THE
SUSPECTS

It would be at this point in a typical investigation,
after
I’d presented my profile and suggestions, that we’d consider the local investigators’ list of suspects.

We’ve dealt with John Pizer, the alleged Leather Apron, and Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly’s sometime live-in companion. Presented with these two, I could easily have eliminated them—Pizer on alibi and Barnett on motive. So who else was there?

Well, there were plenty, and more and more as the years and decades went by and greater numbers of people from all over the world became interested in, then obsessed by this case. The search for Jack the Ripper’s identity has become like the speculation over who “really” wrote Shakespeare’s plays—it has become a Rorschach test that often reveals more about the beholder than the subject beheld. But let’s take a look.

PRINCE
EDDIE

Perhaps the most intriguing suspect is Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward
VII
), and grandson of Queen Victoria. I mean, what could be more fascinating than a suspect from the highest, most powerful family in the world? I can tell you that having spent twenty-five years investigating and chasing the lowest of the lowlifes, if a local cop brought me a suspect like him, it would sure get my attention. I should point out here, though, that this theory never came up during the actual Ripper investigation. In fact, it didn’t surface until the early 1960s, so I’m somewhat skeptical going in.

Known as Prince Eddie, the twenty-eight-year-old was second in the line of succession to the throne. This theory has it that the prince, never known as the brightest light or most upstanding exemplar of the Hanover line, suffered from effects of syphilis on the brain as a result of his debauching and that he used to slum in Whitechapel and pick up lowly women. The dementia caused him to kill some of these women for sport, and as a deer hunter he had the skill to disembowel his victims. Once operatives at Buckingham Palace learned what was going on, they had him put away under the supervision of royal physician Sir William Gull until he died of pneumonia in January of 1892. An alternate theory has Gull either dispatching him himself or supervising his “euthanasia” when it became clear he was too great a liability to the crown. His fiancée, Princess Mary of Teck, was then betrothed to his younger brother. Together, those two went on to become King George V and Queen Mary. Another variation of the story has Prince Eddie frequenting homosexual brothels in the East End and conducting the murders as a manifestation of his mad hatred and fear of women.

Still a third narrative—in many ways the most interesting—suggests that Eddie secretly married Annie Elizabeth Crook and had a baby girl by her. Since Annie was not only a poor, lower-class woman but also a Catholic (by law, members of the royal family could not marry outside the Church of England and still maintain their station and place in the line of succession), this would have been a huge scandal that would have shaken the very foundations of the monarchy. Operatives of the crown picked up Annie, spirited her off to a lunatic asylum (who there could possibly believe such a lowborn girl’s claim of marriage to the Prince of Wales’ son?), and figured they’d suppressed the problem.

But there was a complication, as there always is. The baby’s nursemaid, Mary Jane Kelly, spilled the beans to some of her friends—Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, and Kate Eddowes—and tried to blackmail the government with what she knew. It was then necessary to eliminate all of these people to keep the story quiet. This is where Sir William Gull comes in again. It was his responsibility (with his obvious medical knowledge) to venture out into the East End with a driver and henchman, find the women, and kill them. Gull, a Freemason, employed the ritualistic punishment meted out to the Juwes as a warning to others who would interfere.

Okay, there are a number of problems with all of the Prince Eddie theories. For one, and this has nothing to do with profiling, the prince can be alibied for each of the murders by eyewitness accounts and the myriad royal diaries and court circulars. Sure, it’s possible for a prince to duck out of sight, but not in situations where he’s being seen by scores or hundreds of people.

A second problem, even apart from the fact that absolutely no contemporary or historical evidence supports the claim against the prince, is that no one who could commit these kinds of crimes, particularly the frenzied butchery of Mary Jane Kelly, could continue functioning and interacting with people in a relatively normal way. Someone would have noticed something, and it would not have stayed a secret. These are the crimes of an individual who does not know how to interact with women, and whatever his personal hangups or character flaws, Prince Albert Edward would have been trained to this social grace. Moreover, to me, these crimes are the work of a disorganized, paranoid offender. I cannot conceive of the killer, particularly the prince, planning the crimes to the point of venturing into a foreign neighborhood with great risk of being recognized with the intended purpose of mutilating women he’d never met. The same logic applies to Dr. Gull, who, in addition, was more than seventy years old and had had a stroke.

We face conspiracy theories over and over again in criminology, and the royal conspiracy theory will probably continue to attract attention as long as interest in the Ripper murders remains. Conspiracy theories are attractive. They make sense of the random, the banal. It is much more palatable, for instance, to suppose that the president of the United States—the most powerful man on earth—was murdered and history changed because of some vast and powerful group of evil men than because one lone and inadequate paranoiac didn’t feel good about himself and therefore felt the need to make a stab at personal significance.

But if you have to work too hard to get a conspiracy theory to come together so all the pieces and connections fit, it’s probably not authentic. Even simple conspiracies are difficult to pull off. People setting out to commit crime do not think in elaborate, step-by-step-by-step ways.

DR.
FRANCIS
TUMBLETY

Francis Tumblety was born into a poor family in Ireland in the 1830s, the youngest of eleven children. While he was still a child, the family moved to Rochester, New York. From an early age he was an energetic hustler, selling pornographic literature to canal-boat travelers while still in his teens, then learning about medicines from a disreputable Rochester druggist. He ventured out into the world, beginning in Detroit, and set himself up as an “herb doctor.” Somehow, he got people to fall for his claims and he became rather well-off. He would move from city to city as authorities recognized him as a charlatan.

He began wearing elaborate uniforms, and during the Civil War, moved to Washington, D.C., where he claimed to be a military surgeon and friend of President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses Grant. After the war he traveled widely throughout the United States, getting in and out of trouble with the law. His personal life was shrouded in secrecy, though he was outwardly flamboyant, and at one point he was sued by another man for sexual assault. Many people who knew him believed he disliked and avoided women.

On November 7, 1888, he came to the attention of the Metropolitan Police in London when he was arrested for gross indecency and indecent assault with force and arms against four men, beginning in July. Awaiting trial, he jumped bail and fled to France and then back to the States under the alias Frank Townsend. By the time he returned, American newspapers were already printing the rumor that London police suspected him of being Jack the Ripper. The rumor gained adherents when Inspector Walter Andrews, who was working on the case, was dispatched to New York, at which point Tumblety hastily quit that city, too. It was reported that Scotland Yard had requested samples of his handwriting. He dropped out of sight, then turned back up in Rochester, where he lived with his sister. He died in St. Louis in 1903. His considerable fortune was distributed to various nieces and nephews and several charities. Obituaries mentioned that he had been a suspect in the Ripper murders. A collection of preserved human uteruses was found among his possessions.

In spite of this interesting finding, the fact that the murders stopped when he fled England, and all the contemporaneous speculation about him, I don’t find Tumblety a serious suspect. He was apparently homosexual, and I do not believe he would have had the passion and frenzy for such destructive overkills and mutilation of the other sex. I also believe it unlikely that the man who perpetrated the Kelly murder could have gone on to a functioning life afterward without any outward signs of the depraved behavior. Tumblety was a con man, the exact opposite of the
UNSUB
I’d be looking for. His constant hustles and flights show Tumblety to be an organized, intelligent individual. And as I’ve mentioned, I believe the actual Ripper to have been someone who would not seek personal publicity—again, just the opposite of Tumblety. There is also every indication that he was still in police custody awaiting bail at the time of the Kelly murder.

SEVERIN
KLOSOWSKI
AND
NEILL
CREAM

Severin Klosowski was born in Poland, where he apprenticed in surgery. He came to England in 1887 and worked as a hairdresser and barber, ultimately in a basement shop on the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, but this was proven to have happened in 1890, after the final murder. He becomes a suspect because of this physical proximity to the murders and the fact that between 1895 and 1901, and now calling himself George Chapman (after the woman he cohabited with, who coincidentally shared the name Annie Chapman with the second Ripper victim), he poisoned three successive women with whom he had lived as husband. He was charged, tried, convicted, and executed by hanging in April 1903. Some contemporaneous evidence suggests that Inspector Abberline believed Klosowski/Chapman to be the Ripper.

We can discount this one relatively quickly, too. He is not a good match for any of the eyewitness accounts. Yes, he was in the area and, from his training, knew his way around the inside of a human body. But he was still hanging around and in business when the murders ceased. And he had relationships with women, which I do not believe the Ripper would have. He was organized enough to marry and dispatch three women in succession, though since he probably wasn’t technically married to any of them, the profit motive doesn’t really come into play here. Still, there is no way a man hacks apart five or six women, lies low for ten years with no one noticing anything about him, then resumes his homicidal career as a poisoner, who, along with bombers, are the most cowardly and detached of all murderers.

It just doesn’t happen that way in real life.

Other poisoners who have been suggested as suspects can be eliminated for similar reasons. Most prominent among these is probably Dr. Neill Cream, whose checkered career also included arson, blackmail, and illegal abortions. He was found guilty of the strychnine poisoning of four London prostitutes in 1892, so you can see why his name comes up.

On the scaffold, as he was about to be hanged, he is reputed to have declared, “I am Jack the—” and then the trapdoor was released.

As tantalizing as this is, we have another real problem with Cream, too. He is known to have been incarcerated at the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet from November 1881 into July 1891. So the American correctional system has given him his alibi.

JAMES
MAYBRICK

Since 1993, anyone doing investigation into the identity of Jack the Ripper has had to come to grips with the possibility of James Maybrick. Though he had never been considered a suspect before then, in that year a book was published entitled
The Diary of Jack the Ripper.
It purported to show how a successful Liverpool cotton broker led a secret life as the Whitechapel Murderer. Maybrick is an interesting case for another reason. He was allegedly the victim of murder himself, by arsenic poisoning, for which his beautiful American wife was tried, convicted, and just barely avoided the gallows.

By 1887, Maybrick’s marriage to Southern belle Florence Elizabeth Chandler had become shaky. He had a mistress and Florrie had a lover. When his business started going downhill, in supposed punishment for her infidelities he began beating her. He was also a hypochondriac who treated himself with arsenic, both for his health and as a sexual stimulant.

In April 1889, Maybrick became ill. He died on May 11. Florrie became a suspect when a packet of arsenic was found in her room and it was discovered that James had changed his will to cut her out. There were, indeed, traces of arsenic in Maybrick’s corpse, but since he’d been self-administering the stuff for years, who could tell how it got there? Even so, Florrie was put on trial.

The judge was Sir James Stephen, whose son James Kenneth Stephen was a tutor to Prince Eddie at Cambridge and has become a minor Ripper suspect in his own right, partially due to his poetry demonstrating a rather severe, paranoid hatred of women. At the time of the trial, Judge Stephen was practically senile and, by most accounts, completely mishandled the proceedings. After Florrie was convicted, he sentenced her to death. The sentence was commuted, and after she’d served fifteen years, she was freed. She returned to America in 1904 and lived until 1941.