The Cases That Haunt Us (11 page)

The evidence against James Maybrick as the Ripper is a sixty-three-page journal, written on the leaves of a Victorian photo album that was given to Michael Barrett, a Liverpool scrap-metal dealer in 1991 by his drinking buddy Tony Devereux. Devereux died sometime after the transfer and, in any event, according to Barrett, said he knew little of the journal’s provenance.

The writer of the journal does not identify himself as Maybrick, but many references in the work demonstrate that it is his. The published book consisted of a photographic copy of the diary along with extensive background and commentary by Shirley Harrison, an author brought to the project by the British publisher. When the book hit the stands, it was hyped as “the day the world’s greatest murder mystery will be solved.”

Through Harrison and others, the diary has been subjected to a number of tests by handwriting experts, ink and paper specialists, and historians, with ambiguous results. Some say it is genuinely of the age, and others claim it to be an elaborate forgery. The handwriting does not match any of Maybrick’s known exemplars, but some supposed experts have explained this away by saying that since the writer clearly suffered from multiple personality disorder, he would have had several distinct handwriting styles. I think this is bogus, but let’s go on.

The basic thrust of the diary is that the Ripper murders were caused by the writer’s grief and rage over the infidelities of his wife, whom he thought of as a whore. He couldn’t kill her, so he displaced that rage by killing actual prostitutes. Since a prominent Liverpool businessman couldn’t do this in his own neighborhood, he’d go somewhere else during his business travels and do it there. Professionally, he frequented the area around Whitechapel Street in Liverpool, so he would carry out his murderous activities around Whitechapel Street in London. There’s also some rather fancy stuff about the name Jack coming from the first two letters of James and the last two of Maybrick.

The final entry reads:

I give my name that all know of me, so history do tell, what love can do to a gentle man born.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Dated this third day of May 1889.

First of all, take my word for it—love can do a lot of things to a gentle man, but what the Ripper did isn’t among them.

A number of forensic factors suggest the diary is fake. There is evidence that much of the writing was done at only a few sittings, rather than episodically, as an actual journal would have been. A Scotland Yard examiner stated that many of the handwriting flourishes appear to have been added after the writing was completed to make it look more authentically Victorian. Martin Fido, one of the experts called in to evaluate the diary before publication, found about twenty anachronisms in the text. Some of the descriptions appear to be based on newspaper accounts, rather than what was later learned to have actually taken place.

Then there are certain crime-scene issues. The writer speaks of a hideout on Middlesex Street, or Petticoat Lane. Yet why would the killer of Catherine Eddowes, clearly on the run from the police, flee from Mitre Square and
past
Middlesex Street to drop the bloody apron in Goulston Street, then return to Middlesex Street? It doesn’t make sense.

Even more to the point, how does a fifty-year-old man with a family, children, and no sociopathology suddenly blossom into a disorganized serial killer? He can’t, and doesn’t. Anyone who thinks his situation through enough to decide that he wants to kill prostitutes to get back at his wife but must do so on trips to another city, where he’ll hide out, stalk women of the night, rip them up, and then return to his own world and home, would not exactly be disorganized. In fact, I’ve never seen one that organized. No one plans that carefully, then goes into such a frenzy of sexual pathology. And as we’ve said with other suspects such as Joseph Barnett, even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to return to normal life after that without someone recognizing something about his postoffense behavior.

I have seen many diaries and writings of serial offenders. This one is noteworthy not so much for what it doesn’t get wrong, as for what it fails to reveal. Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and Arthur Bremer, to name but three, all left extensive writings full of specific detail. If this diary were authentic, I would expect it to shed some new light on the crimes or their methodology, which is missing here. In a real killer’s diary, I’d expect to see his whole pathological construct laid out, rather than just a simple and breast-beating excuse for why he has to kill these women. All of that is missing from the so-called Maybrick diary, which must be judged an elaborate fake.

WHAT
DID
THE
POLICE
KNOW?

We could go into many more suspects here—there are scores of them—but none of the theories has enough going for it to be taken seriously and they don’t shed enough light on the investigative process to warrant the space.

Was Jack, then, such an elusive, clever criminal genius? Not by any means. He knew the area and he was lucky. The dark corners and back alleys favored by the lowest rung of prostitutes, who had no place indoors to go with their clients, were the same ones that facilitated a killer like Jack.

Now it’s time to review those individuals the police considered suspects. And as we do that, let me profile the police actions themselves, based on the behavioral evidence they collectively left.

Did the police have a good idea in the end of Jack’s identity? They may very well have.

The fact is, the major police effort, the tremendous expenditure of resources and manpower, stands down rather quickly after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly—more quickly than after the previous murders. We have already noted that the police were really under the gun, being subjected to massive public and press criticism and condemnation. Would they have risked another murder by easing up on their presence in Whitechapel? Knowing the way bureaucrats and public servants respond to outside pressure, it is difficult to conceive that they would. So alternatively, we may speculate they had reason to believe that although the killer had not been captured and brought to justice, the reign of terror was over.

So who at Scotland Yard might have known or at least thought he knew?

We have three main sources for this: the MacNaghten Memoranda; Dr.(at this point, Sir) Robert Anderson’s 1910 memoir,
The Lighter Side ofMy Official Life
; and the so-called Swanson Marginalia, actually Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson’s handwritten commentary in his copy of Anderson’s book, which was released by his family after the 1987 publication of Martin Fido’s book
The Crimes, Detectionand Death of Jack the Ripper.

Sir Melville Leslie MacNaghten had been assistant commissioner in charge of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, having joined as assistant chief constable in 1889. We must therefore point out that his information would not have been firsthand, though he would have had access to all important information. The memorandum was written in 1894 and consisted of seven pages written in his own hand, marked “Confidential” and placed in his files. He names three likely suspects:

(1) A Mr M.J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31
^st
Dec.—or about 7 weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private info I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

(2) Kosminski, a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circs connected with this man which made him a strong “suspect.”

(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.

In his memoirs, Robert Anderson speaks of a lower-class Polish Jew whom he does not name and states that the subject “was caged in an asylum, the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer at once identified him, but when he learned that the suspect was a fellowJew he declined to swear to him.”

This witness Anderson mentions is probably Joseph Lawende, the cigarette salesman who was believed to have seen Catherine Eddowes with the Ripper at the entrance to Mitre Square. The Polish Jew in question would be Aaron Kosminski, the second name in the MacNaghten Memoranda.

Kosminski was a hairdresser who moved to England in 1882. The records of the large Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, which would have handled most of the patients in and around Whitechapel, listed attacks of mental illness going back to 1885. By the late 1880s, he was known to wander about picking food scraps out of the street and would refuse food offered by anyone else. He would not wash and had at one point threatened his sister with a knife. From 1890 on, he essentially spent the rest of his life in asylums.

In the margin of his personal copy of Anderson’s book, where he talks about the Polish Jew and the witness who refused to ID him, Donald Swanson penciled:

because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect, and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged, which he did not wish to be left on his mind.

D.S.S.

He continues:

And after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London.

On the endpaper he wrote:

After the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home [probably the police convalescent home in West Brighton where the suspect and the witness were apparently taken to get them away from the glare of London publicity] where he had been sent by us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified.

On suspect’s return to his brother’s house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City
CID
) by day and night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards—Kosminski was the suspect—D.S.S.

THE
REMAINING
SUSPECTS

When I was asked to participate in Peter Ustinov’s television special in 1988 and offer a profile, I agreed with the understanding that I could only analyze the evidence, materials, and suspects presented to me.

The suspects they presented were Robert Donston Stephenson, who often went by the name of Dr. Roslyn D’Onston; Montague John Druitt and Aaron Kosminski, two of MacNaghten’s three suspects; Sir William Gull, the royal physician; and Prince Edward Albert, Duke of Clarence.

The only one of these five we haven’t mentioned so far is Stephenson, a self-publicizing con man who claimed to be a practitioner of magic. He was in Whitechapel at the right time and was known to be very interested in the Ripper murders, one time acting them out for startled onlookers. Since he was into witchcraft, these elements would surely have shown up in ritualized ways in the crimes. He would also have been able to bring his victims to a secure location rather than risking murdering them on the streets. Though the theory has its supporters, I have found nothing in his murky background that qualifies him as a good suspect.

Prince Eddie and Gull we have already considered. So let’s consider the remaining two here, Druitt and Kosminski, plus the third MacNaghten suspect, Michael Ostrog.

Ostrog was an immigrant, probably from Russia or Poland, a known criminal and possibly a doctor. He was too old and too tall to match the witness accounts. He was imprisoned in September of 1887 but transferred to Surrey Pauper Lunatic Asylum when he displayed signs of insanity (probably faked), then released in March 1888. Since he was sentenced to prison for theft in Paris on November 18, it’s unlikely he was even in London at the time of all of the Ripper murders. He surfaces again in London in 1904, partially crippled and living in the St. Giles Christian Mission.

The police were definitely paying attention to him and were concerned during the murder series when he failed to report to them as directed. That he was in and out of mental institutions also probably had something to do with MacNaghten’s interest in him, but again, I find nothing compelling in the facts we know to suggest that he might be the Ripper. Nothing else in his background suggests a propensity toward the type of savage violence we see in these crimes, and despite the mental illness, he seems too organized and “together” to fit the personality I’d be looking for.

Which gets us to Montague John Druitt. Druitt is an interesting suspect primarily because of when he died. He was pulled out of the Thames on December 31, 1888, and police estimated he’d been in there more than a month. His coat was weighted down with stones, and he had cash on him and two checks from the boys’ school in Blackheath where he’d taught. They were probably severance checks, and the supposition is that he had gotten into trouble for sexual advances to some of the students. Though he has been described as a doctor, he was, in fact, a schoolteacher who was just beginning to make his way as a junior barrister. There was some mental instability and a history of depression in his family, and after his father died, his mother was placed in an asylum.

I have always been a little surprised by the weight given to Druitt’s candidacy as the Ripper. Aside from his untimely but convenient death, nothing really ties him to the crimes, including any known association with Whitechapel. There is no evidence of violence in his background, and a man doesn’t just jump full-blown into the kinds of crimes we’re talking about.