The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (13 page)

Jack the Ripper has often been described as the ‘world’s first serial killer’. This is frankly not true, as there are many examples throughout history of serial murder stretching back through the centuries. However, he might more accurately be described as the first ‘modern’ serial killer; that is to say, not only did extensive news coverage at the time make the murders known to much of the civilized world, but also the sheer weight of theorizing about the Ripper’s identity over the ensuing years would make it
de rigueur
to analyse the behaviour and possible motives of not just Jack the Ripper, but also those killers that came before and after.

In his memoirs, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who became assistant chief constable of the Metropolitan Police in 1889, was moved to write that even by 1913 not many people outside of the legal and medical professions had much of a concept of ‘motiveless murder’, or ‘killing for its own sake’.
¹
Individuals disposed to this sort of behaviour were deemed by medical authorities as far back as the mid-nineteenth century to be suffering from ‘moral insanity’, described by one doctor in 1855 as ‘a form of mental derangement which consists in a morbid perversion of the feelings, affection and active powers, without any illusion or erroneous state impressed on the understanding; it sometimes coexists with an unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties’.
²
Such lack of moral conscience coupled
with an outward normality would later been seen as elements of psychopathy. The press of 1888 were having difficulty coming to terms with the concept of murder for mere personal gratification, but one correspondent attempted to set the record straight early on:

It may interest your readers to learn in connection with the Whitechapel murders that a number of parallel cases occurred some seven years ago near Bochum in Westphalia. The murderer was in the habit of lassoing women, and treating them in exactly the same manner as his confrère of Spitalfields. After many fruitless efforts on the part of the police to catch the perpetrator of the outrages, they at last arrested a gipsy, who was duly sentenced to death and beheaded. Unfortunately, a few days after his execution the murders recommenced! The assassin had the impudence to write to the magistrate of the district that he meant to kill a certain number of victims and would then give himself up. The papers applied to such a murder the expressive term of lustmord (pleasure murder).
³

The
British Medical Journal
also published a brief article in which ‘an eminent surgeon’ speculated that those individuals who were not of the medical profession ‘are prompted rather by a desire to account for them (the murders) – that is to say, to find some motive for them – than by any knowledge of the subject’.
⁴
The London
Evening News
, perhaps unable to understand this concept, treated the report rather disparagingly but chose to mention an important point, namely that laymen had ‘treated the occurrences as though they were unprecedented in the annals of crime’ but that the eminent surgeon stressed that ‘it seems desirable to point out that such is by no means the case’.
⁵

Nonetheless, for many there simply
had
to be a reason for the Whitechapel murders in order for people to attempt to come to terms with what was happening in the world’s most powerful city. An early correspondent, and probably the most prominent one, was Lyttleton Forbes Winslow, a noted and distinguished medical man who, having grown up at his father’s asylums (and running them after his death in 1874), had a formidable experience of the insane. In September 1888 he wrote to
The Times
:

I think that the murderer is not of the class of which ‘Leather Apron’ belongs, but is of the upper class of society, and I still think that my opinion given to the authorities is the correct one – viz., that the murders have been committed by a lunatic lately discharged from some asylum, or by one who has escaped. If the former, doubtless one who, though suffering from the effects of homicidal mania, is apparently sane on the surface, and consequently has been liberated, and is following out the inclinations of his morbid imaginations by wholesale homicide.

He also wrote to Scotland Yard in November 1888, stating that the murderer was a ‘homicidal lunatic’ and put his services at the disposal of the government.
⁶
It is difficult to say how much notice the police took of Winslow’s claims, but early suspects were those with some medical background or history of insanity or both. The former category was no doubt influenced by Dr George Bagster Phillips’s assertion that the murderer of Annie Chapman possessed significant anatomical skill, added to which was coroner Wynne Baxter’s announcement at the end of the Chapman inquest that an American doctor had apparently been offering £20 for specimens of uteri with the intention of giving them away with a medical publication he was producing.
⁷

One early suspect who fitted both criteria was Oswald Puckeridge, born at Burpham, near Arundel in Sussex, in 1838. He became a chemist and married Ellen Buddle in 1868, and they had a son. Oswald suffered bouts of insanity and was often a patient in mental hospitals, generally being discharged after a few days. The record shows a subsequent series of admissions and discharges over the next few years, at one point it being noted that he was a ‘danger to others’. It is not known when or by whom Puckeridge came to the attention of the police in 1888, or how seriously they took him as a suspect, but he was obviously someone who needed to be investigated. The only mention of him was contained in a report by Sir Charles Warren:

A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on 4 August. He was educated as a surgeon and has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.
⁸

The same report mentioned Jacob Isenschmid, who had come to the attention of the police at around the same time. He was born in Switzerland in 1843, married Mary Ann Joyce in 1867and had five children. On 11 September 1888, Dr Cowan and Dr Crabb of Holloway, North London, informed the police that they believed Isenschmid to be the Whitechapel murderer. Police learned that he had been lodging with a Mr Tyler at 60 Milford Road, Holloway, since 5 September and that he was frequently out of the house and was missing on the night of Annie Chapman’s murder. He had later left his wife following an argument. By 17 September, he had been confined to Fairfield Road asylum, Bow, where Sergeant William Thick learned that he had told a number of women in
Holloway that he was ‘Leather Apron’. He had been maintaining a living by collecting sheep’s heads, feet and kidneys from the market, which he dressed and sold in the West End, and perhaps this casual work explained his absences from his lodgings.
⁹

Two days later, Inspector Abberline reported that Isenschmid was known to a publican named Gehringer of Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, and that he was known locally as the ‘mad butcher’. Significantly, he was believed to be the man with a bloodstained hand seen by Mrs Fiddymont and others at the Prince Albert following the murder of Annie Chapman and that this would be confirmed as soon as the doctors thought he was fit to appear for identification.
¹⁰
It is unclear whether any confirmed identification was made by Mrs Fiddymont, and Isenschmid was subsequently returned to Colney Hatch asylum.

Another early suspect of note was the volatile Charles Ludwig, a German hairdresser, who had come to London from Hamburg in 1887 or 1888 and found employment with Mr C. A. Partridge in the Minories, lodging with a German tailor named Johannes in Church Street, Minories, until his disorderly habits made him unwelcome, and he moved to a hotel in Finsbury. His landlord presented the press with a rather alarming picture of him:

He is … a most extraordinary man, is always in a bad temper, and grinds his teeth in rage at any little thing which puts him out. I believe he has some knowledge of anatomy, as he was for some time an assistant to some doctors in the German army, and helped to dissect bodies. He always carries some razors and a pair of scissors with him, and when he came here again on Monday night last he produced them. He was annoyed
because I would not him sleep here, and threw down the razors in a passion, swearing at the same time.
¹¹

In the small hours of Tuesday 18 September 1888 he accompanied prostitute Elizabeth Burns to Three Kings Court, Minories, which led to some railway arches. There, he pulled a knife on her, and her cries of ‘Murder!’ attracted a police officer from his beat. He dismissed Ludwig and walked Miss Burns to the end of his beat, where she said, ‘Dear me, he frightened me very much when he pulled a big knife out,’ and explained that she was too afraid to make the complaint in Ludwig’s presence. Johnson searched unsuccessfully for Ludwig and alerted other constables to the situation.

Ludwig then appeared at a coffee stall in Whitechapel High Street at 3.00 a.m. and pulled a knife on a bystander, for which he was arrested and remained in custody for a week. They also learned that he was believed to have had blood on his hands on the day of Annie Chapman’s murder. His remands continued, as he was the most promising arrested suspect hitherto. For a moment, elements of the press regarded him as being ‘connected by popular imagination with the murder’.
¹²
However, he, and Isenschmid, would later be exonerated of the crimes, when it became apparent that both were safely in custody when the later atrocities occurred.

Another interesting line of enquiry at the time, and one which fitted the notion of suspects with experience in medical fields, was the case of a group of three ‘insane medical students’ who had gone missing. Enquiries were made, and two were located and accounted for, but the third, John Sanders, could not be traced. Sanders studied at the London Hospital in 1879, but his mental condition had deteriorated to the extent that by 1887 he was becoming increasingly violent. His mother
was traced to the leafy suburbia of St John’s Wood, north-west London, but she told the police that he had ‘gone abroad’ two years earlier.
¹³
From what is known from the surviving documents, the hunt for John Sanders came to a dead end.

So the policemen on the ground, the press and the general public, few of whom knew about motiveless murders and struggled to rationalize a succession of crimes apparently committed by the same person on a class of society who had nothing of value, were looking for more prosaic explanations. The attack on Emma Smith was perceived, owing to her account, to be the work of a gang, a theory that still held sway following the death of Martha Tabram and maintained at the time of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols:

The officers engaged in the case are pushing their inquiries in the neighbourhood as to the doings of certain gangs known to frequent these parts, and an opinion is gaining ground among them that the murderers are the same who committed the two previous murders near the same spot. It is believed that these gangs, who make their appearance during the early hours of the morning, are in the habit of blackmailing these poor unfortunate creatures, and when their demands are refused, violence follows, and in order to avoid their deeds being brought to light they put away their victims.
¹⁴

‘High Rip’ gangs were mentioned frequently in the press during the autumn of 1888, the most notable being the gang of that name from Liverpool, who were known for their extreme violence. The ‘High Rips’ were often portrayed as having some level of organization, which they used to plan criminal activities. However, one of the most terrifying features of the gang was their willingness to engage in random
acts of violence. There was often no attempt at theft, and it seemed that nobody could pass without some form of abuse or assault being inflicted upon them.
¹⁵
They had their equivalents elsewhere, such as the notorious ‘Scuttlers’ of Manchester; these were essentially youth gangs, deprived of moral values and self-discipline and downtrodden by the monotony of the city’s slums. Extreme violence was usually meted out between rival gangs, and by 1890 it was believed that more young people were in Strangeways prison for scuttling than for any other crime.
¹⁶
Both examples appear to demonstrate violence for its own sake.

London, like any large metropolis, was also the home of similar gangs; in November 1888 an American newspaper listed the ‘Marylebone Gang’, the ‘Fitzroy Place Gang’, the ‘Jovial Thirty-two’ and the ‘Black Gang’, to name but a few.
¹⁷
In the East End there were immigrant gangs from Eastern Europe such as the rival ‘Bessabarabians’ and ‘Odessians’, as well as the ‘Hoxton Mob’ (or ‘Hoxton High Rips’) and the ‘Monkey Parade’. The disruptive and often dangerous activities of the latter were reported weekly in the local press. However, what they got up to was not a patch on what was happening to the unfortunates on the streets of Whitechapel.

Of course the idea of ‘aliens’, or foreigners, being to blame was also very much a part of the picture, with the incitement of suspicion against the Jewish community being prevalent early on. The scare surrounding the mysterious – and perhaps non-existent – ‘Leather Apron’ was a significant element of that suspicion, especially when the newspapers began circulating sinister descriptions of the ‘mad Jew’. Enter Edward Knight Larkins, a clerk in the HM Customs statistical department, who had the idea that the murderer was a Portuguese sailor
who came to London from Oporto on cattle-boats. Over several years, Larkins approached many authorities, including the senior police officials involved in the Ripper case, and surviving official documentation shows that they took his highly detailed endeavours very seriously, at least early on. Two specific boats, the
City of Cork
and the
City of Oporto
, were earmarked by Larkins as being in the London docks at the time of each of the Whitechapel murders, all of the crews being Portuguese, which was important to Larkins, as he felt a need to comment on what he considered to be the ‘vengeful character’ of that nation.
¹⁸
He initially settled on Manuel Cruz Xavier and José Lourenço as individuals to be followed up, and Scotland Yard did indeed make enquiries of the consulate in Oporto. Even Montague Williams QC, nobody’s fool, was convinced that Larkins was on to something. Larkins was extremely persistent, and initially the police were of the opinion that the theory was of ‘great practical interest’, until the inconvenient absence of the names of the suspects from the relevant crew lists led Larkins to construct more elaborate scenarios based on them changing ships, or travelling as stowaways, or even the involvement of a third ship. Robert Anderson eventually stated that Larkins was ‘a troublesome “faddist” & it is idle to continue the subject with him’.
¹⁹
Nonetheless, Edward Knight Larkins, through his persistence, could be considered the first ‘Ripperologist’. However, his case illustrates a problem that would continue to beset researchers, writers and readers even to this day – namely the extent to which it is legitimate to modify a theory as new information emerges. If Jose Lourenço, for example, had been found hunched over Mary Kelly’s body, bloody knife in hand, he would not have been released simply because his name wasn’t on a crew list. An explanation for the anomaly would
have been sought, and the idea he had entered the country as a stowaway would then have seemed plausible enough.