The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (21 page)

In 1999, author M. J. Trow proposed a new suspect, philanthropist and brewing heir Frederick Charrington. Despite his family connection, he was a teetotal extremist who often picketed pubs and music halls. He conducted tent-meeting crusades in the East End and built a huge mission hall, where he distributed free teas to the poor, and in 1887 started a campaign against prostitution, noting down the identities of
clients visiting brothels and threatening to reveal their names. It was widely known that the disreputable lodging house keepers who permitted prostitution on their premises were more afraid of Charrington than of the police, and one house even had his portrait on the wall so that they could recognize him should he turn up unannounced. Trow’s theory presented Charrington as the Ripper, citing his disapproval of prostitution as a main motive and suggesting that his suspect was merely ‘street cleaning’. What was important about this proposition is that Trow did not believe that Charrington was the Ripper in the slightest. In a presentation to the Cloak and Dagger club and later in a print article
³³
, Trow said that Frederick Charrington was ‘a good man doing a difficult job at a difficult time and no more Jack the Ripper than I am’. What Trow had done was pick a person and use facts and supposition to put them in the frame – the whole exercise was intended as a valuable demonstration of the ease with which an innocent man might be framed as Jack the Ripper, effectively summing up the activities of most theorists of the preceding hundred years.

The internet radically changed the world of ‘Ripperology’, granting access to information at the tap of a keyboard and supplying information that previously would have taken researchers months of legwork and expense to accumulate. By the end of the millennium, more information found its way to the researcher, when all the surviving information retained in the Scotland Yard and Home Office files of the Public Record Office were made truly accessible to all and Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner produced
The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Source Book
.
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The result of many years of transcribing the documents first-hand, it gave everybody the chance to go back to basics, see the words of the official reports made by policemen, politicians and others, to hear their thoughts and
get as rounded an account of their investigation as possible. With the surviving official records now on the bookshelves, that thrust towards the importance of contemporary facts was given a much-needed boost, showing the world that the Ripper story was not beholden to the world of cranks and sensation seekers, but could now be considered as an important field of study for the true crime enthusiast, the social historian and the academic alike.

The artist Walter Sickert had been skirting the fringes of culpability for the Whitechapel murders for decades until American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell decided to follow her criminologist nose and declare him to be the Ripper. Cornwell’s wealth, success and high profile ensured that her investigation into this marginal player would gain enormous coverage. In fact, it probably became the most publicized example of Ripper sleuthing ever.

In a move that would become repeated by others in the following years, Cornwell undertook her own investigation, using modern investigative methods and the help of several experts in the field of forensics. She had been struck by the imagery of a number of Sickert’s paintings which depicted women often as though they were dead or even mutilated. Cornwell believed that Sickert fitted the psychological profile of a sex killer, the trigger being a childhood operation to treat a fistula in his penis, resulting in deformity and impotence. The clues to his guilt were in the paintings, but Cornwell was able to go further than most. Not only was she able to finance DNA testing on Ripper letters kept at the Public Record Office (with the intention of finding matches on known Sickert correspondence), but she also began buying the paintings.

Tests on the letters drew a blank, with no matches found in the nuclear DNA. But then testing was done for mitochondrial
DNA (mtDNA), which proved more positive. Unfortunately, mtDNA is no guarantee of proof. Stephen P. Ryder, in his
Casebook
dissertation on Cornwell’s theory, stated simply that:

Finding an mtDNA match between two samples does not mean that one person left both, but that only a certain percentage of the population could have left both …

In this case, the mtDNA ‘sequences’ found indicate, according to Cornwell, that only 1% of the population of the U. K. could have left the DNA found on those Ripper letters, and that the person who left DNA on Sickert’s correspondence was a member of that 1% population. (Other DNA experts, when asked to comment on this analysis, state that the actual percentage could range anywhere between 10% and 0.1% of the contemporary population). In 1901 there were nearly 40 million people in the United Kingdom. That means that Sickert, if we assume it is his mtDNA that was found, and that Cornwell’s figure of 1% is correct, was one of approximately 400,000 people whose mtDNA shared those same sequences.
¹

Such odds were hardly conclusive of one man’s guilt, and Cornwell’s theory was slowly pulled apart by sceptics, often savagely, and with no small amount of personal rancour, which Cornwell most certainly did not deserve. It was noted that there was no proof that Sickert had ever had an operation for a penile fistula, though there was the possibility that he had suffered from an anal fistula. What’s more, Walter Sickert was certainly not impotent or sexually backward; if anything, he was known for being rather promiscuous. In other words, he was not sexually scarred and incapable, and thus this reason for him killing prostitutes need not have entered the equation. Critics also stated that there was no evidence to suggest that
Sickert was in London at the time of the murders. Cornwell hit back with the claim that there was no evidence to suggest he
wasn’t
. Unfortunately there was: several pieces of evidence quoted by Sickert’s biographer Matthew Sturgess put the artist in France from late August until the beginning of October 1888.
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Obviously there was more to Cornwell’s theory, and she eventually published her investigation in
Portrait of a Killer
,
³
a huge seller, which was not perhaps surprising considering the combination of crime fiction’s most successful novelist and the world’s greatest crime mystery. An inevitable documentary also appeared on BBC television, with Cornwell shown at the heart of the investigative process, surveying the East End streets, joining the forensic teams as they worked and flying round the world in her pursuit of the ‘real’ Jack the Ripper. She didn’t mind getting her hands dirty either, handling a range of rather intimidating knives and cutting up large slabs of offal in order to demonstrate which kind of weapon could have been used to inflict the injuries on the Ripper victims. Donald Rumbelow was not convinced and not too happy either. The unfortunate by-product of naming a prominent individual as Jack the Ripper had manifested itself in the vandalism of graves, notably those of Sir William Gull at Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex and James Maybrick in Liverpool. Rumbelow argued that

Out there, there is an element that is going to believe this nonsense that Sickert was the Ripper. Some lunatic will go in the Tate or somewhere else and slash a canvas because he was Jack the Ripper. This is the sort of thing – this is the sort of nonsense – which actually triggers this behaviour and there is this element out there who’ll believe it.
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Patricia Cornwell’s belief in Sickert as the Whitechapel murderer was, in her own words ‘a given’, and there was some merit in her attempt to drag Sickert’s candidacy away from his royal conspiracy connections, making him a suspect in his own right, investigated separately from the information and misinformation that had gone before via Joseph Sickert, Stephen Knight and Melvyn Fairclough. But then the other players in the original story had been effectively exonerated, leaving Sickert as a ‘last man standing’.

The research behind
Portrait of a Killer
coincided with the early appearances of the American TV show
CSI
: Crime Scene Investigation
,
⁵
which followed the fictional investigations of a team of Las Vegas forensic scientists as they unravelled the circumstances behind mysterious and unusual deaths and other crimes using state of the art technology. It essentially brought the deductive reasoning of popular fictional detectives into the twenty-first century, and its slick production values revived interest in crime investigation drama in much the same way as
The X-Files
had inspired a resurgence of fascination for the paranormal in the 1990s.
⁶

Also, satellite broadcasting had come into its own, offering literally hundreds of TV channels worldwide, many of which specialized in particular themes. Following on from Patricia Cornwell’s ‘forensics-heavy’ investigation, a trend in Ripper theorizing would gradually become apparent, chiefly manifesting itself in documentaries. Previously, these films had covered known information, often just relying on a retelling of the Whitechapel murders story with relevant reconstructions, graphics and comment from experts in the field. The sudden interest in forensic science as a vehicle for entertainment would see an increase in documentaries which would appear to show the presenter as investigator, perhaps earnestly
sifting through evidence, claiming to have ‘reopened the case’ and coming up with their ‘definitive’ solution. Invariably, this ‘evidence’ would be known to keen students of the case already, but the fact that TV treatments of the case had to appeal to a wider audience meant that very often the material was cited as being new or exclusive.

Another good example of the growing interest in solving the Ripper mystery using now obligatory modern methods came with the claims of a former police officer, Trevor Marriott: ‘Mr Marriott, who worked on many murder investigations during his career in the police, has subjected the facts to forensic dissection and has used proven modern investigative techniques to attempt to solve the mystery.’
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Like many theories, Marriott’s attempt to name the Ripper was full of holes. Settling on the notion that the killer was a merchant seaman, he undertook research into finding correlations between ships berthed at the London docks and the nights of the Ripper murders, which threw up several possibilities. Although inconsistent records did not permit Marriott to name a definitive individual, his suspicion rested upon Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed in 1896 for the murder of Juliana Hoffman in New York and who had confessed to his lawyer that he was Jack the Ripper. The investigation also attempted to dispel some long-held beliefs; it was always assumed that the murderer removed the victims’ organs at the scene of crime, whereas Marriott, convinced that this could not have been so owing to the time frames available, claimed that the organs were removed by somebody while the corpses were lying outside the mortuary. The difficulty involved in tracing these organs and removing them under very tight circumstances was investigated thoroughly by Marriott, who consulted with pathologists and even attended dissections of
corpses to demonstrate his point. If anything, he was thorough in his pursuit of the truth in that respect. But his early decision to look into the idea of a merchant seaman as a suspect came from his belief that nobody had looked at the case from this angle before; it was a mistaken belief, for, as we have seen, seamen and workers at the docks and riversides, owing to their ease of transit and often disreputable characteristics, had been very much in the frame from the earliest days of the investigation. Edward Knight Larkins tried repeatedly to direct the police to a number of individuals who may have been on boats berthed at the docks at the time of the murders, and even Queen Victoria had suggested searching the boats in her telegram to the government following Mary Kelly’s murder.

Trevor Marriott, as a former detective,
⁸
also tried to use his investigative experience to go back to the original case and work from a modern police perspective. Not only was he branching into the now-obligatory world of ‘cold case’ investigation, but he was also deconstructing the evidence to find new interpretations of it. One significant notion was that the bloody apron piece in Goulston Street was not deposited by the murderer of Catherine Eddowes, but by Eddowes herself after using it as a makeshift sanitary towel. With claims like this, expounded in books, internet forums and, later, lecture tours, Marriott attempted to challenge preconceived ideas of the Whitechapel murders and their investigation. Once again, a theorist would claim some form of ‘ownership’ of the case.

A recurring theme in the new methodology behind Ripper theorizing was ‘profiling’. The FBI character profile of 1988 had by now been joined by visual and geographical profiling, the latter pioneered by British investigative psychologist David Canter, who declared: ‘Criminals reveal who they are and where they live not just from how they commit their crimes,
but also from the locations they choose.’
⁹
These methods were used in a documentary
¹⁰
which eventually put together the
face
of Jack the Ripper, apparently based on
thirteen
contemporary witness statements. The resulting image received considerable publicity, mainly because it resembled Lord Lucan or Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury, which partially took the sting out of the enterprise for those not fully conversant with the content of the original broadcast. Nonetheless, the claims of the investigators were evidence that the concept of ‘ownership’ of the identity of the Ripper was still going strong, almost as if nobody else had ever tried:

Laura Richards, head of analysis for Scotland Yard’s Violent Crime Command, analysed evidence from the case using modern police techniques and has been able to form the most accurate portrait of the Ripper ever put together.

She said: ‘For the first time we are able to understand the kind of person Jack the Ripper was. We can name the street where he probably lived; and we can see what he looked like; and we can explain, finally, why this killer escaped justice.
¹¹

The project did not name a name – it probably did not intend to – but according to Laura Richards he was somebody from the lower classes, poorly educated and what he did was by choice, reacting to events that had shaped him early in his life. The geographical profiling techniques suggested that the Ripper lived in the Flower and Dean Street area of Spitalfields, confirming his status as a poor, local man.

Another theorist who chanced his arm at identifying the murderer during this period was M. J. Trow. Trow had written a number of books on true crime, as well as historical biographies and crime fiction,
¹²
and his
The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper
used an interesting exercise whereby he listed all of the main suspects and rated them with marks for eligibility.
¹³
Following a challenge from his publisher,
¹⁴
Trow began to look into a potential suspect, one that had not been considered before, and settled on Whitechapel workhouse mortuary attendant Robert Mann. Using the FBI profile, as well as geographical and offender profiling techniques as a key, Trow noted that Mann worked in a job that gave him access to dead bodies, where perhaps he could glean information about anatomy and surgical procedure and, as victims Tabram, Nichols, Chapman and McKenzie had ended up in his mortuary, gloat over his handiwork. Mann was born in the immediate area and, as an inmate of the Whitechapel Union workhouse, was well placed geographically to commit the murders. Trow stated that Alice McKenzie was the last true Ripper victim and that her injuries were significantly less violent because Mann was weak and terminally ill. A book was produced,
¹⁵
outlining the case in full, as well as a TV documentary tie-in,
¹⁶
as was becoming customary.

But there were problems with the hypothesis, and it was on the internet that the greatest dissenters made their voices heard, calling Mann a ‘non-starter’ and picking out significant flaws and inaccuracies, which were later acknowledged by Trow himself. In answering his critics, he was apologetic, but felt that some of the criticism was unfounded:

I repeat I cannot prove that the strange, enigmatic mortuary attendant was definitely Jack the Ripper. All I can say is that he is closer than most other possibles and, at the very least, a starter!
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