Legacy of the Ripper (24 page)

Number six, Hastings Close resembled a scene of carnage, a charnel house. As they waited for the arrival of the Scenes of Crime officers they did their best to examine the body of Mandy Clark and surrounding blood-soaked hallway. The thing that stood out most to Holland was the fact that, as Wright quickly pointed out, the killer had arranged the scene to resemble that reported after the murder of Annie Chapman. Close to the body, her killer had arranged a neat pile of the girl's belongings, or perhaps had brought them with him for effect. There was a tissue, neatly folded, two pennies (in Chapman's case it had been two farthings, long discontinued from British coinage), and two combs which forensics would later confirm as having been Mandy's from hair samples clinging to them. This tended to confirm that the killer had remained in the house for some time after the murder and had removed the combs from the bathroom or the girl's bedroom. It was a chilling re-creation of the murder site in Whitechapel back in 1888 and added to Holland's view that the killer had to be in some way deranged to enact so elaborate a copy of the scene.

There was blood on the tiled floor of the hallway and on the table which stood against the wall. Holland assumed correctly that the girl had been standing by the table when she was attacked, perhaps not seeing the knife before it sliced into her neck. The mutilations to her body were what Holland and Wright found so disturbing. Apart from the intestine draped over the girl's shoulder the mutilations to the body were appalling to say the least. Wright pulled a sheet of paper from his inside pocket, and as far as he could see on cursory examination the killer had done his best to copy the exact series of injuries inflicted in Annie Chapman's body so long ago. The later poet-mortem examination of the body of Mandy Clark would confirm that those injuries exactly matched Chapman's. Perhaps the most telling was the fact that Mandy Clarks head been almost severed from her body, the wound to her neck inflicted with great strength and appalling determination. The girl's abdomen had been laid open entirely as in the case of Chapman. The only difference, and Holland assumed this to be because of the drug fuelled state of the young man now in custody was that whereas in Chapman's case certain organs had been removed and taken from the scene by the Ripper, in Mandy Clark's case her uterus, and the upper portion of her vagina had been removed and were found an hour later by a member of the forensic team in the rubbish bin at the rear of the house, another sign that the killer had taken his time over the killing and the subsequent aftermath.

On their way back to the station to commence the questioning of Jack Reid, and despite the fact that they had the man they believed to be the killer in custody, something didn't quite add up in the mind of Carl Wright.

"Something's a bit screwy about this, sir," he said to Holland, a deep frown upon his face.

"Explain, 'screwy' sergeant," the inspector replied.

"Well, so far the first two killings have exactly mirrored the murders of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols. All of a sudden he deviates from the path. Annie Chapman's organs were never discovered, and if our man was trying to copy her murder, then to be honest we should have found him walking down the road with her organs concealed either on his person or in a bag or something similar, on his way to dispose of them. He had nothing on him at all."

"Because he was influenced too heavily by the drugs, sergeant," Holland surmised. "Look, it's all very well us believing that he set out to re-create the Ripper murders, but we have to bear in mind that with each killing he probably found himself becoming more and more sickened by the actual acts he was perpetrating. That does happen you know."

"Yes, sir, I know it does, but the first two murders were just so cold and calculating. This one seems a bit messy, that's all."

"Good God, they're all messy, sergeant."

"I know, sir, but I think you know what I mean."

"Yes, I do, but let's face it. I think we're dealing with a very sick and highly deranged individual here. I've a suspicion that questioning our suspect might prove to be a very disturbing experience for both of us."

And so it was to prove. Later that day, Mike Holland and Carl Wright sat down in interview room one at the station, with the young Jack Reid seated opposite them, the table and chairs on which they sat being the only furniture present and the hum of the obligatory police tape recorder the only sound in the room apart from the voices of the officers and the suspect.

Interrogation, Disbelief, and Arraignment

After managing to persuade Jack to identify himself and provide them with his home address, the police arranged for the man's parents to be informed of his arrest. A worried and appalled Tom Reid contacted Holland and informed him that he and his wife would arrive in Brighton the next day.

Meanwhile, under a series of intense interrogations over the next twenty four hours, Jack Reid revealed his amazing, (though preposterous, so the police believed) story. He told of his receiving the strange package bequeathed by his Uncle, Robert Cavendish on his eighteenth birthday, and of how the journal that he found contained within that package and the letters from his uncle and those of his ancestors that accompanied the journal proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the pages had been written by none other than Jack the Ripper himself. Further, Jack explained, reading the journal had brought about some kind of mental aberration in his mind and he'd set out to discover why and how. He related the story of the untimely death of his uncle and his search for Robert's brother, Mark, in the hope of discovering more about the circumstances of his uncle's death and the events leading up to it. Finally, he'd told of his chance meeting with Michael, of slowly realising he was being drugged against his will and of his meeting with the man at the house on Abbotsford Road and his revelation that Jack was himself a descendant of The Ripper himself and as such, had inherited the genes of the killer and was somehow carrying out the killings in Brighton without being aware of the fact.

The police found all of this quite ludicrous but set about checking the young man's story. Surely, thought Mike Holland, verification of the details surrounding the man named Michael and the man in the house on Abbotsford Road would be simple enough, but that was when the problems began to mount both for the police and for Jack.

First, the address he'd given them for Michael turned out to be a squat, with no official records as to its lawful inhabitant. Of Michael there was no sign and neighbours informed the police that they hadn't seen him for some time. The unlocked flat lay bare and deserted, no clothes, personal belongings or anything to indicate that it had been lived in at all in recent weeks. Despite the police showing a picture of Jack to them, none of the people in the neighbouring flats could ever remember seeing him with Michael, even less remember him actually living there. The only suspicious fact that the police ascertained was that the flat was devoid of fingerprints. It had been wiped clean by its previous inhabitant, giving them no means of establishing whether there was any truth in Jack's story of having stayed there for a number of weeks. In itself, it wasn't enough to corroborate Jack's story, a fact made worse by the police's visit to the house on Abbotsford Road.

Like Michael's flat the house was deserted. Jack had described the appearance of the room in which he'd talked with the man as best he could, allowing for the darkness and the bright lights that shone in his eyes. However, all the police found was a dusty, uninhabited sprawl of a house with a 'For Let' sign standing at a crooked angle in the front garden.

A phone call to the local Estate Agent's office gave them the information that the house had been unoccupied for six months since its owners had left to live abroad, and that they'd had trouble finding a tenant due to the high rent being demanded by the owners, allied with the general dilapidation of the property. Holland even went so far as to have the Electricity Company check to see if any power had been expended in the house in the recent past. Nothing! There had been no electricity used in the house for six months.

Jack's story, weak in the first place, began to look even weaker when the police demanded to see the journal he'd mentioned. Jack reiterated that 'the man' had taken it and that they should get it back from him as it would prove what he'd been telling them. As Holland pointed out to Jack, the fact that 'the man' seemed not to exist lent credence to his own view that the journal was also a figment of Jack's imagination.

As the effects of the drugs wore off, Jack began to think a little more clearly and demanded that he be provided with a solicitor before he said anything further. Mike Holland, fully aware of Jack's rights under the law, had no choice but to suspend his questioning until legal representation could be found for the young man. A short time later, the duty solicitor was found and his first instruction to Jack was to tell his client not to say another word to the police. He would need time and a series of interviews with Jack before he would allow the police to question him further. For now, every question would be met with the same response; "No Comment."

The first piece of good news for Jack came with the arrival of his parents. Tom and Jennifer were at least able to confirm that Jack had indeed received some form of package from his late uncle and that he appeared to have been greatly disturbed by whatever it contained. Sadly, they were unable to confirm the contents of that package, having been prevented from seeing whatever was within the package by Jack himself. Unfortunately, they also had little choice but to reveal Jack's troubled childhood, his fixation with blood and his sporadic outbursts of violence towards other children.

Very slowly the police began to weave together a tapestry of evidence that would show Jack Reid to be a highly disturbed young man with a history of mental illness and a fixation with blood that led in their opinion to the terrible and vicious series of murders that had eventually been perpetrated in Brighton. The fact that he'd appeared to have lied, (or at least fantasised) about Michael and the man in the house on Abbotsford Road only lent further weight to the police theory.

The longer the police inquiry went on the less Jack's story held up. Not one of the so-called 'facts' he'd related to the police could be sufficiently corroborated. Apart from the death of his Uncle Robert and some wild ideas about Robert Cavendish having had nightmares about Jack the Ripper while he lay in a coma some time before his death, confirmed by the man's widow Sarah Cavendish, there was nothing else whatsoever that the police could learn that could confirm any other part of Jack Reid's story. Sarah Cavendish did inform the police that her husband had become susceptible to nightmarish hallucinations in the months leading up to his death, but that information just gave the police more evidence of a degree of insanity or at least some form of mental illness being carried by the Cavendish family, a fact hotly disputed by Tom Reid but nevertheless accepted by those involved in the inquiry.

The one thing that did, however, leave a niggling doubt in the minds of Holland and Wright was the information that Jack provided to them about his Uncle Mark Cavendish, Robert's brother. He'd told them that the mysterious man in the house on Abbotsford Road had told him about the suicide of his uncle in Malta. Police checks wit their counterparts on the Mediterranean island confirmed that fact. How could Jack have known that piece of information? The answer came from the Maltese police inspector who'd handled the investigation into Cavendish's death. Some time before the murders in England had begun, a young man calling himself Jack Reid had telephoned the local police in Valetta, the capital of Malta seeking information on the whereabouts of his uncle. The police officer who took the call had checked the local police records and then informed the young man of the tragic death of his uncle.

Holland was satisfied that they'd got their man, though Carl Wright reserved the right to a niggling doubt, a belief that maybe, just maybe, they'd missed something of importance in the strange and tragic case of 'The Brighton Ripper'.

Following a series of psychological evaluations, a whole battery of further interviews with his solicitor present and no further corroboration of anything in Jack Reid's story, he was committed for trial on the charge of murder, three counts, his trial to commence three months from the date of his arraignment.

Tom and Jennifer Reid hired the best barrister they could afford, Simon Allingham, to represent Jack at his trial, but despite Allingham's best efforts it proved impossible to obtain bail for his client and Jack Reid found himself held in custody until his case came to court. When it did, it would prove to be a short and very decisive affair.

Trial and Retribution

Just three short months passed before Jack Reid faced the judge and jury at house Crown Court in Brighton's neighbouring town of Hove, in East Sussex. Security was tight on the opening day of the trial and the public gallery filled to overflowing with those who sought a glimpse of the man whom the denizens of the Press had already dubbed 'The Brighton Ripper'. Official opinion of the young man's state of mind had been divided in the run up to the trial. There appeared to have been a fifty-fifty split in the estimations of those learned members of the psychiatric profession, with half of those who'd examined Jack finding him to be a highly disturbed and potentially psychotic individual, the other half reporting that he was as sane as the next man, though with possible homicidal tendencies. Consequently, the defence's submission that he be deemed 'unfit to plead' and automatically detained in a secure psychiatric unit was denied.

Meanwhile, to their credit, Mike Holland and Carl Wright had continued their investigation, under pressure from Wright, in whatever time they could spare to do so. As far as their superiors were concerned they had their man and the case was effectively closed, barring the trial itself. Wright, however, had continued to plead with Holland to delve further into Jack's claims regarding the mystery man and his young accomplice, as something about Jack's tale rang true to the detective sergeant. Holland, not one to ignore the gut feelings of his sergeant had agreed to do whatever they could to try and substantiate or disprove Jack's story completely. Unfortunately, there appeared to be so many holes and inconsistencies in Jack's statement and in his personal recollections of the weeks leading up to his arrest that the two policemen had been forced to abandon any hopes of revealing any fresh evidence before the trial.