Tales of Sin and Madness (36 page)

“Phaw!” PC Neil said, a deep frown creasing his young brow. “That’s a tall one if ever I heard it. The Ripper killed nine women, and there ain’t no such thing as ghosts. So this joker cutting up street walkers, whoever he is, is a fool and don’t know his history, and we’ll catch him, don’t you worry ‘bout that.”

So, was Deeming Jack the Ripper?

We know that Deeming was capable of murder, and particularly violent and callous ones at that.

Certainly the newspapers around the world were quick to connect Deeming with the Ripper. After all, he’s a Brit and killed his two wives and three children by slashing their throats. He admitted to buying knives in Whitechapel at the time of the murders, and a London dressmaker identified Deeming as being with her on both the night of the double murder in Whitechapel, and the morning after, where he showed great knowledge of the Eddowes murder. Apparently they were together on the 30th of September, and met up again the next morning. Though Deeming had told the lady his name was Lawson, the dressmaker identified the man she was with, and who frightened her with talk of the mutilations, as that of Fred Deeming when showed a photograph of him. It’s also interesting to note that Deeming’s father tried to commit suicide numerous times by cutting his own throat with a knife.

“He had a great hatred for his father,” Doctor Shields, a physician at the Melbourne Gaol, told me. “His father used to beat Frederick as a child, savage beatings that must’ve taken a great toll on the boy, both physically and mentally. He turned to his mother, with whom he had a close relationship, and who, as a Sunday school teacher, drummed into him the wages of sin and punishment. He told me how much he loved his mother, and how devastated he was when she died in ‘75. Frederick was in his early twenties at the time. As much as he loved his mother, he loathed his father more. When I met with him in prison, I found him dull and moody; he told me he often fantasised about his past, that he wished his mother was still alive. He told me he talks to her, every night at 2am, and that she tells him things, including telling him to kill his wives and children. When I asked him about his father, he grew red-faced, incensed, and he roared how he wished he was the one who had slashed his father’s throat, because he would have done it properly; wouldn’t have botched it all those times like his father had. After speaking with the man, I have no doubt his mind was afflicted with a kind of madness, partly borne from his childhood, partly due to a disease of the mind from late stage syphilis. He told me that he had gone searching for a woman who had given him the venereal disease, intending to kill her. Of this he said with a peculiar voice: ‘I’ve had my own back, anyhow, as more than one of them found out.’ He believed in the extermination of all such women.”

When asked if he suspected Deeming of being Jack the Ripper, the doctor refused to answer. However, he did make one last comment regarding Deeming, which was as strange as it was puzzling.

“Not only were his parents deeply religious, but they were strongly superstitious and believed in the spirit world, and claimed to have psychic powers. Deeming told me that his father used to tell him that he had the devil in him and would come to a terrible end, and his mother even prophesied that he was born to be hung. When I saw Deeming, he was forever clutching the
Book of Common Prayer
, and in his cell they found other books, such as
Hymns, Ancient and Modern
and
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
. He never mentioned it to me, but I tend to suspect that his parents passed onto him their belief in the spirit world and their psychic ability.”

But surely the most damning statement in regards to Deeming being the Ripper comes from an unlikely source – one of Fred’s inmates at Melbourne Gaol.

The man, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted me when he heard I was writing this article and after hearing about the murders of the prostitutes in the city. Wanting to unload what he knew, perhaps to lift some of the guilt he had been carrying around with him for the past five months, he told me this remarkable story, which he swears is true and came straight from Deeming himself.

“He was a strange one all right,” the prisoner said. “We’d hardly been introduced when he starts telling me stuff, real intimate things, like how and why he killed his wife in Windsor. Says she found out his secret, just like the first one, and that once that happened, he had to do away with her. He tells me that his wife found his letter from Mary Kelly, and that because of what it says in it, as well as some items she found along with the letter, she asks him whether he knows anything about the murders in London. He says they argued, but he managed to calm her and tell her he had nothing to do with them. He waited till she was asleep before he done the deed, but that she woke up just as he was creeping up to the bed, and she screamed a couple of times, then he smashed her head with an axe, then slashed her throat. He then went on to say how he dumped her body in the floor and then covered her in concrete. Well, I was stunned, of course, listening to this man spew all this guff. Without a breath he then goes on to tell me about his first wife and kids, and how she found out his secret, so he had to do them in, too.

“Finally he stops and I ask the question – what secret did your wives find out? 'Well, about me being Jack the Ripper, of course,' he says. Well I just about fell out of me cot. I didn’t believe him at first – thought he was just pulling my leg. But then he goes on to explain about the murders, saying that he done them because he was exterminating the class of women that gave him the syphilis. He says that it was his dead mother who told him to carry out the extermination. He says he killed five whores, five diseased whores who needed to be punished for their sins, stopping when he killed the one that gave him the disease in the first place. I wouldn’t have believed him if not for the look in his eyes as he was telling me all this, a mad sincerity that convinced me he was telling the God’s honest truth. I’m as certain now as I was then – I was sharing a cell with the Ripper himself!”

I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to decide whether Fred Deeming was telling the truth to his fellow prisoner, or whether this inmate was lying altogether. If both were telling the truth, then the truth of the Whitechapel fiend has finally been revealed, and all you have to ask yourself now is whether Jack the Ripper’s ghost haunts the house in Windsor and is now repeating his crimes here in Melbourne.

With the 30th of September quickly approaching, we all wait with baited breath to see if two more unfortunates are murdered in the slums of Melbourne. Police presence has been heightened, but will that stop the madman of Melbourne? If it’s a mortal killer, then perhaps. Then again, they never caught Jack in Whitechapel. But if it’s a spirit at work, then it’s safe to say that three more women will be brutally slaughtered before the year’s out, and there’s not a thing anyone can do to stop it. Whatever happens, we here at
The Argus
will keep you informed and up-to-date with this most baffling and bloodcurdling of cases.

--Manfred Cohen

NOTES:

When asked to contribute a story to the Evileye Books anthology
The Evileye Annual Compendium of Dastardly Plots & Sublime Debauchery
(not yet released at the time of writing) I decided I wanted to write a story that used a real life crime or mystery as its centre-point, as this fitted in with my Evileye Books series,
The Garbage Man
.
I tossed around a number of ideas. I even researched and began a story concerning Harold Holt’s disappearance in 1967, but nothing ‘clicked’. What I really wanted to write about was Jack the Ripper, as I have a strong interest in the Ripper case. But, the Ripper was a UK-based crime, and I wanted to set my story in Australia – again, to echo
The Garbage Man
.
Then I remembered there was an Australian connection with the Ripper – Frederick Deeming, a popular contemporary Ripper suspect who moved to Australia a few years after the Ripper murders and brutally murdered his second wife, and was later hanged for the crime in Melbourne Gaol. This was perfect – not only could I write a story dealing with the Ripper, but set it in Australia. I did copious amounts of research into Deeming’s life (including taking a visit to his home in Windsor, where he murdered his wife, Emily), as well as research into Melbourne in the late 1800s and newspapers of the late nineteenth century, in order to create an authentic and accurate newspaper article that would be at home in an 1891 edition of
The Argus
. I hope I succeeded, but even if I fell short, I still had a lot of fun researching and writing this particular story.

For anyone with an interest in the Ripper case, please check out my Jack the Ripper site, Saucy Jacky: http://saucyjacky.wordpress.com/

UNBORN LIVES

“Why are they doing this? We didn't do anything wrong!”

You agree, but you wish the woman would shut up. Her breath reeks of stale cigarettes, which you should be used to, but it sickens you more than the fetid air wafting in through the tiny holes dotting the darkness.

All you know is that you're in a forest somewhere, lying face down in a box. There are no animal noises, only the occasional chanting from the unseen masses outside, and the frequent yammering of the stranger beside you, whose name you asked a little while ago, and whose response was: “What does a name matter at a time like this?”

How you got here is a mystery. You can't remember what you were doing at the time of your kidnapping, but you can remember everything else: you were born in Melbourne, Australia; you have a wife and two kids; and you work at a computer software company — although you now feel as though you haven't really lived your life, merely viewed it like a movie on fast-forward.

With a jolt, the box starts to move; a gradual ascent, like a roller coaster beginning its climb to the top of the rise.

The woman screams once, loud and piercing. “OhmyGodwhat'shappening?”

You hear her trying to break free, but you know that's not possible. The box doesn't allow for much movement.

The woman soon gives up trying. She goes back to sobbing and uttering familiar phrases such as: “Why are they doing this?” and, “I haven't done anything wrong.” But this time she adds, “...have I?”

Is this punishment? you wonder.

But you haven't done anything wrong, either.

Nothing you can remember, anyway.

And then a strange voice says:

You won't do anything wrong. Not now.

You look out the nearest hole; see the forest moving by slowly and then you glimpse dark figures below.

There's about fifty, all wearing dark clothing, and chanting. You can't see their faces and although their voices are many and echo through the dense forest, you can't understand what they're saying.

The woman sobs: “I have a husband. I'm only thirty-eight. I haven't even lived. Christ I need a smoke.”

She's the same age as you, and this fact scares you, though you're not sure why, and like her, you too ache for a cigarette.

The compartment becomes hotter and as the trunks of the pine trees become the tops, you lose sight of the figures below, though not before one of them looks up and you glimpse a white skeletal face, grinning.

The image stays with you, even when you close your eyes; you can't rid your mind of the face — it's eerily familiar — and when light pushes through your world, you open your eyes to a luminous orange pulsating through the holes, and the woman turns and looks at you, tears glinting off her milky white cheeks. “There's a fire,” she says flatly. She doesn't blink. “A huge furnace. We're heading straight towards it.”

“What did we do?” you cry. “Why are they doing this to us? We've done nothing wrong!”

But you would have
, the voice intones.
That's why we're stopping you before you could do the damage.

There's a jolt. You feel the box turning.

You dare to look outside.

What shocks you the most is the sheer number of boxes following yours up the conveyor belt; a seemingly endless sea of smooth brown crates, all punched with tiny holes, so they resemble chocolate Swiss cheese, all, presumably, containing bodies within.

As the flames get nearer and the heat more intense, you notice, stamped in bold red on the side of the box closest to yours —
24, fire, accidental, number of deaths: 5
. On the box behind —
17, fire, deliberate, number of deaths: 16
.

And underneath, the one common bit of writing, printed in smaller letters — by order of the Death Prevention Agency, sanctioned by the World Peace Organisation.

What in Christ's name is the World Peace Organisation?
you wonder.

And whose deaths are they preventing?

Certainly not yours.

Your vision expands to see other conveyor belts — hundreds of them all over the land, crisscrossing each other over and between the statuesque pine trees. There are thousands of boxes rolling through the forest and these are the signs you can make out: Serial Killers; Motor Vehicle ‘Accidents’; Gang related Shootings. You watch with a sickening punch to the stomach as the boxes in their respective groups are: sliced with over sized swords; rammed into each other with powerful hydraulic arms; and shot at with all types of guns.