The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (54 page)

The point is, one can’t help but wonder whether such instances as this (and there are others that can be given as examples) are the result of carelessness and simple lapses in memory, or whether efforts were made to purposely deceive and mislead.

(It is only fair to say, by the way, that as much as Sir Charles Warren’s directive to erase the message from the wall is to be deplored, his motives for doing so at least were pure: To prevent the spread of violence against Jewish residents of the district. And in that he succeeded.)

So much has been written about the Whitechapel murders through the years that it is virtually impossible to keep track of it. In 1972 Alexander Kelly put together a well-organized and highly useful bibliography that had to be updated twelve years later because another one-hundred-odd books and articles on the subject had been published in the intervening period. The revised edition, too, soon became outdated. Jack the Ripper had become a cottage industry.

Much of what has been written, at least in recent years, is well researched and scholarly, but a good deal of what has come down to us over time is, in whole or in part, simply nonsense. The one thing that almost every single “expert” has in common with every other is the ability to articulate logical reasons why the newest most-favored suspect could not
possibly
be the Ripper. Where they all fail — every single one of them — is when they offer their own candidate for the distinction. This is where imagination most often comes into play, where supposition comes to the fore, where data becomes selective and credulity is stretched to the breaking point. Where — in the words of Donald Rumbelow, a former London detective and author of one of the best works on the subject (
Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook
) — “every fact is capable of being wrenched into the weirdest of interpretations.”

And, as we have seen, it does not help very much to go back to “original” sources, to the writings of those who were on the scene and were directly involved. That, very often, serves only to compound the confusion. Still, it is entertaining, if not always entirely instructive, to review the record.

Among those officials who could have known the identity of the killer, or
might
have known, are the following:

Major General Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. His grandson, in his biography of Warren (
The

Life of General Sir Charles Warren
by Watkin W. Williams), wrote: “I cannot not recall that my grandfather... ever stated in writing his personal views on the identity of Jack the Ripper. It was a subject about which he very seldom spoke. My impression is that he believed the murderer to be a sex maniac who committed suicide after the Miller’s Court murder (of Mary Jane Kelly) — possibly the young doctor whose body was found in the Thames on December 31, 1888.”

Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CID of the Metropolitan Police, who claimed to have known who the Ripper was. In his biography (
The Lighter Side of My Official Life
), Anderson wrote that the man was a Polish Jew: “I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer... But no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer. I will merely add that the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him. In saying that he was a Polish Jew, I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact.”

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City Police. Arguing in his memoirs that there was no man living who knew as much about the Whitechapel murders as he did, he was equally as definitive in his viewpoint as Anderson was: “I must admit that, though within five minutes of the perpetrator one night, and with a very fair description of him besides, he completely beat me and every police officer in London; and I have no more idea now where he lived than I had twenty years ago.”

(It is hard to believe, albeit possible, that Anderson knew something that Smith did not.)

Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of Scotland Yard who headed the CID from 1903 to 1913. He had access to the
complete file and claimed (according to two separate reliable sources) that he had documentary proof of the Ripper’s identity, but he burnt all of the papers without explaining why. All Macnaghten would disclose in his memoirs was that he believed the man to be a sexual maniac who “committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888.”

This is a view shared by his successor, Sir Basil Thompson, who wrote (in
The Story of Scotland Yard
): “The feeling of the CID officers at the time was that they [the murders] were the work of an insane Russian doctor and that the man escaped arrest by committing suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888.”

But Macnaghten also left behind a packet of private notes in which, according to his daughter (in a letter to the
New Statesman
, November 7, 1959), he named three individuals whom the police strongly suspected at the time. The names are: Kosminski (no first name can be found for him), Michael Ostrog, and M. J. Druitt.

Kosminski was described as “a Polish Jew who lived in the very heart of the district where the murders were committed” who “had a great hatred of women” and had “strong homicidal tendencies.” He was sent to a lunatic asylum around March 1889.

Ostrog was described as “a mad Russian doctor and convict... unquestionably a homicidal maniac [who] was said to have been habitually cruel to women, and for a long time was known to have carried about with him surgical knives and other instruments; his antecedents were of the very worst and his whereabouts at the time of the Whitechapel murders could never be satisfactorily accounted for.”

Macnaghten wrote that he was “inclined to exonerate” Kosminski and Ostrog. Druitt was another matter.

Druitt he described as “a doctor of about forty-one years of age and of fairly good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, and whose body was found floating in the Thames on
December 3, i.e.,
seven
(my italics) weeks after the said murder. From private information I have little doubt that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer; and it was alleged that he was sexually insane.”

(The notes, from which the above was taken, were written in 1894, six years after the Whitechapel murders, and were copied “almost verbatim” from the original by Major Arthur Griffiths, the Inspector of Prisons and author of
Mysteries of Police and Crime.
)

Macnaghten, who was wrong about Druitt’s profession — he was a lawyer, not a doctor — and wrong about the dates — Mary Jane Kelly was murdered in Miller’s Court during the night of November 8-9, approximately
three
weeks before Druitt’s body was recovered from the river, not
seven
— was probably just as wrong about Druitt being the Ripper.

Chief Inspector Frederick G. Abberline, the Scotland Yard officer who (along with Chief Inspector D. S. Swanson) was in charge of the Ripper investigations. Abberline never wrote his memoirs and, as far as is known, left no notes behind, but was said to be one of the first to suggest the possibility of the perpetrator being a woman. But after his death he was quoted by a close colleague as saying that he believed the killer was George Chapman, the infamous “borough poisoner” who was taken into custody in 1902. Chapman, a Pole whose real name was Severin Antoniovich Klosowski (not to be confused with Kosminski), was the candidate of choice on the part of several officials at Scotland Yard, a view confirmed by Superintendent Arthur Neil in his memoirs
Forty Years of Man-Hunting
.

Yet, Chief Inspector Walter Dew, a young detective assigned to Whitechapel at the time of the murders (it was he who was warned in Miller’s Court, the site of Mary Kelly’s murder: “For God’s sake, don’t look!” — see page 299), wrote in his reminiscences that there were no
real grounds for believing Chapman/Klosowski to be the Ripper. Said Dew: “I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes. I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then by the man’s amazing elusiveness.”

Another officer who was directly involved in the investigations, Detective Sergeant Benjamin Leeson, wrote in his memoirs,
Lost London
: “I am afraid I cannot throw any light on the ‘Ripper’s’ identity, but one thing I do know, and that is that amongst the police who were concerned in the case there was a general feeling that a certain doctor, known to me, could have thrown quite a lot of light on the subject. This particular doctor was never far away when the crimes were committed.”
¹²⁰

After that tantalizing offering, Leeson went on to write: “Many stories and theories have been put forward, but, with one exception, I doubt if any of them had the slightest foundation in fact.” The exception, he wrote, was Chapman/Klosowski who, he felt, “could” have been the Ripper.

But then, having slightly cracked the door open, he quickly and firmly slammed it shut again: There lacked proof, he said, there were inconsistencies; the evidence, though strongly suggestive, was inconclusive.

In the final analysis there was only one conclusion he could come to: “Nobody knew,” he flatly stated, “and nobody ever will know the true story of Jack the Ripper.” When all is said and done, he was probably right.

Or, at least half right.

N
OTES

1. It may be only a coincidence, but an “accommodating neighbor” by the name of Anstruther was mentioned in Watson’s account of
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
. Watson also had a medical practice in Queen Anne Street at the time, just around the corner from Harley.

2. Holmes and Watson had obviously been to see a performance of the popular success of the 1888 season,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, which opened at the Lyceum Theater in August of that year with the American actor Richard Mansfield in the title roles.

The Lyceum, which was soon to play a brief role in the Holmes adventure known as
The Sign of the Four
, was coincidentally where the play,
Sherlock Holmes
, starring William Gillette, was first performed in September 1902.

3. It had indeed been an active period for Holmes. According to the great Holmesian authority William S. Baring-Gould (
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
and
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
), the private consulting detective was involved in several cases that summer that Watson never got around to writing up, including
The Bishopsgate Jewel Case
and an affair Watson made passing reference to in
The Sign of the Four
as “the case of the most winning woman Holmes ever knew.” The only other reference to be found to a Mrs. Cecil Forrester is also in
The Sign of the Four
in which Watson makes casual mention of Mrs. Forrester’s “little domestic complication.” This is the first inkling we have that it was an “amusing” complication, and sadly we will never know what made it so.

4. Simpson’s dining rooms have survived the years and it is still a popular dining spot in The Strand, located just a few steps away from the entrance to the Hotel Savoy and the Savoy Theater.

5. Inspector (later Chief Inspector) Frederick George Abberline joined the Metropolitan Police in 1863, was promoted to sergeant in 1865 and to inspector in 1873. Detective Sergeant William Thicke had been a member of the Metropolitan Police since 1868 and was well known in the streets of London’s East End slums as “Johnny Upright.”

6. A reference to this curious habit may be found in
The Musgrave Ritual
, in
which Watson, admitting that while he himself was not the tidiest of individuals, commented: “... When I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jackknife in the very center of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs.”

7. G. Lestrade (first name unknown) was a twenty-year veteran inspector with Scotland Yard by 1888. He had been involved in several of Holmes’s cases through the years, including
The Hound of the Baskervilles
,
The Sign of the Four
, and
A Study in Scarlet
. While professing disdain for Holmes’s methods, he sought his advice time and time again and advanced his career, in part, on the strength of help that Holmes was able to give him. Holmes, in turn, considered him “the pick of a bad lot... quick and energetic, but conventional... lacking in imagination and normally out of his depth.” Watson, in
A Study in Scarlet
, called him a “sallow, rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow,” the only thing approaching a description that we have of him.

8. Spitalfields had fallen on hard times long before the Whitechapel murders, being already notorious in the reign of George III, a century earlier, and becoming by 1861, in the words of social reformer Henry Mayhew, “one of the most notorious rookeries for infamous characters in the metropolis.” Charles Booth, the pioneer sociologist, called the residents of the district “of the lowest class... vicious, semi-criminal.” It was a place, he said, “where murder was considered a dramatic incident, and drunkenness as the buffoonery of the stage.”

Jack London, who visited in 1902, the year of Edward VII’s coronation, was to write in
The People of the Abyss
: “Spitalfields was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces.” The women of the area, he was told, “would sell themselves for thru’pence or tu’pence or a stale loaf of bread.”

9. Much was made of the fact by social reformers of the times that East London, with a population of 2,000,000 — greater than the total populations of most European cities — had no mortuary worthy of the name despite the area’s extremely high death rate. The shed behind the workhouse on Old Montague Street was all there was — “a disgraceful hole-and-corner hovel,”
The Daily Telegraph
called it.