The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (77 page)

No heroine of maudlin fiction suffered more or so intensely. She became the heroine of Victorian melodrama; she was ejected from her old home—exactly twelve months after her triumphant acquittal. It snowed that day . . .

In May of the following year, she was forced to ask for relief. She was entitled to do this because her husband had been in the world war, and she was thereby enabled to claim protection under the State Soldiers’ Aid Fund. The authorities gave her the exact sum of sixty-five dollars a month, to keep her and her four children.

The end?

My friends, it is a sad one. According to the latest information to hand, our heroine is still alive. But, alas, oblivion has descended upon her in a blue-black cloud. On the afternoon that she received the first instalment of the Soldiers’ Aid Grant, she moved with her four children to a five-roomed apartment on the second floor of a two-family house on Ethel Avenue, Peabody. Her rent there was twenty-five dollars a month, and she paid it from her welfare allowance. Is it any wonder that one of her friends recently declared “that the children might do with a little more clothing, and that food is not too plentiful”?

Jessie is now said to be thin, although there are no grey hairs on that once thickly thatched black head. Her skin, we are told, is still very white. She can look out of her kitchen window and see her old home just one street away. Perhaps sometimes she thinks of the fireman on his knees—and lying starkly still outside the bathroom.

One might have thought that her spirit would have been broken. Not at all; the same courage that enabled her to face the applauding audiences at her trial now enables her to plan for the future. She has an eye, we are told, on another residence, which could be bought for just over one thousand pounds. She has not the money, but she is hoping that this will turn up.

Perhaps a New Hampshire farmer who knocked at her door one night, his face flushed like a crimson moon, and who said apologetically that “he hated to bother her, but he wanted to marry her. His wife had died and he was pretty well off,” could have been prevailed upon to provide it—but Jessie said “No!” For, you see, there was a tag tied to the offer: the New Hampshire farmer naturally wanted a wife who would live with him down on his farm.

Jessie did not see her way to grant such a request. Living in the backwoods was not for her. After all, she had once been a great figure—her name had been in every paper, crowds had cheered wildly every appearance she made. How could she hide herself away in the bleak Middle-West? She turned this farmer down—cold.

The last recorded words of our heroine may or may not be pathetic. When a reporter called upon her concerning the last offer of marriage, she swept a hand round her present shabby abode and said contemptuously: “This is only temporary, I shall climb again.”

Time alone will provide the answer to this statement.

Time—and that ever-crazy country, America.

(The Whitechapel Murders, 1888)

Philip Sugden

The identity of Jack the Ripper, who slaughtered six prostitutes in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888, remains the greatest unsolved crime mystery of the Victorian age. The case is thick with theories. Candidates for the killer have ranged from known criminals to luminaries of Court and Social; he (the assumption has to be that the Ripper was male) is said to have moved in several unlinked (and, one is tempted to add, ever-decreasing) circles: medicine, midwifery, butchery, sorcery, Freemasonry, to name but a few. The late twentieth century has thrown up some likely and unlikely suggestions, including Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, an American quack called Tumblety, and even James Maybrick, the unlikely author of the disputed “Ripper diary”, who stumbles into the frame from another Victorian puzzle, that of his own lingering death in Liverpool six months after the last Ripper murder (qv,
Florence Maybrick
elsewhere in this volume). This review of the case and the clues comes from the historian Philip Sugden (b. 1947), who published his authoritative full-length survey of the facts in his book
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
(Robinson, London 1994)
.

“Hunt the Ripper” is almost as old a game as the murders themselves.

In 1888, at the height of the Ripper scare, Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told Sir James Fraser, his counterpart in the City of London: “We are inundated with suggestions and names of suspects.” And four years later Chief Inspector Abberline, the man who had coordinated the police investigation on the ground, remembered it as a time of despair. “Theories!” he snorted in an interview for
Cassell’s Saturday Journal
, “we were lost almost in theories, there were so many of them.”

Today, more than a century on, little has changed. The identity of Jack the Ripper is almost a British obsession and the production of new and improbable theories a cottage industry for amateur sleuths. The term “Ripperologist” is now widely used to describe these theorists and may one day find a place in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Some genuine researchers and an entirely respectable periodical devoted to the murders acknowledge the term, but in common parlance it has come to denote the Ripper charlatan or crank. Unfortunately, too many of the contributors to the steadily growing stack of Ripper books have been written by authors of this stamp and they have taken us away from, not towards, the truth. For there is an important distinction between the methods of the historian and the archetypal Ripperologist. The historian sets out to recover the facts by patient research and the rigorous evaluation of primary sources, and his conclusions follow upon the evidence he has uncovered and studied. The Ripperologist works in the reverse order. First he decides who he wants Jack the Ripper to be. And then he plunders the sources for anything that will invest his candidate with a veneer of credibility. In doing so, inevitably, he perverts, if not suppresses, evidence that conflicts with his theory, and in the worst instances he has not scrupled to buttress his case with “evidence” that has been completely invented. The historian seeks truth. The Ripperologist is too often only intent upon selling a theory and his business is confidence trickery.

In 1910 Dr L. Forbes Winslow was falsifying evidence on the Ripper and he was not the first of his kind. However, since the early 1970s, when alleged royal connections with the case stimulated fresh public interest, the potential rewards for marketable theories—and consequently the temptations to fake evidence—have grown. Stephen Knight’s
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, published in 1976, was a worldwide bestseller. In Knight’s tale the victims were murdered to prevent them revealing that Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson, had married a Catholic, and the principal killer was none other than Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen herself! It was based upon “revelations” made by the artist and picture restorer Joseph Sickert, but only two years after Knight’s book came out Sickert pulled the rug out from under his feet by admitting that the story had been “a hoax . . . a whopping fib”. In 1991 extracts from fake Abberline diaries were published and in 1993 another fraudulent diary, this one purporting to be that of the Ripper himself, was marketed amidst huge publicity. Few readers appear to have been deceived. But in all this welter of speculation and falsehood there is a real danger that the few facts we know about Jack the Ripper will be lost and it is important that we keep them before us.

Let’s recall them now.

Because the Ripper was never caught we cannot be certain how many murders he perpetrated. Detectives and surgeons involved in the case themselves disagreed on the true total of his victims, estimates ranging from four to nine. Both Robert Anderson, Head of CID, and Abberline, the senior Yard man on the spot, opted for a tally of six. This was, and is, a common view, and it is the one adopted here, but it is important to understand that the existing evidence permits lower or higher figures to be plausibly argued. All six victims were prostitutes and all were slain within a single square mile of the East End of London in the late summer and autumn of 1888.

The first murder now widely attributed to the Ripper was that of Martha Tabram, found dead on the first floor landing of George Yard Buildings, a tenement block in George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street, on the morning of Tuesday, 7 August 1888. Martha had been stabbed frenziedly to death. Dr Timothy Killeen, who conducted the post-mortem examination, found thirty-nine stab wounds on her body. Two different weapons appeared to have been used. Most of the wounds could have been inflicted with a penknife but there was a deep wound in the breast which Dr Killeen felt could only have been made by a strong, long-bladed weapon like a dagger or bayonet.

The number of wounds and the use of more than one weapon suggest the possibility that more than one attacker was involved but the mysteries surrounding Martha’s death were never dispelled. Just over three weeks later, on the last day of August, another woman was killed.

The second victim was Mary Nichols, known to her friends as Polly, a hard-drinking forty-three-year-old Londoner. Like Martha Tabram before her she was living apart from her husband and, also like her, was supporting herself by soliciting on the streets. At about one-twenty on the morning of her death, 31 August, Polly was turned out of a common lodging house in Thrawl Street because she couldn’t afford fourpence to pay for a bed. She was wearing a new black straw bonnet trimmed with black velvet and, as she left the house, told the deputy to keep her bed for her until she raised the money. “I’ll soon get my ‘doss’ money,” she said laughing, “see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now!” About an hour later she was seen, very drunk, on the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road. And not much more than an hour after that she was dead. Her body was discovered at about three-forty by a carman walking to work along Buck’s Row (present Durward Street), Whitechapel.

Charles Cross, the carman, may have disturbed and scared away the killer because medical opinion placed the time of death only minutes before he arrived on the scene. Even so Polly had sustained horrific injuries. Her throat had been cut down to the spinal column and her abdomen ripped open, exposing her intestines. A post-mortem examination was made by Dr Rees Llewellyn. He concluded that the wounds had been inflicted with a strong-bladed knife and that the murderer had exhibited “rough anatomical knowledge”. No further clues came to light. Police made numerous inquiries in the neighbourhood but the killer seemed to have vanished without leaving, as Chief Inspector Swanson reported, “the slightest shadow of a trace”.

A week later he struck again. On this occasion the victim was a forty-seven-year-old widow named Annie Chapman. Annie supplemented meagre earnings from crochet work, antimacassars and flower selling with casual prostitution. Her fate was strikingly similar to that of Polly Nichols. Expelled from a common lodging house in Dorset Street because she lacked the money for a bed, Annie was on the streets in the early hours of Saturday, 8 September, and just before six her dead and mutilated body was found in the backyard of No. 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. The throat had been ferociously severed, the abdomen laid open and the womb, together with parts of the vagina and bladder, extracted and carried away by the murderer. The pitiful contents of Annie’s pocket—two combs and a piece of coarse muslin—were found carefully arrayed by her feet.

It was the Hanbury Street murder that yielded what appeared to be the first important clues to the identity of the killer. Dr Phillips, the police surgeon who carried out the post-mortem, told the inquest that in his view the culprit had displayed both anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. And this time there was a witness. At five-thirty, shortly before Annie was killed, Mrs Elizabeth Long saw her talking to a man outside No. 29. Unfortunately, she only saw the man’s back. But she remembered that he was only slightly taller than Annie (Annie was about five feet tall), that he was wearing a dark coat and brown deerstalker hat and that he was of “shabby genteel” appearance. She thought he was a foreigner over forty years old.

The macabre slaying in Hanbury Street plunged Whitechapel and Spitalfields into panic.

For some days afterwards excited crowds gathered about the murder sites in Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street, turning furiously upon anyone they fancied to blame. Several times police had to rescue innocent eccentrics from the hands of lynch mobs. After dark the streets were deserted except for patrolling constables and homeless vagabonds. And in Mile End a vigilance committee was established to raise a reward for the capture of the murderer.

The CID investigated numerous suspects. The most famous at this stage of the murder hunt was John Pizer, known throughout the neighbourhood as “Leather Apron”. Pizer was an unemployed shoemaker. He fell under suspicion because of his reputation for bullying local prostitutes and after the Nichols murder newspapers linked him with the crime in a series of lurid articles. Terrified of mob vengeance, Pizer took refuge at his brother’s house in Mulberry Street. The police arrested him there on 10 September but subsequent questioning soon established that he had sound alibis for the dates of the murders. Indeed, when Annie Chapman was killed Pizer was hiding at his brother’s house, afraid to venture out. “I will tell you why,” he informed the inquest, “I should have been torn to pieces!”

By the end of the month the East End had recovered its nerve. But then, on the morning of Sunday, 30 September, two women were slain, only one hour and some three-quarters of a mile apart.