The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (45 page)

They can repeat any number of digits after one hearing – as many as three hundred. Yet they are not “calculating prodigies”, able to multiply huge numbers within seconds or extract tenth roots from twenty digit numbers, as many such prodigies have been able to. But when a box of matches fell on the floor, both murmured “111” before the matches hit the floor – and again, proved to be correct.

One day Sacks found them sitting in a corner, wearing an odd, contented smile and swopping six-digit numbers. He noted down several of these, and when he got home, checked through a book of mathematical tables, and discovered that all the numbers were primes – numbers that cannot be divided by any other number without a “leftover”. Now, the odd thing is that there is no mathematical method of determining whether some large number is a prime or not – except
painstakingly to try dividing all the smaller numbers into it; if it gives a “remainder” with every smaller number up to half its own size, then it is a prime. Yet the twins were apparently pulling primes out of the air without the slightest effort.

The next day Sacks again sat in on their game, and suddenly interupted it with an eight-figure prime (taken from his book of tables). They looked at him in astonishment; then, after a half-minute pause their faces broke into broad smiles. Then the twins began swopping nine-figure primes. Sacks offered a ten-figure prime; once again there was wonderment. After a long silence John brought out a twelve-figure number. Sacks had no way of checking this, because his book only went up to ten-figure primes; but he had no doubt it
was
a prime. An hour later the twins were swopping twenty-figure numbers.

What were the twins
doing
during their half-minute silence when Sacks introduced the eight-figure prime? The answer can only be that they were making the effort to
see
the number – to see it in some symmetrical way so they could see if there was any “remainder”. Most of us can visualize, say, nine or sixteen by imagining a group of dots laid out in three rows of three or four rows of four; the twins must have been doing the same thing on a far vaster scale.

This offers us an important clue. We know that the two hemispheres of the brain have different functions: in effect, the left is a scientist, the right an artist. The left is concerned with language and logic; the right with intuitions and insights. The left sees the world from a “worm’s-eye view”, the right from a “bird’s-eye view”. In civilized human beings the left is the “dominant hemisphere”, and my
sense of identity
resides there, so that when I use the word “I” it is the left brain speaking. (See also article on synchronicity.) In most of us the powers of the right brain – to visualize patterns, for example – are fairly limited compared to the reasoning powers of the left. It seems clear that in the Twins the powers of the left are extremely limited, but the powers of the right are apparently hundreds of times greater than in the rest of us.

It would seem that the general lesson to be learned from twins is that the non-stop left-brain activity demanded by civilization has suppressed all kinds of “natural” powers in the right, such as telepathic communication, physical empathy, and the ability to grasp reality with a “bird’s-eye vision” – with a “telescope” instead of the microscope we habitually use. And cases like those of the Jim twins – in which the same kind of things have happened to twins who have been separated since birth – seem to hint there are laws and patterns of events scientists and philosophers have not even begun to suspect.

27

Jack the Ripper

Shedding New Light on the World’s Most Infamous Serial Killer

In spite of the epidemic of twentieth-century serial killers with sobriquets like the Boston Strangler, the Buffalo Slasher, and the Sunset Slayer, Jack the Ripper still remains far and away the world’s most famous – or infamous – serial killer. This is not due simply to the grisly picturesqueness of the nickname but to the fact that the murders took place in the fog-shrouded London of Sherlock Holmes and that – unlike the three killers mentioned above – the identity of Jack the Ripper is still a total mystery.

One other interesting fact deserves to be taken into account: Jack the Ripper was the first sex killer in the modern sense of the term. The notion that sex crimes made their first appearance as late as 1888 sounds rather strange. What about Roman emperors like Tiberius, who enjoyed deflowering altar boys? What about Gilles de Rais and Vlad the Impaler and Ivan the Terrible? The first thing we notice about these men is that they were all rulers or members of the aristocracy. They had leisure – which can also lead to boredom – and sufficient authority to be able to impose their will on their victims. But the majority of criminals throughout history have killed or robbed for purely economic reasons.
The Newgate Calendar
, a compilation of crimes published in London in the late eighteenth century, contains only half a dozen “sex crimes”, and these were not violent rapes but what we would call seductions. The lower classes were too hungry to bother about “forbidden” sex, and the upper classes could obtain it so easily that rape would have been pointless.

In the early nineteenth century a significant development occurred; the rise of pornography. The man most responsible for this was the Marquis de Sade – again an aristocrat – who died in an asylum in 1816.
He was very highly sexed, and since he spent most of his life in prison, he had little to do but fantasize about sex. His books, with their monstrous daydreams of rape and torture, inspired many imitators in the 1820s, not all of whom shared his taste for flogging and being flogged, but every one of whom was excited by the notion of the forbidden.

In the two decades preceding Jack the Ripper, there
were
a few crimes that we would nowadays describe as sex murders, but these were usually perpetrated by people who would today be committed to an asylum – like the Italian youth Vincent Verzeni, who graduated from killing chickens to disemboweling women and “sucking their blood”, or the Boston teenager Jesse Pomeroy, who enjoyed inflicting pain on younger children and ended by killing two of them.

Compared to these, there was something utterly calculated about the Jack the Ripper murders, which took place in the Whitechapel area of East London, in the autumn of 1888, and which produced a morbid sense of shock and panic.

It was still dark on the morning of September 1 when a cart driver named George Cross walked along Bucks Row on his way to work. It was a narrow, cobbled street with the blank wall of a warehouse on one side and a row of terraced houses on the other. In the dim light Cross saw what he thought was a bundle of tarpaulin and went to investigate. It proved to be a woman lying on her back, her skirt above her waist. Cross decided she was drunk, and when another man approached, he said, “Give me a hand getting this woman on her feet”. The other man, a market porter, looked down dubiously; his first impression was that she had been raped and left for dead. He bent down and touched her cheek, which was cold, and her hand. “She’s dead”, he said. “We’d better find a policeman”. He pulled down her skirt to make her decent.

In fact, the beat of Police Constable John Neil took him through Bucks Row, and a few minutes after the men had left, the light of his bull’s-eye lantern showed him the woman’s body, which lay close to a stable door. It also showed him something the men had been unable to see: that the woman’s throat had been cut so deeply that the vertebrae were exposed.

An hour later the body, which was that of a middle-aged woman, lay in the yard of the local mortuary, and two paupers from the workhouse next door were given the job of stripping it, while a police inspector took notes. It was when they pulled off the two petticoats that the inspector saw that the woman’s abdomen had been slashed open with a jagged incision that ran from the bottom of the ribs to the pelvis.

The woman was identified through a Lambeth Workhouse mark stenciled on her petticoat. She was Mary Ann Nicholls, a prostitute who had been living at a common lodging house in Thrawl Street – one of the worst slums even in that poverty-stricken area. A few hours before her death she had staggered back to the lodging house, her speech slurred with drink, and admitted that she lacked the fourpence necessary for a bed. The keeper had turned her away. “I’ll soon get the money”, she had shouted as she went off down the street. “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got”. She went looking for a man who would give her the price of a bed in exchange for an uncomfortable act of intercourse on the pavement in a back alley. What had happened, the police surgeon inferred, was that her customer had placed his hands around her throat as she lay on the ground and strangled her into unconsciousness – there were bruises on her throat. Then he had cut her throat with two powerful slashes that had almost severed the head, raised her skirt, and stabbed and slashed at her stomach in a kind of frenzy.

Oddly enough, the murder caused little sensation. Prostitutes were often killed in the slums of London, sometimes by gangs who demanded protection money. The previous April a prostitute named Emma Smith had dragged herself into London Hospital, reporting that she had been attacked by four men in Osborn Street. They had rammed some object, possibly an iron bar, into her vagina with such force that it had penetrated the uterus; she had died of peritonitis. In July dismembered portions of a woman’s body had been recovered from the Thames. And on 7 August 1888, a prostitute named Martha Tabram had been found dead on a landing in George Yards Buildings, Whitechapel; she had been stabbed thirty-nine times with a knife or bayonet. Two soldiers were questioned about her murder but proved to have an excellent alibi. Evidently some sadistic brute had a grudge against prostitutes, it was hardly the kind of story to appeal to respectable newspaper readers.

That attitude was to change dramatically eight days after the murder of Mary Ann Nicholls, when another disemboweled body was found in the backyard of a barber’s shop in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. It was a place where prostitutes often took their customers, and this is evidently what Annie Chapman had done at about 5:30 on the morning of Saturday, 8 September 1888; a neighbour had seen her talking to a dark-looking man “of foreign appearance”, dressed in shabby genteel clothes and wearing a deerstalker hat. Half an hour later a lodger named John Davis went downstairs and into the yard, where the lavatory was situated. He saw the body of a woman lying against the fence, her skirt drawn up above her waist and her legs bent at the knees. The stomach
had been cut open and some of the intestines pulled out. As in the case of Mary Ann Nicholls, the cause of death was a deep gash in the throat. The murderer had placed the woman’s rings and some pennies at her feet and a torn envelope near her head. Medical examination revealed that the killer had also removed the uterus and upper part of the vagina.

Now, suddenly, the press awoke to the fact that the unknown killer was a sadistic maniac. The
Star
that afternoon carried the headline: “Latest Horrible Murder in Whitechapel”. When Mrs Mary Burridge, of Blackfriars Road, South London, read the story, she collapsed and died “of a fit”. Sir Melville Macnaghten, later head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), would eventually write in his memoirs: “No one who was living in London that autumn will forget the terror created by these murders. Even now I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys: ‘Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel.’”

In our own age of mass violence, we find it impossible to imagine the shock created by the murders. A journalist who reported the crimes later began his account of them in a popular booklet: “In the long catalogue of crimes which has been compiled in our modern days there is nothing to be found, perhaps, which has so darkened the horizon of humanity and shadowed the vista of man’s better nature as the series of mysterious murders committed in Whitechapel during the latter part of 1888”. “Shadowed the vista of man’s better nature” – this is what so frightened Londoners. It was as if an inhuman monster, a kind of demon, had started to hunt the streets. Hysteria swept over the whole country. There had been nothing like it since the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families were slaughtered in East London, and householders all over England barricaded their doors at night.

On 29 September 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter that began: “Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet”. It included the sentence; “I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled” and promised: “You will soon hear of me with my funny little games”. It was signed “Jack the Ripper” – the first time the name had been used. The writer requested: “Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight”. The Central News Agency decided to follow his advice.

That night, a Saturday, the “ripper” killed again – this time not one, but two prostitutes. At 1:00
A
.
M
. on Sunday morning a hawker named Louis Diemschutz drove his pony and cart into the backyard of a workingman’s club in Berner Street. The pony shied and Diemschutz
saw something lying in front of its feet; a closer look showed him that it was a woman’s body. The Ripper was either in the yard at that moment or had only just left it when he heard the approach of the horse and cart. When Diemschutz returned a few moments later with a lighted candle, he was able to see that the woman’s throat had been cut. There had also been an attempt to cut off her ear. She was later identified as Elizabeth Stride, an alcoholic Swedish prostitute.