The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (46 page)

The killer had been interrupted but his nerve was unshaken. He hastened up Berner Street and along Commercial Road – this murder had been farther afield than the others – and reached the Houndsditch area just in time to meet a prostitute who had been released from Bishopsgate police station ten minutes earlier. Her name was Catherine Eddowes, and she had been held for being drunk and disorderly. He seems to have had no difficulty persuading the woman to accompany him into Mitre Square, a small square surrounded by warehouses, only a few hundred yards away. A policeman patrolled the square every fifteen minutes or so, and when he passed through at 1:30, he saw nothing unusual. At 1:45 he found the body of a woman lying in the corner of the square. She was lying on her back, with her dress pushed up around her waist, and her face had been slashed. Her body had been gashed open from the base of the ribs to the pubic region, and the throat had been cut. Later examination revealed that a kidney was missing and that half of one ear had been cut off.

The murderer had evidently heard the approach of the policeman and hurriedly left the square by a small passage that runs from its northern side. In this passage there was a communal sink, and he had paused long enough to wash the blood from his hands and probably from his knife. In Goulston Street, a ten-minute walk away, he discarded a bloodstained piece of his victim’s apron. The policeman who found it also found a chalked message scrawled on a nearby wall: “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing”. The police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, ordered the words to be rubbed out, in spite of a plea from a local CID man that they should be photographed first; he thought they might cause a riot against the Jews, thousands of whom lived in Whitechapel.

Macnaghten admitted later: “When the double murder of 30th September took place, the exasperation of the public at the non-discovery of the perpetrator knew no bounds”. The “Jack the Ripper” letter was released, and the murderer immediately acquired a nickname. And early on Monday morning the Central News Agency received another missive – this time a postcard – from Jack the Ripper. It read: “I
was not codding [joking] dear old boss when I gave you the tip. You’ll hear about Saucy Jack’s work tomorrow. Double event this time. Number one squealed a bit. Couldn’t finish straight off. Had not time to get ears for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again”.

The public exploded in fury. Meetings were held in the streets, criticizing the police. Sir Charles Warren’s resignation was demanded. Because the murderer was suspected of being a doctor, men carrying black bags found it dangerous to walk through the streets. The police decided to try bloodhounds, but the dogs promptly lost themselves on Tooting Common.

Yet as October passed with no further murders, the panic began to die down. Then, in the early hours of 9 November the Ripper staged his most spectacular crime of all. Mary Jeanette Kelly was a young Irishwoman, only twenty-four years old, who lived in a cheap room in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street. At about two o’clock that morning she was seen talking to a swarthy man with a heavy moustache; he seemed well dressed and had a gold watch chain. They entered the narrow alleyway that led to her lodging: room 13.

At 10:45 the next morning a rent collector knocked on her door but received no reply. He put his hand through a broken pane of glass in the window and pulled aside the curtain. What he saw sent him rushing for a policeman.

Jack the Ripper had surpassed himself. The body lay on the bed, and the mutilations must have taken a long time – an hour or more. One of the hands lay in the open stomach. The head had been virtually removed and was hanging on only by a piece of skin, as was the left arm. The breasts and nose had been removed and the skin from the legs stripped off. The heart lay on the pillow, and some of the intestines were draped around a picture. The remains of a fire burned in the grate, as if the Ripper had used it to provide himself with light. But this time, medical examination revealed that the Ripper had taken away none of the internal organs; his lengthy exercise in mutilation had apparently satisfied his peculiar sadistic fever.

This murder caused the greatest sensation of all. The police chief finally resigned. Public clamour became louder than ever; even Queen Victoria made suggestions on how to catch the murderer. Yet the slaughter of Mary Kelly proved to be the last of the crimes of Jack the Ripper. The police, hardly able to believe their luck as weeks and months went by without further atrocities, reached the conclusion that the Ripper had either committed suicide or been confined in a mental
home. A body taken from the river early the following January was identified as that of a doctor who had committed suicide, and Scotland Yard detectives told themselves that this was almost certainly Jack the Ripper. But their claims have never been confirmed.

There have, of course, been many fascinating theories. Forty years after the murders, an Australian journalist named Leonard Matters wrote the first full-length book on Jack the Ripper. He ended by telling an extraordinary story: how a surgeon in Buenos Aires was called to the bedside of a dying Englishman, whom he recognized as the brilliant surgeon Dr Stanley, under whom he had studied. Stanley told him a horrifying story. In 1888 his son Herbert had died of syphilis contracted from a prostitute two years before; her name had been Mary Jeanette Kelly. Dr Stanley swore to avenge Herbert’s death and prowled the East End of London looking for the woman. He would pick up prostitutes, question them about Mary Kelly, then kill them to make sure they made no attempt to warn her. Finally, he found the woman he was seeking and took his revenge. Then he left for Argentina.

Matters admitted that his own search of the records of the British Medical Association had revealed no Dr Stanley nor anyone who even resembled him. But there are other reasons for regarding the Stanley story as fiction. If Dr Stanley was only trying to silence his first four or five victims, why did he disembowel them? In any case, syphilis is unlikely to kill a man in two years – ten is a more likely period. But the most conclusive piece of evidence against the Dr Stanley theory is that Mary Kelly was not suffering from syphilis.

Ten years later an artist named William Stewart published
Jack the Ripper: A New Theory
. Stewart had studied the inquest report on Mary Kelly and discovered that she was pregnant at the time of her death. He produced the remarkable theory that Jack the Ripper was a woman – a midwife who had gone to the room in Miller’s Court to perform an abortion. After killing Mary Kelly in a sadistic frenzy, she had dressed up in her spare clothes and left, after burning her own bloody garments in the grate. The immediate objection to this theory is that Mary Kelly had no spare clothes – she was too poor. But the major objection is that there has never yet been a case of sadistic mutilation murder in which the killer was a woman. Stewart’s “Jill the Ripper” is a psychological improbability.

In 1959 the journalist Donald McCormick revived a theory that dated to the 1920s. A journalist named William LeQueux described in a book called
Things I Know
how, after the Russian revolution, the Kerensky government had allowed him to see a manuscript written in French by
the “mad monk” Rasputin and found in a safe in the basement of Rasputin’s house. It was called
Great Russian Criminals
, and it declared that Jack the Ripper was a sadistic maniac named Alexander Pedachenko, who was sent to England by the Russian secret police to embarrass the British police force. Pedachenko, said LeQueux, was later arrested after he tried to kill a woman in Tver (Kalinin). In fact, LeQueux wrote three books about Rasputin, all full of cynical invention. And although they were written before
Things I Know
, they all fail to mention this extraordinary theory. But the strongest objection to the Rasputin-Pedachenko theory is that Rasputin did not speak a word of French and that he lived in a flat on the third floor, in a house with no cellar.

In the same year that McCormick’s book was published, Daniel Farson investigated the Ripper murders for a television program and succeeded in securing an extraordinary scoop. Sir Melville Macnaghten had hinted strongly in his memoirs that he knew the identity of Jack the Ripper and spoke of three suspects, although he finally dismissed two of these. Farson succeeded in getting hold of Macnaghten’s original notes and learned the name of this chief suspect: an unsuccessful barrister named Montague John Druitt – the man whose body was found in the Thames in early January 1889. Farson did some remarkable detective work and learned a great deal about Druitt’s life and death.

Alas, when Macnaghten’s comments are examined closely, it becomes very clear that he knew little or nothing about Druitt. He calls him a doctor when he was a barrister. He says he believes Druitt lived with his family, when in fact he lived in chambers, like most lawyers. He says he believes Druitt’s mind snapped after his “glut” in Miller’s Court and that he committed suicide the following day. We know that Druitt killed himself three weeks later and that he did so because he was depressed after going to see his mother, who had become insane – he was afraid that the same thing was happening to him. In fact, Macnaghten joined the police force six months after the Ripper murders came to an end, and it is obvious that his Druitt theory was pure wishful thinking, without a shred of supporting evidence.

When, in 1960, I published a series of articles entitled “My Search for Jack the Ripper” in the London
Evening Standard
, I was asked to lunch by an old surgeon named Thomas Stowell, who told me his own astonishing theory about the Ripper’s identity: that it was Queen Victoria’s grandson – the heir to the throne – the Duke of Clarence, who died during the flu epidemic in 1892. Sowell told me that he had seen the private papers of Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, and that Gull had dropped mysterious hints about Clarence and Jack
the Ripper, as well as mentioning that Clarence had syphilis, from which he died. When, subsequently, I asked Stowell if I could write about his theory, he said no. “It might upset Her Majesty”. But in 1970 he decided to publish it himself in a magazine called
The Criminologist
. Admittedly, he did not name his suspect – he called him
S
– but he dropped dozens of hints that it was Clarence. Journalists took up the story and it caused a worldwide sensation. Stowell was so shaken by all the publicity that he died a week later, trying to repair the damage by claiming that his suspect was
not
the Duke of Clarence.

A writer named Michael Harrison, working on a biography of Clarence, carefully reread Stowell’s article and realized that there were many discrepancies between the career of
S
and that of the Duke of Clarence. He concluded that Sir William Gull had indeed referred to a suspect as
S
but that it was not the Duke of Clarence, but someone who was closely acquainted with him. Studying Clarence’s acquaintances, he discovered the ideal suspect: James Kenneth Stephen, a poet, lawyer, and man-about-town who had become distinctly odd after being struck on the head by the vane of a windmill and who, like Clarence, had died – in a mental home – in 1892. Harrison had no trouble in disposing of Clarence as a suspect, pointing out that at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, Clarence was celebrating his father’s birthday at Sandringham. But he was far less successful in finding even a grain of evidence to connect Stephen with the crimes. It is almost impossible to imagine the intellectual young aesthete, author of a great deal of published verse, stalking prostitutes with a knife.

The next major book on Jack the Ripper was optimistically entitled
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
(1976) and was written by a young journalist named Stephen Knight; he was following up a story propounded in a BBC television series called “The Ripper File”, which in turn was based on an astounding story told by Joseph “Hobo” Sickert, son of the famous Victorian painter Walter Sickert. This story also involved the Duke of Clarence – although not, this time, as the murderer.

According to Hobo Sickert, his father and the heir to the throne were close friends, and the Duke often went slumming with the bohemian painter. In Sickert’s studio in Cleveland Street, Soho, Clarence met an attractive young artist’s model named Annie Crook. She became his mistress and in 1885 gave birth to a baby girl they named Alice Margaret. Then, according to Sickert, Clarence and his mistress got married in a private ceremony.

The story becomes more preposterous. When the secret marriage
reached the ear of Queen Victoria, she was horrified. Annie was not only a commoner but a Catholic. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, gave orders that Annie and the baby were to be kidnapped. A carriage drove up to the house at 6 Cleveland Street, and Annie and her baby daughter were hustled into a carriage and taken off to a mental home; there Sir William Gull performed a sinister brain operation on Annie to make her lose her memory. (This, incidentally, is virtually impossible; even nowadays scientists are uncertain where the source of memory lies, and in 1888 ignorance was total.)

The child, Alice, was handed over to a nanny in the East End of London – one Mary Kelly. Eventually, Alice found her way back to Walter Sickert and became his mistress. Joseph “Hobo” Sickert was the outcome of this union.

But Mary Kelly made the mistake of deciding to blackmail the royal family. She had taken a number of fellow prostitutes into her confidence, and the Prime Minister decided they all had to be killed. The task was given to Sir William Gull, who had sadistic tendencies anyway. His method was complicated but original; he would drive around the streets of Whitechapel in a coach until he saw his prospective victim, who would then be lured inside and disemboweled. His coachman, a man named Netley, was an accomplice. (A more recent theory suggests that Netley himself was Jack the Ripper.) And since Gull was also a Freemason, he left various clues in the form of hints of masonic ritual, such as the objects arranged so carefully around Annie Chapman and the misspelling of Jews as
Juwes
. Mary Kelly, of course, was the final victim.