The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (47 page)

It is not clear whether Knight believed this incredible farrago of nonsense. He probably did not. He knew that Gull had suffered a stroke in 1887 and would have been incapable of the murders. And a fellow investigator named Simon Wood had uncovered Annie Crook’s rent book and discovered that she left the Cleveland Street address in 1886, a year before she is supposed to have been kidnapped. Moreover, the records show that she was living a perfectly normal life until 1920, when she died in a workhouse. Her religion was Church of England, not Roman Catholic. Simon Wood told Knight all of this soon after publication of
The Final Solution
, but Knight made no attempt to correct his “facts” in the paperback edition. Since his book had become something of a bestseller, it was not in his interests to admit that he had been deceived by Hobo Sickert.

It was, in fact, Hobo Sickert himself who pulled the rug out from under Knight by publicly admitting that the Jack the Ripper part of his
story was pure invention. He insisted, however, that the story of Annie Crook giving birth to the Duke of Clarence’s daughter – and the daughter becoming his own mother – was true. And in this he was probably being truthful. The most convincing part of Knight’s book is his description of the various “clues” to the affair that Sickert slipped into his paintings.

In fact, this part of the story was confirmed – or at least strongly supported – in a book entitled
Sickert and the Ripper Crimes
(1990) by Jean Overton Fuller. It also demonstrates that Hobo Sickert did not invent his Jack the Ripper story out of whole cloth; it looks as if a remarkable coincidence led him to believe that there
was
some connection between the Duke of Clarence and the Ripper murders.

Jean Overton Fuller’s mother had a friend named Florence Pash, an artist who was also an intimate of Walter Sickert. Florence had told Mrs Fuller that Sickert knew the identity of Jack the Ripper and that he had carried some sinister secret around with him for the rest of his days – a secret that, at times, made him fear for his life. Florence Pash also confirmed that Mary Kelly
had
worked for Sickert as a nursemaid before the murders. We know that Sickert was obsessed by the Ripper murders and that he painted several pictures based on them.

All this, according to Jean Fuller, proves that Sickert was himself Jack the Ripper and that his motive was to kill the blackmailing prostitutes who knew the secret of Annie Crook.

This is obviously absurd. Why should Sickert go around murdering prostitutes because they knew that the Duke of Clarence had fathered an illegitimate child? Protecting his royal friend’s good name is obviously an insufficient motive. Besides, Jack the Ripper was a sadist who enjoyed disemboweling women. Walter Sickert seems to have been one of the nastiest and most spoiled men who ever lived, but as far as we know, he was not a sadist.

What the Florence Pash evidence
does
seem to prove is that the Duke really fathered an illegitimate daughter, who became the mother of Joseph Sickert. It also confirms the unlikeliest part of Hobo Sickert’s story: that Mary Kelly acted as a nursemaid to the baby. She may even have tried to blackmail Sickert. But even without the blackmail motif, we can understand why Sickert thought he was the custodian of a frightening secret. When Mary Kelly became – almost certainly by pure chance – the Ripper’s final victim, he must have felt certain that the long arm of Buckingham Palace was involved. And when Hobo Sickert, the child of Walter Sickert and Annie Crook, came to hear of this tale of a royal love affair followed by murder, he understandably came to believe
that the Palace was somehow involved in the murders. At least Fuller’s book enables us to understand how the whole silly story came to be invented.

But that leaves us with the question: Who
was
the Ripper? In 1988, the centenary of the murders, half a dozen books propounded new theories – or old theories with a new twist.

Martin Fido’s
Crimes
,
Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper
returned to Macnaghten’s original notes, which listed three men as the chief Ripper suspects: Druitt (whom we have already dismissed), an insane Russian doctor named Ostrog (the origin of “Pedachenko”), and an insane Polish Jew named Kosminski, who was committed to an asylum in 1889. Sir Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, is on record as remarking that the Ripper was a Polish Jew. Fido looked through the records of insane asylums and found a man named Aaron Kozminski, who died in 1891; but he was suffering from paranoid delusions and obviously lacked the cunning and intelligence to be the Ripper. A further search, however, uncovered a Nathan Kaminsky, treated for syphilis in March 1888, but about whom nothing more is known. Fido identifies him with David Cohen, another Polish Jew, who was committed to an asylum in December 1888 and died in the following year; Cohen was too violent to associate with his fellow patients. Fido speculates that a man who mumbled his name as “Nathan Kamin” might have been misheard as saying “David Cohen”. This is true; it is also true that Cohen
might
have been Jack the Ripper. But there is not a shred of real evidence that he was.

Paul Begg, another “Ripperologist”, points out in
Jack the Ripper: Uncensored Facts
that a close associate of Anderson, D. S. Swanson, wrote in the margin of Anderson’s autobiography the comment that the Polish Jew died in “the Seaside Home”. This would seem to rule out Kaminsky-Cohen as the Ripper.

In
The Ripper Legacy
, Martin Howells and Keith Skinner describe their fruitless investigation into an “Australian connection” mentioned by Daniel Farson: the notion that Druitt’s cousin Lionel moved to Australia and wrote a pamphlet entitled “Jack the Ripper – I Knew Him”. This trail led nowhere. Nevertheless, Howells and Skinner endorse Farson’s conclusion that Druitt was Jack the Ripper and suggest that his “suicide” in the Thames was actually murder – that former associates from his Cambridge days, a society called The Apostles, learned that he was the Ripper and killed him in order to prevent a scandal. The book reveals their remarkable tenacity as researchers, but their theory contains as many “ifs” as Martin Fido’s.

The “black magician” Aleister Crowley was convinced that the Ripper was another “magician” by the name of Roslyn D’Onston Stevenson (who preferred to be called “D’Onston”), who committed the murders as part of a ritual to gain supreme magical powers. Crowley tells a preposterous story about how D’Onston ate parts of the bodies at the scene of the crime and in so doing stained his ties with blood. The bloodstained ties were then found in a tin box under D’Onston’s bed by his lesbian landlady.

In fact, D’Onston wrote a letter to Scotland Yard claiming to know the identity of Jack the Ripper: a doctor named Morgan Davies. His grounds for this belief were that he had heard Davies describing the murders to some fellow doctors and enacting the crimes with a gruesome realism that convinced D’Onston that Davies had actually committed them. The police seem to have treated it as yet another crank letter. In
A Casebook on Jack the Ripper
(1976), criminologist Richard Whittington-Egan went into the D’Onston theory at length but concluded that D’Onston was a fantasist and something of a con man.

Whittington-Egan’s friend Melvin Harris decided to investigate D’Onston and discovered that Whittington-Egan had been less than just. Many of D’Onston’s “fantasies” about his service in India and fighting under Garibaldi turned out to be true. Harris’s
Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth
is an impressive piece of research. But it utterly fails to explain why a man who went to the police alleging that someone else was Jack the Ripper (on grounds that cannot be taken seriously) should himself have been the Whitechapel murderer.

Another brilliant piece of investigation was carried out by a Norwich accountant named Steward Hicks, who searched through the lunacy records for 1888 and came upon the name of a doctor named John Hewitt, who had been a patient in Coton Hill, an asylum in Staffordshire. Walter Sickert once described how he had taken a room near Camden Town and how his landlady was convinced that one of her previous lodgers, a student vet named John Hewitt, was Jack the Ripper – Hewitt had burned all his clothes in the grate (presumably to destroy bloodstains) and often stayed out all night. Hewitt’s mother had finally removed him to Bournemouth, where he died of tuberculosis.

Could it be, wondered Hicks, that Hewitt’s mother had actually realized he was Jack the Ripper and had had him committed to an asylum in Staffordshire? His research revealed that Hewitt had died of “general paralysis of the insane” in 1892, so he
could
be the Ripper. Hicks approached me with his theory, and I was able to help him gain access to the records of Coton Hill asylum, which had now been removed to the
Staffordshire asylum. Alas, they revealed that Hewitt had committed himself to the asylum before the murders began. There was, however, still a slim hope for Mr Hicks’s theory. Since Hewitt had committed himself voluntarily to the asylum, he was allowed to go in and out as he pleased. If he had been away on the dates of the Whitechapel murders, that would constitute almost overwhelming circumstantial evidence that he was the Ripper. Regrettably, when Hicks finally gained full access to the papers in the Public Records Office, they made it clear that the dates when Hewitt was absent from the asylum were not the dates of the murders. Hicks tells me that, in spite of this, he still believes he may find evidence to show that Hewitt could have been Jack the Ripper. I wish him luck but cannot share his optimism.

Other theories that surfaced around the time of the Ripper centenary are that the killer was Frank Miles, a homosexual artist who was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s (and who died insane), and that he was Joseph Barnett, the man who had lived with Mary Kelly until shortly before her murder. The Frank Miles theory – advocated by Mr Thomas Toughill – is open to the same objection as Harrison’s Stephen theory: that highly educated, “aesthetic” young poets (or artists) are not likely to turn to disemboweling. Bruce Paley, author of the Joseph Barnett theory, has a stronger case, in that whoever killed Mary Kelly locked the door behind him – yet the key is known to have been missing for some time. Barnett
could
easily have had the key. On the other hand, it may simply have turned up again before Mary Kelly was killed. And since Barnett is known to have been a mild little man, the theory that he killed five women because he was madly in love with Mary and disapproved of her habit of selling her favours is, to say the least, unlikely.

Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict
, by myself and Robin Odell, also appeared during the centenary. In
Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction
(1965), Robin Odell had suggested that Jack the Ripper was a Jewish
shochet
, or ritual slaughterer, whose sadistic tendencies were stimulated by his profession until he began killing women. This is conceivable – except that it is hard to see why a sadist whose job involved slaughtering cattle by cutting their throats should have felt the need to kill women. And since all the records that might have enabled Odell to identify his slaughterer were destroyed during the Second World War, it seems that we must regard his theory as one more interesting might-have-been.

Since the early 1980s the phenomenon of serial murder has seized the public imagination, and careful psychological studies – particularly by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia – have thrown
some important new light on the phenomenon.
¹³
What can they tell us about Jack the Ripper? To begin with, the great majority of serial killers have emerged from working-class backgrounds. The middle- or upper-class serial killer is virtually unknown – presumably because the kind of frustrations that lead to multiple murder tend to spring from childhood poverty and ill treatment. This means that we can fairly confidently dismiss all the theories that involve an upper-class Ripper (or even a middle-class doctor like Matters’s Dr Stanley or D’Onston’s Morgan Davies).

We must also recognize that part of the fascination of the Ripper murders lies in the mistaken notion that the murderer must have been a master criminal, a kind of Dracula who preferred to mutilate his victims rather than drink their blood. In fact, the surprising thing about most serial killers is that they tend to be ordinary, nondescript individuals. In many cases, they seem so gentle and polite that their acquaintances find it impossible to believe they were capable of murder. The Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, falls into this category; so does Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf sadist, and Earl Nelson, the Gorilla Murderer – a charming young man who liked to discuss the Bible.

In many cases, the killer himself is totally unable to understand the urges that drive him to kill, and criminologists admit to being equally baffled. In September 1980 four black men were shot with a .22 rifle in Buffalo and Niagara Falls; in October two black cab drivers were stabbed to death and their hearts cut out. The killer had opened the ribcages and seemed to possess some medical skill. In December 1980 four black men were stabbed to death in New York by a man who simply approached them in the street.

The following January an eighteen-year-old army private named Joseph C. Christopher – a white – attacked a black soldier with a potato knife and then tried to emasculate himself. In custody, Christopher confessed to being the “Buffalo Slasher” as well as the .22 killer and the knife-wielding maniac of New York. People who had known Christopher in Buffalo were astounded; he was a quiet, ordinary teenager who was not known as a racist or a homosexual. (All the victims were male.) He had been raised in an Italian neighbourhood by a dominant father and a passive mother – in that respect he resembled the Boston Strangler – and had adored his father, who had taught him to shoot. Christopher had been much affected by his father’s death, which had occurred in 1976, when he was fourteen. He himself seemed to have no idea of why
he had killed. As a “monster”, Joe Christopher is a total disappointment. Yet he provides us with a more realistic image of the serial killer than the notion of a raving maniac.