The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (48 page)
Read The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
The probability is that Jack the Ripper was as “ordinary” and as nondescript as Christopher. He was probably not even insane, like “Pedachenko”, or violent, like Kaminsky-Cohen. So there is almost certainly no hope of establishing his identity more than a century after the murders. He was a “nobody”.
Yet, oddly enough, there is a suspect who fits this description of a “murderous nobody”. After Daniel Farson had presented his television program on Jack the Ripper in 1959, he received a letter from a man who signed himself
G
.
W
.
B
. and who explained that he was a seventy-seven-year-old who lived in Melbourne, Australia. He wrote:
When I was a nipper, about 1889, I was playing in the streets about 9.00
P
.
M
. when my mother called, “Come in Georgie or JTR [Jack the Ripper] will get you”. That night a man patted me on the head and said, “Don’t worry, Georgie. You would be the last person JTR would touch”. [This man was apparently Georgie’s own father, who was born in 1850 and so would have been thirty-eight at the time of the murders.] My father was a terrible drunkard and night after night he would come home and kick my mother and us kids about something cruelly. About the year 1902 I was taught boxing, and after feeling proficient to hold my own, I threatened my father that if he laid a hand on my mother or brothers I would thrash him. He never did after that, but we lived in the same house and never spoke to each other. Later, I emigrated to Australia. I was booked to depart with three days’ notice, and my mother asked me to say goodbye to my father. It was then he told his foul history and why he did those terrible murders, and advised me to change my name because he would confess before he died. Once settled in Melbourne I assumed another name. However, my father died in 1912 and I was watching the papers carefully, expecting a sensational announcement.
This, of course, never came. Georgie’s explanation for his father’s heavy drinking is that he had always wanted a daughter but that his first child – a female – was an imbecile; later children were all boys. “During the confession of those awful murders, he explained that he did not know what he was doing but his ambition was to get drunk and an urge to kill every prostitute that accosted him”.
His father, Georgie explained, was a dung collector, and on one occasion, after killing a woman, he had removed his outer pair of trousers, which were saturated with blood, and hidden them in the manure. Later, while his partner went to have a meal of sausage and mash, Jack (this was the father’s name) buried himself in the manure to keep warm and upon hearing a policeman asking questions about Jack the Ripper felt “scared to death”.
Many sadistic killers commit their crimes only after they have been drinking heavily, and “Georgie’s” account of his father rings psychologically true. A highly dominant individual, a bully who beat his wife and probably felt a contempt for all women, might well have experienced a kind of homicidal rage when accosted by prostitutes. It is also hard to imagine why a seventy-seven-year-old man should bother to write an anonymous letter from Melbourne with a completely false story. And, assuming his story to be true, it is equally hard to see why his father should have invented the story about being Jack the Ripper.
It is possible that, even at this distance in time, a check of the records of ships bound for Australia in 1902 could reveal the identity of “G.W.B”. and that this in turn might lead to uncovering the identity of a man called Jack (surname probably beginning with a
B
) who was born in 1850, died in 1912, and was a manure collector in Whitechapel in 1888. We would have no means of being certain that this man was Jack the Ripper; but he would seem to me far and away the likeliest candidate.
Postscript to Jack the Ripper
In 1993, a new – and highly plausible – candidate was added to the list when a book called
The Diary of Jack the Ripper
was published. The author of the
Diary
(found scrawled in an old notebook) was James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, whose young wife Florence was accused of poisoning him. Florence was found guilty and sentenced to death, but later reprieved. The
Diary
revealed that Maybrick was an ‘arsenic eater’ (in small quantities arsenic is a powerful stimulant), and that he was driven to a frenzy of jealousy by his young wife’s infidelities. Maybrick spent a great deal of time in Whitechapel on business and, according to the
Diary
, vented his fury against Florence by murdering prostitutes.
Although the authenticity of the
Diary
has been widely questioned, powerful internal evidence suggests that it
was
written by James Maybrick, and that Maybrick was Jack the Ripper.
28
Did Joan of Arc Return from the Dead?
On 30 May 1431 Joan of Arc was burnt as a heretic by the English; she was only nineteen years old. She regarded herself as a messenger from Heaven, sent to save the French from their enemies the English (who were in league with the Burgundians who captured her). At the age of thirteen Joan began to hear voices, which she later identified as those of St Gabriel, St Michael, St Marguerite and St Catherine. When the news of the encirclement of Orleans reached her little village in Lorraine, Domremy, her voices told her to go to lift the siege. Her military career was brief but spectacular: in a year she won many remarkable victories, and saw Charles VII crowned at Rheims. Then she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English for ten thousand francs, tried as a witch, and burnt alive.
But that, oddly enough, was not quite the end of “the Maid”. “Now one month after Paris had returned to her allegiance to King Charles”, writes Anatole France, “there appeared in Lorraine a certain damsel. She was about twenty-five years old. Hitherto she had been called Claude; but now she made herself known to divers lord of the town of Metz as being Jeanne the Maid”. This was in May 1436, five years after Joan had died at the stake.
It sounds very obviously as if some imposter had decided to pose as Joan the Maid. But there is some astonishing evidence that suggests that this is not so. Joan’s two younger brothers, Petit-Jean and Pierre, were still serving in the army, and they had no doubt whatever that their sister had been burnt at Rouen. So when they heard that a woman claiming to be Joan was at Metz, and that she had expressed a wish to meet them, the brothers hastened to Metz – Petit-Jean was not far away, being the provost of Vaucouleurs. One chronicler describes how the
brothers went to the village of La-Grange-aux-Ormes, two and a half miles south of Metz, where a tournament was being held. A knight in armour was galloping around an obstacle course and pulling stakes expertly out of the ground; this was the person who claimed to be their sister. The brothers rode out on to the field, prepared to challenge the impostor. But when Petit-Jean demanded, “Who are you”?, the “impostor” raised her visor, and both brothers gaped in astonishment as they recognized their sister Joan.
In fact Joan was surrounded by various people who had known her during her spectacular year fighting the English, including Nicole Lowe, the king’s chamberlain. If she was in fact an impostor, it seems absurd that she should go to a place where she would be sure to be recognized. (John of Metz was one of her first and most loyal supporters.) And the next day her brothers took her to Vaucouleurs, where she spent a week, apparently accepted by many people who had seen her there seven years earlier, when she had gone to see the local squire Robert de Baudricourt, to ask him to send her to see the Dauphin, the heir to the throne. After this she spent three weeks at a small town called Marville, then went on a pilgrimage to see the Black Virgin called Notre Dame de Liance, between Laon and Rheims. Then she went to stay with Elizabeth, Duchess of Luxembourg, at Arlon. Meanwhile her brother Petit-Jean went to see the king and announced that his sister Joan was still alive. We do not know the king’s reaction, but he ordered his treasurer to give Petit-Jean a hundred francs. An entry in the treasury accounts of Orléans for 9 August 1436 states that the council authorized payment of a courier who had brought letters from “Jeanne la Pucelle” (Joan the Maid).
The records of these events are to be found in the basic standard work on Joan of Arc, Jules Quicherat’s five-volume
Trial and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc
(1841), which contains all the original documents. One of these documents states that on 24 June 1437 Joan’s miraculous powers returned to her. By then she had become something of a protégée of Count Ulrich of Württemberg, who took her to Cologne. There she became involved in a clash between two churchmen who were rivals for the diocese; one had been appointed by the chapter, the other by the pope. Count Ulrich favoured one called Udalric, and Joan apparently also pronounced in his favour. But her intervention did no good; the Council of Basle considered Udalric a usurper, and the pope’s nominee was appointed. The Inquisitor general of Cologne became curious about the count’s guest (remember that this was at the height of the “witchcraft craze”), and was apparently shocked to learn that she
practised magic, and that she danced with men and ate and drank more than she ought. (The magic sounds more like conjuring: she tore a tablecloth and restored it to its original state, and did the same with a glass which she broke against a wall.) He summoned her before him, but she refused to appear; when men were sent to fetch her the count hid her in his house, then smuggled her out of the town. The inquisitor excommunicated her. Back at Arlon, staying with the Duchess of Luxembourg, she met a nobleman named Robert des Armoires and – no doubt to the astonishment of her followers – married him. (The original Joan had sworn a vow of perpetual chastity under a “fairy tree” at Domremy.) Then they moved to Metz, where Robert had a house, and during the next three years she gave birth to two children.
Two years later, in the summer of 1439, the “Dame des Armoires” went to Orléans, whose magistrates gave her a banquet and presented her with 210 livres by way of thanking her for her services to the town during the siege. Oddly enough, these same burgesses had paid for Masses in memory of the Maid’s death three months earlier; presumably they must have changed their minds in the meantime. After 1439 the Masses ceased.
After two weeks she left Orléans in rather a hurry, according to one chronicler, and went to Tours, where she sent a letter to the king via the Baillie of Touraine, Guillaume Bellier, who had been the Maid’s host ten years earlier. Moreover, she soon afterwards went to Poitou, where she seems to have been given the nominal command of a place called Mans – presumably by the king she had enthroned. Then the king transferred this command to Joan’s ex-comrade in arms, Gilles de Rais. Since the days when he had fought beside Joan before the walls of Paris, Gilles had begun to practise black magic – in an attempt to repair his fortunes, drained by his excesses – and had become a sadistic killer of children. In the following year, 1440, Gilles would be tried and condemned to be hanged and burned. Meanwhile – assuming he met the Dame des Armoises (which seems practically certain, since she had to hand over her command to him) – he seems to have accepted her as his former comrade-in-arms. He also placed her in authority over the men-at-arms.
In 1440 Joan finally went to Paris and met the king. And for the first time she received a setback; after the meeting the king declared her an impostor. It may be significant that he did so after the interview. Surely if he could see she was a fraud he would have said so at the time? He even attempted to practise on her the same trick he had tried at their first meeting eleven years earlier, concealing himself and asking one of his
men to impersonate him. But as on the previous occasion Joan was not to be deceived; she walked straight up to the king and knelt at his feet, whereupon the king said: “Pucelle, my dear, you are welcome back in the name of God”. It seems, to say the least of it, strange that he should then have decided she was an impostor.
And now, according to the journal “of a Bourgeois of Paris”, Joan was arrested, tried and publicly exhibited as a malefactor. A sermon was preached against her, and she was forced to confess publicly that she was an imposter. Her story, according to the “Bourgeois of Paris”, was that she had gone to Rome about 1433 to seek absolution for striking her mother. She had, she said, engaged as a soldier in war in the service of the Holy Father Eugenius, and worn man’s apparel. This, presumably, gave her the idea of pretending to be the Maid . . .
But the whole of this story is doubtful in the extreme. To begin with, Joan then returned to Metz, and continued to be accepted as “la Pucelle”. In 1443 her brother Pierre refers to her in a petition as “Jeanne la Pucelle, my sister”, and her cousin Henry de Voulton mentions that Petit-Jean, Pierre and their sister la Pucelle used to visit the village of Sermaise and feast with relations, all of whom accepted her. Fourteen years later she makes an appearance in the town of Saumur, and is again accepted by the officials of the town as the Maid. And after that she vanishes from history, presumably living out the rest of her life quietly with her husband in Metz.
What then are we to make of the story that the king declared her an impostor, and that she admitted it publicly? First of all, its only source is the “journal of a Bourgeois of Paris”. This in itself is odd, if she was involved in such a public scandal. Moreover, the “bourgeois” was hostile to the earlier Joan, in the days before her execution. Anatole France mentions that the common people of Paris were in a fever of excitement at the news that the Maid was still alive and was returning to Paris. The University of Paris was still thoroughly hostile to the Maid, who had been condemned as a witch.