When Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888, he became instantly the world’s most infamous, and also its best-known murderer. He was not the world’s most prolific killer, nor the first to mutilate his victims. France’s Gilles de Rais murdered and mutilated more than fifty children. Hungary’s Countess Elizabeth Bathory murdered an unknown number of servant girls—the number certainly ran into dozens—to take baths in their blood, and is known to have bitten chunks out of their flesh. But the enduring fascination of the Ripper lay in the mystery of his identity, and in his obvious desire to shock, to spit into the face of society. He was also, as we shall see, one of the first examples of what we now call a sex killer, and therefore, of what is now labelled a serial killer.
A Plague of Murder could be about all those who have killed large numbers of people—in which case, it would have to include the Nazis, and Mafia contract killers, and insane gunmen who go on a rampage and shoot anyone who crosses their path, and terrorists who blow up public buildings. But it is not, because serial killers are different.
The term ‘serial killer’ was invented in 1978 by FBI agent Robert Ressler to describe obsessive ‘repeat killers’ like Jack the Ripper. Before that, they were called ‘mass murderers’, an ambiguous phrase, since it included criminals like the Frenchman Landru ‘Bluebeard’ who murdered women for their money. Ressler coined the new term because of the increasing number of American multiple sex killers—like Albert DeSalvo, Ted Bundy, Dean Corll, John Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas—whose crimes had achieved worldwide notoriety. Since then, cases like that of the Milwaukee ‘cannibal’ Jeffrey Dahmer and the Russian Andrei Chikatilo have made it clear that he was right: there is a fundamental difference between serial killers and other types of murderer.
What drives a man to become a serial killer? One answer—as we shall see in this book—is that their self-esteem is often so low that killing is a way of asserting that they exist. In some cases, the killing has no sexual component. Donald Harvey, an American nursing orderly, was sentenced in 1987 for murdering twenty-four people, mostly elderly hospital patients. It emerged later that Harvey had been sexually abused by two adults since he was a child and warned that his mother would be harmed unless he kept silent. Years as a passive object of lust led to the total destruction of his self-esteem; killing hospital patients was his way of asserting that he was a ‘doer’, a mover, not a nonentity.
In most cases of serial murder there is an element of this kind of self-assertion. Many such killers are naturally ‘dominant’—members of what zoologists call ‘the dominant 5 per cent’—but find themselves in a situation in which they feel passive and impotent. Psychologically speaking, such killers can differ as radically as the American Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to 360 murders that were basically motivated by sex, and the British nurse Beverley Allitt, who killed children in hospital out of some strange sense of inadequacy.
The same inadequacy can be seen in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, who drugged and murdered males he lured back to his Milwaukee apartment, and the Russian Andrei Chikatilo, whose sexual impotence vanished only when he was inflicting multiple stab wounds on his victims.
The desire to inflict pain is an element that links many serial killers. This sadism may or may not have been present early in their lives but could have developed as a result of sexual obsession. Here we encounter one of the strangest and most difficult psychological mysteries connected with the serial killer. Many men, from Casanova and the anonymous Victorian who wrote My Secret Life to H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, have experienced a desire to sleep with every attractive woman they see; the urge seems to be as uncomplicated as an angler’s desire to catch a fish. Yet in others this urge can get out of control and turn into the need to inflict pain and humiliation. One of the most horrific examples of the sadistic rape syndrome was Donald ‘Pee Wee’ Gaskins. He was imprisoned for murdering nine people, thought to be business acquaintances with whom he had quarrelled. Later it was revealed that he was probably the worst serial killer of this century; he killed consistently and regularly over a number of years, the result of an abnormal and overdeveloped sexual urge. In 1991 he went to the electric chair having confessed to killing over 120 victims.
Gaskins explained that he acted when a boiling rage, like hot lead, welled up from somewhere deep inside. Other serial killers acted only when drunk, or under the influence of drugs. One man, Steve Wilson, killed two prostitutes in a motel in Los Angeles in 1944, cutting them up in the manner of the original Ripper. He told the psychiatrist that he had strong sadistic tendencies which only emerged when he was drunk—his first wife had left him because he liked to creep up on her when she was naked and cut her buttocks with a razor; he would then apologize and kiss the wounds. Wilson was executed in the San Quentin gas chamber in September 1946.
Many other serial killers have committed their murders when drunk—two notable cases being the Briton Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer from Milwaukee. All three—Wilson, Nilsen and Dahmer—have one thing in common: a traumatic childhood. When Steve Wilson was 5, he and his siblings were placed in an orphanage. Dennis Nilsen’s father was a violent drunk and Nilsen was farmed out to his grandparents. Jeffery Dahmer’s parents quarrelled violently for years before finally separating, and Dahmer complained that his childhood was loveless. The seeds of serial murder are planted in childhood, in a sense of neglect and occasionally of downright abuse. Since this rarely happens in higher-income families, the majority of serial killers are working class, and the few who are not (Dahmer’s father was an electrical engineer) are neglected and emotionally deprived.
Can a head injury turn a man into a killer? As we shall see during the course of this book, many serial killers have sustained serious and damaging head injuries early in life, including Joseph Vacher, the nineteenth-century ‘Ripper’, Earle Nelson, America’s ‘wandering sex killer’, and Albert Fish, who is believed to have killed dozens of children over a lifetime of sexual perversion.1
We can also see that sex murder—in the sense of murder committed purely for sexual satisfaction—is a fairly recent phenomenon. There have, of course, been notable exceptions (we have already mentioned Gilles de Rais and Countess Elizabeth Bathory) but throughout the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, sex crime, in our modern sense of the term, was unknown. The first sex murderer to achieve universal notoriety was the unknown killer who called himself Jack the Ripper.
Between 31 August 1888 and 9 November 1888, five murders took place within an area of half a mile in the East End of London. The killer’s method was to cut the throat of the women—probably from behind—then to cut open the stomach and pull out the intestines. On several occasions he took away certain organs.
The first of the Ripper murders to attract the attention of the general public was that of a prostitute named Mary Anne Nicholls (known as Polly), who was found just before dawn on Friday, 31 August, lying on the pavement in Bucks Row, Whitechapel, with her throat cut. It was not until she had been removed to a nearby mortuary that it was discovered that the abdomen had been slashed open from the ribs to the pelvis. Polly Nicholls, 42, had been sleeping in a fourpence-a-night doss house, but had been turned away the evening before because she had no money. She had gone off looking for a male who would give her a few pence in exchange for sex in an alleyway. In fact, her killer had displayed exceptional coolness in cutting her throat within a few feet of an open bedroom window; the people in the room had heard nothing.
It was in the vicinity of such an alleyway, used for casual sex, that the body of 47-year-old Annie Chapman was found sprawled on her back in the early hours of September 8. She lay in the yard of a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, a few coins lying ritualistically around her. Two front teeth were missing; so were her ovaries and kidneys. Again, the killer had murdered her quickly and silently, close to a house full of people.
The murders caused widespread anger and panic. There were noisy meetings in the street, and editorials demanded action from the police. And on 28 September, the Central News Agency received a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, and threatening more murders. When it was published two days later, the gruesome soubriquet captured the public imagination. And as if reacting to the clamour, ‘the Ripper’ committed a double murder that same night. He was interrupted immediately after he had cut the throat of a woman named Elizabeth Stride, in the backyard of a workmen’s club in Berner Street; a carter drove into the yard and saw a man bending over the body. By the time he had raised the alarm, the man had fled. He walked half a mile to Mitre Square, on the edge of the city, and picked up a prostitute named Catherine Eddowes, who had just been released from jail for drunkenness. There he cut her throat and disembowelled her, removing the left kidney and some of the entrails. After this the killer cut off part of her apron, then went and washed his hands in a public sink in an alleyway; the piece of apron was found a quarter of a mile away to the north and bloodstains on it suggested that it had been used to wipe the blood off the knife. Someone had written on a wall above it ‘The Juwes [or Jewes] are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of Police, ordered the words to be erased in case they caused antisemitic violence.
Another ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter, which must have been posted soon after the double murder, reached the Central News Agency the next day, apologizing for not sending the ears of the victim, but explaining that he had been interrupted. And on 16 October, George Lusk, the president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, also received a letter (‘from hell, Mr Lusk’) enclosing half a human kidney, taken from someone suffering from Bright’s Disease (as Catherine Eddowes was), and stating that the writer (who signed himself ‘Catch me when you can’) had fried and eaten the other half.
October 1888 passed without incident, but on the morning of 9 November, the body of 24-year-old Mary Kelly was found in her rented room in Millers Court, mutilated beyond recognition. The killer had obviously spent a long time dissecting the body and removing most of the organs and entrails, slicing off the breasts, and cutting the skin off the face so it looked like a skull. A pile of burnt rags in the grate suggested he had done this by firelight. This time no body parts had been taken away.
This, so far as we know, was the last of the Ripper murders.
The uproar caused by Mary Kelly’s murder led to the resignation of Sir Charles Warren, and to renewed efforts by the police and a committee of public vigilantes to trap the murderer. But although three more cut-throat murders of prostitutes were attributed to Jack the Ripper during the next three years, the public had, in fact, heard the last of the sadistic disemboweller of Whitechapel.
Over the years, there have been at least two dozen books claiming to have established the Ripper’s identity once and for all. The first, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, by an Australian journalist named Leonard Matters, announced that the killer was a certain Dr Stanley, who had murdered the women to avenge the death of his son, who had died of syphilis acquired from Mary Kelly; he had questioned several prostitutes about Mary Kelly, killing them to prevent them from warning her, then having finally discovered the woman who had been responsible for his son’s death, had killed her with exceptional savagery. Unfortunately for this theory, Mary Kelly was not suffering from syphilis, and no Dr Stanley can be traced in the medical registers of that time. Matters almost certainly invented the whole story.
Since then, the many candidates have included an unsuccessful barrister called Montague John Druitt, who drowned himself in the Thames soon after the murders, Queen Victoria’s grandson the Duke of Clarence (who died in a flu epidemic in 1892), Queen Victoria’s physician Sir William Gull, the Duke of Clarence’s tutor James Stephen, a mad Russian doctor named Pedachenko, a journalist named D’Onston Stephenson, the painter Walter Sickert, the artist Frank Miles (a friend of Oscar Wilde), an insane Jew called Kaminsky or Cohen, and an American quack doctor named Frank Tumblety. All of those, for various reasons, must be discounted.2
In my own view the most likely suspect so far is a man who is himself known as a murder victim. In 1993, The Diary of Jack the Ripper by Shirley Harrison revealed that a handwritten notebook signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ had turned up in Liverpool. Apparently the original finder was an out-of-work scrap dealer called Mike Barrett, who claimed that he had been given the Diary by a friend named Tony Devereux, with the comment, ‘Do something with it.’
In a book on poisoning, Barrett came upon the Maybrick case, and learned that the Maybricks had lived in Battlecrease House—which was mentioned in the Diary as the home of the man who signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’. The author of the Diary—to judge from internal evidence—was James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, who died in 1889, apparently poisoned by his wife Florence. The defence was based on the fact that Maybrick habitually swallowed arsenic, strychnine, cocaine and other drugs as stimulants. Nevertheless, Florence was convicted and sentenced to death; at the last minute her sentence was commuted to fifteen years imprisonment.
In 1880, five years before the murders, the 41-year-old Maybrick had fallen in love with 18-year-old Florence on a transatlantic crossing; they married and moved into Battlecrease House, in Aigburth, Liverpool. Their relationship soured when Florence discovered that he had a mistress, whom he still saw regularly, and several children. She banished him from her bed. Worse still, she began to have affairs with other men—she even stayed in a London hotel with a lover named Alfred Brierley. The writer of the Diary seems to be a man who lives in a frenzy of jealousy; he often refers to his wife as ‘the whore’.
Maybrick was frequently in London on business, and stayed in the Whitechapel area. He had known Whitechapel well since his early days as an apprentice in London, and married a woman named Sarah Robertson there (so the marriage to Florence was apparently bigamous). He seemed a highly plausible candidate for the Whitechapel killer.
The publisher of The Diary of Jack the Ripper made the serious mistake of offering it to the Sunday Times for serialization. It was a disastrous miscalculation. The Sunday Times had been deeply embarrassed over the affair of the forged Hitler diaries, which historian Trevor Roper had endorsed as genuine; now it took the opportunity to denounce the Ripper Diary as a fraud, on the grounds that the handwriting was unlike that of Maybrick’s will, which was written in ‘copperplate’. Unfortunately, no other example of Maybrick’s handwriting seems to exist, although he must certainly have used a less formal hand for personal letters.
Six months later, the Diary’s finder, Mike Barrett, announced that he had forged the Diary using a modern ink called Diomine. He had withdrawn the claim within hours, explaining that he was drunk at the time (he was an alcoholic), and had said it in order to hurt his wife Anne, who had recently left him. And although Barrett’s handwriting is not remotely like that of the Diary, and the ink in which it was written has been proved not to be Diomine, the claim has stuck, so that most people now have a vague notion that the Diary has been proved a fraud.
The contrary is true. In July 1994, Barrett’s wife Anne admitted to Paul Feldman—producer of a video on the Diary, who had spent a fortune researching its provenance—that the Diary had been in possession of her family for years, originally belonging to her father, then her grandfather. It had been given to her by her father, Billy Graham, but she had taken no interest in it—she was not even sure whether Jack the Ripper was a real or fictional character. Because her husband was trying hard to become a writer, she had decided to give him the Diary, to see if he could turn it into a literary project that might prevent him from drinking so heavily. Since they were on such bad terms, she preferred to give him the Diary through his friend and drinking companion Tony Devereux, who was simply to hand it to him with the comment, ‘Do something with it’. Devereux followed her instructions, handing over the brown paper parcel without even opening it.
Anne Barrett’s father was dying of cancer; nevertheless, he agreed to see Paul Feldman. Feldman had been tracking down James Maybrick’s many descendants—mostly the illegitimate line—and was convinced that Billy Graham was a Maybrick. He was stunned when Graham admitted, on tape, that in fact he was the grandson of Florence Maybrick, who had called herself Graham when she came out of prison. Feldman also recalled that when Florence revisited England from America, long after her release from prison, she had commented that she wanted to see her children—when in fact she had only one surviving child by Maybrick.
Feldman’s researches have established convincingly that Florence had already had an illegitimate child in Liverpool before she met Maybrick, and that the child had been ‘farmed out’ to a family named Graham. The evidence for this is circumstantial, yet very persuasive. Towards the end of the Diary, the writer remarks ‘I have told Bunny all’—Bunny was Maybrick’s pet name for Florence, it seems, therefore, highly probably that the Diary was originally in Florence’s possession, that after her death it was passed on by her solicitor to her illegitimate son, William Graham, and by him to his son Billy—who confirms that he gave it to his daughter Anne.
When the Diary was examined by the American expert on forged documents, Kenneth Rendell, Rendell announced that it was a forgery, dating from 1921, plus or minus twelve years. This is obviously absurd; the Diary is either a modern forgery, dating from after 1986, or it is almost certainly genuine. The ink expert Alec Voller—who works for Diomine—also looked at the Diary, and stated unhesitatingly that the fact the the ink had ‘bronzed’ indicated that it was at least ninety years old.
In my own view, James Maybrick is far and away the likeliest Ripper candidate so far.
The purpose of this book is to explore the mind of the serial killer through examples and case histories. They are chronicled from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the first serial killers emerged, to the mid-1990s, when one policeman declared, ‘there may be as many as five thousand of them out there.’
The rise of sex crime in the nineteenth century is linked to the rise of pornography, which first became widely available towards the end of the eighteenth century, with books such as Fanny Hill (1747) and the Marquis de Sade’s novels, which included Justine and Juliette. The latter particularly recognized the link between sexual excitement and violence. The marquis himself was twice imprisoned, once for beating prostitutes and again for writing books of such extraordinary violence. In the early years of the twentieth century, killers of the “bluebeard” type, such as Johann Hoch and Belle Gunness, America’s favourite murderess, began to appear and at one period New Orleans was home to a man who killed only Italian shopkeepers. The twenties gave rise to people like Carl Panzram, a cool and calculating, intelligent and articulate ‘resentment’ killer.
The period following the Second World War saw a decline in the murder rate, but it rose steeply during the fifties. The crime figures always fall during and immediately after wars, but it soon became clear that something strange was happening. An increasing number of murderers seemed to be in the grip of a compulsion to kill, from Christie with his private morgue at 10 Rillington Place to the German Werner Boost who killed courting couples and violated the woman. In Britain, the most traumatic crimes of the sixties were the Moors murders, and the most frightening thing about them was that Ian Brady was an articulate and intelligent ‘criminal outsider’ who shared Sade’s obsession with ‘the forbidden’ and quoted Dostoevsky. Before the end of the decade, Charles Manson would also preach a philosophy that justified murder. But it was the seventies that saw the emergence of serial murder in Robert Resseler’s sense, with sex criminals like Dean Corll, John Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas, who killed on an unprecedented scale. And in the eighties and nineties, cases like the Atlanta murders, the Green River killer, the Paris ‘phantom’, the Night Stalker, the Milwaukee cannibal, the ‘Red Ripper’ and the Gloucester ‘house of horror’ revealed that serial murder is a disease that criminologists have not yet even begun to understand.
This book is an attempt to throw some light on the problem by tracing its history and development.
1 For a discussion of the effects of head injury see chapter 11, where it has special relevance to the behaviour of Frederick West.
2 I have dealt at length with the suspects in a compilation entitled The Mammoth Book of True Crime II.