Among hundreds of letters offering advice to the City Police on how to catch the Whitechapel murderer is one, dated 16 October 1888, from Major R D O Stephenson, c/o the London Hospital. This is the time-wasting busybody and one-time suspect Robert Donston Stephenson who believed that the infamous ‘Juwes’ written in chalk in Goulston Street on the night of the ‘double event’ (29/30 September) was actually ‘Juives’ and therefore the killer was French. Since Stephenson went on to denounce Dr Morgan of the London Hospital, he was clearly throwing unhelpful barbs in any number of directions.
As a self-confessed Satanist, Stephenson had some bizarre comments on the Whitechapel murders, seeing in them a ritualistic necromancy involved in Haute Magic. Various body parts are required for the spells to work, including ‘a preparation made from a certain portion of the body of a harlot’. How Stephenson’s magician was supposed to obtain the other ingredients – the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer’s gallows, candles made from human fat, the head of a black cat which has been fed on human flesh and the horns of a goat used as murder weapons – is unclear; but presumably acquiring the genitalia of a prostitute was simple by comparison!
What is more interesting – and relevant – to reality is Stephenson’s take on the pattern created by the murder sites. Because the Kelly murder was committed indoors, Stephenson believed that she was not a victim of the Whitechapel murderer (which is a theme more rational people have also taken up). The remaining six – like most contemporaries, Stephenson adds Emma Smith and Martha Tabram to Macnaghten’s ‘canonical five’ – form, he said, a perfect cross. By drawing a line between Mitre Square (the Eddowes murder) and Buck’s Row (Polly Nichols) we have one arm of the cross. By joining Hanbury Street (Annie Chapman) with Berner Street (Liz Stride) we have the other. Martha Tabram, Emma Smith and the Goulston Street graffito all lay along the longer arm of the cross. Kelly of course had to be discounted because Dorset Street lay outside the cruciform pattern. ‘Did the murderer, then … deliberately pick out beforehand on a map the places he would offer [the sacrificial victims] to his infernal deity of murder? If not, surely those six coincidences are the most marvellous of our time.’
As Paul Roland says1, ‘Once you start playing “join the dots” you can make any series of random events and locations assume an unintentional significance provided you are selective in choosing the pattern you wish them to conform to.’
Supporters of this ‘hidden pattern’ hypothesis have also discovered a satanic pentagram, a uterus-shaped vesica piscis (the womb being the killer’s target in the eyes of many theorists) and even an arrowhead which points to the West End, specifically the Houses of Parliament.
But ironically, the peculiar Major Stephenson is nearly right; serial murder does create patterns of a different kind and it is these which we must understand to find our killer. The term that covers this hypothesis is geographical profiling, coined in the late 1980s by Canadian police officer Kim Rossno in describing an aid to psychological profiling which we shall discuss in the final chapter.
Just as we might scoff at ‘Roslyn D’Onston’s’ black magician murderer stalking the East End, so some police forces and even sections of the media still dismiss profiling as nonsense. ‘Criminal profilers,’ wrote the Washington Post, ‘may be the logical outgrowths of a society that believes all of human reality can be quantified … a touching faith in the truth revealing ability of statistical analysis.’2 Benjamin Disraeli once dismissed statistics as ‘lies, damned lies’ as though statistics were worse still; and quantitative history as taught by universities today does tend to deny the human element. But that said, there is a sure reality in the concept of geographical profiling – murder-mapping – that cannot be denied.
All seven of the women murdered by the man the media dubbed Jack the Ripper were flesh-and-blood people, with families, friends, hopes and fears, but that is not why Jack killed them. Follow that path, that the victims were interconnected and/or known to their killer and you arrive at the conspiratorial nonsense we mentioned in Chapter One.
Although several people are recognized today as geographical profilers of eminence, I have chosen Dr David Canter as the man most in step with Jack, even though I believe he eventually misses him by several hundred yards. In connection with the Washington sniper killings in 2002, Canter asked himself what was it about the victims that made them victims? His answer was ‘not who they are, but where they are’. In working this out, we have to take into account two features. The first is the home or base of the killer, which is a fundamental focus for his operations; and the other is how far he is prepared to travel in search of prey. Psychological profilers often use the hunting analogy because we can all recognize the image readily. The hunting area of a big cat in the wild is huge and any number of hapless victims cross its path. It selects them as a human murderer does. They are random, but they are not random. The cat will pick on the old, the lame, the young because they cannot run or fight back. It has no concept of honour or fair play or sport; it simply wants to obtain its next meal as quickly and with the expenditure of as little energy as possible.
In the case of Jack the Ripper, the original media nickname – the Whitechapel murderer – says it all and anchors us in reality. His victims were found in his killing zone, which for him meant Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Only once, through necessity, did he kill elsewhere – as we shall see in the case of Kate Eddowes. It is important to remember that the murderer killed on foot; all his victims were within easy walking distance of his base of operations. This is why some suspects do not work. Foreign sailors, like the Portuguese four – José Laurenco, Manuel Xavier, Joao Machado and Joachim de Rocha – do not fit the bill because they arrived in the Port of London by merchant ship and left in the same way. They had no working knowledge of the killing ground and would have had to have been magical, not merely lucky, to get away with the crimes.
Likewise, the notion of a carriage being involved – various aspects of the ‘highest in the land’ theory depend on one – falls apart for the same reason. All the victims, we know, were killed where they were found – there is no forensic evidence of body-dumping – and no tracks of wheeled vehicles near any of the murder sites. Modern serial killers use motorized transport, often in connection with their jobs and this means that their geographical range is huge. The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, struck on both sides of the Pennines. He was a long-distance lorry-driver and acquired knowledge of places far afield. And he cruised red light districts in his car. Even so, most of his murders happened on his own patch, within the ‘circle’ of Yorkshire. Child-killer Robert Black was a highly unusual killer in that his crimes were not only committed as far apart as Oxford and Edinburgh, but there were also huge distances between the murder/abduction sites and the places where he dumped his victims’ bodies.
Because of the nature of the area, the type of victim and the man I believe the Whitechapel murderer to have been, we know that he travelled over small distances in search of prey and was able to return just as quickly. As behavioural investigative adviser Professor Laurence Alison says:
Today’s geoprofilers would break down the sub-tasks the offender needed to accomplish in order to escape and examine the exit points from the scene of each attack. They would systematically consider the most likely route home, including temporal (time) and topographical (detailed lay of the land) patterns that may influence the choice the offender makes in targeting crime scenes.3
The seven murder sites form dots on a map and, as David Canter says, each dot ‘encapsulates layers of meaning, the explosive mix of a criminal’s and a victim’s habits’.4 What is it about each of the locations that was important? In investigating the brutal sex killings committed by Robert Napper in the 1990s, Laurence Alison found the pattern which I believe closely mirrors Jack:
‘First by committing the first offence in one direction … then moving the next offence in a different direction, then the third in [yet another] only returning [to the first direction] after a further offence. In other words [serial killers] use in sequence all points of the compass.5
Martha Tabram was killed on Tuesday 7 August 1888 in George Yard Buildings to the south of Wentworth Street. George Yard itself, narrow, dark, infested with a criminal underclass, linked Wentworth Street to Whitechapel High Street and is today called Gunthorpe Street. The White Swan pub still stands and it was from here that Martha Tabram vanished into the darkness with a soldier cliet. George Yard itself was demolished in 1972, although sections of Victorian walls still survive. The best known image, taken from William Stewart’s 1938 book, shows the original archway through which Martha walked. The precise murder spot was on a first floor landing. The space here, hemmed in by stairs and walls, is important to our killer as we shall see later.
Polly Nichols died in Buck’s Row in the early hours of 30 August. The street had already been renamed Durward Street when Leonard Matters visited it in 1928, but the actual buildings had changed little:
It is a narrow, cobbled, mean street, having on one side the same houses – possibly tenanted by the same people – which stood there in 1888. They are shabby, dirty little houses of two storeys and only a three foot pavement separates them from the road, which is no more than twenty feet from wall to wall. On the opposite sides are the high walls of warehouses which at night would shadow the dirty street in a far deeper gloom.
As we shall see, the cramped, confined space was important as a crime scene, but the fact that Polly was killed at the entrance to an even more enclosed space, the stables known as Brown’s Yard, is more claustrophobic still. William Stewart’s 1938 photograph shows Emma Green’s New Cottage still standing and the original stable doors now fronting a garage.
‘Dark Annie’ Chapman met her end on Saturday 8 September behind No 29 Hanbury Street, one of a terraced row of once-smart houses built for the Huguenot weavers who moved into the area in the eighteenth century because it was outside the trading restrictions of the City itself. Photographs taken in 1961 by Margaret Whitby-Green show the narrow passageway that led from the front of the building to the yard at the back. Ahead of Annie and her killer as they walked was a set of wooden stairs rising to the upper floors. The corridor itself kinked to the right and the back door to the yard, hinged on the left, opened outwards. Here, three stone steps led down to the yard itself, with its privy (lavatory) and rickety wooden fencing all round; it was another confined space, better for the killer’s purposes than Buck’s Row. Another of Margaret Whitby-Green’s photographs shows the view from the back door, with the stairs to the right this time. This was the view seen by Annie’s murderer as he left. It was already dawn and he had places to be.
Berner Street was formed on 1 May 1868 out of a combination of Upper and Lower Berner Street and Batty Buildings. It was a dingy area twenty years later, with two-storey terraced houses facing each other, but it was considered respectable at the time and was dotted with shops, like Matthew Packer’s grocers, two doors down from the killing ground of Dutfield’s Yard.
‘The scene of [Liz Stride’s] murder,’ wrote the Star on 1 October 1888, ‘was within the gateway at No 40, which is occupied by a Jewish working men’s club… It is a building of two storeys. A passage wide enough to admit a cart separates it from the next house… The court is very small… At night, this courtyard is dark except for the light from the house windows.’
Again, a dark area. Again, a confined space. On the night of 29/30 September, it was almost perfect.
But not quite. The second murder site on that night of the dreadful ‘double event’ was Mitre Square, near Aldgate in the jurisdiction of the City Police. The basic outline of the square still exists, but new buildings have given the place a sense of light and space that it did not possess in the Autumn of Terror. There were three gas lamps in the square which gave very little light and the only major way in was via Mitre Street. The other two passages were very narrow, probably only allowing access for one person at a time. The square was dwarfed by tall warehouses and only one of the two private houses there was occupied – No 3 was the home of City policeman Richard Pearse. William Stewart’s photograph of ‘Ripper’s Corner’ where the body of Kate Eddowes was found on the broad slab of the pavement shows what is probably leaking rainwater from a downpipe, but it looks eerily like blood.
Of all the sites of the Whitechapel murders, it is most difficult today to imagine that of Mary Kelly, killed on 8/9 November 1888. Leonard Matters, writing in 1929, was aware of the new developments:
What Dorset Street was like sixty years ago can only be imagined… it is undergoing a rapid change [by then it had been renamed Duval Street] and the buildings on the left hand side going east have nearly all been torn down to make room for extensions of Spitalfields Market… The house in which Kelly was murdered was closed, save for one front room still occupied by a dreadful-looking slattern who… swore at me and shuffled away down the passage.
Matters took what was probably the last photograph of the place because three days later a wrecking crew moved in. The passageway that led to No 13 Miller’s Court was three feet wide and twenty feet long; the yard itself almost fifteen square feet. Kelly’s room was ‘a dirty, damp and dismal hovel, with boarded-up windows and a padlocked door as though the place had not been occupied since the crime was committed’.6 That was only twelve feet square.
Many writers on the Whitechapel murders have found something different or even special about the murder of Mary Kelly and I agree. But it has nothing to do with her age, her alleged attractiveness or her personal history. It has everything to do with the room in which she died.
The crime scene of the last victim, ‘Clay Pipe’ Alice McKenzie, on Wednesday 17 July 1889, was described by the East London Observer:
The scene of the murder is probably one of the lowest quarters in the whole of East London and a spot more suitable for the terrible crime could hardly be found on account of the evil reputation borne by this particular place… The thoroughfare itself [Castle Alley] is blocked up, both day and night, with tradesmen’s carts and wagons and costermongers’ barrows. This alley, which is entered by a passage, not more than a yard in width… is entirely shut off from view of the main road and would hardly be observed by the ordinary passer-by… Although the houses… are densely populated, the people generally enter them from the Spitalfields end, especially at night time on account of the dark and lonely nature of Castle Alley.
As the paper says, the clutter of vehicles rendered the gas lamps almost useless and Alice’s body was found between two wagons chained together. It was not ideal, but it would have to do.
‘The murderer,’ continued the Observer, ‘on account of the narrowness and intricacy of the surrounding thoroughfares, would have no difficulty in getting away unobserved; and if, as is believed, he is residing in one of the dozen common lodging houses or small houses within a stone’s throw of the spot where the deed was committed, he would have no trouble in concealing his identity after making his escape.’7
Any Ripperologist with a conspiratorial bent should have read these words before embarking on the theme of Masonic ritual, foreign sailor, arrogant artist or unpleasant Liverpool cotton merchant. As if to underscore this point and to back up the correctness of the Observer’s journalist 120 years ago, a study conducted in 1994 found that the average distance travelled by one sub-group of stranger murderers was just 525 yards.8
One problem for any researcher trying to identify the man who was Jack is what profiler David Canter calls the ‘plague of coincidence’. I believe that seven women were killed by the same man in the space of eleven months (six of them within four months) in one relatively small area of London’s East End. One of the myths of the Ripper case, which has been used pivotally in more than one silly theory, is that all the victims (the ‘canonical five’ as the core) knew each other. If we plot their early lives: Polly Nichols came from central London (Fetter Lane); Annie Chapman from Paddington; Liz Stride was Swedish; Kate Eddowes came from Wolverhampton; and Mary Kelly was almost certainly Irish. In the context of the dosshouses where they spent their final weeks: Annie Chapman stayed at Crossingham’s at 35 Dorset Street; Polly Nichols at 18 Thrawl Street and the White House, 56 Flower and Dean; Liz Stride lodged at 32 Flower and Dean and 35 Devonshire Street; Kate Eddowes stayed at 55 Flower and Dean. Mary Kelly of course, had her room in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street. As far as we are able to plot the pubs in which the victims drank: Polly Nichols frequented the Frying Pan; Annie Chapman, the Britannia; Liz Stride the Queen’s Head and the Bricklayers’ Arms; and Mary Kelly the Britannia, the Horn of Plenty and the Ten Bells. Only the Britannia is common ground – to Chapman and Kelly, not the others and the only vague concentration of doss is Flower and Dean Street, not Dorset Street as many Ripperologists contend. In other words, all that connects the victims is that they followed the same (highly dangerous) occupation (as did several hundred like them) and lived in the same area, along with half a million others.
Given the similarity of names, it is not surprising that coincidences occur and they do confuse. There are Annies, Sarahs, Elizabeths, Kates and Marys all over the Ripper story. The fact that Kate Eddowes used the name Kelly when she pawned items on the day of her death has fuelled all sorts of speculation, but before the Jews moved in, Whitechapel was a strongly Irish community and most street girls used aliases to keep one step ahead of the law.
Certainly, all the Ripper’s victims were prostitutes and this is important in establishing motive – we shall examine it further in the last chapter – but the plague of coincidence is continued even in descriptions of the clothes the dead women wore and those worn by their clients, according to eyewitness accounts.
David Canter is writing about modern serial killers when he says:
As the anonymity of cities grows and the mobility of even established rural communities is overlaid with the cosmopolitan values of the Internet and mass media, we all know each other less and less.9
But even by 1888, London was the largest city in the world. Whitechapel and Spitalfields, known as the Abyss or the Ghetto, was home, as we have seen, to half a million people. In part, it was that very anonymity that sheltered Jack the Ripper and it was partly the reason he was never caught.
To understand who the man was, we have to visualize the ‘mental map’ of his crimes. This is the ‘bundle of knowledge, feelings, familiarity, habitual paths and half-forgotten experiences…’10 which fill a murderer’s mind. Put simply, a serial killer will follow a certain geographical pattern. The Whitechapel murderer is what is known by some profilers as a ‘marauder’ – he killed within a circle of comfort, the first full-blown crime the nearest to his home, the others radiating outwards as he got bolder and more experienced and also because of the need to avoid a return to his former crime scenes. Some eyewitnesses certainly saw him talking to his victims before he struck, but no one saw him leave because he knew the area so well. Every court, every alleyway, the position of every lamp, the beat of every policeman – all of this formed a vital part of his mental map.
David Canter fits the circle hypothesis to the Ripper murders but is led astray by the Maybrick Diary. He finds the psychological tone of the diary disturbing, believing that it could well have been written by someone with a deep psychosis. This may be true (although dozens of crime fiction writers produce similar stuff for their readership as a matter of course!) but it does not give us Jack. The diaries have Middlesex Street as the killer’s lodgings, so that becomes the home or lair or centre of operations and all the murders radiate out from that to form a distinctive pattern.
We know that the Maybrick Diary is a fake, so that Middlesex Street is yet another red herring in a long list of red herrings.
That said, Dr Canter’s thesis still holds good. There is a pattern to the Whitechapel murderer’s crimes. Each location does have deep significance for him. Geographical profiler Spencer Chainey of University College London’s Jill Dando Institute has plotted a profile map of Jack’s killings. If we place the canonical five in a computer programme, we get a focus of activity centred on Wentworth Street. If we factor in the murders of Martha Tabram and Alice McKenzie we get a slightly different pattern which, intriguingly, shifts the emphasis further east. The main centre of activity, which includes the doss-houses frequented by all of Jack’s victims, represents his hunting ground. The other, less pronounced, may be his home or a similar focus – the Ripper’s lair. As ever, the secrets lie in the Abyss.