No self-respecting book on Jack the Ripper would be complete without a discussion of the various theories, some nonsensical, some ingenious, all of them fascinating, which have emerged in the long trail on the search for the most elusive killer of them all.
In the process of any criminal investigation, part of the work of the police is to eliminate suspects as quickly as possible and that is what we must do here. Unfortunately, such is the grip of the Ripper that the number of suspects has risen dramatically in recent years and shows no sign of diminishing, however far-fetched and preposterous the idea. As I write, a book is about to emerge naming the anonymous (of course!) pornographer ‘Walter’ as Jack. Another alleges that the whole thing was a media enterprise born of the need to win a newspaper circulation war.
The police, under outrageous and mounting pressure at the time, arrested nearly 200 men in the weeks over which Jack struck, only to have to release all their suspects for lack of evidence. Most of the men discussed in this chapter were not arrested. Many of them did not come to the attention of the police at all and come under the category of ‘non-contemporaneously alleged’. This is the silly season of the Ripperologists, the far-fetched theories which cause such delight.
I must admit to being slightly schizoid. As a writer of true crime, I know that murder is grim and that no one exposed to it emerges quite intact; not the victim, obviously, nor his/her family. But neither do the police who investigate it, the journalists who cover it; nor, controversially, the murderer himself. Crime fiction however, is one great romp, in which the reader curls up with a good book in order to be entertained.
The same schizophrenia is apparent in Rosemary Herbert’s definition of murder in her seminal work on Crime and Mystery Writing:
From the time of its origin as an Old English word until today, the term ‘murder’ has meant the most heinous kind of taking of life, the killing of one or more than one human being by another, also known as homicide. The term often denoted secret homicide and it carried the sense of great wickedness, deadly injury and great torment. In the laws of England, Scotland and the United States, murder is defined as the criminal killing of a human being with malice aforethought or wilful murder. In the law courts of these nations, conviction on a charge of wilful murder rests upon establishing that the perpetrator was of sound mind when the act occurred.1
So far, so factual, but the definition in the context of fiction immediately widens to an unbelievable degree. We are presented with detective novels, police procedurals, private eye novels, the quest for means, opportunity, motive and much more. It is in this context that many Ripper theories lie. When I wrote my essay for Maxim Jakubowski’s Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper I pointed the finger at Frederick Nicholas Charrington, the heir to a brewing fortune who, outraged by the violence instanced by the consumption of his own family’s beer, turned his back on the Charrington fortune and spent years in the East End battling the demon drink on behalf of others and fighting prostitution. What better way to throw a spotlight on the social evils of the East End than to kill and mutilate unfortunates and start an outcry? At the end of my essay I formally apologized to the shade of Frederick Charrington, a good man in a troubled time, but what I was doing was showing how easy it was to put almost any contemporary in the frame.
This is where William Ewart Gladstone steps into the picture. ‘The People’s William’ had become the ‘Grand Old Man’ by 1888. He had already served three times as Prime Minister and still had one term left. He was a fierce Christian, seventy-nine years old and in the year of the Whitechapel murders was leader of the Liberal opposition. He had no known links with Whitechapel. It is certainly true that the GOM’s moral fervour had led him as an undergraduate at Oxford to fight the social evil of prostitution. He did visit prostitutes, but notably the rather more fashionable streetwalkers of the West End whom he would invite politely back to tea with Mrs Gladstone.
As we saw in Chapter One, the public image, despite years of mythbusting and excellent Ripper research, is still effectively the suave monster in the top hat and cape. The mythology of the doctor runs like a blood-trickle through the case and so the bag carries the deadly surgeon’s blade. The bag had no actual link with the politician in that Gladstone never carried one, but the context can be traced to 1876. In that year, the Turks massacred an estimated 12,000 Christian Armenians in Bulgaria. Gladstone, all the textbooks assure us, came ‘thundering’ out of retirement to demand that Disraeli, his nemesis at No 10, kick the Turks out of Europe ‘bag and baggage’. The Gladstone libel is patent nonsense.
Algernon Charles Swinburne must be among the silliest candidates ever for Jack the Ripper. He is a classic example of the non-contemporaneous alleged suspect; nothing about him fits. He was born in 1837, which certainly does not rule him out as the Whitechapel murderer, but certainly no fifty-one-year-old stranger was seen in the company of any of the victims on the various nights in question. A slim, effeminate, narrow-shouldered boy, he was mercilessly bullied at Eton and failed to obtain a degree from Balliol College, Oxford. He became a friend, in the 1860s, of the great and good among the literati, had a nervous breakdown and was ‘rescued’ by the minor poet and critic Theodore Watts-Dunton with whom he lived in semi-retirement until his death in 1909. He has no known links with Whitechapel and was known to have masochistic tendencies. Whatever else motivated the crimes of Jack the Ripper, masochism was not among them.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was, like Swinburne, an oddity and underneath the outward trappings of Victorian respectability, quite possibly a little bit sordid. He took holy orders in 1861 and burst onto the literary scene under his pen name Lewis Carroll four years later with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The focus of the book, and the vicar’s attention, was the eleven-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church. It was Ripperologist Richard Wallace who suggested the man in Jack the Ripper: ‘Light-Hearted Fiend’, in 1997. Wallace believed that various entries deleted from Dodgson’s diaries, now at the British Library, held clues to the killings. There is in fact absolutely nothing to connect Lewis Carroll with Jack the Ripper.
Dr Thomas Barnardo is of a different calibre altogether. For the first time in this chapter, we have a man with contemporary links with Whitechapel who actually talked to Liz Stride shortly before she died and viewed her corpse in the mortuary. Barnardo underwent some sort of Christian conversion in 1862 and began preaching in the Dublin slums before coming to London to study medicine as a preliminary to missionary work. He never got further south-east than Stepney, where he founded his East End Mission for destitute boys. Ripperologist Gary Rowlands has read something sinister into Barnardo’s lonely, repressed childhood and the sudden religious fervour, which became a way of life by his young manhood. Religious mania has often been cited as a motive for murder and such characters litter crime fiction. In fact, it is extremely rare and there is absolutely no sign of it in the Whitechapel killings. Rowlands took the commonly held medical theme of the murders and added into the mix an alleged diary of Barnardo’s in which the murder dates were left curiously blank. Barnardo was a well-known figure in the Whitechapel/Spitalfields area and he was surely too familiar a face for no one to have commented on his being seen at at least one murder site, for example. To explain the sudden end to the killings, Rowlands postulates that this was brought on by a swimming pool accident shortly after the death of Mary Kelly, which left him deaf!
But the medical theme refuses to go away. We have already dismissed Barnardo, but other medical men have been suggested. The first is Dr William Wynn Westcott. Serious books on the Whitechapel murders do not even include the man as a footnote, but this chapter, devoted as it is to the lunatic fringe, will be more generous. Westcott was educated at University College, London and practised medicine in the West Country before moving to Camden and became coroner for Central London. In the year before the Ripper killings he co-founded, with MacGregor Mathers and William Woodman, the Order of the Golden Dawn, a sub-Masonic society given to Rosicrucian and occult rituals. Ripper theorists Andrew Holloway, Ron Maber and Christopher Smith put Westcott forward in a series of newspaper articles in the 1980s, based largely on the assumption that the Whitechapel killings had a ritualistic element to them beyond that of the disorganized serial killer. There is no actual evidence against Westcott at all.
The second medical murderer is Dr Thomas Neill Cream who committed his first killing in Chicago in 1881 and was lucky to get a mere ten years. An inveterate womanizer, Cream’s target was his mistress’s husband and his method was poison, specifically strychnine. He came to England early in 1891 and settled in Lambeth where he used the same corrosive MO on local prostitutes. An extraordinary exhibitionist, Cream wrote taunting letters to the police under a variety of assumed names and tripped himself up. He was executed by the hangman James Billington in the autumn of 1892 and, under the muffling hood and with the rope around his neck, muttered the infuriating half sentence, ‘I am Jack the …’ before Billington’s pulling of the gallows lever cut him short. Despite the efforts of devotees who have tried to claim otherwise, Cream was still in Joliet prison, Illinois, serving time for the Chicago murder, when the real Jack struck. Lambeth is not Whitechapel and although the victims were all prostitutes, serial killers do not change their modus operandi. Strychnine, not the knife, was Cream’s weapon.
What are other possibilities? Frederick Bailey Deeming horrified both Britain and Australia in the years shortly after Jack’s work by committing mass murder. His first victims were his wife and four children, killed at Rainhill near Liverpool. As a plumber and fitter, Deeming had the tools and the expertise to bury them in concrete under the kitchen floor before leaving for Melbourne in 1892. Here he used the alias of Drewen or Druin, well aware that he was a wanted man. Having killed his second wife in Melbourne, Deeming was caught, tried and found guilty. He supposedly confessed to the last two canonical murders in Whitechapel, that is Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly, although this seems to have been a fiction invented by the Australian newspapers. The ‘evidence’ is non-existent. Deeming’s crimes were domestic – his victims were all family members, not random strangers of the night and we have incontrovertible proof that he was in South Africa in the autumn of 1888 taking him out of the frame altogether.
Dr Roslyn D’Onston was another fantasist whose macabre fascination with the Whitechapel killings has led to an assumption that he was the murderer. We have discussed his puerile map theories already. His name was fictitious – Robert Donston Stephenson was born the son of a Yorkshire seed-oil mill owner in 1841 and at twenty-two was working in the Customs office in Hull. An insufferable snob who grated on his workmates, he was fired and moved to London to become a freelance journalist, writing mostly for William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. It is likely that he was addicted to both alcohol and drugs and may have been charged with assault in June 1887 and indecent assault in the October of the Autumn of Terror. He booked himself into the London Hospital in November and was visited by Dr Morgan Davies, Resident Accoucheur at the hospital who described the Whitechapel murders so graphically that Stephenson believed Davies to be the killer. Stephenson’s biographer, Melvin Harris, claims that Davies was a red herring and that Stephenson himself was the killer. This is odd in that the Stephenson/Davies take on the Ripper’s modus operandi involved sodomizing his victims, which did not happen. Stephenson owned a number of ties which were apparently bloodstained and which were used to carry away the grisly body parts from several of the Whitechapel victims. That Stephenson was a liar, a drunk and made a nuisance of himself (as did several others), pestering the police with ever wilder theories, is not in doubt. As for his being the Whitechapel killer, there is no evidence against him whatsoever.
At least George Chapman was a genuine murderer. Born Severin Klosowski, in Nagornak, Poland in 1865, he seems to have obtained genuine medical qualifications in Warsaw before moving to England in June 1887. Here he worked as a hairdresser, first in the West India Dock Road, then in a basement shop below the White Hart on the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard. He was thirty-seven when William Billington hanged him at Wandsworth for the murders of Isabella Spink, Elizabeth Taylor and Maud Marsh. All three were Klosowski’s mistresses and they all three died by antimony poisoning.
Why should anyone link him with the Ripper? He was in the area, had violent tendencies, surgical knowledge and access to sharp blades. The murders stopped because Klosowski emigrated to the United States relatively soon after Mary Kelly’s death. Retired Chief Inspector Abberline believed Chapman might be Jack and when asked to explain the different MO. involved said, rather limply, that Klosowski’s mistresses, were ‘of different classes and obviously call for different methods of dispatch’.
The theory which blew Ripperology apart in the 1990s was that of the Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick. Whereas many of the suspects in this chapter are born of little more than wishful thinking, Maybrick at least has two tangible pieces of evidence linked to his name. Unfortunately, there is a very high chance that neither of them is genuine. Maybrick holds a rare distinction; he is at once an alleged murderer and an incontrovertible victim. On 11 May 1889, seven months after the death of Mary Kelly, he was given arsenic by his wife Florence and subsequently died. Sentenced to death for murder, she was reprieved and released from prison in 1904.
Ninety years later, the ‘Diary of Jack the Ripper’ – allegedly written by Maybrick in 1888 – was published. Some Ripperologists rejoiced – we knew who Jack was at last. Others were sceptical. The so-called Hitler diaries had been authorized by the eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, bought by The Times for £1 million and were subsequently found to be forgeries. We do not have time in this brief survey to trace the provenance of the Maybrick diaries, except to note that at one point the owner of the book claimed he had forged it himself – a confession immediately retracted by his lawyer.
Exhaustive tests were carried out on the diary, checking ink and paper, not to mention graphology expertise, which was brought to bear on the handwriting (it may be worthy of note that this does not match the only known example of Maybrick’s hand, his signature). Such tests were inconclusive – the paper is old, the ink is old. What cannot be ascertained by science is exactly when the two were put together. The narrative, interspersed with family details and confused, bad poetry, is certainly gripping and reads like the work of a seriously disturbed mind:
I thought it a joke when I cut her breasts off, kissed them for a while. The taste of blood was sweet, the pleasure overwhelming, will have to do it again, it thrilled me so. Left them on the table with some of the other stuff…
‘Maybrick’ is referring to the murder of Mary Kelly, but Kelly’s breasts were not on the table next to her bed – one of them was on the bed itself, underneath her body. These facts were not common knowledge until 1987 when the long-lost medical report of Dr Thomas Bond was rediscovered. Whoever the writer was, he was working without this evidence and he was not the Whitechapel murderer.
The diary claims that the killer took rooms in Middlesex Street – and the sense of the text implies that this was in July 1888 – which places him at the heart of the Ripper’s killing grounds and gives him time to learn the street pattern and the habits of the nightwalkers. From that point on the errors multiply – there was clearly no actual attempt to decapitate Polly Nichols as the diary states; there were no rings or coins near Annie Chapman’s body, although the diary says there were; the timing of the deaths of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes is impossible, with the diary’s fifteen minutes between the murders. In short, the Maybrick diary is a forgery, an example of fiction which has been better written by a number of authors who are perfectly happy to put their names to the work.
In June 1993, a gold half-hunter watch came to light which had scratched on the interior of the case ‘J.Maybrick’, ‘I am Jack’ and a series of initials which are those of the canonical five. We have the same problem here as with the diary – the watch is old, but when were the scratches made and by whom? The diary and the watch were supported in 1997 by Ripperologist Paul Feldman who used various ‘clues’ from the murders to bolster the case. Feldman claimed that the police were checking the torn envelope found near Annie Chapman’s body in Hanbury Street to match the ‘M’, ‘J’ and ‘Sp’ handwritten on it. In fact, from Inspector Chandler’s reports of September 1888, the ‘J’ (for James in Feldman’s contention) is clearly a figure 2. ‘Sp’ is obviously Spitalfields and ‘M’ is the first letter of any number of addresses in the area, e.g. Miller’s Court, Montague Street, the Minories and so on. The inverted ‘v’s carved into the cheeks of Kate Eddowes, Feldman contended, formed the Maybrick ‘M’ if placed side by side. If not placed side by side of course, they form two inverted ‘v’s!
Well-known Ripper experts have placed the Maybrick theory firmly in context. Philip Sugden wrote2:
A reading of the diary still leaves me baffled as to how any intelligent and reasonably informed student of the Ripper case could possibly have taken it seriously.
And Melvyn Harris went one better, noting that the diary’s ‘time-wasting stupidities will linger on to dog historians for years to come’.
But of all the theories which have captured the public imagination, none has struck a chord like that delicious old chestnut, the ‘highest in the land’. The British are obsessed with their ‘toffs’. We are a lord-loving country and if it can be proved that our lords are also serial killers, then so much the better. There is undoubtedly an element of envy in this. We love our lords, but we also hate them for their wealth and power – to prove that one of them was a sexual deviant and lustmurderer would be wonderful! Theorists have reasoned, over the last century, that the reason that Jack was not caught is that there was a conspiracy and cover-up of monumental proportions that could only be orchestrated by the highest echelons in their corridors of power.
Although the ‘highest in the land’ is not one theory but several interwoven, I will deal with the elements separately for sanity’s sake. The highest of the highest involved was Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale who was the eldest son of Edward, Prince of Wales. ‘Eddie’ as he was known in the family, had inherited his mother’s deafness and his father’s well-known aversion to study. He died from influenza early in 1892 (which some Ripperologists believe was yet another lie by the establishment to mask something altogether more sinister) so we will never know what kind of monarch he would have made; his younger brother, in turn, became George V.
Eddie was taught privately at home and went through the sham of attending Trinity College Cambridge where his deafness made real study an impossibility. In the year of the Ripper, in accordance with the sycophancy of the time, he was given an honorary Doctorate of Law by the university and was gazetted to his father’s elite cavalry regiment, the 10th Hussars. He was twenty-four.
The concept that Clarence was the Ripper appeared as early as 1970 when Dr Thomas Stowell put the notion forward in The Criminologist. However, he also wrote to The Times:
I have at no time associated His Royal Highness, the late Duke of Clarence, with the Whitechapel murderer or suggested that the murderer was of royal blood…
– so perhaps he had had second thoughts or was misrepresented in the first place. By the 1960s, an awareness of the psychological compulsion found among sociopaths was already known, so Stowell (actually an expert in industrial medicine, not psychiatry) assumed that Eddie had become sadistically aroused watching the skinning and dressing of deer on innumerable hunting parties at Balmoral. By 1888, with his mind going because of the ravages of tertiary syphilis, he turned his attention to random killings – and subsequent mutilations – in the East End.
Jack Spiering developed these theories into Prince Jack, but the evidence against Eddie is non-existent. Despite the elaborate contrivance of journalist Stephen Knight (see below) there is nothing to link him with the East End and physically he was too tall to fit any one of the eyewitness accounts of those seen with the victims shortly before they died. The weakest element of the story is the syphilis contention – and it is extraordinary that Dr Stowell should think this possible. For Eddie to have been syphilitic to the extent that his brain was affected, he would have had to have suffered from the disease by inheriting it from his parents. Bearing in mind that his father was a notorious womanizer, this is entirely possible, but syphilitic children always exhibit Hutchinson’s triad, that is congenital eye problems, badly disfigured teeth and jaw and deafness. Only the last fits Eddie. He also has fairly watertight alibis for the nights in question. On 31 August 1888, when Polly Nichols died, Clarence was the guest of Viscount Donne at his country home, Derby Lodge, in Yorkshire, where he stayed until 7 September. From there, he went straight to the cavalry barracks at York on the day before Annie Chapman was killed and stayed there until 10 September. When Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes died on the night of the ‘double event’, Clarence was with his grandmother, the Queen, at Abergeldie, in Scotland. Victoria was a diligent diary keeper and recorded that Eddie had lunched with her – this was ten hours after Jack butchered Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square. At the time of Mary Kelly’s death on the morning of the Lord Mayor’s Show, Clarence was staying at Sandringham, the family home in Norfolk.
Conspiracy theorists who have the heir presumptive in the frame contend that such alibis are meaningless because the entire family, plus their huge entourage of servants, would have colluded to concoct them.
For those who find the Duke of Clarence too high profile to be Jack, the focus has shifted sideways and down a little to his tutor, J K Stephen. The son of the judge in the Florence Maybrick murder trial and a cousin of the darling of the literati, Virginia Woolf, Stephen was a Cambridge-educated scholar who wrote poetry and was a regular contributor to various journals. He may have been a misogynist (one theory runs that he and Clarence were lovers) and he was certainly a manic-depressive – his father became insane and Virginia Woolf committed suicide – and it may be that an accident on holiday in Felixstowe in 1886–7 in which he was hit on the head by a windmill’s sails, made matters worse. There is nothing to link Stephen with Whitechapel, unless we implicate Clarence in some way. In short, the evidence against him is nil. He died at the end of February 1892, at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, of ‘mania, refusal of food, exhaustion’.
The best known of the ‘highest in the land’ variety is that concocted by Stephen Knight and Joseph Sickert in 1976. It has spawned its own spin-offs and at least two films – Murder by Decree and, more recently, From Hell. So well-established has this hokum become that even the most ill-informed on the Ripper case will tell you – ‘It was the Queen’s doctor, wasn’t it?’ Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution begins as many potentially good books do with speculation and scepticism and ends up with ‘proven fact’. Knight’s confidante, Joseph Sickert, claimed to be the son of the influential Victorian artist Walter Sickert, but he was, in Knight’s own words, ‘vague’ and ‘disordered’.
Knight’s story goes like this. Walter Sickert worked from a studio in Cleveland Street (for which there is no evidence) and the Duke of Clarence occasionally visited it on his way to and from the homosexual brothel in the same street, which became a hotbed of scandal in 1889. There is, of course, no evidence for this either, although certain members of the aristocracy were certainly on the visitors’ list. The bi-sexual Clarence, it is alleged, fell in love with and subsequently married a Catholic shopgirl who worked in Cleveland Street, one Annie Crook. Apart from there being no evidence that any such marriage took place, Knight’s assumption is that the whole mess had to be covered up because the royals were unpopular and that the country was on the brink of an Anarchist revolution as evidenced by the ‘bloody Sunday’ riot in Trafalgar Square in 1887. Since Clarence was the heir presumptive, he could not have remained married to a Catholic anyway, as the events of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson were to prove in 1936.
In the tortuous plot of the Knight-Sickert conspiracy, the witness to the wedding was Mary Kelly who saw a wonderful opportunity to blackmail the government. The Marquess of Salisbury, then Prime Minister, turned to his fellow Lodge member in the Masons, the queen’s physician-in-ordinary, Sir William Gull.
The royal doctor set out to find everyone connected with the case. Annie Crook was illegally kidnapped and placed into Gull’s own lunatic asylum where various operations were carried out on her brain. Gull’s coachman, John Netley, spent the next four years trying to find and run over little Alice, the child of the Clarence-Crook marriage. Since all five of Jack’s victims were friends and shared their deadly secret, they all had to die. Netley obligingly drove the increasingly deranged Gull to the murder sites in his coach and the look-out, who made sure the surgeon’s work was not interrupted, was Walter Sickert, who knew Mary Kelly well.
It is difficult to know where to start unravelling this farrago of nonsense. Knight’s times and dates do not add up. His motivation is weak in the extreme. More recent writers, who should know better, have accepted the coach theory to explain why no one was apprehended covered in blood. A coach of Gull’s calibre would have been very unusual in Whitechapel and no eyewitness mentions one. The police at the time may have had little scientific knowledge of a forensic nature to help them, but they could recognize wheel-tracks and found none.
Most bizarre of all is the Masonic connection. Stephen Knight’s second book, The Brotherhood, threatened to blow the lid off the supposedly sinister cult and he died only two years later. There were rumblings at the time that he had crossed the wrong people, still ‘the highest in the land’. In fact he died of a cerebral tumour despite surgery, having developed epilepsy in 1977. Much has been made of the Masonic clues left at the murder sites. A neat row of coins was placed between the feet of Annie Chapman in the yard at Hanbury Street, a Masonic symbol. The cutting of the throat and the placing of entrails over shoulders follows the pattern of the method of execution meted out to the murderers of the great mason, Hiram Abiff, who built Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Even the inverted ‘v’ on Kate Eddowes’ cheeks is the Masonic triangle created by the architect’s divider, Knight claimed. Most significantly of all is the tortuous and perplexing red herring of the Goulston Street graffito – ‘The Juwes are the Men who will not be blamed for nothing’ – scrawled in chalk above the bloody, torn apron of the Mitre Square victim. This is not a mere misspelling of ‘Jews’ but a dark hint at the names of Abiff’s murderers –Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum.
It is ludicrous in the extreme. There was no need for panic in the royal household or government even if the marriage did take place. Merely buy off Kelly and the tiny handful in the know and the problem was solved. The Marquess of Salisbury was not a Mason, so his link with Gull is implausible. According to the records available, Annie Crook was Anglican, not Catholic. There is no record of a marriage having taken place (‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?’ conspiracy theorists rejoin). The address at which Knight claims Annie Crook lived was a hole in the ground in 1886. An Elizabeth Cook lived in the new apartments built on the site, but she lived there until 1893 rather than being whisked away at dead of night to an asylum. The Juwes are purely fictitious characters who have no links with Masonry and there was no neat row of coins between Annie Chapman’s feet, merely the random scattering of items from her pocket.
Most potently of all, John Netley, whose apparently murderous attempts on Alice Crook ended with his being chased by a mob into the Thames, where he drowned, actually died in a fall from his coach near Baker Street in 1903. And Sir William Gull, master Mason and butcher par excellence, had had two strokes by the autumn of 1888 which left him seriously paralyzed and totally incapable of the ferocious attacks on the Whitechapel victims.
Ripperologist Melvyn Fairclough, a friend of Joseph Sickert, took up the torch after Stephen Knight’s death, leaning heavily on the diaries allegedly written by Inspector Frederick Abberline of H Division, one of the detectives leading the hunt for the Whitechapel murderer. Again, the Masons are cast as the villains, but this time the net is wider. The instigators of the killings are members of the most exalted level of Freemasonry, Royal Alpha Lodge No 16. Cover-ups aplenty took place because Sir Charles Warren, the hapless Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ensured that the incriminating ‘Juwes’ wall-writing was obliterated, not to prevent anti-Semitic rioting, but to protect his fellow Mason, William Gull. In Fairclough’s version, fed to him by Joseph Sickert, the actual mastermind is, to use Abberline’s diary phrase ‘the Candlestick Maker’, Lord Randolph Churchill. By 1888, the cavalier Churchill had destroyed his own career by quarrelling with both the Prince of Wales and Lord Salisbury and his own life by contracting the syphilis that would kill him in 1895. The inconsistency of Caroline Maxwell, who knew Mary Kelly and who gave evidence at her inquest that she talked to her some hours after she was in fact dead, led Fairclough to speculate that the real corpse in Miller’s Court was actually Winifred Collins, another friend involved in the Cleveland Street clandestine marriage.
By the time Fairclough’s book The Ripper and the Royals was published in 1991, he had already acknowledged that the Abberline diaries were almost certainly forgeries. There are errors throughout, not least the reversal of the inspector’s own initials, G F, rather than F G. We have already effectively dismissed both the clandestine marriage and the trumped-up Masonic connection; grafting on Churchill would seem gratuitous in the extreme, although oddly, the extraordinarily detailed description given by George Hutchinson of a man he saw in the company of Mary Kelly shortly before she died, could just about be the man.
The remaining survivor of the ‘highest in the land’ theory is Walter Sickert and crime writer Patricia Cornwell put her reputation and a vast amount of money into making grand claims with her 2002 book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. Cornwell’s case rests on the fact that Sickert suffered a fistula, a malformation of the penis which made sex impossible and that this led to an abnormal and sadistic impulse to kill women in Whitechapel. Ms Cornwell also claims that Sickert’s stationery was of a similar type to that used in the infamous letter to Dr Openshaw at the London Hospital and that traces of Sickert’s DNA can be found on the stamp of that letter’s envelope. The stationery evidence is weak in the extreme – the Scottish firm of Alexander Pirie and Sons was a very common brand, but no examples of this company’s paper came from Sickert’s correspondence in 1888, when he was using exclusively Johnson Superfine. The DNA evidence, which ought to be relatively conclusive, is anything but. The condition of the Openshaw stamp is too poor for nuclear DNA testing to be accurate, so the less convincing mitochondrial DNA (by no means unique) was used by Cornwell’s researchers. Admittedly this gives us only 1% of the community who carried this particular DNA configuration, but all it proves is that Walter Sickert may have written one or more of the hoax letters sent to the police or newspapers; it certainly does not prove that he was the Whitechapel murderer.
As for the fistula, the evidence suggests that this was an anal condition, corrected by surgery and that the artist had a perfectly natural sex life which resulted in several illegitimate children.
Now that we have eliminated the fictional and the fanciful, we can look at the plausible. Although there are different versions of the Macnaghten Memoranda and the biographical details in it are confused, the names written there are at least flesh and blood characters who were clearly at one time considered likely suspects.
The first ‘possible’ is M J Druitt. Macnaghten gets the man’s age and occupation wrong and tantalizingly drops in the line – ‘From private information I have little doubt that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer.’ Montague Druitt was a graduate of New College Oxford, a keen cricketer and a teacher at a boys’ boarding school in Blackheath. He was called to the Bar in 1885. In July of that year his mother was admitted to an asylum in Clapton and, soon after that, Druitt lost his job at the school for reasons that were never made clear. His body was fished out of the Thames on 31 December, seven weeks after Mary Kelly’s murder. The inquest returned a verdict of suicide as a note was found in his chambers which read ‘Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother and the best thing for me was to die.’ Druitt’s dark hair and moustache certainly ties in with various eyewitness accounts of men seen talking to various victims on the nights they died, but other than that, as Inspector Abberline admitted to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1903, there is ‘absolutely nothing… to incriminate him’. Rather like the Duke of Clarence, whom Druitt superficially resembles, he had alibis for most of the nights in question – his cricketing fixtures with the MCC and other clubs rule him out.
Next, Macnaghten cites ‘Kosminski, a Polish Jew’. This is much more realistic, because the man was a Whitechapel resident and clearly deranged. Along with 95% of Victorian society, Macnaghten believed that Kosminski’s insanity was ‘owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices’ [masturbation]. Further research by Ripper experts found that Aaron Kosminski was committed, via the Mile End Workhouse, first to Colney Hatch asylum (1891 to 1894), then to Leavesden, near Watford, where he remained until his death in 1919. He was one of those tragic victims of what Karl Marx called ‘alienation’, one of the countless wanderers of Jack London’s Abyss who litter the Ripper story. He never washed, heard voices, refused to work and only ate scraps from the gutters in the belief that fresher food might be poisoned. Macnaghten says Kosminski had a hatred of women and showed homicidal tendencies; certainly he attacked an attendant (albeit a male) with a chair while in the asylum. Notes on the man by Robert Anderson and Chief Inspector Swanson are very confused, however. Anderson arrogantly says he knew who the Whitechapel murderer was but could not name him. He also states that Kosminski was recognized by an eyewitness ‘the instant he was confronted with him’. Macnaghten claims the man was seen by a City PC near Mitre Square, which is untrue and Swanson claims that Kosminski was identified at the Police Convalescent Home in Brighton. Apart from the peculiarities of this venue as a place for identification, the witness – by deduction, probably the civilian Joseph Lawende – was now apparently, sixteen months after Kate Eddowes’ murder, positive in his identification of a man he claimed even at the time he would not know again. All in all, it looks as though policemen even as senior as Macnaghten, Anderson and Swanson were easily swayed by the stereotypical image of a raving lunatic.
Macnaghten’s third suspect is Michael Ostrog, ‘a mad Russian doctor and a convict and unquestionably a homicidal maniac’. Some of the silly theories I have not included in this chapter (for lack of space) include deranged Russians, so perhaps Ostrog should not surprise us. Macnaghten believed him to be a knife-carrying misogynist, whereas he was actually a conman with a tally of fourteen known aliases, fraudster and thief. Convict he certainly was, having been imprisoned first in Oxford in 1863. He did time in Cambridge and Burton upon Trent too and was released from the Surrey Pauper Lunatic Asylum on 10 March 1888. This in itself may have been a con trick, because he was transferred there from Wandsworth Prison, which may have had a harsher regime. The most recent research has revealed that Ostrog was incarcerated in a Paris asylum at the time of the Whitechapel murders, which effectively takes him out of the frame. Although he once pulled a gun on a policeman trying to arrest him, there is no hard evidence that he carried knives or had any antipathy towards women. He is last heard of in the St Giles Christian Mission, Holborn, in 1904.
There are many other suspects, real and imaginary, who could be placed in this chapter, but space prevents it. Most criminologists today concur that the Whitechapel murderer lived in the area where he killed – we saw this in Chapter Two. Of the 103 suspects named by John J Eddleston in his excellent Jack the Ripper, an Encyclopaedia3 only nineteen have established Whitechapel links. All of those can be excluded on a variety of logical grounds. As Eddleston himself says:
Though few writers will readily admit it, there is a good chance that the real Ripper has never come to public attention. Most sensible writers accept that Jack was a local man, of the same class as those he murdered and was someone the victims would readily have accepted as one of their own. The suggestion that after claiming his victims he vanished back into obscurity, for whatever reason, and has never been traced is much more likely than claiming a Royal, Masonic or similar connection.
It is time we looked for such a man.