For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.
Hamlet
The Land of the Moabites has classic unsavoury Old Testament origins: ‘And it came to pass, God destroyed the cities of the plain.’ (I can’t help wondering whether this destruction wasn’t as a result of earthquakes releasing storms of flammable, religious-looking petroleum gas, 3,500 years before oil companies got in on the act.) Mix such flaming erudition with lightning and simple minds, and you’ve got a decent amount of ‘wrath’. Ditto a supply of gas to ‘the Burning Bush’.
Anyway, fearful of the fiery skies and quakes, the righteous citizen Lot had gone up into the mountains suffering the fear. When he got to the new location he lived in a cave with his two daughters, neither of whom had a husband. Both were worried about the preservation of their race. ‘There is not a man in the earth to come in unto us,’ the elder of them said. Therefore they devised a plan to get their dad rat-arsed on wine and take it in turns to fuck him. ‘Behold, I lay yesternight with my father,’ said the elder. ‘Let us make him drink wine this night also; and thou go in and lie with him that we may preserve the seed of our father.’ The younger one went in that night and got on with it, and ‘Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father and the first born bore a son and called his name Moab.’
About 3,500 years later, in August 1868, a Frenchman called Frederick Augustus Klein was in the area. Klein was a reverend attached to the Anglican Mission in Jerusalem. He was on his way up the eastern side of the Dead Sea, and stopped for rest one night in a town called Dhiban. A friendly-looking Arab pitched up and asked him if he wanted to see something no white man had ever seen before. Had the Arab been wearing a mackintosh, Klein might well have declined. However, he followed him into some ruins, where a large basalt slab was located. ‘This stone,’ recorded Klein, ‘was lying amongst the ruins of Dhiban, perfectly free and exposed to view, the inscription uppermost.’ Miraculously, the stone was in perfect condition. It was the inscription, of course, that was of interest, written in a very ancient script which, according to his guide, nobody had ever been able to decipher.
Mr Klein had just discovered the ‘Moabite Stone’.1
Various European legations operated out of Jerusalem, and Klein went through the doors of one. A pro-German citizen of Strasbourg, he laid the news of his discovery on the German archaeological equivalent of Charles Warren, a Freemason called Dr Heinrich Petermann. He was the very same man who had risked it with Warren in the bowels of Solomon’s Temple, consecrating the unique Masonic lodge, ‘Warren’s Lodge’, under the place where the three Assassins had murdered Hiram Abiff. Petermann immediately went about the business of securing the stone for his national museum. All this was conducted in utter secrecy, a bunch of Nubian thugs being hired by Petermann to guard his new treasure.
By the time Warren got whisper of it all the ingredients for a bitter controversy were in place. Facilitated by Sir George Grove and the Palestine Exploration Fund in London, Warren managed to bungle up an environment wherein the precious artefact was destroyed.
The Arabs would have sold the stone to anyone who wanted it for fifty cents, but by now the French also had wind of it. All this colonial interest aroused Muslim suspicion, and they started to get defensive. Warren went out to Dhiban one night, and there was a punch-up on the shore of the Dead Sea – ‘Blows were exchanged,’ says his biographer.
Make no mistake, it was the Germans’ stone. Petermann had actually secured its purchase and permission to transport it out of the country. That didn’t stop the British and the French from wanting it, or at least an impression of it, for their own national museums. It all got bitter, as everybody wanted a part of somebody else’s history. In obliging mood, the sons of Lot freaked out and smashed the thing to bits, resulting in plenty of shattered pieces to go around.
This was bad enough. Back in London, Sir George Grove made it worse. On 8 February 1869 he published a letter in The Times, claiming that Warren ‘has made a discovery that promises to be of great importance’. In fact Warren had discovered nothing, but by his interference he had had quite a lot to do with the stone’s demise. This was of little consequence to Grove, who ploughed on with his eulogy: ‘A few months ago, Captain Warren heard of a stone in the old country of Moab. The stone was then whole, but on finding that the Franks [Europeans] were enquiring for it, the Arabs broke it up into several fragments, which they hid in the granaries of their neighbouring villages.’2
Sir George’s letter went off like a bit of a bomb in Jerusalem, and Warren was transformed overnight into an international pariah. ‘It threw a completely false and discreditable light on Warren’s actions,’ lathered Watkin Williams. As far as his grandson was concerned, Warren was a Victorian giant, bestriding an inviolate plinth. Where there was fault it was always somebody else’s – in this case Grove’s: ‘By claiming him as the discoverer it put him wrong with Klein, it put him wrong with the Germans generally leaving them to infer that he had meddled in their affairs, it proclaimed to the British public that his enquiries had caused the destruction of the Stone, and that he had allowed the greater part of his discovery to pass into the hands of another nation.’3
All this was true, of course. With customary cack-handedness Warren had botched it. The French managed to get the stone, restore it, translate it, and shove it up in the Louvre. Petermann’s rage, shared by his countrymen (who, as history would have it, were presently engaged in a war with the French, and besieging Paris), was described by Williams as ‘irritation in German quarters’. ‘When I saw [Grove’s] letter,’ wrote Warren with some honour, ‘I saw but one course before me. I wrote home and resigned my connection with the Palestine Exploration Fund.’4
It was all very sore indeed. But there was another element here that didn’t get into the pages of Watkin Williams’s book. Ever shy of his hero’s Freemasonry, he neglected to mention the personal hurt this affair brought upon Warren. The fraternal bond between himself and Petermann was now smashed as surely as the stone itself. Grove had driven a wedge into the event of a lifetime, and it must have cut Warren to the quick.
‘Warren’s Lodge’, with its carved compasses and whatnot, together with the catastrophe of the ‘Moabite Stone’ were among the Commissioner’s most indelible memories, and were also to become an irresistible inspiration for Jack. Just as ‘Juwes’ had its source in the gloom of Warren’s past, so too would a funny little joke over ‘Moab’.
When Warren wasn’t digging, he was writing about digging. Before his summary disassociation from the PEF (happily later repaired) he had contributed a variety of papers for publication. The Fund produced quarterly statements, in which Captain Warren’s expertise was generously in evidence. In a table of ‘Conversion of Hebrew Sounds into Amharic’ (1876), we find his explication of ‘з’ (or something similar beyond the capacity of my typewriter): ‘where pronounced hard in Hebrew it seems to have become Qaf in Arabic, which is vulgarly pronounced as a hard “G” – instance – Gedoroth – Katrah’.5
This from a man who couldn’t work out ‘Juwes’ on an East End wall. Warren’s overriding passion, of course, was buried in the subterranean mysteries of Solomon’s Temple. It was the myth or reality of Hiram that had driven his shovel in those perilous foundations. What was the truth of it all? Then, as now, Freemasons looked for substance in the Hiram Abiff tradition.
At Shadwell Clerke’s consecration of the Quatuor Coronati on 8 November 1886, Bro Hayter Lewis read a paper, ‘On an Early Version of the Hiramic Legend’, a theme taken up by Warren himself at the formal inauguration on 3 March 1887: ‘My object this evening is to call attention to the orientation of Temples, with special reference to the Temple of Solomon and the Master Mason’s Lodge.’
An erudite dissertation followed, Biblical sources welded into Warren’s antediluvian perceptions of Masonry. He thought it was as old as the hills – at any rate, not much their junior. ‘With all mankind the Deity first abode in Heaven,’ he said, and the closest you could get to it was the mountaintops where sacrifices were made. ‘But as the worship of the heathen gradually degenerated’, the people began to look upon these high places ‘as the occasional haunts of the Gods’. It was primitive man who kept God at high altitudes, and it was Solomon who was to change all that. In a dream ‘God promised him the gift of wisdom’, and he came to realise that the hitherto stratospheric omnipotence could handle business just as easily at ground level. The rising of the sun in the east, and its setting in the west, could be represented by symbol in the artifice of a great building. ‘Behold the Glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the East.’ Ergo, Solomon’s Temple and the subsequent orientation of every Masonic lodge thereafter. ‘The key to the whole subject,’ declaimed Warren, ‘may be found in the book of Ezekiel.’6
Ezekiel is a name to be remembered. The Ripper was to use the Book of Ezekiel as a virtual workshop manual in orchestration of the destruction he visited upon Mary Kelly. No prophet in the Bible is of more interest to Freemasonry than Ezekiel; or, by the time we get to Kelly, of more interest to me.
Meanwhile, Warren continued to argue his case, quoting again from the Book of Solomon: ‘Then spake Solomon. The Lord said he would dwell in thick darkness. I have surely built thee an house [my emphasis] to dwell in, a settled place for Thee to abide in forever. And Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the congregation of Israel, and spread forth his hands towards heaven and said, Behold [the House of the Lord].’7
Inevitably, Warren moved on to this temple’s architect and builder, Hiram Abiff: ‘I have come to the conclusion that our legends are of an ancient date and have a substantial basis … I put forward as a solution that modern Masonry is a combination of the mysteries of the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians, that it thus forms the chief of the triads running so remarkably through all Masonic Lore.’8
By the late nineteenth century, however, Masonry’s claims to antiquity began to look a bit shaky, its rituals and icons suggesting a more recent provenance. Not a lot stands sure against any objective enquiry, and this includes Hiram Abiff.
Perhaps Hiram was an eighteenth-century fabrication, ripped off from the Old Testament? Bro G.W. Speth, one of the founders of the Quatuor Coronati and Number 4 in its hierarchy, addressed just such a question in Builders’ Rites and Ceremonies: The Folk Lore of Masonry. His book doesn’t do a lot for the mystique of Hiram. It ‘not only shows the origin of the present day custom of burying coins under foundation stones, but also gives numerous instances both of “foundation sacrifices” and “completion sacrifices”’. These architectural horrors were based on ‘the old idea that stability of an edifice would be best secured by sacrificially immuring within it, the body of an artificer’.
Examples of this practice are to be found in the Bible. In Kings 1.16.34, a deluded God-fearer called Hiel the Bethelite buries his firstborn in the foundations of an important building as an amulet to fortune. Not quite confident of the efficacy of this sacrifice, Hiel similarly inters his younger son, Segub, under the city gates. Most hideously, it seems these kids were buried alive. I don’t know if Bro Speth had first-hand knowledge of uncovering these Old Testament horrors, but Warren unquestionably did. Such ‘foundation sacrifices’ were to be discovered all over the forgotten lands of Moab and Midian.
‘The widespread custom of “foundation sacrifice” survives in Palestine,’ wrote Biblical historian Stanley Crook in 1908, ‘when popular opinion required that blood shall be shed at the inauguration of every important new building.’ Blood was still gushing at the close of the nineteenth century, although by 1898 (for a jetty at Haifa) it was from a sheep instead of a child.9
The children of Solomon’s time were not so lucky, particularly as the King was more or less preoccupied with real estate. He built not only at Jerusalem, but at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer (Kings 9.15). On the site of his great administrative building at Gezer, ‘a gruesome discovery was made’. Secreted in the foundations was the skeleton of a young girl – or at least the upper portion of it, for she had been sawn in half. She was estimated to have been about sixteen years old at time of death. Near the mouth of the cistern in which she was discovered were ‘the decapitated heads of two girls’. Unfortunately we have no picture of this sacrificial site, but a PEF photograph of another young female skeleton found at another dig gives the gist of it. This one was disinterred with her head intact, and replicating the other, had been ritually sawn in half.10
Bearing this unfortunate creature in mind, we now shift attention through thirty-five centuries to Charles Warren’s new police headquarters on Victoria Embankment. Retaining the name ‘Scotland Yard’ from its former location, this sprawling edifice was still under construction.
Cue the ‘Fiend’ and ‘Friend’ of the Commissioner. What a wheeze it would be to stick one down, in the style of a Moab sacrifice, in the foundations of Charlie’s new building, ha ha. Forty-eight hours after the ‘Double Event’ and its short-lived message on the wall, a labourer working in the rubble-filled vaults of New Scotland Yard discovered a curious parcel secured with strings. He thought it was discarded bacon, but investigation proved it to be the headless and armless torso of a young woman who had been sawn in half.
This archaeologically inspired piss-take would henceforth be known as ‘the Whitehall mystery’, or ‘the Scotland Yard Trunk mystery’. I’m not going to get into a protracted analysis of its ‘investigation’, because there wasn’t one. Jack’s outing into the bowels of New Scotland Yard was a shade too close to the Commissioner’s knuckle, and every effort was made to disassociate this outrage from the Ripper. The Met was characteristically ‘without a clue’. ‘The police never imagined there was any connection with the Whitechapel Murders,’ chimes The A to Z, ‘despite press speculation.’
To dismiss the link with J.T.R. as no more than ‘press speculation’ is to dismiss the Scotland Yard trunk in its entirety. We have nothing but the press. Jack’s ersatz sacrifice certainly can’t be examined from Metropolitan Police files, because there aren’t any. Not a scrap of contemporaneous paper is to be found: no statements, no interviews, no nothing. This is a crime as audacious as anything Alfred Hitchcock might have dreamed up, literally in the guts of the Commissioner’s emerging new headquarters, yet it is without a history?
The nearest we get to archive material is three meagre sheets (MEP05/271) summarising the atrocity as though it were a myth rather than a Ripper reality. Since these pages are dated October 1936, forty-eight years after the event, I imagine even the most acquiescent of ‘students’ might find them a bit late in the day. This lack of material reveals more than it tries to hide. Although the Met couldn’t wash away ‘the Scotland Yard Trunk mystery’, it was just as hysterically motivated to try to cover it up.
The new police building had been a while in coming. The riverside site had originally been intended for a grand opera house, but the scheme ran into financial difficulties. The backers couldn’t afford a roof, and what had been built was demolished. In 1885 the land was acquired by the Receiver of the Metropolitan Police, who went about the business of commissioning a new police headquarters.
A cartoon in Punch (1886) tells the dispiriting tale. The state had little use for opera singers, and preferring policemen to Rossini, one of the latter was kicked out in lieu of Warren and his unsteady gang.11
Designed by Norman Shaw, one of the leading architects of his age, New Scotland Yard was, according to the Echo, ‘at the very centre of our civilised community’. Not a stone’s throw from the Home Office, ‘it is beneath the very shadow of the House of Commons itself’. ‘They are the buildings,’ waxed the Echo, ‘which are intended as the new Metropolitan Police Headquarters, the future of our whole protective system!’12
The construction of New Scotland Yard was half complete. Scaffolding was up, and nascent stairways disappeared into the gloom of its foundations. Like a medieval dungeon they were a labyrinth of hazard and places where daylight never came. On 2 October 1888, together with his mate, a carpenter called Frederick Wildbore was early into the vaults. For the previous three weeks Wildbore had been working here from Monday to Saturday, hiding his tools overnight in a maze of recesses destined to become cells. In one of them he rediscovered something he’d been aware of in the darkness the day before, but had ignored. A light was struck, and the men found themselves looking at some kind of parcel. About two feet by three feet, wrapped in cloth and bound with strings, it had no smell, nor any attraction, and neither was inclined to touch it. Later that day Wildbore mentioned the find to his foreman, William Brown, who ordered the item to be brought into the light for examination.
Wildbore returned to the vaults in the company of a bricklayer by the name of George Budden. ‘I struck a light,’ said Budden, ‘and saw the top bare, and the rest wrapped up in some old cloth.’ Thinking little of it, he dragged it over a makeshift bridge into a part of the vault where there was daylight. ‘A lot of old strings of different sorts were tied up all round it several times across each way.’ Budden cut the strings, and to everyone’s shock they found themselves looking at the headless upper half of a woman’s body. ‘I was not alone when the parcel was opened,’ he said. ‘There were present the Foreman Bricklayer [William Brown] and Wildbore.’13
The coppers arrived in short order from nearby King Street, and the Divisional Surgeon was sent for. Whatever was said was said, and down they all went to the recess, where Detective Hawkins (A Division) made a preliminary inspection of the scene. The torso appeared to have been wrapped in some kind of dress material, another piece of which was discovered in the recess. The area where the parcel had been placed was seething with maggots.14
By now Dr Thomas Bond had arrived. A Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Surgeon to the Met since 1867, it was he who was to prepare a report for Robert Anderson, determining that the Whitechapel murders were all the work of the same hand, and that their perpetrator ‘must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring’.
Such qualities were palpably in evidence here. The torso weighed fifty pounds, and how Jack had managed to transport it in unremitting darkness was everyone’s puzzle. ‘Not only would the risk of detection be very great,’ surmised The Times, ‘but he would also stand a good chance of breaking his neck.’ Such peril was corroborated by the workmen. Gaining access to the vault meant crossing a trench on a plank. ‘It was so dark, even in daytime,’ said Wildbore, ‘and people who didn’t know the place wouldn’t have found their way there.’15
Joined by Detective Wren and Inspector Marshall, Dr Bond made a brief examination of the torso before looking about the recess where it had been discovered. ‘The wall was stained black at the place where the parcel had rested against it,’ he said. ‘I thought the body must have been there several days [my emphasis] from the state of the wall.’16
That evening the coroner’s officer delivered the torso to the mortuary at Millbank Street, where Bond made preparations for a postmortem the following day. As it was already in advanced putrefaction, he stored it overnight in spirits of wine.
He wasn’t the first to try to preserve it. Although the postmortem was to be conducted in the strictest secrecy, a part of the secret was already out. On 3 October the Evening News revealed that the torso had previously been pickled in some strong disinfectant, and correctly considered this a significant lead: ‘For weeks he must have kept the body concealed near either his office or apartment, waiting for favourable opportunities to make away with the body piecemeal.’
Implicit in the News’s coverage was an understanding that the victim had been butchered at an earlier date, and then preserved at the assassin’s discretion until he considered it opportune to transport his mocking handiwork to New Scotland Yard. He chose a time that couldn’t have been more embarrassing for Warren. Two days had passed since the outrages of Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride, and here was another one, mutilated beyond belief and dumped like an insult, under his nose.
‘The remains, it is almost certain, were hidden in the building sometime between Saturday evening and Tuesday morning,’ determined the Evening News. It was a considered assessment, as was its caveat: ‘There is now no doubt that a terrible murder has been committed, as from the way in which the body has been treated it is impossible that it could have been spirited away from a dissecting room after having answered the purpose of lawful operation, and a more sickening spectacle than the remains present can hardly be imagined.’
Bond got into it early the following morning. By 8 a.m. on 3 October, he and his assistant Charles Hibbert had begun the mouthwatering process of trying to work out exactly what it was they were looking at. For two hours the doors were locked and the press kept on the other side. Bond was to withhold the details of his findings in deference to the Home Office ‘for their guidance at the inquest’, scheduled four days hence, under Westminster coroner John Troutbeck. Why civil servants should be offering a physician ‘guidance’ isn’t stated, but more official interference was brewing, and it was to the Home Office that Bond and his notes would go.17
Press exclusion naturally didn’t quell press interest, and the scraps the papers assembled over the next few days were to prove remarkably accurate. ‘The head and neck have been severed at the juncture of the caryical and spinal vertebrae,’ reported the Evening News, ‘the arms have been disarticulated at the shoulder joints, while not only are the legs missing, but the pelvis has been sawn clean through [my emphasis], exposing all the viscera, and it is believed the organ referred to in the Chapman case [the womb] is also missing.’
Indeed it was. But in compensation for the missing womb, something else had turned up, or rather found its way into Jack’s scenario. About three weeks before, on 11 September, a workman called Frederick Moore had noticed something curious on the mudbank of the Thames, which ran adjacent to his timberyard. A ladder was procured, and a few minutes later he was on his way back up it, carrying a human arm. The limb quickly found itself in the possession of a policeman, who wrapped it in newspaper before transporting it to his station at Gerard Row.18
The Divisional Surgeon was called, a Dr Neville of nearby Pimlico Road, who had little difficulty in identifying the arm as that of a ‘well-formed, tall, and well nourished young woman, probably about 25 years of age’. In his view the victim was recently dead, and the arm had been in the water ‘two or three days’.
Who was she? Where was the rest of her, and had she been murdered? As soon as the medical examination was concluded, a Police Inspector had the arm removed to the mortuary, where it was preserved awaiting the orders of the aforementioned coroner, John Troutbeck. It was considered unlikely that any inquest would be held, but no one really knew, and the police went about the business of trawling the river for more body parts. After one day the project was abandoned, without success.
In the meantime, a familiar theory was on the road: the arm might have been ‘thrown onto the river bank by a medical student with a view to create a scare’. In response to this claptrap a representative of the Central News Agency ignored Scotland Yard and visited one of the leading London hospitals. He was assured that ‘the arm could not possibly have been removed by a student from any hospital dissecting room. Students are allowed to dissect only in the room set apart for the purpose.’19 This tallied with Dr Neville’s judgement. Although some surgical skill was evident, ‘the handiwork was scarcely good enough for a person acquainted with the principles of anatomy’.
The following day, a journalist from the Star interviewed Neville.
‘Were there any rings on the hands [sic] Doctor?’
‘No, and no sign of rings being worn that I could see.’
‘Was there anything to indicate whether the arm was that of a woman of refinement or the reverse?’
‘Well, I should say not a refined woman, for the nails were dirty.’
‘That might be due to immersion in the dirty water of the river?’
‘Certainly; but I also observed that the nails were not neatly trimmed as a lady’s generally are.’
Neville dismissed any possibility that it might be a man’s arm: ‘No doubt that of a young woman; under thirty years of age, I should say, judging from the freshness of the skin and the tension of the muscles and sinews.’
The arm had been tied near its shoulder end with a piece of cord, like a tourniquet. Neville had no explanation for this, ‘unless it was to prevent blood flowing from the limb while it was being conveyed to the water’.
‘Could this limb possibly have come from some dissecting room?’
‘I do not think so for a moment. If it had, there would have been on it some evidence of the dissection.’
No such sign was evident here. ‘Moreover,’ said Neville, ‘no dissecting room authorities would allow the removal of a limb.’
‘Then this discovery could not be due to some medical student’s hoax?’
‘I consider the matter of that explanation an impossible one. The limb must have been severed with a large sharp knife, whereas a dissecting knife is a small one.’
Irrespective of such informed opinion, the coppers were not going to abandon their ‘Insane Medical Student’. Loss of such an actor would compound the difficulty of selling Catherine Eddowes’ travelling kidney as a ‘hoax’. So what did Neville think the explanation was? ‘It certainly suggests to me that it was murder.’
The newspapers were in no doubt of it, and three weeks later Neville’s assumption had evolved into a certainty.
Back at Millbank mortuary, Dr Bond and his assistant Mr Hibbert had barely got the torso out of its preservative before Bond reportedly exclaimed, ‘I have an arm that will fit that.’
It’s more likely that the perception was Hibbert’s – he had previously examined the arm on 16 September. Now it was rejoined with the Scotland Yard trunk, and its fit was found to be impeccable. The body had cautiously begun to reveal something of itself, and thus some insight into whoever had killed her.
If Dr Neville had been right on 11 September that the arm was recently dead, and that it had been in the water two or three days, then the victim had been killed on or about 8 September – the same day as Annie Chapman.
Despite police efforts to disassociate this murder from the Whitechapel series, the date remains of resonance. If this unidentified woman wasn’t killed by the Ripper, then the police were obliged to accept that two independent killers with identical intent were abroad in the metropolis, and that these two different killers had murdered two different women on what was probably the same day. Moreover, both were of an identical mindset, making off with their victims’ wombs, and both electing to make a drama of their handiwork.
It was (and is) suggested that the assassin hauled his fifty pounds of putrescent flesh into the dangerous environs of New Scotland Yard in order to hide it. My perception of his reasoning is precisely to the contrary. I think he hauled it into the Met’s headquarters because that’s where he wanted it found. He’d used a saw to cut his victim in half, cut off her head, and carve through the bones of her arms. From there on he had demonstrated absolute control over the body parts: the head, legs and left arm were still missing, but he had flagged up his crime – the right arm in the river. Had he wished, of course, he could easily have slung the torso in after it. But he was thinking of Charlie. He was thinking of Charlie when he carried his segment of bloody apron to Goulston Street, thinking of Charlie when he cut compasses in Eddowes’ face on the square; and it was the same preposterous copper who brought him here. Jack was soon to make his motive in the vaults transparent, but even at this juncture the world’s most wilfully blind policeman must have known what was up.
We’ve seen Jack’s interpretation of Jubela and Jubelo at the crime scenes of Chapman and Eddowes. But what of Jubelum, the last to suffer Solomon’s vengeance? ‘It is my order that you be taken without the walls of the Temple, and there have your body severed in two, and divided to the north and south.’
Although Charles Warren was one of the world’s leading Masonic historians, we are enjoined to believe that not the remotest shadow of Solomon’s penalties crossed his mind. ‘No clue in the hands of the police,’ dribbled Home Secretary Henry Matthews, ‘however apparently unpromising, should be neglected.’20
The sawn-in-half body at New Scotland Yard, delivered as a possible jocular take on a ‘foundation sacrifice’, looked very promising indeed. It was right out of Warren’s past, out of Masonry, out of the Land of Moab – and Warren utterly neglected it. As a matter of fact, he made a point of going nowhere near it. Such insouciance (i.e. Establishment panic) ‘fanned the fire of rage and indignation’, wrote the New York Herald, ‘with which the blundering blindness of the London police is viewed in the great metropolis’.21
While Warren was fully engaged with the details of covering Jack’s tracks, the ungrateful psychopath was still having fun with body parts. Two more arms were to appear. The first had been found on Friday, 28 September, about a mile down the river in the grounds of the Blind School at Lambeth. It was quickly dismissed as having ‘nothing whatever’ to do with the torso at Scotland Yard. ‘An examination [by a medical expert],’ reported The Times, ‘shows that whereas the arms have been wrenched from the sockets of the body on the Embankment, the bones at the St George’s Mortuary consist of a complete arm and include the shoulder blade. Moreover, the arm found in the Thames at Pimlico was freshly amputated, but the arm in question must have been detached from the female trunk to which it belonged some very considerable time ago. Lastly, the bones constitute the left arm, and as the arm found in the Thames was also a left arm, they must belong to different bodies.’
This was apparently what Ripperologist Mr DiGrazia might call a ‘common arm’, or ‘garden arm’, of the sort that occasionally turns up in flowerbeds. ‘The police [it goes without saying] attach no importance to the Southwark [Lambeth Blind School] discovery.’
With this The Times has contradicted everything, including itself, and sounds like Swanson’s parrot. In his preliminary examination, Dr Hibbert categorically stated that the Pimlico arm was the right arm, and thus does not dismiss the arm in question here. And even if the Lambeth arm didn’t fit the Scotland Yard trunk, might not another arm suggest another murder? The police eagerly ‘attach no importance’ to it, but was it not once attached to a woman’s body? Furthermore, no doctor had said that the arms from the torso had been ‘wrenched from their sockets’. According to Hibbert, they were first cut into with a very sharp knife and then disarticulated through the joint, with a saw being used after that.
But why trouble with forensic niceties when Bro Swanson’s emergency service is on permanent call-out? ‘The Lambeth arm,’ concluded The Times, ‘is stated to have been the subject of dissection [i.e. sourced at a hospital], and is supposed to have been placed where it was found as a hoax.’ We might recall what Dr Neville said not two weeks before about ‘hoaxes’ pulled by medical students: ‘I consider the matter of that explanation an impossible one.’ Impossible is the word. The London medical schools didn’t open their doors to students for the autumn semester until 1 October.22
But even so, ‘the Student Arm-Collector’ had been up to his rotten little tricks again, in Peckham.
Given the circumstances, one might imagine the cops could have caught this mad little medic, even if they couldn’t catch the Ripper. One might imagine that the hospital authorities would by now be especially alert to missing arms. But the indefatigable ‘Medical Student’ managed to smuggle another arm out, which he deposited (after boiling it) in an East London street – timed, it would seem, to coincide with the resumption of Troutbeck’s second inquest into the Scotland Yard trunk.
Be they left or be they right, these Peckham bones were those of a woman’s arm. ‘There was a supposition in the locality that the discovery might have some connection with the discoveries at Whitehall and Pimlico,’ penned The Times in hushed acquiescence, ‘but this is not encouraged by the authorities.’ You can bet your Bobby’s helmet it wasn’t. So what – we wait breathlessly – might these bones have been? The authorities ‘appear to hold the belief that the present “find” is due to a senseless freak on the part of a medical student’.
Keep swallowing that Fowler’s Solution.
I just mentioned, somewhat prematurely, Troutbeck’s second inquest, and now I begin with the first. It was convened at the Sessions House, Westminster, on the morning of Monday, 8 October, Detective Inspector Marshall watching for the police. Frederick Wildbore, who found the torso, was naturally first witness up. Reiterating his story, he described the hazards of the vaults, and how he was more than certain the body wasn’t there before 28 September: ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t there last Friday because we had occasion to do something at that very spot.’23
George Budden, who brought the bundle out, told the same story, underlining the vault’s inhospitality: ‘It is a very dark place, always as dark as the darkest night in the day.’
Detective Hawkins, the first copper on the scene, had no argument with that. ‘The vault where it was said the body was lain was very dark, and the recess was across a trench [via a plank] which was also in the dark. I looked further along the recess where it had been and saw a piece of more dress material. The wall was very black and the place full of maggots.’24
Troutbeck heard next from the foreman of the works, William Brown, who deposed: ‘The works on the Embankment are shut off by a hoarding, 8 feet or 9 feet high, and there are three entrances with gates, two on Cannon Row and one on the Embankment.’ Although there was no nightwatchman, all these gates were locked at night except one, which was secured by a latch and string, admitting only those who knew how to pull it. ‘The approach to the vault from Cannon Row,’ said Brown, ‘was first by planks and steps, and planks again.’ He confirmed that his men had frequently been active in the vaults during the week before the discovery.
So we’re looking at an eight- or nine-foot fence, fifty pounds of dead flesh, and a place of hazard and absolute darkness. How the perpetrator got his burden there was unknown. But when he did it was irrefutably established. It had to have been after the works were closed on the night of Saturday, 29 September. This fact was finally nailed by a labourer called Ernest Hedge. He was in the vaults, he said, at five o’clock that afternoon, and was the last to leave the site. They were shutting down until Monday, and he had gone to fetch a hammer. Striking a light, he crossed the trench and had a last look around. ‘The vault led to nowhere,’ said Hedge, ‘and there was no parcel there then.’25
This unequivocal evidence, establishing that there had been no torso in the vaults before Saturday, 29 September, was to have dramatic repercussions. Although Wildbore and his mates were certain about what they had seen – or rather not seen – the scenario was about to cop a bit of a bombshell. At the second inquest, some two weeks later, the authorities would try to deny the men’s deposition, insisting that all five had been blind to the body in the vault. Wildbore’s statement that ‘the body could not have been where it was found above two or three days’ was to be elasticised by the authorities into a comfortable six weeks.
It was quite the reverse of the shenanigans at Berner Street. There, those who had seen the grapes couldn’t possibly have seen them, while here, those who had not seen the torso couldn’t possibly have missed it. In other words, at both locations the conviction of on-site witnesses was to be subsumed within the requirements of an official cover-up.
As yet in ignorance of what he’d be obliged to say at the second inquest, Dr Bond was next to take the oath. His evidence constituted an emerging impression of the victim. ‘The trunk was that of a woman of considerable stature, and well nourished.’ It was seventeen inches long, twenty-eight inches at the waist, with a thirty-six-inch bust. He assumed she must have been about five feet eight, and maybe twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Details of her butchery came next. ‘The lower part of the body and pelvis had been removed (about an inch and a half below the navel) and the fourth lumbar vertebra had been sawn through in the same way as the removal of the head.’ Decomposition was advanced.26
The absence of the lower organs, including the womb, made it impossible to determine whether or not she had ever borne children. Neither could he say whether wounds to the neck were the cause of death. ‘There was nothing to suggest that it was sudden,’ said Bond. But internal examination revealed that the heart was pale and totally drained of blood, with no blood-staining of any other organ. This suggested death was not by suffocation or drowning, but most likely from blood loss, ‘proving to my mind, that she died of haemorrhage’.27
She bled to death, but her arm didn’t? This possibly explains the tourniquet around it, designed to keep blood in the limb while the rest of her body was drained.
‘The date of death,’ continued Bond, ‘as far as we could judge, would have been six weeks or two months before the discovery, and the decomposition occurred in the air and not in water.’ He found no other wounds on the torso, but over it ‘were clearly defined marks, where the strings had been tightly tied’. ‘The body appeared to have been wrapped up in a very skilful manner, and was absolutely full of maggots.’28
Certain of these conclusions were soon to resonate:
1) The date of the victim’s death.
2) The absence of blood in the body.
3) Its infestation with maggots.
Bond had just about done, and was poised to hand over to Dr Hibbert for his findings on the arm. But at Troutbeck’s intercession he concluded with a résumé: ‘She was not a stout woman, but she was a fully developed one. There was no abnormal excess of fat, but the body was that of a thoroughly well nourished plump woman.’ In his view, as he’d indicated, ‘the hand was certainly not that of a woman used to manual labour’. Raising issues of class, this was a point of interest to Troutbeck. ‘Would the hand be that of a refined woman [i.e. not a whore]?’29
It was left to Hibbert to complete the reply. He confirmed that it was a right arm, and summarily quashed any hopes that its discovery might be the result of a jape by a medical student. ‘For a surgical motive the cut would have been made to leave the skin outside,’ but in this case the arm ‘had been separated from the trunk at the shoulder joint and then the bone was sawn through’. Although the amputation could have served no anatomical purpose, he acknowledged that it had been made with a certain amateur skill. The arm was severed, he said, ‘by a person who knew where the joints were, and then cut them pretty regularly’. Did this apply to both arms? Hibbert answered in the affirmative.
Intelligence rather than anatomical expertise had guided the knife. Unlike the torso, the limb was charged with blood, and ‘when the string was loosened it was found there was a great deal of blood in the arm’. The skin appeared very thin and corrugated from immersion in the water, but in comparison to the body was not much decomposed. There were no scars or bruises. A few dark hairs under the arm matched hairs on the torso, and gave an indication of hair colour: she was a brunette. Hibbert’s testimony was of particular interest in terms of forming a picture of the victim. Assessing her as a few years younger than Dr Bond would have it, he estimated her age as twenty. ‘The hand itself was long, well shaped, and carefully kept, and the nails were small and well shaped.’30
Unless she’d had a manicure at the morgue, this was curious. Dr Neville had described the nails as ‘not neatly trimmed as a lady’s generally are’. But this of course preceded the discovery of the torso. Bearing in mind that no postmortem was anticipated for the arm, it’s easy to suppose that Neville’s view was formulated in the expectation of the cops dismissing the limb, as they were to do with the Lambeth arm, and the Peckham arm. But now it couldn’t be ignored, and no way was its owner a skivvy. This hand hadn’t shoved a scrubbing brush or heaved coal. If its owner worked, it was probably in the service of a lady, assuming she wasn’t a lady herself.
À propos of that, Inspector Marshall was next up, with some pertinent information. It was revealed that the torso was wrapped in a dress that, if not worn by her at the time of her death, had very probably belonged to the victim. But he didn’t bother to give the jury any measurements, so we cannot be sure. ‘It is a broche satin cloth,’ he said, ‘of Bradford manufacture, but an old pattern, probably of 3 years ago.’ There was nothing special about it – it probably cost sixpence ha’penny a yard. He went on to describe his visits to the vault immediately after the discovery of the torso, and later with two other officers: ‘I made a thorough search about the vaults in the immediate vicinity. I examined the ground and found a piece of newspaper [produced]. I also found a piece of string, which seems to be a piece of sash-cord and Mr Hibbert handed me two pieces of material which he said had come from the body. With regard to the piece of paper, I have made enquiry, and find it is a piece of the Echo, dated the 24th August 1888. Mr Hibbert also handed me a number of small pieces of paper which he said were found on the body, and I find they are pieces of The Daily Chronicle.’31
Marshall went on to contradict everyone who had given an opinion on the matter of access to the site. ‘It is easy, I think, to get over the hoarding in Cannon Row, but there are no indications of anyone having done so.’ As to the length of time the torso had been in the vault, he deferred to the builders, and especially Hedge. ‘I should think,’ he said, ‘the body had been where it was found for days, from the stain on the wall. But the witness who has been examined declares most positively that it was not there on Saturday, as he was on the very spot.’ Troutbeck recalled Hedge, and he reconfirmed this: ‘I looked into the very corner with a light for the hammer. I am quite sure the parcel could not have been there without my seeing it [my emphasis].’32
This was to become a point of supreme importance, and to present a dilemma for the court. ‘The fact that everyone is of opinion that no stranger could have put the parcel in such an out of the way corner,’ said the Post, ‘considerably narrows the scope of the enquiry, and on Monday week other workmen will be called who will prove that the parcel was not in the vault on the Saturday before the Monday it was found.’
With everyone certain the torso wasn’t there until after the works closed on Saturday, 29 September, Troutbeck adjourned for two weeks.
The press was in no doubt that this was another Ripper outrage. ‘There are upon the body found in the cellars exactly the same proofs of a purpose as have been afforded by two, at least, of the cases in Whitechapel’ (as was obvious to everyone but the Metropolitan Police), wrote the Scotsman. ‘The first of the series of the murders and mutilations was committed on August 7th, the second August 31st. Put these facts by the side of the statement of the medical men that the woman whose mutilated body has been found on the Thames Embankment was murdered in early August, and it becomes impossible to doubt that the same person was responsible for all the bloodshed.’33
It was a ‘PERFECT CARNIVAL OF BLOOD IN THE WORLD’S METROPOLIS’, headlined the New York Times. ‘It is an extremely strange state of affairs altogether – THE POLICE APPARENTLY PARALYSED.’ This was certainly true of the mesmerised dupe at their head. A hysterical Freemason was working mirrors out of Scotland Yard, and straight coppers didn’t have a chance. ‘Careful inquiries’, together with ‘a thorough search of the enclosed ground’, were reported. But Jack had another trick up his sleeve, and such painstaking subterranean efforts were soon to manifest themselves as an embarrassing sham.
‘Of course,’ moaned the Daily Echo, ‘no information as to what has transpired is afforded by any of the officers, who – as evidenced by their attitude to the Press in the East End during the past few days – very zealously obey the stringent orders they have to “give nothing to reporters”. Their object is to ascertain whether any other portions of the mutilated body have been hidden away, either beneath the heaps of debris lying about on all sides, or in the long corridor-like vaults beneath the buildings.’34
The police put up the usual appearance of going about their investigations, claiming to have scoured every inch of ground and even draining an abandoned well. Marshall was specifically looking for the victim’s head. But even without it, he must by now have had a reasonable understanding of who she was.
Give or take a year or two, she was about twenty, an imposing young woman, voluptuous even, and tall by the standards of the day. She had dark brown hair, and took care of her appearance: there were no working-girl scars on the arm, and it was a well-manicured hand. Certainly she was no malnourished unfortunate from London’s East End. The common material of her dress indicated that she looked like a lady rather than actually being one. It was a pretty safe bet that she was a girl in service. She had been dismembered indoors, and her torso most probably stored (in a vat or a barrel of disinfectant) in the same place. Were this the case, she was less likely to have been employed as a lady’s maid than as some sort of domestic in the house of the man who killed her. No way was Jack crazy enough to haul fifty pounds of murdered flesh too far, and the locations at which the body parts were found suggested that she might well have lived in the area of their discovery – at Pimlico, on the north side of the Thames, or maybe Battersea, just over the bridge. It wasn’t too wild a guess, therefore, to picture a tall, rather refined girl, in domestic service, perhaps to a gentleman, in residence near the river.
Somebody out there thought they recognised her.
Lilly Vass was eighteen years old when she vanished in July 1888. With only the clothes she stood in she had left her home in Chelsea, and had never been heard of since. On 7 October, motivated by reports of ‘dreadful things’ in the newspapers, her mother went (again) to the police, and shortly after found herself in the mortuary at Millbank. Understandably, she was ‘quite unequal to the ordeal of making an inspection’, but nevertheless was able to give details of her missing child. Lilly seemed to fit the bill. About five feet six inches tall, she was ‘fairly stout, with fine arms, and of dark complexion’. Mrs Vass said that her daughter had been in service with a lady at Sealcott Road, Wandsworth Common (adjacent to Battersea), and had left home on 19 July, ‘ostensibly to go back to her situation’. But Lilly had lied: ‘Although I have always found her a truthful girl, I am bound to say that she had deceived me in one respect.’ She had in fact left her situation in Wandsworth, ‘although she had told me she had not’. For some reason Lilly had quit, and had apparently elected to keep her new whereabouts a secret.35
‘She was not a girl devoid of sense,’ said her mother. ‘I think that if she were alive she would write, even if she did not wish me to know where she was.’ Mrs Vass was convinced her daughter had been abducted, and it was therefore possibly her employer who didn’t want anyone to know where she was. This mystery person may have been a new ‘mistress’, but more likely it was a ‘master’, and her murderer. The reason she lied may well have been so as not to upset her mother with any intimation of immorality. Did this explain why she had left home without packing any clothes? Had she been promised a new wardrobe? She had told her mother ‘that she thought she was going to travel [with her employer] to the Isle of Wight’.36
Now, the Isle of Wight has no less interest to me than does Conduit Street. Ten thousand places in England would mean nothing compared to this frequent haunt of my candidate, where he sailed his yacht and ‘took in the bracing air’. It seems that Lilly’s new employer had promised to take her on a ferry, but had actually had something rather different in mind. Two days after Mrs Vass went to the police, a letter was received at Leman Street police station in Whitechapel. ‘I am going to do another job right under the very nose of damned old Charlie Warren,’ it warned. We can confidently assume that the first job was already under Warren’s nose at New Scotland Yard.
Lilly Vass barely made the London press – the above is sourced from provincial newspapers. Journalists in the capital showed a curious lack of interest, but not less than did the police, who quietly dropped any further investigation. The geography was too dangerous. Although the British press willingly sold the ‘Fiend in his Lair’ routine, they kept well away from the West End. Only one Dr Forbes Winslow broached the possibility of an upmarket assassin. In a letter to The Times he expressed his ‘confident belief that the murderer is not of the class to which “Leather Apron” belongs, but is of the upper-classes of society’. This went down like a rock, and Winslow was virtually in a minority of one.37
Not so in the United States. With no predisposition to protect certain class interests, the American newspapers took a more inquisitive view. Interviewed by the New York Herald in early October, a physician called Dr Alan Hamilton demonstrated a remarkably modern understanding of the serial killer. In response to a question about the Ripper’s state of mind (and he had no doubt that the Scotland Yard trunk was Jack’s work) Hamilton replied, ‘Oh, he is probably reading the newspaper accounts of the murders and enjoying it, going all over the crimes again in his imagination.’ And fantasy would ‘demand more reality’: ‘The more he gives way to his passion, the more pleasure it is likely to give him.’ Referencing similar ‘monomaniacs’, he thought it was very likely that the culprit was ‘an intensely refined, over-educated man, who had degenerated into a condition of ultra-sensuality’. Capping this assessment, he added, ‘I should not be at all surprised to hear that he is a man living in an aristocratic part of the city.’38
Such conclusions, however, could be given no credence by the Metropolitan Police. If Jack was operating outside the East End, they were going to have to start investigating outside the East End – and that would be a whole different ball-game. Victorian gentlemen would not be so ready to call Jack a ‘genius’ if his target became Kensington ladies. With West End wives and daughters on the slab, they might demand more than the pathetic sideshow from the police thus far. Warren’s arse was already on the line. Society might panic, the idiot might be fired, and a real policeman brought in. Disaster would ensue. Any honest broker wouldn’t need more than a wet weekend to sort this nonsense out, and Salisbury’s government would fall. It was an inflammatory time for Jack to up the ante.
On 5 October the Central News Agency received another letter. Following ‘Dear Boss’ and ‘Saucy Jacky’, it was designated as the murderer’s third. This extraordinary communication could, and should, have busted Jack the Ripper. Instead, by selectively quoting from it, the police turned it into another writ of deceit.
On 8 October, under the headline ‘ANOTHER COMMUNICATION KEPT SECRET’, the Evening News published a version of it: ‘A third communication has been received from the writer of the original “Jack the Ripper” letter and postcard, which acting upon official advice, it has been deemed prudent to withhold for the present. It may be stated, however, that although the miscreant avows his intention of committing further crimes shortly, it is only against prostitutes that his threats are directed, his desire being to respect and protect honest women.’
Could any trick the Met pulled ever approach the obscenity of this? Suddenly everyone is prepared to give the Purger’s mail a bit of credibility. Suddenly everyone is supposed to see the socially responsible side of Jack. Far from belittling this letter as the work of a ‘hoaxer’, now everyone wants to take him at his word – not a bad chap, really, bit of a gent even: he doesn’t kill anyone but fourpenny whores, and then only in Whitechapel. You can rest easy in your West End beds. So utterly ridiculous is this deception a sloth could see through it. By trying to invest the murderer with some sort of ‘moral code’, the authorities are attempting to dissuade the public from believing he’s moved up West.
Laughably, like the Victorian police (and in deference to the ‘canonical’), Ripperology is also obliged to try to dismiss the Scotland Yard trunk. It invalidates all their favourite candidates. This wasn’t Kosminski carrying half a woman who weighed almost as much as he did out of the East End. The letter could not have been written by Kosminski either, a certifiable moron who probably had difficulty spelling his own name. Nor was it penned by that hilarious non-starter Michael Ostrog, who existed only as some sort of disturbance in the mind of Sir Melville Macnaghten.
How does this letter square with that mincing junk out of The A to Z in respect of the torso? If ‘the police never imagined there was any connection with the Whitechapel Murders’, what were they doing withholding a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ that made an unequivocal reference to it? Clearly a connection had been made, and when we come to the full text of this letter it will be understood why. It was ‘deemed prudent to withhold [it] for the present’, wrote the Evening News. But like Joseph Lawende’s description of the man in Mitre Square, it was withheld forever.
This is the only letter from the Ripper that the Metropolitan Police wanted everyone to believe was genuine. ‘Hoax’ had gone onto temporary hold. It is little wonder that Scotland Yard withheld the accurate text. It went into Warren like an arrow. This wasn’t a policeman attempting to protect the public, it was a Freemason attempting to protect Masonry – at least, the upper echelons of its ruling elite. I shall have more to say of this letter by and by (including the manipulation of its text), but for the moment, this is how it is presented in the archives.
The handwriting below isn’t the Ripper’s, but belongs to a journalist at the Central News Agency called Thomas J. Bulling. Why he copied the original rather than sending it to Scotland Yard is supposedly unknown. ‘It is odd,’ writes Ripperologist Mr Stewart Evans, ‘that Bulling chose to transcribe this letter instead of sending it.’ In my view it is less ‘odd’ than obvious.
It is a document that screeches of interference. By copying it, you could make it say whatever you like. At this juncture, what the police most definitely would have liked was for Jack himself to deny responsibility for the Scotland Yard trunk, and that’s exactly what this dodgy bit of conjuring purports to do. ‘I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall.’ I do not believe Jack the Ripper wrote that. I think it was written at the behest of Donald Swanson. Before we get into it, let’s have a look at Bulling’s text.
THE CENTRAL NEWS LIMITED
5 New Bridge Street
London Oct 5 1888
Dear Mr Williamson
At 5 minutes to 9 o’clock tonight we received the following letter the envelope of which I enclose by which you will see it is in the same handwriting as the previous communications
“5 October 1888
Dear Friend
In the name of God hear me I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore god will bless the hand that slew her, for the women of Moab and Midian shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit forever. Do as I do and the light of glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes yes three must be ripped, will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke, well well Jacky’s a very practical joker ha ha ha Keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper”
Yours truly
T J Bulling
At the top of his letter Bulling says he encloses the envelope, ‘by which you will see it is in the same handwriting as the previous communications’. Thanks for that, and I’m quite sure they could see it. But why then could they not see the letter? It can’t be lost, or it couldn’t be copied. Jack swears he’s got nothing to do with the Scotland Yard murder, but who’s accusing him? Certainly not the police. They’re doing everything they can to disassociate him from it, and this, of course, is part of their effort. No other Ripper letter was transcribed, so what’s the deal with this one? Why did the police not demand the document itself? Warren and his team of barcodes had just stuck posters up all over East London reproducing the first two communications – ‘Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station.’ So why so coy about Jack’s latest bleat of triumph?
The answer, of course, is because the text had been manipulated to satisfy police requirements, and leaked in part to the press, which explains why the original has never been seen. Its author (or rather, the pen that translated him) is anxious to disassociate himself from the Whitehall torso, offering even to do the detective work for them: ‘I will hunt down and destroy her murderer’.
Well, thank you for the sentiment, Jack, but anyone of an enquiring mind might imagine this is more an expression of police paranoia than anything as absurd as the Ripper’s code of ethics. This was a man who was to cut out Mary Kelly’s cunt, and I think we’re justified in treating any declarations of his ‘honour’ with all due caution. I also think we’re entitled to treat this transparently prompted fakery out of Bulling with the greatest contempt. It reeks of the sidewinding chicanery of Swanson, who invented his own history and knew nothing of Warren’s. So anxious were the ‘eyes and ears’ to camouflage this West End outing, they overlooked the very element that gives it away.
Just as Jack chose Conduit Street out of 28,000 streets in London, so here he chooses ‘Moab’ out of 3,237 names in the Bible. Bro Swanson was too hypnotised to realise it, but both had intimate connections with his boss. The words ‘Moab’ and ‘Midian’ do not appear by accident. They are not the average patter of a murderer, and most particularly not in the context of this torso secreted in the style of a sawn-in-half Moabite ‘foundation sacrifice’ at New Scotland Yard.
It was all part of the ‘Funny Little Game’, coordinated to embarrass ‘the biggest fool in London’. Putting aside the rueful episode of the Moabite Stone, Warren’s sojourn in the lands of Moab and Midian was amongst the most uncomfortable memories of his life. It was there he put a murderer to death; it was there he indulged his passion for ‘Biblical diggings’, turning up foundations where sawn-in-half girls were not entirely uncommon. Just as a chill of sickening nostalgia was in wait on an East End wall, so too in the foundations of his own new buildings was this homicidal/Biblical joke from his past.
The Ripper was on Warren’s case, and Warren was playing by the Ripper’s rules. Get into Warren’s history and that’s where the Ripper was, persecuting him with Masonic esoterica and cod Biblical vernacular that could have been lifted right out of the Old Testament. Jack will ‘bless the hand that slew her’, and ‘their blood shall mingle with the dust’. It is not I, but the Metropolitan Police, that gave this letter its credibility, ‘Do as I do and the light of glory shall shine upon you.’ Ha ha …
This text, with its Americanism ‘quit forever’, is as revealing of the Ripper as it is of Warren himself. His tormentor was holding up a mirror, and if Bro Charlie had had the balls, he could have seen the Ripper’s face. He dared not look. He couldn’t sponge this one away, so he stayed away from Scotland Yard, hoping to gull the public into believing that an entirely different killer was abroad in the metropolis. (No one bought into it but the authors of The A to Z.)
Two weeks later Jack wrote again, and this missive too was withheld. But without Bulling’s accommodation in calligraphics, it presented a more credible scenario. No denials here: the Ripper was claiming the torso as his own work. ‘One of the two women I told you about was a Chelsea girl [almost certainly Lilly Vass] and the other a Battersea girl. I had to overcome great difficulties in bringing the bodies [sic] where I hid them. I am now in Battersea.’39
Was there another body in the foundations of New Scotland Yard? It is quite possible. As will soon become apparent, the police had barely troubled to search the place. Covering up for a criminal had assumed more importance than his crimes, and on every conceivable level Warren was inhibiting the process of detection.
Warren was indeed a ‘Masonic stooge’, rushing around like a headless chicken. He was constantly in denial. ‘Juwes’ had to be denied, grapes had to be denied, Packer’s man with the ‘educated voice’ and the sketches that went with him had to be denied, and the torso screeching provenance was denied along with them.
It wasn’t always thus. Paradoxically, it was in the lands of Moab that (the then Captain) Warren had shown the wherewithal of a policeman. In 1882 a team of his archaeological associates, led by Professor Edward Palmer and Lieutenant William Gill of the Palestine Exploration Fund, had been slaughtered by Bedouins. Warren got up a posse that tracked down and captured the perpetrators, ‘avenging’ their crime by ‘promptly executing the murderers’.40 But he dared show no such vengeful initiative in 1888.
Without it yet having been revealed who had done it, the scandalous mopping-up at Goulston Street was beginning to leak, and on 8 October the Evening News headlined the ‘STUPIDITY OF A POLICE OFFICER’. Two days later the truth was out, and condemnation avalanched on the ‘worthless’ Commissioner: ‘It is clear the Detective Department at Scotland Yard is in an utterly worthless and hopeless condition. That were there a capable Director of Criminal Investigation, the scandalous exhibition of stupidity and ineptitude revealed in the East End inquests, and immunity enjoyed by criminals, murder after murder, would not have angered and disgusted public feeling as it has undoubtedly done.’ Telling it like it was from the Telegraph. And where was this incapable Director of Criminal Investigation, ‘Andy Handy’? Why, he was ordering another café au lait up the nearest rue in Paris.
W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette didn’t have a lot of time for the preposterous encumbrance either: ‘The Chief official who is responsible for the detection of the murderer is as invisible to Londoners as the murderer himself. You may seek Dr Anderson at Scotland Yard, you may look for him in Whitehall Place, but you will not find him.’ And why, at the height of the most febrile crisis in the history of British criminal investigation, was that? Because Robert Anderson was ‘taking a pleasant holiday in Switzerland’. (In reality he was in Paris on behalf of Salisbury’s government, colluding with The Times in the expectation of destroying Charles Parnell.*)
Meanwhile the warped house of cards was in imminent danger of collapse. Warren was drowning. His inclination must have been to run, and on 10 October 1888, that’s exactly what he did.
Less than a week before, Henry Matthews had written to his private secretary, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, recommending that it ‘is essential that some visible evidence of effort – of ingenuity – of vigorous & intelligent exertion should be on record’. Without it, continued Matthews, ‘Sir C.W. will not save himself’. What was needed was a bit of high-profile spin, ‘some visible evidence of effort’, and just such an asinine diversion took place four days later. Thirteen thousand coppers had ‘not a shadow of a clue’, so Warren decided to hand the case over to animals. He threatened to buy a puppy, train it up and have it ready for next March (a prospect that must have filled the Purger with dread). In the meantime he hired a couple of bloodhounds, whose names I’ve withheld to protect the innocent.41
Future plans involved tracking the Fiend from a crime scene to his ‘lair’, and to that end a test was organised wherein Charlie would assume the role of Jack, and the dogs would sniff along as a pair of manhunters. Considering that Warren himself had declared the Ripper ‘left no clue’, we can only wonder what it was they were expected to follow. Presumably they were supposed to smell something, but as even Dr Bagster Phillips had pointed out, they were more likely to want to smell the victim than the murderer. That didn’t deter Warren, who’d probably offered the hounds a whiff of his strap.
To ensure that the exercise was representative, he selected an area with the closest topographical similarity he could find to Whitechapel, i.e. Hyde Park. Three hundred and eighty-eight resplendent acres of boating lake and flowerbeds up the road from Kensington Palace was just the ticket. The dogs were probably told that Rotten Row (rue du Roi, where fashionable people made their promenade) was a bit like Buck’s Row, EC; and with your nose on the deck, what’s the difference?
Anyway, at 7 a.m. on 10 October, off they all took, the Commissioner sporting a pair of knickerbockers in ingenious replication of the outfit in which the Fiend was known to commute through East London. The hounds gave desultory chase, and Warren was last seen rushing up the Serpentine and vanishing around the back of the tea rooms. Everyone had a good laugh, apart from the authorities. Doggerel from the journalist George Sims gave a flavour of the pantomime.
The brow of Sir Charles it was gloomy and sad,
He was slapped by the Tory and kicked by the Rad;
The populace clamoured without in the yard
For Matthews, Home Sec, to be feathered and tarred;
‘Do something – do something!’ Lord Salisbury cried,
‘We’ve done all we can!’ worried Warren replied:
‘We keep on arresting as fast as we can,
And hope soon or late we shall get the right man.’
Then, goaded by taunts to the depths of despair,
The poor First Commissioner tore at his hair,
And fell upon Matthews’ breast with a sob.
But the Whitechapel vampire was still on the job!
At last when the city was maddened with fears,
And the force had dissolved into impotent tears,
They brought him of bloodhounds the best to be found,
And the ‘tecs’ and the dogs sought the murderer’s ground;
Then the bow-wows were loosened with noses to earth,
They trotted away mid the bystanders’ mirth.
The bloodhounds ran north and the bloodhounds ran south,
While Matthews looked on with a wide-open mouth.
‘Good heavens!’ he cried, ‘Are you dotty, Sir Charles?
Is it possible you, with your stern common sense,
Believe in this melodramatic pretence?’
Warren had nothing to offer but ‘melodramatic pretence’. The hysteria in government must have been incredible, featuring interdepartmental hallucinations of the headlines ‘RIPPER CAUGHT – PROMINENT FREEMASON – THE YARD HAD COVERED HIM UP’.
Nobody in their right mind was interested in arresting that, any more than they had been inspired to imprison regal buggers abusing boys at Cleveland Street. The machine’s job was to keep this scandal up East, and providing nobody panicked, between manipulation and bluster they believed they could get away with this, brazen a way through; and, as history is my witness, they did.
But it wasn’t going to be easy, because Jack had a surprise for them in the vaults. While Warren twiddled time away in humiliating make-believe, proposing to buy a puppy for fifteen quid and train it, another dog was already on the case.
The dog’s name was ‘Smoker’. It belonged to a journalist called Jasper Waring, and within two minutes they were to expose the ‘meticulous search’ of the new police buildings as a charade.42
‘The police have had another discovery forced upon them,’ mocked the Evening News. ‘A gentleman who had great faith in the scenting powers of his Spitzbergen Terrier offered its services to the police at Westminster, but the offer was declined without thanks.’ Ignoring the ‘tailor’s dummies’, Waring obtained consent from the works contractor at New Scotland Yard, a Mr Grover. ‘The dog was placed in the dark vaulted recesses where the body was found,’ continued the News, ‘and the animal at once made it apparent that it had the scent of something underground. The earth was removed, and at a little more than half a foot depth, the dog seized something, which turned out to be a human leg. The police eventually made themselves useful, by wrapping the leg carefully in brown paper and taking it to the mortuary.’ The News added as an acid codicil: ‘Anybody is at liberty to make his own comment.’43
I don’t know what these comments might have been, but I suspect they may have been influenced by the now universal public disgust felt for Warren’s police force. If its entranced Commissioner hoped to draw attention away from New Scotland Yard by hauling his silly arse around Hyde Park, he had most singularly failed. I imagine the public were asking why he didn’t take his bloodhounds into the foundations of his own building – Warren didn’t visit the vaults until 19 October – and further, why the Metropolitan Police had consistently deceived the public it purported to serve.44
‘The police would make a thorough search [and] this would occupy some considerable time’ (the Echo, 3 October). ‘The grounds where the remains were found were yesterday subject to rigid examination’ (The Times, 4 October). ‘The police are searching in all directions for the missing portions of the body’ (Lloyd’s, 7 October) – but not, apparently, even six inches into the dirt underneath the spot where the torso was found.
‘Smoker’ had tossed a potentially disastrous spanner in the works. Dr Bond was on his way, and when he got there he pronounced the leg to be human, and estimated that it ‘had been buried at least six weeks’.
Oh dear. Did this ever put the police in Shit Street. Detective Dog had changed everything. Reality was swept aside, and suddenly the authorities were obliged to insist that the torso had been there all the time, because if the workmen were right, and the body hadn’t been there when the leg was buried, it meant that Jack had visited the vaults at New Scotland Yard twice.
‘The statement of the workmen,’ wrote The Times, ‘that the body found a fortnight ago had only been in place from the Saturday until the Tuesday, is a matter of the greatest difficulty to those who have investigation of the mystery.’45 We might reasonably consider this an understatement. Jack must have been there once, on or about 24 August, to bury the leg, and again on or about 29 September, to secrete the torso. Bond couldn’t yet say whether the leg belonged to the body, but that was irrelevant to the matter of public deception.
This wasn’t some East End nut trying to hide a body, but a psychopath with a plan; and the plan looked as if it had something to do with Charlie Warren. Jack had tossed the arm in the river, and had he wished, he could just as easily have tossed the leg in too. But he didn’t wish anything of the sort, and instead on two separate occasions suffered the enormous hassle of bringing his body parts to New Scotland Yard.
A ‘lack of clues’ simply wouldn’t do to explain it, because this was a clue, and by Jack’s oath on the ‘women of Moab and Midian’, let no one try to pretend the police didn’t understand it. It was they who took the letter seriously, they who selectively leaked from it, and they who ultimately withheld it. The choice of Warren’s new building wasn’t trivial – it was clearly targeted. And if such a reality became public, some very uncomfortable questions might get asked.
Various newspapers were already speculating along these lines: ‘Perhaps this “fiendish assassin” was taunting Warren?’46 Oh dear, oh dear, that was at the very nub of it. At all costs the workmen had to be proved wrong – made to see what they hadn’t seen. And if they wouldn’t see it, then the authorities had other means at their disposal.
John Troutbeck reconvened his coroner’s court on the morning of Monday, 22 October. The ground for his proceedings was prepared. Since the discovery of the leg the press had been the conduit for diversionary tosh, such as this from The Times, on 19 October:
The opinion is confirmed that the body must have lain there more than the days declared by the men. It is to be remembered that when it was discovered it was not by the smell, for that was altogether unnoticed, and it is easy to account for the non-observance of any smell by the workmen when it is brought to mind that in such places deserted and starved animals frequently crawl to die, and moreover, in the excavations of old foundations like those about Westminster there are frequently cesspools which are all taken as a matter of course. A board leaning across the angle in the wall in which the body was found would have effectively concealed the parcel altogether, and it would not now have been brought to light but for the fact that some lost clothes were thought to have been discovered by accidental survey of the dark recess. Thus the men may have given honest testimony, to the best of their belief, in saying that the parcel was not there on the last Friday and Saturday in September, the fact being that they had not observed it, and anyone who has seen the place can bear testimony that it would be easy to overlook anything hidden in that darkest recess of a dark vault.
In a later chapter we will explore the depths of criminal collusion between Sir Robert Anderson and The Times newspaper. Meanwhile, such villainous crap is indicative of the crisis the Establishment acknowledged itself to be in. The Times had proposed a bunch of worthless deceptions in order that it might argue the irrelevant. Every specious reason to discredit the workmen is here enshrined. Acknowledging that the parcel wasn’t discovered by its stench, it posits that the men couldn’t have smelt it anyway, because the foundations were apparently awash with decaying animals. This smokescreen of human and animal smells is utterly fallacious, because anyone who ever got near the torso – Wildbore (who found it), Budden (who hauled it out) and Brown (who ordered it opened) – said it had no smell at all. Having put up a camouflage in respect of the stench, The Times moved on to try to camouflage the torso itself. A non-existent and never previously mentioned ‘board’ is brought into the equation, and this board ‘would have effectively concealed the parcel altogether’. Forget the retrieval of tools (Wildbore’s kit and Hedge’s hammer), the discovery was now predicated on ‘the fact that some lost clothes were thought to have been discovered by accidental survey of the dark recess’. ‘Lost clothes’ are now substituted for the habitual concealment of tools at that very spot in the foundations where workmen had been busy for the last three weeks. Nothing was ‘accidental’ about the discovery of the torso, but never mind what Wildbore and Hedge had said at the previous hearing. ‘It would be easy,’ concluded The Times, ‘to overlook anything hidden in that darkest recess of a dark vault.’
In other words, stand by for another nobbled inquest.
‘Inspector Marshall, who has the character of not leaving a clue untouched’ (except for a leg), sat in again on behalf of the Met. By now the jury were familiar with the story, but perhaps not with the way it was about to be retold. What the authorities required was a repudiation of the evidence given by the workmen at the previous session. Any idea of a dual visit by the murderer was most unwelcome, and Troutbeck’s task therefore was to unite the torso and the leg in a single delivery. Bogus ‘witnesses’ were put up to try to effect this, stuffing the benches to fabricate a dynamic. At failing theatrical presentations this is known as ‘papering the house’.
Nothing new was brought to the proceedings. What is of interest is what was left out.
The only familiar face to be called belonged to the foreman of the works, William Brown. He told the court he’d been in the vaults on Friday, 28 September. ‘He did not examine the recesses,’ he said. ‘The body might have been there without him seeing it.’ To wit, he is a non-witness. He didn’t go into the recess, so what was the point of asking him what was in it? Moreover, Brown didn’t come into the picture until 2 October, when the torso was discovered by somebody else, so who gives a toss what he didn’t see on 28 September?
If Brown’s evidence was worthless, what are we to make of the next waste of breath? Mr George Errant, Clerk of the Works, stated that he was ‘on the works’ on Saturday, 29 September, but said nothing about going into the vaults. Errant had seen less than nothing – and this isn’t surprising, since he was a pen-pusher in the office upstairs.
The ‘papering’ continued with a carpenter’s labourer called Lawrence, who had at least been into the vault, but, startlingly, had seen nothing either, because ‘the place was so completely dark’. Another labourer, Alfred Young, ‘gave similar evidence’, as did Mr Franklin, who like Brown had been down in the vaults on Friday, 28 September, ‘but did not absolutely look upon the corner where the body was found’.
Thus five ‘witnesses’ were able to say what they hadn’t seen. Astute members of the jury might have noticed that (excepting Brown) none of these men had been called at the previous inquest, and none who had given evidence then were recalled now. Where, for example, was Frederick Wildbore, the man who had actually found the body, who had struck a light in the recess and had stated unequivocally, ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t there last Friday because we had occasion to do something at that very spot.’ Would not a reiteration of his evidence have cleared the matter up? Indeed it would, and it was precisely for that reason that Wildbore wasn’t called.
Nor did Troutbeck call George Budden, the man who had hauled the bundle out. Eyewitness accounts from those who’d first encountered the body would have been most unuseful, and would have kyboshed the forensic swindle coming up from Dr Bond.
It was a revelation to me, genuinely astonishing, how these coroners’ courts were bent into compliance with the desired outcome, how the certainties of original witnesses were subverted to the corrupt requirements of a predetermined verdict. Under no circumstances could anyone be allowed to believe that Jack had made multiple visits to New Scotland Yard.
Having explored nothing of 29 September, much less 2 October, Troutbeck deftly consigned the discovery of the torso onto a back burner, shifting the focus forward to 16 October and the underground detective work of ‘Smoker’. His owner, Mr Jasper Waring, and Waring’s associate Mr Angle, related how they had gone into the foundations with the dog, but now adjusted its disinterment of the leg to the opposite side of the recess. It had also plunged to a greater depth, and had confusingly become an arm: ‘The arm [sic] was found some 12 inches down’ – whereas the leg, according to Waring, was ‘at the depth of only 4 or 5 inches when the stones were removed’. It was this barely hidden limb that, despite his ‘exhaustive search’,47 had been missed by Marshall.
Such raw incompetence was of no interest to Troutbeck, who in Wynne Baxter mode had one last difficulty to navigate before the lads from the Yard were home and dry. This was Ernest Hedge, saved to the last, when his evidence could be put up in direct contradiction with the ‘expert evidence’ that would follow. Hedge was adamant about his visit to the vault on the 29th, though he now had a slightly different story to tell. ‘With respect to Saturday 29th,’ recorded The Times, ‘when he went into the vault, he said to look for a hammer, he now said he saw the tools deposited on the opposite side to where the body lay. He struck a light to look into the recess, and the parcel was not there then.’ Nor could it have been, because when the torso arrived later that night it was deposited in the recess opposite. By its usual casuistry, The Times says this was ‘where the body lay’.
Dr Bond was the next witness, and was in no doubt of it. But, temporarily ignoring the issue of the torso, he opened his deposition with a statement on the leg:
I went into the recess of the vault where the body was found, and found there a human leg partially buried. It was uncovered but had not been removed from the place where it was found. I examined the earth which had covered it, and I found that this gave unmistakable evidence of having covered the leg for several weeks – that the leg had been there for several weeks. Decomposition had taken place there, and it was not decomposed when placed there. The upper part of the leg was in a good state of preservation, but the foot had decomposed, and the skin and the nails had peeled off. We found that the leg had been divided at the knee joint by free incisions, and very cleverly articulated without injury to the cartilages.
He had no doubt that the leg belonged to the body and the arm. At last he came to the point at issue if a dual visit to the vaults was to be denied: ‘I took the opportunity, I may say, while in the vault, to examine the spot where the body was found,’ and in direct contradiction to what he had said before, he now claimed that there was no argument about it, the builders were wrong: ‘The body must have lain there for weeks, and it had decomposed there.’
‘You think it had decomposed in that spot?’
‘Yes,’ insisted Bond. ‘The decomposition was of a character of a body only partially exposed to the air. The brickwork against which it leant was deeply covered with the decomposed fluid of the human body turned black, and it could not have been done in a day or two. The stain is not superficial, but the brickwork is quite saturated. I should think it must have been there quite six weeks when found – from August.’
At the previous hearing Bond had said, ‘I thought the body must have been there several days from the state of the wall,’ although he couldn’t be sure. Now he was certain it had been there for several weeks, rotting away for half the summer.
Troutbeck let him get away with it, but Bond was lying. Established facts militate against his revised point of view. Dr Neville had said the Pimlico arm was from a recently dead body (about 8 September), and Dr Hibbert was broadly in agreement: ‘It wasn’t much decomposed.’ Unless the perpetrator had murdered the arm at a different time to murdering the torso, Dr Bond’s assessment is impossible. The body couldn’t have been in the vaults since August, when the arm was still living in September.
Bond didn’t work in the vaults, but Wildbore and Hedge, who did, were positive that the torso had not been there prior to 29 September. Both were eyewitnesses, so that’s two against one – and 2,000 against one if you include the maggots.
I do not believe for a moment that Dr Bond was innocent of the significance of the maggots. By the nineteenth century it was well understood that their presence in a corpse could be used to determine the time of death. It is in fact an ancient science, used in cases of homicide for the best part of seven hundred years. In our day it is known as ‘forensic entomology’, and one of its leading practitioners, Dr Mark Benecke, has a philosophy that couldn’t be more appropriate to the New Scotland Yard trunk: ‘Maggots don’t lie.’
Let us navigate that servile little creep Troutbeck, and return again to the previous hearing. Bond had said the body was ‘absolutely full of maggots’. This statement, out of the physician’s own mouth, bears witness to the certainty of the workmen, and whether he was aware of it or not, it proves that Bond was wrong.
‘Flies typically lay eggs on a corpse – which it can detect at a very great distance – minutes after death, and the eggs take a few hours to a day to hatch into maggots. Maggots have a life-cycle that can be used to date the material they feed and breed on.’48 The maggots most usually encountered on lifeless flesh can be sourced to three different types of fly:
1) The common bluebottle. Eggs are laid on fresh rather than putrefied flesh. The maximum number by a single female is 2,000, in groups of about 150. The eggs hatch at between eight and fourteen hours, depending on temperature. At a further eight to fourteen hours the first skin is shed and a larval instar emerges. The second instar emerges after two or three days, and the third stage within seven to eight days, and remains feeding for a further five days. When fully grown the maggot leaves the body and travels some distance, where it buries itself in soil and pupates. Twelve days completes the cycle.
2) The greenbottle, entirely similar to the above.
3) The common housefly. The female lays about 150 eggs which hatch in between eight to fourteen hours, the first larval stage lasting thirty-six hours. Second instar, one or two days, third instar three or four days, depending on conditions (temperature, etc.). The pupal stage (buried in the earth) generally seven days.49
Bond said the body was ‘full of maggots’ (second instars), and this is consistent with the workmen’s timeframe of two to three days. The temperature in London on 29 September 1888 was 61° Fahrenheit. On 2 October it was 42°.50 The relatively cool environment may have slowed the larval development by a day or two, but it is quite impossible for the torso to have been full of maggots and also in situ for six or more weeks. If the body had been there in August it would have been infested within twenty-four hours. The maggots would have pupated and been long gone, leaving nothing but a filthy mess of bones.
Let no one imagine it was the dress that protected the body from insect attack, because at the first inquest George Budden had stated, without dissent, that it was ‘open at the top’.
Why would Jack interfere with his own expertly tied parcel? I suggest it was to initiate the very chain of events over which Bond and this court were now obliged to dissemble. He wanted his handiwork discovered, and that’s why he exposed it. ‘Maggots don’t lie.’51 They leave that to the Victorian police.
The Ripper was destroying women, but he was also destroying Charles Warren. He was targeting authority as represented by its most senior policeman, and its most senior policeman knew it. He could make himself look ridiculous with as many bloodhounds as he liked, but he could never catch the Ripper. They were in a kind of homicidal stalemate – Jack as trapped in his own obsession as Warren was trapped in the results of it.
The great American forensic psychiatrist Dr James Brussel, who in the 1960s busted into the thinking of Albert DeSalvo (known as the Boston Strangler), was a master at understanding this mindset: ‘The motivations behind the acts of a madman possess their own logic. The [psychopathic] murderer does not act wholly irrationally. There is a method to his madness; there is a logic, a rationale, hidden behind what he does and how he does it, however wildly bizarre and completely without reason it appears to be. The challenge to the psychiatrist/criminologist is to find that logic … seeking out the hidden mathematics of the disturbed mind.’52
DeSalvo didn’t escalate the sexual humiliation, or the grotesque ‘pretty bows’53 he tied about his victims’ necks, by accident, and neither by accident did Jack the Ripper elaborate his crime scenes with flagrant Masonic symbolism. You would have to be blind as a bloody bat, a Freemason, a Ripperologist, or all three, not to consider the ‘hidden mathematics’ here.
Jack was in Charlie’s face, and the maggots make it impossible for him not to have visited New Scotland Yard twice. He buried the leg at some time in August, before murdering Lilly Vass (if she it was) and tossing her arm into the river about 8 September, but preserving her torso in disinfectant until he judged the time right to inflict maximum embarrassment on Warren, delivering it as a ‘Moab’ piss-take to the vault over the weekend of the 29th, to coincide with the ‘Double Event’.
If the leg was buried in August, before the arm’s owner was murdered, they couldn’t belong to the same body. It would seem the Ripper sourced different corpses to make his deposits at New Scotland Yard. In a letter dated 23 October, he was happy to clear the matter up: ‘The leg you found at Whitehall does not belong to the trunk you found there.’ This probably explains what he meant by ‘a Chelsea girl’ and ‘a Battersea girl’.
We now return inexorably to Troutbeck’s court for the dénouement. It was another classic nonsense, challenging nothing of the tradition established by the likes of Wynne Baxter.
Troutbeck’s dismissal of evidence (otherwise known as the summing-up) was predictably curt. He rehearsed nothing of the dates, the discrepancies in the evidence, or the difficulties the assassin would have had accessing the vaults. How Jack had scaled a nine-foot hoarding with his body parts was of no interest, nor did Troutbeck wish to explore to whom those body parts might have belonged. ‘There was no evidence, of the identity or of the cause of death,’ he said.54
Apparently he had paid no attention when Dr Bond had stated that death had most likely been caused by ‘haemorrhage’. But even if he’d missed it in court, he could have read it in the newspapers. ‘Death,’ reported The Times on 10 October, ‘is defined as having been one which drained the body of blood.’
Now this is most pertinent, and anyone actually interested in apprehending this monster might have been grateful to have it as part of the official record. It was an abstruse diagnosis that would reiterate itself in the corpse of another of Jack’s victims, dubbed ‘the Pinchin Street Torso’, and also more importantly some eight weeks hence at Bradford, where the Ripper would murder a child, Johnnie Gill, draining his body of blood.
Steering well clear of this kind of thing, Troutbeck had almost finished. ‘The medical evidence,’ he said, ‘was that the body had been cut up after death, and that no mortal wounds had been discovered.’55 So what have we got? ‘The jury had before them the surmise that no one would mutilate a body except for the purpose of concealing an identity, which, once established, might lead to the detection of a terrible murder, but beyond that fact, they could not go except by supposition.’
It was hardly necessary to establish the identity of the victim to conclude that this was a terrible murder. But did not this wretched little coroner wonder who might have had some part in it? Apparently nothing was further from his mind. ‘He left it,’ wrote The Times, ‘to the jury to say whether they would return a verdict of “Found Dead” or “Wilful murder against some person unknown”.’56
She was most certainly ‘found dead’. There could hardly be any conjecture over that. But the fact that she was found dead about a mile away from where her arm was found dead must surely have precluded Troutbeck’s proposed choice of verdicts. Found dead by what means? Was it a suicide? Did the torso decapitate itself before throwing its arm in the river and sawing itself in half? ‘Found dead’ is nothing beyond a statement of the obvious. Troutbeck may as well have offered the jury ‘found downstairs’.
But ‘wilful murder’ was a little sensitive in these troubled days, and might have associated this West End atrocity with the East End Purger. You were definitely ‘found dead’ if Jack hit you in Whitechapel (but let no one imagine this was a Ripper hit).
The last word the public were ever to hear of the Scotland Yard trunk comes again from The Times. ‘The jury,’ it wrote, ‘after a brief consultation, found a verdict of “Found Dead”, and were then discharged, the police being left, the Coroner said, with the charge of solving the mystery.’57
This didn’t look at all promising.
* See Appendix I, ‘The Parnell Frame-Up’.