The Poisoning of James Maybrick
(May 11, 1889)
James Maybrick was a rich, self-made Liverpudlian businessman, who fell in love with 18-year-old Florence Chandler, from Alabama, on a ship crossing the Atlantic to Liverpool in 1881. Maybrick was then 41. Ignoring their 23-year age difference, they married. The couple became the toast of the town—Alabama girls being a considerable rarity in Liverpool. The Maybricks attended all the best social gatherings and seemed to everyone to be a picture of marital happiness. But things started to go wrong in their relationship. Florence found out that Maybrick not only kept several mistresses before they had married, but that he was still continuing to see one of them. James explained that he could hardly stop visiting this lady, as she had born him five illegitimate children . . .
Florence Maybrick
Death of a Wife Beater
After their marriage the Maybricks settled into Battlecrease House in Aigburth, a suburb of Liverpool. It was there that James died after a short, violent illness.
When she found out about James’s mistress, Florence naturally felt that she had been betrayed and deceived, but she could do nothing publicly: divorce was unthinkable, both because of the attendant scandal and the near certainty that the court would award sole custody of their children to James. So she denied Maybrick her bed and began a series of flirtations. Her “flirtation” with a man called Alfred Brierly resulted in three nights spent together in a London hotel. Maybrick, finding out, became insanely—and some would say hypocritically—jealous.
The Maybricks quarrelled violently about her relationship with Alfred Brierly after returning from the Grand National Horse Races on March 29, 1889. The argument ended with James beating Florence and shouting that he wanted a divorce. It was this, the prosecution later argued, that drove Florence to murder her husband: the assault and his mistress were one thing, but if Florence were divorced for committing adultery, she would be a “ruined woman” in Victorian society—a social outcast and, quite possibly, destitute.
A month later, on April 27, James fell ill with diarrhea and vomiting. After days of agony he died on May 11. At the autopsy doctors found small traces of arsenic poisoning, and questioning of the Maybrick servants turned up the fact that Florence had been seen soaking arsenic-based flypapers in water in her bedroom shortly before James became ill. She insisted that she was simply using it for a beauty preparation. Still she was charged with her husband’s murder. The jury found her guilty.
Addicted to Poison
Florence Maybrick in court before Judge Stephen
Florence Maybrick’s trial was a travesty of justice: the jury was not told an essential fact that would otherwise have certainly caused them to acquit her.
James Maybrick had been a drug addict, and—strangely enough—the drug to which he was addicted was arsenic. This is, in fact, a powerful stimulant—if taken in nonlethal doses—and doctors in the nineteenth century often prescribed it as both a painkiller and as a pick-me-up.
Sooner or later James would have died of arsenic poisoning—for years he’d been ingesting doses that were large enough to kill anyone who had not built up a phenomenal resistance. But James was aging, and his system couldn’t have taken the punishment indefinitely. If Florence’s jury knew that James was an arsenic addict who would have inevitably dosed himself to death, it would almost certainly acquitted Florence on the strength of “reasonable doubt.”
The judge, Fitzjames Stephen, seemed to be of that opinion; during the first day of his summation, he all but told the jury to acquit Florence. Then something odd happened: that evening Florence asked to speak to the judge in private, which he allowed. The next day Stephen had changed his tack, and all but told the jury to convict. The jury complied, and Stephen sentenced Florence to death by hanging.
Arsenical Fantasy
A single fact seems to prove the “Maybrick-Ripper diary” a fake: Florence’s affair with Brierly apparently took place around Christmas 1888—months too late to have inspired the Ripper murders. Yet it is possible that the arsenic-mad Maybrick might have fantasized that he was the killer, and he may have “confessed” as much to his hated wife.
Mrs. Jack the Ripper
The death of James Maybrick, left, raises a few questions. Was he a murder victim? Or an accidental overdose? And, was Maybrick also an infamous murderer himself?
What did Florence tell the judge to make him violently—some might say homicidally—against her, when he had been previously on her side? The matter remained a mystery until 1992, when a document was discovered that purported itself to be the secret diary of James Maybrick. It did indeed contain details of murder, but not those of James himself. In the diary, James gave a detailed confession to being Jack the Ripper.
The Jack the Ripper murders took place in autumn 1888—more than eight months before James’s death. In the diary James claimed that jealousy over his wife’s adultery and his addiction to arsenic had driven him to murder prostitutes in London. Each killing, he wrote, was a proxy for the wished-for murder of his wife.
The “Maybrick diary” remains a highly controversial document. Both the ink and paper appear to be old enough to be genuine, and it contains accurate details about the murders that were not generally known. Yet many believe it is a forgery. It seems just too perfect that one of the nineteenth century’s most famous murder victims was himself the Victorian period’s most infamous murderer.
In the light of the diary, it’s tempting to speculate that James made a deathbed confession that he was Jack the Ripper, and Florence then passed this on to the judge in the hopes of some leniency. Instead Judge Stephen may have decided Florence was an outrageous liar and turned against her. He sentenced her to death, but judgment was later commuted to life imprisonment. Florence was released in 1904, having spent 14 years in prison.
(1888)
Jack the Ripper, the mysterious murderer, who terrorized Victorian London, is perhaps the most iconic serial killer in the public mind. When asked to name famous serial killers most people will mention him, even though nobody knows his real name or even very much about him. Some believe (incorrectly) that “Jack” was the first known serial killer. Others suppose that the Ripper crimes took place over many years and that his victims ran into the dozens. In actual fact, the murders took place over just a few months in 1888, and the victims were possibly no more than five in number.
Jack the Ripper: identity unknown
The “Canonical” Five
Just who was a Ripper victim? Experts agree on five names—these are often referred to as the canonical five: Nicholls, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly. Two others, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, are also strong contenders, and there may be as many as five others.
Polly Nicholls’s Bad Luck
At 2:30 AM on Friday, August 31, a fellow prostitute saw Mary Anne “Polly” Nicholls on Osborn Street in the seedy Whitechapel district of London’s East End. Three-quarters of an hour later, her body was found by a cart driver named Cross on Bucks Row (now called Durward Street), lying in the entrance to the Old Stable Yard at the west end of the street. In the mortuary of the Old Montague Street Workhouse it was discovered that she had been disemboweled. Death was due to severing of the windpipe. A bruise on her face indicated that the murderer clamped his hand over her mouth before cutting her throat. A woman sleeping in a bedroom only a few yards from the murder had heard no sound.
“I shant quit ripping them . . .”
On September 28 the Central News Agency received a letter threatening more murders: “I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.” It was signed “Jack the Ripper.”
The murders caused a mass panic. Meetings were held in the streets, criticizing the police and the home secretary. Bloodhounds were suggested, but when used they promptly lost themselves in the borough of Tooting. The newspapers of the time gave extremely full, lurid reports of the murders and inquests and tirelessly offered theories.
Someone who saw Annie Chapman talking to a man outside 29 Hanbury Street mentioned that the possible murderer sported a large moustache and was of a “foreign appearance.” Newspapers and broadsheets widely circulated this description and unfortunately played directly to Londoners’ bigotry; many would have liked to believe that only a foreigner was capable of such monstrous crimes.
Coins Laid at Annie’s Feet
Annie Chapman’s mortuary photo
The next Ripper murder took place on September 8. Annie Chapman, aged 47, was turned away from a lodging house in Dorset Street, having no money to pay for a bed. It seems probable that the murderer picked her up outside the yard where the murder took place, 29 Hanbury Street in the Spitalfields district just north of Whitechapel. She accompanied him down a passageway at the side of the house some time after 5:00 AM. The body was found shortly after 6:00 AM. The head had been almost severed from the body. The body was cut open, as in the case of Mary Anne Nicholls, and the kidneys and ovaries had been removed. Two front teeth were missing (repeating a curious feature of the Nicholls murder), and two brass rings and some copper pennies were laid neatly at her feet.
Again the murderer had carried out the crime with extreme coolness and had made no sound. There were 16 people living at 29 Hanbury Street, and a scream would have quickly brought help to the victim.
Mr. Deimschutz Almost Catches Jack Red Handed
On the morning of September 30, two murders were committed in Whitechapel. The first was of a Swedish woman called Elizabeth Stride. A hawker named Louis Deimschutz drove his horse and cart into the backyard of the International Workers Educational Club in Berner Street (A school now stands on the site.). He saw a woman’s body on the ground and rushed into the club to raise the alarm. Stride’s throat had been cut very recently—so recently that it is likely that Jack the Ripper had been interrupted and hid in the shadows of the yard. He then made his escape, as Deimschutz ran past him into the club to get help. This was at 1:00 AM.
Jack Takes Some Souvenirs
A wanted poster from 1888 calls the killer “Leather Apron.” He was called several names before giving himself the name Jack the Ripper in a letter to a news agency.
At around 1:00 AM on September 30, Catherine Eddowes, a 43-year-old prostitute, was released from Bishopsgate Police Station, where she had been held for drunkenness. The Ripper picked her up and took her into a narrow alleyway that extends between Mitre Square and Duke Street, known as Church Passage (now St. James’s Passage). Police Constable Watkins passed through the passage on his beat at 1:30 AM. A quarter of an hour later he again passed through the square and found Eddowes’s body in the corner of the square near Church Passage. Her face had been badly mutilated—perhaps to delay identification—and the body cut open in the usual way: the left kidney and some of her entrails had been removed and taken away. It was some time before she was identified, and, in the meantime, one of the newspapers published a report that she was thought to be a certain “Mary Anne Kelly.” This is a remarkable coincidence, since the name of the final victim was Mary Jane Kelly.
A householder who lived in nearby Bemer Street testified that she saw a young man carrying a shiny black bag walking away from the scene of the crime.
Jack or Jill?
One early theory was that Jack was actually a Jill—that is, a woman. Some Ripper theorists posit that she might have been a mad midwife (thus the basic medical knowledge suggested by the killings and the lack of rape in the attacks). But the Ripper must have been very strong to kill so quickly, and cases of female serial killers are rare.
Jack Writes in Red
Jack’s letter “from hell”
After these murders the Central News Agency received another letter signed “Jack the Ripper,” in which he expressed regret that he had been interrupted while with his victims and had not been able to send the ears to the police (There had been an attempt to cut off the ear of Catherine Eddowes, although this fact had not been made public at that time.). He also mentioned that “number one squealed a bit,” which is borne out by a witness in Berner Street who heard a cry. Jack himself most likely wrote the letter, which he posted only a few hours after the murders and wrote in blood red ink.
Bands of vigilantes patrolled the streets of Whitechapel at night, but as weeks passed without further crimes, the panic died down. Then, on November 9, the last of the murders took place at a house in Miller’s Court, which ran off Dorset Street (now Duval Street). Mary Jane Kelly was younger than any of the other victims. She was 24.
Mary’s Room
The mutilated corpse of Mary Kelly
On the morning of November 9, at 10:45, a man knocked on the door of Mary Jane Kelly’s one-room, ground-floor flat to collect the rent. Getting no reply, he peered in through the dirty, broken window. Jack had evidently spent a long time in there. The walls of the room were spattered with blood, and what remained of Kelly lay on the bed. Her throat had been slashed so deeply that her head had been almost severed from her body. Her lower face was slashed to ribbons. Her heart had been cut out and placed on the bed pillow. Her belly had been torn open and her entrails pulled out and draped over a picture frame. One of the thighs of her spread-eagled legs had been filleted to the bone.
As usual with the Ripper, he had swiftly killed his victim, then mutilated her corpse. He had apparently worked by the light of a lit pile of rags, the ashes of which were lying burned out in the grate. The probable time of the killing was set by neighbors’ reports of hearing a cry of “Murder!” at about 3:30 AM. It goes some way to show just how frightened the people of the East End were by the Ripper murders that none of the dozen or so inhabitants of Miller’s Court investigated the cry. The inquest revealed that no parts of Kelly’s body had been taken away this time.
Why Did Jack Stop?
The Metropolitan Police Service, charged with solving the Whitechapel murders, received a great deal of criticism for its inability to identify the elusive Jack the Ripper. Newspapers and magazines began to satire their ineffectual efforts, such as this cartoon that shows a blindfolded policeman wandering through the East End.
We have no certain idea who Jack the Ripper was, so we cannot be certain just why he apparently ceased killing in November 1888. But, given the frequency of the murders and the savagery of the attack on Mary Kelly, it seems likely that Jack was rapidly getting out of control.
It is possible that he moved to another country—where at the time savage murders were easier to conceal than in England—but this does not seem likely. He was evidently an “antisocial” serial killer; these prefer to leave their victims to be found—thus horrifying and terrifying the public. Totally hiding his activities would not fit his psychological needs.
It is also possible that he simply got tired of killing, but this is almost unknown among serial killers. A more likely reason that the killings stopped was that “Jack” was either locked in a mental asylum, had committed suicide (although this is also almost unknown among serial killers), or he had died, possibly killed by a potential victim who fought back.
(August 4, 1892)
Lizzie Borden is remembered as one of the most infamous murderers of the nineteenth century. There is even a jump-rope song—still chanted in school playgrounds of today by happily ghoulish children—that gives the details of the gruesome case:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother 40 whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father 41.
What is less well known, however, is the fact that Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the brutal murder of her father and stepmother.
Lizzie Borden
The Double Murder
Police photos of Abby Borden, left, and Andrew Borden, right. The murder of the couple was excessively violent, which suggests that the culprit was very angry or upset.
In 1892 Lizzie Borden, aged 32, lived with her father, her stepmother, and her older sister at 92 Second Street—an unfashionable address in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts. Nonetheless Andrew Borden, a bank director, was one of the richest men in town. He was known, however, as something of a miser.
At 11:10 AM on August 4, housemaid Bridget Sullivan heard Lizzie screaming: “Come down quick! Father’s dead! Somebody’s come in and killed him!”
Bridget found the 72-year-old Andrew lying sprawled on his back on the couch in his study. He was quite dead, and his head was a shattered, red mess. Upstairs they found Abby, Lizzie’s 64-year-old stepmother, lying on the guest bedroom floor with her head also smashed in, this time from behind.
Whodunit?
It was a fairly short list of suspects in the double murder. The only people in the house at the time of the killings, other than the victims, were Lizzie and Bridget. The evidence ruled out any possibility that either Andrew or Abby killed the other and then his-or herself. One of the two women or some undetected interloper had to have done it.
Medical examination showed that an axe or a hatchet had felled both victims. Contrary to the 40 or so “whacks” listed in the playground rhyme, Abby had taken only 18 blows to the back of the head and Andrew 11 blows to the front. But the amount of “overkill” in each murder—just 2 or 3 blows would have been deadly—suggested a frenzy or fury.
A key factor in the investigation was blood spatter. Lizzie had raised the alarm only minutes after the murders, but neither she nor Bridget bore bloodstains when the neighbors arrived. And neither apparently had time to wash and change into clean clothes. The police nevertheless charged Lizzie with double homicide.
Motives
The Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts, still stands. It is now open as the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast/Museum.
The Borden household had been an unhappy one for some time. Lizzie and her sister, Emma, were in their 30s and, by Victorian standards, considered “old maids.” Their main hope—if they indeed wanted to marry—was their father’s fortune: once the old man died they would both be rich spinsters and thus prime targets in the local marriage market.
Andrew’s marriage to Abby Durfree Gray—his second wife—had damaged these prospects. Not only would she inherit the lion’s share of his money, but she was also pressuring him to lend money to her relatives.
The Borden daughters were habitually frosty with their rather meek stepmother and even took over the front half of the house as their private preserve. They’d often row with their father and stepmother and refused to call Abby anything but the coldly formal “Mrs Borden.” Emma, though, was not a suspect; she’d been away at the time of the murders. But it turned out that both she and Lizzie had had a blazing argument about money with Andrew shortly before both of them had stormed off on holiday. Lizzie, however, had unexpectedly returned home . . . just before the killings.
The Trial
A newspaper illustration of Lizzie Borden during her trial in June 1893. Although she gave incriminating testimony at the inquest, enough for the police to charge her with murder, none of it was allowed in the actual trial, which made it far easier for the 12 jurors to acquit her.
The tension in the Borden household did give Lizzie some motive for the crime, but there was no confirming physical or witness evidence. The prosecution claimed that a broken hatchet found in the cellar had been the murder weapon and that Lizzie had cleaned its blade and then broken off the bloodstained wood handle. But the missing handle had then shown up in the cellar—quite unstained.
The prosecution offered only one bit of strong evidence: a few days after the murders, Lizzie was seen burning a dress. She maintained that it had been ruined by wet paint, but the prosecution argued that it was the bloodstained garment that she wore during the murders. But no nineteenth-century jury was going to hang a rich woman on the grounds of a single piece of circumstantial evidence.
The jury found her not guilty, yet until her death in 1927, Lizzie (still a spinster) was dogged by the rumor that she had committed bloody murder. Various theories have been presented to explain the mystery. Some have suggested that the maid, Bridget, had done the gruesome deed. Alfred Hitchcock proposed that the supposedly absent Emma killed Andrew and Abby but admitted that this was just speculation. In the end, Lizzie is still the most likely candidate, but like the jury we still must admit that there is no conclusive evidence against her.
Lady Killer
Domestic murders were quite common in late-nineteenth-century America, as was death by extreme violence (such as axe blows). It was the titillating thought that a genteel lady might have swung the hatchet that created the persistent interest in the case.
(1910s)
In 1900 a handsome, blond young man named Bela Kiss went to live at 9 Kossuth Street in the Hungarian village of Cinkota, just outside Budapest, accompanied by his wife, Maria, aged 25. Maria Kiss acquired a lover, Paul Bihari, and eventually Kiss lamented to the inhabitants of Cinkota that Maria and Paul had run away together.
In 1912 the forsaken spouse hired an elderly widow, Mrs. Jakubec, as housekeeper. Mrs. Jakubec regarded the frequent arrival of women at first with surprise, then understanding tolerance. Kiss then started collecting enormous metal drums, filled (as he explained to Trauber, the village constable) with gasoline, which would be in short supply during the approaching European war. Kiss was a tinsmith by trade, so metal drums caused no surprise.
Bela Kiss
The Handsome Hoffmann
The Margaret Bridge in Budapest, as it looks today. Using the name Hoffmann, Kiss lived there before he went to war.
Meanwhile Budapest police were searching for two widows, named Schmeidak and Varga, who had been missing for months. They were known to have visited the flat of a man named Hoffman, living near the Margaret Bridge in Budapest, who had also vanished. This Hoffman was a handsome, blonde man, with a bushy moustache, who seemed widely read, but was familiar to the brothel madams of Budapest as a regular and generous customer of insatiable sexual appetite.
In November 1914, three months after the war started, Bela Kiss was conscripted from his Cinkota home and within a few hours was on his way to the front; in May 1916, Constable Trauber received notice of his death in action.
Pickled Bodies
No one questioned Kiss’s habit of stockpiling metal drums all over his rented property. He explained their presence by telling townsfolk that he was storing gasoline, which would be in short supply during the war.
When, a month later, a party of soldiers entered Cinkota looking for petrol, Trauber and other townsfolk, including Kiss’s landlord, remembered the metal drums Kiss had so prudently hoarded. They located seven drums inside the house, and when they drilled a hole in one of them, a nauseating smell filled the room. A chemist said it was the smell of decaying flesh. The drum proved to contain a garroted, naked woman, preserved in alcohol.
Detective Chief Dr. Charles Nagy, of the Budapest Police, lost no time in getting to the cottage at 9 Kossuth Street in Cinkota. The other drums also contained the corpses of strangled women—seven of them. In due course, the police found additional drums on the property.
A cache of letters in a locked room proved to be from women, many addressed to Hoffman in Budapest. Further investigation there left no doubt that Kiss was a “Bluebeard” killer, placing matrimonial advertisements in newspapers and living on the income of the women who answered them, including the missing widow Katharine Varga, who had owned a prosperous dressmaking business.
Nagy learned that 17 drums had originally been delivered to Kiss, and the remaining 10 were located in various hiding places, such as below the earth floor of the henhouse. Nagy finally accumulated evidence that Kiss had murdered 30 women, including Maria Kiss, and a man, Paul Bihari.
The Search
A Times Square subway entrance. Was is really possible that Bela Kiss had made his way to New York, where he could live anonymously?
But where was Kiss? Had he really died in battle? In Hungary “Bela” and “Kiss” are common names, and there could have been dozens of Bela Kisses in the army. Nagy received a message saying that Kiss had died in 1915, followed immediately by another stating that Kiss was in the hospital. Nagy arrived to find that this man had died, but the body was definitely not that of Kiss. It seemed that Kiss had somehow swapped identity papers with a dead man, then vanished.
The missing killer became famous. In 1919 he was reported crossing the Margaret Bridge. In 1920 a member of the French Foreign Legion reported that he believed Kiss was a fellow soldier named—not surprisingly—Hoffman. But by the time the police arrived, Hoffman had deserted.
In 1932 Detective Henry Oswald of New York’s Homicide Squad (known as “Camera Eye” to the press because of his amazing memory) was certain that he’d seen Kiss emerging from the Times Square subway station, but by the time he had reached the spot, Kiss had vanished in the crowd of New Yorkers. The report of this sighting led to a rumor that the now elderly Kiss had taken a job as janitor of an apartment building on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Again, by the time the police arrived, he had vanished.
That, it seemed, was the last reported sighting of the elusive Bela Kiss.
(1935)
In the 1930s the people of Sydney, Australia, were fighting an unofficial war—on sharks. The climate and their national temperament meant that large numbers of Sydneyites were spending a great deal of time frolicking in the very inviting sea, with the inevitable result that shark attacks were on the rise.
The Australians reacted with a strategy of shark wardens keeping watch on the beaches and rewards to fishermen for each shark delivered, dead or alive. One of the few sharks delivered alive was a monstrous 11-foot tiger shark.
A tiger shark
Whose Arm?
Crowds pack the beach off Coogee Pier during a hot summer day in the mid-1930s.
On April 25, 1935, less than a week after taking up residence at the Coogee Aquarium, the shark did something that sharks rarely do: it vomited. And in the cloud of regurgitation, before the eyes of horrified aquarium goers, floated a human arm.
Medical examination showed something even more shocking: the shark’s teeth hadn’t severed the arm at the elbow—it had been hacked off with a knife.
The arm was in amazingly good condition . . . considering where it had been for more than a week. Its size and a tattoo of two boxers indicated that the arm came from a man—a fact confirmed by the fingerprints. It had belonged to Jim Smith, a second-rate boxer and petty criminal.
Smith had been last seen in the company of his friend Patrick Brady, a forger, drinking and playing cards at the Hotel Cecil on the afternoon of April 7. They had then gone to the cottage rented by Brady on nearby Gunnamatta Bay. Examination of the vacated cottage showed that a mattress and a trunk had been replaced and the walls of one room scrubbed suspiciously clean—circumstantial evidence that Smith might have been killed and dissected in the cottage and then the remains removed in the trunk.
Police arrested Brady on May 16, but the apparently straightforward if gruesome case was about to take some strange twists.
The Second Man
A taxi driver from near Gunnamatta Bay came forward with a story to tell. A very nervous Brady had called at his house on the morning of April 8, asking for a ride into Sydney. He’d then acted strangely, keeping one hand crammed into a pocket at all times, as if hiding something. He also peered repeatedly out of the back window, as if checking for a tail.
Brady’s destination was the home of Reginald Holmes, a seemingly respectable businessman who ran a successful boatyard. In fact Holmes was also a crook, secretly using his yard’s speedboats to smuggle cocaine, cigarettes, and other contraband.
The police extensively questioned both Holmes and Brady, but neither would admit to anything. So Holmes was released and Brady charged with murder. Yet the charge would never stick; there wasn’t even evidence to prove a murder had actually taken place—a man can survive with a severed arm, after all. Unfortunately for the police, the aquarium owners had already killed the shark and disposed of it in the bay, removing any chance of examining its stomach for additional “evidence.”
The Bizarre Sydney Harbour Boat Chase
Reginald Holmes led police on a long, strange boat chase through Sydney Harbour, shown above, before he finally gave himself up. He admitted that he knew Jim Smith, the man whose arm had been severed, but he swore that another man had as good as confessed to killing him.
On May 20, the investigation took another, tragicomic, twist.
That day Reginald Holmes stepped out onto his boat dock, pressed a pistol to his forehead, and pulled the trigger. But he held the gun at an angle—possibly wincing in anticipation of the shot—and the bullet bounced off his skull, knocking him bloody and unconscious but otherwise unharmed.
His knees buckled as the bullet hit him, and he fell off the dock into the water. This revived both him and his will to live. He clambered into a speedboat just as the police arrived to investigate the gunshot. A farcical four-hour boat chase ensued, weaving through the busy ferry traffic of Sydney Harbour, before Holmes gave himself up.
He confessed that Brady had indeed visited him after Smith’s murder and had threatened him, outlandishly enough, with Smith’s severed arm. Brady and Holmes had once been partners in a forged check scam but had since fallen out. Now Brady wanted help and threatened that Holmes would end up like Jim Smith if he held back.
Only Unanswered Questions
The police finally had a cooperative witness to whom Brady had all but admitted killing Smith. But on June 12 Holmes was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car, shot dead. Stranger still, he’d indirectly committed suicide. On June 11, according to author Alex Castle, he’d withdrawn £500 out of his bank and paid it to a hit man to kill him.
Brady, acquitted for lack of evidence, maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. Indeed this might be true. Holmes’s evidence, like his sanity, was suspect. And Brady had no motive to kill his friend, but a local mobster, Eddie Wayman, did. Police records show that Smith was a police informer and had informed on Wayman’s activities several times.
But, in the end, the stunning coincidence that the very shark that ate Jim Smith’s arm was caught alive and then threw it up in front of witnesses, came to nothing. We don’t know who killed Smith—or even if he was killed at all.
Embarrassed to Death
Why was Reginald Holmes so determined to kill himself? The one answer might be that he was literally mortified over the likely revelation of his criminal history, and that the scandal would destroy his respectable standing in (then) ultraconservative Sydney society.
The Riddle of the Boston Strangler
(1962–1964)
Between June 1962 and January 1964, 13 women were raped and strangled to death in Boston, Massachusetts, by a killer who, naturally, became known as the “Boston Strangler.” The public panic and outcry eventually led to a police investigative operation similar in scope to that of the Jack the Ripper investigation in 1888—but far bigger.
The murders started on June 14, 1962, when the killer sexually molested and strangled 55-year-old Anna Slesers. Over the next month and a half the killer struck five more times. The victims were all elderly: the youngest was 65 years old and the oldest 85.
Albert DeSalvo
Two Patterns
Boston’s Gainsbourough Street, site of one of the earliest Strangler murders
After the summer 1962 flurry, there was a gap in the Strangler killings until December of that year. But when the murders began again the killer had changed his pattern.
On December 5 Sophie Clark was found raped and strangled. But unlike the previous victims, she was a young woman—only 19. Over the next month, six more women were killed in the same way as the elderly summer victims, but almost all were in their 20s.
Finally, on January 4, 1964, the killer raped and strangled 19-year-old Mary Sullivan. He had repeatedly bitten her corpse, ejaculated over her face, and left her with a broom handle thrust into her vagina. Then the killings suddenly stopped.
An End to Killing
Five of the women whose murders are linked to the Boston Strangler. From left: Sophie Clark, 21; Jane Sullivan, 67; Helen E. Blake, 65; Ida Irga, 75; and Patricia Bissette, 23.
The rapes in the Boston area continued, however. Investigators were of two minds as to whether the Strangler had stopped killing and whether the rapes were his work, too. Bizarrely the rapist seemed to be a polite, almost gentle person; he occasionally allowed his would-be victims to talk him out of raping them and would invariably apologize to those he did attack.
The descriptions of the “gentle rapist” reminded the police of an offender who had recently been jailed for two years. He earned the nickname the Measuring Man, because, posing as a modeling agency scout, he talked his way into apartments and persuaded young women to allow him to take their measurements. Occasionally he ventured a few indecent caresses. Some of the women even had sex with him in hopes of landing one of the “modeling” jobs. The Measuring Man was a husky young ex-soldier, Albert DeSalvo. He was imprisoned for “lewd and lascivious behavior,” as well as for attempted breaking and entry.
He was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for observation. The doctors there diagnosed him as schizophrenic and not competent to stand trial. Soon after his permanent committal to Bridgewater, DeSalvo confessed to a fellow patient that he was the Boston Strangler, and the patient informed his lawyer. DeSalvo was sentenced to life imprisonment, but he had served only six years when he was found stabbed to death in his cell. His killer was never identified.
Home Sweet Home
In taped interviews, DeSalvo confessed in detail to the 13 murders in Boston. He also gave investigators a life history that was both bizarre and sickening. Albert DeSalvo’s father had been a brutal man who ill-treated his mother—on one occasion he deliberately broke her fingers one by one. He openly brought prostitutes into the family home, with whom he had sex in front of the children. Albert had incestuous relations with his sisters, and his childhood home was permeated with an overpowering atmosphere of sex. As an adult, he confessed, he was a man who wanted to have sex with every woman he saw, a mental outlook that led him first to the Measuring Man sex cons and later to rape.
Two Stranglers?
Richard DeSalvo, left, brother of Albert DeSalvo, at a 2000 news conference in Boston. Family members of the Strangler’s final victim are fighting to clear DeSalvo’s name, insisting that the real killer is still free.
There is now a movement to exonerate Albert DeSalvo of the Boston Strangler murders.
It seems to some that the criminal who committed the Measuring Man cons and the post-Strangler rapes was simply too “gentle” a man to be a killer. And researchers have also pointed out that DeSalvo’s confessions contained many fundamental inaccuracies about details of the murders. For example he claimed to have raped Mary Sullivan’s corpse. But the coroner’s report states that the killer had not penetrated her.
Then there is the change in the age of the Strangler victims—between the first and second wave of murders—that some believe indicates that there was actually more than one killer on the loose. FBI investigator Robert Ressler has written that there are “so many different patterns that it’s inconceivable, behaviorally, that all these could fit one individual.”
A Correct Guess?
A psychological profiling team attached to the original investigation in 1962 also concluded that there was more than one Boston Strangler. They concluded that the “Summer” Boston Strangler was an embittered homosexual with a mother-hate fixation: thus his choice of elderly victims. The “December” strangler, they thought, was a copycat killer—a heterosexual schoolteacher, they surmised, who lived on his own—whose tastes were for young women. The arrest and conviction of DeSalvo nullified these theories. Yet, perhaps, the profilers may have been closer to the truth than they realized . . .
(1964–1965)
Between February 1964 and January 1965, the bodies of six women, mostly prostitutes, were found in areas near the Thames River in England. These women met ugly deaths after living hard-knock lives. The first victim, Hannah Tailford, age 30, worked in the underground world of stag films and sex orgies. Her decomposing body was found in the water near Hammersmith Bridge on February 2, 1964. She was naked, except for her stockings, and her panties had been stuffed into her mouth.
Idendikit drawing of “Jack the Stripper”
The “Nude” Murders
Hammersmith Bridge
Soon after, the naked corpse of another prostitute showed up in the Thames. Irene Lockwood, 26, had been tiny, just 5 feet tall. All of the victims would turn out to be small women—none of them stood over 5 feet, 2 inches. Like Tailford, Lockwood had been strangled with a ligature. The next victim was found in an alleyway at Osterley Park, Brentford. She was a 22-year-old prostitute and striptease artist, Helen Barthelemy. There were a number of curious features. A line around her waist showed that her panties had been removed after death, and there was no evidence of normal sex, however, four of her front teeth were missing. Oddly enough they had not been knocked out by a blow but were forced out. There was male semen in her throat.
Here, then, was the cause of death: a penis, probably in the course of performing an act of oral sex, had choked her. The missing teeth suggested that the killer had repeated the act after death.
The Paint Clue
Helen Barthelemy
Barthelemy had disappeared some days before her body was found. Flakes of paint found on her skin provided a clue to the mystery, though, because the paint type was used in spraying cars. Clearly the body had been kept somewhere near a car factory. The “nude murders” now became a public sensation, for it seemed likely that they were the work of one man. The fourth victim—Mary Fleming, 30, found on July 14, confirmed that the same man was responsible. Her false teeth were missing, there was sperm in her throat, and her skin showed traces of the spray paint. She had vanished three days earlier.
Her body was found in a cul-de-sac, and a van was observed leaving the scene. A motorist driving past Berrymede Road, at 5:30 AM, had to brake violently to avoid the van that shot out in front of him. On November 25, 1964, another body with missing teeth was found under some debris in a car park in Hornton Street, Kensington. She was identified as Margaret McGowan, 21, and had disappeared more than a month before.
The Last Victim
Far right, police at the last Stripper crime scene. The naked body of Bridie O’Hara (right) was found behind a storage shed on an industrial estate less than a mile from where Mary Fleming had been found.
The last of the Stripper’s victims, a prostitute named Bridie O’Hara, 28, was found on February 16, 1965, in some undergrowth on the Heron Trading Estate in Acton. She had been last seen on January 11, in the Shepherds Bush Hotel. As usual, teeth were missing and sperm was found in the throat.
Detective Chief Superintendent John du Rose was recalled from his holiday to take charge of the investigation. The Heron Trading Estate provided the lead they had been waiting for. Investigation of a paint spray shop revealed that this was definitely the source of the paint found on the bodies. The proximity of a disused warehouse solved the question of where the bodies had lain before they were dumped. This enabled experts to establish the spot where the women must have been concealed: it was underneath a transformer in the warehouse.
War of Nerves
Even with this discovery, the case was far from solved. Thousands of men worked on the Heron Trading Estate. The police decided to throw an immense 20-mile cordon around the area, to keep a careful check on all cars passing through at night. Drivers who were observed more than once were noted; if they were seen more than twice, they were interviewed. Du Rose conducted what he called “a war of nerves” against the killer, dropping hints in the press or on television that indicated the police were getting closer. They knew he drove a van, they knew he must have right of access to the trading estate by night. The size of the victims, who were all short women, suggested that the killer was under middle height.
As the months passed, and no further murders took place, du Rose assumed that he was winning the war of nerves. The killer had ceased to operate. Du Rose checked on all men who had been jailed since mid-February and all men who had died or committed suicide. In his book Murder Was My Business, du Rose claims that investigators had narrowed down a list of 20 suspects to just 3 suspects when one of them, recently revealed as a man named Mungo Ireland, did commit suicide, leaving a note that said he could not bear the strain any longer. Ireland was a security guard who drove a van and had access to the estate. At the time the women were murdered, his rounds included the spray shop. He worked by night, from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. He was unmarried. The case is still open, but Du Rose believes that Ireland was the murderer called Jack the Stripper.
How Many?
No one is sure just how many women were victims of Jack the Stripper. Besides the six most agree upon, two other deaths stand out as following the same Stripper’s pattern. The first was another prostitute, Elizabeth Figg, whose body was found on a Thames towpath in 1959. Gynneth Rees’s body, naked except for a single stocking was found about a mile from the water. She had been strangled and several of her teeth were knocked out. Key differences are that Figg was strangled manually rather than by ligature, and her dress, though torn open, was still on. Rees, although close to the Thames, was found in a garbage heap.