INVESTIGATING WITH HINDSIGHT
STEWART EVANS
MANY of today’s popular Ripper suspects emerged many years after the murders. They were not contemporary suspects in any shape or form and never featured in the police investigation at all. Indeed, ‘suspect’ seems rather too strong a word to use in relation to them for, seemingly, anyone can point the accusing finger at whomsoever he wishes without the need for any supporting historical evidence to validate his claim.
A favourite source of suspects in the years immediately following the Ripper crimes were cases where actual murderers were brought to justice. These included such infamous names as Mrs Mary Pearcey, Dr Thomas Neill Cream, Frederick Deeming and George Chapman. Today, the list of Ripper suspects includes many of the witnesses and characters who actually appeared in the accounts and records of the murders, such as Timothy Donovan, Michael Kidney, John Kelly, Joseph Barnett, George Hutchinson and John McCarthy. At the ridiculous end of the suspect spectrum we find such individuals as Dr Thomas Barnardo, Sir William Withey Gull, HRH Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward (Eddy), Walter Sickert, Lewis Carroll and the 1889 alleged murder victim James Maybrick.1
Since the 1988 centenary of the murders it has been increasingly popular to add ‘criminal profiling’ to the list of aids deployed in an attempt to solve the Ripper murders.2 It is questionable whether modern profiling is relevant to a series of Victorian murders for which we have very little hard evidence and no certainty about which killings were committed by the same individual. Popularised in America by the FBI and dramatised in films, profiling has, however, attracted a great following. It is looked upon by most seasoned police officers as of dubious value, many of them arguing that its methods are merely common sense and provide conclusions about murders that they would arrive at themselves anyway without outside help. So although it may be interesting to apply modern profiling techniques to the Whitechapel murders of 1888–91, we feel that it is of little real value and most certainly will not result in the identification of the murderer.
As retired police officers with joint service experience of around sixty years, we felt that readers would, naturally, want to know exactly what opinions and conclusions we have reached as a result of our long-standing interest in this mystery. We both visited the scenes of the crimes in the 1960s, when much remained unchanged and radical rebuilding had yet to begin. We thus gained a good idea of how the area looked at the time the unknown killer prowled those streets.
The loss of official documents over the years has greatly hindered Ripper research and has become the stuff of legend. Often too much is read into this and it provides a useful aid for those who wish to promote ‘official conspiracy’ theories. The truth is more mundane. Much of the material held by the City of London Police was simply lost during the Blitz in London. Scotland Yard itself did not escape totally unscathed but the bulk of the Metropolitan force’s archived records survived the war.
The police are not renowned for their sense of history and stored records can take up an awful lot of space. There was a tendency simply to destroy documents that were out of date and no longer required. The late Mr Heron, Scotland Yard’s first archivist, told Donald that until 1959, when the Yard’s files came under the control of the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) it was customary for the porters to dispose of handfuls of paper to make room for newer material. In 1970, while engaged upon research for his history of the City of London Police, Donald consulted the old files at Scotland Yard. He was allowed to take documents, including the Ripper files, home and he photocopied several of them.
Writing to researcher Keith Skinner in 1992, Norman Fairfax, another Scotland Yard archivist, said that when he first started work in the registry on the third floor of the famous New Scotland Yard building on the Embankment, the old files were kept in the ‘P.A.’, the loft of the building. No one was permitted upstairs except the registry staff and, ‘curiously’, certain visitors. The Ripper documents were then kept in long green trays with the papers folded into four and tucked in so that three-quarters of the documents were visible. The trays were on the end of industrial shelving. According to Mr Fairfax, it became apparent that as the number of visitors increased so the number of papers decreased until around 1948 when it was decided that visitors should no longer be allowed in the PA.
This would seem to indicate that as early as the 1940s material was being taken from files and not returned. The visitors involved, one must assume, were the friends or guests of high-ranking police officers who were able to break through the red tape that then existed. It was not until the 1970s, with greater official laxity, that researchers were allowed access to the still closed Scotland Yard files. In 1972 researchers for BBC television’s Barlow and Watt docu-drama ‘Jack the Ripper’ were allowed to view the files. In notes made during his research, series producer Paul Bonner recorded that the Scotland Yard file Mepol 3/141 contained reports ‘that seem to have been called for by Scotland Yard in January 1889’ and that ‘they include a range of colourful suspects (mostly from outside Whitechapel)’. These included:
September 27th 1887 ‘Mary’ – the male barber from Bremen (discovered, subsequently, to have been in prison in Osterhausen on the Ripper dates).
October 5th 1887 – Dick Austen – sometimes a sailor and more recently in ‘R’ Troop of the 5th Lancers.
January 14th 1889 – Pierce John Robinson reported by his business partner, Richard Wingate of Edgware Road.
These were followed by various police reports of suspects pointed out to the police by members of the public, and included:
November 22nd 1888 – James Connell, a 36-year-old Irish draper from New Cross Road, Greenwich, picked up a married woman at Marble Arch and took her into Hyde Park. There, while walking and talking with her, he started speaking of ‘Jack the Ripper and lunatic asylums’. This so upset Mrs. Martha Spencer that she called PC 271A Fountain who was passing by. He took both of them to Hyde Park Police Station where Inspector Bird sent a telegram of inquiry to Greenwich ‘as to the correctness of his address and his respectability; a satisfactory reply having been received, he was then allowed to go as nothing further suspicious transpired’.
December 9th 1888 – Antoni Pricha of Hatton Garden who was drawn to the attention of PC 61A, Thomas Maybank, by Mr. Edward Knight Larkins of H.M. Customs.3
Edwin Burrows, aged 45, of Victoria Chambers, Whitechapel, a common lodging house, of whom Inspector Rutt of ‘A’ Division said ‘has been sleeping on seats for 12 months and is evidently doing his best to exist on the pound a week his brother allows him’.
December 17th 1888 – Douglas Cow, met by Mrs. Fanny Drake of the Conservative Club, Clerkenwell Green, while she was crossing Westminster Bridge. His behaviour led her to report him to Inspector Walsh on his horse beneath Westminster Abbey. Mr. Cow produced letters and business cards proving his identity and that he worked for Cow and Co., India Rubber Merchants of 70 Cheapside. Walsh took them both to ‘A’ Division station at Rochester Row where the information was ‘imparted to the lady when she at once apologized to Mr. Cow for having caused him inconvenience and both parties then left the station’.
All these are no longer to be found in the records. Paul Bonner noted that the theme that ran throughout these reports appeared to be that if the ‘suspect’ could show that he was a respectable citizen, he was alright and that if he could prove his identity, he was ‘fairly o.k.’. It appeared that no alibis for the preceding September and November dates were given, nor, indeed, asked for. At least 100 men in the file were taken to police stations for carrying black bags, having foreign accents, accosting women or talking about the Ripper in pubs. They were released when they were able to prove their identity. At least two suspects, one Dutch and one American, gave their addresses as Bacon’s Hotel, Fitzroy Square. Significantly there was no mention in this file, nor any other, of Macnaghten’s named suspects, Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog. Other files present at this time but now missing were reports by Inspector Edmund Reid and Chief Inspector West on the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith in April 1888.
The late Stephen Knight, while carrying out research for his influential 1976 book Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, also accessed the Scotland Yard files and was assisted by Donald Rumbelow who supplied him with some of the photocopies he had made earlier. We are also told, by Robin Odell, that the late author, publisher and criminologist Joe Gaute borrowed the files and actually had them at home. Stories are told that researchers accessing these files in pre-Public Record Office days were shown into a garret room at New Scotland Yard where they were left to peruse the material, unsupervised, at their leisure. What went missing during this period we do not know.
From notes and photocopies made by these early researchers we know that other documents later disappeared from the files that were finally handed over to the Public Record Office in the 1980s. Among these were the papers relevant to a suspect suggested by a Mr Callaghan, via Dr Forbes Winslow – G. Wentworth Bell Smith.4 This suggestion was investigated and disposed of by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson himself. The missing documents also related to the suspect Roslyn D’Onston (Robert Donston Stephenson). D’Onston, a patient in the London Hospital, had suggested a suspect of his own, Dr Morgan Davies of the hospital. D’Onston was himself linked with the murders in December 1888 by a pub acquaintance, George Marsh, but was dismissed as a suspect by Inspector Roots who saw him when he attended Scotland Yard on Boxing Day 1888. Roots stated he had known D’Onston, an excessive drinker, for twenty years. It is not known who stole this material or where it now reposes.
Other relevant documents would have been routinely destroyed by the police themselves, as was their practice. These would have included the bulk of the written statements taken at the time, police officers’ pocket books (and notebooks specifically issued during the investigation of the murders), station occurrence books, station detention and bail records, arrest warrants, dockets and many other valuable references.
Fortunately police reports on the investigation were sent to the Home Office and these have survived, some of them lengthy and detailed. The Home Office files were not pillaged over the years and are, essentially, complete. They comprise overview reports on the investigation. Filed under the HO 144/220 and 144/221/A49301 series, these records are now held in the National Archives and guaranteed safe for future generations. They put the lie to much false theorising about suspects and incidents in the Ripper story.
The Home Office did, however, once have items that have been missing almost since the time of the murders. A note on file A49301 shows that out of forty-eight items, twenty-two were destroyed or missing when filed in 1893.
Possibly the question most frequently asked of Ripper authorities is ‘Will Jack the Ripper ever be positively identified?’ We have different views on this. I feel confident in saying that the case will never be solved. This may not be the answer anyone wants to hear but I believe it is an honest and accurate one. The evidence as to the identity of the killer could not be adduced by the police at the time of the murders and it is therefore possible to say that, at this remove, it certainly will not be found. If the evidence was not obtained in the first place, no matter how many ‘lost’ papers may be discovered none will identify the murderer. There may be new material to add, such as finds of recent years have proved – for example, the case of Francis Tumblety whose status as a contemporary suspect was revealed in the letter written by ex-Chief Inspector Littlechild and found in 1993. We may, at best, add to the list of viable suspects but this is a far cry from proving the identity of the Ripper.
Another interesting and relevant point as regards Tumblety is that Littlechild stated that there was a ‘large dossier’ concerning him at Scotland Yard. This dossier has never been located nor is there any mention of Tumblety in the extant official files at the National Archives. However, Littlechild was head of the Special Branch and Tumblety was an Irish-American with Irish Nationalist sympathies, maybe even a Fenian. It is more than likely that the documents comprised a Special Branch file and these have never been released to the archives for reasons of secrecy. They are held confidential in perpetuity. There is a Special Branch index book listing records that were compiled by the likes of Monro, Anderson, Williamson and Littlechild during the crucial and formative years 1880 to 1910. The book reveals a Fenian/Whitechapel line of inquiry of some sort. Should the relevant Special Branch files ever be made available for public scrutiny, they might precipitate more progress in Ripper research than has been achieved at any other time, save possibly when the main police and Home Office files were made public in the 1970s.
Peripheral mysteries may also be cleared up and more information on known suspects will almost certainly be discovered. We have seen new research by Philip Sugden positively eliminate Michael Ostrog, who was listed as a suspect by Macnaghten – he was incarcerated in Paris at the time of the murders. So in the final analysis the student of the Ripper mystery is left to weigh the pros and cons of each viable suspect and decide who his own favoured ‘culprit’ is.
Many reach the conclusion that Jack the Ripper was a total nonentity who has never been named – and this may well be true.
NOTES FOR THE CURIOUS
DONALD RUMBELOW
One of the problems I faced when I researched the early history of the City of London Police was the lack of documentation in the possession of the City Police themselves. Had it not been for the Police Committee papers lodged at the Corporation of the City of London, no history would have been possible. There are two major explanations for the loss of such documentation. The Blitz began with bombs on the City itself in 1940. All of the City Police stations took direct hits during this time. Moor Lane A Division, present-day Barbican, was completely destroyed and never re-formed. The second reason for the lack of records is the carelessness or indifference of police generally to the keeping and storing of such documentation. City Police photographs taken after the IRA bombing of the Old Bailey (1973) and the Moorgate Tube disaster (1975) were thrown away after five years. Such destruction is not peculiar to the City; this is a police scandal which still continues to this day. All police forces should be compelled to have a resident archivist.
I joined the City Police in 1963 and, being a Londoner by adoption, soon immersed myself in the capital’s history. Within a short time I was teaching London history to police probationers at Bishopsgate police station’s School of Instruction. It was here on the sixth floor that there had once been a force museum. One of the exhibits was the ‘From hell’ letter to Mr Lusk.5 About 1959 the museum was broken up. The two constables in charge, Vic Wright and ‘Jock’ Watt, were away at the time. The police inspector in charge of the school decided that he wanted another classroom and sent in the cadets to clear out the museum. When Wright and Watt returned they found that the exhibits had just been dumped in another room; some things were broken or torn, others were missing and the letter had gone. Under-standably the two men were angry and would never have anything to do with the museum again.
Fast forward to 1966 when a new police station was built at Wood Street close to the City’s Guildhall. The building was near completion when I was told to report to the inspector overseeing the project and asked when I was going to do something about the museum. I did not even know there was to be a museum in the new building but apparently I was in charge. I had been scavenging around the stations for some time and was horrified to see items such as letters to the governor of Newgate Gaol and parish records dating back to the eighteenth century. For some reason these had found their way into police hands and were now being thrown out. I recovered what I could and placed the material in the Guildhall Library and Records Office. Other items I retained for the police museum. On one collecting expedition I came across some filthy card boxes containing photographs and papers relating to the Siege of Sidney Street and awaiting destruction. I knew something about this case involving the murder of three City policemen in 1910 and thought the destruction of such papers absolutely wrong. I managed to squirrel them away and eventually took them home bit by bit. Only several years later did I think of using them to write a book, The Houndsditch Murders (revised edition 1988). The bulk of these papers, like so many other photographs and documents, I deposited in the Corporation of London Records Office. This is where I have always thought such papers should be stored. Eyebrows were raised when I took the Dr Openshaw letter from someone calling himself Jack the Ripper to the National Archives at Kew in 2004. Such items are not for sale. I have enjoyed them while they have been in my possession and I want others to enjoy them equally.
I found a cache of over 300 Jack-the-Ripper-related letters from the public to the City Police commissioner in a broken cupboard in the basement of Old Jewry headquarters. I had not expected to find anything because the cellar had just been emptied out. The correspondence was in some very old and torn cardboard boxes. Some people knew that they were there but did not rate them of any value, which is why they had been left for throwing out. The only individuals who had shown any interest in the collection were stamp collectors who had taken many of the envelopes for the Victorian stamps. This is why some of the letters cannot now be exactly dated. I eventually deposited these letters in the Records Office too, having kept them at home for a number of years and referred to them in the original edition of The Complete Jack the Ripper.
In about 1966/7, after I had been told about the proposed museum, I was in the photographic department in the upstairs room of Old Jewry when I spotted some glass plates. Picking them up, I found one of them to show Metropolitan policemen; it was dated about 1870. The other I instantly recognised as an image of the exterior of Miller’s Court. Being a young uniform constable in the City of London Police in the 1960s was like being the lowliest private in a Guards regiment from which so many of my colleagues had been recruited. We were the first of those who had just escaped two years’ National Service and had not had any military training so it is hard to explain the atmosphere except in such terms. When I asked about the photographs I was told by the detective sergeant, Ken Poole, that they came from an album that contained more images. His response, like that of so many others, was that he would not tell me the whole story or let me see everything he knew about because he wanted the material for an autobiography when he retired or to sell to the newspapers. More I never found out.
I found the photograph of Mary Kelly’s body, along with the Eddowes images, in the filthy attic room at Snow Hill police station where the remains of the old museum had been dumped. At some point the Kelly picture had been fixed to something with a drawing pin: the holes at the top are still visible on reproductions. In about 1969 I began to write a history of the City Police (published in 1971 by Macmillan as I Spy Blue). I was given access to the Metropolitan Police files relating to the Siege of Sidney Street and Jack the Ripper. Both sets of files I took home at different times and photocopied a number of them. When my book was published in 1975 I considered that I had no further use for the Ripper files and, to the best of my recollection, gave the photocopies to Stephen Knight, which explains in part the very fulsome thanks I receive in his book. With the commissioner’s approval, and as a thank you, I placed a set of the Kelly and Eddowes photographs in the Scotland Yard files which were empty of images except for those of Tabram, McKenzie and Coles.
It was through my involvement with the museum that I first met Professor Francis Camps and his assistant Sam Hardy, who had found the drawings of Eddowes’ body in situ and of Mitre Square in the basement of the London Hospital. I contacted him, told him of the Eddowes and Kelly photographs, and went to see him. I gave him a set of the photographs and in return borrowed the Mitre Square drawings, which I had framed and hung in the museum for several years. I had asked Camps to keep the photographs to himself and so was annoyed to discover that he had a number of sets printed off, one of which he gave to Dan Farson who then published them for the first time in his 1972 book Jack the Ripper.
As I have explained elsewhere, I understand that the City Police were in possession of the Miller’s Court photographs because in the delay before authorisation was given for the door to be opened, City officers arrived, forced an entry and then took the pictures as their justification for doing so. This, of course, is completely contradicted by the evidence that McCarthy broke open the door with a pickaxe. I am perfectly willing to be persuaded by this but there are references to Superintendent Arnold ordering one of the windows to be taken out prior to McCarthy’s entry, which might just explain the City Police photographs. Dr Bagster Phillips, we know, had a photograph taken of the exterior of Kelly’s room and he produced it for the coroner at the inquest. I think it worth pointing out, too, how conveniently near at hand the City Police were. Bishopsgate police station was not a 5-minute walk from Miller’s Court and it would have been surprising, during the wait to effect entry, if City detectives had not made their way to the murder scene.
It is not clear what the police procedures were for taking photographs. In Metropolitan Police Orders of 1 January 1889 yearly returns were requested for ‘The number of Bodies of Persons unknown to be photographed during the year 1888, the number identified, and the number remaining not identified.’ Although this was for identification purposes, only this instruction would explain the photographing of Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, McKenzie and Coles. Presumably, like the Metropolitan Police, the City force used a professional photographer. In the City Police Order Book for Bishopsgate police station dated 5 September 1887 to 7 May 1889, and now kept in the basement safe of the station, there is an order from John Whatley, the Chief Clerk at Old Jewry, dated 23 October 1888. It is addressed to the chief inspectors and inspectors of each division and states that, ‘The Commissioner orders that whenever it may be necessary for future identification to obtain the photograph of a body found dead or otherwise. Application is to be made at once to this office.’ In the same book an order dated 31 October 1888 says, ‘The Commissioner orders that the accompanying patterns of “Silent Boots” be sent for the Inspection of members of the Force, should any boots of the same pattern be required they may be obtained on application at this office.’ Obviously the Star’s criticisms that criminals could hear the police approaching in their regulation boots had been taken to heart.
In the City Police museum, at least when I was curator, there was a large loose-leaved album containing not only mortuary photographs but prisoner photographs also, of men, women and children, dating mostly from the 1870s. Among them were photographs of the Bidwell brothers and their two accomplices who famously tried to rob the Bank of England in 1873. I published these in an article written for the Bank of England in 1973 and later in a City of London Police 150th anniversary booklet published in 1989. Full-length photographs were originally taken of the prisoners; a few survived, but the majority had been cut down to head-and-shoulders portraits which had then been mounted on a card recording the individual’s name, age, date of arrest, offence and sentence. How long this practice continued is impossible to determine. A professional photographer was used to take photographs of the Houndsditch murderers in 1910.
One has to assume that this practice of using professional photographers continued throughout the interwar period, although there is no documentary evidence to confirm this. Certainly there is no evidence for a photographic department. It took two City Police amateur photographers to bring this about. Between 1939 and 1945 Arthur Cross and his assistant Fred Tibbs, photographed the effect of the Blitz on the square mile. Tibbs lived at Bishopsgate police station because his family had been evacuated to Wales and was frequently on scene within minutes of the ‘All Clear’ sounding. His image of the falling front of the Salvation Army headquarters in Queen Victoria Street is internationally famous. The shot is slightly blurred because he pressed the button at the same instant as he fell backwards into a pot-hole. I managed to recover a complete collection of Cross and Tibbs’ work which I deposited in the Museum of London, which subsequently published a small pamphlet on it.
The two men had a small basement room in Bishopsgate police station which they were allocated just prior to the outbreak of war in 1939. In 1959 a new Commissioner, Sir Arthur Young, was astounded by what he saw and on leaving this black hole commented, ‘If the officer took from this room the equipment belonging to himself, the force would be in a mess photographically.’ In fact, the only equipment belonging to the force at this time were some dishes and trays and a flat-bed glazing machine. Cross was paid 10s a month for the use of his small plate camera. He was not allowed to spend more than £10 a year on materials and was allowed 4 hours to complete each photographic assignment before returning to uniform duty. The commissioner radically transformed the photographic department. A stunned Arthur Cross soon found himself spending not £10 a year, but over £1,000. Two rooms at Old Jewry were converted into a studio and darkroom and photographic, a much expanded department, was located here when I first joined the force.
‘On the Day of Judgement, when all things shall be known, when I and other Ripperologists ask for Jack the Ripper to step forward and call out his name, we shall look at one another as he does so and say, “Who?”’ These words from the original edition of my book have often been taken to assume that I do not believe we will ever know the Ripper’s real name. Possibly not. The opinion most frequently voiced to support the claim that there will never be a solution to the Ripper crimes is that too many documents are missing. Despite this, the spark still lingers that somewhere some of those hundreds of discarded Scotland Yard documents may still exist and with them the necessary clues to provide an answer. It may be just a question of looking in the right place. I often quote the example of the American scholar Dr Leslie Hotson who, back in the 1920s, looked for a true account of the death of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great contemporary. The crude outlines of his death had been known for nearly four centuries, that he had been stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in Deptford. By asking the right questions and pushing the right buttons Hotson found the complete inquest papers and witness statements in archives where they had sat undisturbed and waiting. For several centuries writers and scholars had argued and guessed at the truth. Again, by asking the right questions and pushing the right buttons, he went on to unearth an unknown cache of letters written by Shelley to his first wife.
So, and this is said very frankly, there just might be a solution out there. Will it be my favoured suspect, Timothy Donovan, Annie Chapman’s lodging-house keeper in Dorset Street? The best that I can say here is that it may be so. I doubt it, but reason goes out of the window and this is where instinct, unreasoning instinct takes over. As I have explained elsewhere, Mary Kelly has to be excluded from the Ripper equation because Donovan died shortly before she was murdered. Here I find myself agreeing with Superintendent Arnold that there were only four victims. Donovan fits neatly in the frame – he was the right age, he was deputy at the lodging house where he could hide and clean up after each killing, he knew Chapman and almost certainly some of the other victims, and he conveniently died just before the Kelly murder which has to be attributed to some other unknown.
But proof? That’s something else.