Chapter 10

“From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

By the time I reached my third-floor walk-up apartment at Addison and Broadway, I was exhausted and cold. The wind had picked up as it often does near Lake Michigan, and low clouds raced across the black sky. I was glad to get inside. The weather in Chicago leaves a lot to be desired. I think about moving somewhere south, but my apartment is only two blocks from Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, and that makes up for a lot.

My neighborhood’s been undergoing gentrification. Only a few properties are holdouts - my building thankfully among them. All the renovated units are now condos, half the size of mine, but they go for a whole lot more money. I guess that’s progress. My building, I fear, will shortly succumb.

My mind was still racing as I retrieved my mail in the vestibule and shoved it in my purse. I couldn’t deal with it now. I was too keyed up about Tom and silently begged the Gods of the Universe to hasten his full recovery. But the big knot in my stomach didn’t go away. Neither did the image of a hidden safe that Mrs. Toller mentioned. I wondered where it was and if that’s where the Conan Doyle notes and manuscript were hidden.

I snuck up the stairs, trying not to wake my next door neighbors, the twins, Glendy and Lucille Carrabine. They’re great gals who live for bingo, bird watching and going to Cubs games. You’d never guess they’re in their 80’s. Lately I’ve been worried about them. They’re on a crime-stoppers spree. They fancy themselves caped crusaders and try to identify wanted criminals listed on the Cook County Crime Stoppers website. They hope they’ll spot a perp, and if their tip-off leads to a capture, their goal is to collect the thousand-dollar reward advertised on the website. I’ve tried to discourage them, but to no avail. Sometimes I rue the day I taught them to use a computer. I’d check on them later. Right now, even though I was dead tired, I had things to do.

My ragdoll cat, Cavalier, greeted me at the door with one loud meow and retreated to the kitchen. That meant he was hungry. I fed him then quickly checked the entire apartment, looking for notes under the door or any evidence of a break-in. Nothing. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Next I checked for hidden listening devices or cameras. Nothing. Lately somebody has been harassing me, and I was nervous and couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that someone was watching my every move. Who was it? What did they want?

Truth be told, I haven’t slept well since the damn harassment started about a month ago. Sometimes life is a gentle stream that takes you along on a pastoral boat trip. That’s how things had been going for almost a year. A great love life, beautiful cat, good friends and enough work. Then, in an instant, some unknown jerk was stalking me, and life hurled me down the rapids without a paddle.

The trouble began with some threatening notes pushed under my apartment door in the middle of the night. The notes stopped on the very day I installed a DVR nanny cam disguised as an air freshener in the hallway outside my door. That same day my phone started ringing twenty times during the day. After that came the unordered pizza deliveries and the small packages in my mailbox filled with dead shrimp reeking of Lake Michigan. Then someone slashed the tires of my Miata. I couldn’t take it anymore.

A little over a week ago I changed shifts with Woodley. Now I’m on days so I can be here at night. It seems to have worked. The phone calls, shrimp mail, and pizzas have stopped, and there’s been no harassment for awhile. I was ready to chalk it up to some sick April Fool’s joke, but my gut didn’t really believe that. I’ve been investigating, but was beginning to think that the search for the Loch Ness monster might be successful before I found who was responsible. I was real tired of looking over my shoulder. I should have reported this all to the police -that’s what Mitch would have said. But I didn’t. In fact I didn’t even tell Mitch. We’ve been so happy together in one of those magical interludes life sometimes hands you. Mitch Sinclair is not only handsome, he’s smart, attentive and witty. And needless to say the sex is terrific. He’s been in Europe the past two months on a big job, and I really miss him. On the other hand, if he were here, we’d be having a row about my being stalked and harassed. He wants me to move in with him. He thinks I take too many chances, make too many enemies, and put myself in harm’s way. Maybe he’s right, but I didn’t need to hear it again.

It was late. I was tired, and I knew I had to relieve Woodley at the early hour of 7 AM. But I needed to learn more about Conan Doyle and the Jack the Ripper murders, so I searched Google. If Doyle had known the identity of Jack the Ripper, why hadn’t he written about it in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories and revealed the secret? Why would Doyle write some notes about it but never use the information? The more facts I could amass on the Ripper case, the more light I could shed on Doyle’s notes and the conclusions he may have made. I forced myself to believe that Tom was going to gain consciousness soon, and he was sure to know a lot more than I did. I had to catch up.

I listed some topics to research, including chronology of the Ripper murders; the victims; the Ripper letters; suspects; eye-witnesses; police; and cross references of any connections between Conan Doyle and the Ripper case, including anyone Doyle knew with any connection to the Ripper murders.

The web was filled with sites on Ripperology, including casebook.org and the national archives site of the U.K. The Ripper murders, it seems, are a science unto itself. Books, movies, TV documentaries, tours of the murder scenes, you name it. This is a serial murder case still very much alive today. It’s been called the ultimate cold case.

I started making notes. Chronology: At least five women were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel district in the East End of London. The murders took place over a 40 day period from August 31st to November 9th, 1888. Some Ripperologists suggest more than 5 victims, but that’s the generally agreed upon number. The crime scenes were horrifically gruesome and made headlines around the world. Yet after 125 years, no one has ever been charged in any of the killings.

Victims: Mary Anne Nichols, the first, killed on 8/31/1888. Second, Annie Chapman, on 9/8. Then on 9/30, two murders in one night, called the double event - first Elizabeth Stride at 1 AM, then Catherine Edowes at 1:45 AM. The fifth victim, Mary Kelly, was killed on November 9th. All were working class prostitutes brutally murdered on weekends in the early morning hours in very risky spots where the murderer might easily have been seen.

Ripper letters: Hundreds of letters were written to police, newspapers, and citizen vigilante groups from people claiming to be Jack the Ripper. One famous ‘Dear Boss’ letter, which had been thought to be authentic, was recently proved a fake when some internal correspondence at the Star Newspaper was discovered to reveal a reporter for the Star named Frederick Best was involved in writing the letter in a blatant attempt to exploit the murders and sell papers. A handwriting expert confirmed that the Dear Boss letter was in Best’s handwriting. One other letter known as the “From Hell” letter, was sent to Mr. Lusk, the head of the Vigilante Committee. This letter is believed to be authentic. It arrived along with part of a kidney from Catherine Edowes, one of the Ripper’s latest victims.

Suspects: I found nearly a hundred named suspects, some totally ridiculous, like Jill the Ripper and Lewis Carroll. There seemed to be five main ones - three named by Sir Melville Macnaghten, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. One was Montague John Druitt, a teacher at a boarding school in Blackheath. No hard evidence exists that Druitt was Jack the Ripper with the exception of Commissioner Macnaghten’s statement. Macnaghten subsequently destroyed all the documents pointing to Druitt.

Macnaghten also named Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew, who lived in Whitechapel and was known to hate women and have strong homicidal tendencies. He was admitted to a lunatic asylum in March 1889.

Michael Ostrog, the third of Macnaghten’s three suspects, was a well-known criminal who spent the majority of his life in prison for theft. Ostrog was eventually transferred to a lunatic asylum where he registered himself as a Jewish doctor. No evidence exists he was even in the Whitechapel area during the time of the murders, and he didn’t fit the eyewitness descriptions of the killer.

George Chapman, the fourth suspect, was named by Inspector Abberline, who did much of the actual Ripper investigation. Chapman, whose real name was Severin Klosowski, was a Polish barber’s assistant. He poisoned three wives and was hanged in 1903.

The two policemen, I noted, didn’t agree on their suspects.

The fifth and most famous suspect was Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence. Known as Prince Eddy, he was the grandson of Queen Victoria and heir presumptive to the throne of England. Prince Eddy wasn’t named a suspect until 75 years after the murders when a book came out in 1962 and created a bombshell. The Prince, it was theorized, had syphilis, causing him to go insane and commit the murders. After that, more theories involving Prince Eddy surfaced claiming that he married a Catholic shop girl and had a child, and the murders were done to protect the crown from scandal.

Tom and I had talked in the past about Prince Eddy as a possible suspect. The theory that he was the Ripper has been debunked by most Ripperologists. They point to court circulars that list the Prince as being in Scotland at the time of two of the murders. They also say he didn’t have any medical knowledge and wasn’t a violent man. Yet there were a lot of conspiracy theories on the web involving him, the Masons, government officials, and even his physician, Dr. William Gull.

Police who worked on the case: I put together a grid with information on every policeman involved in the case. Almost all of them wrote books or were extensively interviewed. The three top cops, Macnaghten, Anderson and Abberline, wrote books and/or were extensively interviewed. All three said something startling. Each one said out-right that he knew who the Ripper was. Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard in August 1888, stated several times that the identity of the Whitechapel murderer was known. “...He had been safely caged in an Asylum.” (Criminals and Crime, 1907). In a posthumously published introduction to a 1920 Police Encyclopedia, he wrote “there was no doubt whatever as to (the) identity of the criminal.” Anderson also wrote in his autobiography, The Lighter Side of my Official Life, that: “One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type.”

That quote was a direct connection to Doyle with its reference to Doyle’s famous criminologist, Sherlock Holmes. If Anderson didn’t know Doyle personally, he’d certainly read some of his Sherlock Holmes stories. I made a note to investigate this interesting connection further.

Anderson also wrote that “...if he (the Ripper) was not living absolutely alone, his people knew of his guilt, and refused to give him up to justice. I will only add that when the individual whom we suspected was caged in an asylum, the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer at once identified him.” Finally, he stated that he was “almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer, but no public benefit would result from such a course and the traditions of my old department would suffer.”

This statement was highly suggestive. Perhaps that could have been the same reason why Doyle himself never disclosed the identity if he knew it. Anderson retired and was knighted in 1901.

Frederick George Abberline, 1st Class Inspector, who did much of the actual work on the Ripper case, wrote a letter to G. J. Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on a leaf of the Metropolitan Police Stationery with the number ‘52983’ in the margin, dated 15th December 1889-92. The number in the margin of the note, ‘52983’ is a reference to the number on Abberline’s report on the Mary Kelly inquest, on file in the Public Record Office. Mary Kelly was the last of the 5 victims. The note reads as follows:

“With respect reference to your last instruction my interview with J. K. Stephen. Lord Randolf Spencer Churchill Sir W Gull were confirmed. I am sending this report for you personal Attention. No further investigation will be made. I leave this in your hand. I have done our duty. Rest of my report will be sent on. I shall now heed to my burns.

Yours respectfully,

Det. F. G. Abberline.”

After Abberline retired, Nigel Morland wrote in an article in the Evening News (June 26, 1976) and in The Ripper and the Royals, that Abberline told him, “I’ve given my word to keep my mouth permanently closed about it. The case was shut and that I know and my superiors know certain facts.” The Ripper “...wasn’t a butcher, Yid or foreign skipper...you’d have to look for him not at the bottom of London society at the time but a long way up.” Abberline resigned February 7, 1892, after which he took over the European Agency of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten, appointed Assistant Chief Constable CID in 1889, was quoted as saying, “...I have a very clear idea who he was and how he committed suicide...” (Daily Mail). He also stated that, “Although...the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888, certain facts pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer.” (Days of My Years, 1914). Macnaghten wrote in his February 1894 memoranda, “A much more rational theory is that the murderer’s brain gave way after his awful glut in Miller’s Court - where Mary Jane Kelly was murdered - and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations. That he was by then confined in some asylum.” Macnaghten was promoted to Chief Constable in 1890 and Assistant Commissioner of the CID in 1903.

The second thing I found was that Macnaghten admitted, prior to his appointment in 1903, that he had burned the most incriminating papers in the Jack the Ripper files to protect the murderer’s family.

Facts were starting to swim in my head. It was past 3 o’clock, and I was too beat to go on. What the police said about the case was giving me a lot to follow up and think about. They all said they knew who did it, but the case is still unsolved. They each fingered different suspects, but their suspects don’t fit the profile of the person they suggest was the killer. Why was “no further investigation” to be made after Abberline’s December 15th letter? Why did Macnaghten burn evidence “to protect the family?” Much of what was done on the case clearly didn’t seem to measure up to standard police work, and there did seem to be a cover up or a conspiracy going on. If so, who was it that the police were trying to protect? And where did Doyle and his notes fit in?

With Cavalier curled up against me, I fell asleep on the sofa thinking this was a good starting point for us to go over when Tom regained consciousness.