First, the boss referred to is not the boss of the police but the boss of the Central News Agency. While it would not be unusual for a certain type of sexually oriented predator to communicate with the press, to blow his own horn and let the world know how he thinks of himself and what he wants to be called, we would expect this communication to be with an individual newspaper. We know, for example, that both the Star and News, among many other papers, were publishing regular and lurid details of the Whitechapel murders. On the other hand, it takes a fair amount of sophistication for an offender not associated with the business of journalism even to realize that a news agency exists that supplies the various papers. This type of insider information would be particularly beyond the range of the type of largely disorganized, emotionally deficient individual that the behavioral clues had shown this killer to be.
This is further underscored, in my opinion, by the use of language in the letter. Psycholinguistically speaking, the “Dear Boss” letter is a performance, a characterization by a literate, articulate person of what a crazed killer should sound like. It’s too organized, too indicative of intelligence and rational thought, and far too “cutesy.” I don’t believe an offender of this type would ever think of his actions as “funny little games” or say that his “knife’s so nice and sharp.”
Rather, this all points to someone who knows how to use language and knows the system and wants to get the message out as quickly as possible, rather than giving an individual news organization an exclusive. And when we look at journalism in Victorian England, we find it to be a freewheeling, sensationalistic business in which truth and restraint were often sacrificed in service of a big story.
Everyone had a vested interest in the Whitechapel murders: the people of the East End who were the potential targets; the rest of London who had had their confident, insular world shaken; the police, who had been tested as never before; the government, which was increasingly embarrassed; and of course, the press. The Whitechapel murders sold papers and kept journalists employed. How much more mileage could they get out of the Jack the Ripper murders?
And it wasn’t solely a matter of commerce for the press, either. The agenda for some was more complex. As Martin Fido points out, this was the time of the London County Council elections, and the radicals were attempting to take over the East End and make their mark. The year before, on November 13, 1887, the Metropolitan Police under the leadership of Sir Charles Warren had put down a massed demonstration by the unemployed in Trafalgar Square. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. The Whitechapel murders became a ready-made issue for the radical press. The fear generated became a way for them to say, “Look at the conditions here! What is being done? What would be done if this were happening in the West End?” The mainline papers had to pick up the story or be left behind.
So the “Dear Boss” letter, being made public so soon after the Double Event, helped keep the case in the forefront. Yet I remain in agreement with Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dr. Robert Anderson and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who believed the writer to be an enterprising journalist. In fact, they both believed they knew the identity of the man.
And just as significant as any of these considerations is that, like the Yorkshire Ripper almost a century later, this type of UNSUB would not communicate with the police in this manner. Unlike the organized antisocial type, this individual would not want to proclaim himself this way, particularly not talk about future crimes. This type thinks only of what he is doing at the moment. And he would not have come up with a nickname for himself, particularly such a flamboyant one. In my twenty-five years of experience, all of the serial offenders who communicated with the press or police and proposed names and identities for themselves leaned much more to the organized, antisocial side of the continuum than the disorganized, asocial side. I therefore believe that by disseminating the “Dear Boss” and “Saucy Jacky” communications, the police and press were actually hindering the investigation, diverting attention away from the real UNSUB.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention to the case chronology, another important consideration for any investigator or analyst, you may have noticed that the “Dear Boss” letter was dated September 25 and postmarked September 27. The Double Event took place on the night and morning of September 29 to 30. And the writer does refer to “clip[ping] the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly.”
Catherine Eddowes’s right earlobe was, in fact, sliced off. Was this a lucky guess? Probably. So much was done to Eddowes that the writer could have mentioned just about anything and have been right. If it was the real guy, wouldn’t he more likely have mentioned some of the major mutilations he intended to inflict? And of course, he did not send the ear to the police.
As far as the timing, arriving just a day before the Double Event, this again may have turned out to be a lucky guess, but not an uneducated one for someone paying close attention, as an enterprising newspaperman would. The Nichols murder had taken place on a Friday. The Chapman murder had occurred a week later on a Saturday. There had been no murders for the next two weekends, so if one was going to happen at all, the weekend of September 28–29 would be a likely time. Also, with no murders in that stretch of time, the story was starting to get cold, so if you wanted to revive it, this would be the moment.
The “Saucy Jacky” postcard then, which was posted on October 1, was an attempt to “catch up” with what had actually happened and authenticate the first communication: the “double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off . . .” People believe what they want to believe, and for a public anxious to know the monster they were dealing with, this was just the kind of authentification they needed.
Of course, in one important sense, the “Dear Boss” letter became a real and self-actualizing part of the case. Because even if the communication was not authentic, it ensured that this series of crimes would be immortalized. Without the Jack the Ripper identity, I doubt whether this offender would have so captured history and the public imagination.
“FROM HELL”
The frenzy was still intense. In addition to the stepped-up police patrols, locals had formed their own protective organizations. The most highly visible was probably the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, which was headed by George Akin Lusk, a builder who specialized in the restoration of music halls. Lusk attained a high profile for himself by writing about the case in the Times.
On October 16, Lusk received a package in the mail: a small cardboard box wrapped in brown paper and bearing a London postmark. In the box was half a kidney, soaked in wine to preserve it. Wrapped around the kidney was a crudely written letter:
From hell
Mr Lusk
Sor
I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer
signed Catch me when
you can
Mishter Lusk.
Lusk assumed the organ and letter to be a hoax, possibly by a medical student or group of students with easy access to an anatomy lab. But he was persuaded by friends to hand it over to authorities for analysis. Dr. Thomas Openshaw of London Hospital believed it to be human, and from an individual of about forty-five and suffering from Bright’s disease, not an inconsistent finding in a chronic alcoholic. A number of other experts had a chance to examine the kidney, with mixed opinions as to its authenticity in the Eddowes murder. That authenticity, however, has never been ruled out, and much of the scholarship over the years suggests that the kidney may actually have belonged to the victim.
I can’t speak to the forensic likelihood of the kidney’s having come from Catherine Eddowes’s body, but the accompanying letter is certainly intriguing. Despite the apparent differences in handwriting (possibly attributed to an increasingly fragmented psyche), many of the Ripperologists and other students of the case who bel
ieve the “Dear Boss” and “Saucy Jacky” communications to be authentic believe the same of the Lusk letter, and vice versa. I’m not so sure. Handwriting experts are divided on the matter, so I can’t rely on them for help.
I think it is highly significant that even after the frenzy created by the Jack the Ripper pseudonym, the writer of the Lusk letter does not use it. Even after he is tagged with such a “glamorous” title, he does not take it on himself. Since I believe the Boss and Jacky letters to be fakes, I’m intrigued by the possibilities for this one. Though I said I didn’t believe this type of offender would feel the need to communicate with the public, it is possible that the Boss letter, especially arriving so soon after the Double Event, may have compelled the disorganized killer to come out and “set the record straight,” to keep control, as it were. He may have sent the piece of kidney to authenticate himself after the ear mention in “Dear Boss.” In other words, he wouldn’t have felt a need to communicate until someone else claimed credit and tried to define his personality and identity for him.
His own sense of identity and emotional orientation is more accurately portrayed by where he says the letter is coming from: “From hell.” The style of the writing itself is virtually an illiterate parody of the cleverer and more sophisticated style of the first letter, as if the writer is trying unsuccessfully to show himself equal to the wit and flair of the pretender. I might add that Donald Rumbelow, a former police officer, a gifted author, and one of the greatest experts on the case, agrees with the assessment that of all the communications, the Lusk letter is the only one likely to be genuine.
Some of the letter’s critics claim that the spelling—“Sor,” “prasarved,” “Mishter”—suggests “stage Irish” dialect; in other words, an educated person’s attempt to sound colloquial. Although that’s possible, to me the spelling suggests someone not terribly familiar with English writing, most likely an uneducated immigrant, who is writing it the way he hears it.
That the letter was sent not to the police, not to the press, but to a local ad hoc community leader is also significant, because I believe strongly that this type of disorganized offender is going to be operating only within his own circumscribed zone of comfort. This is a concept we’ll develop in more detail shortly.
It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that a disorganized offender who, we’ve already established, has a perverse sense of curiosity about the inside of the human body, might try to satisfy that curiosity by eating some of it. And as to the closing salutation, “Catch me when you can,” that can have two meanings. One would be an obvious taunt to the police from someone who has found that he can repeatedly get away with murder. The other would be a cry for help, similar to the “For heAVens Sake cAtch Me BeFore I Kill More I cannot control myselF” message scrawled on a wall by Chicago murderer William Heirens with his victim’s lipstick. One of Heirens’s other victims, a six-year-old girl, was found cut up in pieces in a suburban sewer.
Could I be mistaken about the authenticity of the Lusk letter? Sure. A lot of the experts disagree with me. But what I can say is that unlike the communications that came before it, this one is consistent with what I would expect from the type of UNSUB I suspect Jack the Ripper to have been.
PROACTIVE IDEAS
There was much speculation about the best way to catch this elusive and unprecedented killer, some of it from ordinary citizens, some from “experts.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, had been published the previous year, speculated that the killer might be a man disguised as a woman. A midwife walking around Whitechapel in the early-morning hours with a bloody apron would arouse little suspicion.
A few years later, in 1894, Conan Doyle suggested to an interviewer how Holmes would have attempted to crack the case. One of his techniques would have been to reproduce the “Dear Boss” letter and invite the public to respond. This is a highly legitimate proactive technique, which Special Agent Jana Monroe of my unit used successfully in the Rogers murder case in Florida when a billboard reproduction of the killer’s handwriting led to a swift ID. To give the Metropolitan Police their due, however, they did reproduce the “Dear Boss” letter on posters that were placed throughout the East End, but the technique came to nothing. As I don’t believe the letter to be authentic, I’m not surprised.
One newspaper reader, as described by Donald Rumbelow in his landmark Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook, suggested in a letter that police search the “Saucy Jacky” postcard; since “no two persons’ thumbs are alike, the impression of one suspected person’s thumb should be taken and microscopically examined.” Rumbelow reports that the letter was filed away and that it would be seventeen years before the first fingerprint conviction.
When the press began circulating the idea that the killer could be a depraved doctor or medical student, Rumbelow writes how one person suggested placing the following advertisement in newspapers the Ripper might see:
Medical Man or Assistant Wanted in London, aged between 25 and 40. Must not object to assist in occasional post mortem. Liberal terms.
Although I do not believe the Ripper to have been a medical man, he certainly had the curiosity, and this is the kind of ploy that might just have brought him out.
Dr. Forbes Winslow, a flamboyant physician and amateur detective who believed the killer to be a homicidal maniac goaded on by a religious mania, suggested having wardens from lunatic asylums patrolling with the police since they would be much more likely to recognize such tendencies in an individual. He also proposed a newspaper advertisement reading:
A gentleman who is strongly opposed to the presence of fallen women in the streets of London would like to cooperate with someone with a view to their suppression.
The police would then gather in hiding at the prearranged meeting place and grab whoever showed up.
“BLACK MARY”
On the morning of Friday, November 9, Thomas Bowyer, an Indian army retiree known to friends and neighbors as Indian Harry, was dispatched by his boss, local merchant John McCarthy, to collect rent at a house he owned at 13 Miller’s Court. It was almost right next to Spitalfields Market and a short walk from both Goulston Street to the south and Hanbury Street, site of the Chapman murder, to the northeast. With the kinds of tenants who lived in such buildings as McCarthy’s, collecting the rent was a regular ordeal for both landlord and renter.
The entrance to Miller’s Court was a narrow, dingy passageway next to McCarthy’s candle shop. Bowyer knocked on the door of Mary Jane Kelly, also said to have been known as Ginger, Fair Emma, and Black Mary to her various friends and clients. She was a streetwise, twenty-four-year-old Irish girl and by most accounts was quite pretty, though no photographs of her are known.
It was about 10:45 in the morning when Bowyer called on her, a good time to find her in. He knocked several times without response and began to suspect she didn’t have the rent money and was avoiding him. He tried without success to spring the lock, but there was a long-broken windowpane that had never been fixed. Inside it, an old coat had been hung in place of a proper curtain for some measure of privacy. He pushed aside the coat and peered in. The room was only ten by twelve feet, and the sight that met Thomas Bowyer’s eyes was one of such unmitigated horror that he was virtually paralyzed. A body was lying on the bed, but it was so mutilated, so torn apart, with so much of the flesh ripped off and the insides strewn across the bed and onto the floor, that the dimensions of the body, the outlines of its form, could no longer be discerned.
When the hideous sight had finally registered in his brain, Bowyer raced down to McCarthy’s shop. McCarthy went back up with Bowyer, glanced in the broken window himself, then immediately dispatched Bowyer to the Commercial Street police station.
He returned with Inspector Walter Beck and Detective Constable Walter Dew. Dew was a tough straight-shooter known as Blue Serge because of the suit he wore habitually. He would go on to fame as the detective who caught the
notorious poisoner Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. But the image he saw at 13 Miller’s Court was so emotionally harrowing that it haunted him the rest of his life. Since this was the first indoor scene, where good evidence could be collected, a conscientious effort not to disturb it was made, and not until 1:30 P.M., when Superintendent Thomas Arnold arrived, was the door finally broken in.
The bed and surrounding area were saturated with blood. The body, as described by Dr. George Bagster Phillips, showed what had to be the final escalation of the killer’s homicidal mutilating frenzy. The face was cut apart and the head just about severed. The breasts had been cut off, abdomen ripped open, and the internal organs thrown about the room. Much of the remaining body, including the pubic area, right thigh, and right buttock had had the flesh removed down to the bone. The heart was missing from the scene. Not only had the killer attempted to desex this victim, he’d gone all the way to dehumanize, to depersonalize her. Some of the doctors who either visited the scene or studied the body in autopsy estimated that the mutilation had taken as long as two hours, though the cause of death, the severing of the carotid artery, had taken place far sooner.
It is difficult for normal people to conceive of an act this depraved as a sexual fantasy, but our research shows that it is. Part of the fantasy is destroying the victim to the extent that the offender feels that he becomes her sole possessor. The mutilation murderer James Clayton Lawson Jr., who teamed up with rapist James Russell Odom, whom he met in California’s Atascadero State Mental Hospital, explained his 1970s killings of young women whom Odom had just raped with forthright candor: “Then I cut her throat so she would not scream. . . . I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person and destroy her so she would not exist. I began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her breasts off. After this, all I remember is that I kept cutting on her body.”
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 6