Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Macnaghten goes on to recall those terrible foggy evenings and the “raucous cries” of newsboys shouting out that there had been “Another horrible murder . . . !” The scene he sets becomes more dramatic with each page until one can’t help but get annoyed and wish that his autobiography had been one of those quashed by the Home Office. I suppose it is possible Macnaghten heard those raucous cries and experienced those fatal foggy nights, but I doubt he was anywhere near the East End.

  He had just returned from India and was still working for his family. He did not begin at Scotland Yard until some eight months after the Ripper murders supposedly had ended and were no longer foremost on the Yard’s mind, but this didn’t keep him from deciding not only who Jack the Ripper probably was, but also that he was dead and had murdered five victims “& 5 victims only”: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows, and Mary Kelly. It was Melville Macnaghten’s “rational theory” that after the “fifth” murder of November 9, 1888, the Ripper’s “brain gave way altogether” and he most likely committed suicide.

  When the young, depressed barrister Montague John Druitt threw himself into the Thames toward the end of 1888, he unwittingly cast himself as one of three main suspects Macnaghten named in Jack the Ripper’s bloody drama. The other two, lower on Macnaghten’s list, were a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski, who was “insane” and “had a great hatred of women,” and Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor who was committed to a “lunatic asylum.”

  For some reason, Macnaghten thought that Montague Druitt was a doctor. This erroneous supposition was passed down the line for quite a long time, and I suppose some people may still think Druitt was a doctor. I don’t know where Macnaghten got his information, but perhaps he was confused because Montague’s uncle, Robert Druitt, was a prominent physician and medical writer, and Montague’s father, William, was a surgeon. I am afraid that Montague or “Monty” will always remain a bit shadowy because it does not appear there is much information available about him.

  In 1876, when he was a dark, handsome, athletic nineteen-year-old, Druitt enrolled at New College, Oxford University, and five years later was admitted to the Inner Temple in London to pursue a career in law. He was a good student and an exceptionally talented cricket player, and worked a part-time job as an assistant at Valentine’s School, a boys’ boarding school in Blackheath. Homosexuality or child molesting—or both—are suggested as the reasons why Druitt, a thirty-one-year-old bachelor when he died, was fired from Valentine’s School in the fall of 1888. Macnaghten claimed in his memo that Druitt was “sexually insane,” which in the Victorian era could have referred to homosexuality. But Macnaghten backs up his accusation with nothing more than so-called reliable information that he supposedly destroyed.

  Mental illness ran in Druitt’s bloodline. His mother was committed to an asylum in the summer of 1888 and had attempted suicide at least once. One of Druitt’s sisters later committed suicide as well. When Druitt drowned himself in the Thames in the early winter of 1888, he left a suicide note that indicated he feared he would end up like his mother and thought it best to kill himself. His family archives at the Dorset Record Office and the West Sussex Record Office turned up only one letter of his, which he wrote to his uncle Robert in September 1876. Although Druitt’s handwriting and language do not resemble anything found in alleged Ripper letters, even to consider making a judgment based on this isn’t meaningful or fair. In 1876, Druitt wasn’t yet twenty years old. Handwriting and verbal performance can not only be disguised—they also tend to change as one ages.

  Druitt became a suspect in the Ripper murders for the convenient reason that he happened to commit suicide not long after what Macnaghten considers the last Ripper strike on November 9, 1888. The young barrister was probably guilty of nothing more than a hereditary mental illness, and perhaps what fatally tipped the scales against him was acute distress over whatever he allegedly had done to be fired from Valentine’s School. We can’t know his mind or feelings at that point in his life, but his despair was sufficient for him to put rocks in the pockets of his topcoat and jump into the frigid, polluted Thames. Druitt’s body was recovered from the water the last day of 1888, and it was supposed, based on the degree of decomposition, that he had been dead for about a month. At his inquest in Chiswick, the jury returned a verdict of “suicide whilst of unsound mind.”

  Doctors and lunatics seem to have been popular Ripper suspects. B. Leeson, a constable at the time of the Ripper murders, states in his memoirs that when he began his career, the training consisted of ten days’ attendance at a police court and a “couple of hours” of instruction from a chief inspector. The rest one had to learn through experience. Leeson wrote, “I am afraid I cannot throw any light on the problem of the Ripper’s identity.” However, he added, there was a particular doctor who was never far away when the crimes were committed. I guess Leeson was never far away when the murders were committed, either, otherwise he couldn’t possibly have noticed this “same” doctor.

  Perhaps Frederick Abberline refrained from writing about the Ripper cases because he was smart enough not to trot out what he didn’t know. In his clipping books, every case he includes is one he personally investigated and solved. The news articles he pasted on pages and underlined (precisely, with a straightedge), and his comments are neither copious nor especially enthusiastic. He made it plain that he worked very hard and wasn’t always happy about it. On January 24, 1885, when the Tower of London was bombed, for example, he found himself “especially overworked, as the then Home Secretary Sir Wm. Harcourt wished to be supplied every morning with the progress of the case and after working very hard all day I had to remain up many nights until 4 and 5 A.M. the following morning making reports for his information.”

  If Abberline had to do this in the Tower of London bombing case, one can be sure that during the Ripper murders he was often up all night and in the Home Secretary’s office first thing in the morning for briefings. In the Tower bombing, Abberline arrived “immediately after the explosion” and suggested that all people on the scene were to remain there and be interviewed by the police. Abberline conducted many of the interviews himself, and it was during this process that he “discovered” one of the perpetrators through “the hesitation in his replies and his general manner.” There was quite a lot of press about the bombing and Abberline’s excellent detective work, and if four years later his presence seemed to fade, it was probably because of his supervisory position and his discretion. He was a man who worked relentlessly and without applause, the quiet clockmaker who did not want attention but was determined to fix what was wrong.

  I suspect he anguished over the Ripper murders and spent much time walking the streets at night, speculating, deducing, trying to coax leads out of the foggy, filthy air. When his colleagues, friends, family, and the merchants of the East End gave him a retirement dinner in 1892, they presented him with a silver tea and coffee service and praised his honorable and extraordinary work in the detection of crime. According to the East London Observer’s account of the appreciation dinner, H Division’s Superintendent Arnold told those who had gathered to celebrate Abberline’s career that during the Ripper murders, “Abberline came down to the East End and gave the whole of his time with the object of bringing those crimes to light. Unfortunately, however, the circumstances were such that success was impossible.”

  It must have been painful and infuriating for Abberline when he was forced in the fall of 1888 to confess to the press that “not the slightest clue can at present be obtained.” He was used to outwitting criminals. It was reported that he worked so hard to solve the Ripper murders that he “almost broke down under the pressure.” Often he did not go to bed and went days without sleep. It wasn’t uncommon for him to wear plainclothes and mingle with the “shady folk” in doss-house kitchens until the early hours of the morning. But no matter where Abberline went, the “miscreant” was not there. I have to wonder if his path ever cros
sed Walter Sickert’s. It would not surprise me if the two men had talked at one time or another and if Sickert had offered suggestions. What a “real jolly” that would have been.

  “Theories!” Abberline would later thunder when someone brought up the Ripper murders. “We were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them.” By all indications, it was not a pleasant subject to bring up with him in later years, after he had moved on to other cases. Better to let him talk about the improved sanitation in the East End or how he solved a long string of bond robberies by tracing clues that led to an unclaimed hatbox in a railway station.

  For all his experience and gifts, Abberline did not solve the biggest crime of his life. It is a shame if that failure gave him pain and regret for even a moment when he worked in his garden during his retirement years. Frederick Abberline went to his grave having no idea what he had been up against. Walter Sickert was a murderer unlike any other.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CROCHET WORK AND FLOWERS

  Mary Ann Nichols’s body remained at the mortuary in Whitechapel until Thursday, September 6, when her decomposing flesh was finally allowed privacy and rest.

  She was enclosed in a “solid-looking” wooden coffin and loaded into a horse-drawn hearse that carried her seven miles to Ilford Cemetery, where she was buried. The sun shone only five minutes that day, and it was misty and rainy.

  The next day, Friday, the British Association’s fifty-eighth annual meeting took up important topics such as the necessity of lightning rods being properly installed and inspected, and the vagaries of lightning and the great damage it and wild geese could do to telegraph wires. The hygienic qualities of electric lighting were presented, and a physicist and an engineer debated whether electricity was a form of matter or energy. It was announced that poverty and misery could be eliminated if “you could prevent weakness and sickness and laziness and stupidity.” One bit of good news was that Thomas Edison had just started a factory that would begin producing 18,000 phonographs a year for £20 or £25 each.

  The weather had been worse this day than yesterday, with no sunshine reported at all, and squalls roared in from the north. Heavy rain and sleet smacked down, and Londoners moved about in a cold mist, going to and from work and later to the theaters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was still drawing large audiences at the Lyceum, and a parody of it called Hide and Seekyll had opened at the Royalty Theater. The play She was reviewed in that day’s paper as “a formidable experiment of dramatizing,” offering a murder and cannibals at the Gaiety. At the Alhambra, one of Walter Sickert’s favorite music halls, the doors opened at 10:30 P.M. with a cast of dancing women and Captain Clives and his “marvelous dog.” Sickert’s own handwritten date on a music-hall sketch he made the night before, on August 5th, proves he was in London at that time. Quite possibly he was out on the streets in the early morning of the 6th, since music halls did not let out until half past midnight.

  On August 5th, Annie Chapman was sleeping off her last glass of spirits while London’s early night life was going on. The week had been a bad one, worse than usual. Annie was forty-seven years old and missing her two front teeth. She was five feet tall, overweight, with blue eyes and short, dark-brown, wavy hair. As the police later put it, “she had seen her better day.” On the street she was known as “Dark Annie.” In some accounts her estranged husband was said to be a veterinary surgeon, but in most of them he was described as a coachman employed by a gentleman who lived in the Royal Borough of Windsor.

  Annie and her husband had no contact with each other after they separated, and she made no inquiries into his life until her weekly allowance of ten shillings suddenly stopped in late 1886. One day, a wretched-looking woman, having the appearance of a tramp, appeared at the Merry Wives of Windsor public house and inquired about Chapman. She said she had walked twenty miles from London, staying in a lodging house along the way, and wanted to know if her husband was ill or using that as an excuse not to send money. The woman at the door of the Merry Wives of Windsor informed the tramp that Mr. Chapman had died on Christmas Day. He left Annie nothing but two children who wanted nothing to do with her: a boy who was an inmate of the Cripples’ Home, and a well-educated daughter living in France.

  Annie moved in with a sieve maker for a while, and when he left her, she borrowed small sums from her brother, who finally cut her off. She had no further contact with any members of her family, and when her health allowed, she made pennies by selling crochet work and flowers. Acquaintances described her as “clever” and industrious by nature, but the more her addiction to alcohol tightened its grip on her life, the less she cared what she did to earn her keep.

  During the four months before her death, Annie had been in and out of the infirmary. She was spending her nights in Spitalfields doss-houses, the most recent one located at 35 Dorset Street, which joined Commercial Street and Crispin Street like a short rung on a ladder. There were an estimated 5,000 lodging-house beds in the hellish dens of Spitalfields, and The Times later observed that at Annie’s inquest the “glimpse of life . . . was sufficient to make [jurors] feel there was much in the 19th century civilization of which they had small reason to be proud.” In Annie Chapman’s world, the poor were “herded like cattle,” and were “near starvation.” Violence smoldered day and night, fueled by misery, alcohol, and rage.

  Four nights before her death, Annie got into an altercation with another lodger named Eliza Cooper, who confronted her in the lodging-house kitchen, demanding the return of a scrap of soap Annie had borrowed. Annie angrily threw a halfpenny on the table and told her to go buy it herself. The two women began to quarrel and carried their disagreement to the nearby Ringer public house, where Annie slapped Eliza across the face and Eliza punched Annie in the left eye and chest.

  Annie’s bruises were still noticeable the early Saturday morning of September 8th, when John Donovan, the deputy of the lodging house on Dorset Street, demanded payment of eight pennies for a bed if she planned to stay. She replied, “I have not got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary.” Donovan reminded her that she knew the rules. She replied that she would go out and get the money and please not to let her bed to someone else. Donovan would later tell police that she “was under the influence of drink” when the night watchman escorted her off the property.

  Annie took the first right on Little Paternoster Row, and when the night watchman saw her last she was on Brushfield Street, which ran east to west between what was then called Bishopsgate Without Norton Folgate and Commercial Street. Had she headed but a few blocks north on Commercial Street, she would have reached Shoreditch, where there were several music halls (the Shoreditch Olympia, Harwood’s, and Griffin’s). A little farther north was Hoxton—or the very route Walter Sickert sometimes took when he walked home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens after evenings at various music halls, theaters, or wherever it was he went on his obsessive wanderings late at night and in the early morning hours.

  At 2:00 A.M., when Annie emerged onto London’s East End streets, it was fifty degrees and sodden out. She was dressed in a black skirt, a long black jacket hooked at the neck, an apron, wool stockings, and boots. Around her neck was a piece of a black woolen scarf tied in front with a knot, and under it she wore a handkerchief that she recently had bought from another lodger. On the wedding ring finger of her left hand she wore three base metal or “flash” rings. In a pocket on the inside of her skirt was a small comb case, a piece of coarse muslin, and a torn bit of envelope that she had been seen to pick off the lodging-house floor and use to tuck away two pills she had gotten from the infirmary. The torn envelope had a red postmark on it.

  If anyone saw Annie alive over the next three and a half hours, no witness ever came forward. At quarter to five, thirty-seven-year-old John Richardson, a porter at the Spitalfields Market, headed toward 29 Hanbury Street, a rooming house for the poor that, like so many other dilapidated dwellings in Spitalfields, had once been a barnlike workplace for weaver
s to toil on hand looms until steam power had put them out of business. Richardson’s mother rented the house and sublet half of its rooms to seventeen people. He, being the dutiful son, had dropped by, just as he always did when he was up early, to check the security of the cellar. Two months ago someone had broken into it and had stolen two saws and two hammers. His mother also ran a packing-case business, and stolen tools were no small matter.

  Satisfied that the cellar was safely locked, Richardson went through a passage that led into the backyard and sat on the steps to cut a bothersome piece of leather off his boot. His knife was “an old table knife,” he later testified at the inquest, “about five inches long,” and he had used it earlier to cut “a bit of carrot,” then absently tucked the knife into a pocket. He estimated he was sitting out on the steps no longer than several minutes, his feet resting on flagstone that was just inches from where Annie Chapman’s mutilated body would be found. He neither heard nor saw anyone. Richardson laced up his mended boot and headed to the market just as the sun began to rise.

  Albert Cadosch lived next door at 25 Hanbury, his backyard separated from 29 Hanbury by a temporary wooden fence that was five to five and a half feet high. He later told police that at 5:25 A.M., he walked into his backyard and heard a voice say “No” from the other side of the fence. Several minutes later, something heavy fell against the palings. He did not check to see what had caused the noise or who had said “No.”

  Five minutes later, at 5:30 A.M., Elisabeth Long was walking along Hanbury Street, heading west to Spitalfields Market, when she noticed a man talking to a woman only a few yards from the fence around the yard at 29 Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman’s body would be found on the other side barely half an hour later. Mrs. Long testified at the inquest that she was “positive” the woman was Annie Chapman. Annie and the man were talking loudly but seemed to be getting along, Mrs. Long recalled. The only fragment of the conversation she overheard as she made her way down the street was the man asking, “Will you?” and the woman identified as Annie replying, “Yes.”