Jack the Ripper
Page 12
So far, we have looked at the man’s behaviour toward religion, pious names, physically inflicted people, newspaper ads, young male adults, the military, the police, the poor, and the prominent. All we have seen is a relentless manipulator with no scruples. For whatever reasons, some found this man to have been an entertaining showman. It can’t be denied there were editors at the time, who enjoyed spoofing him in their columns (Thomas D’Arcy McGee was one, for instance). Roger Palmer explained it well when he publicly wrote, ‘The 19th century press wrote him up as a buffoon because they had no other way of processing him.’ Even today, there are people who admire Tumblety. They like reading about a man who boldly challenged authority and spoke up for himself. But, there are also those who loathe him for all the anguish he caused to others. You do not need to have a strong medical background, to figure out there was something seriously wrong about the man. To help pinpoint the disorder, we can turn to an item entitled ‘Profile of the Sociopath’. Some notes and traits have been have taken from the work and are listed here:
Pathological Lying:
[Sociopaths have] no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. They can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities.
Grandiose Sense of Self
Glibness and Superficial Charm
Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at the core. Sociopaths do not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities.
Incapacity for Love
Manipulative and Conning:
They never recognise the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviour as permissible. They appear to be charming yet are domineering. They may humiliate their victims.
Need for Stimulation
Shallow Emotions:
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
Promiscuous Sexual Behaviour / Infidelity
Callousness / Lack of Empathy:
Unable to empathise with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
Parasitic Lifestyle:
They tend to move around a lot.
Poor Behavioural Controls / Impulsive Nature
Irresponsibility / Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. They do not accept blame themselves, but blame others, even for acts they obviously committed.
Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility:
They change their image as needed to avoid prosecution. They change their life story readily.
The notes presented here were not in any particular order, but they related well to the bullet points in the ‘Profile of the Sociopath’. More information can be found in Caroline Konrad’s study into the subject. Under the heading ‘The Malignant Personality’, she listed five features found in mentally ill people of this nature.
1. They are habitual liars.
2. They are egotistical to the point of narcissism. They really believe they are set apart from the rest of humanity by some special grace.
3. They scapegoat; they are incapable of either having the insight or willingness to accept responsibility for anything they do.
4. They are remorselessly vindictive when thwarted or exposed.
5. Genuine religious, moral, or other values play no part in their lives. They have no empathy for others and are capable of violence. Under older psychological terminology, they fall into the category of psychopath or sociopath, but unlike the typical psychopath, their behaviour is masked by a superficial social façade.
‘Profile of the Sociopath’ was influenced by the work of Professor Robert D. Hare of the University of British Columbia. Tumblety fell prey to those descriptions and can be identified with many if not all of them. His malignancy can also be detected in Caroline Konrad’s evaluation.
Some of the most cowardly and horrendous acts of exploitation were the senseless murders of Whitechapel prostitutes, in the year 1888. From the list of suspects, only one name was drawn out and commented on by a former Scotland Yard Chief Inspector. The name was Tumblety, and ever since those words from John Littlechild have been made known, Ripperologists have debated over whether or not this manipulative doctor committed these unforgettable murders.
If ever the day should come when new evidence enables us to declare Francis Tumblety innocent of the Whitechapel atrocities, certain Ripperologists will experience a feeling of satisfaction. The most content Ripper historians might very well end up being those who rely on modern day criminal profiling techniques. Many use this popular system as a beacon in their search for Jack the Ripper. No light shines upon Tumblety when the profiling methods of today are superimposed on the East End of London, in 1888. As Roger Palmer once said, ‘Tumblety runs 100 per cent counter to everything we are taught. Everything the Resslers are yelling from the roof-tops.’7 Simply stated, after utilising offender profiling techniques, no student of this method will draw a conclusion about how a fifty-eight-year-old homosexual male killed and mutilated a handful of female prostitutes. Due mainly to his age and sexual preference, Tumblety does not come close to being linked with the current image designed for the Whitechapel fiend.
Conversely speaking, if evidence should arise resulting in a moral certainty to Tumblety’s guilt in the Whitechapel Murders, then other Ripperologists would be satisfied; such as, those who respected the words of Inspector Walter Andrews, in December 1888, when he stated the Whitechapel murderer could be found among the current list of suspects. Tumblety was the best-known Ripper suspect in North America when Andrews came to Canada and shared his impressions.
Those who believed Inspector Andrews were not drawn in by the yellow journalism of the New York Herald. The pro-Irish newspaper wrote of how Andrews had come from England to engage in an illegal political enterprise. Some researchers simply did not buy into this. Instead, they sensed Andrews had voyaged across the Atlantic to gather information on the antecedents of Francis Tumblety; a task which was in accord with the Inspector’s official duty of taking charge of the Whitechapel Murders investigation. This was a duty he shared with Inspectors Abberline and Moore.
As for the author, it is his belief that Tumblety was suspected as a Whitechapel murderer at a very early stage in the drama – as early as 7 August 1888, when the first East-End victim fell in George Yard. The suspicions against him did not arise from the police or the citizens of London. Instead, they came from a Royal Artillery Colonel who saw right through the phoney act his suspect engaged in. The officer took part in a military investigation of the George Yard murder, and revealed some of its details to the American press. The Colonel claimed his suspect was a phoney medical man and spiritually polluted. The correlation between Tumblety and the English Colonel, Sir Francis Charles Hughes-Hallett, is lengthy and requires its own chapter.
It is as true today as it was in 1888: those who understand Tumblety the best, are the ones who take him seriously. He was a Ripper suspect who was gripped by a lifelong malignant personality disorder. He was a manipulator of religion and a harmful exploiter of the vulnerable; a disturbed man who skilfully hit his targets without empathy.
Notes
1. National Archives, War Dept. records, File ‘B’, Doc. 261, JAO
2. Nobody has located any official record of McClellan having issued that order, yet it is true Tumblety had a history of peddling questionable medical pamphlets. He mainly sold them in Rochester and Canada during the 1850s. The literature was of a sexual nature.
3. Rochester Union (5 April 1881)
4. Document 1769, Turner-Baker Papers, Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA
5. Brook
lyn Citizen (23 November 1888). Discovered by Roger Palmer
6. Riordan, T., Prince of Quacks: The Notorious Life of Dr. Francis Tumblety, Charlatan and Jack the Ripper Suspect (McFarland, 2009), pp.96–7
7. Robert Ressler coined the term serial killer in the 1970s. While working for the FBI, he was credited for establishing the methods of offender profiling.
Bibliography
Riordan, T., Prince of Quacks: The Notorious Life of Dr. Francis Tumblety, Charlatan and Jack the Ripper Suspect (McFarland, 2009)
Tumblety, Dr F., A Sketch of the Life of the Gifted and World-Famed Physician (Brooklyn: Eagle Printing Company, 1889)
Tumblety, Dr F., A Sketch of the Life of the Gifted and World-Famed Physician, second edition (1893)
Evans, S.P. & Gainey, P., Jack the Ripper: The First American Serial Killer (Kadansha, 1998)
Other Sources
‘Recollections of a Police Magistrate’ in Canadian Magazine, Vol. 54 (Nov 1919–Apr 1920). Discovered by Stephen Ryder.
Brooklyn Citizen (Courtesy of Roger Palmer)
Brooklyn Standard Union (Courtesy of Roger Palmer)
Bucks County Gazette
Buffalo Morning Express (Courtesy of Tim Riordan)
Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago)
Evening Star (Washington)
Morning Freeman
The New York World
Rochester Union
San Francisco Chronicle
www.casebook.org
www.jtrforums.com
www.mcafee.cc
Acknowledgements
Appreciation goes to Roger Palmer for sharing the illustration of Francis Tumblety. Special thanks goes to John Spanek for assisting in the technical aspects of this report.
After twenty-two years in the medical profession, Joe Chetcuti retired in 2004. He has contributed numerous articles for two prominent London periodicals that deal with the Victorian era (The Whitechapel Society Journal and Ripperologist). Joe was born and raised in the San Francisco peninsula and still lives there. He is an active member of the Jack the Ripper Writers website. He is pleased with the growth of interest in the Martha Tabram murder case and senses that crime was a significant aspect of the Whitechapel mysteries.
10
Prince Albert Victor
M.W. Oldridge
Jack the Ripper was only the trade name, as he himself (or, more likely, someone ghostwriting his infernal letters) would have had it; but, from the very first, the day-to-day identity of the Whitechapel murderer was tantalisingly unknowable, occluded by the East End’s trademark peasouper, or otherwise lost to sight in the Minoan maze of its bloody streets. The sensational sangfroid of the culprit thrilled and appalled – the killer wandered the streets unsuspected by the police, committed homicides of astonishing audacity, and fled again, all unseen. His work was an anonymous, effortless reflection on the horror of chance, anticipating the mad juxtapositions of the dreamworld, shortly to be mapped by Freud, and the accidental, abstract semantics of Dada and Surrealism. When the scare died down, all that remained of the Ripper was his cognomen, a Saussurean signifiant detached from its signifié, the chief symbol of his popular terror. Behind the soubriquet, however, he seemed to have abandoned his mission as invisibly as he had taken it up.
And so began the instinctive hunt for meaning. Out of the jigsaw pieces of his victims, the task of assembling the image of the Ripper commenced, haphazard, fumbling. The disjunction of this aimless mystery offended logic, and solutions were sought everywhere – the doctor bent on revenge, the sociopathic Russian agent, perhaps even the social reformer pushing the envelope of charity. And then, in 1962, with rival administrations on separate continents guaranteeing each other’s destruction, with missiles hauling slowly, slowly towards Cuba, with the world never more than minutes away from ruin, another suspect was named – the one-time heir presumptive to the British throne.
Of course, every society gets the kind of conspiracy theories it deserves, but the identification of Prince Albert Victor with Jack the Ripper proved popular, informing Ripperology until the centenary of the murders. This anniversary was more-or-less coincident with the end of the Cold War and, with global nuclear efforts scaled back in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union, and with the setting back of the hands of the apocalyptic clock, there came a lifting of the paranoid burden. Prince Albert Victor dropped from the radar at the same time, his candidacy a monument to more fearful times, to the crooked potential of absolutism and imperialism, to the banished spectre of the annihilation of the masses by their leaders. Meaningful in its day, the Royal Ripper Theory was an unusual cultural victim of the political and social change of the late 1980s and early 1990s – like the systems it imitated, it became obsolete almost overnight, and was swept away, to be replaced by the information age, a generally untrammelled plurality of opinion, and widespread and remote digital access to data which were once much less readily available.
We are dealing with a relic, then; let us trace its provenance. Prince Albert Victor was born in 1864, the first son and natural heir of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and Alexandra, Princess of Wales; upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Albert Edward would become King Edward VII. At the time of his birth, therefore, little Albert Victor was second in line to the throne of the world’s greatest empire, and it alarmed the establishment to discover, as they soon did, that he seemed generally to resist his tutors’ attempts to educate him. He was perceived to be intellectually frigid, and the full range of disappointed, Gradgrindian adjectives was deployed to explain his lack of progress – listless, dull, dormant, the Prince made for a poor student. As a result, he was put to sea aboard the HMS Bacchante, returning to England three years later with, perhaps, a little more practical wisdom and, more certainly, a Japanese tattoo. He went up to Cambridge in spite of his apparent weaknesses, attending Trinity College, where, it is said, he was deferentially excused from having to run in the intellectual rat-race which went on around him.
This, however, is not to say that Eddy – as he was called by his family – had failed entirely to integrate into Cambridge’s social whirl. On the contrary, rumours of sexual immorality and other unbefitting behaviour leaked back to the palace: while his intellect remained stubbornly undernourished, even in Trinity’s hothouse learning environment, his libido and his capacity for drink seemed almost to have grown to compensate. Nature, then as now, abhorred a vacuum, but Eddy’s concerned entourage were determined to map the sharp lines of discipline onto the virgin territory of his mercurial conscience. Another spell in the military ensued – Eddy chose his regiment, some said, because he liked the look of the uniform. His effete style bolstered allegations of homosexuality; his craning neck, impeccably waxed moustache and unusually long arms made him a curious physical specimen. This was the man who, theoretically, was one day to become King – when Eddy left Cambridge in 1885, his grandmother, the Queen, was well into her sixties, his father was in his forties, and the future of this aging monarchy appeared, startlingly, to rest in the hands of this impish, feminine gadabout.
Perhaps in spite of his own sexual preferences, concerted efforts were now made to find Eddy a wife whose strengths would lock, enzyme-like, into the erratic profile of his own weaknesses. Princess Mary of Teck was the lady identified, but, with the marriage only six weeks away, Eddy died at Sandringham, aged twenty-eight, on 14 January 1892. He had contracted a severe dose of influenza, which was then sweeping the court, and this led on into a fatal pneumonia. The grief of his much-tested family was genuine; shock was felt across the country, and transmitted by telegraph wire to the most far-flung parts of the empire; in London, Sir Edward Bradford, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ordered his men into mourning, from which they would not emerge until 26 February. Elsewhere, colder – perhaps shrewder – assessments marked the elevation of Eddy’s more capable brother George to the position of heir presumptive as ‘a merciful act of providence’. Eddy’s worrying peccadilloes no longer threa
tened to write themselves into the history of the monarchy and, were it not for the long memories of Ripperologists, he would have been very much forgotten.
But had the capital’s police mourned a man whom, three and a half years earlier, they were desperate to apprehend? Was Eddy – in the moments between his bouts of drinking and, as rumour had it, his convulsions of homosexual debauchery – the greatest criminal of his generation, ripping female prostitutes to shreds on the dismal streets of Whitechapel? In 1962, Phillippe Jullien alleged that he was, acting, he said, in concert with the Duke of Bedford, a man who had died a year to the day before Eddy, shooting himself through the heart during a spell of madness. Little attention seems to have been paid to Jullien’s allegation upon its publication, but, the other side of the Summer of Love, the dark charge against Eddy was laid for a second time. This time, the mouthpiece of the allegations was one Dr Thomas Stowell, a surgeon of Southampton, who published an article in the periodical The Criminologist hinting strongly at Eddy’s guilt. Stowell had faux-discreetly attempted to protect his suspect’s identity under the pseudonym of ‘S’, but the Devil was, as ever, discernible in the details.
Stowell’s theory was, broadly, this: Eddy, he supposed, had contracted syphilis while on his global jaunt, and, in its tertiary phase, the disease had propelled the Prince into a murderous insanity. Creeping around the East End through the gruesome autumn months of 1888, he had been responsible for the whole sequence of Ripper killings, but Eddy found himself arrested shortly after the awful murder and disfigurement of Catherine Eddowes, and, under a veil of secrecy, he was sent to an asylum. From here he soon escaped, returning (rather daringly) to London for his pièce de résistance, the wholesale obliteration of Mary Jane Kelly. Recaptured and returned to the asylum, Eddy’s subsequent care was delegated to Sir William Gull, the Queen’s Physician-in-Ordinary. A man on the wrong side of a debilitating stroke, Gull was now asked to take up the most extraordinary of tasks: the rehabilitation of Jack the Ripper. In fact, he went about the job so competently that Eddy – shot to the moon, mentally, while his homicidal instincts held him in their thrall – was able to carry out perfunctory official duties over the next few years. Stowell, though, examining the matter in hindsight, detected telltale signs of physical and emotional deterioration in Eddy’s shortening public speeches.