The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors

by Edward B. Hanna

  (It is hard to believe, albeit possible, that Anderson knew something that Smith did not.)

  Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of Scotland Yard who headed the CID from 1903 to 1913. He had access to the complete file and claimed (according to two separate reliable sources) that he had documentary proof of the Ripper’s identity, but he burnt all of the papers without explaining why. All Macnaghten would disclose in his memoirs was that he believed the man to be a sexual maniac who “committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888.”

  This is a view shared by his successor, Sir Basil Thompson, who wrote (in The Story of Scotland Yard): “The feeling of the CID officers at the time was that they [the murders] were the work of an insane Russian doctor and that the man escaped arrest by committing suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888.”

  But Macnaghten also left behind a packet of private notes in which, according to his daughter (in a letter to the New Statesman, November 7, 1959), he named three individuals whom the police strongly suspected at the time. The names are: Kosminski (no first name can be found for him), Michael Ostrog, and M. J. Druitt.

  Kosminski was described as “a Polish Jew who lived in the very heart of the district where the murders were committed” who “had a great hatred of women” and had “strong homicidal tendencies.” He was sent to a lunatic asylum around March 1889.

  Ostrog was described as “a mad Russian doctor and convict... unquestionably a homicidal maniac [who] was said to have been habitually cruel to women, and for a long time was known to have carried about with him surgical knives and other instruments; his antecedents were of the very worst and his whereabouts at the time of the Whitechapel murders could never be satisfactorily accounted for.”

  Macnaghten wrote that he was “inclined to exonerate” Kosminski and Ostrog. Druitt was another matter.

  Druitt he described as “a doctor of about forty-one years of age and of fairly good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, and whose body was found floating in the Thames on December 3, i.e., seven (my italics) weeks after the said murder. From private information I have little doubt that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer; and it was alleged that he was sexually insane.”

  (The notes, from which the above was taken, were written in 1894, six years after the Whitechapel murders, and were copied “almost verbatim” from the original by Major Arthur Griffiths, the Inspector of Prisons and author of Mysteries of Police and Crime.)

  Macnaghten, who was wrong about Druitt’s profession — he was a lawyer, not a doctor — and wrong about the dates — Mary Jane Kelly was murdered in Miller’s Court during the night of November 8-9, approximately three weeks before Druitt’s body was recovered from the river, not seven — was probably just as wrong about Druitt being the Ripper.

  Chief Inspector Frederick G. Abberline, the Scotland Yard officer who (along with Chief Inspector D. S. Swanson) was in charge of the Ripper investigations. Abberline never wrote his memoirs and, as far as is known, left no notes behind, but was said to be one of the first to suggest the possibility of the perpetrator being a woman. But after his death he was quoted by a close colleague as saying that he believed the killer was George Chapman, the infamous “borough poisoner” who was taken into custody in 1902. Chapman, a Pole whose real name was Severin Antoniovich Klosowski (not to be confused with Kosminski), was the candidate of choice on the part of several officials at Scotland Yard, a view confirmed by Superintendent Arthur Neil in his memoirs Forty Years of Man-Hunting.

  Yet, Chief Inspector Walter Dew, a young detective assigned to Whitechapel at the time of the murders (it was he who was warned in Miller’s Court, the site of Mary Kelly’s murder: “For God’s sake, don’t look!” — see page 299), wrote in his reminiscences that there were no real grounds for believing Chapman/Klosowski to be the Ripper. Said Dew: “I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes. I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then by the man’s amazing elusiveness.”

  Another officer who was directly involved in the investigations, Detective Sergeant Benjamin Leeson, wrote in his memoirs, Lost London: “I am afraid I cannot throw any light on the ‘Ripper’s’ identity, but one thing I do know, and that is that amongst the police who were concerned in the case there was a general feeling that a certain doctor, known to me, could have thrown quite a lot of light on the subject. This particular doctor was never far away when the crimes were committed.”120

  After that tantalizing offering, Leeson went on to write: “Many stories and theories have been put forward, but, with one exception, I doubt if any of them had the slightest foundation in fact.” The exception, he wrote, was Chapman/Klosowski who, he felt, “could” have been the Ripper.

  But then, having slightly cracked the door open, he quickly and firmly slammed it shut again: There lacked proof, he said, there were inconsistencies; the evidence, though strongly suggestive, was inconclusive.

  In the final analysis there was only one conclusion he could come to: “Nobody knew,” he flatly stated, “and nobody ever will know the true story of Jack the Ripper.” When all is said and done, he was probably right.

  Or, at least half right.

  NOTES

  1. It may be only a coincidence, but an “accommodating neighbor” by the name of Anstruther was mentioned in Watson’s account of The Boscombe Valley Mystery. Watson also had a medical practice in Queen Anne Street at the time, just around the corner from Harley.

  2. Holmes and Watson had obviously been to see a performance of the popular success of the 1888 season, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which opened at the Lyceum Theater in August of that year with the American actor Richard Mansfield in the title roles.

  The Lyceum, which was soon to play a brief role in the Holmes adventure known as The Sign of the Four, was coincidentally where the play, Sherlock Holmes, starring William Gillette, was first performed in September 1902.

  3. It had indeed been an active period for Holmes. According to the great Holmesian authority William S. Baring-Gould (Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes), the private consulting detective was involved in several cases that summer that Watson never got around to writing up, including The Bishopsgate Jewel Case and an affair Watson made passing reference to in The Sign of the Four as “the case of the most winning woman Holmes ever knew.” The only other reference to be found to a Mrs. Cecil Forrester is also in The Sign of the Four in which Watson makes casual mention of Mrs. Forrester’s “little domestic complication.” This is the first inkling we have that it was an “amusing” complication, and sadly we will never know what made it so.

  4. Simpson’s dining rooms have survived the years and it is still a popular dining spot in The Strand, located just a few steps away from the entrance to the Hotel Savoy and the Savoy Theater.

  5. Inspector (later Chief Inspector) Frederick George Abberline joined the Metropolitan Police in 1863, was promoted to sergeant in 1865 and to inspector in 1873. Detective Sergeant William Thicke had been a member of the Metropolitan Police since 1868 and was well known in the streets of London’s East End slums as “Johnny Upright.”

  6. A reference to this curious habit may be found in The Musgrave Ritual, in which Watson, admitting that while he himself was not the tidiest of individuals, commented: “... When I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jackknife in the very center of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs.”

  7. G. Lestrade (first name unknown) was a twenty-year veteran inspector with Scotland Yard by 1888. He had been involved in several of Holmes’s cases through the years, including The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of the Four, and A Study in Scarlet. While professing disdain for Holmes’s methods, he sought his advice time and time again and advanced his ca
reer, in part, on the strength of help that Holmes was able to give him. Holmes, in turn, considered him “the pick of a bad lot... quick and energetic, but conventional... lacking in imagination and normally out of his depth.” Watson, in A Study in Scarlet, called him a “sallow, rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow,” the only thing approaching a description that we have of him.

  8. Spitalfields had fallen on hard times long before the Whitechapel murders, being already notorious in the reign of George III, a century earlier, and becoming by 1861, in the words of social reformer Henry Mayhew, “one of the most notorious rookeries for infamous characters in the metropolis.” Charles Booth, the pioneer sociologist, called the residents of the district “of the lowest class... vicious, semi-criminal.” It was a place, he said, “where murder was considered a dramatic incident, and drunkenness as the buffoonery of the stage.”

  Jack London, who visited in 1902, the year of Edward VII’s coronation, was to write in The People of the Abyss: “Spitalfields was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces.” The women of the area, he was told, “would sell themselves for thru’pence or tu’pence or a stale loaf of bread.”

  9. Much was made of the fact by social reformers of the times that East London, with a population of 2,000,000 — greater than the total populations of most European cities — had no mortuary worthy of the name despite the area’s extremely high death rate. The shed behind the workhouse on Old Montague Street was all there was — “a disgraceful hole-and-corner hovel,” The Daily Telegraph called it.

  10. Holmes had been studying analytical chemistry and “morbid anatomy” at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (or “Bart’s” as it is affectionately called) when he and Watson first met in January of 1881, as Watson related in A Study in Scarlet:

  “Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

  “How are you?” Holmes said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

  A bronze plaque commemorating the event may be found on the wall of the hospital’s pathological laboratory.

  11. This was from The Star of August 31. For some inexplicable reason, Watson was reading a two-day-old newspaper. But he is right about some of the facts being wrong: Mary Anne (Polly) Nicholls was removed to the mortuary, where her abdominal wounds were discovered, not the hospital. And, strictly speaking, she had not been disemboweled.

  12. It is difficult to appreciate just how badly shaken Londoners were by the Nicholls murder. The brutality of the attack was unprecedented, and sex crimes per se were virtually unknown — so foreign to Victorian England that the murder of Polly Nicholls was not even recognized as a sex crime until years later, the term not having yet been created.

  Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was to join Scotland Yard the following year as assistant chief constable in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division, was to write: “No one who was living in London that autumn will forget the terror created by these murders. Even now (1915) I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys: “‘Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel!’”

  13. Strangely, there are only two references to the gasogene in the writings edited by Conan Doyle: one in A Scandal in Bohemia, the other in The Mazarin Stone. Yet this ingenious apparatus, which produced carbonated water, is certainly among the better-known furnishings of 221B Baker Street. The gasogene, or Gazogene-Briet as it was properly called, was of French manufacture and consisted of two wire-bound glass globes, one on top of the other, connected by a glass tube. The lower globe contained water, the upper globe the chemicals for producing the carbonation. Michael Harrison (in The London of Sherlock Holmes) thinks it was probably purchased by Holmes at Mondollot Fils’s London establishment, 13 Little James Street, Bedford Row.

  14. Holmes had at least three dressing gowns, or long lounging robes, that have been mentioned from time to time by Watson: one blue, one purple, and one “mouse-colored.” His favorite (based on the number of references to it) would appear to be the latter.

  15. This “interesting little matter” could only have been The Manor House Case, which Watson mentioned briefly in The Greek Interpreter but never bothered to write up, apparently feeling it lacked in dramatic interest. Baring-Gould sets the probable date of its occurrence as Monday, September 3, 1888.

  16. Holmes must have been referring to Oscar Wilde’s condemnation of fox hunters as being “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.” However, he was somewhat premature in that the line had not yet been written. It was taken from Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance, which did not have its London premiere until 1893.

  17. The London telegraph system was truly a marvel of the age, and Holmes made frequent use of it, even after the telephone came into wide use. Occupying several of the upper floors of the General Post Office Building at St. Martin’s le Grand, the telegraph department employed some 3,000 operators in the 1880s, most of them women. Once a message was received over the wires in the central office, it was rushed by underground pneumatic tube to one of a network of district offices scattered throughout the city, and then by foot messenger to the recipient, often being delivered within minutes of being sent.

  18. London’s police constables had been known colloquially as both “bobbies” and “peelers” for several years, the names taken from Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel (1788-1850) who, after taking charge of what was then a small disorganized department, made it into the world’s foremost metropolitan police force.

  19. The crest was that of the Sussex Regiment. Some sources give the date of the postmark as 28 August.

  20. Holmes could never be accused of false humility, but it would be misleading to leave the impression that he was a braggart. He was simply honest to a fault. “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues,” he is on record as saying. “To a logician, all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate oneself is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.” (The Greek Interpreter)

  In any event, there can be no doubt that he was indeed the world’s leading authority on the subject of tobaccos, being the author of the seminal monograph Upon the Distinctions Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos. (See The Sign of the Four.)

  21. Of the Baker Street Irregulars, Watson quotes Holmes as remarking (in A Study in Scarlet): “There’s more work to be got out of one of those little beggars than out of a dozen of the force. The mere sight of an official-looking person seals men’s lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles.”

  Holmes employed the Irregulars to good advantage in several cases, including The Sign of the Four, The Crooked Man, and The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax. This description of Wiggins, by the way, is somewhat more detailed than any found in Watson’s earlier accounts, although this is not the first time he was referred to by Watson as “unsavory and insignificant.” (See A Study in Scarlet.)

  22. This would have been a park-keeper’s wife by the name of Elizabeth Long, who testified at Annie Chapman’s inquest that she was on her way to early morning market when she also saw and heard the man who was with Annie. She confirmed the conversation “Dicko” heard, but her description varies somewhat. He was indeed wearing a deerstalker and long coat, she told police, but his accent was that of a foreigner, not of a cultured English gentleman. Since he had his back turned to her as she passed, she did not see his face.

  23. One authority, Tom Cullen (Autumn of Terror), says that according to some “witnesses” who claimed to have seen him, the man carried a Gladstone bag (what was then known in America as a “carpet bag”). Others claimed he carried a bag of a shiny black oilcloth, or “American cloth” as the Victorians called it. Such bags, says Cullen, were popular novelties in the ‘80s, but after
the murders began, anyone spotted carrying one in the East End “was not only in peril of arrest, but in positive danger of his life.”

  24. Watson, by alluding to socialists “who are always stirring up so much trouble,” may have been thinking about two events that rocked England’s complacent upper classes in the mid-1880s: A riot, during the winter of 1886-87, of unemployed dockworkers and laborers who rampaged and looted their way through Piccadilly and Mayfair before being dispersed; and the events of “Bloody Sunday” in November 1887, both widely believed to have been sparked by socialist agitators. “Bloody Sunday” occurred when troops were called out to disband thousands of unemployed workers who were camping out in Trafalgar Square and St. James’s Park in protest. Altogether four thousand constables, reinforced by grenadiers and mounted cavalry, were deployed to break up the mob, described by the conservative press as “a foul camp of vagrants” and “the scum of London.” A pitched battle ensued, and before the day was over hundreds were injured and more than three hundred arrested.

  25. To add to the confusion, when the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police moved to larger quarters on the Victoria Embankment in 1891, the new building became known as New Scotland Yard and the old site became Great Scotland Yard (originally named because it occupied the site of a palace maintained in medieval times for visiting Kings of Scotland).

  It did not end there. Approximately one hundred years later, police headquarters was to be moved yet again, this time to a modern glass office block at Broadway and Victoria Street. It is known as the “new” New Scotland Yard.