The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The last victim that was certainly the Ripper’s was unlike the others. She was young, just 24, and attractive. Her name was Mary Kelly and she only turned to prostitution occasionally to pay the rent. She was killed indoors and she also cried out.

  On the night of 9 November 1888, she was seen on the street soliciting a “well-dressed gentleman”. Sometime between 3.30 and 4 a.m., the woman sleeping in the room above Kelly’s heard Kelly scream: “Oh, murder.” In the morning, the rent man found her mutilated corpse.

  Being indoors and undisturbed, the Ripper had been able to spend more than an hour on his grisly task. Mary Kelly’s clothes were found neatly folded on a chair so it is thought that she took her “gentleman” back to her room and undressed herself ready for sex. It was then that he pulled out his knife. This time she had been facing him, saw the murder weapon and cried out. He slashed her throat, almost decapitating her, but blood splashed on his clothes, which were found burnt in the stove. Then he set about her corpse. Both breasts were cut off and placed on the table, along with her nose and flesh from her thighs and legs. Her left arm was severed and was left hanging by the flesh. Her forehead and legs had been stripped of flesh and her abdomen had been slashed open. She was three months pregnant at the time of the attack. Her intestines and liver had, once again, been removed and her hand was shoved into the gaping hole left. There was blood around the window where the Ripper was thought to have escaped, naked except for a long cloak and boots.

  Other murders followed that may have been the work of the Ripper. The headless corpse of Elizabeth Jackson, a prostitute working in the Chelsea area, was found floating in the Thames in June 1889. In July that year, Alice McKenzie, a prostitute in Whitechapel, was found with her throat cut from ear to ear and her sexual organs cut out. And street-walker Frances Cole, also known as “Carroty Nell” because of her flaming red hair, was found in Whitechapel with her throat cut and slashed around her abdomen. A policeman saw a man stooped over the body, but he ran away before the constable could get a good look at him.

  The description of the Ripper that has seized the public imagination comes from a friend of Mary Kelly’s who saw her with a man that night. He was five feet six inches tall, about 35, well-dressed with a gold watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket. Kelly was seen in conversation with him.

  “You will be all right for what I have told you,” he said.

  “All right my dear,” she replied, taking him by the arm. “Come along, you will be comfortable.”

  A few hours later a chestnut vendor saw a man matching that description, wearing a long cloak and silk hat with a thin moustache turned up at the end and carrying a black bag.

  “Have you heard there has been another murder?” he said.

  “I have,” the chestnut seller replied.

  “I know more of it than you do,” said the man as he walked away.

  There are a huge number of theories as to the identity of the Ripper. The police had 176 suspects at the time. The most popular is the mad Russian physician Dr Alexander Pedachenko who worked under an assumed name in an east London clinic that treated several of the victims. A document naming him as the Ripper was said to have been found in the basement of Rasputin’s house in St Petersburg after the mad monk’s assassination in 1916. However, some have pointed out that Rasputin’s house did not have a basement.

  A Dr Stanley is another popular suspect. He is said to have contracted syphilis from a Whitechapel prostitute and thus took vengeance on them all. He fled to Buenos Aires where he died in 1929, after confessing all to a student.

  V. Kosminski, a Polish Jew who lived in Whitechapel, threatened to slice up prostitutes. He went insane and died in an asylum. East European Jewish immigrants, who were unpopular in London at the time, were regularly blamed for the Ripper killings. It was said that the murders were ritual Jewish slaughters performed by a shochet, a butcher who kills animals according to Talmudic law. This theory was given some little credence by the confused message “The juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing” that was scrawled on a wall in Whitechapel after the murder of Catherine Eddowes. “Juwes”, the Masonic spelling of“Jews”, also gave rise to the theory that the murders had been some Masonic rite. The police commissioner Sir Charles Warren was himself a high-ranking Mason. He had the graffiti removed to prevent inflaming anti-Jewish feelings in the area, he said. Sir Charles Warren resigned after the murder of Mary Kelly, admitting his utter failure to solve the case.

  Another Polish immigrant, Severin Klosowich—alias George Chapman—was also suspected. He was a barber’s surgeon in Whitechapel and kept sharp knives for bloodletting and for the removal of warts and moles. He poisoned three of his mistresses and went to the gallows in 1903.

  Thomas Cutbush was arrested after the murder of Frances Cole for stabbing women in the buttocks. He died in an insane asylum.

  The insomniac G. Wentworth Bell Smith who lived at 27 Sun Street, off Finsbury Square, was a suspect. He railed against prostitutes, saying, “They should all be drowned.”

  Frederick Bailey Deeming confessed to the Ripper’s murders. He had killed his wife and children in England, then fled to Australia where he killed a second wife. He was about to kill a third when he was arrested. It is thought that his confession was an attempt to delay, if not evade, the gallows in Australia.

  Dr Thomas Neill Cream poisoned prostitutes in London and went on to murder more in the United States. He is said to have told his hangman “I am Jack…” as the trapdoor was opened.

  The police’s prime suspect was Montague John Druitt, an Oxford graduate from a once-wealthy family. After failing as a barrister, Druitt became a school teacher, but he was a homosexual and was dismissed for molesting a boy. He moved to Whitechapel where he was seen wandering the streets. In December 1888, his body was fished out of the Thames. There were stones in his pockets and it is thought he had drowned himself.

  Salvation Army founder William Booth’s secretary was also a suspect after saying “Carroty Nell will be the next to go” a few days before the slaying of Frances Cole. Alcoholic railway worker Thomas Salder was arrested after the murder of Alice McKenzie. He also knew Frances Cole, but was released due to lack of evidence.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed that the Ripper was a woman. His theory was that “Jill the Ripper” was a midwife who had gone mad after being sent to prison for performing illegal abortions.

  The spiritualist William Lees staged a séance for Queen Victoria to try and discover who the Ripper was. The results frightened him so much he fled to the Continent. The Ripper, he believed, was none other than the Queen’s personal physician Sir William Gull. Gull’s papers were examined by Dr Thomas Stowell. They named the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, commonly known as Prince Eddy, the grandson of Queen Victoria who died of syphilis before he could ascend to the throne, as the Ripper, Stowell says. Another suspect is James Kenneth Stephen, a homosexual lover of Prince Eddy. The two of them were frequent visitors to a homosexual club in Whitechapel.

  The painter Frank Miles, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, has also been named as the Ripper.

  But Ripperology constantly moves on. In 1976, Stephen Knight published Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution airing the theory that the Ripper murders were not the work of a single mad man, but rather an establishment conspiracy to cover up a morganatic marriage entered into by the demented heir to the throne Prince Eddy.

  In 1973, when Knight was working on a documentary about the Ripper murders for the BBC, a contact at Scotland Yard advised him to speak to a man named Sickert who knew about the secret marriage between Eddy and a poor Catholic girl, later divulging Sickert’s address and phone number.

  The man was Joseph Sickert, son of the famous painter Walter Sickert. Joseph briefly outlined a tale in which Prince Eddy, while slumming as a commoner under the aegis of the artist, met a girl named Annie Crook in a tobacconist’s shop in Cleveland Street. Annie soon
fell pregnant and she, Eddy and their daughter Alice were living quite happily in Cleveland Street until the Queen found out. She was furious. Not only was Annie a commoner, she was also a Catholic. Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, it was illegal for the monarch or the heir to the throne to marry a Catholic. And under the Royal Marriage Act 1772, royal children were prohibited from marriage without the specific consent of the monarch. Royalty was unpopular at the time and any scandal might risk revolution.

  Queen Victoria handed the matter over to her prime minister Lord Salisbury, who organized a raid on the couple’s Cleveland Street apartment. With the aide of the Queen’s physician Sir William Gull, Annie was committed to a lunatic asylum where attempts were made to erase her memory, eventually driving her insane.

  But Alice had escaped. When the raid had taken place, the child had been in the care of Mary Kelly, an orphan rescued from the poor house by Walter Sickert who was employed as Alice’s nanny. Forced back on her own devices, Mary left the child with nuns and returned the East End, where she fell into a life of drink and prostitution. However, in her cups, she often told her story and some of her fellow women of the night—notably Polly Nichols, Liz Stride and Annie Chapman—encouraged to her to pressure the government for hush money.

  Learning of the threat, Salisbury called on Gull once more and coachman John Netley, who had often ferried Eddy on his forays into the East End, to get rid of the troublesome women. They performed the Ripper murders and built up the image of Jack with letters and the symbols of Freemasonry. Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Robert Anderson was employed as look-out, Joseph Sickert said. As Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, he was also in the perfect position to cover up the crime and hamper any investigation.

  The women who knew the secret were duly despatched, along with Eddowes, whose murder, Sickert said, had been a mistake. She often went by the name of Mary Kelly and the conspirators thought that she was the woman they were looking for. When they discovered their mistake became known, they found the real Mary Kelly and killed her in a manner so gruesome that it would scare anyone else who had got a whiff of the scandal into silence. They had even organized a scapegoat in the person of poor barrister, Montague Druitt, who was chosen to take the blame and was, Sickert hinted, murdered for it.

  The daughter Alice grew up quietly in the convent and, by an odd twist of fate, later married Walter Sickert and gave birth to their son, Joseph. Sir William Gull died shortly after the murders, but there were rumours that he had been committed to an insane asylum. Annie Crook died insane in a workhouse in 1920. Netley was chased by an angry mob after he unsuccessfully tried to run over Alice with his cab shortly after the murders. He was believed to have been drowned in the Thames.

  Joseph said that his father Walter Sickert was tormented with guilt over the murders and, as a form of expiation, painted clues into several of his most famous paintings. Checking out the story, Knight found that a woman named Annie Crook lived at 22 Cleveland Street at that time and that she did give birth to an illegitimate daughter. This was also handy for the homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, centre of the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, in which the notorious bi-sexual Prince Eddy was thought to be implicated.

  However, before Stephen Knight had finished writing Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, he had fallen out with Joseph Sickert. This is partially because he rejected Sickert’s story that Sir Robert Anderson was the third man in the killings. Instead Knight insisted that Joseph Sickert’s own father, Walter Sickert, was the third man. Joseph Sickert was not unnaturally offended by this suggestion, withdrew his co-operation and held back part of the story. From what Joseph Sickert told him, Knight concluded that Sir William Gull was the evil genius behind the Ripper murders. Sickert later claimed he kept back the name of the ringleader because he did not want to bring shame on the culprit’s family. But as Knight’s story came into general currency Sickert found that his omission had rebounded on him. The shame was now being heaped on his family. He was particularly upset when the 1985 TV film Murder by Decree portrayed Prince Eddy as the heartless seducer of the naïve Annie Crook, who he intended to dump. Sickert was offended by this, believing that his grandparents had shared a great love. They had suffered enough in their lifetime, he thought. It did not seem fair to him that they should be slandered after their deaths and he resolved to reveal the vital details he had withheld.

  In doing so he confirmed everything that he had told Stephen Knight, though he continued to insist that Sir Robert Anderson, not Walter Sickert, had been the third man. But there were more men in the gang—maybe as many as 12. These included Lord Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, two of those who took the fall in the Cleveland Street Scandal.

  The reason Stephen Knight concluded that Walter Sickert, not Sir Robert Anderson, was the third man was because Sickert knew too much simply to have been a bystander. When he had told his son what he knew of the Ripper murders, he divulged details that only someone who had been there when the murders happened would have known. But Joseph Sickert had withheld the source of his father’s information. Walter Sickert had been told the inside story of the Ripper murders by Inspector Frederick George Abberline, the policeman in charge of the investigation. Abberline, in turn, had been told the story by one of the men involved—the heir to the throne Prince Eddy’s tutor J. K. Stephen, one of the favoured suspects of the lone-madman theory of the murders. Stephen, Sickert said, was one of the Ripper gang and part of the conspiracy. Abberline had written down what Stephen had told him in three diaries which he had given to Walter Sickert, who passed them on to his son. Both father and son regularly referred to the diaries to keep the details of the Ripper murders fresh in their minds.

  One of the reasons that Knight discounted Anderson as a member of the Ripper gang was that he had been out of the country at the time of the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. But Sickert maintained that Anderson’s role, as a detective, was able to collect and collate information on the whereabouts of Mary Kelly and the other blackmailers. The fact that Catherine Eddowes was not one of the blackmailers and was killed by mistake, because she had been unfortunate enough to use the pseudonym Mary Kelly, seems to confirm that whoever was in charge of tracking the women down had slipped up or was not available at the time.

  Sickert continued to maintain that Sir William Gull and John Netley were the men who actually performed the murders and mutilations. However, he later revealed that Gull had not begun his murderous campaign on his own initiative. He was acting on the orders of more prominent men. His orders came from his Masonic superiors in the Royal Alpha Lodge No 16. The chief conspirator, Sickert maintained, was none other than Lord Randolph Churchill, father of wartime leader Winston Churchill. Although the Freemasons deny Lord Randolph Churchill was ever a member, Sickert maintained that he was Magister Magistrorum—the master of masters. There are other indications that he was a mason, but had joined under the alias Spencer. Like his son, he often used the double-barrelled surname Spencer Churchill.

  Lord Randolph Churchill had a twisted reason to hate women. By 1888 he was already suffering from bouts of madness, caused by the tertiary syphilis that would kill him. He blamed his condition and the loss of his meteoric political career on the woman who had given him the disease. It seems that Sir William Gull, an expert on syphilis, was treating him. By 1886, because of his condition, Lord Randolph Churchill ceased having sex with his wife, the beautiful American Jenny Jerome. She began to take lovers. This left Lord Randolph Churchill alone and bitter. His condition left him reliant on drugs. Like his son, he was a big drinker. He was also audacious and brooked no opposition. He even defied the Prince of Wales, threatening to publish incriminating letters which would lose him the throne if the Prince did not back down in an affair involving Churchill’s brother Lord Blandford. The Prince of Wales did as Churchill demanded but refused to speak to him again for eight years. Lord Randolph Churchill believed that
he had been robbed of the chance to be prime minister and did anything he could to exercise power behind the scenes. He saw himself as a second Machiavelli and was known to be unscrupulous. He was certainly a man who could have cooked up the Ripper conspiracy and would have had the expertise to pull it off.

  Winston Churchill was a tireless defender of his father, whitewashing him in his biography Lord Randolph Churchill. As Home Secretary in 1910, Winston Churchill was in a perfect position to remove any evidence linking his father to the Ripper murders from the police files. When they were opened in 1988, the Ripper files were found to be far from complete. Soon after, Winston Churchill quit the Freemasons. There were other connections between Churchill and the conspiracy. Walter Sickert gave Winston Churchill painting lessons and Churchill had been induced into the masons by Lord Euston.

  Joseph Sickert maintained that J. K. Stephen was related to Annie Crook and may have introduced Eddy to her. Sickert also believed that Lord Randolph Churchill got carried away with the power the Ripper conspiracy gave him. After killing Mary Kelly and the other blackmailers, he intended to finish the job by killing Annie Crook, her daughter Alice and Prince Eddy himself. It was then that Stephen broke with the other conspirators and, breaking his Masonic oath, talked to Inspector Abberline. Like so many others involved in the conspiracy, Stephen died in a lunatic asylum. He starved himself to death after being told of Eddy’s death in 1892. Four days later, Abberline retired from the police force.