Here, then, are three chief defendants in the indictment which this series of murders opens against London. Ourselves, the great public of London, stand first in the dock, convicted by flagrant and horrible proof of indifference to the physical and moral degradation of our fellow-citizens; convicted of tolerating darkness, filth, crime, and obscenity as ordinary incidents of metropolitan life; standing aside with intellectual apathy, with pockets closely buttoned, and with minds intent on our own pleasures and businesses, and looking on indifferently at the work of the few devoted toilers who have done so much to redeem London from these horrible disgraces. It is for Londoners to respond to Mr. Barnett’s appeal for means with which to complete the rebuilding of his parish, and to annihilate the plague spots which still lurk in it. Nor need these contributions be altogether donations in the ordinary sense, since considerable experience has shown that large investments in work of this kind produce a fair and reasonable return for capital.
Next, our municipal authorities stand charged with indifference to the lighting, paving, and cleansing of their streets and courts, and with permitting the inhabitants to carry on a traffic prohibited by law, and one which it lies with them to suppress.
Lastly, the police need to be quickened by a higher sense of public morality, to be strengthened in number, and to be encouraged and commanded to a much stricter exercise of their ordinary duties as patrols. At present, night charges are rather discouraged; the opposite tendency ought henceforth to prevail. But this is a measure of repression which can only be effectual if it be accompanied and preceded by an unwearying and unstinting effort to remove the conditions under which criminal and degraded conditions arise. While earnestly hoping, therefore, that the secret of these assassinations may, as there is some reason to hope, be quickly unravelled, there remains the yet more ardent desire that the lessons taught by these horrors will be enduring, and will have a fruitful effect on the social well-being of the metropolis.
Blood Money to Whitechapel
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
While the exploits of Jack the Ripper have been regarded by most observers to be the labors of a single person who may be described as either insane or monstrous—possibly both—and a matter to be dealt with by the police and the rest of the justice system, others placed the blame on society as a whole. Numerous articles, essays, and letters to the press vehemently indicted an uncaring populace of the rich and middle class for the atrocities being committed in London’s East End.
Among the most eloquent was George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the Nobel Laureate playwright, novelist, essayist, and short story writer. As an ardent socialist, he was a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he wrote and orated about such of its primary causes as equal rights for women, the elimination of private ownership of land, and the abolition of the exploitation of the working class by the wealthy. As a Fabian, he was one of the founders of Great Britain’s Labour Party.
Shaw wrote about sixty plays, most of which focused on his political and social beliefs, attempting to make them more palatable to the general public by making them comedic, but his vast audiences disappointed him by enjoying them for their entertainment value, largely ignoring his polemics. His best-known play is Pygmalion (first performed in 1913), which was adapted for a motion picture in 1938, earning him an Oscar for his work on the screenplay. After his death, it found new life as the Broadway musical My Fair Lady (1956).
Though Shaw had little to say about Jack the Ripper himself, he used the murders to deliver his message about social injustice, addressed to the editor of The Star, even before the final horror was perpetrated.
“Blood Money to Whitechapel” was first published in the September 24, 1888, issue of The Star.
BLOOD MONEY TO WHITECHAPEL
George Bernard Shaw
Sir,— Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question? Less than a year ago the West End press, headed by the St. James’s Gazette, The Times, and the Saturday Review, were literally clamoring for the blood of the people—hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were starving—heaping insult and reckless calumny on those who interceded for the victims—applauding to the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which followed—behaving, in short, as the proprietary class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances, argument, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology, economics, and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers; collections of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house investigations into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and unanswerable, and all pointing the same way. The Saturday Review was still frankly for hanging the appellants; and The Times denounced them as “pests of society.” This was still the tone of the class Press as lately as the strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed. Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism. The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards, the Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be slow to draw it. “Humanity, political science, economics, and religion,” they will say, “are all rot; the one argument that touches your lady and gentleman is the knife.” That is so pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle with the party of Desperation and Death!
However, these things have to be faced. If the line to be taken is that suggested by the converted West End papers—if the people are still to yield up their wealth to the Clanricarde class, and get what they can back as charity through Lady Bountiful, then the policy for the people is plainly a policy of terror. Every gaol blown up, every window broken, every shop looted, every corpse found disembowelled, means another ten pound note for “ransom.” The riots of 1886 brought in £78,000 and a People’s Palace; it remains to be seen how much these murders may prove worth to the East End in panem et circenses. Indeed, if the habits of duchesses only admitted of their being decoyed into Whitechapel back-yards, a single experiment in slaughterhouse anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in a round half million and save the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people. Such is the stark-naked reality of these abominable bastard Utopias of genteel charity, in which the poor are first to be robbed and then pauperised by way of compensation, in order that the rich man may combine the idle luxury of the protected thief with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the pious philanthropist.
The proper way to recover the rents of London for the people of London is not by charity, which is one of the worst curses of poverty, but by the municipal rate collector, who will no doubt make it sufficiently clear to the monopolists of ground value that he is not merely taking round the hat, and that the State is ready to enforce his demand, if need be. And the money thus obtained must be used by the municipality as the capital of productive industries for the better employment of the poor. I submit that this is at least a less disgusting and immoral method of relieving the East End than the gust of bazaars and blood money which has suggested itself from the West End point of view. —Yours, &c.,
G. Bernard Shaw.
Who Was Jack the Ripper?
PETER UNDERWOOD
As the author of more than fifty books, almost all of which were dedicated to ghosts and psychic phenomena, and with more than seventy years’ experience investigating paranormal events, Peter Underwood (1923–2014) was named the “King of Ghost Hunters” by Oxfor
d’s Ghost Research Foundation.
An early interest for Underwood was Borley Rectory, described by the British press as “the most haunted house in England,” and he became the foremost expert on the subject, coming to the conclusion that, indeed, some of the paranormal phenomena were genuine. Having devoted much of his life to the study of apparently supernatural and psychic phenomena as a parapsychologist, he wrote (in No Common Task: The Autobiography of a Ghost-hunter, 1983) that he believed 98 percent of reports of ghosts and other unexplainable events were due to such natural causes as misinterpretation, hallucination, pranks (and, although he did not suggest it, alcohol); he was mainly interested in the 2 percent that gave every indication of being genuine.
In addition to his dozens of books about ghosts, Underwood wrote well-researched books on other subjects: Horror Man: The Fascinating Life and Work of Boris Karloff (1972), The Vampire’s Bedside Companion: The Amazing World of Vampires in Fact and Fiction (1975), and Death in Hollywood (1992).
“Who Was Jack the Ripper?” was first published in Jack the Ripper: One Hundred Years of Mystery by Peter Underwood (London, Blandford Press, 1987).
WHO WAS JACK THE RIPPER?
Peter Underwood
SUSPECTS NOS. 1, 2, AND 3
Who was Jack the Ripper? A good question and one that it may be possible to answer. But to do so it is necessary to look at all the serious contenders for that title, to look at the people who have reached the conclusions they have reached, and to see whether any of the theories is more likely or more probable than any of the others or whether there is a new suspect who fits the bill better than anyone.
The candidates are numerous and varied. First in the field and quite a strong candidate, still favoured by many people who have studied the murders, is the mad Russian Alexander Pedachenko. He was “the greatest and the boldest of all Russian criminal lunatics,” claimed William Le Queux, writing sixty-five years ago. In his book, Things I Know (1923), Le Queux claimed he had seen a manuscript written by Rasputin entitled Great Russian Criminals, which Le Queux had found in the cellars of Rasputin’s house. The manuscript was in French.
Here it was stated that Jack the Ripper was Pedachenko, who had worked in maternity hospitals in Russia and was known to have homicidal tendencies. Sent to England by Russia’s secret police with the original idea of exposing the weaknesses of the English police, he was said to have lived in Westmoreland Road, Walworth, and stalked Whitechapel by night. He was assisted in his evil schemes by a fellow Russian named Levitski and a seamstress named Winberg. Donald McCormick, one of the more serious and thorough Ripperologists, after exploring most of the plausible theories then under consideration, came down on the side of Dr. Pedachenko as the killer. On his return to Russia Pedachenko is said to have been caught in the act of murdering and mutilating a woman and was committed to a mental hospital where he died in 1908.
There are some difficulties in accepting some of the alleged evidence implicating Pedachenko since, as Colin Wilson has pointed out, Rasputin’s own daughter told him that her father could not speak a word of French and there was no basement or cellar in their house. However Prince Serge Belloselski corresponded with William Le Queux, who supplied the Prince with the original French version of part of the Rasputin manuscript, so something of the kind must have existed at some time. Furthermore, in another unpublished manuscript, coeval Dr. Thomas Dutton expounded his experiences over a period of sixty years (he has a lot to say about the alleged handwriting of Jack the Ripper which we shall examine in a later chapter), and Donald McCormick, in an entry in Dr. Dutton’s diary for 1924, found an interesting item.
Dutton refers to William Le Queux’s book, Things I Know, and his theory on the Ripper murders. He says further examination might have established that Pedachenko and Klosowski were doubles. Klosowski was a Pole who had some medical training and was at one time employed in a hairdressing establishment not far from the scene of the murders; he was later known to the police as George Chapman and he is said to have been seen at least once in suspicious circumstances by Inspector Abberline of Scotland Yard. When Chapman was arrested (for poisoning three women) Abberline remarked to the arresting officer that he “had caught the Ripper at last!” Some Ripperologists have suggested that Chapman was motivated by sadism but gave up his Ripper activities when it looked as though he was likely to be arrested and took to poisoning his victims. He was hanged in April, 1903. What Le Queux should also have found out was that Konovalov/Pedachenko worked as a barber-surgeon for a hairdresser named Delhaye in Westmoreland Road, Walworth, in 1888. Donald McCormick found an entry in the London Post Office Directory of 1889 listing a William Delhaye, hairdresser, of Westmoreland Road, Walworth.
Donald McCormick also publishes an item from a confidential Russian Secret Police bulletin which contains two unequivocal statements. It refers to “Konovalov, Vassily alias Pedachenko etc.,” and it states: “…wanted for the murder of a woman in the Montmartre district of Paris in 1886, for the murder of five women in the East Quarter of London in 1888 and again for the murder of a woman in Petrograd in 1891.” The item ends with the sentence: “Known to disguise himself as a woman on occasions and was arrested when in women’s clothes in Petrograd before his detention in the asylum where he died.”
McCormick ends his book, The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959), by pointing out that, disregarding the Russian evidence against Konovalov, there is considerable evidence against him from (according to Dr. Dutton’s diaries) a French doctor who says that a Russian surgeon named Konovalov was high on the list of suspects (the same man seems to have been seriously suspected of the murders by Sir Basil Thomson, one time Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police), and by the French police, following the murders in Paris in 1885–88, and also by Dr. J. F. Williams of St. Saviour’s Infirmary, who told Dr. Dutton that a Russian barber-surgeon assisted him occasionally at the Infirmary, and, finally, by the contemporaneous Dr. Thomas Dutton himself who compiled three handwritten volumes of Chronicles of Crime. Even more important, damning perhaps, is the fact that Konovalov/Pedachenko knew several of the accepted Ripper victims, including Annie Chapman, Mary Nichols, and Mary Kelly. Dr. Dutton confirmed with Dr. Williams that these, and possibly other Ripper victims, visited the clinic of St. Saviour’s.
When he wrote his book Donald McCormick felt, overwhelmingly, after his thorough and time-consuming researches into the Ripper murders, that “all the evidence points to the mysterious Russian doctor as the author of the terrible series of crimes.” At the end of 1986—nearly thirty years later—he told me he still believed that the author of the crimes was Dr. Pedachenko. Unfortunately I understand that Dr. Dutton’s notebooks have disappeared and Donald McCormick is unable to say what has happened to the lithographed copy of the Ochrana Gazette once shown to him by the late Prince Belloselski.
To my mind the evidence that someone such as Dr. Pedachenko committed the murders is quite strong. Certainly Inspector Abberline and his team of seven detectives on the case seem to have thought so at the time, evidenced by the walking stick presented to him at the conclusion of the enquiry with a carved head that may well be based on the suspect’s features. This stick is preserved at Bramshill Police Staff College in Hampshire and I am grateful to them for allowing me to examine it and photograph it.
—
Perhaps the most famous theory, first expounded by Leonard Matters in his book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper (1929), is that the multiple murderer of women in London’s East End was a mysterious “Dr. Stanley.”
Motive, apart from insanity—which may be a reason but is hardly a motive—has always been the difficulty in deciding who was Jack the Ripper. It is a motive that the police look for in cases of murder but in the Ripper murders of 1888 it was difficult to find one. Colin Wilson, among others, may well be right in assuming that sexual satisfaction, possibly achieved through the act of mutilation, was the motive and it is interesting to note that at none of the inquests was
there any mention of sexual assault. It is possible that the victims were forced or persuaded to perform an act of fellatio on the murderer (it was reported that both Mary Nichols and Annie Chapman had front teeth missing) but it is not known whether those performing the post-mortem examinations were looking for or found any traces of male semen in the mouths or upon the mutilated bodies of the victims. Of course at the time of the murders it is unlikely that such evidence would have been made public had it been found. In more recent multiple murders of women medical evidence in this respect has been forthcoming.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 13