Annie and the Ripper

by Tim Champlin

  Annie clutched the medallion in her hand, feeling its warmth. It had been worth it, after all, she decided, yet again. Abusers and killers had to be stopped. This was a flawed world, and it was up to people like her, Inspector Abberline and all law enforcement officers to keep some semblance of order.

  She returned the medal and the letter to the chest, closed it and turned the key in the lock. The matter was over and done with. Today was the first day of Spring, and it was time to turn her attention to the upcoming season with the Wild West Show. Time to let go of the past. Bill Cody had fired Lillian Smith, the chunky teenage sharpshooter from California. This eliminated the bone of contention that nearly caused Annie and Frank to quit the show. This year of 1889 was going to be bigger and better. Bill Cody and Nate Salsbury had planned a grand European tour that included, not only England again, but also France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy. It would be a very full season.

  She went into the kitchen to fire up the cookstove and brew a pot of coffee before Frank got up. They would sell this house and she could be rid of her aggravating domestic chores, including the necessity of hiring and firing cooks and housekeepers.

  She and Frank would be on the road again, and she could hardly wait.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Midlands

  June, 1905

  "Blimey, Ned, we can't be giving up our meal ticket!"

  Tall, lean Ned Ashworth put an arm around his partner, Terry Collins, and walked him away from the tent where the body of Jack the Ripper was on display. "There comes a time, Terrence, m'boy, to let go and move on."

  "Move on to what?" Collins took off his soft cap and rubbed a hand across his bald pate. The fringe of hair circling his head was ruffed up, badly in need of a trim. He blinked in the bright sunlight. "Why didn't you ask me before you started talking about selling out? After all, we been partners, now, for twelve years."

  "Thirteen years, but that's not the issue," Ashworth said, removing a cigar stub from the corner of his mouth. "Look at it this way. It's been a good run, but our time is done. We need to get back to what we do best—stage acting and legerdemain. That's our natural calling."

  "But we have a new generation paying to look at the most famous criminal in English history. Why sell him?"

  "You haven't been paying attention to the details. Our receipts have slacked off the last six months, and even in the summer they haven't picked back up. We've displayed the body all over England, Wales and Scotland. Everybody who has any interest in seeing him has already come and paid and gawked—many of them more than once. We've used up the market. The younger folk don't care anythin' about history, and The Ripper is definitely history now."

  "But he has a few good years left, Collins persisted. "At least one or two more seasons at the county fairs."

  "We've had to do some repairs to keep him from coming apart. All this travelin' has been 'ard on him," Ned said. He held up a hand as Collins started to object. "Figure it this way…how long would it take us to collect five hundred pounds on admission fees, not even deducting our travel expenses?"

  "Five hundred pounds…" Collins' Adams apple moved up and down. "Can't hardly say that figure without chokin'."

  "Yes, just think of it…all that cash in our 'ands at one time. Five 'undred crisp one pound notes," Ned Ashworth said.

  "Why does this bloke want to pay so much of an old, worn out corpse?" Collins sounded dubious.

  "I don't know and I don't care. It's a chance for us to make a lot of money and get out from under. Frankly, this body is beginnin' to get me down. I'm tired of draggin' 'im all over the countryside. Time for somebody else to take charge and assume ownership."

  "This Lord what's-his-name must have a scheme to make money off The Ripper."

  Ned Ashworth took a deep breath and squinted back toward the tent in the meadow where they would open for business in ten minutes. A small group of ten or twelve people waited outside the roped-off area. "After doin' m'best negotiations with Lord Thurston, I've come to the conclusion that he wants this body to add to his collection. He has the money and doesn't care what it costs. He's like an art collector who has to have a one-of-a-kind original painting in his collection, damn the expense. Those rich blokes are all alike—they have to have the best, the rarest, the only. If there were three dozen Jack the Rippers around, Lord Thurston wouldn't care anything about buying ours."

  "Just what kind of collection does he have, anyway?" Collins asked.

  Ashworth glanced around the vacant field as if he might be overheard. "Just between you and me, it's very strange. He lives in that eight-hundred year old stone castle on the highest hill around. One of those old, gray places he inherited from ancestors away back. Has a reputation as a very odd duck. Never married, keeps to himself in that drafty old pile o'stones, takes part in some kind o'strange rituals, so the townsfolk say. Witches and demons—that sort o'thing. Now, it ain't my place to be passin' judgment on no man, mind you, but rumor has it he keeps a collection of skulls that once graced the gates of London town—Captain Kidd, Sir Thomas More, one or two of Henry the Eighth's wives what was beheaded, and who knows what other personages. And now he wants to add the actual, preserved, entire body, clothes and all—minus the brain o'course—of Jack the Ripper. Can't you just see it—him at a fancy masked ball with all his weird friends, standing around the alcohol tank, toasting Jack's health with goblets o'blood?"

  "Ha! Ned, your imagination is runnin' amok."

  "Well, my imagination has served us well all these years while we've managed to figure out ways to make the crowds pay to see us, to make them laugh and cry and gasp with astonishment and go away feelin' they got more than their shilling's worth."

  "I'll give you credit, Ned. You have that. So be it, then. Where and when does Lord Thurston want to close the bargain?"

  "He's waiting for us to send him word that we accept his offer. Then he'll be sending down a hearse drawn by six black horses and a mounted honor guard to collect Jack and escort him to his new home. Or, if the rumors are true, to his old home--Hell--in Thurston Castle."

  "Amen."

  EPILOGUE

  The real Frederick George Abberline retired in 1892 after 29 years of service. Apparently, the strain of the unsolved Ripper case had no negative impact on his health as he lived to be 86 years old, dying in December, 1929.

  Buffalo Bill Cody and his wife, Louisa, had a stormy relationship for years. She stayed at home when the show was on the road in the states or went overseas for months at a time. She was from a good family and enjoyed family life and a home. Cody enjoyed change and travel. She was very jealous of him, probably with good reason. A handsome, affable man who liked to drink and socialize, he attracted many good-looking younger women. There were rumors of infidelity. Lulu was given to throwing tantrums and broke up some costly hotel furniture in New York in 1898 when she thought he was entertaining another woman in his room. Unlike most modern marriages of movie stars, their marriage remained painfully intact until his death. In that era, divorce was not socially acceptable. A divorce could have hurt Cody's popularity and reputation. Yet, he finally did sue her for divorce in 1900, but the case was dismissed and Cody had to pay her court costs of $318. In spite of their public clashes they finally settled down in old age to put up with each other. Perhaps they even cared for each other. No one knows for sure.

  Photographs of Louisa, or Lulu as he called her, taken about the time of their marriage show her to be reasonably pretty. Photos of her later in middle age reveal a homely, dowdy matron. Although Bill Cody's hair grew white and began to thin, he always wore it long and carried himself with the air of a showman until his final days.

  Cody's open, generous nature, along with inattention to business and money, caused him to be in debt much of his life. The slow passage of time, the changing tastes of the public, the fading of the frontier and a new generation becoming attracted to the movies eventually led to the end of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. But in the 1
890s, it still played to packed arenas around the country. Two Pinkerton men traveled with the show in an effort to prevent pickpockets from working the crush of people who swarmed to get tickets. The frontier might have just passed into history, but millions of Americans wanted to see for themselves what it had been like. As the show rolled into the twentieth century, Cody's version of the wild west continued to draw thousands of spectators to every performance. Still the ultimate showman, a white haired Cody, mounted on his magnificent horse, led the grand parade into the arena each day, bowed and waved his hat to his fans as always. He was giving thousands of Americans their last glimpse of what the real wild west had been like--Indians, settlers, the Custer massacre, holdups of the Deadwood stage, the hunting of the buffalo herds, the skillful cowboys and sharpshooters. But, after several announced farewell tours, the show finally faded away in 1916. Sick and in debt, he tried to continue performing, working for another man to whom he owed money. He finally died of prostate cancer in January, 1917 and is buried on a Colorado mountaintop.

  In late October, 1901, a night train was rolling across North Carolina carrying most of the stock and personnel of Cody's Wild West Show to the season's last show dates in Virginia. At three in the morning, the locomotive plowed, head-on, into a freight train. Several stock cars in the forward part of the train were derailed and most of the horses killed. More fortunate were the humans who were in passenger coaches farther to the rear. Frank Butler was not injured and Annie Oakley was only bruised, although stories circulated that she'd been severely injured, and that her hair turned snow white within a few hours of the accident. It seems she was the one who fostered these stories. This turned out to be false, although by the following year her hair was fully white. There are conflicting stories as to the reason.

  Frank and Annie decided it was time to leave the show, and they retired. But they didn't slow down. A year after leaving the show, she acted in a play written for her, titled, The Western Girl. Although she had no experience as an actress, the show toured for about a year to mostly favorable reviews.

  But peaceful retirement was not to be. On August 11, 1903, a Hearst-owned Chicago newspaper broke the story that Annie Oakley had been caught stealing in order to get money to buy cocaine. According to the paper, Annie pled guilty and threw herself on the mercy of the court. The international star was destitute, dependent on drugs, and her striking beauty was gone, the reporter wrote. The erroneous story was picked up on the wire and spread all over the country.

  Annie was furious. An imposter, pretending to be Annie Oakley, had ruined Annie's good reputation she'd spent all her life building up. Determined to clear her name, she filed twenty-five lawsuits for libel, demanding damages of $25,000 each against twenty-five newspapers. At her own expense, she traveled back and forth across the country, appearing in court when the cases came to trial. In all, she wound up suing fifty-five newspapers who'd printed the story without checking its validity. She either won judgments or settled out of court in nearly every case.

  Stung by her actions, the wealthy and powerful William Randolph Hearst hired a detective to go to her hometown of Greenville, Ohio, to see if he could dig up any dirt on her--anything in her past that was detrimental to her reputation. He found nothing.

  She spent six years traveling and testifying in court about her life, refuting the false story. And she won. It's not known if she actually profited from this relentless campaign to restore her reputation, but money was not the important thing. It's generally thought that she and Frank wound up losing money after they deducted all the travel expenses and lawyers' fees. But, in the end, she was vindicated, publicly exonerated and applauded by nearly everyone, including some of the newspapers, who apologized.

  Annie and Frank were like rolling stones who couldn't settle down for long. They continued performing, now and then hooking up with a traveling show. For the remainder of their lives they hunted, vacationed in Florida in the winter, and she gave shooting lessons and clinics and exhibitions. Always willing to help the poor and less fortunate, she was active in charity work, giving many free exhibitions to raise money. About 1920, to the detriment of posterity, Annie had most of her gold medals melted down and the proceeds given to a tuberculosis sanitarium near Pinehurst, New Jersey.

  During the patriotic fervor of the Great War, she discussed with former president, Theodore Roosevelt, the idea of raising a volunteer regiment of women who were skilled with arms and willing to use them, if necessary, to defend the home front. Roosevelt was adamantly against a regiment of women. She did visit many army camps in the states to inspire the soldiers by giving shooting exhibitions to young men who weren't even born when she was performing at the peak of her fame. They knew this petite, white haired lady only as a legend from the past.

  While Annie was a staunch advocate of women carrying guns to protect themselves, she was not publicly in favor of women obtaining the right to vote. She continued to perform and even made $700 for a total of twenty-five minutes work at a shooting exhibition in 1922. She talked of making a comeback, but realized at age sixty-two it wasn't likely to happen. In November of that year she was riding in a car north of Daytona, Florida when the driver lost control and flipped over. Annie was pinned underneath with a fractured hip and right ankle. She spent several weeks in the hospital and for the rest of her life was required to wear a brace on her lower leg.

  In failing health, she was visited by Will Rogers in 1926. He wrote a newspaper column about her. As a result of this column, Annie received a thousand letters from people all over the country. Revered by the public to the end, Annie Oakley, a frail, white haired lady, passed away of pernicious anemia on November 3, 1926 at the age of 66. Her husband, Frank Butler, followed her in death only eighteen days later in Michigan. He was about 76. They are buried side by side in Darke County, Ohio.

  As for Jack the Ripper…who knows? His end could have been just as I described it.

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