There was, however, a break in the case. This time witnesses had seen a man with each of the victims, and the descriptions were almost identical. Seen with Stride was “a man, age 28, height five feet eight inches, dark complexion, small dark moustache, black diagonal coat, hard felt hat, collar and tie; respectable appearance.” Seen with Eddowes was a man age thirty, height five feet seven or eight inches, mustache fair, medium build, but he was not as formally dressed. Instead of a collar and tie he wore a reddish neckerchief under a loose jacket.
Other witnesses claimed they saw a well-dressed man carrying a “shiny black bag,” and decades later, in 1931, Robert Clifford Spicer claimed that, as a constable that night, he had arrested just such a man around 2 A.M. The man was sitting on a dustbin in an alley with a prostitute named Rosy who had two shillings in her hand. But at the local police station the inspector informed Spicer that his suspect was a highly respected doctor with an address in Brixton, and the man was released even though Spicer asked what a respectable physician was doing sitting on a dustbin with a prostitute in a dark alley.
Meanwhile, the taunting letters from Jack the Ripper had begun. To this day there is controversy over the authenticity of the letters, but one of them was accompanied by a gruesome bit of evidence in a cardboard box: a portion of a kidney. The letter said: “From Hell…. I send you half the kidne [sic] I took from one woman, preserved to you, tother piece I fried and ate it, it was very nice.”
The curator of the London Hospital Museum examined the organ and stated that it was a portion of the kidney of someone who drank alcohol heavily. “I should say it belonged to a woman aged about forty-five and had been removed from the body within the last two weeks.” The left kidney of Katherine Eddowes, a heavy drinker about forty-two years of age, had been taken away by the Ripper after her murder less than two weeks before.
The fifth and last murder by the Ripper showed some differences from the others. Mary Jane Kelly, the victim, was young and pretty, only twenty-five, whereas the other prostitutes were aged forty to forty-five. Secondly, she was the only one of the victims to be killed indoors, in her room, instead of in a dark alley. But, like the others, she was a prostitute and a known heavy drinker.
At 2 A.M. on November 30, 1888, George Hutchinson, a laborer, had no place to sleep. He saw a man standing at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, but paid little attention to him because pretty Mary Kelly was approaching. He had always fancied Mary, but never had the money to afford her. Now she asked to “borrow” sixpence, her way of soliciting, but Hutchinson had to admit he didn’t possess even this small sum.
Mary Kelly said that in that case she would have to look for money elsewhere, and walked across the street to the man on the corner. Jealous, Hutchinson looked more closely at the man and, as he told police later, his suspicions were immediately aroused because it was unusual to see so “well-dressed” a man in the East End.
If Hutchinson’s eyewitness account is accepted as truth, then his was the first real look at Jack the Ripper, because Kelly’s murder took place shortly after the man and the girl walked toward her house, watched by the jealous Hutchinson. In the earlier eyewitness accounts, the sightings of possible suspects were not closely linked in time or place to the killings.
The man, according to Hutchinson, was about five feet six inches in height, dark complected, with heavy eyebrows and a thick mustache which curled at the ends. He wore a soft felt hat, a long dark coat, a black tie fastened with a horseshoe tiepin, and spats over buttoned shoes. Hutchinson thought he looked like a foreigner. Ominously, the man carried in his left hand a thin parcel about eight inches long.
Pretty and saucy Mary Kelly was butchered more cruelly than any of the others. And this time another puzzling clue emerged. Kelly’s room contained a fireplace, and the grate was still warm when police arrived in the morning. Obviously a fire had burned in it late at night. In its ashes were a woman’s felt hat, a woman’s clothing, and a piece of burnt velvet.
Mary Kelly’s clothes were neatly stacked in a pile by the bed, so whose clothes had been burned? And why burn them unless they were bloodstained? Was it possible that Jack the Ripper was a woman and thus had been able to elude detection? And what class of woman would have anatomical knowledge? Midwives, police knew.
But another answer to the clue of the fire occurred to police. Doctors who examined Mary Kelly’s remains concluded that it would have taken the Ripper two to two and a half hours to accomplish his mutilation. In that time he needed light and a fire. Mary Kelly was too poor to own firewood, so the Ripper had used her other clothes to make a fire that would provide light and keep him warm while he concluded his grisly work.
Modern forensic science was in its infancy in the 1880s. Still, by examination of the wounds of all of the Ripper’s victims, police surgeons were able not only to describe the type of weapon, a long thin knife, but to narrow the field of suspects to someone who had a knowledge of surgical cutting as well as of the locations of anatomical organs. This, together with eyewitness descriptions of a “well-dressed” man, led police to discard the notion of a slaughterhouse worker or a butcher, and to begin searching among the better classes for a physician, or a layman with medical knowledge.
By coincidence, a play based on the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson had opened in London at this time and suggested the possibility that a “normal” man might also be a sadistic killer. But police apparently were loath to concede that the killer was a “normal” Englishman. Instead they focused their suspicions on a Pole named Severin Klosowski and a Russian named Alexander Pedachenko.
Severin Klosowski, the Pole, had been in his native country a feldscher, an assistant to a doctor. In London he was a barber’s assistant. Police pointed out that in Europe the local barber was the poor man’s doctor, often performing minor surgery. Thus Klosowski would have knowledge of surgical technique. Moreover, he physically resembled the description of eyewitnesses, even to the mustache curled at the ends. And he was known as a “ladies’ man,” drifting from woman to woman.
Klosowski was not arrested for the Ripper’s crimes. In 1890 he left for the United States with a wife and settled in Jersey City, where, very soon after, a Jack the Ripper–type murder occurred. Two years later he returned to England, using the name George Chapman. The police had lost track of him until it was learned that three of his wives, one after the other, had died suddenly, suffering from violent stomach cramps.
Whether or not he was Jack the Ripper, Chapman became a legend in forensic-science history, because it was at his trial that the first chemical analysis of poison by forensic scientists in England resulted in the conviction of a killer. The poison was antimony.
Scotland Yard was certain that Jack the Ripper and George Chapman were the same man, but many students of the case disagree. For one thing, Klosowski was only twenty-three at the time of the murders, not thirty or thirty-five. Also, his mode of crime was to marry a woman, take her money, then dispose of her quietly by poison, not mutilation.
To further confuse the issue, it was discovered that Klosowski had a “double” in London, a Russian who was also a barber-surgeon. The police never named the man, but an author, William Le Queux, a former British Secret Service agent, revealed the name Alexander Pedachenko. His source was, of all people, Rasputin, the fanatical monk who was so powerful in the court of the Tsar of Russia. Le Queux claimed that the Kerensky government in Russia gave him documents found in Rasputin’s house so that he could write an exposé of the friend of the deposed Tsar. Among them was a manuscript labeled “Great Russian Criminals” which said that Pedachenko, “the greatest and boldest of all Russian criminal lunatics, was encouraged to go to London and commit that series of atrocious crimes.” The motive, according to Rasputin, was to bring discredit on the Russian emigré revolutionaries who lived in the East End. And that, it was thought, might explain the chalked message about “the Juwes.”
Police
searching for Pedachenko went to a certain basement and there found Klosowski (before he left for America). The two men were remarkably similar in appearance and often used to assume each other’s identity. The coincidence of the two look-alikes was never explained, and Pedachenko eventually went back to Russia, according to Rasputin.
Or did he drown? For years police officials told many people, off the record, that Jack the Ripper was a Russian surgeon who had been found drowned in the Thames a month after the last killing. Nevertheless the official search continued, and the names of new suspects emerged, ranging from an American doctor to the Duke of Clarence, King Edward VII’s eldest son, who was allegedly insane.
A few years ago I journeyed to Wichita, Kansas, with other pathologists to speak at a seminar on Jack the Ripper organized by Bill Eckert, a forensic historian and head of INFORM, the clearinghouse for information on forensic subjects. We discussed what modern forensic science could have done to assist the police in their search for the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Fingerprinting, blood-typing, hair and fiber analysis, and many other modern procedures were not available to the surgeons who examined the victims in 1888. If they had been, there is no doubt in my mind that Jack the Ripper would have been caught. For example, the piece of Katherine Eddowes’ apron found in the doorway must have contained fingerprints. The Ripper had apparently used the cloth to wipe his bloodstained hands after the murder.
Secondly, some of the victims might have fought back before death, and caused scratches on their assailant’s face or neck. Often, tiny rolls of skin are found under a victim’s fingernails and can aid in the identification of a murderer. Further, if the assailant had somehow been cut, an analysis of the bloodstains in the area might have revealed his blood, and typing the blood could have narrowed the field of suspects. Also, the analysis of semen stains, if any, would have assisted in locating the killer.
As to speculations that the killer was a woman (“Jill the Ripper,” as one newspaper said), there are even blood analysis procedures which can distinguish female blood from male, although they are so new that the courts have not yet accepted them.
The surgeons in 1888 were able to describe Jack the Ripper’s knife, but nowadays we can actually reproduce the weapon’s blade by pouring a hot waxlike substance into the wound and waiting until it cools. London police could have taken such a replica to various shops which sold knives, and also could have compared it physically to surgical or slaughterhouse knives.
If the killer bit his victim, modern dental odontology could have recreated his teeth. And finally, of course, hair from the killer’s head, as well as fibers from his clothing, would almost certainly be found at the scene of such violent crimes, and they could have led to positive identification.
In Wichita we also discussed the strange phenomenon of so little blood at the scene of the butchery. The surgeons in 1888 believed that the killer clapped his hand over his victim’s mouth, then slit her throat. But the lack of blood indicates she was dead before the knifing began, so we believed she was strangled first, and then the mutilation began.
In 1992 the English government will at last open Scotland Yard’s files on Jack the Ripper, and we can expect a fresh surge of speculation on the case of the most famous criminal of all time. If those files contain original documents and evidence, forensic science may yet play a role in identifying the immortal Jack the Ripper.
THE RETURN OF THE RIPPER
Almost a century after Jack the Ripper terrorized London, a series of nearly identical murders occurred in England. Once again the victims were prostitutes in inner-city slums who were savagely mutilated and, just as in the 1890s, police received taunting letters from someone who signed his name “The Ripper.”
Because of television and other means of instant communication which swiftly, and graphically, circulated the news of the murders, the new Ripper’s deeds inspired even more widespread horror than Jack’s. And the public was right to be afraid, for this “Ripper” did not stop after five murders; he eventually killed thirteen young women in his murderous rampage.
The killing spree began on October 29, 1975, in Leeds, an industrial city in northern England. Chapeltown, an inner-city ghetto of Leeds with seedy bars and pubs, was the area in which Wilma McCann earned her living as a prostitute. Dressed in a pink blouse, blue bolero jacket and white slacks, McCann made the rounds of pubs that night and was intoxicated when she emerged from the last one, the Room At The Top, shortly before one o’clock.
The next morning a milkman spotted a body in the Prince Philip playing fields. Wilma McCann’s white slacks were down around her knees, and her brassiere had been moved up to expose her breasts. She had been stabbed in the lower abdomen and chest thirteen times, and her head had been crushed with hammer blows. Despite the sexual overtones of the crime scene, there was no evidence of sexual activity.
Less than three months later, on January 21, 1976, another prostitute, Emily Jackson, was found murdered in Leeds in an even more brutal manner. This time in addition to the crushed skull there were no fewer than fifty-two stab wounds, and the killer had thrust a piece of wood between her legs.
The murders of these two prostitutes received little press coverage, and no connection was made between the deaths. Indeed, they were almost forgotten, until on February 5, 1977, the killer struck again in Chapeltown, smashing Irene Richardson’s head with a hammer, and stabbing her so viciously that her intestines spilled out. Once again the clothing of the victim had been pushed around to reveal her sexual parts, although no evidence of sexual activity was found.
My friend and colleague Professor David Gee of Leeds University’s Department of Forensic Science was the man who first realized the connection between the killings. He performed the autopsies on all three victims and saw the forensic “signature” of a single killer: the identical modes of death, hammer blows plus stabbing of the chest and the lower abdomen, as well as the clothing moved to reveal sexual parts even though no rape had taken place. When Dr. Gee revealed his findings, the press dubbed the killer “the Yorkshire Ripper,” and a new legend in the annals of serial crime was created.
In April of that same year, there was another slaughter in Chapeltown, this time of a streetwalker named Jayne MacDonald, whose body, in addition to the usual wounds, had a broken bottle embedded in her chest. The public now demanded action, and police launched a massive manhunt. Hundreds of people were interrogated, prostitutes were cautioned, a mobile police post was established in Chapeltown, and plainclothesmen fanned out through the area at night.
Then the Ripper struck again. Maureen Long was intoxicated as she walked along Manningham Lane in Leeds at about 2 A.M. on July 9, 1977. A man in a car offered her a lift and she accepted. When she proposed sex for money, he agreed and took her to a waste ground on Randle Street near her home. Once she was out of the car, he struck her with a hammer and stabbed her in the stomach, the chest and the back. He rearranged her clothes, as usual, then left her for dead.
But Maureen Long didn’t die, and police finally had a witness who could describe the anonymous killer. Long told them that he was about thirty-seven years old, over six feet tall, and had long blond hair. Ironically, her description turned out to be far off the mark and impeded the investigation, as detectives overlooked potential suspects who did not fit it.
The Ripper had been fortunate, but then he made a second mistake. On October 9, 1977, in his next encounter with a prostitute, Jean Jordan, in Manchester, a city near Leeds, he gave her a five-pound note in advance, and forgot it after he murdered her. Later he realized that this note was newly minted and taken from his pay packet at his place of employment, so it might be traced. But once again fate seemed to smile on the Yorkshire Ripper. The body hidden in bushes had not been found after a week. Emboldened, he decided to return to the scene of the crime and retrieve the note. But when he did so, he found the body but not her purse, and left empty-handed.
Five days later when the
police discovered the body, they also found her handbag containing the five-pound note. Immediately they realized the significance of the banknote and started on its trail. The note could not be traced to one man, but it could narrow the field to employees of companies which had received a certain batch of currency from a subbranch of the Medford Bank in Shipley. Eventually the police interviewed eight thousand men, including the Ripper, but his wife assured the police that on the night of the murder he had been home in bed with her.
And so the killings went on. Helen Rytka, eighteen, was the next victim, and the Ripper, in a break with his custom, raped her before stabbing her to death. In doing so, he left evidence of semen. In the 1890s forensic science could have done nothing with such evidence. But in 1977 forensic scientists on the case, led by Dr. Gee, quickly analyzed the semen stains and discovered the Ripper’s blood type. It turned out to be Type B, which is found in only six percent of the population in Britain.
Furthermore, footprints in bloody areas near the bodies of his victims had been measured, so Dr. Gee knew the Ripper’s foot size. The wounds had been analyzed, enabling Dr. Gee to describe the weapons—a ball-peen hammer, knives and a Phillips screwdriver. And tire tracks had been found which could eventually identify his car. Gradually, forensic science was homing in on the killer—and then the murder of his next victim, Josephine Whittaker, left yet another critical forensic clue. Tiny metallic particles and machine oil were found in the wounds of Whittaker’s body. From this clue Dr. Gee knew that the Ripper worked around machinery.
But just at that time the case was sidetracked by a series of letters signed “Jack the Ripper,” and a tape recording. The letters were similar to those received by a puzzled police force ninety years before, as was the tape, which began, tauntingly, “I’m Jack. I see you are having no luck catching me.” Police not only took the letters and the tape seriously, they also played the tape on national television and radio. The voice on the tape had a peculiar accent associated with a small mining town called Wearside, and police told detectives to disregard all suspects without such an accent. Unfortunately, the tape was fraudulent.
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