The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  * * *

  But he never emerged. There were no more ax attacks on any woman in Texas. It seemed that the Midnight Assassin, if there ever was such a man, had indeed moved on to conduct his attacks somewhere else. But where had he gone?

  In the first week of September, a story came over the news wires. In the lower-class Whitechapel district in the East End of London, 4,295 miles away from Austin, a man had come across what he believed was a dead animal lying in a poorly lit alley. When he had looked again, he realized he was looking at a woman’s body.

  She was cut up and drenched in blood.

  PART SIX

  SEPTEMBER 1888–AUGUST 1996

  “I would suggest that the same hand that committed the Whitechapel murders committed the Texas murders.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The dead woman’s name was Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, a London prostitute who made so little money that she often was seen begging for food and drink. She had been slashed twice in the throat with a knife, the wounds so deep that she was nearly decapitated. Her skirt had been pushed up to her waist and she had been stabbed as many as thirty-seven times in the abdomen, including twice in the genitals.

  Prostitutes had been killed before in London—a metropolis of 5.6 million—but this killing was so gruesome that it had attracted the attention of the press. According to the wire service story, the lead suspect was an unknown man who wandered through the district at night, coming out of the fog to extort money from the prostitutes and beating those who refused to give him what pennies they had. Although none of the women had been able to give a detailed description of the man, other than to say that he wore a leather apron, the police reassured the public that it would only be a matter of time before he was apprehended. Already, they said, they had a suspect they were looking for: a “Jewish immigrant” named Pizer who was a slipper maker by trade and who was known to walk the Whitechapel streets.

  It seemed like nothing more than a one-day story. But a Daily Statesman reporter who read the wire service dispatch immediately saw a connection—“a striking similarity,” he wrote for the newspaper’s September 5 edition—between “the murders across the water and the servant girl murders in Austin.” He noted that the Whitechapel and Austin murders had been “perpetrated in the same mysterious and impenetrable silence.” He also pointed out that the Whitechapel prostitutes had described the man who had attacked them as “a short, heavy-set personage,” which was the same description given by Irene Cross’s nephew regarding the man who had come into her quarters to murder her in August 1885.

  A few days later, on the morning of September 8, the severely mutilated body of another Whitechapel prostitute, Annie Chapman, was found in the back alley of a dilapidated lodging house less than a quarter-mile away from where Polly Nichols’s body was discovered. Chapman had a deep knife wound to her neck and more wounds to her abdomen. Her small intestines had been ripped out and thrown to the ground. Part of her uterus was missing.

  After Chapman’s murder, a letter purportedly from the killer signed “Jack the Ripper” was received by a London news agency. In the letter, which began “Dear Boss,” the writer stated that he was “down on whores” and wouldn’t “quit ripping them” until he was caught.

  The letter set off a panic in the East End. At night, according to one reporter, Whitechapel was “saturated” with police officers. Bloodhounds raced up and down the fog-enshrouded alleys. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, made up of a group of volunteer East End citizens, patrolled the streets, looking for suspicious characters.

  When it turned out that Fisk, the slipper maker, had a perfect alibi proving that he was not in the Whitechapel area the nights of Nichols’s and Chapman’s murders, dozens of new tips poured into the Metropolitan Police Service about who this Jack the Ripper could be. Among the suspects was a lunatic butcher, a “fanatical vivisectionist” (a person who injures living animals for scientific and medical research), a mad Polish hairdresser, and a couple of “Jewish paupers.”

  The police investigation, however, hit nothing but dead ends. On September 30, at 12:45 a.m., a third Whitechapel prostitute, Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride, was found dead, the victim of a single incision by a knife that severed the main artery on the left side of her neck. Less than an hour later, a fourth prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, was found in a corner of Whitechapel’s Mitre Square. Her throat had been cut, and her face, stomach, and pelvic areas slashed. Her intestines were missing, as was her left kidney and uterus.

  The London police investigated more suspects, including a Russian con man, an abortionist, and even the actor playing the dual role of Jekyll and Hyde in the stage version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, which was being performed that very month at London’s Lyceum Theatre. Back in Austin, the Daily Statesman was churning out more stories suggesting that Scotland Yard was looking for the wrong man. The murders of the Whitechapel prostitutes, the newspaper said, were almost certainly the work of the Midnight Assassin, who also committed two murders within the span of an hour. “The peculiar mutilation of the bodies, the silence in which they are slain—no out-cry—the impenetrable mystery that envelopes the assassin—all tend to make a case almost entirely similar to the series of Austin women murders,” the Daily Statesman concluded in one of its stories.

  Under such headlines as “America’s Whitechapel” and “Is the London Monster from Texas?” other American newspapers began pushing the London-Austin connection. The New York World weighed in, concluding that “it is by no means impossible that the perpetrator of the Austin murders and the Whitechapel fiend are one and the same … a man gratified at the gush of blood, the warm quiver of the flesh and the crunch of cold steel into the bones.” The Atlanta Constitution, the leading newspaper of the South, also argued that it was perfectly logical that “the man from Texas” would have moved to London:

  “The fact that he is no longer at work in Texas argues his presence somewhere else,” the Constitution explained. “His peculiar line of work was executed precisely in the same manner as is now going on in London. Why should he not be there? In these days of steam and cheap travel, distance is nothing. The man who would kill a dozen women in Texas would not mind the inconvenience of a trip across the water, and once there he would not have any scruples about killing more women.”

  The fact was that significant differences existed between the Austin and Whitechapel attacks. The victims in Texas had been slaughtered with axes, knives, steel rods, and bricks. Only a knife had been used on the Whitechapel women. What’s more, the Texas victims did not have their organs carried away. And there had been no letters written by anyone in Texas claiming credit for the murders or hinting at more attacks to come.

  Nevertheless, the idea that Jack the Ripper was a Texan made for sensational copy, and soon the newspapers in England were in on the frenzy. “A Texas Parallel!” cried the Woodford Times of Essex. “The monster has quitted Texas and come to London!” trumpeted the London Daily News, a newspaper that circulated around the country.

  No doubt because they didn’t want to have to face the possibility that one of their own would want to dismember prostitutes with such relish, many of England’s citizens eagerly embraced the idea that a less civilized American was doing the Whitechapel killings—someone who had grown up surrounded by what one London writer described as “more pernicious cultural influences.” It was especially easy to imagine that this American was, as one letter writer put it to London’s Daily Telegraph, “a Texas rough.”

  And surely, declared other letter writers, a sophisticated, self-controlled Englishman wouldn’t have written that “Dear Boss” letter. The letter’s crude grammar and syntax “most certainly” suggested “an American background.”

  Incredibly, even detectives for the London Metropolitan Police were intrigued by the Texas theory—so much so that they decided to hunt down “three persons calling themselves Cowboys” who had come to England in May 1887, more than a year e
arlier, as members of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. Cody had been asked to bring his show to England to perform at the American Exposition, a kind of trade fair designed to promote the United States’ latest industrial, mechanical, and agricultural advancements, and he and his entire cast—209 people in all, including the famous female sharpshooter Annie Oakley and 90 “real Indians”—had sailed from New York on the State of Nebraska steamship, along with 180 horses, 18 buffalo, 10 elk, 5 Texas steers, 4 donkeys, and 2 deer belowdecks.

  At Earl’s Court in the heart of London, Cody’s Wild West show had played to standing-room-only crowds—as many as 30,000 had come to each performance. One afternoon, Queen Victoria, who was celebrating her Golden Jubilee, arrived. It was reportedly the first time since her husband’s death a quarter of a century earlier that she had appeared in person at a public event. The queen was so impressed that she returned to watch a second show on the eve of her Jubilee Day festivities, this time with an assortment of Europe’s kings, princes, and princesses. At one point, the Prince of Wales and the kings of Denmark, Greece, Belgium, and Saxony had hopped aboard the Deadwood Stagecoach and, with Buffalo Bill in the driver’s seat, ridden around the arena.

  During their time in London, however, many of Cody’s men who played pistol-waving cowboys had developed rather rowdy reputations. One of the cowboys, Jack Ross, had been charged with “willfully” breaking a plate-glass window at a pub. Another, Richard Johnson, who was billed in the show as “the Giant Cowboy,” had been charged with assault at another pub after getting into a fight with two police constables, one of whom had to be hospitalized. Ross and Johnson had been released from jail and allowed to return to Cody’s company, which went on to perform in other English cities before heading back to the United States in May 1888. But for unknown reasons three other men who played cowboys had remained in England. Maybe, the police detectives surmised in October, one of those cowboys was not just rowdy but an utterly deranged Wild West killer. And maybe he had come from Austin, Texas.

  The detectives found the three men, subjected them to lengthy interrogations, and eventually released them after they “satisfactorily accounted for themselves.” The detectives learned that at least four Lakota Indians from the show had been inadvertently left behind in London and were still wandering the streets. One of them was Black Elk, who had fought at Little Big Horn as a young teenager and in Buffalo Bill’s show performed as an Indian chief—“reserved and dignified,” the show’s announcer called him. The London police were curious to find out if Black Elk had grown so angry over being left behind in London that he had allowed his savage side to take over.

  When Black Elk and his fellow Lakota tribesmen were found, however, they too “satisfactorily” accounted for their whereabouts on the dates of the Jack the Ripper murders. As an act of generosity, the English government transported the four Lakota tribesmen to yet another western show that was traveling through Europe—this one run by a promoter named Mexican Joe, who gladly hired them to be his token Indians until they earned enough money to pay for their trips back to their reservations in America, as far away from the civilized white world as possible.

  * * *

  At this point, London police detectives figured the “Texas parallel” had hit a dead end. But it hadn’t. One afternoon, a detective talked to an English sailor by the name of Dodge who said he recently had gone to have a drink at the Queen’s Music-Hall, a working-class pub. There he had encountered a man “of about 5 feet 7 inches in height, 130 pounds in weight, and apparently thirty-five years of age,” who was a native of Malaysia.

  According to Dodge, the Malay said he had been working as a cook on steamers that came in and out of English ports, and that he recently “had been robbed by a woman of bad character” in Whitechapel. The man had said that “unless he found the woman and recovered his money he would murder and mutilate every Whitechapel woman he met.”

  The story made the wire services and was cabled to America. One of the reporters at the Daily Statesman ripped the story off the telegraph machine and started reading. A Malaysian cook in London? Wasn’t there a Malaysian cook at the Pearl House named Maurice? A man who just after the Christmas Eve killings of Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips had suddenly decided to leave Austin, telling people he was headed for Galveston in hopes of finding a job on a steamer to take him to England?

  In the next day’s edition of the Daily Statesman, there was a long article under the headline, “A WONDERFUL COINCIDENT. Bloody Links Connecting Whitechapel with the Austin Assassinations. A Strange Story Graphically Told of the Crimes with a Malay Cook as the Central Figure.” The article reminded readers that “nothing was known” about Maurice’s past and that during his time in Austin, he “rarely had been seen about town.” It mentioned that “three of the most bloody and cruel of the Austin murders”—those of Eliza Shelley, Mary Ramey, and Susan Hancock—had occurred “three or four blocks away” from the boardinghouse where “this Malay is said to have slept.” For a few weeks, Maurice had been “kept under detective eyes, hoping that something definite would be found to warrant his arrest,” yet he had done nothing suspicious until he left Austin “during an unguarded moment.”

  An accompanying editorial stated that it was not just coincidence but “a strong possibility” that the Malay cook at the Pearl House and the London Malay cook on the steamer were “one and the same.” The editorialist also speculated that “this inhuman wretch, wandering demon and bloody fiend” could very well be a member of “the secret order of thugs, in the East, who worship Bhavani, the goddess of crime, whose business and occupation is murder, with the cord and the silent knife.”

  The Daily Statesman’s reports were quickly picked up by the wire services and cabled across the ocean. The London newspapers published a number of articles and letters from readers that concluded it made perfect sense that a Malaysian was behind both the Texas and Whitechapel murders. According to a couple of the articles, Malay men were bred to commit such vicious killings. One London writer actually concluded that the mutilations of the Whitechapel prostitutes were all done according to “peculiarly Eastern methods” designed “to express insult, hatred, and contempt.”

  Sir Charles Warren, chief of the Metropolitan Police, ordered his officers to begin “searching everywhere” for the Malay cook. But they couldn’t find him. Nor did any other witness come forward to say that he too had met a Malay who told a story about murdering prostitutes. Eventually, Sir Warren was forced to acknowledge that Dodge, the seaman, probably had invented the entire tale about a Malay killing Whitechapel prostitutes. “The Malay story cannot hold,” Warren told a newspaper reporter.

  * * *

  Yet even then, the idea of a Whitechapel-Texas connection continued to intrigue people around the world, even those who belonged to the highest circles of academia. On the evening of December 14, 1888, a little more than a month after one more Whitechapel prostitute, twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Kelly, was discovered eviscerated—her face had been cut, her throat severed down to the spine, and her abdomen emptied of almost all its organs—Dr. Charles Edward Spitzka, America’s most famous alienist, arrived at the Academy of Medicine on West 43rd Street, just across the street from Bryant Park, for the monthly meeting of the New York Society of Medical Jurisprudence, made up of a group of the city’s most esteemed lawyers and doctors. Although the society’s meetings were usually devoted to technical issues regarding medical testimony at criminal and civil trials, the title of this evening’s discussion was “The Whitechapel Murders: Their Medico-Legal and Historical Aspects.” Spitzka, the society’s vice president, had agreed to deliver a long speech laying out his theories about Jack the Ripper.

  Spitzka, who was thirty-six years old, was a brilliant doctor—“a man of tremendous intellectual heft,” another doctor had once said about him. Raised in New York City, he had gone overseas to study at the medical schools at the University of Leipzig and the University of Vienna, specializing in the
field of alienism, the study of people whose minds had become “alienated” from reality. When he returned to New York, he joined the city’s Post-Graduate Medical School as a professor of nervous and mental diseases. In 1881, he had been asked to conduct a lengthy examination of Charles Guiteau, the assassin who had shot President James Garfield, and he had made national headlines when he testified at Guiteau’s trial that he was a “moral monstrosity” who had been driven to kill for reasons beyond his mental control.

  In 1883, Spitzka had authored a textbook, Insanity, Its Classification, Diagnosis and Treatment, which was immediately hailed as the standard of psychiatric writing in that pre-Freudian era. In articles he penned for such high-flown medical journals as Alienist and Neurologist and the American Journal of Insanity, he had written that it was a grave mistake to believe that the criminally insane were nothing more than “idiots” or depraved half-human “beasts.” Even in the depths of their delusions, they possessed what Spitzka had described as a “reasoning mania.”

  That evening at the Academy of Medicine, Spitzka walked into the packed lecture hall carrying a sheaf of papers. His red hair was brushed straight back from his brow and his thick mustache ran across his entire face and intersected with long, triangular sideburns. Affixed to the bridge of his nose was a pince-nez.

  Spitzka started off with some general comments about other great mass murderers of ancient history. He mentioned the Roman emperor Tiberius, who according to myth killed children and kept their heads for relics, and he brought up the folk talk of Bluebeard, the fifteenth-century French nobleman who supposedly had murdered his many wives. He told the story of the Marquis de Sade, the aristocrat who tortured women in the late 1700s, and he summarized a few cases of men who found a “voluptuous exaltation” when they committed murder—among them a young Parisian named Louis Menesclou, “the lilac murderer,” who in 1880 had enticed a young girl with lilacs before cutting her into pieces.