The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  Ironically, within a few months it was evident that the murders had come to an end, and it was widely assumed that the Ripper was dead.

  5. From Hell

  At the peak of the murders, the police were being bombarded with an estimated one thousand letters per week. The Lord Mayor, bishops, spiritualists and the newspapers were similarly deluged. Few of them were of any genuine help. Many were from cranks. All of them had to be bundled up and passed on to the hard-pressed police, who had to sift through them and decide which were worth following up. Occasionally one gets more than a hint of the exasperation they felt at this correspondence. Scribbled across many of them in red ink now are such remarks as ‘Take no notice of this’, ‘The man must be a lunatic!’ and ‘Not acknowledged’. Letters were still coming in at such a rate the following July that the Yard was forced to go to the unusual length of having acknowledgement slips, headed ‘Whitechapel Murders’, printed. The newspapers suffered from the collective madness only slightly less. After The Star published a leader on the murders, it was inundated with letters and for several days it overflowed with correspondence on the question ‘Is Christianity a Failure?’ Two of the many letters not accepted for publication were signed respectively ‘J.C.’ and ‘Shendar Brwa’ – the latter being an anagram of Bernard Shaw. The Shavian wit is evident throughout the first letter, too, blasphemously signed ‘J.C.’ (Jesus Christ):

  Sir,

  Why do you try to put the Whitechapel murders on me? Sir Charles Warren is quite right not to catch the unfortunate murderer, whose conviction and punishment would be conducted on my father’s old lines of an eye for an eye, which I have always consistently repudiated. As to the eighteen centuries of what you call Christianity, I have nothing to do with it. It was invented by an aristocrat of the Roman set [St Paul], a university man whose epistles are the silliest middle class stuff on record. When I see my name mixed up with it in your excellent paper, I feel as if nails were going into me – and I know what the sensation is like better than you do. Trusting that you will excuse this intrusion on your valuable space.

  I am, Sir &c., J.C.

  Most readers could not grasp that the murders were being committed by an individual such as themselves. There had to be something extraordinary about such a man. One woman, writing ‘In confidence’ from the Isle of Wight, thought that he might be a large ape belonging to some wild beast show. Clearly she had been reading Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, for she continues, ‘This animal would be swift, cunning, noiseless and strong, standing over its work until a footstep was heard and then vaulting over a fence or wall, disappearing in a moment, hiding its weapon high up in a tree [in Whitechapel?] or other safe place, and returning home to lock itself up in its cage.’

  A 46-year-old widow, however, believed that respectable women such as she had nothing to fear from the Whitechapel murderer as she thought it was true that he ‘respects and protects respectable females’. His manners were none too gentlemanly, it seems, for she continued, ‘I feel certain it was him whom I saw one night in the Devonshire Street end of Cavendish Court on or about the 30th of August. Although conducting himself in a disgusting manner he allowed one to pass without a murmur.’ Piously she hopes that, ‘when in the agony of his own death he takes the last look for mercy, may the sigh of his soul be Jesus, sweet Jesus’.

  One popular theory was that the criminal had been ‘badly disfigured by disease – possibly had his privy member destroyed – and he is now revenging himself on the sex by these atrocities’. Somebody else, who had reached the same conclusion, thought that he might be ‘suffering from syphilis and is using the part cut off from the woman as a kind of poultice to suck off the virus from his ulcers. This is a vile superstition of the Chinese and Malays who commit this kind of crime for this very purpose.’ If true, it pointed to a man who had travelled in the China Seas.

  The alternative, which another correspondent suggested, was that he was a hill tribesman. ‘In the sanscrit mythology, particular reverence is paid to the male and female generative organs. I have been informed by old soldiers who had been admitted to the home life of the Hill Tribes, the very organs themselves, preserved are hung up as Amulets &c.’ Warming to his theme he asks, ‘Has a gang of these Hill tribes started to work? They would be scarcely distinguished from Europeans in a dimly lighted street. Murder for obtaining the female organ among them is a sacred action.’ The other possibility – too dreadful to contemplate – was that it might be a white man who had adopted their customs while on civil or military duties: ‘Sunstroke would then loose all civilized restraints on such matters.’ The same correspondent, in further conversations with this old soldier, had been told by him that it was quite common for the East Indian tribes to carry a concealed weapon with a fine point like a needle, dipped in poison, of which one prick in the vein would mean instantaneous death. A man armed with such a weapon could, while caressing a woman, deliver ‘the fatal prick on the spine or veins of the neck’, and she would fall to the pavement with very little noise. ‘The cutting of the throat diverts suspicion and complies with the savage ritual.’ He forwarded with his second letter thirty copies of his pamphlet ‘The Apocalypse Unveiled and a Fight with Death and Slander’, which was his own translation of the Book of Revelation into plain everyday speech; he didn’t guarantee the correctness of his explanations of the symbols but had simply thrown the pamphlet out as a challenge in order that a fuller understanding could be attempted.

  An English teacher who had been in Turin for the past twenty-two years thought that a follower of Buddha might be the killer – perhaps one of the Thugs, who were practised killers and ‘bound to offer human victims to their deity … The murders taking place at given periods in the month may be some indication as to the time such human sacrifices are offered – perhaps at different phases of the moon.’

  Dreams often suggested ways of tracking down the killer. A clergyman in Newmarket dreamed that the culprits were two men named Pat Murphy and Jim Slaney, and that they would walk past 22 Gresham Street in the City at 4.10 p.m. on Wednesday, 18 November. As he couldn’t leave Newmarket on that day, would the police kindly send a couple of detectives to watch for two young men? As proof that this wasn’t a hoax he had asked his churchwarden to countersign his letter, which was politely acknowledged, as was another from B. Barraclough of York who said that he had sent a telegram two days before that read: ‘Watch the house 20 Wurt Street, W.C.’ He explained why in the letter that followed. His children had been experimenting with the table to see if it would rap out a message, as it was supposed to do in a seance. It did, in fact, rap out, ‘More murders tonight in London’. In reply to further questioning it said that another woman would be killed by the same man, whose name and address were ‘Tom Totson, 20 Wurt Street, W.C.’ Furthermore, the spirit had told the sender to warn the police by telegram, which he had done, partly to relieve himself of the heavy responsibility lying on him and partly from a belief that there may be ‘more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’.

  Equally receptive to these unseen influences was Josiah E. Boys, late Private, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who wrote a warning to Sir James Fraser, the City Police Commissioner, that he had seen a message scrawled on one of the walls of a water closet in Guildhall and reading: ‘I am Jack the Ripper and Intend to do another murder at Adelphi Arches, at 2 a.m.’ Mr Boys thought that this warning might be a hoax but as the writer had added: ‘I will send the ears to Colonel Frazer’, he thought that he had better communicate these facts at once, as he thought there was striking similarity in the handwriting to the letters which had been published in the newspapers. The message, he concluded lamely, had been scrawled on the wall in lead pencil.

  The commonest suggestion of all was that the killer could be trapped by disguising policemen as women. These letters nearly all stress that the men must be clean shaven and armed with snaps (handcuffs) and revolvers. Richard Taylor, who gave his address as t
he Public Baths, Endell Street, Long Acre, asked for the following suggestion to be forwarded to the Vigilance Committee as he couldn’t find out their address:

  …in addition to the ordinary costume, I would suggest that a kind of corset of metal (ring mail would be most efficient) should enclose the trunk and that, as broad a band as possible of thin flexible steel be worn round the throat, this being light could be made with a suitable covering to represent an ordinary collar, and if a broad tapering piece were attached to that and bent up under the jaw, it would shield the throat from anything like serious injury. This collar would be further utilized as the terminal of a powerful storage battery, to be varied à la dress improver, the terminals could be on either side of the collar, or, assuming the victim is (as is most probably) grasped from the rear, a pair might be led up the headgear and discharged if grasped from that position. The shock would possibly so seriously disconcert the assassin, that it would be a comparatively easy matter to secure him.

  A gentleman in Cheshire, not quite so vicious, suggested that women should carry a piece of paper liberally pasted with bird lime which they could slap upon the Ripper’s rear shoulder or back and which he would not observe but which would identify him to the police. Precisely at what stage of the attack they were to get this out of their handbag he does not make plain. An extra precaution, wrote an ex-patriate Yorkshireman from Cleveland, Ohio, would be an alarm wire fixed to the pavement kerbs with electric warning buttons about thirty feet apart; these would lead to a shop or store, ‘where the police have got to warm themselves on winter nights’, where there would be a panel of alarm bells, each of which would indicate the street that they were connected to. Prostitutes would be additionally armed with revolvers so that, when attacked, they could keep the Ripper at bay and ring one of these bells for help. A policeman on horseback, so the same writer calculated, should be capable of galloping to any one of these points within half a minute. He stressed that on no account must the recipient (the Lord Mayor) let an Irish detective peep at his plan. It must be an Englishman. Should the police wish to make him an offer …

  A more practical suggestion was that there should be better street lighting and that the police, by means of their whistles, should develop a rapid warning system to alert colleagues on other beats.

  Of course, some of the letters were decidedly odd. The instructions in the following letter are so explicit that it is a reasonable assumption that the writer was himself some kind of fetishist. He asks for locks of hair from the last two victims to give to a friend of his who, so he says, by similar means had brought to justice persons who were guilty of cruelty to animals when there was no other evidence to convict them. (Did he use hair from these animals?) He instructs: ‘cut the hair with any human hand and send it to me … If the hair cannot be procured send on something belonging [to] the victims [that] they were wearing at the time and worn close to the skin.’

  A number of letters had quite hilarious origins. A telegram from Dublin warned ‘Arrest Palermo Nagro, Alias Wilmo, ht. 5 feet to 5 feet 9, as Whitechapel Murderer.’ It was signed ‘I. Fogarty, 47 North Strand Road’. The report which followed from the Dublin CID, who interviewed the sender, was that ‘Fogarty is and for some days past suffering from Delirium Tremens. He is aware that he sent a telegram to London, but respecting what he cannot say.’ Apparently his friends had telegraphed his wife in Cork to come and fetch him, which she did, but she had managed to get him only as far as Dublin when he gave her the slip. He got away for only a few minutes but this was long enough for him to send the telegram. He was horribly frightened when he was questioned about it and thought that he was going to be prosecuted for causing a public mischief. The officer charitably concluded: ‘There is no doubt that the fellow was mad when sending the telegram,’ and presumably recommended no further action.

  Some writers thought that the Ripper was a foreigner and that he should be kicked out of the country with other political refugees and into the sea. ‘If the government don’t act plucky … the City is doomed to destruction,’ said one. He added that the murders were committed from anti-police motives and that they were calculated to overthrow the Empire. He explained:

  A week or two ago I noticed a poster of The Star saying ‘War on Warren’. I have been daily looking for the outbreak in any form and I admit it is apparent [that] in the Horrors they thought [that] by demoralising the Police force [that] they would make government impossible [and] that Lord Salisbury would resign and Gladstone come in and the ruin of the Empire certain – and their distinguished object gained – A Republic – God Forbid.

  The safety of the public has depended very much upon the Salvation Army who have been going about the country, amongst the labouring classes especially making good citizens and antagonistic to the Socialists who hates them and would like to destroy them.

  Another writer took the opposite view. He thought that, because the victims were working class, the Ripper must be of the ‘upper or wealthy sort’ who think that the world and its inhabitants exist ‘for their pleasures – that of revenge being included – as a life business; without regard to any law but their own will’.

  Yet another thought that the Ripper might be one of the socialist pedagogues who nearly every day hoisted the red flag in Hyde Park. He had overheard one of them say, ‘Wait till we get a few murders done up here in the West End and then you’ll see what a howl there’ll be.’

  A number of the many suspects were named. They included the lunatic living in Fulham who used to recite and sing tragical stories, accompanying his gestures with an ivory-handled knife which he used to keep in a black shiny leather Gladstone bag; Herbert Freund, who used to create disturbances in St Paul’s Cathedral; the Germans who worked in the Sugar House in Hanbury Street (and seldom leaving it), who had come to England to avoid army conscription in their own country; Richard Mansfield, the star of a successful stage production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the writer accusing Mansfield had not been able to rest for a day and a night after seeing the performance, claiming that no man could disguise himself so well and that, since Mansfield worked himself up into such a frenzy on stage, he probably did the real life murders too); William Onion, who had been released from Colney Hatch lunatic asylum and who had ‘ginger whiskers’ and ‘a Crucked flatish nose’ with a faint scar, the result of being hit by a pepper box. One correspondent was positive that the Ripper could be identified by procuring Davidson’s Illustrated Comprehensive Bible. This, if it were to be opened at the Lord’s Supper, would show ‘a knife clearly visible, but who is the holder of that knife, I seem to think he will be found out. I may be saucy when I am irritated but I would shrink from those deeds. Yours respectfully John Legg Bagg Junior. P.S. I do not think it is my Father because I know he would not do it neither do I think he had been to London.’ Another anonymous correspondent signed himself ‘Richard Whittington the Second’. Another forwarded his suggestions on Home Office notepaper. A popular suspect was the watchman in Mitre Square; one writer said she had dreamt she had seen him peeping out of the warehouse door and laughing at the policemen as they turned the corner. A writer from Australia thought the murders were the work of Germans who skinned people and wore these second skins as disguises which they pasted on with American glue; their motives were that they were working in league with their men in the Colonial Office, and in time hoped to get the Crown of England, the Colonies and India and the New World. (The Commissioner, not surprisingly, scribbled across the letter: ‘This appears to be the work of a lunatic’.)

  There was no lack of volunteer detectives ready to help the police. Ladies offered to take the place of the prostitutes and were quite willing to be martyred for the sake of their country. A father of five daughters, four of them living with him, asked that, should his help be needed, advertisements be placed as follows in the Evening Standard :

  Nemo Come – I should then present myself in Old Jewry

  Nemo Go – I should then present myself at Scotlan
d Yard

  Nemo Remain – In this latter case I should present myself at Leman Street Station at 7 o’ clock in the evening of the day on which the advertisement appears.

  One of the Ripper’s hiding places, it was suggested, might have been an old vault in the Jews’ Cemetery. Alternatively, he could have escaped through the underground sewers which would account for his sudden disappearances; at the same time he could tear into shreds the dark woollen serge coat which he would have been wearing and scatter its bloodstained pieces underground. Other letter writers were obviously having a good laugh at the expense of the police, including Andy Handy who ‘saw A man go into Mr Barclay & Son he had A bag in his hand and it snap open and I saw two feet and A head of A human Person he had A large knife in his pocket’. Another prayed that God would show him the murderer. Apparently He did better than usual; He showed him the Ripper in his three disguises, one of them involving a black turban cap of Scotch pattern, which led the writer to conclude that the Ripper might be a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian, a soldier or a lord. A final bonus, granted to this same visionary, was the vision of an unknown woman who could be identified by her missing nose – and who was the missing link in the case (she was apparently the woman whom the Ripper had been searching for and now that he had killed her there would be no further killings). Of course, if the police have no faith and didn’t believe him …

  There were many suggested ways of trapping Jack. One nineteenth-century Emmett suggested that female dummies should be placed in the darkest and loneliest spots; their arms and legs would be powerful springs ‘capable of being released by moderate force, such as raising the chin or pressing the throat. Once released these springs would act like the arm of an “Octopus” and hold the person entrapped, while a sound resembling a police whistle might proceed from the machine.’