The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  DR BROWN: … The abdomen was all exposed; the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder; a piece of intestine was quite detached from the body and placed between the left arm and the body.

  MR CRAWFORD: By ‘placed’ do you mean put there by design?

  DR BROWN: Yes.

  MR CRAWFORD: Would that also apply to the intestines that were over the right shoulder?

  DR BROWN: Yes.

  A similar sort of thing had happened to Annie Chapman. Dr Phillips had said of the body in the back yard at Hanbury Street: ‘The intestines, severed from the mesenteric attachments had been lifted out of the body and placed on the shoulder of the corpse.’

  At the time several newspapers had said that the Yiddish spelling of Jewes was ‘Juwes’, but in The Times of 15 October Warren asked the newspaper to report that he had made inquiries about this very point, his attention having been drawn to the newspaper reports, and that the Yiddish equivalent was ‘Yidden’. The report concluded: ‘It has not been ascertained that there is any dialect or language in which the word “Jews” is spelt “Juwes”.’ However, there is a spelling which approximates to it so closely that one can’t help speculating that, had Police Constable Long taken a little more care in copying down the message, the investigation might have taken a slightly different turn. The spelling is the French word for Jews, the feminine form of which is ‘Juives’ (masculine ‘Juifs’). On the black fascia on which the message was written, it is possible that he didn’t see or else ignored the dot over the ‘i’; and in an italic hand the ‘i’ and ‘v’ when they are joined together could quite easily be mistaken for a ‘w’.

  When all is said and done there is only one letter which has real credibility and that is the letter addressed ‘From Hell’. The others may or may not have been written by the Ripper. It is unlikely that we shall ever know. Most writers have made the mistake, when they have been comparing specimens, of looking for similarities between such normal signatures as the suspects Druitt’s and J. K. Stephen’s and the Ripper letters. This is a mistaken approach, as was thoroughly proved at the trial of Peter Kürten, who in Düsseldorf fifty years later deliberately modelled himself on the Ripper even to the extent of writing to the newspapers. Under stress his handwriting became unrecognizable – so much so that he showed the ‘murderer’s’ letters to his wife, when they were published in facsimile in the newspapers, and although she looked at them carefully she saw no resemblance between them and her husband’s handwriting.

  In August 1968 a Canadian graphologist, C. M. Macleod, published in The Criminologist an article called ‘A “Ripper” Handwriting Analysis’. This was prompted by Professor Camps’s article ‘More About “Jack the Ripper”’ which had appeared in the February issue and which had reproduced in facsimile some of the letters. The specimens he chose for analysis were the letter addressed ‘From Hell’ and the one beginning ‘Old Boss you was rite …’

  In Macleod’s opinion, ‘they are the efforts of two persons having similar perversions but important personality differences. Both specimens reveal a propensity to cruelly perverted sexuality to a degree that even the most casual amateur graphologist could hardly mistake.’ The most obvious thing about both letters is their untidiness. The blotting and smearing suggest that the writers were addicted to drink or possibly drugs. Both were certainly sadists, as indicated by the ‘sharp angles and dagger strokes’ which ‘can only be produced by a violently jerky thrust of the hand, suggesting extreme tension finding a vent in anger’. Their ages would have been somewhere between twenty and forty-five, and both were probably ‘working class’. If he had had to pick one of them as being the real Jack the Ripper then he would go for the writer of the letter ‘From Hell’, who ‘shows tremendous drive in the vicious forward thrust of his overall writing, and great cunning in his covering-up of strokes; that is, the retracing of one stroke of a letter over another, rendering it illegible while appearing to clarify. While Sample 1 appears to be written better than Sample 2, it is in fact extremely difficult to decipher; whereas Sample 2, except for the atrocious spelling is fairly readable.’ Macleod continues:

  I would say that this writer was capable of conceiving any atrocity, and of carrying it out in an organised way. I would say he had enough brains and control to hold down some steady job which would give him a cover for his crimes. He has imagination, as revealed in the upper-zone flourishes. Those hooks on the t-bars, among other signs, indicate tenacity to achieve a goal.

  I could have looked for this killer among men such as cab-drivers, who had a legitimate excuse to be anywhere at any time. I should have sought a hail-fellow-well-met who liked to eat and drink; who might attract women of the class he preyed on by an overwhelming animal charm. I would say he was in fact a latent homosexual (suggested by lower-zone strokes returning on the wrong side of the letter) and passed as a ‘man’s man’; the roistering blade who made himself the life and soul of the pub and sneered at women as objects to be used and discarded. He would, of course, have had wits enough to stop short of explaining how he used them.

  6. Aftermath

  The following year, 1889, new fears began to spread that Jack the Ripper was not dead and that another wave of killings was about to start.

  On 17 July 1889 a woman was murdered in Whitechapel. In almost every respect the killing, in Castle Alley, was a Ripper event. Shortly before 1 a.m. Police Constable Walter Andrews met the duty sergeant on his nightly rounds and, after a few words of desultory greeting, continued his patrol. The sergeant had only gone about 150 yards when he heard Andrews blow his whistle for help. He ran back to see what was the matter and followed the constable as he ran up Castle Alley. Lying on the pavement, close to two vans, was the body of a woman. She was on her right side with her clothes half up to her waist. The constable pointed to the pool of blood under her head and said, ‘Another murder.’ He had already knelt down and felt the body which, in spite of a slight drizzle, was still warm.

  Close by was a man whom the constable had seen walking along the street with a plate in his hand innocently going for his supper. As he had been the only person in the street the constable had made him wait with him until he could prove his innocence, which he soon did. As soon as police reinforcements arrived they were sent immediately to the lodging and coffee houses to make searches.

  The top of the woman’s left thumb was missing, as was a tooth from the upper jaw. The dress was patched under the arms and sleeves and she had on odd stockings, one black and the other maroon. Her brown stuff skirt, kilted brown linsey petticoat, white chemise and apron, paisley shawl (which was still around her shoulders) and button boots were all old clothes. Her only possessions were a farthing and an old clay pipe, which were found under her body.

  The woman was soon identified as ‘Clay pipe’ Alice McKenzie. Not much was known about her. She had been living with a labourer, John McCormack, who for the past sixteen years had done casual work for Jewish tailors in Hanbury Street (where Annie Chapman had been murdered) and for other people in the neighbourhood. He had met McKenzie in Bishopsgate and they had been living together in lodging houses in the Whitechapel area for the past six or seven years and at 52 Gun Street for the past twelve months. According to the other lodgers they had lived comfortably together. Previously McKenzie had lived with a blind man. In spite of their intimacy McCormack could tell the police little else about her background except that she had said that she came from Peterborough and had sons who were living abroad.

  McCormack told the police that he had come home from work at about 4 p.m. on 16 July and had given McKenzie some money (one shilling and eight pence) before he went to sleep. When he woke up between 10 and 11 p.m. he found she had gone out. He did not see her again until he was taken to the mortuary to identify her body.

  McKenzie often went out at night but whether she was a prostitute or not is doubtful, although the police certainly regarded her as such. Like the other women, she dran
k heavily.

  Dr Bagster Phillips carried out the initial post-mortem but Robert Anderson, the head of CID, for some unknown reason wanted a second opinion and asked Dr Bond of the Great Western Railway to confirm the findings. On 18 July Bond went to the mortuary with Dr Phillips, who explained to him that the wounds on the throat had been so disturbed that any examination he might make would convey no definite information as to the injuries. He pointed out the original wounds, their character and direction, and Bond formed an opinion, as far as he was able to, that the cuts were made from left to right. He also thought, as far as he could make out, that the knife had been plunged deeply into the left side of the neck, behind the sternomastoid muscle, and brought out by an incision above the larynx on the same side. There appeared to have been two stabs in the throat. The knife had been carried forward into the wound, leaving just a small tongue of skin between the two stabs. (If this was a Ripper killing, then the murderer had changed his methods from the customary practice of severing the throat with two deep cuts.) There were several small superficial cuts on the throat but the two main thrusts were about two inches long and had been made by a knife which had been driven in from above, in a downward and forward motion.

  The weapon, Bond thought, was a sharp-pointed knife and he believed that the cuts had been made while the woman’s head was thrown back upon the ground. Phillips thought that the knife must have been a smaller one than any that had been used before. There were no bruises on her face and lips, nor on the back of her head, but there were two bruises high up on the chest which indicated that the killer had stabbed her with his right hand while he held her down with his left.

  On the right side of the abdomen and extending from the chest to below the level of the umbilicus there was a jagged incision made up of several cuts; these extended through the skin and subcutaneous fat. At the bottom of this cut there were seven or eight superficial scratches each about two inches long and lying parallel to each other. There was a small stab wound, one eighth of an inch deep, on the mons veneris.

  Death had been instantaneous from the stab wounds in the throat; the abdominal wounds had been inflicted afterwards. There was some disagreement as to whether the killer had been left- or right-handed. Dr Phillips thought that the bruises on the left side of the stomach had been caused by the murderer pressing down with his right hand while he used the knife with his left; Dr Bond thought that they indicated the exact opposite. Bond concluded:

  I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel murders, viz. sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully and resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation, each mutilation indicating sexual thoughts and a desire to mutilate the abdomen and sexual organs.

  I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.

  However, Dr Phillips disagreed with this conclusion. He did not believe that all the Whitechapel killings had been the work of one man. After long and careful deliberation he had arrived at this conclusion ‘on purely anatomical and professional grounds’. He stressed this point by emphasizing that he was not taking into consideration all the circumstantial evidence and the facts in favour of the one-man theory. He had ignored all evidence which he hadn’t had at first hand.

  As he had himself carried out or assisted in five out of the seven post-mortems under discussion (Chapman, Eddowes, Kelly, McKenzie and Coles) his evidence on this point must carry a lot of weight.

  Yet another murder, two months later, was thought to be the Ripper’s handiwork. Fortunately, it can be proved to be otherwise. At 5.20 a.m. on 10 September 1889, a patrolling policeman found the naked trunk of a female body in some railway arches in Pinchin Street, not far from Berner Street where Long Liz Stride had been murdered. The street was a lonely spot but was patrolled every half hour by the night duty constable.

  From the post-mortem report, the time of death fixed the murder as probably happening thirty-six hours before on the Sunday night, 8 September, which was the anniversary of Annie Chapman’s murder just one year before. If this was a Ripper killing, then the murderer had once more changed a now well-established technique.

  It would also mean that for the first time the murder had been committed in the murderer’s house.

  However, there was no evidence to show that death had been caused by cutting the throat; there was no mutilation of the body although there was dismemberment, no removal of organs or intestines; further, the murder had not been committed in the streets or in the victim’s house. There was none of the frenzied mutilation of the body, as there had been with Mary Kelly, and which might have been expected as the murder had happened indoors.

  There was a gash on the trunk but according to the doctor this had been done after death, probably to confuse the police and make them think that this was another Ripper killing. In fact, it looked as if the knife had slipped. The whole of the wound looked as though the murderer had intended to make a cut preparatory to the removal of the intestines but had then changed his mind.

  On medical grounds and the evidence of the modus operandi, any suggestion that this unidentified woman was a Ripper victim can be dismissed.

  7. Suspects

  The best known of all the Ripper documents are the legendary Macnaghten papers. These are not a large manuscript collection, as is often supposed, but a single document written by Sir Melville Macnaghten several years after he joined Scotland Yard as an assistant chief constable in 1889 and before he was appointed head of the CID in 1903. There are two versions of these notes. One forms part of the Ripper case papers which are deposited in the MEPOL (Metropolitan Police) papers in the National Archives (Kew). The other set of papers was in the possession of Lady Aberconway, Sir Melville Macnaghten’s daughter, who made them available to the writers Dan Farson in 1959 and to Tom Cullen in 1965. The former quoted from them in a television documentary which he made at the time, although only the initials of leading suspects were given. Tom Cullen was more fortunate, and could print the names in full; Farson was able to do the same thing eight years later when he published his own account of the same story.

  Yet although both sets of papers are supposed to emanate from the same source, there are very important differences between them.

  For example, Farson and Cullen quote Macnaghten as saying that the main suspect was:

  Mr M. J. DRUITT, a doctor of about 41 years of age and of fairly good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, and whose body was found floating in the Thames on 3rd December, i.e. seven weeks after the said murder. The body was said to have been in the water for a month, or more – on it was found a season ticket between Black heath and London. From private information I have little doubt but that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer; and it was alleged that he was sexually insane.

  Whereas the Scotland Yard version is:

  A Mr M. J. Druitt, said to be a doctor and of good family – who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, and whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31st December – or about seven weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

  Which, we have to ask ourselves, is the original?

  Some light was shed on this problem by Philip Loftus when he reviewed Farson’s book in the Guardian on 7 October 1972. His own interest in Druitt had started several years earlier, in fact in 1950 when he was staying with a friend, Gerald Melville Donner, who happened to be the grandson of Sir Melville Macnaghten. Donner owned a Jack the Ripper letter, which Loftus thought was a copy, written in red ink, framed and hanging on the wall.

  ‘Copy be damned,’ Donner said, ‘that’s the original.’ As proof that he owned some original documents he pulled out Sir Melville Macnaghten’s private notes which Loftus described as
being ‘in Sir Melville’s handwriting on official paper, rather untidy and in the nature of rough jottings’. Loftus thought that they mentioned three suspects: a Polish tanner or cobbler; a man who went around stabbing young girls in the bottom; and a 41-year-old doctor, Mr M. J. Druitt.

  Donner died in 1968 and the notes then seemed to have disappeared. Loftus wrote to his family inquiring of their where abouts, but the family told him that they did not know. He also wrote to Lady Aberconway, who was Donner’s aunt – Sir Melville had two daughters – asking her the same questions. She explained: ‘My elder sister, ten years older than myself, took all my father’s papers when my mother died – which is why Gerald has them: I have never seen them. But in my father’s book “Days of My Years” he talks of “Jack the Ripper” … that is all the information I can give.’

  The notes that were in the elder sister’s possession and which Farson and Cullen both quoted from, are typewritten copies. Farson says ‘she was kind enough to give me her father’s private notes which she had copied out soon after his death.’ Tom Cullen also told me, in conversation, that the notes he had seen were typewritten.

  So, in addition to the two existing sets of notes, whose where abouts are known, there must be added those untidy ‘rough jottings’ which disappeared after Donner’s death. This immediately prompts one to ask how many other papers have disappeared. As most of them have been in the possession of the police for over a hundred years one might imagine the answer to be ‘very few, if any’. Unfortunately this is not the case. But before anyone begins attributing sinister motives to the police for the destruction or disappearance of relevant papers, certain explanations must be made to put the problem in its proper perspective.