The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  The following document, which is also reproduced for the first time, was written by Dr Thomas Bond, who carried out the post-mortems on both Alice McKenzie and Mary Kelly. Besides being a lecturer in Forensic Medicine and consulting surgeon to A division and to the Great Western Railway, he was also the author of several publications, including one on the ‘Diagnosis and Treatment or Primary Syphilis’.

  7 THE SANCTUARY

  WESTMINSTER ABBEY

  November 10thb’88

  Dear Sir,

  Whitechapel Murders

  I beg to report that I have read the notes of the four Whitechapel Murders viz-:

  1. Buck’s Row

  2. Hanbury Street

  3. Berners [sic] Street

  4. Mitre Square

  I have also made a Post Mortem Examination of the mutilated remains of a woman found yesterday in a small room in Dorset Street-:

  All five murders were no doubt committed by the same hand. In the first four the throats appear to have been cut from left to right, in the last case owing to the extensive mutilation it is impossible to say in what direction the fatal cut was made, but arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman’s head must have been lying.

  All the circumstances surrounding the murders lead me to form the opinion that the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was first cut.

  In the four murders of which I have seen the notes only, I cannot form a very definite opinion as to the time that had elapsed between the murder and the discovery of the body. In one case, that of Berners [sic] Street the discovery appears to have been immediately after the deed. In Buck’s Row, Hanbury St, and Mitre Square three or four hours only could have elapsed. In the Dorset Street case the body was lying on the bed at the time of my visit two o’clock quite naked and mutilated as in the annexed report. Rigor Mortis had set in but increased during the progress of the examination. From this it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty the exact time that had elapsed since death as the period varies from six to twelve hours before rigidity sets in. The body was comparatively cold at two o’clock and the remains of a recently taken meal were found in the stomach and scattered about over the intestines. It is therefore, pretty certain that the woman must have been dead about twelve hours and the partly digested food would indicate that death took place about three or four hours after food was taken, so one or two o’clock in the morning would be the probable time of the murder.

  In all the cases there appears to be no evidence of struggling and the attacks were probably so sudden and made in such a position that the women could neither resist nor cry out. In the Dorset St case the corner of the sheet to the right of the woman’s head was much cut and saturated with blood, indicating that the face may have been covered with the sheet at the time of the attack.

  In the first four cases the murderer must have attacked from the right side of the victim. In the Dorset Street case, he must have attacked from in front or from the left, as there would be no room for him between the wall and the part of the bed on which the woman was lying. Again the blood had flowed down on the right side of the woman and spurted on to the wall.

  The murderer would not necessarily be splashed or deluged with blood, but his hands and arms must have been covered and parts of his clothing must certainly have been smeared with blood.

  The mutilations in each case excepting the Berners [sic] Street one were all of the same character and showed clearly that in all the murders the object was mutilation.

  In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals.

  The instrument must have been a strong knife at least six inches long, very sharp, pointed at the top and about an inch in width. It may have been a clasp knife, a butchers knife or a surgeons knife, I think it was no doubt a straight knife.

  The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring. There is no evidence that he had an accomplice. He must in my opinion be a man subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually, that may be called Satyriasis. It is of course possible that the Homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that religious mania may have been the original disease but I do not think either hypothesis is likely. The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible.

  Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described, he would be solitary and eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he isn’t quite right in his mind at times. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear of trouble or notoriety, whereas if there were prospect of reward it might overcome their scruples.

  (This letter went to Robert Anderson, head of CID)

  These are the two major documents, and most of the arguments for or against the respective theories hinge on them to some extent. The suspects who are now to be discussed are the main contenders for the shroud of Jack the Ripper. They will not be the only ones. In such a popular game as Hunt the Ripper there will always be new contenders.

  They have included Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend George Francis ‘Frank’ Miles (theory unpublished); and Charlie the Ripper, a pasty-faced fish-gutter who could never make love (Reveille, 12 March 1976). The trouble with these and many other theories is that the so-called evidence is nothing of the sort. The standard of evidence that is offered is frequently such that if any of the ‘names’ were alive today they would win a fortune in libel actions. If one is asked: ‘Is the murderer among the following suspects?’, one can only try to be objective and say that, without a lot more new evidence, the answer must always be ‘Perhaps’. It can only remain conjecture. I have always had the feeling that on the Day of Judgement, when all things shall be known, when I and the other generations of ‘Ripperologists’ ask for Jack the Ripper to step forward and call out his true name, we shall turn and look with blank astonishment at one another as he does so and say ‘Who?’

  The Lodger

  The Bible-spouting lodger with a ‘down on whores’ is probably the most popular image of the Ripper. The factual basis for Mrs Belloc Lowndes’ fictional character ‘The Lodger’ began with the newspaper claims of Dr L. Forbes Winslow, who describes himself in his memoirs, Recollections of Forty Years, as a medical theorist and practical detective. His earliest theory, published in The Times after Annie Chapman’s death, was that the killer was a lunatic who had recently been released from an asylum or had escaped from one. He became so interested in the case that he soon found himself actively engaged in the hunt for the Ripper, pursuing clues and searching for facts to prove his deductions. ‘Day after day,’ he wrote, ‘and night after night I spent in the Whitechapel slums. The detectives knew me, the lodging-house keepers knew me, and at last the poor creatures of the street came to know me. In terror they rushed to me with every scrap of information which might to my mind be of value. To me the frightened women looked for hope. In my presence they felt reassured, and welcomed me to their dens and obeyed my commands eagerly, and found the bits of information I wanted.’

  It is not surprising that he subsequently went on to claim that it was he and not the detectives of Scotland Yard who had reasoned out an ‘accurate scientific mental picture of the Whitechapel murderer’. He actually claimed that
not only had he been able to prove beyond any doubt the identity of the murderer but also, by his revelations to the newspapers, he had also been able to stop the Ripper killings.

  Forbes Winslow soon abandoned his original theory of the escaped lunatic. He changed it to a more firmly held belief that the murders were committed by a homicidal lunatic who was goaded by a religious monomania and a warped sense of duty, and that it was his mission in life to exterminate this class of woman from the face of the earth. One of Winslow’s many suggestions was that the police should be replaced by warders from lunatic asylums, who would be stationed in Whitechapel to look for possible lunatics, since they were experienced in dealing with such persons while the police were not. Much to his annoyance, the only reply was the usual printed acknowledgement from the Commissioner.

  Pointing out that lunatics could be caught in their own traps if their ideas were humoured, he suggested that he might insert in the newspapers an advertisement reading: ‘A gentleman who is strongly opposed to the presence of fallen women in the streets of London would like to co-operate with someone with a view to their suppression.’ He then proposed to have half a dozen detectives waiting at the prearranged meeting place to seize and question everyone who replied to the advertisement.

  Forbes Winslow never doubted that if the police had acted on his suggestions they would have caught the Whitechapel killer. He was astonished that they did not appreciate their own incompetence and he was dismayed by their reluctance to allow others – himself – who were far more competent to handle the case, to take over the investigation.

  He was not the only one obsessed with his own theories. Among the amateur detectives prowling Whitechapel was a director of the Bank of England who disguised himself as a labourer and roamed the lodging houses clad in heavy boots, a fustian jacket and with a red handkerchief around his head and a pickaxe in his hand.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the following year, 1889, that Winslow was given the slender clues on which he built his shaky case. His theory rested on the initial acceptance that the Ripper had killed eight women, the earliest of his victims being an unknown woman who was allegedly murdered in Christmas week of 1887, and the last, Alice McKenzie, on 17 July 1889.

  He says that he was given the first clue on 30 August 1889 when a woman, with whom he was in communication, told him that she had been spoken to by a man in Worship Street. He had asked her to come down a court with him and had offered her £1 to do so. She had refused, but with some of her neighbours had followed him instead to a house in Finsbury out of which she had seen him coming some days before. Subsequently, after Alice McKenzie’s murder on 17 July, she had seen him washing his hands in the yard of the house. He was in his shirtsleeves at the time and had a peculiar look on his face. This was about 4 a.m. in the morning. The inference was that he was washing off bloodstains.

  The lodging-house keeper where the man had lived told Forbes Winslow that in April 1888 the man had rented a large bed-sitting room in his house. The man had said that he was in England on business and that he might stay there for a few months or perhaps even a year. The keeper and his wife noticed that each time he went out he wore a different suit of clothes, and would often change three or four times a day. He had eight or nine suits and the same number of hats. He used to stay out late and when he came home creep silently into the house. He had three pairs of rubber-soled shoes, one pair of which he always used to wear when he was going out. (Winslow subsequently showed a pair to a New York Herald reporter who tried them on: ‘Here are Jack the Ripper’s boots,’ said the doctor, taking a large pair of boots from under his table. ‘The tops of these boots are composed of ordinary cloth material, while the soles are made of indiarubber. The tops have great bloodstains on them.’)

  On 7 August, the night that Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times, the landlord was sitting up late with his sister waiting for his wife to return home from the country. About 4 a.m. their lodger crept into the house and told them that he had had his watch stolen in Bishopsgate. This turned out to be false. Next morning, when the maid went to make his bed she found a large bloodstain on the bedding. His shirt was found hanging up, with the cuffs recently washed. A few days later the lodger left, allegedly for Canada, but apparently in September he was seen getting into a tram car in London.

  He was thought by everyone who met him to be mad. He frequently expressed his disgust at the number of prostitutes in the streets and vented some of his spleen by scribbling fifty or sixty pages of foolscap with his own blend of religion, morality and ‘bitter hatred of dissolute women’. Sometimes he would read these diatribes to his landlord.

  As soon as Winslow was in possession of this information he knew instantly: ‘That’s the man!’ Had he constructed an imaginary man, he wrote, out of his experience ‘of insane people suffering from homicidal religious mania, his habits would have corresponded almost exactly with those told me by the lodging-house keeper’.

  At this point in the story, Winslow’s published account begins to diverge from his statement of 23 September 1889 to Chief Inspector Swanson and which is now filed away in the case papers in the National Archives at Kew.

  In his book Winslow says that once he was in full possession of these facts he told the police and suggested to them a plan to capture this lunatic on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral where he went every morning at 8 a.m. To his dismay the police would not co-operate. He finally warned them that, ‘unless they assisted me in the capture of Jack the Ripper on a certain Sunday morning, and if they allowed the mysterious red tape-ism and jealousy surrounding Scotland Yard to interfere’, he would publish his clue to the world. This is precisely what he was forced to do, he says, since, according to his memoirs, the police ignored his threats, and so he published his story in the New York Herald.

  When the story was picked up by the British newspapers Chief Inspector Swanson was sent from Scotland Yard to take a statement from him. It is from this document, which is now quoted for the first time, that the truth of Winslow’s story emerges.

  Winslow denied that the story was an accurate account of his interview with the reporter. In fact, it was a misrepresentation of the whole conversation. The original purpose of the reporter’s visit had not been to discuss Jack the Ripper but an autograph book that Winslow possessed. Gradually the reporter had got him into a discussion of the Whitechapel murders and Winslow had not objected to this line of questioning as he had understood that the conversation would not be published. In fact, he says that he was much surprised and annoyed to see it in print, especially as it so misrepresented what he had said. Frankly, it is hard to believe that Forbes Winslow was as naive as this.

  Chief Inspector Swanson forcibly pointed out that Winslow had not given any information to the police about any suspect bar one (the escaped lunatic), yet there was a statement in the newspapers saying that he had. Winslow denied any responsibility for this story. He had then produced a pair of Canadian felt galoshes and an old boot. The felt boots were moth-eaten and the slough of the moth worm remained on one of them. So much for the bloodstains.

  He then related the previous story together with a few additional particulars which he did not publish in his book. The entire story, he said, had been told to him on 8 August 1889 by Mr E. Callaghan of 20 Gainsborough Square, Victoria Park. In April 1888 Mr Callaghan and his wife had been living at 27 Sun Street, Finsbury Square, and they had let a room to a Mr G. Wentworth Bell Smith, whose business it was to raise money for the Toronto Trust Society. The details about the writing, the suits, hats, late hours and the stolen watch are much the same as before. The household regarded him as a lunatic because of his delusions about ‘Women of the Streets’, who he frequently declared should be drowned.

  His frequent complaint was that the prostitutes walked up and down the aisles of St Paul’s during morning service. His other delusions were about his wealth and great brain power. Frequently he would talk and moan to himself. He kept three loaded re
volvers in a chest of drawers in his room. If anyone knocked at his door he would stand with his back against this chest so that they were within easy reach. Because his lodger’s behaviour was so erratic, the landlord had given this information to the police only after he had left.

  He was described as about 5 ft. 10 ins. tall; he walked with his feet wide apart, and he was somewhat knock-kneed. His hair and complexion were dark, his moustache and beard so closely cut that he appeared to be merely in need of a shave; his teeth were probably false. He could speak several languages, was well dressed and told the household that he had done some wonderful surgical operations.

  This was the only information that Winslow had except for that relating to the woman who had been accosted by (apparently) the same man who carried the proverbial small black bag. All the withering scorn which he fires at the police in his book for their lack of action on his suggestions is only the mirror of his own incompetence. Certainly he was not the great detective he claimed to be. The only clues he possessed, and these are totally worthless, were given to him a year after the murders started. He did not even know the name of the woman who had seen the lodger washing in the yard (though in fairness he said that he could get the information from Mr Callaghan).

  Chief Inspector Swanson reported to his superiors that he was unable to find a record of any information having been given to the police by Callaghan. Any such would have been given after the Tabram murder on 7 August and before 31 August when the investigation was still in the hands of H division. Inspector Abberline had no record of any such information.

  Happily for Forbes Winslow, the police made none of this public when he published his book.

  M. J. Druitt

  Montague John Druitt’s parents had been married for three years when he was born on 15 August 1857, at Wimborne in Dorset. He was to be the second of their seven children. His mother, Anne Druitt, was twenty-seven years old, ten years younger than her husband, William, who was the town’s leading surgeon just as his father had been before him. Medicine seems to have been a Druitt family tradition – William’s brother Robert and his nephew Lionel were both doctors.