The opening sentence – that the police were greatly amused as they knew the details of Nideroest’s discovery – is clearly not true. If they had known them, why should the Moscow Ochrana have appealed for information about a man who had been brought to Moscow by a secret service agent and some months later had been caught there attempting to murder and mutilate a woman? The question can be put even more simply: why should the Tsarist secret police not only find, but even doubt the existence of, one of their own men when the secret police of the Revolutionary Government that overthrew them were able to do so and to say just how ‘amused’ their predecessors had been by the incident? The answer that immediately springs to mind is that the Revolutionary police were discrediting their predecessors as much as possible and that they were faking extra evidence. In fact, Le Queux was the perfect ‘fall-guy as well as propagandist for the new régime’.
The genuineness of the Rasputin papers is open to doubts on several counts. They were written in French which Rasputin, according to Prince Belloselski, ‘was certainly not fluent enough in … to dictate a narrative in that tongue. If he dictated this at all it must have been in Russian.’ Once the doubts have been raised they harden into near certainty that the papers were faked, particularly when A. T. Vassilyev, who was the Tsarist police chief, states in his book, The Ochrana, that Rasputin’s apartments were searched immediately after his death for compromising documents and that none were found. This is not to say that Le Queux did not receive any papers from the Kerensky government. Indeed, that he might have done so is confirmed by an independent source, C. W. Shepherd, whom Le Queux in his memoirs describes as editor of the Northern Newspaper Syndicate. ‘Shep’ ghosted three books for Le Queux and was highly amused when the publisher wrote to Le Queux after the receipt of one of these manuscripts, ‘I see the old hand has not lost its cunning.’ When I asked him if he had ever seen the Rasputin papers he told me that he had once had to make a flying visit to St Leonards or Hastings where Le Queux was then living (he could not recall the date) and while he was there, Le Queux had pointed out the Rasputin documents to him. He said: ‘I saw them in a terrific-sized envelope, sealed and plastered with signs and codes and all sorts of things.’ Unfortunately Le Queux never opened it in his presence.
The only reason for Le Queux to have been sent these papers was, as Prince Belloselski says, to help ‘show up the Czarist Government in the worst light. Indeed, the only object for Kerensky to pass these documents on to Le Queux would have been for propaganda purposes.’
Le Queux must have realized that he was being used in this way. Although he was a money-spinner he was also a lavish spender and had to spend much of his time abroad to avoid his creditors. He was constantly hard up and yet, with this new evidence in front of him, he nowhere refers to it in his biography of Rasputin but chooses to wait five years before appending it as a sort of footnote in his autobiography. His only explanation for his startling decision is the rather lame excuse that he had only recently discovered that a doctor called Pedachenko actually did live in Tver.
One doubts him, just as one doubts the genuineness of the Rasputin papers. So what the Russian sources eventually boil down to is a collection of papers that came into existence only after 1906 – eighteen years at least after the murders; and the source for them was a well-known liar: Nideroest had been publicly proved to be one on more than one occasion.
They have to be dismissed from the case.
The only point not so far discussed with respect to these sources, is what possible reason the Russian secret police had for sending Pedachenko to England to commit these murders. This was allegedly done to show up the defects in the English police system. This is such a preposterous argument, however, that it cannot be taken seriously. McCormick suggests, slightly more plausibly, that Pedachenko was being used as an agent provocateur to discredit the anarchists who were using England as a base for their attacks on the Tsarist regime. He claims that Nideroest was a counter-espionage agent and that this was his role when he helped his colleague, the anarchist leader Peter the Painter (Peter Piatkow) to escape from the house in Sidney Street which was done with the connivance of the English police. This is to suggest, quite preposterously, that the English police condoned the instigation of the Latvian anarchists’ jewel robbery that led to the murder of three of their colleagues – among the worst crimes in English police history – and then let the real architect of it escape and let two men die in the siege itself. The chief argument against this theory is that the anarchists and other aliens were not expelled to their own country, even when they were implicated in such plots. Of the Sidney Street gang, eight were tried for murder and, with one exception – and her sentence was quashed on appeal – all were acquitted. None of them was expelled and, in the case of the woman who was found guilty, the jury made a specific request to the judge that she should not be deported. To underline this point, one of those involved, the only one who was not an anarchist, was sent back to Russia in 1917 as the Bolshevik delegate from London; after the October revolution he became deputy head of the Cheka! It was British policy to tolerate these political refugees who included such names as Lenin, Litvinoff and, for a very short time in 1907 for a Bolshevik conclave, Stalin.
None of them was expelled as an undesirable and yet Nideroest was just that. This fact stands squarely in the way of McCormick’s theorizing: Nideroest was arrested in 1909 and expelled from the country in 1915.
British source. McCormick quotes an entry from Dr Dutton’s diary of 1924:
Another theory on the Ripper. This time by William Le Queux in Things I Know. It is a great pity that he did not follow up what is a useful clue. By failing to do so, and by taking the Rasputin MS at its face value, he has only made a fool of himself. Further examination might have shown that Pedachenko was Klosowski’s double. The fact that Pedachenko was a doctor at a Russian hospital is neither here nor there. What Le Queux should have found out was that Pedachenko worked as a barber-surgeon for a hairdresser named Delhaye in the Westmoreland Road, Walworth, in 1888.
McCormick found out that there was such a hairdresser as Dutton had described, but by itself this means little. He does not produce any evidence for Pedachenko’s existence. Dr Dutton’s source for his story was a Dr J. F. Williams, who told him that a Russian barber-surgeon named Pedachenko assisted him occasionally at St Saviour’s Infirmary on an unpaid basis. Dr Williams believed that Pedachenko worked as a barber-surgeon in various establishments in south London and that he ‘removed warts, treated skin diseases’ – which is exactly what a feldscher might be expected to do.
Dutton also quotes the private evidence, again uncorroborated, of Wolff Levisohn, who was one of the prosecution witnesses at Chapman’s trial. He had first met Chapman when he was working in High Street, Whitechapel, in 1888. At the time Levisohn knew Chapman as Ludwig Zagowski. They met from time to time up until 1890. At Chapman’s trial Levisohn made one of the most damaging, and so far unquoted, statements against the whole Chapman/Ripper theory. He said: ‘I talked to the accused about medicines, and he asked me if I could get him a certain medicine, but I said no, I did not want to get twelve years.’ What did he mean? From such a remark the only inference that can be drawn is that Chapman was asking him to get a poison of some sort. It could not have been drugs, as it was not then a criminal offence to use them. As this request was made before 1890 it is a strong argument in favour of Chapman’s having consistently stuck to the same method throughout his murderous career. It also makes one wonder whether he managed to get this substance from somewhere else and, if he did, who was his victim? Was there a murder of which we know nothing? Certainly such consistency of method is far more likely than the theory that he changed his nature from frenzied sadist with a knife to a cold, calculating poisoner.
Levisohn saw Chapman once again in 1894 or 1895, when the latter was working in Tottenham, and then lost sight of him until 1903, when he was tried. According to Dutton, however, Levisohn told
Abberline at the time of the Whitechapel murders that ‘he should look for a Russian who lived somewhere in Walworth, did a certain amount of illicit doctoring and attended barbers’ shops to cut out warts and moles.’ This tallies with Dr Williams’s story. There was apparently some resemblance between Pedachenko and Chapman, so much so that, according to Dutton, ‘Abberline for a long time thought that Pedachenko and Klosowski were one and the same person.’ This, the evidence suggests, they surely were. We do not know when Chapman asked Levisohn to get him some poison, but if it was early on in their relationship, and if Chapman was confident as well as careless enough (as the evidence throughout his trial showed that he was) to have done so, then this would have been sufficient for Levisohn to give his tip to Abberline. True, the name he gave Abberline was ‘Ludwig Zagowski’, but it is just possible that – being a traveller in hairdressers’ appliances – he had discovered that Chapman was working under an alias in the Walworth Road.
To sum up, the evidence from the British sources suggests that Pedachenko/Chapman was a single person and not two individuals as Dr Dutton maintains. Indeed the only person who tries to separate them is Dr Dutton. As McCormick says, ‘Dutton’s suggestion that “Klosowski” posed as his double, with the implication that the latter was Pedachenko, is not followed up by any explanation.’ What Dutton has done is to blur some of the Chapman evidence and relate it to the Nideroest story and to documents that did not come into existence until nearly twenty years after the murder and possibly even later. It is significant, surely, that the reference to Pedachenko was not entered in his diary until 1923, which was the year following Le Queux’s publication of Things I Know.
McCormick’s book is highly readable but almost worthless as a research tool. Unfortunately, since first published in 1959, the book has become increasingly discredited. Sources cannot be checked, dialogue has been invented and the facts cannot be trusted.
Neill Cream
Dr Neill Cream is another famous murderer who has been suggested as Jack the Ripper. His chequered career of arson, blackmail, abortion and murder was finally brought to an end in 1892 when he was found guilty of the murder of four London prostitutes, whom he had picked up in the boroughs of Walworth and Lambeth (which led to his being called the Lambeth Poisoner) and poisoned with strychnine. On the scaffold he is said to have exclaimed: ‘I am Jack the –’ just as the bolt was drawn. The hangman is said to have sworn that this was so. What makes the incident open to doubt is that among those who were present in their official capacity was the new Commissioner of the City of London Police, Sir Henry Smith, who boasted many years afterwards in his autobiography that nobody knew more about the Ripper case than he did. Smith, it will be remembered, had several times clashed with Warren on the latter’s handling of the case. The fact that Smith does not mention this incident is surely significant.
Far more damaging to Cream’s claims, however, is that from November 1881 to July 1891 he was serving a life sentence for murder in the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet in America.
Donald Bell suggested a new Cream/Ripper theory in his article entitled ‘Jack the Ripper – The Final Solution?’ which appeared in The Criminologist (Vol. 9, No. 33, 1974).
Bell points out that racketeering and corruption flourished in the Chicago of the 1880s and argues that Cream might have bribed his way out of prison, or escaped. In corroboration, a major handwriting expert, Derek Davis, asserts that Cream’s writing matches that in two of the Ripper letters.
Yet the evidence of the Governor of Illinois, the prosecuting attorney, contemporary newspapers, Cream’s relatives, and Cream himself proves that he was not released until 1891.
There is further evidence of his continued imprisonment in a petition sent by Cream’s solicitors to the Home Secretary while Cream was in Newgate Prison, shortly before his execution on 15 November 1892. This petition included a sworn affidavit from Thomas Davidson, an accountant-bookkeeper with Messrs John Ross & Co., Quebec. He stated:
That, as one of the executors under the will of the late William Cream, of Quebec, I found on the testator’s death [1887] his eldest son, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, a life prisoner in Joliet Prison, State of Illinois, USA, for complicity in murder. That being desirous of assuring myself as to his guilt or innocence I applied to the authorities connected with his trial and conviction for the evidence upon which such conviction was based and received such documentary evidence as convinced me of his innocence. That I then exerted every legitimate influence I could command to secure his liberation, and succeeded eventually in getting him released in the early part of the summer of 1891. That he came immediately to me in Quebec on being liberated, and that at my first interview with him I concluded he was unmistakably insane, and stated my conviction to his brother, Daniel Cream, in whose house he was stopping.
The other relevant affidavit was made by Jessie Cream, the sister-in-law in whose house Cream had stayed after his release. She said that Cream had been released from the Joliet Prison in Illinois on or about 29 July 1891. He had stayed with her family until he sailed for England in September 1891.
Besides these two affidavits, there are the facts that in December of 1890, Cream wrote from prison to Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, asking that someone be sent to see him and that on 12 June 1891, his life sentence was commuted to one of seventeen years, which, with time off for good behaviour, meant his release on 31 July 1891. The date of his pardon is confirmed by the Joliet Daily News of 13 June 1891.
Unless these facts are disproved – and Donald Bell does not disprove them – then suppositions about handwriting, similarity of appearance to Ripper suspects, and the multitude of other vague generalizations fall down and Cream is left a poisoner, which is what he was, and not Jack the Ripper.
There is a further theory, that he had a double and that they provided alibis for each other. Early in Cream’s career he was defended on a charge of bigamy by Sir Edward Marshall Hall who advised him to plead guilty. Cream refused to do so and protested that he had been in prison in Australia at the time of the offences. His description was sent to the prison in Sydney where he claimed to have been, and the prison confirmed that a man of that description had been in prison at the times in question. Cream was released but was recognized again by Marshall Hall when he was tried on the charges of murder many years later. Marshall Hall’s theory, according to his biographer Edward Marjoribanks in The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, was that ‘Neill Cream had a double in the underworld and they went by the same name and used each other’s terms of imprisonment as alibis for each other.’
This has led to the suggestion that while Cream was serving his life sentence in America, his double was committing the Whitechapel murders. As the double had given Cream an alibi for the bigamy charge, Cream subsequently tried to repay the debt by shouting those last, interrupted words from the scaffold.
Duke of Clarence, Stephen, Gull and Sickert
In 1970 Dr Thomas Stowell caused something of a public sensation when he published, in The Criminologist, his ‘A Solution’ to the Jack the Ripper mystery. His source material was apparently the private papers of Sir William Gull who had been Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. Throughout his article Stowell referred to the suspect only as ‘S’. However, he dropped enough clues to show that he was pointing a finger at HRH Prince Albert Victor (‘Eddy’), Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of the future King Edward VII. When asked to confirm or deny this interpretation, Stowell would do neither, apparently on the grounds that he did not want to embarrass the present Royal Family. Moreover, Stowell died within a few days of publishing his theory, and his notes were burned, unread by his distressed and mourning family.
It is hard to take Clarence seriously as a suspect. According to James Pope-Hennessy:
Even his nearest and dearest, who were naturally bent on making the best of poor Prince Eddy, could not bring themselves to use more positive terms. Prince Eddy was certainly dear and good, kind and
considerate. He was also backward and utterly listless. He was self-indulgent and not punctual. He had been given no proper education, and as a result he was interested in nothing. He was as heedless and as aimless as a gleaming gold-fish in a crystal bowl.
From childhood he had been handicapped by feeble health. At twenty-four years old he suffered from gout. He was attractive to women and preferred dissipation to work. Because of his long neck – ‘a neck like a swan’ was how the family described it – he was forced to wear excessively high starched collars which led to his nickname ‘Collars-and-cuffs’. In a letter to Clarence’s father the Prince of Wales, Viscount General Wolseley, who had found fame leading the failed attempt in 1885 to rescue General Gordon beleaguered in Khartoum and later became C-in-C of the army, maintained that Clarence disliked the army (which he joined after leaving university), was immature for his age and his brain and thinking powers were described as maturing slowly – which was qualified in the same letter by the addition: ‘some of our very best & ablest men have mentally matured with extreme slowness’. He was then twenty-seven years old, and died the following year.
Fortunately it was possible to verify from other sources that Stowell had indeed been referring to Clarence, as was generally supposed. He had discussed his theory at various times with other people, among them the author Colin Wilson, who had met him in 1960 when he was writing a series of articles for the London Evening Standard called ‘My Search for Jack the Ripper’. This research was to be the raw material for his masterly novel, Ritual in the Dark. Stowell invited Wilson to lunch and in the course of their conversation it became clear that he thought Wilson had reached the same conclusions as himself about the Ripper’s identity. In fact, the ‘clues’ in Wilson’s articles to which he attached so much significance were quotes from the newspapers of the time, which Stowell might easily have found out for himself. This illustration of the casualness of Stowell’s research goes some way to explaining the not infrequent errors which he makes – a casualness that might be attributed to his age, however, for he was already in his seventies. Wilson found him a friendly and likeable man and for a long time was under the impression that Stowell was a surgeon, which is how he had introduced himself, although Wilson wondered from the way that his hands were shaking as he cut his steak just how much longer he would be able to continue operating.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 22