The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  Certain idiosyncrasies of the writer are a peculiar clockwise arc on the tail of letters. A normal tail would be counterclockwise. Then there are the numerous ink blots which give the letter its messy appearance. Most of them start on the left-hand side of the letter, which suggests that the writer may have redipped his pen at the beginning of each line. This is not true of every line but it does suggest that a more experienced penman would have avoided these large refill blots. With other evidence they indicate that the writer was neither very skilful with the pen nor concerned with clarity and legibility, and that he was not concentrating on the manner of his writing.

  There are other indications of semi-literacy. The words ‘tother’ ‘prasarved’ and ‘Mishter’, the last two apparently phonetic misspellings, possibly indicate an English dialect. But since ‘knif’ and ‘whil’ are not phonetic misspellings the writer must have had enough education to know that the silent k and h were part of the words. More interesting is the word ‘women’ which should read ‘woman’ – unless of course he was referring to the double murder, and if so, did he mean to say ‘one of the women’? The layout of the letter suggests a copybook training but the omission of the date and the inclusion of the word ‘signed’ suggests that he did not learn his lessons well.

  Mann is highly critical of Harrison’s arguments for Stephen’s guilt – especially his ready acceptance of ‘thirty-four attested letters’ written by the murderer. This is a reference to Donald McCormick’s Dr Dutton, who had asserted that this number were in the same handwriting. Mann comments that nowhere do Dutton, McCormick or Harrison give any proof of the similarity of two letters, let alone thirty-four.

  Mann then makes his own detailed comparisons – twenty-six in all – between the Lusk letter and specimens of Stephen’s handwriting falling on either side of the 1888 date. The overwhelming evidence is that the two do not match; and if the author of the Lusk letter was indeed Jack the Ripper, then J. K. Stephen was not that man.

  The other name which frequently crops up in these theories is that of Sir William Gull, who first came to public notice in 1871 when he successfully treated the Prince of Wales for typhoid fever. Queen Victoria was so grateful for his ‘great services’ to the Crown that she rewarded him the following year by creating him Baronet and Physician Extraordinary to the Queen, in addition to his existing title of Physician in Ordinary to the Prince of Wales and to the Royal Family generally.

  Stowell says that Gull was seen more than once in Whitechapel on the night of a murder and suggests that he may have been there for the express purpose of certifying the murderer insane. Who saw him there, one asks? Stowell was quoting from Gull’s own papers, so are we to assume that the doctor was watching himself? And if ‘S’ was insane and Gull was treating him, why should the latter wait in Whitechapel to catch him when he could have done so much more easily and with far less fuss in his own consulting rooms? One can hardly believe that it was necessary to catch ‘S’ in the act of murder to prove his insanity.

  Stowell quotes a story about the medium R.J. Lees, a spiritualist who, according to Fred Archer in his book Ghost Detectives, used to hold seances for Queen Victoria. Apparently Lees had three visions of the coming murders. On the first occasion he claimed to have seen the murder committed. He described the murderer as wearing a dark tweed suit and a light-coloured overcoat, which he used to cover up his bloodstained shirt. Lees was apparently so shaken by this experience that he went abroad – only to bump into the murderer on his return while boarding a London omnibus at Shepherd’s Bush. His wife who was with him and who seems to have had a refreshing degree of scepticism only laughed at him when he pointed out the man as Jack the Ripper, as did also a policeman whom Lees tried to persuade to arrest the man. While they were arguing the man jumped into a cab and drove away.

  The police apparently took Lees’s story a little more seriously when, without knowing that they had received a letter threatening to clip the next victim’s ears off, he told them he had seen in another vision that the ears were mutilated. This apparently convinced them that his powers were genuine, and they took him seriously when he told them of a third vision, this time of Kelly’s death. They allegedly used him as a human bloodhound, after the body had been found, in an attempt to trace the murderer’s flight from Miller’s Court. He took them to a fashionable house in the West End belonging to a highly reputable physician. Under questioning, the doctor’s wife told them that her husband had ‘sudden manias for inflicting pain’. On one occasion she had caught him torturing the cat, and on another brutally beating their son. She had noticed that her husband’s absences from home coincided with the murders.

  The doctor, when questioned, admitted to sudden losses of memory. He had found bloodstains on his shirt and on another occasion scratches on his face which he could not account for. When his wardrobe was searched the tweed suit and light overcoat which Lees had seen in his first vision were found among his clothes. The doctor wanted to kill himself when he realized what he had done. Instead, a specially formed commission on lunacy found him to be insane and he was committed to an asylum where he died many years later.

  There are several variants of this story but the general outline is the same in each. Stowell went on to speculate as to whether the house that Lees had gone to was Gull’s at 74 Brook Street. His own variant of this story had been told to him by Gull’s daughter who said that her mother had been subjected at the time of the murders to a cross-examination by a medium and asked a lot of impertinent questions. Sir William Gull who came downstairs while she was being questioned admitted that he had had losses of memory since a slight stroke in 1887 and on one occasion had discovered blood on his shirt. Stowell speculated that all this might have been a deliberate attempt on Gull’s part to divert suspicion from Clarence, although one would have thought that this was carrying self-sacrifice a little too far, especially when there was every chance of the murders continuing.

  Medically, the slight stroke that Gull had in 1887 was the first attack of severe paralysis. Although he recovered from it, its effects were serious enough to prohibit him from further medical practice. Taken with the fact that he was seventy years old at this time, this is surely enough to cast doubts on the story of his roaming about Whitechapel trying to catch his patient. There is enough internal evidence in the story to show that the doctor referred to could not possibly have been Gull. According to Lees, the wife complained that she had caught her husband brutally beating their small son; Gull’s son was by this time a barrister, and so could hardly have been the child referred to. Finally, Gull did not die in a lunatic asylum. He died at home on 29 January 1890, after a third stroke which left him speechless.

  However, in spite of these doubts, Gull played an even more sinister role in the story told by Joseph Sickert who claimed to be the natural son of the Victorian artist Walter Sickert but whose real name was Gorman. This story had its first public airing when the Jack the Ripper crimes were investigated by television’s fictional detectives Barlow and Watt in the BBC television series, Jack the Ripper. This in turn became the springboard for Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.

  Unfortunately, it isn’t.

  Knight and Sickert collaborated on the book. They alleged that Walter Sickert was deeply implicated in the murders although they do try to soften the blow by saying that he was probably acting under duress. Knight goes so far as to suggest that his theory resolves the ambiguity of Stowell’s ‘S’ which, so he says, stands for ‘Sickert’. The fact that the details fit the artist even less than the prince pales into insignificance at the revelation that there was not one Jack the Ripper but three! The other two are supposedly Sir William Gull and a coachman, John Netley.

  The motive for the murders is the alleged marriage of the Duke of Clarence to a Roman Catholic. There is no proof that such a marriage took place nor has one been alleged until now. No matter, this does not stop Knight from alleging that Clarence was a regular visito
r to Sickert’s studio at 15 Cleveland Street nor that it was on these visits that he met and fell in love with Annie Elizabeth Crook who worked at a tobacconist’s shop near by.

  She became his mistress, so the story goes, and subsequently his wife. The affair supposedly had to be kept secret because with the amount of anti-Catholic feeling that then existed the announcement of such a marriage might have shaken the foundations of the throne itself. Sickert and Mary Kelly are supposed to have witnessed the marriage. A daughter, Alice Margaret, was born to the couple on 18 April 1885. Such a birth did occur, but whether Clarence was the father is impossible to prove; the father’s name was left blank on the birth certificate.

  The happiness of the couple was apparently short-lived. Again in the story, in April 1888 Clarence and Annie Crook were abducted from Cleveland Street by government officials. Sickert was returning to his studio and was an eyewitness to this. They were taken away in separate carriages and never saw each other again. Annie was detained for four months in Guy’s Hospital where she was operated upon by Sir William Gull who destroyed her memory in some devilish manner. She was never the same again. She spent the rest of her life drifting in and out of workhouses and other such institutions, and died in 1920.

  Meanwhile, reverting back to 1888, Mary Kelly, knowing that as an eyewitness to the marriage she might be in danger, was in hiding in the East End. There she fell in with Nichols, Chapman and Stride and with their help tried to blackmail the authorities into buying her silence. The plan misfired and Sir William Gull was charged with the extraordinary job of silencing them. His unlikely accomplices, so Knight alleges, were Queen Victoria, the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, the Freemasons, Sir Charles Warren, Sir Robert Anderson, Inspector Abberline and a host of minor walking-on parts. Have we left anyone out? I don’t think so. Even Oscar Wilde gets a mention.

  Using the same facts that were supplied to Simon Wood and myself by Alan Neate, the former Record Keeper of the Greater London Records Office, it is astonishing to see how selective Knight was with his material. The papers in question relate to the Crook family – Sarah, Annie and Alice. Seen in their proper context, a totally different picture of the family emerges. It is worth going into in detail as little of this material has been published before. Most surprising of all was the deletion from Knight’s story of Sarah Ann Crook, the mother of Annie and the grandmother of Alice. She doesn’t even get a mention and yet the greater part of the material supplied by Alan Neate relates to her.

  She was born on 31 August 1838, according to Poor Law entries, at 22 Great Marylebone Street. We don’t know her maiden name, only that her parents were born in Berwick-upon-Tweed. There was also a sister who was living at 8 Carlisle Street, Soho Square in 1895. Sarah was twenty-four when she had a daughter, Annie Elizabeth Crook. This child was not the rustic heroine of Knight’s imagination. He wrote: ‘She was of Scottish descent, and had wound her way to London from her country village in the Midlands, her rustic imagination brimming with visions of fortune in the big city.’ The fact is that Annie Crook was born in north London on 10 October 1862; her birthplace is given alternatively as St Marylebone Infirmary and St Pancras. Even had she been born in Berwick, she would not have been of Scottish descent, for Berwick has been the northernmost town of England since 1462, the last time it changed hands with the Scots. It is doubtful whether either mother or daughter ever strayed much beyond the adjacent districts of St Marylebone, St Pancras and Holborn. According to a Board of Guardians deposition dated 18 December 1913, Sarah was legally settled in the parish of St James Westminster, which is where she had lived at 18 Portland Street (now D’Arblay Street), Carnaby Street and elsewhere for about forty years, up to 1902. When this deposition was made Sarah was living in Tooting Bec Hospital.

  The surname Crook belonged to William Crook, whom Sarah is stated to have married (there is conflicting evidence) in 1863, a year after Annie’s birth. Whether the child was illegitimate, whether the child was his or someone else’s, we don’t know. Nor do we know if he was the father of Sarah’s second daughter, of whom we likewise know very little.

  William Crook is listed variously as being a cabinet-maker, piano-maker and french polisher. On 13 May 1882 husband and wife were destitute. They were given outdoor relief by the St Pancras Relieving Officer of meat and bread to the value of is. 5d. Their past addresses were 24 Francis Street for seven months, Howland Street, for three months, and others at Saville Street, St Marylebone, Hanson Street and Whitfield Street. Sarah suffered from epilepsy, and because of this an order was made to admit her to the workhouse; but someone has written across the Relieving Officer’s report, ‘Didn’t come’. Apart from the specific references to her destitution, the epilepsy, getting worse as she grew older, was the probable reason why she spent so much time without her husband in the workhouses and infirmaries. The same argument applies to Annie, who was also epileptic, until hemiplegia, paralysis of one side of the body, led to her continual confinement from 1903 onwards. The likelihood that the epilepsy was inherited is a more pragmatic explanation than Knight’s suggestion that it was induced by a brain operation performed by Sir William Gull.

  On 5 June 1891 Sarah’s fits and destitution were the cause of her being taken to the Relieving Officer by police. She earned money by working as a charlady, as did Annie, now aged eighteen. Sarah and William were then living at 16 Upper Rathbone Place. Six months later William was apparently living with Sarah’s second daughter, now Mrs Jackson, at 9 Phoenix Street and Sarah herself at 21 Great George Street. William died in the St Pancras Infirmary on 4 December 1891 aged sixty-one. Cause of death was given as ‘Prostatic obstruction, cystitis consecutive Bright’s disease’.

  On 12 October 1895 Sarah was admitted to the St Pancras Workhouse for causes given as hysteria and alcohol. A month later she was in the Poland Street Workhouse having been homeless for two nights. She was then fifty-seven. She gave previous addresses at 11 Pancras Street (now Capper Street), for three weeks, 23 Carnaby Street, for ten months, and Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street), Holborn, for six months.

  Annie Crook surfaces into this twilight world when her daughter Alice, Sarah’s granddaughter, was born on 18 April 1885. As we have seen, the space for the father’s name was left blank on the birth certificate. Knight’s argument is that the father was Clarence. However, far more questions are posed by the entry on Alice’s marriage certificate – she married in July 1918 when she was thirty-one – where her father’s name is given as ‘William Crook (deceased) – General labourer’. Two questions spring to mind immediately: was this done to conceal the stigma of her illegitimacy or was there an incestuous relationship between her mother and grandfather? Alternatively, if there was such a relationship, need it have been incestuous given that William Crook is said on one document not to have married Sarah until a year after Annie’s birth and so may not have been her father? Could this explain why he and Sarah were living at separate addresses when he died? Either way, the marriage certificate is a fatal blow to the Clarence theory.

  On 22 January 1889, just over two months after the Kelly murder, Annie and the four-year-old Alice were destitute and brought to the Endell Street Workhouse. Their last address was 9 Pitt Street (later renamed Scala Street), Tottenham Court Road. They left the next morning before the visit of the Assistant Relieving Officer. It’s worth noting as a rebuttal to Knight’s theory that there was no attempt at concealment nor was any attempt made to detain them although we are supposed to believe that at this particular moment they were being hunted down by Sir William Gull’s mad coachman John Netley.

  The birth certificate of Alice Crook in which the name and surname of her father is left blank

  The marriage certificate of Alice Crook in which William Crook is shown as her father

  In fairness to Knight it is worth adding that he suggested to Alan Neate that Annie may have used the surnames Maitland or Macklin, which points to concealment, but this was for the 156 days she was allegedly in
Guy’s Hospital after her abduction.

  One name that Annie definitely did use was Greenwood (or Greenaud, which is the other alternative given). On 8 December 1895 her mother Sarah was taken from Bow Street police station to Bear Yard Infirmary as she had had a series of epileptic seizures aggravated by drink. Her relatives were given as the sister living in Soho Square and Annie Crook or Greenwood living at 91 Wild House and then at 1 Stephen Street, Tottenham Court Road. She subsequently lived at 23 Carnaby Street using the same surname. This suggests either a marriage or a common-law relationship – almost certainly the latter, as she drops the surname two years later. On 19 May 1897 Sarah was taken to Charing Cross Hospital suffering from a scalp wound. She had been found by police on the Dials (presumably Seven Dials) and had probably injured herself through an epileptic or drunken fall. Annie’s address on this occasion is given as Mrs Greenwood, 91 Room, Sardinia Dwellings, Drury Lane. Ten days later, when Sarah is in the Poland Street Workhouse because she is homeless and cannot be moved because of sore feet, Annie’s address has been struck through, as has her surname Greenwood; in place of the address has been inserted, 25 Ward Westminster Union (the term Ward in this context meaning a district of the borough and not a hospital ward) and Crook substituted for Greenwood. Sarah had five days at the Poland Street Workhouse; a note on the form explains ‘Appl. sent to Cleveland Street a few weeks back, but took her own discharge, not liking the food.’