She finds further evidence of Sickert’s so-called guilt in the series of paintings known as The Camden Town Murder. This was a commonplace murder in 1907 of a prostitute named Emily Dimmock. The woman’s throat had been cut, but there were no other mutilations, which did not stop the newspapers from making Ripper comparisons. There was a newspaper story some years later that Sickert – who had moved into the area two years earlier – had seen the body before its removal to the mortuary. Cornwell’s inference throughout is that he was the murderer and that he was back in business after a gap of nearly twenty years. Nowhere in her discussion of the case does she mention that a young artist named Robert Wood had been tried for the killing and acquitted.
The Murder series is a collection of paintings and drawings showing nude women, generally sprawling in different poses on beds, with a clothed man either standing or sitting close by. When they were exhibited one magazine described Sickert as an art anarchist ‘representing the extremes of revolutionary modernity’. The increasing commercial activity of the art world meant that the artist had to sell himself in order to market his pictures, he must be a ‘picturesque figure … or must have genius for self-advertisement before he can hope to be attractive to the public mind’. Sickert certainly knew about self-advertisement. He had been a professional actor before he was an artist. Contemporaries other than Osbert Sitwell have described how he liked dressing up as ‘a cook, a raffish dandy, a Seven Dials swell, a book-maker, a solicitor, or an artist even’. His role-playing as Jack the Ripper, his claim that he had lodged in the same room as the murderer (one of his paintings is called ‘Jack the Ripper’s bedroom’), even that he had pencilled the name of the murderer into a book which was subsequently lost, were ways of advertising the Murder works by association with the Ripper murders.
The splayed position of the nude in ‘L’affaire’ may contain visual references to the Ripper murders since Kelly and Eddowes were found in the same position with legs splayed and heads turned to one side. Judith Walkowitz has argued that there was a domestic re-enactment of the Ripper drama between husbands and wives. Magistrates received many applications with regard to threats used by husbands against wives, such as ‘I’ll White-chapel you’. It may be that it is this sick re-enactment during an argument about the rent that the works capture, which explains the lack of murders actually taking place in the pictures.
Cornwell tries to argue that the Camden paintings are further evidence that Sickert must have been Jack the Ripper, as only the murderer, apart from the investigators, would have known how the bodies had been left. Unfortunately descriptions had already been published in The Lancet, which Sickert, with his fascination for the subject, may have read or, as is much more likely, had seen in the book Vacher l’eventreur et les crimes sadiques which was published in France in 1899. Joseph Vacher was known as the French Ripper who confessed to the murder, mutilation and rape of eleven people. He was guillotined in 1898. The importance of this book is that the section on the Ripper murders published, for the very first time, the mortuary photographs of Eddowes and one of Kelly. As a regular visitor to France, and with his strong interest in the subject, almost certainly Sickert would have bought a copy of this book, which would explain the similarities of the poses, his ability to describe the mutilations and why, if he were the trophy hunter that Cornwell suggests, there are no paintings based on the Nichols, Chapman and Stride murders. That there are none is almost direct confirmation of the fact that the Murder paintings were based on the photographs in the Vacher book. It would also explain the dating of the paintings, which were done between 1907 and 1912. He links the Ripper murders to the Camden Town murder in order to sell them.
Cornwell is very selective in her evidence. One of her constant mantras is that she can’t prove that Sickert did the murders but then no one else can prove that he did not. This is an outrageous statement. It is up to her to prove that he was the Ripper and not for other people to prove that he was not. Richard Shone, in a lengthy review in the Spectator, showed that there was ample evidence for Sickert being away on holiday in France at the time of the murders; this was dismissed with a throw-away remark that he could have made a swift Channel crossing to return and commit them.
By the end of her book, Cornwell herself seems to weary of the chase. Much of her evidence degenerates into personal statements with no hard facts behind them. Nothing she says comes close to offering a solution.
James Maybrick
In March 1982 a man calling himself Michael Williams telephoned the literary agent Doreen Montgomery asking if she would care to see Jack the Ripper’s diary, which he was convinced was the real thing. The caller’s real name was Michael Barrett. The diary was a scrapbook, hardbound in black cloth, with seven bands of gold foil across the two-inch spine. The first forty-eight pages had been cut out, with seventeen blank pages at the end; in between were sixty-three handwritten pages of the ‘diary’. A small fragment of what was believed to be the torn edge of a photograph was lodged in the binding, which suggested that the cut out pages had had photographs mounted on them.
The writer was alleged to be a Liverpool businessman, James Maybrick, whose wife Florence was accused of murdering him with arsenic in 1889. She was convicted and sentenced to be hanged but was reprieved and the sentence commuted to penal servitude for life. She was released after serving fifteen years and died in America in 1941.
Everything about Shirley Harrison’s book The Diary of Jack the Ripper has proved controversial. Its origins have been muddied from the beginning. It was said to have been found under the floorboards of Battlecrease House, Maybrick’s home, when repairs were being carried out. Barrett would say that he had been given it by a drinking friend, Tony Devereux, later that he had forged it and later still that it had been forged by his wife, Anne. Two years later Anne Barrett, reverting to her maiden name of Graham after breaking up from Mike, would say that the diary had been a family hand-down from her father, and that, to preserve her anonymity, she had given it to Devereux to give to her husband whom she hoped would use it as the basis for a novel. She had done it in this way to stop her husband from pestering her family with questions. Her father would say that he had seen the diary in 1943 and was given it by his stepmother in 1950.
The book itself is genuinely old but whether late Victorian, or even Edwardian, is open to question. The major problem that has to be faced is: when did the ink go on the paper? Was the ink itself genuine? One of the experts hired to give a date to the diary’s composition discovered in the ink a synthetic dye called nigrosine which, he said in his report, had been in use only since the 1940s and that the ink did not date from 1889 but post-1945. Subsequent research, however, showed that the ink had been commercially patented in 1867 and was in general use by the 1870s. According to one specialist, although the diary had passed a range of tests, a modern forgery could not be ruled out as ‘someone just might have been able to synthesise a convincing ink or located a bottle of ink of sufficient age that was still usable (although these seem to be quite rare)’. A qualification that was made throughout these and subsequent tests on the diary was that further testing was essential to establish authenticity. Financial restraints, so its backers claimed, were a hindrance to the full testing needed.
According to Mike Barrett, he had bought the ink from the Bluecoat Chambers Art Shop, Liverpool. The owner suggested that it was possibly an ink supplied by Diamine, a Liverpool firm, which was almost identical to that used in Victorian times. Any expert would know that it was modern. Analysis of the diary’s ink showed that it contained chloroacetamide, a preservative first marketed in 1974.
More potentially damaging to the genuineness of the diary was the discovery of a ladies’ watch, an 18-carat gold Lancaster Verity hallmarked 1846, which had supposedly belonged to Maybrick, with the words ‘I am Jack J. Maybrick’ scratched across the centre together with the five Ripper victims’ initials about the edge. Such a convenient discovery at this time immediatel
y invited comparisons with the Ireland forgeries of the eighteenth century when William Ireland, to convince doubters of the genuineness of his Shakespeare manuscripts, immediately produced chair, candlestick and a host of other objects to vouch for their authenticity. Robert Smith, Shirley Harrison’s literary agent, thought that the signature on the watch was similar to Maybrick’s own signature. Writing one’s normal signature on the strip of a plastic credit card is difficult enough; to scratch a normal signature on the inside of a ladies’ watch plus a confession ‘I am Jack’ and the initials of the five victims is a feat worthy of admiration.
Dr Turgoose, at the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, using a scanning electron microscope to examine the inside of the watch, thought that the engravings might date back ten years, and possibly much longer but could not rule out the possibility of forgery as he could not conclusively prove the age of the engravings. ‘They could have been produced recently’, he said, and ‘deliberately artificially aged by polishing, but this would have been a complex multi-stage process, using a variety of different tools, with intermediate polishing or artificial wearing stages’. Another expert said that the engravings were of some considerable age and privately (why privately?), they could date to 1888 or 1889. Again there was the proviso that more work needed to be done to pinpoint their age.
Given that the estimated value of the diary if genuine was reckoned to be £4,000,000 it is astonishing that what might have been the clinching tests on it and the watch were never carried out.
But the biggest problem facing the investigators was that the handwriting of the diary did not match the writing and signature in Maybrick’s will or on his marriage certificate. Nor does it match a lengthy inscription, in a bible given by Maybrick to his mistress, published in Anne Graham’s book. Handwriting comparisons were made by Sue Ironmonger, a member of the World Association of Document Examiners. She believes that an individual’s handwriting is as revealing as fingerprints. ‘It doesn’t matter if a person is young or old, or switches from their right to left hand after an accident. The style may appear to change but, in fact, the components of every individual’s handwriting remain consistent.’ She could not link the diary with the Maybrick will, the Dear Boss letter and other Ripper letters in the National Archives. She is in no doubt that the diary was not written by James Maybrick.
Further evidence of Maybrick’s supposed guilt was said to have been found in the Mary Kelly photograph. Bloodstains on the wall beside the bed (Dr Bond says ‘arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman’s head must have been lying’) supposedly show the letters FM (Florence Maybrick). However, one of these ‘letters’ is partly obscured and, it has been argued, could have been the letter ‘J’ for ‘James Maybrick’. This, frankly, is wishful thinking. Such letters, had they been visible, must have been equally visible not only to the police and doctors but to the inquest jury who visited the room. The journalist accompanying the jury describes how the inspector, ‘holding a candle stuck in a bottle, stood at the head of the filthy, bloodstained bed, and repeated the horrible details with appalling minuteness. He indicated with one hand the bloodstains on the wall, and pointed with the other to the pools which had ebbed out to the mattress.’ The fact that nobody mentions such letters is clear evidence that they did not exist. Reading letters into the bloodstains is like reading faces in the clouds; we are fooled, as Hamlet would say, to the top of our bent.
The diary is not a diary in the conventional sense with days and dates. It is a series of entries to which the reader must give his or her own chronology. This, I have always thought, was the cleverest part of the forger’s skill as any ‘wrong’ interpretation or misattribution could always be explained away as reader error.
There is no hard evidence to link the persona of Maybrick, the Ripper and the writer of the diary. They remain separate entities despite the arguments of the diary’s supporters to meld them together into one recognizable identity. The Ripper Diary. The Inside Story, published only in 2003, is a useful synthesis of the ten years of investigation into it. After weighing up all the evidence the authors were forced to conclude: ‘Despite the many tests by experts in ink, handwriting and paper, for all the weighty opinions of historians, psychologists and authorities on the Ripper, not to mention the best efforts of Scotland Yard detectives, journalists and private investigators, over the last decade, we are no nearer knowing the true origins of this most controversial of documents.’
Robert Donston Stephenson
Self-styled Doctor Roslyn D’Onston.
According to Melvin Harris, author of Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth, The Ripper File, and The True Face of Jack the Ripper, here is the only suspect who has the right profile for being Jack the Ripper.
Robert Donston Stephenson was born in 1841 in Sculcoates in Yorkshire. His father was a mill-owner and co-proprietor of a manufacturing company. Stephenson had a good education, possibly in Munich, although he was subsequently to claim that he had medical degrees based on studies in France and the United States. In 1859 he briefly joined Garibaldi’s army in the struggle towards a united Italy, inflating his age by four years, and gained the rank of lieutenant. As a boy he had always been fascinated by occult science and in 1860 was introduced to the writer Bulwer Lytton who initiated him into the hermetic Lodge of Alexandria. He was a pupil of Lytton’s and came to know all the practices of the ‘forbidden art’ of Black Magic. In 1861 family pressure forced him to take a post, almost a sinecure, with the customs service in Hull, a job from which he was eventually fired. In the next few years he travelled widely in Asia and America, acquiring knowledge of magical practices, before heading for London and possibly living on some small family allowance supplemented by freelance journalism. He dropped the family name of Stephenson except on those occassions when he was forced to use it.
D’Onston was living in Whitechapel at the time of the Ripper murders. He was forty-seven years old. In appearance, at this time, he was 5 ft. 10 ins., of sallow complexion with a heavy, mouse-coloured moustache waxed and turned up at the ends, brown hair turning grey and of a military appearance. The person giving the description said that he was not a drunkard ‘but a regular soaker – can drink from 8 o’clock in the morning until closing time but keep a clear head’.
On 26 July 1888 he booked in as a private patient, registered as neurosthenic, at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. As a private patient, it is argued, he would not have had the same restrictions placed on him as would other patients and so could freely move about the hospital and the extensive grounds which would have given him cover on his nocturnal prowlings. If he was Jack the Ripper then the first killing in Buck’s Row would have been literally just across the street from the hospital, a walk of no more than three or four minutes. He would have been ideally placed to commit the other murders. The Ripper’s killing ground was a walk of no more than thirteen to fifteen minutes across from west to east, between Buck’s Row and Mitre Square, and about the same walking distance, north to south between Hanbury Street and Berner Street.
D’Onston’s motives for the murders can only be guessed at. Harris suggests inter alia the allure of the unknown, but argues too for a black magic/sexual motive involving ritual killing. A partial answer to the question of motive had been supplied by D’Onston himself in an article he wrote for W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette of 1 December 1888 headed ‘Who is the Whitechapel Demon? (By One Who Thinks He Knows)’. He puts the view that there was a distinct motive for the killings and mutilations, and that is that they were necessary to provide the substances essential to a black magic evocation of evil spirits and demons. Essential to some of its workings were substances which could ‘only be obtained by means of the most appalling crimes, of which murder and mutilation of the dead are the least heinous. Among them are strips of the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer’s gallows, candles made from human fat … and a preparation made from a certain portion of the body of a harl
ot. This last point is insisted upon as essential.’ The certain portion necessary was the uterus. The murdered were laid out in the form of a calvary cross.
In D’Onston’s possession, one story goes, was a box containing five ties, each one stiffened, it was believed, with the congealed blood of the Ripper’s victims. D’Onston, when boasting that he knew Jack the Ripper, explained that when the killer took away the missing organs from his victims, he tucked them into the space between his shirt and his tie.
The first four murders were apparently ‘taunt and display’ killings; being indoors, the murderer could afford to linger over the Kelly killing.
In November 1888, D’Onston asked Stead for money to hunt down the Ripper. Not surprisingly, as D’Onston was still in hospital, Stead refused. D’Onston remained in the London Hospital until 7 December 1888, having had a rest cure of 134 days. On leaving hospital D’Onston, living in a common lodging house near St Martin’s Lane, met George Marsh, an amateur detective, who had himself been trying to hunt down the Ripper. They met two or three times a week and discussed the murders. D’Onston explained how the murders were committed. The killer, he said, was a woman hater and to get himself into a sufficient state of arousal would ‘bugger’ her and, with his right hand, cut her throat at the same time while holding on with the left. He told Marsh that the Ripper was Dr Davies, who had been a house physician at the London Hospital and lived in the locality of the murders. The two men drew up an agreement to share the reward that was being offered when they had procured the conviction of the doctor. In this agreement D’Onston is referred to as ‘Dr R. D’O Stephenson (also known as “Sudden Death”)’. The latter was a gambling term.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 27