Sometimes, the perspective is that of the victims. In Patrice Chaplin’s novel By Flower and Dean Street Jack the Ripper meets and kills ‘Long Liz’ Stride; the big difference is that it is set in modern Hampstead, Jack is an advertising executive called Ken, who writes dog-food jingles, and Long Liz a modern wife called Connie. Whether we are dealing with a case of possession or not isn’t clear. Connie keeps experiencing a time warp which takes her back to Victorian Whitechapel and the persona of Elizabeth Stride. The reason for the haunting is that Jack (let’s stay with the name) has returned to finish the killing that he couldn’t complete in 1888. In the second half of the story Ken (or is it Jack?) is incited by Jack (or was it Ken?) to hack himself to death among the tomato plants in the conservatory. No more dog jingles for him – which explains one book review headed: ‘The new Ripper and his tasty morsels’.
Taking the same character of Elizabeth Stride, a more subtle approach was used by Kay Rogers for her short story, ‘Love Story’. The narrator is Stride herself, now a gin-soaked creature haunted by the clean, virginal and loving girl that she once was. However much she drinks she cannot stop this other self from haunting her. She knows that she will be free of this other self only if she can find the pure love that she once dreamed of and still craves. Eventually, she does find it – in a Whitechapel courtyard where she sees in the eyes of Jack the Ripper a pure ‘scarlet’ love. In that instant the other self deserts her, leaving Stride alone with the man who is about to kill her.
Finally, perhaps the best of the Ripper short stories, and one that certainly grows on the reader. This is Harlan Ellison’s ‘The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World’. Jack is transported forward in time to the last city in the world, a place of antiseptic aluminium cubes from which the Whitechapel slums have disappeared and where there are only metallic buildings and a metallic sky. He is glad because (here the story is following Cullen’s theory) he was motivated to commit the murders to bring about social reforms. But something is wrong. Suddenly there is a time transference and he is back in Whitechapel, committing murder once more. As he does so he understands what has happened. He has been brought forward in time by a group of hedonists so that they can batten and feed on his unspoken thoughts and sensations. This leads up to the most sensational motivation ever attributed to the Ripper, and one worth ending on: ‘He hates them all, every one of them, something about a girl, a venereal disease, fear of his God, Christ, the Reverend Barnett, he … he wants to fuck the Reverend’s wife!’
9. Beyond the Grave
According to a leading forensic pyschiatrist the multiple killer is increasing. The world’s worst serial killer is thought to be a British doctor, Harold Shipman, who killed more than two hundred people. In June 1993 New York police announced the capture of Joel Rifkin, a modern Jack the Ripper who had admitted to the killing of at least seventeen prostitutes while cruising the streets of Manhattan. His truck carried the bumper sticker ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me’. In November 2003, a former lorry painter, Gary Ridgway, pleaded guilty to the killing of forty-eight women to become America’s most prolific serial killer. In Britain in the same month, Anthony Hardy, ‘The Camden Ripper’, was convicted of murdering three prostitutes. In 1994, the Russian Andrei Chikatilo, the ‘Rostov Ripper’, was executed, with a bullet in the neck, after having been found guilty of the killing and mutilating of fifty-two women and children. He had murdered twenty-one boys between the ages of eight and sixteen, fourteen girls between nine and seventeen, and seventeen older women. There was the Polish Jack the Ripper who was first known as ‘The Red Spider of Katowice’. In America in 1978 Richard Chase, twenty-eight, of Sacramento was charged with six murders; one of his women victims had been disembowelled to remove certain internal organs. In Britain in recent years there has been the Yorkshire Ripper, Dennis Nilsen (fifteen victims) and the Stockwell Strangler. The majority of murders are still committed in the domestic situation, where victim and killer are known to each other, but why there should be this increase in apparently motiveless mass killing is not clear. Nor is it possible to draw up a profile of the typical mass killer, as the motivation for such murderers, when it is known, varies greatly. The Boston Strangler had an excessive sex drive, Nilsen said that he had not known penetration for some years and Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, penetrated only one of his thirteen victims. The publicity is an important element but again, like the sexual motive, is not true of all mass killers.
In some cases there is a clear identification with Jack the Ripper. In November 1972 the body of a young girl, well known for her casual sex relationships, was found lying on the floor of her London flat. Her head was covered with a towel, her skirt was rumpled up and about her waist, her bra was undone and her underclothing pulled down. There was a torn stocking around her neck. Her body glistened from a quantity of yellow, lemon-smelling, domestic fluid that had been sprayed over her and was running down her legs. The room had been greatly disturbed, but on the wall was a message, written in the same yellow liquid that was on the body. There was only one word: ‘Ripper’.
In 1978, a fifteen-year-old boy was acquitted at Nottingham Crown Court of a Jack the Ripper style murder. In court he claimed that his stepfather had told him about the Ripper and had taken him to see a film about the murderer; further, that the stepfather had a thing about stabbing women and used to stab nude pictures. He claimed that he had told him to stab the teenage victim ‘like Jack the Ripper’.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children warned that warring parents are producing a new breed of mini Rippers. Because of the violence at home innocent children are being turned into potential psychopathic killers.
The sinister undertones of the Whitechapel murders are increasing rather than diminishing. For example, some years ago a man left a message with my colleagues asking if I would go to see him as he had a Ripper collection. Naturally enough, I was sufficiently intrigued to go to his house. It was on a bright Saturday morning in early summer. My host, a short, dark-haired man with a heavy jaw, was waiting outside to greet me. We went upstairs to his first-floor flat and he shut the door. Although it was only 11 a.m. there were heavy blankets, doubling as curtains, pulled across the window to keep out the light. There was very little room to manoeuvre. Behind the door was a double bed and at the bottom, wedged in between the wall and the bed, there was a table of which only one side could be used. I sat at this table while my host pottered about, making coffee.
Sensing my unease, he eventually pulled out his collection. It could be broken down into three categories. The first consisted chiefly of photographs of himself at the various murder scenes, dramatically pointing out the ‘spot’ on the twentieth-century pavements. The second consisted of tracings of the Illustrated Police News drawings of the Ripper’s victims. Each of the bodies had been slashed with red ink to simulate the mutilations and was lying in a large pool of red ink; at some point he had run out of red ink and had changed over to green. He told me that he was hoping to make models of these, beginning with Mary Kelly.
The final category was probably the most frightening of all. He knew that I was interested in the affair known as the Siege of Sidney Street and so he had made a similar tracing of the shooting of the three policemen. Underneath it were other tracings of victims of the Nazis and Japanese war crimes. Most of these had been copied from Lord Russell of Liverpool’s books Knights of the Bushido and Scourge of the Swastika. I particularly remember one of a Chinese man who had been bound to a tree, his eyes gouged out. As was the case with all these tracings, the only colouring in them was to indicate the mutilations.
By the time I had leafed through them all – I just did not grasp at first what I was looking at – I was feeling decidedly uncomfortable and a little bit scared. Suddenly I realized that neither of us was talking any longer, and that my host was staring at the tracings in my hand. His eyes glazed and he pushed his heavy jaw forward.
Without once turning my back on him I rose to my feet (happily I was bigger than he was), made some polite excuses and left. I have not seen him since. Some years afterwards I was told that he was working in a hospital as a mortuary attendant.
Clearly, interest in the Ripper can be unhealthy. This is a fact often overlooked by those, such as myself, who play Hunt the Ripper. On 12 March 1974, Terence Collins, aged twenty-one, was found guilty of battering a 79-year-old woman to death with a tombstone as she knelt by a grave in a Surrey churchyard. After killing her he ran into the street and screamed at a school teacher he bumped into: ‘Don’t look at me. I will cut your face. I have got the devil in me today.’ He then went into an antiques shop and said that he wanted a swordstick, sharpened to a fine point, and a black cloak with a red silk lining, ‘like the one that Jack the Ripper wore’. When he was arrested and questioned the next day he told the police, ‘Sometimes I think I am the devil; sometimes Jack the Ripper or a vampire or something like that.’ The court was told that he had been in a mental hospital three times and was suffering from a psychopathic disorder. Collins pleaded guilty to manslaughter, with diminished responsibility, and was sent to Broadmoor indefinitely.
Three months later, on 4 June, eighteen-year-old Thomas Hopkins was jailed at Manchester Crown Court for life after pleading guilty to wounding with intent a 67-year-old woman. The judge told him that there was some dispute among the doctors about just how mentally ill he was, but all of them agreed that he needed treatment of some kind in prison. The prosecution said that when detectives searched his home they found documents relating to Jack the Ripper and a tea caddy containing photographs of Hitler. One of the documents read: ‘Jack the Ripper. I have returned from the dead. I will kill again – I hate women (bitches).’
In September 1980, a former actor, John ‘The Preacher’ Sherwood, and a ‘brother Christian’, Anthony Strover, stamped, kicked and punched to death a 31-year-old mentally ill woman during an attempted exorcism to drive out the Devil. Both men belonged to a religious sect known as the Invisible Church which was based in Richmond, Surrey. Sherwood, according to one witness, looked ‘like a Mormon off a wagon train. His beard was long and he looked just like a preacher.’ Both men violently assaulted the woman during the two thirty-minute exorcism sessions and continued to beat her even after she had lost consciousness. The exorcism, Sherwood claimed, had happened on the spur of the moment. He said: ‘The spirits were contorting her face. I wasn’t meaning to harm her. She was full of the evil which kept showing itself. Looking back I remember pressing down on her body and rib cage and buffeting it with my hands, elbows and knees. I don’t remember kicking her.’ Strover said that he didn’t believe that in exorcism the actual person could be hurt, that it was just the spirits being cast out. Sherwood explained that he thought the body had been injured ‘by the great force of the devils leaving her – the last one was Judas Iscariot’. The other demon which had hovered over her body told Sherwood, as he called out to Satan and asked for the name of the Devil, that his name was Jack the Ripper. Sherwood told the court: ‘I wasn’t hallucinating in any way, it was a different being to me. It was against the Devil that my attack was directed, I believe he went out of her.’
Echoes of the Whitechapel murders can be found in these and many other cases. Yet only two categories can be considered as genuinely Ripper-style murders. These can perhaps be defined as firstly, those where all the victims are prostitutes, and secondly, where the murderer has consciously imitated his famous predecessor and has admitted it. Even so, this definition has its drawbacks, as there have been many prostitute killers, especially in continental Europe, where the Ripper has become something of a cult figure.
Ten years after the Whitechapel murders a French Jack the Ripper was sent to the guillotine. His name was Joseph Vacher. The fifteenth child of a poor peasant family, when he was eight years old he had been attacked and bitten by a mad dog. He would later claim that the resulting mental instability was the explanation and excuse for the murders, mutilations and sexual assaults which led to him being called The Ripper. In 1890, after conscription into the army, the official reports show that he suffered from a persecution mania. He would become overexcited. He believed that he was surrounded by and being threatened by unknown enemies. In this dangerous mood he would threaten to cut the throats of his fellow-conscripts with a razor; the threats were such that some of them would keep a bayonet by their bed in case of a surprise attack.
In May 1893 he was on sick leave when he quarrelled with and tried to murder a young woman in the town of Baume-les-Dames near the Swiss frontier. He tried to kill himself with the gun that he had used on her but only succeeded in damaging his left eye; he was left horribly scarred but refused to have the bullet extracted from his face. Committed once again to a lunatic asylum, he made several escape attempts. Less than a year later, in April 1894, he was discharged as sane, and free to begin a series of wanderings, killings and mutilations along the highways of France. In the cloth bag in which he carried his clothes he also carried a butcher’s cleaver, a large pair of scissors and several knives. By 1897 he was suspected of having murdered at least fourteen people, including two shepherd boys and a shepherdess.
In the circular that was issued in July 1894 to trace him he was described as being about thirty years old, of medium height with black hair, beard and eyebrows and a bony face. ‘His upper lip is raised. It is twisted to the left and his mouth contorts when he speaks. A scar runs vertically from his lower lip to the right side of his upper lip. All the white of his left eye is bloodshot and the lower lid has no lashes and is slightly raw. The man’s appearance makes a highly disagreeable impression.’ The circular concluded: ‘This is the man referred to in the press as the “Jack the Ripper of the Southeast”.’
The following month he was near Tournon, in the Rhône valley, when he launched an attack on a woman gathering pine cones, not seeing that her husband was nearby. Her husband heard the attack and with the help of another man managed to overpower him. Vacher tried to explain: ‘I’m an unhappy man, a cripple, a good-for-nothing. I should be in a hospital. I desire women and they spurn me. If I go into a brothel, they take my money, are disgusted with me, throw me out without giving anything in exchange. I’m accused of assaulting people. But if I do anything wrong, it’s God who makes me do it – and He will protect me.’
Astonishingly, it was not realized at first that the Ripper had been arrested and Vacher was remanded on a charge of having offended against public decency. The examining magistrate ordered further enquiries to be made and only then was it realized who the authorities had in custody. There was a prolonged medical examination, lasting until the summer of the following year, into Vacher’s mental condition. The doctors’ conclusions were that he was sane. ‘His crimes are those of an anti-social individual, a bloodthirsty sadist, who believed himself to enjoy immunity because of the fact that he was not condemned by a court and because of being a released lunatic.’
His trial took place in the Assize court of Bourg-en-Bresse in October 1898. Outside the waiting crowds shouted, ‘Vacher to the guillotine’.
The verdict was not in dispute. Vacher’s plea of insanity was rejected and he was sentenced to death. Enormous crowds were watching as he was part-carried, part-dragged to the guillotine on New Year’s Eve 1898. Vacher had fainted from fright.
Jack the Stripper
There are obvious similarities between the London ‘Nude’ murders of 1964–5 and the Whitechapel killings of 1888. Neither murderer was caught and, in both cases, the police investigation was abruptly terminated, apparently for the same reason – that the murderer was thought to be dead. The victims of both men were prostitutes. Jack the Stripper’s had an extra peculiarity: they were all between 5 ft. and 5 ft. 3 ins. tall. In both cases there was the same intensive manhunt. Eight senior detectives, ranging in rank from Commander to Superintend
ent, led the Nudes investigation; between them they had solved between seventy and a hundred murder cases.
The six murders occurred in inner London between February 1964 and February 1965, when they ended abruptly. All the women were from the Bayswater and Notting Hill areas. Initially it was thought that there might have been eight victims, murdered over a much longer period. The two victims who were discounted were Elizabeth Figg, who was murdered in June 1959, and Gwynneth Rees, murdered in November 1963. Figg’s partially clothed body was found on a river walk between Chiswick Bridge and Duke’s Meadow. Both women solicited in the Notting Hill area. There were many similarities between their murders and the other six, but there were also enough inconsistencies in the murderer’s modus operandi (such as leaving the bodies partially clothed) to make it advisable for the police to exclude them altogether from the Nudes investigation and to concentrate on those with a defined and well-established pattern.
The first Nudes murder was that of Hannah Tailford who was last seen alive when she left her home at Thurlby Road, West Norwood on 24 January 1964. She was a former part-time waitress from Northumberland who had drifted into prostitution. For a time she had lived with a man named Walter Lynch and they had a three-year-old daughter. She used various pseudonyms, including Teresa Bell and Anne Taylor, and generally solicited in the Bayswater Road. Her body was found on 2 February 1964 in the Thames near Hammersmith Bridge. The flame-coloured blouse, dark skirt, dark blue coat and hat which she had been last seen wearing were missing. She was still wearing stockings, which were around her ankles, and her briefs had been stuffed into her mouth, presumably to stop her from crying out. From the injuries to her head it was thought that she might have been knocked unconscious and thrown into the river somewhere along Duke’s Meadow, which was about half a mile away, and which was a local spot for prostitutes and their West End clientele as well as for courting couples.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 32