About seven hundred people were questioned in the investigation. At first there was a strong suspicion that she might have been killed because she was blackmailing a client. She had a reputation for attending ‘kinky’ parties, and in a flat she rented in Victoria for purposes of prostitution the police found cameras and studio lighting equipment. However, strong though these suspicions were, the coroner’s jury was impelled to return an open verdict. The bruising on her face was not conclusive evidence that she had been attacked. It might just as easily have been the result of a fall. It was equally possible – though there were strong reasons for doubting it – that she had committed suicide by undressing and stuffing her briefs in her mouth to stop herself from screaming in case she lost her nerve, which frequently happens with a certain type of suicide.
The post-mortem showed that she was pregnant. So was Irene Lockwood, whose naked body was found on the Thames foreshore ten weeks later on 8 April at Duke’s Meadow, about three hundred yards from where the first body had been found. She had been in the water for about twenty-four hours. She was identified by her fingerprints and the tattoo on her right arm, reading ‘John in Memory’. She had been strangled. She was found to have been friendly with a girl who had been murdered a year before named Vicki Pender. They had both been car prostitutes and taken part in the ‘blue films’ racket. At first it was thought that, like Hannah Tailford, she might have been killed because she had tried to blackmail a client with photographs; Vicki Pender had been beaten up a number of times for precisely this reason.
While this investigation was under way a man confessed to the first murder. At his trial, this 54-year-old bachelor said that he had only confessed because he was ‘fed up’, but the more likely explanation was that he had done it out of loneliness and the need for some attention. The police took his confession more seriously than they do the usual imitative confession (common enough during a murder investigation) because some of his descriptions of the girl, including details of her accent and clothing, were uncannily accurate. After a six-day trial he was found not guilty and acquitted. He told reporters as he left the court: ‘I was confused and depressed although I shall never really know why I said I did it.’
The main proof of his innocence was that while he was in custody the Stripper struck again. This time the victim was a convent-educated girl named Helen Barthelemy, who had run away from home to Blackpool and had there worked on the Golden Mile as a striptease artiste. She had moved to London about a year before she died. Shortly before doing so she had been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for her part in a robbery, but the sentence had been quashed on appeal. She was a prostitute in the Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill areas. Her body was found in an alley in Brentford, sixteen days after Lockwood’s body had been dragged from the river. She had been asphyxiated and, from discoloration marks on her body which had been left by her underclothes, it was certain that her clothes had been removed after death.
Another factor, which was to be found also in the later murders, was that four of her teeth were missing – one, broken off, was lodged in her throat – although there was no evidence to suggest that this was the result of a blow. Apart from being the first of the bodies to be found away from the river, she also gave the police their first and apparently their only clue. On her naked body were flakes of paint. From the analyst’s reports, it emerged that the body had been kept in or near a paint spray shop, perhaps a motor repair works.
Until now, the public and press had not realized that this killer was on the prowl. New Scotland Yard, however, took the unusual step of calling a press conference and giving the widest publicity to the three previous murders. In particular, the police emphasized their fear that if they did not get the information they wanted, another woman might soon be murdered. They stressed: ‘This is urgently directed to all women whose means of livelihood places them in danger of meeting the same fate.’
As a result of this appeal, quite a lot of information was given to the police, particularly by prostitutes, about known deviants. For three months there was an uneasy lull, thanks to this publicity and to the increased police patrols in north London. Then, on 14 July, the Stripper struck again.
His fourth victim was Mary Fleming. She was last seen alive in the early hours of Saturday, 11 July. Her body was found in a half-squatting-half-sitting position outside a garage in a cul-de-sac in Chiswick. When she was first spotted at 5.30 a.m. from a bedroom window opposite, the man thought that she was a discarded tailor’s dummy. Moments later, a motorist had to brake sharply as a small, dark-coloured van drove out of the cul-de-sac, narrowly missing him. He was so incensed that he called the police. Minutes later they were dealing not with a dangerous-driving incident but with a murder case.
Again there were some teeth missing from the victim, although this time they were from her dentures.
This case was still being investigated when the fifth victim, Margaret McGowan, was found under some debris in a car park in Kensington on 25 November 1964. The body was badly decomposed – she had been missing since 23 October – and her hands had to be severed and taken away in plastic bags to be fingerprinted. There were tattoo marks on her arms, and the words ‘Helen, Mum and Dad’.
McGowan was a Glasgow girl who had come to live in Shepherd’s Bush. She had three illegitimate children and several aliases, including that of Frances Brown. This had been the name she used when she gave evidence at the Stephen Ward trial, which saw the culmination of the notorious Profumo scandal, two years before. (I can remember her pacing up and down outside the Old Bailey, puffing away on a cigarette. She was a tough, hard-faced little Scot, wobbling precariously on her stiletto heels, with those incongruous-looking tattoos on her bare arms which were poking out of tiny puff sleeves.)
The closest the police came to a lead was through a girl she had been with twenty-four hours before she disappeared. The two were picked up in the Portobello Road by two men who, so the police later thought, might have been businessmen connected with the Earls Court Motor Show. Certainly the men seemed to know each other. They drove off together with one girl in each car. McGowan’s car was lost in the traffic. Probably the driver was inhibited by his social standing from coming forward later; it is highly unlikely that he was the killer, but the police would have liked to eliminate him from their inquiry.
The sixth and final victim was Bridie O’Hara, last seen alive outside the Shepherd’s Bush Hotel public house after it closed at 11 p.m. on 11 January 1965. Yet her body was not found until 16 February, behind a workshop on the Heron Trading Estate only a short distance away. The man who found her saw both feet sticking out from under a bush and also thought they belonged to a tailor’s dummy. The post-mortem showed that she had been asphyxiated and strangled. Some of her teeth were missing.
The same day Detective Chief Superintendent John Du Rose, known to his subordinates as Four-Day Johnny because of the speed with which he normally solved his murders, was brought back from vacation to lead the investigation.
The most remarkable thing about this last murder was that the body had been partly mummified because of the conditions in which it had been kept. Rose’s problem was to find out where. Similar paint traces and dust particles to those found on Barthelemy’s body were present. There were also traces of oil. The bodies must have been kept in a factory or small shop where car repairs were carried out. From the spray pattern the police knew that the bodies had been kept in a small room next to the paint shop. Every garage, factory and repair shop which used a paint-spraying process was searched. Thirty-six detectives swept through the twenty-four square miles of London west of Paddington to find it. Hundreds of samples of paints were sent away for laboratory analysis but, with one exception, there was always some slight difference.
A system of ‘flagging’ was introduced as a check on cars. Any that turned up more than once in the same area during the night became suspect vehicles; three times or more and they were ‘red flagged’ and the d
rivers put down for questioning. If this system had been introduced earlier the killer might perhaps have been caught.
Eventually the place where O’Hara’s body had been kept was found. It was in a transformer building at the rear of a factory on the Heron Trading Estate and opposite a paint spray shop. Analysis showed that the paint used here was the same as that found on the body. However, it seemed that this major clue was only incidental to the killings. The body had certainly been stored in the transformer, but this did not lead to the identification of the killer – although he clearly had a specialized knowledge of this estate. Policemen carried out checks on cars that passed through the estate and concentrated their efforts more and more on this small area. Du Rose waged a war of nerves on the Stripper. He didn’t know his identity but, in a steady stream of press releases, he let it be known that the number of suspects had dropped from twenty down to three, of which the Stripper was one.
Du Rose guessed that the man he wanted was about forty years old and of strong sexual urges. Each of his victims had died at the moment of his frenzied orgasm. One theory which has been postulated is that some of the teeth had been taken out after death in order to permit further oral sexual release. Possibly, if just one of his victims had died through this particular perversion, he might have been acquitted of any charges brought against him. Another theory was that he might have been revenging himself on these women, who had all at some time had venereal disease, and with which he had become infected. A third possibility was that he was challenging the police to catch him by flaunting his killings, which he might have committed for a grudge motive. Nothing was too bizarre to be considered.
Yet instead of the murders continuing it soon became clear that they had stopped altogether. Gradually the number of police patrols in the area were reduced, and a degree of normality begin to return to north-west London.
The Stripper had been stopped – but how? Was he dead, in prison, ill or had he fled the country? Four-Day Johnny ordered an investigation to be made of all men who had been jailed since February 1965, and asked for details of London inquests for the same period on young and middle-aged men. It was while they were checking the background of a south London suicide that certain facts suggesting that he might have been the Stripper began to emerge. This man had had the ideal cover. He was a security man. On the nights when the women had been murdered, he had always been on duty between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. His motives for suicide were obscure. He left a note saying that he was ‘unable to stand the strain any longer’, but there was no obvious reason for his death. Why should he take his life? And why, if he wasn’t the Stripper, had the murders stopped since his death?
In spite of intensive searches of this man’s home and garage nothing turned up, such as clothing or jewellery, which might have linked him firmly with the murdered women. His bewildered family could not explain his death and there was as much of a mystery about him as before.
The remarkable similarities of this case with the Ripper case are obvious and show just how the Victorian police, working on the same lines, could have back-tracked to Druitt. At least it demonstrates that an apparently motiveless death, a note threatening suicide, and the perfect cover for murder are not such unusual phenomena.
The Düsseldorf Ripper
On Friday 23 May 1930, Frau Kürten met her husband, Peter, in the Hofgarten, in Düsseldorf. After a meal, which she didn’t feel like eating, they went for a walk across the Rhine bridge. They were an oddly contrasting couple. She was a gaunt, rawboned woman, prematurely wrinkled, and he was a short, well-dressed man, wearing a hat, as was the fashion, partly to cover his neatly pomaded hair which was parted in the middle and partly to protect the powder and rouge on his face which made him seem much younger than he was. For once in his life Kürten seemed unnaturally dejected. He was deep in the grip of an uncontrollable urge to share his terrible secrets with someone else. His wife was the only confidante he had. Until a day or two before not even she had had the slightest suspicion that he might be the Düsseldorf Ripper, as the press called him. Even now, when he told her that he was the man who had committed the series of murders and attacks that had paralysed the city for the past fifteen months, she couldn’t believe what he was saying. Finally, to convince her that he was indeed the man that the police were looking for, he took her step by step through the killings, giving her such a mass of detail that she was forced to believe him.
Kürten said later that his love for his wife wasn’t based on sex but ‘on respect for her noble character’. Probably his infidelities and his years of imprisonment and theft as a petty criminal had drained her of emotion. Her reaction now to his tale of horror was not one of fear for his safety, as one might have expected, but of fear for her own old age, unemployment and starving alone. Her grief was inconsolable. The only advice that she could give him was that he should kill himself and that she should do the same, as there was no hope left for her in this life. Eagerly, Kürten told her that there was, that he could help them both. He pointed out that there was a large reward being offered for his capture and that, if she told the police what she knew, then she would be entitled at the very least to a large part of it. He did not find it easy convincing her that this was not a betrayal in the true sense of the word. But after extracting from her a promise that she would not kill herself, he arranged to meet her outside St Rochus church the next afternoon.
Next morning he bathed, had his hair cut, and dressed neatly for the meeting. He spent part of the morning walking up and down outside the house of a widow whom he had marked down for his next victim. He was arranging in his mind the grand finale to his terrible career, but had not yet decided whether to kill the widow only or her family as well. His wife arrived, and as they stood talking four policemen with revolvers rushed forward and seized him. He had not expected her to carry out his wishes quite so soon.
His reign as the Düsseldorf monster was at an end. But the fame which he had sought, when, as a teenager he had stood in front of some wax models of murderers and boasted that one day he would be famous like them, did not elude him.
In the past fifteen months he had carried out a series of sex murders and attacks which are almost without parallel in the annals of crime. He was a pyromaniac, a fetishist, a masochist, a sadist and a sex killer. The best brains in the Berlin Alexanderplatz, as well as Düsseldorf’s own efficient police, had been engaged in running him to earth. Nearly three thousand clues had had to be followed up, and over thirteen thousand letters of help had poured in from a terrified public. Nothing, not even spiritualists, mediums and amateur graphologists had been too bizarre to be used in tracking down this sadistic killer.
Peter Kürten was born in 1883 in Mulheim on the Rhine. He was the third child in a family of thirteen. His mother’s family were normal, hard-working people. But the background on his father’s side was far from normal: the family was noted for its arrogance, violence and megalomania, while criminal tendencies, feeble-mindedness, paralysis and delirium tremens characterized it. His grandfather had served several prison sentences for theft, and his children, Kürten’s uncles and aunts, were alcoholic psychopaths.
Kürten’s father was by profession a moulder, and he forced Kürten, who wanted to be a draughtsman, to be apprenticed to the same trade. He was also a brutal, over-sexed alcoholic. For long periods his large family lived in one room. Besides the constant brutality and the drunkenness, his long-suffering wife was often forced to have intercourse with him in front of the children when he came home drunk. Kürten said that if it had not been for the marriage bond, his father’s aggressive brutality to his mother would have constituted rape. Eventually, when Kürten was in his teens, she divorced him.
Kürten’s sisters were also heavily over-sexed. According to his own confession, one of them actually made sexual advances towards him. In 1897 his father was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment for attempted incest with one of his daughters, who was then only thirteen and a half years old
. (It was this incident which seems to have given his wife the grounds for divorce.) Kürten himself tried to commit incest with the same daughter, his sister.
When he was only eight years old Kürten ran away from home for several weeks, sleeping, for part of the time, in furniture vans. In the next six years, he frequently repeated this episode. Some of the time, before he reached his teens even, he lived as a street thief, snatching purses and handbags from his victims, mostly women and young girls.
After his father came out of prison the drunken brutality became even worse and on more than one occasion he attacked Peter with a knife. He began to threaten that he would cut off his head and once, Kürten said, he was prevented from doing so only by the screams of the other children. Kürten, by now fourteen years old and already apprenticed to a moulder, decided to escape yet again. He absconded with several hundred marks belonging to his employer but was caught and sent to prison. He was ashamed at first of the humiliation of being led through the streets in handcuffs. However, during the first of the seventeen sentences that were to take up twenty-seven of the forty-seven years of his life, he was so impressed by the hardened professionalism of the criminals he met that he had himself tattooed like them.
In prison he began to think about how he could avenge himself on society. While he had been on the run he had lived with a prostitute who had submitted to his sadistic practices. Even as an adolescent Kürten’s sexuality was abnormal. As a boy his family had lived in the same house as a sadistic dog catcher. Dogs picked up on the streets and not claimed by their owners were killed for meat or for their fat, which was used as a special ointment by the superstitious. The dog catcher showed Kürten how to torture the animals, and the boy derived even greater pleasure from watching them being killed. Gradually, through reading and talking about his feelings, he began to understand his own character. Instead of attempting to control his impulses he gave free rein to them. From the age of thirteen to sixteen he practised bestiality with sheep, goats and pigs. His greatest pleasure, he discovered, was having intercourse with a sheep and stabbing it simultaneously.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 33