The object of the murder had become the financial value of a body part. Mrs Chapman was the victim of a commercial enterprise.
Would you now please welcome ‘the American Womb-Collector’.
‘Within hours of the issue of the morning papers,’ opined the newly accredited zombie, ‘I received a communication from an officer of one of our great medical schools, that they had information that might or might not have a distinct bearing on our enquiry. I attended at the first opportunity, and was told by the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum that some months ago an American had called on him, and asked him to procure a number of specimens of the organ that was missing from the deceased. He stated his willingness to give 20 pounds for each, and explained that his object was to issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication in which he was engaged.’ (His publishers must have been well pleased that the projected dissertation wasn’t upon the pathology of testicles.) ‘Although he was told that his wish was impossible to be complied with, he still urged his request. He desired them preserved,’ continued the unlikely entertainer, ‘not in spirits of wine, the usual medium, but in glycerine in order to preserve them in a flaccid condition, and he wished them sent to America direct. It is known that this request was repeated to another institute of similar character.’
It was proved almost immediately by newspaper enquiry that no prominent medical school had ever received such an application. But the jury couldn’t know that, and Bro Baxter was hardly interested. Without pausing for breath, he deftly linked author with assassin. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘is it not possible that this demand may have incited some abandoned wretch to possess himself of a specimen?’
At last the jury was party to the classified forensics Bro Phillips had so assiduously tried to hide behind. It must have all sounded so obvious when you knew it. Jack the Ripper was working for a publisher! What Baxter would have had the jury believe was that ‘some abandoned wretch’, converted into an entrepreneur by something that was never said at a non-existent medical school, had then set about terrorising East London, burgling uteri, which he would post to America, where they would be packaged with a book. A sort of ‘buy one get one free’.
‘I need hardly say,’ confided Bro Baxter, ‘that I at once communicated my information to the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. Of course I do not know what use has been made of it.’
I’m happy to supply the answer. None. None, because it was diversionary junk for public consumption; and none, because the Detective Department was busy doing what you were now doing, Coroner Bro Baxter, and that was covering up.
As far as the ‘Fiend’ was concerned, Baxter had learned his lesson the hard way. He would never again make the same mistake. At the Stride inquest he would preside over an ‘in-house’ conspiracy that should have put him in prison. Baxter had joined the automaton, and what a pitiful little maggot Jack had made of him. He all but blew it with ‘the Womb-Collector’, stretching credulity into a backlash of press ridicule.
‘Of all the ludicrous theories,’ mocked Henry Labouchère’s Truth, ‘the theory of the coroner is assuredly the most grotesque. I don’t know if there is any way of getting rid of a Comic Coroner, but if any machinery does exist for the purpose, it ought without a moment’s delay be put into force.’ Truth wanted Baxter ‘retired summarily and quickly’, lest ‘the bibulous gentlemen about Pall Mall might get their livers torn out and offered with some number of a temperance magazine’.9 Baxter’s theory was ‘altogether preposterous’, according to the Observer.
But much more damning for ‘the Comic Coroner’ was the reaction of his peers in the medical profession. ‘My purpose in writing,’ intoned one eminent croaker, Sir James Risden-Bennett, ‘was simply to demonstrate the absurdity of the theory that the crimes were being committed for the purpose of supplying an American physiologist with specimens. It would be extremely easy, here or in America either, for a physiologist to secure this portion of intestines. The notion that they were wanted in order that they might be sent out along with copies of a medical publication is ridiculous; not only ridiculous indeed, but absolutely impossible of realisation.’10 In other words, you don’t have to go through the perversions of obvious Masonic ritual to publish a non-existent book.
No one agreed more than the world’s most respected medical journal. ‘The whole tale is almost beyond belief,’ judged the Lancet, ‘and if, as we think, it can be shown to have grown in transmission, it will not only shatter the theory that cupidity [twenty quid] was the motive of the crime, but will bring into question the discretion of the officer of the law [Bro Baxter] who could accept such a statement and give it such wide publicity.’11
Baxter was no more believed than had he proposed Jack’s disappearance from Hanbury Street up a beanstalk. His artful little fairy tale had backfired. The Lancet hadn’t finished: ‘And what is equally deplorable, the revelation thus made by the Coroner, which so dramatically startled the public last Wednesday evening, may probably lead to a diversion from the real track of the murderer, and thus defeat rather than serve the ends of justice.’12
Or, put succinctly, it was a resounding success. Diversion and defeat of the ends of justice were what it was all about. The felony that terminated inquiries into the death of Annie Chapman shows just how easy it was for bent officials to corrupt justice. It was ‘preposterous’, it was ‘deplorable’, it was ‘comic’, it was a false lead that could only serve to assist the criminal. But it was also an unaccountable system in action. Bro Baxter kept his job. The only individuals with the authority to get rid of him were those who needed him most.
The hostile reaction to his desperate lying, however, panicked the authorities, who realised that some urgent news management was required. Feeble as it was false, the conservative Standard delivered a wriggling little effort, attempting to portray Baxter’s flight of fantasy as the result of a ‘mistake’ by a ‘minor official’. Dismissing the £20 as an unhappy nonsense, the paper went on to dismiss the very notion of the American quack and his fabulously laughable book. ‘The person in question was a physician of the highest respectability,’ assured the Standard, ‘and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities of his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real information for the hypothesis, and the information communicated, which was not at all of the nature which the public had been led to believe, was due to an erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard, and to which a negative reply was given. This theory may at once be dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained even by its author.’13
It wasn’t. But never mind what ‘the public had been led to believe’ – what about the jury? It got the same despicable earful of Establishment camouflage. If ‘the Womb-Collector’ was a ‘theory that may at once be dismissed’, should not the court have immediately reconvened under an honest (non-Masonic) coroner to examine the true nature of Chapman’s mutilations? Was not Bro Dr Bagster Phillips withholding a reality, converted by Bro Coroner Wynne Baxter into a comic fantasy? Such patent rubbish had now been rejected, so what exactly were the pair of them hiding?
Such questions were emotive, and remained bereft of answer. But let no one fret – we’ll soon be back in the gaslight, a sedative is on its way. ‘Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt,’ writes Mr Sugden from his usual altitude, ‘but it would be instructive to learn just how much truth there was in the information he was given.’14
As in, how brown is this shit? The tenor of this sentence is breathtaking. If Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt, might we please know Mr Sugden’s definition of integrity?
Baxter’s ‘integrity’ was shot to bits, and all subsequent evidence reveals him to have been a Masonic dupe. He should have been summarily fired, and prosecuted for misfeasance of office. And he would have been, had he not been protecting the Establishment that owned him.
The answer to the second part of Mr Sugden’s sentence is
none. There was no truth in ‘the information he was given’, because he was never given it. It was merely a contribution to what the Telegraph called ‘the scandalous exhibition of stupidity revealed in the East End inquests’. In short, it was a confection of diversionary twaddle, and once it had served its nefarious purpose, Bro Baxter (like Bro Stowell after him) denied it.15 There was no American in London seeking uteri in glycerine. There was no medical school that could confirm such an approach. There was no £20 on offer for the merchandise, and there was no mind-numbingly ridiculous book to go with it. The ‘minor official’ referred to by the Standard, incidentally, was almost certainly Bro Phillips himself. In apparent ignorance of the impending backtrack, he turned up at Baxter’s court with ambitions to confirm the theory. The witness who previously hadn’t wanted to say anything was now canvassing the ear of any reporter who would listen.
Baxter, meanwhile, was in full mendacious flight on the bench. The Masonic doctor had not been called that day, and was present at the court on his own account, claiming that he had ‘attended the inquest for the purpose of answering further questions, with a view to elucidating the mystery; but he arrived while the Coroner was summing-up, and thus had no opportunity’.16
Phillips was there in order to confirm what everyone else was about to deny. ‘When told by a reporter of the startling statement in the coroner’s summing up [the Womb-Collector], he [Phillips] said he considered it a very important communication, and the public [and, in time, Mr Sugden] would now see the reason for not wishing in the first place to give a description of the injuries. He attached great importance to the applications which had been made to the Pathological Museum, and to the advisability of following this information up to a probable clue.’17
To ‘follow this information up’ was to pursue an utterly false lead, and Phillips knew it as surely as did the Lancet. This creepy little profferer of deceit had no business to be at this court, talking up such junk. ‘The American Womb-Collector’ had about as much credibility as Robert Anderson’s ‘Ink-Stained Journalist’, who was about to make his entrance, poised with his quill, in anticipation of the Ripper’s correspondence. The American Womb-Collector was never to be heard of again, soon to be replaced for the duration by a character of no less fabulous provenance: to wit, ‘the Insane Medical Student’. Their differences were few, but while ‘the Womb-Collector’ gathered in human organs, ‘the Insane Medical Student’ handed them out.
Nothing happens by accident. Bro Baxter didn’t invent his nonsensical theory by accident, and it was no accident that Bro Phillips reappeared at his court to support it. Both were lying, and the Ripper was on a win–win. They knew he was a Mason (or someone pretending to be one), but they didn’t yet know who he was. Was he someone close to the System, or even a part of it? Until this was found out, he had to be accommodated.
Evidence was therefore manipulated, degraded and distorted, and in the case of the imminent outrage at Goulston Street, literally wiped out. When Sir Charles Warren finally got his silly arse down to Whitechapel, he found the vernacular of the ‘Three Assassins’ flaunted like an advert for Freemasonry. In a crazy onslaught, the crime scenes were saturated with it. But Jack’s extravaganza was also his immunity. ‘The feeling,’ accused the Bradford Observer, ‘is that the helplessness of the police is the most discreditable exhibition of their incapacity that has been witnessed for many years.’
Discreditable it was, but they hadn’t seen nothing yet. Under Warren, detectives regarded the office of a Freemason as superior to that of a serving police officer. Dispensing with any sense of duty to the public who paid them, they got into line like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. ‘He never left a clue, lads! He never left a clue! Keep those truncheons up, lads! Not a one! Not a one! Not a one!’
What they actually meant was that he left far too many of the sort of clues they didn’t want to know about. ‘Sir Charles Wakes Up’ was the headline in the New York Herald.18 Warren had just had the kind of door-knock in the dead of night that presages dismay. When he left his home in Westminster at about 4.15 a.m. the last thing he wanted was any further intimation, be it overt or oblique, of Freemasonry. A carriage was waiting outside in the drizzle. This was the Bro Commissioner’s first ever trip to the East End in respect of these murders. He must have rattled out of the Establishment heart of London expecting the worst. And he got it.
4
The Funny Little Game
Ignorance worships mystery, reason explains it.
Robert G. Ingersoll
In the early hours of Sunday, 30 September 1888, the Ripper made two hits. The first was an aborted liaison at a place called Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street in Whitechapel, where he attacked and murdered a forty-four-year-old part-time whore, Elizabeth Stride. It seems his postmortem activity was interrupted by the arrival of a young coster, Louis Diemschutz, with his pony and cart. Sensing something untoward, the animal shied in the darkness, and it was probably in the few moments of ensuing confusion that the assassin made himself scarce.
Like an Argentine toad – touch the bastard and die – our Purger must have been almost toxic with homicidal adrenaline. For him, murder wasn’t even half the story. What motivated him was ritual. He wanted body parts, trophies, wanted to leave his ‘mark’, a pleasure denied him at Dutfield’s Yard by the arrival of Diemschutz and his nag.
The hunt for more action took him west, into the City – over the state line, so to speak, and therefore into a location that made some sense. Stride had been slaughtered on Charles Warren’s patch in Whitechapel. Jack was now out of there, relatively safe in an entirely different police district, a part of London under the aegis of another ex-military man, Assistant Commissioner Major Sir Henry Smith.
At about 1.30 a.m. the killer ran into his next victim, a forty-six-year-old drunk called Catherine Eddowes. The encounter tells us something about the Ripper’s extraordinary credentials as a psychopath. Not an hour before, he’d cut so deep into a woman’s throat that he was down to the vertebrae, yet here he clearly manifested no sign of physical or mental duress beyond that of a man taking a leisurely stroll. A blood-drenched cliché scuttling for a ‘lair’ he was not. There could have been no blood, no exposed canines – nothing to alert this streetwise woman at all. Jack was clearly a man in complete control, and within minutes he had control of Eddowes. The unfortunate woman had just got out of a police cell, where she’d been banged up for a few hours to sleep off the gin. ‘I shall get a damned good hiding when I get home,’ she told the copper who released her. She never made it, but became world-famous instead.
Mrs Eddowes was murdered in Mitre Square, Aldgate, at about 1.45 a.m., suffering horrendous mutilations which probably included Elizabeth Stride’s share too. For it seems very likely that the disturbance at Dutfield’s Yard put in its invoice here. The killer cut her throat, then flayed her in sexual insult, creating a classic Ripper atrocity.
‘The throat was cut across to the extent of 6 or 7 inches,’ recorded City Police surgeon Dr Gordon Brown. ‘The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. The lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through … Several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed.’
No clues, of course, except for the usual cornucopia. It’s a virtual repeat of Chapman, although in Eddowes’ case the intestines were placed on the right, rather than the left, shoulder. Brown’s autopsy was comprehensive, and I’ll get back to it. Meanwhile, I want to concentrate on the injuries inflicted upon the face. Much hatred was lavished there, with apparently random mutilation. But as with everything else in Jack’s signature, there is always a message for Charlie Warren:
There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose, extending from the left border of the nasal bone down ne
ar to the angle of the jaw on the right side of the cheek. This cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth. The tip of the nose was quite detached from the nose by an oblique cut from the bottom of the nasal bone to where the wings of the nose join the face. A cut from this divided the upper lip and extended through the substance of the gum over the right lateral incisor tooth. About half an inch from the top of the nose there was another oblique cut. There was a cut on the right angle of the mouth as if the cut of a point of a knife. The cut extended an inch and a half, parallel with the lower lip.
This is crazy stuff, an uncoordinated frenzy of spite. However, the last cuts Brown describes are very different from the rest, and were almost certainly the last the Ripper made on this occasion. ‘There was a cut on each side of the cheek,’ he notes, ‘a cut which peeled up the skin, forming a triangular flap about an inch and a half.’
Complementary of each other, these are the only duplicated injuries to the face. No slashing here: rage has given way to balance and control. Irrespective of the darkness and the risk of discovery, it was a steady hand and deliberate thinking that cut this precise duo of marks. Like the items ‘placed in order or arranged’ at Chapman’s feet, and the piece of Eddowes’ intestine ‘placed between the body and the left arm’, these cuts were made by ‘design’.
No one would deny that Jack was into ritual. So what did these marks mean, to him or to anybody else? Predicated on Dr Brown’s measurements, we can get an actual-size idea of how they looked.
Ring any bells? Probably not if you’re writing an article for the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, but they look like a pair of compasses to me. Let us hear it again from Bro Warren, recalling the most indelible adventure of his Masonic life. Among the stones of Solomon’s Temple, he wrote, ‘the next visitor will see … the Square and Compasses, as cut by our hand’.
They All Love Jack Page 14