They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Meanwhile, in respect of Mr Sugden’s invitation to ‘source it here’, he writes, ‘fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions’. Well, I’m not a ‘student’, but here are mine. My conclusions are that Scotland Yard under Bro Sir Charles Warren was corrupt from its back door to the front, and, as the Star put it, ‘rotten to the core’. That message on the wall is truly the E=MC2 of Jack the Ripper. It’s the paradox explaining why he was never caught, and why he so easily could have been. That he had the balls to write it, and then to mock it with the apron, is indicative of how he understood his own immunity.

  No serial killer worth the name is going to leave homicidal garbage lying around a crime scene as Jack the Ripper did. He was tossing Freemasonry about like confetti. The whole mechanic of this got-up ‘mystery’ reeks of amateur dramatics, and that’s precisely what it was: stage-managed theatricals construed as a ‘lark’ in the capsized psyche of a very unusual gentleman indeed. The Ripper was a ‘recreational’ killer in the literal sense of the word: a totally sane, highly intelligent psychopath whose sense of fun animated in some esoteric area of his thinking where humour and homicide collide.

  The very obviousness of who they were looking for prevented the police from looking. The Machine had seized. It was moribund, paralysed with anxiety. To quote the brilliant journalist Simon Jenkins, ‘the cynic’s maxim that every organisation ends up being run by agents of its enemy’ couldn’t be more apposite. In respect of this terrible murderer, London now had no police force. It was in the hands of its enemy. The more outrageous he was, the more the police must cover him up. They were like Christians charged with preserving the anonymity of a Judas in their midst.

  The dynamic of Warren’s dilemma was soon to overwhelm him, and would palpably threaten the System itself. ‘The question now turns on a matter of policy, as if fresh murders were committed the public at large might make such an outcry that it might affect the stability of the government,’ were Warren’s own words in his statement of 6 October 1888. He was echoing an editorial in the Star of a few days before, warning of the ‘urgent need to bring light to Whitechapel before the district gave birth to a revolution that would “Smash the Empire”, bringing about a republican regime’. Unknown to the public, the obverse of this argument (actually catching the murderer) was just as dangerous. Jack had something in common with the System, and the System had something in common with Jack. Both he and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had sworn the same Masonic oath:

  The point of a pair of compasses is placed upon his left naked breast, and he himself holds it with his left hand, his right being laid upon the Gospel opened at Saint John.

  ‘I [Charles Warren] of my own free will and accord, I promise before the Great Architect of the Universe and this right Worshipful Lodge, dedicated to St John, do hereby and herein most solemnly swear that I will always hale, conceal, and never reveal any of the secrets or mysteries of Freemasonry that shall be delivered to me now, or at any time hereafter, except it be to a true and lawful Brother, or in a just and lawful Lodge of Brothers and Fellows, him or them whom I shall find to be such, after just Trial and due Examination. I furthermore do swear that I will not write it, print it, cut it, paint it, stint it, mark it, stain and engrave it [and presumably photograph it] or cause it to be done, upon anything movable or immovable, under canopy of Heaven, whereby it may become legible or intelligible [my emphasis] or the least appearance of the character of a letter, whereby the secret Art may be unlawfully obtained. All this I swear [under the usual penalties of t.c.a. etc.] with a strong and steady resolution to perform the same without hesitation, mental reservation, or self evasion of mind in any way whatsoever.’55

  In other words, wash off the wall. ‘A Royal Arch Mason,’ wrote Avery Allyn in 1831, ‘would have felt consciously bound to conceal; having taken an oath, under penalty of death, to conceal the secrets of a Companion Royal Arch Mason, murder and treason not excepted.’

  Welcome to the ‘Funny Little Game’.

  Mirth was what the Ripper was about. He liked jokes and anagrams and juvenile riddles, he loved the profanity and blasphemy of it all. Part of his thinking was like that of a vicious schoolboy mocking the grown-ups; and the greater society’s affront, the greater his merriment. Solemn oaths sworn by the grown-ups were an amusement to the Ripper, like a fart in church. ‘The Gospel of St John is especially important to Freemasons,’ wrote the prolific early-nineteenth-century scholar of Freemasonry, the Reverend George Oliver, ‘because it contains the fundamental principles of the order of which he was Grand Master and patron saint. And every Brother ought always to remember that he had laid his hand on that Gospel, and is thence bound never to withdraw his love from his Masonic Brothers and fellows, in compliance with the doctrines contained in that sacred book.’56

  Bollocks. Ha ha.

  Every outrage dragged Warren further out of his depth, and by implication the System of which he was a totem. The following, published in 1875, expresses a somewhat contradictory point of view to the Reverend Oliver’s:

  Can you trust the fortunes of your country and the safety of your family to men, however honourable and high-minded they may be, who have committed themselves to the guidance of an authority unknown to themselves, who are confederated under the most fearful sanctions of a secret oath, and who are compelled to an inexorable silence, even though tenets should be revealed and orders transmitted from which their innermost soul recoils with unutterable loathing? Sick at heart, driven half-mad at the revelation of the hideous secret, they dare not go back; and oppressed with a deadening despair, they are forced to connive at deeds which they utterly abhor.

  Although this sounds a bit like the penalties for the Victorian masturbator, I think it is a generally accurate representation of what was going on inside Warren’s head. I think he was driven ‘half mad’, as well as driven from office, by Bro Jack the Ripper. The Masonic oath may now mean nothing more than an allegorical rendition of ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ but in the nineteenth century it ran the country. A Brother was required to keep all of a Brother’s secrets, and in the case of the Royal Arch, ‘murder and treason not excepted’.

  By now the anger at Warren’s subservience to the ‘unspoken’ had migrated. In both Europe and the United States the press was short on flattery. ‘Great indignation,’ reported the New York Tribune, ‘had been expressed in England respecting the too apparent and official helplessness and ignorance of the elementary methods of detection … If a really clever officer was to go to work and discover the murderer, it is all but certain that he would for his pains receive a tough snub from headquarters for going outside the scope of his instructions. Herein lies the whole secret of the immunity from arrest of the Whitechapel Murderer.’57

  It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Nor, in my view, more accurate.

  After Goulston Street there could be no turning back – the press would howl, for sure, but most of the public were in the dark, and the rest swallowing Fowler’s Solution. Providing the nightmare could be confined to an East End slum, the executive had a shot at brazening it out. They had plenty of scapegoats and plenty of allies. They could blame the victims themselves, as both Warren and Anderson did. But also on-side was the class fascism of their time. For those who represented the debris of ‘Victorian values’ there were not only upmarket recommendations of genocide in the snootier London tourist guides, but useful letters like this, published in ‘the world’s premier newspaper’, The Times:

  Sir, – will you allow me to ask a question of your correspondents who want to disperse the vicious inhabitants of Dorset Street and Flower and Dean Street? There are no lower streets in London, and if they are driven out of these, to what streets are they to go? The horror and excitement caused by the murder of the four Whitechapel outcasts imply a universal belief that they had a right to life. If they had, then they had the further right to hire shelter from the bitterness of the English night. If they had no such righ
t, then it was, on the whole, a good thing that they fell in with the unknown surgical genius. He at all events had made his contribution towards solving the ‘problem of clearing the East End of its vicious inhabitants’. The typical ‘Annie Chapman’ will always find someone in London to let her have a ‘doss’ for a consideration. If she is systematically ‘dispersed’, two results will follow. She will carry her taint to streets hitherto untainted, and she herself will [illegible] in larger sums than before for the accommodation. The price of a doss will rise from 8 pence to 10 pence or a shilling, the extra pennies representing an insurance fund against prosecution and disturbance.58

  Annie Chapman’s life is valued at two pennies above the market rate, so all six victims added together to a shilling. By this computation the Ripper would have had to kill 120 women to cost a quid. This correspondent’s address, 64 Eaton Place (just around the corner from Charles Warren), reveals more about him than his text. Here is a voice from one of the most salubrious areas of London; it’s the voice of the class the System served to protect. The calamity of these atrocities is reduced to the impact they might have on Eaton Place and its environs, including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the Athenaeum. In short, these homeless scum have brought the hand of ‘genius’ upon themselves, and are better dead than spoiling the view around here.

  Reality is turned on its head, and it is the victims who are the vicious. I think such heartlessness explains the government’s shrewd assumption that, provided information could be carefully managed, the majority would buy into the ‘mystery’, and nobody else who mattered would give tuppence of a damn.

  5

  The Savages

  Clench the fingers of the right hand, extend the thumb, place it on the abdomen, and move it upwards to the chin, as if ripping open the body with a knife.

  Richardson’s Monitor of Freemasonry (1860)

  The ‘Double Event’, as the Stride/Eddowes murders were christened by their perpetrator, is not original to the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard he sent, but was a vulgar colloquialism of the age. It meant to simultaneously suffer venereal disease of both the anus and the genitals. Jack’s choice of such a pleasantry may be trivial, but I don’t think it is. Although characteristic of a pun, I think it had a more substantive meaning for the murderer, and I interpret the ‘Double Event’ as both sobriquet and expression of disgust.1

  The Ripper’s choice of target was opportunistic, but not accidental. Self-evidently he was looking for a ‘type’, his selection of a victim in life no less specific than the signature he wrote into their deaths. This fabulously cruel man didn’t rip the ‘sex’ out of East End whores because he lacked the wit to kill elsewhere. He killed in Whitechapel as part of his statement. He wanted ‘sex’ as low as it got. The furnace of his rage was in his victim’s womb, the ‘filthiest part’ of her being, and he was disgusted with her for what his hatred would have him do.

  Theories seeking to link these women to their killer (as in Clarence) are as risible as the use Freemasonry attempts to make of them. The victims were linked only in circumstance, and insomuch as they were available. As far as this narrative is concerned, Catherine Eddowes’ life lasted about thirty-five minutes: from the time she left the police lock-up to the time the Ripper killed her. Many accounts detail what’s known of her past, her lousy life and those in it, but none of that is of much interest here. Eddowes’ biography matters no more to me than it did to the man who eviscerated her. On her drunken arrest earlier that evening she gave her name as ‘Nothing’, and that’s just about it. She was just another bit of trash in the ugly East End rain.

  A psychopath is at his most dangerous when he’s having fun. Jack was having a lot of fun, playing off the angels and the ogres in his own homicidal fairy tale. Authority would feel the weight of his spite, and women the depths of his revenge. Angels don’t fuck, and in the vernacular of his hatred, I believe that’s how Jack saw women, as either mother-angels or whores. It’s my view that he killed these women as surrogates, punishing them for the sexuality of another, and I believe one woman in particular was on his mind. She was a mother-angel who had proved herself lower than the filthiest whore. Until he got to her, and destroyed her, he owned her in Eddowes and the rest, cut out her mother-part for a trophy, like a huntsman with the head of a vanquished animal. He was ‘walking with God’, as the great detective Robert Ressler characterises the mindset of such a psyche, and what fault there was belonged to the victims.

  ‘It wasn’t fuckin’ wrong,’ claimed American serial killer Kenneth Bianchi. ‘Why’s it wrong to get rid of some cunts?’2

  ‘Four more cunts to add to my little collection,’ brags a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ (dismissed with infantile pomp by Ripperology as a hoax).

  Eddowes was a cunt, and the Ripper put his hands inside her and excoriated what he pulled out, literally hated her guts.

  The question, then as now, is: who was he? Dozens of writers – some admirable, many not – have taken their shot. The list of candidates is phenomenal. If all the Rippers had been in the East End on the same night they’d have been elbowing into each other up the alleyways. There would have been about thirty Fiends out there at first fog. It’s worth a glance at a few of the names. They were (and are) Kosminski, Ostrog, Druitt, Klosowski, Clarence, Pizer, Gull, Austin, Cutbush, Cream, Sickert, Isenchmid, and James Maybrick.

  None of the above was remotely plausible as far as I was concerned. But when the name Maybrick turned up, I was interested. As I intended to set out in the Author’s Note at the beginning of this book, but didn’t, my curiosity about tackling a murder mystery kicked off with reading Raymond Chandler. In his memoir, published in 1962, the inimitable crime writer nominated the case of Florence Maybrick as one of classic forensic interest. Exploring it over about a dozen pages, he concludes that evidence of her guilt is cancelled out by evidence of her innocence, and that the resulting conundrum remains insoluble. What made the name Maybrick interesting to me was that it was not only already associated with an unresolved murder mystery but, many years after Chandler’s death, with the mother mystery of them all.

  This development, reprising the name Maybrick, came via a ‘scrapbook’ that emerged in Liverpool in 1992, provenance unexplained. Ludicrously misnamed as ‘The Diary of Jack the Ripper’,3 it implicated James Maybrick as our famous purger. Beyond Chandler, I knew nothing about James Maybrick, or the mystery surrounding his wife either, but considering both were accused (albeit over a hundred years apart) of being famous murderers, I thought both were worth a closer look.

  In 1880 James Maybrick was a forty-one-year-old Liverpool-based cotton broker who had met and wooed Florence Chandler, a seventeen-year-old Alabama beauty, on an Atlantic crossing. Their wedding the following year was the biggest mistake of her life. Eight years later, and now with two kids, Florence was about to take her seat in the front row of a nightmare.

  It doesn’t take long to dismiss James (or ‘Jim’, as he was nicknamed) as Jack. As a candidate for the Fiend, he suffers from two immediately apparent disqualifications. Firstly, in May 1889 he was supposed to have been murdered by Florence, who in gaslit tradition poisoned him with arsenic soaked out of flypapers. A bowl of such liquid was discovered at their Liverpool residence, and bingo – the System that framed her had both evidence and motive. Florence (who was having an affair with a younger man) was accused of disposing of her much older husband with periodic doses of her lethal soup. The problem with this scenario is that James Maybrick was a lifelong arsenic addict, or as Raymond Chandler put it, ‘Why Doesn’t an Arsenic Eater Know When He’s Eating Arsenic?’ If Florence had been attempting to cull him with his favourite hit, he’d have sought out her stash, quaffed the lot, and probably asked for more. The second and insurmountable problem for the fans of James is self-evident. Jack the Ripper was in the business of murdering women, not being murdered by one of them – particularly not by Florence, who in the scrapbook is apparently the focus of his hom
icidal rage.

  Anyone who thinks this fifty-one-year-old arsenic-head was going to sprawl on his deathbed while some scatterbrained girl murders him with his drug of choice might not be best qualified to examine the complexities of the so-called ‘Maybrick Mystery’. But ‘the Liverpool Document’ suggests just that. Its misleading christening by excited publishers as a ‘diary’ is something I don’t want to get into.

  As a matter of fact, I don’t want to get into this document at all. Argument and counter-argument as to its authenticity is entirely counterproductive. Apparently various scientists, graphologists, ionising-ink experts, ultraviolet paper buffs, and even a clairvoyant have examined it. One proves it’s genuine, another proves it isn’t, and they’re all wasting their time. Personally, I couldn’t give a toss whether it’s real, fake, or written in Sanskrit. This document and its association with the word ‘mystery’ means you’ve got to junk all the crap and start thinking sideways. There’s an ancient Chinese adage: ‘When a finger points at the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.’ Not that I’m accusing devotees of James Maybrick of imbecility, simply that they’re up the right arsehole on the wrong elephant.

  Only two things about this document are of any interest to me: 1) The name Maybrick (which the text doesn’t actually mention); and 2) Its potent association with Freemasonry (which the text doesn’t mention either).

  James Maybrick’s Freemasonry has been guarded as a precious ingredient of the ‘mystery’ for about 130 years, and as far as I’m aware is here made public for the first time. In a later chapter it will become clear why such effort has been lavished on keeping it a secret, and when you know it, you understand why.

  James was a prominent Liverpool businessman, a provincial Mason of zeal and eminence, ‘initiated into the mysteries and privileges of Freemasonry’ on 28 September 1870, although he was clearly unaware of what kind of ‘mystery’ he was going to get. He remained an enthusiastic Freemason until the day of his murder in Liverpool in May 1889.4