How did the ‘hoaxer’ know that kidney was spelt ‘kidne’ in the Lusk letter? He couldn’t have got it from the newspapers, which had published ‘a limited amount of information’, excluding the word. And ‘kidne’ is obviously by intention: the writer makes no other spelling mistake, not even with the more difficult word ‘fiend’. Like the ‘hoaxer’ who knew about Catherine Eddowes’ Bright’s Disease, and the ‘hoaxer’ who knew about the stage Irishman, this ‘hoaxer’ knew about the joker’s spelling of ‘kidne’.
The letter was discovered shoved into a letterbox in West Ham, dated, like the Telegraph article, 19 October. Once again it originated ‘From Hell’, its author displayed multifarious skills as a penman, and it featured, like many Ripper letters, a vignette of crossed bones.
From Hell I am
Somewhere
19/10/88
[drawing of crossed bones]
To the finder
I hope you are pretty well Dear old Boss I shall visit you shortly in about 3 or 4 weeks time I can write 5 handwritings if anybody recognises the writing I shall kill the first female I see in this house or if there is no females I shall be down on the boss. I mean to have Charlie Warren yet even if I get him asleep poor old beggar …
On the day before, the coppers had made a house-to-house search ‘in the neighbourhoods of Hanbury Street, Commercial Street, Dorset Street, Goulston Street, etc.’, but, not unnaturally, ‘not the slightest clue to the murderer has been obtained’. The Star even refers to police looking ‘under beds’,37 and I can’t resist propositioning a bit of dialogue:
POLICEMAN: Cor blimey O’Reilly, Sarge!
SERGEANT: What is it, Hampton?
POLICEMAN: Why, here he is, sir! Under the bed! Next to the bleedin’ po!
SERGEANT: Love a duck! It’s the Fiend!
At every house and tenement the Met’s men visited, they left ‘a copy of the subjoined Police Notice: TO THE OCCUPIER’.
This was a reissue of a handbill first put about on 3 October. It inspired the envelope in which the Ripper sent his latest letter ‘From Hell’. Written in pencil with a crude drawing of a stamp, it was addressed ‘To the Occupier’, immediately establishing itself as another sneer at the police. But, irrespective of its author’s amusement at mimicking their toy-town endeavours, it is ‘kidne’ that makes the letter important, representing a habitual goading of the Commissioner, and using the same terms to express it.
‘I mean to have Charlie Warren’ is an expression that crops up all over the correspondence, as does the nasty little trademark of the crossed bones – both were common amongst ‘hoaxers’, although neither was made public for another hundred years.
We can now either use common sense, or refer the matter to Tinkerbell. The Lusk letter and the West Ham letter must have been written by the same man who sent the kidney. The alternative to this is independent hoaxers deciding to spell ‘kidne’ in the same way, just as independent hoaxers decided to bring an Irish tone into the proceedings.
By coincidence, on the day of writing this I acquired a new book. It’s called The News from Whitechapel. Although exclusively concerned with the coverage of the Ripper case by the Telegraph, it takes a distinctly conservative point of view, and doesn’t trouble its pages with the Telegraph’s reportage of the ‘Tall Irish Cleric’ in Mr Marsh`s shop. In respect of initial newspaper reports of the Lusk kidney, one of its authors, a Mr DiGrazia, is dismissive. ‘All of these reports,’ he says, ‘can be traced back to the imaginations or misreporting of four people – Dr Openshaw, F.S. Reed, Joseph Aarons or an anonymous reporter.’ We’re back in a wonderland of mass hallucination.38
Leaving Commissioner Smith, Inspector McWilliam, Dr Sutton, Detective Inspector Abberline and Lusk out of it, he continues: ‘There is no need to take them seriously, particularly as Openshaw himself (and later Dr Gordon Brown) would emphatically deny the extravagant gilding of Lusk’s package as being more than just half of a common human kidney.’
A ‘common human kidney’? Of the sort we commonly receive through the post, does he mean? Or the sort we commonly keep in our bodies? Mr DiGrazia is still peering under beds.
Lusk sought police protection ‘for some days’ after receipt of the kidney. Whether he got it or not I don’t know, but requesting guards is a curious reaction to a hallucination. In later years Bro Lusk affected to laugh the whole thing off as ‘a practical joke’, but the laughter rings hollow, and I believe there was a more esoteric explanation for his change of mind. I believe this same occult explanation may also be applied to the vacillations of his fellow Masons, Bros Drs Openshaw and Brown, who similarly repudiated their original, and in my view accurate, conclusions.
It was to Bro Dr Openshaw that the Ripper, or the procurer of the common human kidney, now turned his attention. On 29 October Openshaw received a letter, presumably delivered to the same department of the London Hospital in which he had examined the Lusk kidney. It read:
Old boss you was rite it was
the left kidny i was goin to
hopperate agin close to your
ospital just as I was goin
to drop my nife along of
er bloomin throte them
cusses of coppers spoilt
the game but i guess i wil
be on the job soon and will
send you another bit of
innerds Jack the Ripper
O have you seen the devle
with his mikerscope and scalpul
a lookin at a Kidney
with a slide cocked up
As far as I’m concerned, both this and the letter sent to Lusk are transparent amateur-dramatic absurdities from the same brain. The experts went after both texts, wasting everyone’s time with discussion of phonetic minutiae and paragraph after paragraph of worthless oral forensics. By way of example:
The consonant ‘S’ and the combination ‘St’ are pronounced by East London speakers exactly as by standard English RP [i.e. received pronunciation] ones. Where East London differs markedly from RP is in what it does with the ‘t’, finally and in some medial positions as before ‘le’ or ‘en’ and intervocally. The interruption of the air-flow, breath, is by the East Londoner made not by bringing the tongue into contact with the alveolar ridge, but by constricting the glottis to form a glottal stop, in place of the RP lateral or nasal placing, as in ‘kettle’ or ‘kitten’.39
To spare us the rest of it, I’ll get to his point. After a torrent of bile/file/mile/pile/rile and tile, the writer concludes, correctly, that nise/knif/kidny and Mishter are bullshit, and judges ‘the apparent illiteracy of this letter to be feigned’.
I couldn’t agree more, although from the opposite corner. Handwriting expert Mr Thomas Mann isn’t having it. The conclusion at the end of his audit is that ‘the author of the Lusk letter is a semi-literate person’. The script is ‘a product of finger movement rather than forearm or whole arm movement’, he writes, ‘a method of writing that permits only slight lateral freedom and is a characteristic of the semi-literate’. And just in case you don’t buy that, ‘Numerous ink blots attest to someone little concerned with legibility and clarity and relatively unskilled in the use of his writing instrument’ (an expert’s way of describing a pen).40
You can choose which expert you like. In my view one’s right and one’s wrong, but not for the reasons given by either.
Swanson bemoans the lack of an envelope, as a lame excuse for not proceeding with an investigation into the Lusk kidney. In other words, the police would have investigated had they had an envelope. Here we have one. Didn’t anyone investigate it?
What’s the point of getting into an intellectual tizz over ‘kidne’ when the fucker can spell ‘Pathological curator’? The address is written without error. And why? Because the sender wants it to get through the postal system, and therefore makes no purposeful mistakes. He doesn’t want it intercepted by the police.
If the creator of the Openshaw letter can manage ‘Hospita
l’ on the envelope, what’s all this ‘ospital’ nonsense in the text? In my view this envelope demolishes the contrived fatuity of the letter it encloses. It exposes the writing as utterly bogus, ‘whole arm movement’ and all. No ink smears or spelling mistakes on the envelope – those mystifying ingredients are saved for inside. How can it be that comparatively arcane words are spelled accurately on the envelope, while the letter is replete with errors in simple words like ‘goin’ and ‘agin’?
It is tempting to dismiss this text solely because of its asinine attempt at disguise (suggesting that it was the work of an idiot). But it wasn’t written by an idiot at all. It was written with a man in mind who had American connections, hence the use of ‘I guess’.
I imagine the apologists would say the writer copied Openshaw’s address from a newspaper. I would respond, why then can he not copy the word ‘kidney’? But to speculate over spelling errors and ink blots is to make an idiot of one’s time. The writer is urbane enough not only to be aware of an uncommon bit of verse, but also sophisticated enough to adapt it.
O have you seen the devle
with his mikerscope and scalpul
a lookin at a Kidney
with a slide cocked up …
We have a correct spelling of ‘kidney’ here (he’s having such fun he’s forgotten it’s ‘kidne’). This manipulated rhyme is an almost direct rip-off of a Cornish folk tale published in 1871:
Here’s to the devil
with his wooden pick and shovel
digging tin by the bushel
with his tail cock’d up …
But the Ripper’s facility for lyrical adaption isn’t what interests me. I would expect as much from a successful composer of songs. It is the line ‘O have you seen the devle’ that abstracts itself from the page. I’d seen this before. Indeed, the same question was pasted onto a card and mailed from the NW district of London on 10 October, nineteen days before Openshaw received his letter.
Full marks yet again to our ‘Hoaxing Medical Student’. He got his Irish tone right, his left kidney right, his Bright’s Disease right – all before the event – and now he reaches back into the parapsychological void to get his source for ‘have you seen the devil’ right. He’s a soothsayer, sharing an extraordinary telepathy with other hoaxers possessed of clairvoyant skills that will continue to amaze in the next chapter.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE “DEVIL”
If not
Pay one Penny & Walk in-side
If the empirical has got anything to do with it, this text blows the ‘hoaxers’ angle right out of the water, and serves to include the Openshaw letter in the body of Ripper correspondence. Had the card been sent after the Openshaw verse, it would of course be easy for the intrepid Ripperologists to dismiss it as based on something the sender read in a newspaper. But reality has it the other way around. And this postcard was never published in the press, or anywhere else. Thus, to consider these two ‘Have You Seen the Devil[s]’ in isolation from each other is absurd. Irrespective of handwriting, they come out of the same brain. There is a single train of thought here, and if there isn’t, let’s hear how two separate ‘hoaxers’ came up with the same startlingly esoteric quote. It’s hardly as common as ‘a common human kidney’. So what might this little ditty be referring to?
Well, I think it came from ‘close to your Ospital’ – in fact, almost from the opposite side of the street. I think it came from a flyer advertising a waxworks.
‘There can be no doubt that a waxworks museum did flourish opposite the London Hospital,’ write Michael Howell and Peter Ford in their history of Joseph Merrick, ‘the Elephant Man’, ‘for in September 1888, in the midst of the Whitechapel Murders committed by Jack the Ripper, a correspondent who called himself John Law was writing in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette: “There is at present almost opposite the London Hospital a ghastly display of the unfortunate women murdered. An old man exhibits these things, and while he points them out you will be tightly wedged in between a number of boys and girls, while a smell of death rises in your nostrils.”’41
It was in this place, formerly the premises of an undertaker, that the eminent surgeon Sir Frederick Treves had discovered that saddest of God’s creatures, ‘the Elephant Man’. Further confirmation of this revolting entertainment at 123 Whitechapel Road is given by Montagu Williams QC, who in 1892 published a memoir called Round London: ‘The undertaker had for his successor an East End showman. This was ringing the changes with a vengeance. Mutes had given way to masqueraders; tights and spangles had taken the place of crepe; and, as it subsequently appeared, the solemn realities of death had been succeeded by a coarse burlesque of murder.’
‘I paid my penny and entered.’
Williams gives the last line a new paragraph, and because of its importance, so do I. It’s the same entrance fee requested by the Whitechapel Fiend. ‘Pay one Penny & Walk inside’. ‘In the body of the room was a waxwork exhibition, and some of its features were revolting in the extreme. The first of the Whitechapel murders were fresh in the memory of the public, and the proprietor of the exhibition was turning the circumstance to commercial account.’42
I think it was while admiring these effigies of his handiwork that Jack procured his printed ‘Have You Seen the “Devil”’. Or perhaps it came from a local newspaper or a flyer given away in the street, which he subsequently cut out and pasted onto his letter.
Both the Openshaw letter and the ‘Penny’ invitation sneer at the coppers in the same mocking way. Their artificial illiteracy is identical. If they’re the work of the same man – and by any criteria it’s impossible for them not to be – then so is the apparently different handwriting. ‘I can write in 5 different hands’, boasts the second ‘From Hell’ letter.
And I for one believe him.
11
On Her Majesty’s Service
Test everything. Retain what is good.
St Paul
My candidate was famous, and left a lot of shadows. Even so, this narrative was more difficult than anything I’ve ever attempted. Every day when I sit down to write I face a gang of hostile ghosts – Victorian coppers and Victorian Freemasons – demanding that the truth belongs to them. Ripperologists don’t have this problem, because they’re friends of one and ignore the other. Like Bro Charlie, Ripperology is dedicated to the non-detection of J.T.R.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in its dismissal of the Ripper correspondence. In the expert opinion of these boys the letters are all bogus, the product of a variety of hoaxers attempting to impede the saint-like efforts of the Metropolitan Police.
This is Ripperology at its worst (or best, depending on your point of view). None of its multiple candidates can survive acknowledgement of these letters: they go down like flies. Hence the happy acquiescence to the nonsense put about by the Victorian police. For the police to have acknowledged this correspondence as genuine, as much of it is, would have meant that the kingdom’s most repugnant Freemason would have been caught. His erstwhile chums in high places knew this as well in 1888 as I do today.
Deconstruction of these texts wasn’t what you might call easy. Written primarily between the autumn of 1888 and the summer of 1889, there are many of them, and most look like the exertions of madmen. Mailed from all over the country, often from places hundreds of miles apart, there’s no apparent consistency to them, not in paper, pens or inks. They might be in blue, black or red ink, or a combination of all three. Some are crafted in painstaking copperplate, many are in barely intelligible scrawl. It is my contention that virtually every one of them was written by the same hand.
This chapter, then, is about trying to prove that a substantial number of these so-called ‘hoaxes’ were in fact penned by the Ripper, and pursuant to that, attempting to associate them with my candidate, Michael Maybrick.
By myopic convention we are invited to assess these letters in precisely the wrong way. In other words, to look at how they look, rather than at how their
author was thinking. I don’t think Jack was necessarily anxious to disguise his handwriting, but simply manipulated it for a laugh. The grin in the ink is one incontrovertible consistency of the letters, and with that as my compass, I ignored the visuals and went after the ‘voice’.
It is habitual to psychopaths to believe they’re cleverer than everyone else, and usually they are of high intelligence. Before we get into Jack, take a look at these. They were both penned by the same psycho, a particularly unsavoury piece of work called Peter Kürten, who conducted a ‘reign of terror’ in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the interwar years. Like Jack, he killed women and children, and like Jack (who incidentally was his role model) he enjoyed bragging about it.1
Kürten’s ‘normal’ handwriting is above, and following in homicidal mood.
‘The mass-murderer, Kürten,’ writes the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, ‘always listened attentively to conversations about the murders [and] followed the investigations with feverish interest. He described his mental state while doing so as one of apprehensive excitement; and he also had a distinct feeling of superiority because he knew better.’2 (He’d have been all ears at the Savage Club.)
Unlike Scotland Yard, which for private reasons couldn’t catch anything more fascinating than a cold, the German police finally nailed the Düsseldorf Monster through his handwriting. Anyone can see the graphological similarities between Kürten and Jack, and anyone who thinks the Ripper correspondence is the corporate work of a compromised IQ may well be in possession of something similar. Artfulness reeks from its locutions – the exasperating repetitions and the preposterous handwriting are not in default of literary ability, but are prime ingredients of the writer’s malice. Like some precocious kid with a whistle, he knows exactly how to annoy, pulling the wings off the same fly again and again – and more often than not the fly is Charlie Warren.
They All Love Jack Page 40