They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  In a later chapter we will explore the depths of criminal collusion between Sir Robert Anderson and The Times newspaper. Meanwhile, such villainous crap is indicative of the crisis the Establishment acknowledged itself to be in. The Times had proposed a bunch of worthless deceptions in order that it might argue the irrelevant. Every specious reason to discredit the workmen is here enshrined. Acknowledging that the parcel wasn’t discovered by its stench, it posits that the men couldn’t have smelt it anyway, because the foundations were apparently awash with decaying animals. This smokescreen of human and animal smells is utterly fallacious, because anyone who ever got near the torso – Wildbore (who found it), Budden (who hauled it out) and Brown (who ordered it opened) – said it had no smell at all. Having put up a camouflage in respect of the stench, The Times moved on to try to camouflage the torso itself. A non-existent and never previously mentioned ‘board’ is brought into the equation, and this board ‘would have effectively concealed the parcel altogether’. Forget the retrieval of tools (Wildbore’s kit and Hedge’s hammer), the discovery was now predicated on ‘the fact that some lost clothes were thought to have been discovered by accidental survey of the dark recess’. ‘Lost clothes’ are now substituted for the habitual concealment of tools at that very spot in the foundations where workmen had been busy for the last three weeks. Nothing was ‘accidental’ about the discovery of the torso, but never mind what Wildbore and Hedge had said at the previous hearing. ‘It would be easy,’ concluded The Times, ‘to overlook anything hidden in that darkest recess of a dark vault.’

  In other words, stand by for another nobbled inquest.

  ‘Inspector Marshall, who has the character of not leaving a clue untouched’ (except for a leg), sat in again on behalf of the Met. By now the jury were familiar with the story, but perhaps not with the way it was about to be retold. What the authorities required was a repudiation of the evidence given by the workmen at the previous session. Any idea of a dual visit by the murderer was most unwelcome, and Troutbeck’s task therefore was to unite the torso and the leg in a single delivery. Bogus ‘witnesses’ were put up to try to effect this, stuffing the benches to fabricate a dynamic. At failing theatrical presentations this is known as ‘papering the house’.

  Nothing new was brought to the proceedings. What is of interest is what was left out.

  The only familiar face to be called belonged to the foreman of the works, William Brown. He told the court he’d been in the vaults on Friday, 28 September. ‘He did not examine the recesses,’ he said. ‘The body might have been there without him seeing it.’ To wit, he is a non-witness. He didn’t go into the recess, so what was the point of asking him what was in it? Moreover, Brown didn’t come into the picture until 2 October, when the torso was discovered by somebody else, so who gives a toss what he didn’t see on 28 September?

  If Brown’s evidence was worthless, what are we to make of the next waste of breath? Mr George Errant, Clerk of the Works, stated that he was ‘on the works’ on Saturday, 29 September, but said nothing about going into the vaults. Errant had seen less than nothing – and this isn’t surprising, since he was a pen-pusher in the office upstairs.

  The ‘papering’ continued with a carpenter’s labourer called Lawrence, who had at least been into the vault, but, startlingly, had seen nothing either, because ‘the place was so completely dark’. Another labourer, Alfred Young, ‘gave similar evidence’, as did Mr Franklin, who like Brown had been down in the vaults on Friday, 28 September, ‘but did not absolutely look upon the corner where the body was found’.

  Thus five ‘witnesses’ were able to say what they hadn’t seen. Astute members of the jury might have noticed that (excepting Brown) none of these men had been called at the previous inquest, and none who had given evidence then were recalled now. Where, for example, was Frederick Wildbore, the man who had actually found the body, who had struck a light in the recess and had stated unequivocally, ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t there last Friday because we had occasion to do something at that very spot.’ Would not a reiteration of his evidence have cleared the matter up? Indeed it would, and it was precisely for that reason that Wildbore wasn’t called.

  Nor did Troutbeck call George Budden, the man who had hauled the bundle out. Eyewitness accounts from those who’d first encountered the body would have been most unuseful, and would have kyboshed the forensic swindle coming up from Dr Bond.

  It was a revelation to me, genuinely astonishing, how these coroners’ courts were bent into compliance with the desired outcome, how the certainties of original witnesses were subverted to the corrupt requirements of a predetermined verdict. Under no circumstances could anyone be allowed to believe that Jack had made multiple visits to New Scotland Yard.

  Having explored nothing of 29 September, much less 2 October, Troutbeck deftly consigned the discovery of the torso onto a back burner, shifting the focus forward to 16 October and the underground detective work of ‘Smoker’. His owner, Mr Jasper Waring, and Waring’s associate Mr Angle, related how they had gone into the foundations with the dog, but now adjusted its disinterment of the leg to the opposite side of the recess. It had also plunged to a greater depth, and had confusingly become an arm: ‘The arm [sic] was found some 12 inches down’ – whereas the leg, according to Waring, was ‘at the depth of only 4 or 5 inches when the stones were removed’. It was this barely hidden limb that, despite his ‘exhaustive search’,47 had been missed by Marshall.

  Such raw incompetence was of no interest to Troutbeck, who in Wynne Baxter mode had one last difficulty to navigate before the lads from the Yard were home and dry. This was Ernest Hedge, saved to the last, when his evidence could be put up in direct contradiction with the ‘expert evidence’ that would follow. Hedge was adamant about his visit to the vault on the 29th, though he now had a slightly different story to tell. ‘With respect to Saturday 29th,’ recorded The Times, ‘when he went into the vault, he said to look for a hammer, he now said he saw the tools deposited on the opposite side to where the body lay. He struck a light to look into the recess, and the parcel was not there then.’ Nor could it have been, because when the torso arrived later that night it was deposited in the recess opposite. By its usual casuistry, The Times says this was ‘where the body lay’.

  Dr Bond was the next witness, and was in no doubt of it. But, temporarily ignoring the issue of the torso, he opened his deposition with a statement on the leg:

  I went into the recess of the vault where the body was found, and found there a human leg partially buried. It was uncovered but had not been removed from the place where it was found. I examined the earth which had covered it, and I found that this gave unmistakable evidence of having covered the leg for several weeks – that the leg had been there for several weeks. Decomposition had taken place there, and it was not decomposed when placed there. The upper part of the leg was in a good state of preservation, but the foot had decomposed, and the skin and the nails had peeled off. We found that the leg had been divided at the knee joint by free incisions, and very cleverly articulated without injury to the cartilages.

  He had no doubt that the leg belonged to the body and the arm. At last he came to the point at issue if a dual visit to the vaults was to be denied: ‘I took the opportunity, I may say, while in the vault, to examine the spot where the body was found,’ and in direct contradiction to what he had said before, he now claimed that there was no argument about it, the builders were wrong: ‘The body must have lain there for weeks, and it had decomposed there.’

  ‘You think it had decomposed in that spot?’

  ‘Yes,’ insisted Bond. ‘The decomposition was of a character of a body only partially exposed to the air. The brickwork against which it leant was deeply covered with the decomposed fluid of the human body turned black, and it could not have been done in a day or two. The stain is not superficial, but the brickwork is quite saturated. I should think it must have been there quite six weeks when found – from August.’ />
  At the previous hearing Bond had said, ‘I thought the body must have been there several days from the state of the wall,’ although he couldn’t be sure. Now he was certain it had been there for several weeks, rotting away for half the summer.

  Troutbeck let him get away with it, but Bond was lying. Established facts militate against his revised point of view. Dr Neville had said the Pimlico arm was from a recently dead body (about 8 September), and Dr Hibbert was broadly in agreement: ‘It wasn’t much decomposed.’ Unless the perpetrator had murdered the arm at a different time to murdering the torso, Dr Bond’s assessment is impossible. The body couldn’t have been in the vaults since August, when the arm was still living in September.

  Bond didn’t work in the vaults, but Wildbore and Hedge, who did, were positive that the torso had not been there prior to 29 September. Both were eyewitnesses, so that’s two against one – and 2,000 against one if you include the maggots.

  I do not believe for a moment that Dr Bond was innocent of the significance of the maggots. By the nineteenth century it was well understood that their presence in a corpse could be used to determine the time of death. It is in fact an ancient science, used in cases of homicide for the best part of seven hundred years. In our day it is known as ‘forensic entomology’, and one of its leading practitioners, Dr Mark Benecke, has a philosophy that couldn’t be more appropriate to the New Scotland Yard trunk: ‘Maggots don’t lie.’

  Let us navigate that servile little creep Troutbeck, and return again to the previous hearing. Bond had said the body was ‘absolutely full of maggots’. This statement, out of the physician’s own mouth, bears witness to the certainty of the workmen, and whether he was aware of it or not, it proves that Bond was wrong.

  ‘Flies typically lay eggs on a corpse – which it can detect at a very great distance – minutes after death, and the eggs take a few hours to a day to hatch into maggots. Maggots have a life-cycle that can be used to date the material they feed and breed on.’48 The maggots most usually encountered on lifeless flesh can be sourced to three different types of fly:

  1) The common bluebottle. Eggs are laid on fresh rather than putrefied flesh. The maximum number by a single female is 2,000, in groups of about 150. The eggs hatch at between eight and fourteen hours, depending on temperature. At a further eight to fourteen hours the first skin is shed and a larval instar emerges. The second instar emerges after two or three days, and the third stage within seven to eight days, and remains feeding for a further five days. When fully grown the maggot leaves the body and travels some distance, where it buries itself in soil and pupates. Twelve days completes the cycle.

  2) The greenbottle, entirely similar to the above.

  3) The common housefly. The female lays about 150 eggs which hatch in between eight to fourteen hours, the first larval stage lasting thirty-six hours. Second instar, one or two days, third instar three or four days, depending on conditions (temperature, etc.). The pupal stage (buried in the earth) generally seven days.49

  Bond said the body was ‘full of maggots’ (second instars), and this is consistent with the workmen’s timeframe of two to three days. The temperature in London on 29 September 1888 was 61° Fahrenheit. On 2 October it was 42°.50 The relatively cool environment may have slowed the larval development by a day or two, but it is quite impossible for the torso to have been full of maggots and also in situ for six or more weeks. If the body had been there in August it would have been infested within twenty-four hours. The maggots would have pupated and been long gone, leaving nothing but a filthy mess of bones.

  Let no one imagine it was the dress that protected the body from insect attack, because at the first inquest George Budden had stated, without dissent, that it was ‘open at the top’.

  Why would Jack interfere with his own expertly tied parcel? I suggest it was to initiate the very chain of events over which Bond and this court were now obliged to dissemble. He wanted his handiwork discovered, and that’s why he exposed it. ‘Maggots don’t lie.’51 They leave that to the Victorian police.

  The Ripper was destroying women, but he was also destroying Charles Warren. He was targeting authority as represented by its most senior policeman, and its most senior policeman knew it. He could make himself look ridiculous with as many bloodhounds as he liked, but he could never catch the Ripper. They were in a kind of homicidal stalemate – Jack as trapped in his own obsession as Warren was trapped in the results of it.

  The great American forensic psychiatrist Dr James Brussel, who in the 1960s busted into the thinking of Albert DeSalvo (known as the Boston Strangler), was a master at understanding this mindset: ‘The motivations behind the acts of a madman possess their own logic. The [psychopathic] murderer does not act wholly irrationally. There is a method to his madness; there is a logic, a rationale, hidden behind what he does and how he does it, however wildly bizarre and completely without reason it appears to be. The challenge to the psychiatrist/criminologist is to find that logic … seeking out the hidden mathematics of the disturbed mind.’52

  DeSalvo didn’t escalate the sexual humiliation, or the grotesque ‘pretty bows’53 he tied about his victims’ necks, by accident, and neither by accident did Jack the Ripper elaborate his crime scenes with flagrant Masonic symbolism. You would have to be blind as a bloody bat, a Freemason, a Ripperologist, or all three, not to consider the ‘hidden mathematics’ here.

  Jack was in Charlie’s face, and the maggots make it impossible for him not to have visited New Scotland Yard twice. He buried the leg at some time in August, before murdering Lilly Vass (if she it was) and tossing her arm into the river about 8 September, but preserving her torso in disinfectant until he judged the time right to inflict maximum embarrassment on Warren, delivering it as a ‘Moab’ piss-take to the vault over the weekend of the 29th, to coincide with the ‘Double Event’.

  If the leg was buried in August, before the arm’s owner was murdered, they couldn’t belong to the same body. It would seem the Ripper sourced different corpses to make his deposits at New Scotland Yard. In a letter dated 23 October, he was happy to clear the matter up: ‘The leg you found at Whitehall does not belong to the trunk you found there.’ This probably explains what he meant by ‘a Chelsea girl’ and ‘a Battersea girl’.

  We now return inexorably to Troutbeck’s court for the dénouement. It was another classic nonsense, challenging nothing of the tradition established by the likes of Wynne Baxter.

  Troutbeck’s dismissal of evidence (otherwise known as the summing-up) was predictably curt. He rehearsed nothing of the dates, the discrepancies in the evidence, or the difficulties the assassin would have had accessing the vaults. How Jack had scaled a nine-foot hoarding with his body parts was of no interest, nor did Troutbeck wish to explore to whom those body parts might have belonged. ‘There was no evidence, of the identity or of the cause of death,’ he said.54

  Apparently he had paid no attention when Dr Bond had stated that death had most likely been caused by ‘haemorrhage’. But even if he’d missed it in court, he could have read it in the newspapers. ‘Death,’ reported The Times on 10 October, ‘is defined as having been one which drained the body of blood.’

  Now this is most pertinent, and anyone actually interested in apprehending this monster might have been grateful to have it as part of the official record. It was an abstruse diagnosis that would reiterate itself in the corpse of another of Jack’s victims, dubbed ‘the Pinchin Street Torso’, and also more importantly some eight weeks hence at Bradford, where the Ripper would murder a child, Johnnie Gill, draining his body of blood.

  Steering well clear of this kind of thing, Troutbeck had almost finished. ‘The medical evidence,’ he said, ‘was that the body had been cut up after death, and that no mortal wounds had been discovered.’55 So what have we got? ‘The jury had before them the surmise that no one would mutilate a body except for the purpose of concealing an identity, which, once established, might lead to the detection of a terrible
murder, but beyond that fact, they could not go except by supposition.’

  It was hardly necessary to establish the identity of the victim to conclude that this was a terrible murder. But did not this wretched little coroner wonder who might have had some part in it? Apparently nothing was further from his mind. ‘He left it,’ wrote The Times, ‘to the jury to say whether they would return a verdict of “Found Dead” or “Wilful murder against some person unknown”.’56

  She was most certainly ‘found dead’. There could hardly be any conjecture over that. But the fact that she was found dead about a mile away from where her arm was found dead must surely have precluded Troutbeck’s proposed choice of verdicts. Found dead by what means? Was it a suicide? Did the torso decapitate itself before throwing its arm in the river and sawing itself in half? ‘Found dead’ is nothing beyond a statement of the obvious. Troutbeck may as well have offered the jury ‘found downstairs’.

  But ‘wilful murder’ was a little sensitive in these troubled days, and might have associated this West End atrocity with the East End Purger. You were definitely ‘found dead’ if Jack hit you in Whitechapel (but let no one imagine this was a Ripper hit).

  The last word the public were ever to hear of the Scotland Yard trunk comes again from The Times. ‘The jury,’ it wrote, ‘after a brief consultation, found a verdict of “Found Dead”, and were then discharged, the police being left, the Coroner said, with the charge of solving the mystery.’57

  This didn’t look at all promising.