They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  The general consensus, to this day, is that either 1) he was incarcerated in a nut-house, or possibly in prison for some other crime; or 2) he was a short-arsed seafarer currently in foreign parts; or 3) he was dead.

  The latter was the favourite. Melville Macnaghten, and not a few police chiefs after him, put it about that this multiple murderer and sadist of infinite rapacity had somehow given himself a dose of the creeps after Kelly and drowned himself. ‘The probability,’ wrote Macnaghten, ‘is that his brain gave way altogether and he committed suicide, otherwise the murders would not have ceased.’24

  They didn’t. Jack went right on killing. He had killed Mary Kelly on 8 November 1888. Johnnie Gill would follow on 27 December 1888; James Maybrick on 11 May 1889; Alice McKenzie on 17 July 1889; the so-called ‘Pinchin Street Torso’ (Lydia Hart?) on 8 September 1889; Frances Coles on 14 February 1891; and likely many more.

  The Ripper hadn’t stopped killing at all. What had stopped was the police associating him with his crimes. Meanwhile, a conveniently screwed-up nonentity called Montague J. Druitt had stuffed his pockets with rocks and jumped in the big river. They pulled his corpse out of the Thames on the last day of December 1888, and were happy to conclude that this innocent stiff, with nothing to do with Jack the Ripper, was Jack the Ripper.

  Druitt’s suicide as a solution was handed down at Scotland Yard like a family tradition. Because of Macnaghten’s ‘memoranda’ – a document revered by Ripperology, but as transparently bogus as Anderson’s Continental holiday – Druitt became one of the prime suspects, sharing the honour with Ostrog, Kosminski, et al.

  Macnaghten knew that the lot of them put together were rubbish on a dynamic scale. Druitt and Kosminski were passing straws converted into a life-raft, and the police clambered aboard and started lying. Even Abberline confirmed Druitt as a nonsense: ‘absolutely nothing to incriminate him’, he said.25

  From Martha Tabram on, every action was made subservient to the evolving deceit known in the trade as the ‘mystery’. A headless torso at Scotland Yard? ‘The Whitehall mystery’. Body parts in the Thames? ‘The Thames mystery’. A hideously murdered and mutilated child in Bradford? ‘The Bradford mystery’.

  Murder by ‘person or persons unknown’ was of course the predetermined dénouement. The investigation of Alice McKenzie’s murder needn’t detain us long. It was of the usual hopelessness, with the usual ‘fruitless arrests’. It wasn’t until after the inquest that anything of substance developed. Following his acrimonious dismissal as coroner preceding the Kelly cover-up, Bro Wynne Baxter was back, and Divisional Police Surgeon Bro Dr Bagster Phillips was giving his medical evidence.

  Having described another extremely cut throat, the slippery physician moved on to McKenzie’s wounds. ‘There were several,’ reported The Times, ‘and those were most of them superficial cuts to the lower part of the body.’26

  Although no one paid them any particular interest, these ‘superficial cuts’ were of extreme importance. The Times bothers no more with them, so we turn to the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘Seven inches below the right nipple, in a line continuous with it, commenced an external wound. It was seven inches long and deepest in the middle part. It only divided the skin and not any muscular structure, and therefore did not injure any internal cavity. There were scored wounds towards the navel, and seven more running downwards from the middle of the wound.’

  I become interested when anyone seeks to withhold evidence, and especially alert when it’s Bro Dr Phillips, the very same who had done his utmost to navigate the details of Chapman’s injuries. On this occasion he got luckier with Bro Baxter: ‘Dr Phillips sought and obtained permission to withhold certain facts that have come to his knowledge on the course of his examination of the body. What those facts are it is idle to conjecture.’

  Another month was to pass before anyone found out what these ‘facts’ were, and by then they had lost all significance. I don’t doubt this was the reason they were withheld. The inquest was formally postponed until Wednesday, 14 August 1889.

  Just over two weeks before it reconvened, the Whitechapel Murderer mailed one of the most important and revealing letters he ever wrote. It is undated, but has the receipt stamp of the City Police, 30 July 1889, and contained an enclosure:

  He surely is if you’re a Freemason. ‘The House of the Lord’ is Solomon’s Temple, as delineated below on the title page of this Masonic history, and articulated by Charles Warren himself at his Quatuor Coronati lecture: ‘I have surely built thee an house’.27

  The letter accompanying the enclosure is of such importance it is astonishing that it has survived. I can only imagine it was because the Met had persuaded themselves of their own delusion that Jack had drowned himself, and that this belief had somehow infected the City Police.

  a Startling echo

  mat – 11ch – 12vs

  Sir

  Will you cause these Labels to be put up in the place were the woman was found dead in Whitechapel 17 inst and it shall fulfil that that the Lord hath designed it to do

  they are to be put up at midnight –

  for the Lord will look upon them.

  Thus saith the Holy Ghost

  my hand Slew them

  my finger stabed them

  my nails cut them in pieces.

  Nahum 1 – 2 – 3

  Sir Melville Macnaghten wrote, ‘I do not think there was anything of a religious mania about the real Simon Pure,’28 and apart from references to St Matthew, the Lord, the House of the Lord, the Holy Ghost and Nahum, it’s hard not to agree with him.

  Starting with the religious mania, I’m going to take this letter to pieces. The text kicks off (via St Matthew) with a Biblical reference to St John the Baptist, a patron saint of Freemasonry. Matthew, chapter 11, verse 12, references the Baptist in the context of violence:

  And from the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

  Both John the Baptist and John the Evangelist are icons in Freemasonry, celebrated on their respective days of 24 June and 27 December. It is at St John that the Bible is opened for the initiate to take his Masonic oath. The Ripper’s second Biblical quote, Nahum 1 verses 2 and 3, comes from one of the last books of the Old Testament: ‘God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth, the LORD revengeth and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies. The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked.’

  What wickedness was in Jack’s mind? Certainly not his own, but I believe the wickedness of an adulterous woman. ‘And the LORD hath given a commandment concerning thee,’ fulminates the Prophet, ‘that no more of thy name be sown. I will make thy grave, for thou art vile.’

  Nahum is a waltz through vengeance and death. If you were a psychopath you might get a fix out of this junk. In his seminal Masonic work Morals and Dogma (1871), Albert Pike cautions justice tempered by mercy in the department of revenge, ‘but if it be not in human nature not to take revenge by way of punishment, let the Mason truly consider that in doing so he is God’s agent’.29

  Jack was an agent of God.

  This letter is radioactive with Freemasonry, and doesn’t remotely disguise it. But it is its knowledge of the injuries inflicted on Alice McKenzie that makes it astonishing:

  my hand Slew them

  my finger stabed them

  my nails cut them in pieces

  This reference to fingernails is key to the murder of McKenzie. It was the evidence Dr Bagster Phillips had successfully withheld. No information about cutting with fingernails was made public until Wednesday, 14 August 1889,30 yet the writer knows about it, and brags about it, more than two weeks earlier, on 30 July, sixteen days before the resumption of Bro Baxter’s court.

  On 15 August the Manchester Weekly Times reported the proceedings. Bro Dr Phillips was the first to give evidence.

  Witness continuing, said there were some mark
s about the external abdomen which he did not mention [my emphasis] on the last occasion. They were five in number, but with the exception of one were on the left side of the abdomen. The largest one was the lowest. The small one was the exceptional one mentioned, which was typical of a finger-nail mark. They were coloured, and were caused, in his opinion, by the finger-nails and thumb-nail of a hand. He on subsequent examination assured himself of the correctness of his observations. The marks were caused after the throat was cut. They were caused by a broad hand.

  At the first inquest Phillips had led the newspapers to believe that these ‘wounds’ were caused by incompetent use of a knife. On 18 July the Telegraph reported: ‘They were only skin deep and did not divide the muscular structure beneath. They were scored and numbered 14 in all. It would seem from these facts that a less skilful hand was directing the knife than heretofore, or else the weapon itself was of a less formidable character.’

  Nothing about fingernails, so even the most vigilant of hoaxers would have been out of luck. Phillips had clearly created the impression that these were superficial wounds inflicted by some bungling assassin with a blunt knife. By his manipulation of the evidence he was disassociating the murder of Alice McKenzie from the Ripper. At his second appearance he was actually perverting the course of justice, choosing mollifying words and contradicting the evidence in his own autopsy report.

  In this withheld document of 17 July 1889, McKenzie had been cut so deeply with fingernails that Phillips listed the injuries under two different headings. Describing one of these ‘mutilations’ (his word) under ‘Scoring and Wounds of the Abdomen’, he wrote of it ‘ending in a subcutaneous dissection of perhaps 3 or 4 inches’. ‘The abdominal cavity was not opened,’ he writes, but the lacerations were deep enough (incredibly) even to be considered in such a context.

  These unique injuries were in fact a hyper-sadistic assault using the fingers as weapons. Phillips’s suppressed report confirms that the murderer’s nails were dug as viciously into his victim’s corpse as he could get them. ‘My nails cut them in pieces,’ wrote Jack. No hoaxer on earth could have known this, and the author of the 30 July letter is Alice McKenzie’s killer.

  To cut your victim’s flesh with fingernails may be common practice for the sadist, but to make a written point of it struck me as unusual. This signature obviously had some significance for the murderer. At a glance (as in the ‘Women of Moab’), his reference to the wounds reads like a further citation from the Bible, and that’s the first place I looked. A standard concordance lists eight references to nails, most of the variety that fastened Jesus to the Roman equivalent of the electric chair. Not the nails I was looking for, but it had to come from somewhere, and naturally my thinking didn’t exclude what I knew about Michael Maybrick.

  He and the lyricist Frederick Weatherly had composed many religious (sacred) songs, and Maybrick was a ringer for this kind of quasi-religious doggerel. In 1888 Maybrick published four new titles, and in 1889 three others, which later prompted music critic Maurice Disher to remark that they ‘trembled on the brink of blasphemy’. Christian and Masonic themes coalesce in many of these compositions – ‘The Star of Bethlehem’, by way of example, and later ‘The Holy City’, inspired by St John’s supposed ‘Revelation’. From the late 1880s, Maybrick was in ‘religious mode’.

  In an interview given to the Isle of Wight Observer shortly before his death, Maybrick said, ‘I am fond of reading, and my favourite authors are the great poets.’31 I think one of them was Richard Crashaw, a seventeenth-century metaphysical genius who was big on fingernails, and right up Maybrick’s street.32 The curious metaphor of nails as knives surfaces in a poem called ‘Sancta Maria Dolorum’, or ‘The Mother of the Sorrows’. It’s a disturbing howl of motherhood and grief. Every line is an anguish, and every line is death, including the phrase I was looking for: ‘His nails write swords in her’ appears in the third stanza.

  O costly intercourse of death’s, and worse –

  Divided loves. While son and mother

  Discourse alternate wounds to one another,

  Quick deaths that grow.

  And gather, as they come and go.

  His nails write swords in her …

  ‘The Mother of the Sorrows’ reads like an archetypical Maybrick/Weatherly lyric, their ‘Sacred Songs’ frequently ripping off poets like Spenser or Crashaw. Out went the rollicking mariners, and in came the angels, Christian morbidity developing into Maybrick’s trademark: ‘In the shade of death’s sad tree’ (Crashaw); ‘As the shadow of a cross arose’ (Weatherly). (Indeed, the line ‘O costly intercourse of death …’ also appears in the so-called ‘Diary of Jack the Ripper’.)

  But, irrespective of its muse, we have a letter written by Alice McKenzie’s murderer. It doesn’t disguise its Masonry and elements of the co-Masonic sect known as Rosicrucianism. In some distinguished quarters they were considered one and the same: Charles Warren’s pal and founder member of the Quatuor Coronati, William Wynn Westcott, argued that Masonry had evolved from Rosicrucianism. Alice McKenzie’s murderer asks for his labels, ‘SURELY THE LORD IS IN THIS HOUSE’, to be put up at the crime scene: ‘They are to be put up at midnight – for the Lord will look upon them. Thus saith the Holy Ghost.’

  Midnight is magic and central to Rosicrucian doctrine, a sacred hour for the disciples, for ‘Each night at Midnight there is a Service in the Temple’ where the Brethren meet. It’s here things fuse into the eclectic, as they did in the Ripper’s head. ‘The House of the Lord’ is purely Masonic and belongs to the Holy Royal Arch. Masonic historian Bro W.L. Wilmshurst tells us that Psalm 122 represents a microcosm of ‘all that is implied in the symbolic spectacle that greets the eyes of a Royal Arch Mason at the supreme moment of his restoration to light’:

  I was glad when they said unto me

  Let us go up into the House of the Lord

  Our feet shall stand within thy gates

  O Jerusalem.

  ‘He sees how he has “gone up”,’ writes Wilmshurst. ‘Out of the Babylon of his old complex and distorted nature and upon the ruins, he has built for himself an ethereal body of glory, a “House of the Lord”.’33 The House of the Lord is built upon a city (the one Warren spent years excavating), ‘and in this “city” the blessed condition, which mystically is called “Jerusalem”, otherwise known as “The Holy City” … The antithesis of this “Heavenly City” is the confused Babylon City of this world, of which it is written to all captives therein, ‘Come out of her, My People, that ye be not partakers of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues’ (Revelation 18).

  The Book of Revelation insinuates itself into this history like a virus. This isn’t necessarily to criticise the traditions of Freemasonry, any more than it is to criticise those of the Christian Church. The Ripper drew liberally from both, and returned his malignancy wholesale. It’s no accident that Maybrick chose the title of his most enduring song, ‘The Holy City’, from the Book of Revelation, nor that the same thinking chose St John’s ‘Whore of Babylon’ (the Catholic Florence Maybrick) to cut down.

  Masons and Rosicrucians may have bickered about the genesis of their sects, but they shared a burning antipathy to ‘the Scarlet Whore of Catholicism’, Babylon in Revelations – representing Rome. In the case of the Rosicrucians, they called the Pope ‘Antichrist, a blasphemer against Christ’: ‘They execrate him, and look forward to the time when he shall be torn to pieces with nails.’ (Their emphasis.)

  Slashing Alice McKenzie with fingernails was an impulse of thinking that doesn’t explain itself any more than a lightning bolt unravels the complexities of a storm. Huge forces motivate both. McKenzie’s abdominal lacerations were a flash of inspiration in the Freemasonic nightmare, just as were the inverted ‘V’ marks on Catherine Eddowes’ face.

  Doc Bagster Phillips was a Freemason with well-established credentials in judicial obfuscation. Why would any police surgeon withhold evidence about the Beast’s fingernails, only to release it
a month later in mealy-mouthed, deodorised waffle that by then had lost all public interest and significance?

  Here’s his forked tongue in action at the first inquest:

  BAXTER: Are the injuries to the abdomen similar to those that you have seen in other cases?

  DR PHILLIPS: No Sir. I may volunteer the statement that the injuries to the throat are not similar to those in other cases.

  This is like asking a man the size of his hat, and being told the size of his shoes. He was avoiding one question and manipulating the other. Another opinion was sought on McKenzie, and the following day her body was re-examined by another surgeon, the ubiquitous Dr Bond. Phillips accompanied Bond to the mortuary, and Bond reported that Phillips informed him that ‘the wounds in the throat had been so disturbed that any examination I might make unassisted would convey no definite information as to the nature of the injuries’.

  This was unacceptable to Bond. Furthermore, he wrote, ‘Dr Phillips stated that before the parts were disturbed, the cuts which I saw extending downwards really were in a direction upwards.’ The two doctors were already in radical disagreement. Bruises suggesting the mechanics of the homicide to Phillips were rejected by Bond: ‘I saw no sufficient reason to entertain this opinion.’ And because ‘the wounds on the abdomen could have nothing to do with the cause of death’, Bond was convinced he was looking at another example of sexual/sadistic postmortem ritual. ‘On the right side of the abdomen,’ he wrote, ‘extending from the chest to below the level of the umbilicus, there was a jagged incision made up of several cuts which extended through the skin and subcutaneous fat.’ And more importantly, ‘there was also a small stab of one-eighth of an inch deep and a quarter of an inch long on the mons veneris’.