I’ve no wish to score points over those long since dead, or those who, for all I know, are in good faith. But James Maybrick did not resign from Freemasonry in 1874. On 21 December of that year the Jerusalem Chapter (19) was ‘attached to Lodge (32)’, and like all of its other members, James remained with it. As a matter of fact, together with a future Mayor of Liverpool, Sir James Pool, he was elected as a ‘Companion’ of the new amalgamation.
The document kindly furnished to me by the Supreme Council states unequivocally that James had ‘resigned’ from an unnamed lodge in 1874. But once again, like the Orpheus petition, it is faked. There’s no slip of the pen about this – it’s a counterfeit, whose purpose was to deceive. It purports to be a register of members, listing their names and annual subscriptions.
Return of Members of the (?) Liverpool Chapter (?)
Alpass Horace Seymour – dues paid until 1881 – ‘Mort’
Gaskill James – dues paid until 1873
Maybrick James – dues paid until 1874 – ‘Resigned’
It took me less than a minute to recognise this as a fabrication, and less than twenty-four hours to confirm it. Among the thirty names listed, two jumped off the page. I’d seen one of them before, in the archives of the Liverpool Cotton Brokers Association.
I remembered James Gaskill because of a quote that came with him. He was ‘an expert in the judgement of Surats, a knowledge which very few Brokers possessed until the American Civil War brought the despised fibre into general use’.12 I had never heard of surats, and looked it up in a dictionary. It’s a kind of substitute cotton. That’s how I remembered James Gaskill.
That afternoon my researcher Keith pulled two death certificates from the Family Record Office. James Gaskill, who according to this document was still paying his Masonic dues in the spring of 1873, had been dead five years, croaking on 26 April 1868. Another on the list, Horace Seymour Alpass, described as having died (‘Mort’) in 1881, was in reality alive and well, and Grand Master of Liverpool Chapter (19), until he went tits up on 21 August 1884.
So we have one living man who was dead (Gaskill), one dead man who was living (Alpass), and another man who had ‘resigned’ but hadn’t. James Maybrick’s first entry into Supreme Council records is dated October 1874, the very year he was supposed to have left it. Whoever the hoaxer behind this document was, he gets ten out of ten for the copperplate, but zero for the research.
Disinterring James Maybrick’s Freemasonic career sometimes felt like carving Lincoln’s face out of a mountainside. The difficulty is indicative of how comprehensively these records were hidden. Once again, I imply no malfeasance to any of the present custodians – they didn’t fake this document. It was produced late in 1888 or early in 1889, probably the latter, a conclusion that will become clear as Michael closes in on James. What was already clear is that some entity had a reason to disabuse history of the idea that James was a Mason at the time of the Ripper.
The records of Masonic lodges are called Tyler’s books, and it is in these that the business of the lodge (such as resignations) is recorded. I had requested photocopies of these records in an earlier letter, and subsequent to the hoax resignation document had requested them again: ‘The document you sent me is clearly of some age, but despite that it is unreliable and cannot be considered as primary research. Might I therefore ask a little more of your time and generosity to allow me copies of the original documents I requested.’13
It was at this juncture that it all started to get a bit choppy. I’d misguidedly thought the fail-safe tactic for denying any suggestion of a Masonic–Ripper connection was reserved for the Duke of Clarence. I’d expressed no interest in him, and none in Jack either. But never mind that, I’d got answers to questions I had never asked:
I have myself looked slightly into this matter since you wrote and found that Mike Barratt has confessed on two occasions to forging the diaries, that the writing on the will of Maybrick is considered genuine and different from that of the diaries, and that, the use of the name of the Post House pub was anachronistic. Also it seems to be generally accepted that Florence Maybrick did not poison her husband. It therefore seems that you are pursuing a matter that has already been discredited.14
I beg your pardon? At first I thought he’d lost his glasses and written back to the wrong bloke. I was indeed pursuing a matter that had been discredited, and that was this fake resignation document. Other than that, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had no interest in Mike Barratt and what he may or may not have forged.15 My specific interest was in the forgery in front of me, and was nothing to do with a pub or any person called Barratt.
This response was one of the few things that got me relatively miffed. Anyone who’s ‘looked slightly into this matter’ is welcome to their own point of view. If you don’t want to help, don’t help. I’m used to that, that’s your prerogative. But don’t anyone give me history lessons in bullshit. I’m not interested in ‘general acceptance’, or other people’s conclusions on what may or may not have been ‘discredited’. If I were, I’d believe it was Bro Warren’s Jewish sensibilities that washed off that wall, and bollocks about boots. I’d believe that the pathetic suicide in the Thames was Jack the Ripper, and that the inveterate liar Sir Robert Anderson was telling the truth. But I don’t believe it. None of it. If I did, I wouldn’t be writing this book. Of course Florence Maybrick didn’t poison her husband. Of course James Maybrick wasn’t the Ripper. Of course the ‘diary’ is a forgery. Of course its handwriting doesn’t look like James Maybrick’s, and of course its creation has nothing whatsoever to do with an idiot called Mike Barratt. Barratt didn’t write the ‘diary’, and I wouldn’t write about it either unless I was 100 per cent certain of its provenance. In the winter/spring of 1888–89 there were a variety of crooked pens forging documents in respect of James Maybrick, and in that context the ‘diary’ becomes an irrelevance.
Let us therefore leave the squawking to those who excel at it, and remain with the empiric. Notwithstanding the ‘diary’, there are three fabricated documents relevant to James Maybrick. We’re presented with the fake Orpheus petition and an official denial that he was ever a member of that lodge. Supplementing this is a bogus document of ‘resignation’ underpinned by ancillary documentation that translates as a resignation from Masonry itself. These hoaxes are as contemporaneous as they are Freemasonic, and it is in that contiguity that the murder of James Maybrick and the subsequent framing of his wife pushes at the boundaries of credulity.
The ‘Maybrick Mystery’, is the substance of the last part of this narrative, wherein every institutionalised deceit characterising the scandal of the Ripper ascends to its apogee in a corruption called the trial of Florence Maybrick.
Meanwhile, a psychopath was still in the business of laying his pipe. There would be more letters ‘from America’, and many more with a focus on a madman living in Liverpool. On 9 October 1888 the Liverpool Echo had published a letter from a Ripper in Dublin, miffed at a Ripper in Liverpool, who in a letter to that same newspaper claimed himself as the genuine item. His complaint was published in the Echo on 10 October:
A LIVERPOOL FANATIC
The subjoined communication was addressed to the Liverpool Echo office yesterday on an ordinary postcard:–
Stafford Street
Dear Sir, – I beg to state that the letters published in yours of yesterday are lies. It is somebody gulling the public. I am the Whitechapel purger. On 13th, at 3 p.m., will be on Stage, as am going to New York. But will have some business before I go – Yours truly,
Jack the Ripper
DIEGO LAURENZ
(Genuine)
The intention to plant Jack as a ‘Liverpool maniac’ can be judged by the strapline ‘A LIVERPOOL FANATIC’, the city’s premier newspaper subscribing to the amateur-dramatic horseshit that its correspondent is a Mad Liverpool Resident.
On the same afternoon that letter was published, Wednesday, 10 October, Jack underpinne
d his literary efforts by turning up in person (the Marsh family had had a similar visitation to their shop in Whitechapel from an Irish cleric ). Published under the title ‘A STRANGE LIVERPOOL STORY’, it was reported by the Bradford Telegraph on 12 October. The gist of it concerns a young lady who was walking along Shiel Road, Liverpool, when she was abruptly stopped by an elderly woman, ‘who in an agitated and excited manner urged her most earnestly not to go into the park. She explained that a few minutes previously she had been resting on one of the seats in the park when she was accosted by a respectable looking man, dressed in a black coat, light trousers and a soft felt hat, who enquired if she knew if there were any loose women about the neighbourhood, and immediately afterwards he produced a knife with a long thin blade, and stated that he intended to kill as many women in Liverpool as in London, adding that he would send the ears of the first victim to the Editor of a Liverpool newspaper.’
As can be imagined, this somewhat freaked the old duck, and she made off, ‘trembling violently’ as she related her story. It was taken seriously, the Telegraph reporting that a ‘Detective from the Criminal Investigation Department at London has journeyed to Liverpool to investigate the movements of a suspicious character’.16
Thus on one day, 10 October 1888, we have a Liverpool fanatic in the paper and a Liverpool fanatic in the park, both going to some lengths in their claim to be Jack the Ripper. It was reasonable to assume that there was a lunatic in the city, and it is this assumption the authorities were invited to make. ‘Diego’ is the Spanish equivalent of the English ‘James’. San Diego (St James) is the patron saint of Spain. Diego Laurenz, alias James the Ripper, was in Liverpool.
But more important, let’s look at the name in context. We have a Liverpool Fanatic, and a Jack the Ripper (‘Genuine’) whose Christian name is James. Plus we have a correspondent in Scotland signing himself ‘May – bee’. Ergo, with minimal extrapolation, we have a possible Jack the Ripper in Liverpool, called James May(bee). Now, it’s my contention that James May(brick) was being set up as part of the Funny Little Game. All that would be required to finger him was for some unimpeachable individual to come along and make sense of the ‘pipe’. I believe this informant was Michael Maybrick, stage-managing his Masonic brother.
To investigate this proposition further, we must return to another letter out of Scotland (one of what I call the ‘McRipper clump’), dated the same day as ‘May – bee’, and posted one day before DIEGO LAURENZ.
‘May – bee’ was posted in Edinburgh, and the following letter is postmarked ‘Galashiels’, a town on the concert circuit about thirty miles to the south. It’s dated (implausibly) 8 October 1888, but it wasn’t received in London until 11 October.
8/10/88
Galayshiels
Dear Boss
I have to thank you and my Brother in trade, Jack the Ripper for your kindness in letting me away out of Whitechapel I am on my road to the tweed factories. I will let the Innerleithen Constable or Police men know when I am about to start my nice Little game. I have got my Knife replenished so it will answer both for Ladies and Gents Other 5 Tweed ones and I have won my wager
I am yours
Truly
The Ripper
This text is a specific illustration of the point I make. The ego is at it, and he can’t help himself. There is a Jack the Ripper, ‘my brother in trade’, and the signatory himself, simply ‘The Ripper’. This is perhaps the only letter we have referring to them as two different people, the former buried in a pun that is easy to deconstruct. James Maybrick is the ‘brother in trade’.
And on the reverse, it is signed ‘The Ripper’.
Here is Florence Aunspaugh actually using almost the same words in a letter as ‘The Ripper’ uses in his: ‘These English cotton brokers literally despised Michael. He spoke of the English Cotton Broker as, “Traded People”.’
Michael Maybrick was an insufferable snob, up there in his psychopathic ether. He looked down from above on those around him, and especially the little people like Brother James.
I want a last look at another letter before moving on to the Masonically inspired atrocity of Mary Kelly. It’s a Neanderthal scribble which provides another example of Bro James Maybrick as ‘Jack’.
Dear Boss
I am going to say that I’m not going to rip any more up in Whitechapel but one and that is one who was kicking up a row outside a public house in Commercial Road a few night ago I am going to Poplar and Bromley & Plaistow. Five nice fat un I got I will give em [illegible] I live in a dust yards my name is (He Yes still ripping em up) You will hear of me to morrow a good un because it is my birthday.
Written in red ink with no date, this letter is of interest for two reasons. Firstly because its author says he’s going to Poplar, Bromley and Plaistow; and second because he says that the following day is his birthday. I’m looking for towns, and for any birthday that might be of significance. Originally filed by the police as Number 269, the letter following in the sequence, Number 270, has a date of receipt of 24 October 1888.
If 270 was received on 24 October, it’s reasonable to assume that 269 was received on or about 23 October, the day before the birthday ‘tomorrow’. 24 October 1888 was James Maybrick’s fiftieth birthday. Before anyone starts telling me 269/270 is an irrelevant coincidence, let’s see if we can harden it up.
In 269 the Ripper says he’s going to Bromley, and as far as my candidate is concerned, that’s exactly where he went. Bromley is an unlikely night out for Jack the Ripper. It was a bucolic middle-class conurbation in Kent, about a dozen miles south-east of London, and hardly a place for the Whitechapel Fiend. Yet Jack was in town at this time, and we have another letter confirming it. It’s addressed to ‘Inspector Reilly, Bromley Police Station’. No date, and as usual there’s no stamp. There’s no postmark either, meaning it was almost certainly delivered to the police station by hand.
Sir
I received your letter beware you are doomed Delaney will make it hot for you
United U.F. Brotherhood
If you will give me 100 pounds I will inform you where the Whitechapel Murderer is hiding But if you don’t choose then he will start work on some of the hores of Bromley
Jack the Ripper
We don’t know why Jack the Ripper would chose to relocate to Bromley, but we do know why Michael Maybrick got on a train and travelled there in that last week of October 1888.
I think it’s of note that, like the ‘my brother in trade’ letter, Jack’s Bromley letter switches in and out of the first and third person, reiterating his obsession with the sum of £100 as it does so: ‘If you will give me 100 pounds I will inform you where the Whitechapel Murderer is hiding But if you don’t … then he will start work on some of the hores of Bromley.’
Thus we have a Jack the Ripper and Michael Maybrick in Bromley, one to hand-deliver his letter, and the other to sing a song: ‘Mr Maybrick gave a very spirited rendering of Mendelssohn’s “I’m a Roamer”,’ reported the Musical World – and under the circumstances he could hardly have made a more appropriate choice. Throughout the autumn of 1888 Michael Maybrick was almost perpetually on the road, or rather the rails, clocking up thousands of miles on his provincial dates. Jack was similarly on the move, keeping the thrill alive with his letters. On 8 November Maybrick was singing at a Conservative Club in Surrey, and by 9 November both he and Jack were back in London.
15
‘The Ezekiel Hit’
The key to the whole subject may be found in the Book of Ezekiel.
Charles Warren, November 1886
The police investigation and subsequent coroner’s court inquiry into the murder of Mary Jane Kelly were utterly corrupt. Evidence was withheld or distorted, destruction of files wholesale, and lying the norm. Kelly’s Metropolitan Police file contains not much more than you’d expect the police to accrue from an average road accident. But secrecy itself is revealing, and in Kelly’s case the less there is, the more there
is to uncover.
Mary Jane Kelly was a twenty-four-year-old Catholic who differed from Jack’s previous hits on two notable counts. Although by circumstance a part-time slut, she was younger and prettier than the rest, and unlike other victims she was butchered indoors, in her own little room just off Dorset Street, in Whitechapel. We don’t know much about her, and we don’t actually need to. She ran into the Ripper early in the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888. I think the date had significance for Jack. Firstly, because it was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Parade and Banquet at Mansion House, where London’s elite, including Prime Minister Salisbury and Sir Charles Warren himself, would dine. To upstage this mob of distinguished grown-ups sounds like a perfect Ripper day to me. Secondly, 9 November was the birthday of the world’s most eminent Freemason, no less than its Grand Master, HRH Edward, Prince of Wales. Anticipating the murder of Johnnie Gill in Bradford, the Ripper promised ‘Charlie, Dear Charlie’ a ‘Christmas Box’ – so why not a birthday present for England’s future King, ‘the pot-bellied pig’, according to Jack, ‘whose tool he would cut off’. Further references to personages royal were made in a letter dated the day before Mary Kelly’s murder – timed, I believe, not only to screw the Prince’s birthday, but to coincide with and fuck up the Commissioner’s night out.
Whitechapel
8/11/88
Dear Boss
I am still knocking about down Whitechapel I mean to put to Death all the dirty old ores because I have caught the pox and cannot piss I have not done any murders lately but you will find one done before long. I shall send you the kidney and cunt so that you can see where my prick has been up I am in one of the lodging houses in Osborn street but you will have a job to catch me I shoudent advise any coppers to catch hold of me because I shall do the same to him as I have done to others. Old packer the man I bought the grapes off saw me the other night but was to frighten to say anything to the police. he must have been a fool when there is such a reward offered never mind the reward will not be given. You will hear from me a little later on that I have done another murder. But not just yet. Dear Boss if I see you about I shall cut your throat. The Old Queen is none other but one of those old ores I have Been up her arse and shot sponk up her
They All Love Jack Page 54