You don’t chop with a knife, you chop with a chopper. Given the total news blackout, nobody but Kelly’s murderer could have known this. There is no doubt that Jack turned up that morning with some kind of hatchet.
Crime-scene photographs indicate that ‘Kelly’s left femur has been split longitudinally from the hip downwards, exposing the marrow cavity. The outer part of the bone [cortex] stands out in clear relief. Now such an injury – the cleaving of the long bone in a healthy young adult – can only be inflicted with a weapon such as a hatchet. It is impossible with a knife, no matter how robust.’ This assessment comes not from Dr Phillips, but from a surgeon 120 years later. ‘The existence of the split thigh bone is unequivocal evidence a hatchet was used.’23
He killed her and killed her, attacking every quarter of her being except her eyes. Maybe there was something about her ‘watching’ what he did to her that gave him pleasure? Certainly the outstanding feature of this butchery was revenge. Few humans had ever broadcast their hatred like this. The ‘cunt’ had done it to him, and now he was doing it to ‘her’. He perchance teased her in death with sweet names, made love to her with his hate. He hacked off her leg and cut out her heart, taking it for a deserved trophy. He may have kissed her missing lips, the lips he owned, savouring her bloody skull, masturbating, as he said he did, before bidding his whore-bitch carcass adieu.24
The consensus amongst Ripperologists is that Mary Kelly was the last of the victims; she had to be, in order to sustain the invention of the ‘canonical’. Summing up her murder, Colin Wilson wrote, ‘Jack the Ripper left Miller’s Court and walked out of history.’
That comes nicely off the page, but he didn’t. He walked out into Dorset Street. Not a few minutes later, ‘a gentleman engaged in business, stated he was walking through Mitre Square at about ten minutes past ten on Friday morning, when a tall well dressed man, carrying a parcel under his arm, and rushing along in a very excited manner, ran into him. The man’s face was covered with blood splashes, and his collar and shirt were also blood stained. The gentleman did not know at the time anything of the murder.’25
Whoever this ‘gentleman engaged in business’ was, he was another possibly vital witness ignored by MacDonald’s court. An acrimonious air of deceit hung over it. At this point I may as well interrupt with a piece from The Times. Like everybody on the jury, the press were conned.
The jury had no questions to ask at this stage, and it was understood that more detailed evidence of the medical examination would be given at a further hearing. An adjournment for a few minutes then took place, and on return of the jury the Coroner said, ‘It has come to my ears that somebody has been making a statement to some of the jury as to their right and duty of being here. Has anyone during the interval spoken to the jury, saying that they should not be here today?’ Some jurymen replied in the negative. The Coroner: ‘Then I must have been misinformed. I should have taken good care that he would have had a quiet life for the rest of the week if anybody had interfered with my jury.’
Anybody except himself, who was also interfering with the course of justice. In his statement, MacDonald pretended that his enquiries were going on ‘for the rest of the week’, when in fact they were not. His ‘inquest’ was bent from the start, and by the end palpably illegal. We have Mr Tom Cullen to thank for digging up the statute. As he points out, since the thirteenth century the fundamentals of a coroner’s court have been carefully set down in English law. The court must not only determine the cause of death, the nature and number of injuries, including their ‘breadth and deepness’, but in the case of homicide, ‘with what weapon, and in what part of the body the wound or hurt is’.26 In other words, unless the jury knew what weapons did the deed and how often they did it, they cannot possibly deliver an acceptable verdict – verdictum, true speech. ‘All these things must be enrolled in the roll of the Coroner,’ writes Cullen, something MacDonald knew like thirst, ‘yet he deliberately chose to suppress this evidence [his emphasis]. What were the police trying to hide?’27
‘The injuries inflicted upon the seventh victim, Mary Janet Kelly,’ wrote J. Hall Richardson in 1889, ‘have not been placed on public record. One result was to put into circulation a number of statements which may or may not have been in accordance with the truth, but which were misleading because not authorized. “Crowner’s quest law” unmistakably sets out the necessity of recording the nature of all the wounds, the description of the weapon by which they were produced, and the circumstances under which they were inflicted, so that the action of Dr MacDonald in the Dorset Street case cannot be taken as a safe precedent.’28
MacDonald was too busy bullying to trouble himself with such niceties. Screw the rules, and screw the jury; and he was in immediate conflict with both. From the beginning the jury of Shoreditch men smelt a rat, and it was him. MacDonald had been sneaked in, and a subsequent row over jurisdiction was resolved with the police having their way. But the jury did not like it.
Stephen Knight gives a good account of the MacDonald/Met confederation, and I’m pleased to acknowledge dipping into it. ‘The murder had taken place in Baxter’s territory, the Whitechapel district,’ he writes, ‘but the inquest was finally held at Shoreditch Town Hall. This was an unprecedented deviation, and inspired one juror to take the new coroner to task.’ He said: ‘I do not see why we should have the inquest thrown upon our shoulders when the murder did not happen in our district, but Whitechapel.’
This was a reality contested by no one except the coroner’s officer. ‘It did not happen in Whitechapel,’ said Mr Hammond. It apparently only ‘appeared’ to happen in Whitechapel, and thus the H Division police including Abberline, Arnold and Beck, were at 29 Dorset Street in error. Hammond’s point was as foolish as the location of the hearing itself, purposely chosen to keep dissenting voices out. ‘The room in which the inquest was held was exceptionally small, and very few of the general public were admitted.’29 Among those excluded were two of the witnesses who’d seen Kelly alive on 9 November, and indeed the man who’d seen her the night before. Where was Hutchinson and his ‘man in spats’?
MACDONALD: Do you think we do not know what we’re doing here? The jury are summoned in the ordinary way, and they have no business to object. If they persist in their objection I shall know how to deal with them. Does any juror persist in objecting?
JUROR (objecting): We are summoned for the Shoreditch District. This affair happened in Spitalfields.
MACDONALD (lying): It happened within my district.
JUROR # 2: This is not my district. I come from Whitechapel, and Mr Baxter is my coroner.
MACDONALD: I am not going to discuss the subject with the jurymen at all. If any juryman says he distinctly objects, let him say so. I may tell the jurymen that jurisdiction lies where the body lies, not where it is found.
‘There are definite signs the coroner was on the side of the police,’ writes Ripperologist Mr Stewart Evans – raising the question, whose ‘side’ were the police on? Unequivocally we must conclude it was that of a psychopath. The police were the opponents of the people, and the bullying of the jury was a manifestation of it.
Where was Arnold? Where was Anderson? The Assistant Commissioner seemed permanently beset by difficulties with the truth, but here he wasn’t even asked to lie. MacDonald’s inquiry was a whitewash, a flagrant contempt of the people and of the law he was entrusted to administer on their behalf. He led everyone to believe there would be further hearings, and via such duplicity managed to wrap this up that same day. ‘There is other evidence which I do not propose to call,’ he lickspittled, ‘for if we at once make public every facet brought forward in connection with this terrible murder, the ends of justice will be retarded.’
Where have we heard that before? Almost word for word it is what Bro Phillips said when trying to sneak his way around truth of the ritualistic carve-up suffered by Annie Chapman. What ‘ends of justice’? When was justice ever done?
‘MacDonald
not only broke the law in suppressing evidence,’ writes Stephen Knight, ‘but was under instruction to do so, for no government action was taken to correct the situation, despite indignant leaders in the national newspapers, like that of the Daily Telegraph.’
It is in the power of the Attorney General to apply to the High Court of Justice to hold a new inquest, if he is satisfied that there has been irregularity of proceedings, or insufficiency of enquiry. This course is improbable as it is stated that Doctor Phillips, the Divisional Surgeon of Police, with whom the Coroner consulted in private, had had a commission from the Home Office for some time and does not consider himself a ‘free agent’,30 but it is pointed out that by hurriedly closing the inquest the opportunity has been lost of putting on record statements made on oath and where the memory of witnesses is fresh. It is not improbable that a long interval may elapse before a prisoner is charged at a police court.
‘A long interval’. How about forever? The Telegraph makes good sense, but had a rather romantic view of the Attorney General. Bro Sir Richard Webster was unlikely to get into a tizz over ‘irregularity of proceedings’ or ‘insufficiency of enquiry’, because he was presently up to his chops in the government-inspired conspiracy to destroy Charles Parnell. Webster was in situ to look after the legal needs of Viscount Salisbury, not to wet-nurse silly fantasies of upholding the law.
It will be remembered that it was this same Attorney General who manipulated proceedings in the matter of Cleveland Street, telling the House of Commons, ‘No good is done by reporting cases of this description [i.e. buggery, perjury, perversion of the course of justice], and it is generally to the credit of the reporters of the press, that they almost invariably refrain from reporting them.’31
This phenomenon was about to be dramatically demonstrated in Fleet Street, silencing every newspaper including the Telegraph. Once again, Mr Knight sums up well: ‘In normal circumstances, the Home Office would have been eager for justice to have been done. But with Jack the Ripper they were not.’32
Which, under the circumstances, might be considered a classic example of putting it mildly. If every law in the land could be bent as and when required, then a little sportive butchery by one of their own amongst the animal class presented few problems. At Miller’s Court the lousy fairy tales came to an abrupt end. There would be no more ‘Leather Aprons’, no more ‘Insane Medical Students’, ‘Womb-Collectors’ or diminutive ‘Nautical Men’. There would be no more Jack the Ripper.
‘The most extraordinary thing,’ writes Mr Paul Begg, ‘is that whilst one would have expected the murder of Mary Kelly, by far the most horrendous of the series, to have sparked the press and public into another outburst of outrage and panic and sensationalism, the reverse was the case. Press interest poured away like bathwater when the plug is pulled out.’33 And Patricia Cornwell writes, ‘Immediately the press fell silent. It was as if the Ripper case was closed.’34
It was. Ha ha.
Another voice was silenced after Kelly, and it belonged to Mr George Lusk. Here was a man who had organised a Vigilance Committee, called public meetings, caused posters to be put up, and spent weeks shouting himself hoarse. He had predicted that the murders would continue, and they had. His worst fears and warnings had proved absolutely correct with this, the worst outrage of them all. A young woman had been hacked to meat; he had been vindicated. Now at last they must listen – and naturally Mr Lusk had nothing whatsoever to say. Silence. The man who had written letters to the Queen was at a sudden loss for words; like the press, the loudest voice in Whitechapel fell mute.
Now, this outburst of indifference doesn’t play. The question has to be, is there anything of significance in Lusk’s inexplicable speechlessness? I can answer the question with another. What is it that Bro Lusk, Bro Warren, and dear old Bro Jack had in common? As a matter of fact, what did a majority of the British ruling elite (including Attorney General Bro Richard Webster and the future King of England) have in common with the Whitechapel Thriller? We might now take an educated guess as to why Bro Lusk, Doric Lodge (993), and the press were silent after Kelly. Freemasonry was endemic in the police, in the judiciary and in Fleet Street. It filtered from on high down to the lesser ranks as and when required, just as ‘stupidity’ was imposed on honest policemen from above. Masonry was the motor-drive of Yack the Ripper, and Freemasonry covered it up, in the police, the judiciary, the coroners’ courts and the press.
Not so the American newspapers, which suffered no such strictures, and didn’t give a damn for the Brits and their Establishment shenanigans. ‘It takes an event like this to show the London Press and London Police at their very worst,’ was the view of the New York Times. Picking up where Fleet Street left off, the American papers published news the British weren’t allowed to read.
Carefully nurtured propaganda (requiring the public to distance themselves from blood-guzzling Israelites) wasn’t replicated in the American press – in fact, entirely the opposite. ‘He is probably a monster of superior intelligence,’ wrote the New York Tribune after Kelly, ‘in all other respects sleek and sane.’35 ‘He seems to have an almost supernatural ability to disappear and leave no trace of himself behind,’ wrote the same newspaper, dismissing the make-believe ‘lair’ and suggesting how Jack might do it: ‘By taking a cab or the underground railway, he could break the trail and in a short time, place miles between him and his pursuers.’36
Three cheers for the obvious. The ‘trail’ referred to is that supposed to have been followed by Warren and his cancelled dogs. The bloodhound tactic didn’t go down well with the US press, which universally identified it as the bullshit it was. ‘The idea of using Bloodhounds as trackers in the heart of a densely populated district was so preposterous that it is amazing,’ came another open-mouth from the Tribune, which added, ‘The only type of Bloodhound that could hunt down the Fiend is one that is apparently unknown in London – a real detective.’37 The condemnation from the American press was ubiquitous and harsh. Only one thing was certain: Jack the Ripper could go on murdering ‘without fear of any interference on behalf of the London Police’.38
Despite Sir Melville Macnaghten’s later efforts, the American consensus was that the Ripper was a religious nut, but not insane. A discussion held in New York City by the Society of Medical Jurisprudence and State Medicine was reported in the New York Times. ‘These slaughters,’ said one of the participating physicians, ‘are wholly within the lines of the habitual conduct of barbarous ancestors, indulged in for the pleasurable sensation of witnesses’ tortures. Cruel mutilations are not therefore, inconsistent with average soundness of mind. The Whitechapel murderer is behind the times. He is an anachronism, but not necessarily to be accorded the charity of considering himself insane.’39
To précis the American press, we’ve got a sleek, highly intelligent ‘religious’ fanatic who possibly takes the underground.40 He seems to possess almost supernatural powers of evaporation, but these are assisted by the police’s blundering stupidity, their only efficiency devoted to keeping the press away and thus maintaining public ignorance.41
But American journalists didn’t have Bro Sir Richard Webster on their necks, and did better than their British counterparts. Out of the morass of police criticism, I pick one last astonishing quote. It comes again from the New York Tribune, and was published eight months after Kelly, when Jack had triggered yet another scandalous cover-up with his bestial fingernails in Castle Alley. Ignoring pitiful lackeys like Bro Dr Bagster Phillips, this long-dead journalist sat down to think. ‘Who’, he asked, and ‘what’ was this ‘mystery’ all about? He then went on to hit the nail right on its hideous head, suggesting the murders might have something to do with the Prophet Ezekiel.42
Bingo. He had just busted right into Bro Jack’s thinking.
Our American scribe isn’t the only one to associate Jack with the abominable Prophet. Preceding him by six months, and moving on from his ‘assassin’ or ‘firm of assassins’, Bro George R. S
ims graced his column with this: ‘This theory, which for purposes of reference may be called “the Ezekiel theory”, is probably as near the mark as any of the “guesses at truth” which have been so plentiful of late. A new murder is confidently anticipated by the Vigilance Committee for this (Saturday) night, and extraordinary precautions have been taken to prevent the man who has taken the Book of Ezekiel too literally walking off again.’43
Ezekiel was what Bro Dr Bagster Phillips’s visit to the Home Office was all about. Phillips wasn’t a ‘free agent’, but an agent of the ‘Mystic Tie’. Even Mr Philip Sugden agrees that ‘from Phillips, above all others, we might have expected an authentic report about the condition of the body [of Kelly], but he tells us almost nothing. Certainly he spoke at the inquest three days later. On this occasion however, he deliberately suppressed the details of Mary’s injuries.’44
And what were the details you would have liked him to reveal, Phil? Is it the geography of an atrocity according to the instructions of Masonry’s Boss icon, the Prophet Ezekiel? Suppression was the name of the game, including the theft of Kelly’s heart. This had been promised in a ‘hoax’ letter eight days before: ‘I am going, to commit three more murders, two women and a child, and I shall take away their hearts.’ He took Mary Kelly’s heart, and he would prop Johnnie Gill’s under his chin. But of course for the Victorian police and Ripperology, this letter was of no consequence.
Preceding Kelly’s murder, there was a notable adjustment in several of Jack’s letters. He converted the usual mocking ‘Ha ha’ into a double ‘Ah Ah’. Below are a couple of examples, the first in a letter of 30 October, and the second 4 November.
Nothing happens by accident. What was in his head?
‘It is to be remembered that the Prophet Ezekiel,’ wrote our perceptive American journalist, ‘is referring to the wanton lives of the sisters Ahola and Aholiba.’ And so was the Ripper. Jack’s thinking begins at Ezekiel 23. The nasty old maniac is incandescent with rage towards all whores/women in general, but specifically towards two sisters, [Ah]ola and [Ah]oliba, a couple of the racy little sluts Ezekiel and Jack abhor. The Freemasonic Seal of the Grand Lodge of England begins to tell the tale. And what it’s talking about is Ezekiel. On the left we see the compasses on the square, and on the right, done up in armorial disguise, the four elements of Ezekiel’s second vision, to wit the Lion, the Ox, the Man and the Eagle. Underneath, usefully, is the Grand Motto of Freemasonry: ‘Hear, See, Say Nothing’.
They All Love Jack Page 56