by Paul Roland
‘GWB’ – an old man’s confession
The late Daniel Farson was one of the most respected Ripper scholars, whose most celebrated coup was the rediscovery of the Macnaghten Memoranda. His reputation made him an obvious clearing house for every crackpot theory regarding the Ripper, but one item of correspondence that he received in 1959 had an air of authenticity which he found difficult to dismiss.
The letter was sent from Australia by a man who signed himself ‘GWB’. In it, he told of his childhood in London’s East End during the late-1880s when his mother would chide him to come inside by calling, ‘Come in, Georgie, or Jack the Ripper will get you.’ On one occasion his father, a drunken brute, patted his son on the head and assured the boy that he would be the last person the Ripper would touch.
His father grew increasingly violent, beating Georgie’s mother so frequently that father and son stopped speaking to each other for many years. One evening in 1902, Georgie attempted a reconciliation with his father before sailing for Australia. It was then that the old man admitted that he had taken to drink in despair after having fathered a mentally retarded daughter, Georgie’s only sister. Having got that off his chest, the old man evidently felt that the moment was right to unburden himself of another secret and confessed to his son that he was guilty of the Whitechapel murders.
He explained that whenever he was violently drunk and the mood would take him he would seek out prostitutes and gut them with a sharp knife, avoiding the risk of getting blood on his clothes by wearing a second pair of trousers over his regular clothes which he would dispose of in the manure he was paid to deliver during the day.
A confession withheld
The old man urged Georgie to change his name when he reached Australia as he had made up his mind to go to the police and make a full statement before his death, but although the boy did as his father told him to the old man appears not to have been able to summon up the courage to confess.
Farson was of the opinion that the story was so simple and credible that it may just have been true. The father appeared to fit the description submitted by Lawende, who saw the murderer at Mitre Square, when the father would have been 38. But how seriously can one take the confession of a drunkard who had failed to make anything of himself and might have been merely bragging to impress his son, or perhaps to spite him by leaving the boy with the belief that he wouldn’t amount to anything as he had come from tainted stock?
The discovery of Elizabeth Stride.
Portrait of a killer – Walter Sickert (1860–1942)
Interest in the Whitechapel murders has recently been rekindled as a result of the publicity surrounding crime novelist Patricia Cornwell’s personally financed investigation into the killings for her book Portrait Of A Killer. Cornwell is said to have spent $4 million of her own money to obtain original historical documents and to fund private scientific analysis of DNA specimens which she claims prove that the Victorian painter Walter Sickert was the Ripper. Ripperologists contend that her theory is fanciful in the extreme, that the science is inconclusive and that her deductions are fundamentally flawed.
The idea that Sickert might have been the Ripper was first advanced by author Donald McCormick in his study The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959), expanded upon by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976) and made the subject of Jean Overton Fuller’s Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (1990) as well as Melvyn Fairclough’s Ripper and the Royals (2002). All five authors based their argument on the belief that Sickert had an unhealthy obsession with the seamier aspect of London life and the Whitechapel murders in particular and also that he used prostitutes as models. But the fact of the matter is that nearly all artists of the period paid prostitutes to model for them as they had no reservations about removing their clothes and they were readily available in the bohemian areas where the artists had their studios.
Sickert found inspiration in the bustle of the music halls and cafés, as had his French Impressionist friends whose style he had adopted. A basic knowledge of Sickert’s technique reveals that what might appear to be mutilations in the faces of his figures are simply the result of his spontaneous Impressionistic stylings and have no sinister meaning.
The inspiration for the series of morbid ‘Camden Town’ paintings was not the Whitechapel murders, but the murder of Emily Dimmock in 1907 which Sickert was familiar with, being a resident of the area at the time. The claim that Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim, was the subject for this series of morbid paintings appears to have been yet another after-dinner yarn spun by Joseph Gorman Sickert, the creator of the equally fanciful royal conspiracy tale. Gorman claims to be Walter’s illegitimate son, but has offered no conclusive proof of his parentage.
Scenes of crime?
Walter Sickert’s obsession with the Ripper appears to have originated around the same time as his landlady had shared her suspicions regarding a medical student who had been her lodger at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Much has been made of the fact that Sickert was in the habit of dressing as the Ripper, but he was also known to dress up as other historical and fictional characters. It was an expression of his eccentricity and perhaps a habit left over from his earlier life as an actor.
A more serious accusation is that Sickert included details in his paintings which only the murderer would have known. Here we venture into the murky world of the conspiracy theorist who sees hidden meanings where none were intended, but there is nothing in Sickert’s paintings which has any direct bearing on the Ripper murders. Cornwell calls attention to the similarity between the positioning of the models in Sickert’s paintings and the position of the bodies at the crime scenes, but Mary Kelly was the only victim photographed at the crime scene. The other women were photographed at the mortuary. As for Cornwell’s assertion that a pearl necklace worn by one of Sickert’s models was symbolic of blood droplets, the less said the better.
As for a motive, Cornwell claims Sickert was rendered sterile by the appearance of a fistula on his penis and so took his frustration out on prostitutes. But Sickert was a notorious ‘immoralist . . . with a swarm of children of provenances which are not possible to count’, commented his friend Jacques-Emile Blanche. And the fistula was mere family hearsay, according to his nephew John Lessore.
Sickert may have been an eccentric and later suffered depression but he was not a psychopath. As a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche reveals, he did not have an all-consuming hatred of prostitutes. Quite the contrary. ‘From 9 to 4, it is an uninterrupted joy, caused by these pretty, little, obliging models who laugh and unembarrassingly be themselves while posing like angels. They are glad to be there, and are not in a hurry.’
Suspect science
The cornerstone of Cornwell’s case is that her team of forensic scientists discovered a sequence of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) on several ‘Ripper letters’ which matched DNA recovered from letters written by Sickert. The first problem with this assertion is that there is no proof that the letters received by Scotland Yard in 1888 were written by the Ripper. Quite the contrary. Various high-ranking police officials have stated that they believe the two most infamous letters, the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘Saucy Jack’ postcard, to be a hoax perpetrated by a journalist who had abused his access to inside information and was known to them by name.
The second problem with this particular line of inquiry is that many people have handled both the ‘Ripper’ and Sickert letters over the course of the past 125 years which, as any forensic expert knows, could have seriously compromised the evidence, rendering them practically useless for proving anything. In fact, the original nuclear DNA tests came back negative and Cornwell’s team were forced to rely on mtDNA testing which only suggested a possible link. However, mtDNA is a less rigorous test and many individuals can share a similar molecular sequence. These sequences are not unique. On Cornwell’s own admission, as many as 400,000 people might have shared that particular molecular pattern in Victorian England. With
out a sample of DNA taken from Sickert himself or one of his direct descendants no conclusive link can be established and nothing can be stated for certain. For all we know Sickert might have used a sponge to moisten the stamps and seal the envelopes as was a common practice at the time or, as is suspected, a servant might have posted his letters.
In total, 600 letters purporting to be from the killer remain in the police archives (many hundreds more were destroyed). So it is quite likely that with such a large sampling to choose from there is a good chance that one or two letters might have residual DNA that would be a reasonably close match to a specific suspect. But to identify and convict an individual, forensic science demands a positive match – a reasonable proportion of similar characteristics is not sufficient proof. Furthermore, the ‘Ripper letter’ which Patricia Cornwell claims contains both Sickert’s DNA and a watermark found in his own writing paper was never considered a genuine letter by students of the case. So the worst that could be said of Sickert is that he may have been guilty of writing hoax Ripper letters to the police, which does not make him the killer.
An artist abroad
But the most damning evidence against Cornwell’s imaginative theory is the fact that Sickert, it appears, was not in London during the time of the murders, but in France. On 6 September 1888, Sickert’s mother wrote describing how much Walter and his brother Bernhard were enjoying their holiday in St Valery-en-Caux, and on 16 September Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote to his father describing a congenial visit he had made to Walter there. On 21 September Walter’s wife Ellen wrote to her brother-in-law stating that her husband had been holidaying in France for several weeks.
Even allowing for the fact that Walter Sickert was wealthy enough to travel to and from England on the ferry as Cornwell suggests, it seems ludicrous even to consider the possibility that he absented himself from a holiday in France to return to Whitechapel to murder prostitutes whose company he evidently enjoyed and then add obscure clues in his paintings as a boast or confession. What it does prove is that Jack the Ripper continues to intrigue us and will no doubt do so for many more years to come.
A prime suspect – Francis Tumblety (1833–1903)
In 1993, while making a final inventory of his stock, retiring Surrey bookshop owner Eric Barton came across a bundle of letters relating to the Whitechapel murders. His initial feeling was that they were mere curiosities of the period and of as little value as the hundreds of hoax letters received by Scotland Yard during the autumn of 1888. He considered tossing them into the dustbin, but fortunately thought better of it and instead offered them to Suffolk police constable Stewart Evans, who had been a keen collector of Ripper memorabilia since his teens. Evans immediately saw the significance of one particular piece of correspondence written 25 years after the murders by Detective John George Littlechild to journalist George Sims, in which Littlechild named a prime suspect whom Evans had never heard of before, one whose activities and profile appeared to fit the Ripper profile perfectly – Dr Francis Tumblety. The Littlechild letter has been verified as genuine by forensic experts and no one is disputing its authenticity.
‘Knowing the great interest you take in all matters criminal, and abnormal, I am just going to inflict one more letter on you on the “Ripper” subject. Letters as a rule are only a nuisance when they call for a reply but this does not need one. I will try and be brief.
I never heard of a Dr D. in connection with the Whitechapel murders but amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. (which sounds much like D.) He was an American quack named Tumblety and was at one time a frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of police, there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a “Sycopathia Sexualis” subject he was not known as a “Sadist” (which the murderer unquestionably was) but his feelings toward women were remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record. Tumblety was arrested at the time of the murders in connection with unnatural offences and charged at Marlborough Street, remanded on bail, jumped his bail, and got away to Boulogne. He shortly left Boulogne and was never heard of afterwards. It was believed he committed suicide but certain it is that from this time the “Ripper” murders came to an end.’
It was only by a quirk of fate that Tumblety, an Irish-American, had come to the attention of Inspector Littlechild, who was then investigating Irish Nationalist terror activities on the British mainland. Tumblety had no interest in politics. The only interest he served was his own. A rabid egomaniac and shameless self-publicist, he was wanted in the USA and Canada for posing as a doctor and peddling patent medicines of dubious merit, some of them allegedly lethal. The only known photograph shows him sporting a military-style uniform to which he was certainly not entitled.
Francis Tumblety
Morbid interests
The finger of suspicion begins to point towards Tumblety when one recalls that the assistant curator of a London pathological museum claimed that he had been approached by an American doctor who had expressed interest in purchasing women’s sexual organs and was prepared to pay £20 for each specimen. As Littlechild noted in his letter to Sims, the police considered Tumblety a ‘psychopathia sexualis’ rather than a sadist. He may have simply had a morbid interest in collecting such objects, but his unhealthy obsession nevertheless makes him a more likely suspect than the suicidal Druitt, the harmless imbecile Kosminski or the semi-invalid Sir William Gull.
Further clues push Tumblety’s name to the very top of the list of prime suspects in the Ripper killings. Littlechild’s correspondent, the journalist George Sims, had been in Whitechapel at the time of the murders and some years later was approached by a woman who suspected that her lodger may have been the ‘Whitechapel fiend’. She had never learnt his name, only that he claimed to be an American doctor. The lodging house in question was at 22 Batty Street, which runs parallel to Berner Street where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found and is just ten minutes’ walk from the other murder sites, less than five if one is running. At the height of the panic there were rumours that a bloodstained shirt had been discovered in a Whitechapel boarding house and that it belonged to a lodger who had been seen by his landlady returning late at night bespattered with gore.
Although the incident had been widely reported in the national and provincial press at the time, modern researchers have either overlooked it or chosen to dismiss it out of hand as yet another lurid story whipped up by Victorian reporters eager to keep the story spinning – but it has since been confirmed that the house at 22 Batty Street was under surveillance. It is thought that the suspect may have realized that he was being watched and taken up residence elsewhere – namely the Charing Cross Hotel, where a suspicious black bag was later abandoned by a guest who fled the country just after the Ripper murder spree had come to an abrupt end.
After the bag had been advertised in the lost property columns to no avail, the hotel handed it to the police who made an inventory of its contents. Inside they found clothes, cheque books and pornographic prints. The cheque books led the police to cable the American authorities requesting samples of Tumblety’s handwriting, suggesting that Tumblety may have been both the owner of the black bag and possibly even the mysterious Batty Street lodger. But just as the case appeared to be drawing to a conclusion the British press fell suspiciously silent and the police were equally unforthcoming. Had the press been pressured to drop the story to save Scotland Yard further embarrassment after having let their prime suspect slip through their fingers?
Chase across the Atlantic
The New York World revealed that Tumblety had actually been arrested by the London police on 7 November, two days before the last Ripper murder, and charged with gross indecency. But they couldn’t hold him for what was legally no more than a misdemeanour. As soon as he was released on bail Tumblety fled first to France then returned to the USA.
Scotland Yard must have realized the enormity of their error, for they rap
idly despatched a senior detective and two colleagues across the Atlantic in hot pursuit.
They must have taken the possibility of Tumblety being the Ripper seriously, otherwise they would not have wasted such a valuable resource to recapture someone accused of a simple misdemeanour.
When Tumblety arrived in New York on 4 December 1888 looking ‘pale and excited’ according to contemporary accounts, he was met by two American detectives and surrounded by noisy newspapermen who wanted to know if he would confess to being Jack the Ripper. They had already questioned his family and acquaintances, most of whom unhesitatingly agreed that the man they knew could be capable of murder. But Tumblety evidently had no intention of being brought to account and fled his lodgings just two days after arriving in New York. Cheated of a good scoop, the most tenacious reporters left for Tumblety’s hometown of Rochester in upstate New York, where they tracked down his former neighbours. One remembered the young son of Irish immigrants selling pornography to the men working on the nearby canal. Another revealed that Tumblety used to work as a porter at the local hospital where, it is assumed, he picked up a grasp of medical knowledge which had given him a veneer of credibility.