by Paul Roland
Gruesome trophies
But Tumblety’s medical practice was not confined to peddling patent medicines. He is known to have attempted at least one crude abortion on a gullible prostitute and to have had a bizarre compulsion for collecting medical specimens. A gentleman acquaintance related a disturbing incident to an American reporter which may provide a motive for the hideous crimes Tumblety is accused of having committed in Whitechapel.
‘Someone asked why he hadn’t invited any women to his dinner. His face instantly became as black as a thundercloud . . . He said, “I don’t know any such cattle. But if I did I would, as your friend, sooner give you a dose of quick poison than to take you into such danger.” He then broke into a homily on the sin and folly of dissipation, fiercely denounced all women, especially fallen women. He then invited us into his office to illustrate his lecture, so to speak.’
The guests found themselves in a room brimming with a multitude of anatomical specimens preserved in glass jars including the wombs of ‘every class of women’. Could these have been trophies of his victims? And if so, what might have driven him to murder?
A focus for anger
Tumblety is thought to have been bisexual. It was only when he discovered that his wife had been a prostitute and that she continued to ply her trade during their marriage that he turned against all women and indulged in ‘unnatural vices’.
One would not expect a man with homosexual leanings to vent his anger on women, but rather on men, whom he might see as having ‘corrupted’ him. However, it is not inconceivable that Tumblety might have focused his anger on women in the belief that his wife’s rejection had forced him to seek the company of men.
And it is surely no coincidence that he committed his first indecency offence on the day of the first Whitechapel murder and that his subsequent offences coincided with the other killings. If he had been filled with self-loathing he might have attempted to exorcise his anger on a vulnerable target – the prostitutes who were substitutes for his wife.
He acquired a basic knowledge of abortions at the Rochester Infirmary, which would have enabled him to remove the organs within minutes and he is known to have collected such specimens. It is also possible that he might have used his rudimentary medical knowledge, respectable appearance and powers of persuasion to pass himself off as a doctor or even a back-street abortionist in the East End to obtain his victims’ confidence.
Whatever his methods, it is a matter of record that the Whitechapel murders began when he arrived in England and ceased shortly after he left. The accumulation of circumstantial evidence is compelling, but there is one final fact that might seem to seal the case against Francis Tumblety. When he died in St Louis in 1903, an inventory was made of his possessions. It included the expensive accessories one might expect such a flamboyant figure to possess – a gold pocket watch, jewellery and such. But there were two items which puzzled the nuns who had tended him during his final days: two imitation gold rings worth no more than $3 the pair. Could these have been the rings torn from the dead fingers of Annie Chapman?
The royal conspiracy
Journalist Stephen Knight titled his convoluted conspiracy study of the Whitechapel murders Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Subsequent research has proved that it was nothing of the kind. It was pure fiction, but for various reasons Knight’s dark romance captured the public imagination and has stubbornly refused to be displaced by the sordid, unvarnished facts.
The germ of Knight’s story took root in 1973 during research for a BBC docudrama which promised to provide a final solution to the mystery and reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper. Researchers initially approached an unnamed source in Scotland Yard who mentioned that there was a new theory going the rounds concerning a secret marriage between Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria, and an impoverished East End girl named Alice Mary Crook. The source suggested that the researchers should contact Joseph Sickert, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of the painter Walter Sickert and to be privy to the true story behind the Whitechapel murders.
According to Joseph Sickert, Prince Albert Victor – HRH the Duke of Clarence, known to his associates as ‘Prince Eddy’ – was in the habit of slumming in the East End with Sickert senior as his guide. During one particular sojourn among his less privileged subjects, he became infatuated with a lowly shop assistant, a girl by the name of Annie Crook. Annie was not only from a lower class but she was also a Catholic, which would mean that this Cinderella story could never have had a happy ending. But it was doomed the moment the Queen learned that the prince had fathered an illegitimate child and that he had married Annie in a secret ceremony in the hope of making their relationship official.
A dangerous scandal
If news of the relationship reached the newspapers it would cause more than a scandal – it could precipitate a revolution and bring down both the government and the monarchy. Cracks had already been appearing in the Empire’s foundations ever since Sir Charles Warren had ordered the merciless suppression of protestors in Trafalgar Square on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 13 November 1887. The unemployed were dossing down in Hyde Park and a mob had rampaged through the Mall throwing stones through the windows of gentlemen’s clubs. The Establishment was clearly a target for the disenfranchised, disenchanted and dispossessed. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee and the so-called yellow press (popular papers) were demanding social reforms to make the streets safe from criminals in the wake of the Ripper killings. One more provocation and the working class might just take to the streets with clubs, bricks and broken bottles to set the eye of the Empire ablaze.
Something drastic had to be done to smother the story before a journalist caught a sniff. In desperation the Queen entrusted the situation to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. According to Sickert, this loyal servant of the crown sent government agents to abduct the prince and his paramour from their Cleveland Street love nest and confine Annie in an asylum where no one would listen seriously to her tale of a royal plot. However, their plans for the child were thwarted by Annie, who had entrusted the child to the safekeeping of her friend, a prostitute by the name of Mary Kelly. At this point Jack the Ripper makes his entrance upon the stage in opera cloak and black silk top hat like a music-hall villain to despatch Kelly and the small circle of ‘working girls’ to whom she had entrusted the secret, these being Polly Nichols, Liz Stride and Annie Chapman. Then in the final act he tortures Mary Kelly, who dies refusing to reveal the whereabouts of the child.
Strange theories
A dark fairy tale indeed with obvious elements lifted from Cinderella and Snow White with Queen Victoria cast in the role of the wicked stepmother. But who was the Ripper? Sickert claims it was Sir William Gull, the Queen’s personal physician, who enticed the unfortunate women into his coach with bunches of grapes, disembowelled them in the carriage then dumped the bodies in the streets with the aid of a sycophantic servant, John Netley. As for the mutilations,they were perversions of a fictional Masonic ritual symbolizing the murder of Abrim Abif, the founder of the Freemasons, by three fellow masons, Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum – the ‘Juwes’ named in the Goulston Street graffiti.
The choice of murder sites also had Masonic significance. Mitre Square was reputedly the location of key Masonic lodges and the name itself had Masonic connotations – a mitre and a square being symbols in Masonic ritual. But this is yet another example of the selective choice of clues. There was also a suspicion that the murderer may have been a Jewish zealot who slaughtered his victims in a ritual sacrifice to his God during the Jewish sabbath. However, the sabbath begins at sunset on a Friday and ends at sunset on Saturday, and since several victims were killed in the early hours of Sunday morning this makes a nonsense of the whole idea.
Police sketch of the crime scene at Mitre Square
The story gains currency
Incredibly, the BBC swallowed Sickert’s ridiculous story, partly because they could verify a few of the more salient points,
such as the fact that a woman named Annie Crook had lived in Cleveland Street at the time and that she had given birth to an illegitimate daughter, but the main reason they endorsed the charade was simply because it made such a good yarn. And the thing about conspiracies is that the lack of physical evidence is no problem. Quite the opposite, since it can be argued that the conspirators destroyed everything that might implicate them. It is a revisionist historian’s dream, but has no basis in reality.
At this point author Stephen Knight picked up the story. He interviewed Sickert at length and expanded on the ‘evidence’ unearthed by the BBC, claiming to have obtained access to previously unpublished Scotland Yard files which were not to be open to the public until 1992. According to Knight the masons chose a scapegoat to cover their tracks, a young barrister named Montague Druitt, whom they murdered and offered his body in atonement for the crimes. But just when credulity has been stretched so thin it threatens to snap we are asked to believe that the baby girl survived and grew up to marry none other than Walter Sickert, the man who 20 years earlier had accompanied Prince Albert Victor in his sojourns into Whitechapel!
Montague Druitt whose family suspected him of being the Whitechapel murderer.
The real facts
Since the publication of Knight’s book researchers have produced documentation which proved that Annie Crook was not confined in an asylum but admitted herself to various workhouses and that during that time she had her baby, Alice Margaret, with her. Furthermore, on her marriage certificate she listed the father of the child as William Crook, who was her grandfather, which suggests her plight originated from incest, not from her involvement with an aristocrat.
As for Sir William Gull being unmasked as the Whitechapel murderer, he suffered a serious stroke in October 1887 which left him partially paralysed. Moreover, he was 72 years old at the time of the Ripper murders which not only doesn’t tie in with the witness descriptions, but also makes it unlikely that he would have had the strength to subdue his victims even allowing for the fact that one or two may have been the worse for drink. It also has to be pointed out that none of the residents living at or near the murder sites reported hearing a carriage rattling along the cobblestones in the early hours of the morning which would surely have aroused their suspicion.
And finally there is a further twist to the story that even Stephen Knight could not have come up with: shortly after the publication of Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, Joseph Sickert confessed to the Sunday Times that he had fabricated the entire story.
Chapter 5: The Devil Made Him Do It
Of the many hundreds of articles published during the Ripper’s reign of terror there were two which bear closer examination, if only because they were penned by the most colourful characters of the age – the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley and the self-confessed Satanist Roslyn D’Onston, who was himself a suspect. The first is by D’Onston, who claims to have identified the murderer’s nationality and motive and also speculates that the murder sites may have been chosen in order to form a figure of mystical significance.
The Whitechapel Demon’s Nationality: and Why He Committed the Murders
by One Who Thinks He Knows
‘It will be remembered that a chalk inscription (which it is not denied was written by the murderer) was found on the wall in Mitre-square, just above the body of the murdered woman. It ran as follows: “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing”, and was evidently intended to throw suspicion on the Jews. This writing was seen by the police by means of artificial light, and was unfortunately obliterated by them before daylight. Hinc illae lachrymae!! [From hereon they will weep!)
Why did the murderer spell the word Jews “Juwes”? Was it that he was an uneducated Englishman who did not know how to spell the word; was he in reality an ignorant Jew, reckless of consequences and glorying in his deeds; or was he a foreigner, well accustomed to the English language, but who in the tremendous hurry of the moment unconsciously wrote the fatal word in his native tongue?
The answers to these three queries, on which the whole matter rests, are easy. Juwes is a much too difficult word for an uneducated man to evolve on the spur of the moment, as any philologist will allow. Any ignorant Jew capable of spelling the rest of the sentence as correctly as he did, would know, certainly, how to spell the name of his own people. Therefore, only the last proposition remains, which we shall now show, in the most conclusive manner, to be the truth.
To critically examine an inscription of this kind, the first thing we naturally do is not to rest satisfied with reading it in print, but to make, as nearly as we can, a facsimile of it in script.
Inspection at once shows us, then, that a dot has been overlooked by the constable who copied it, as might easily occur, especially if it were placed at some distance, after the manner of foreigners.
Therefore we place a dot above the third upstroke in the word Juwes, and we find it to be Juives, which is the French word for Jews . . . The murderer is, therefore, a Frenchman.
It may here be argued that both Swiss and Belgians make French almost their mother tongue; but Flemish is the natural and usual vehicle for the latter, while the idiosyncrasy of both those nationalities is adverse to this class of crime.
On the contrary, in France, the murdering of prostitutes has long been practised, and has been considered to be almost peculiarly a French crime.
Again, the grammatical construction of the sentence under examination is distinctly French in two points – first, in the double negative contained; and, secondly, in the employment of the definite article before the second noun. An Englishman or an American would have said, “The Jews are men who, &c.” But the murderer followed his native idiom “Les Juifs sont des homes” in his thoughts, and when putting it into English rendered des homes “the men”.
Again, neither Belgians nor Swiss entertain any animosity to the Jews, whereas the hatred of the French proletarian to them is notorious.
The ground for research being thus cleared and narrowed, the next question is, what is the motive? . . .
Now, in one of the books by the great modern occultist who wrote under the nom de plume of “Eliphaz Levy”, “Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie,” we find the most elaborate directions for working magical spells of all kinds. The second volume has a chapter on Necromancy, or black magic, which the author justly denounces as a profanation. Black magic employs the agencies of evil spirits and demons, instead of the beneficent spirits directed by the adepts of la haute magie [High Magic]. At the same time he gives the clearest and fullest details of the necessary steps for evocation by this means, and it is in the list of substances prescribed as absolutely necessary to success that we find the link which joins modern French necromancy with the quest of the East-end murderer. These substances are in themselves horrible, and difficult to procure. They can only be obtained by means of the most appalling crimes, of which murder and mutilation of the dead are the least heinous. Among them are strips of the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer’s gallows, candles made from human fat, the head of a black cat which has been fed forty days on human flesh, the horns of a goat which has been made the instrument of an infamous capital crime, and a preparation made from a certain portion of the body of a harlot. This last point is insisted upon as essential and it was this extra-ordinary fact that first drew my attention to the possible connection of the murderer with the black art.
Further, in the practice of evocation the sacrifice of human victims was a necessary part of the process, and the profanation of the cross and other emblems usually considered sacred was also enjoined. In this connection it will be well to remember one most extraordinary and unparallelled circumstance in the commission of the Whitechapel murders, and a thing which could not by any possibility have been brought about fortuitously. Leaving out the last murder, committed indoors, which was most probably not committed by the fiend of whom we speak, we find that the sites of the murders, six in numb
er, form a perfect cross. That is to say, a line ruled from No. 3 to No. 6, on a map having the murder sites marked and numbered, passes exactly through Nos. 1 and 2, while the cross arms are accurately formed by a line from No. 4 to 5. The seventh, or Dorset-street murder, does not fall within either of these lines, and there is nothing to connect it with the others except the mutilations. But the mutilations in this latter case were evidently not made by any one having the practical knowledge of the knife and the position of the respective organs which was exhibited in the other six cases, and also in the mutilated trunk found in the new police-buildings, which was probably the first of the series of murders, and was committed somewhere on the lines of the cross, the body being removed at the time. Did the murderer, then, designing to offer the mystic number of seven human sacrifices in the form of a cross – a form which he intended to profane – deliberately pick out beforehand on a map the places in which he would offer them to his infernal deity of murder? If not, surely these six coincidences are the most marvellous event of our time.
To those persons to whom this theory may seem somewhat far-fetched, we would merely remark that the French book referred to was only published a few years ago; that thousands of copies were sold; that societies have been formed for the study and practice of its teachings and philosophy; and, finally, that within the last twelve months an English edition has been issued. In all things history repeats itself, and the superstitions of yesterday become the creeds of today.’
The Ripper and the Beast