by Paul Roland
If one man could be said to match the Ripper for notoriety it was the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley’s reputation for outrageous behaviour led the press to dub him ‘the wickedest man in the world’; he enjoyed nothing more than provoking polite society with his salacious stories, one of which concerned the bisexual novelist Mabel Collins, her lesbian lover Vittoria Cremers, Collins’s former lover Robert Donston Stephenson and Jack the Ripper. Crowley’s contemporary document reads:
‘Some few years before Whitechapel achieved its peculiar notoriety, the white flame of passion which had consumed the fair Mabel [Collins] and her lover, who passed by the name of Captain Donston, had died down; in fact he had become rather more than less of a nuisance; and she was doing everything in her power to get rid of him. Naturally eager to assist in this manoeuvre was her new mistress, a lady passing under the name of Baroness Cremers . . .
[Donston] drifted first into studies medical, and (later) theological. He was a man of extremely aristocratic appearance and demeanour; his manners were polished and his whole behaviour quiet, gentle, and composed; he gave the impression of understanding any possible situation and of ability to master it, but he possessed that indifference to meddling in human affairs which often tempers the activity of people who are conscious of their superiority.
These three people were still living together in Mabel Collins’ house in London . . . and for one reason or another [Donston] thought it right to maintain his influence over Mabel Collins . . . and it made her all the more anxious to get rid of him; judging everybody by herself, she was quite sure he would not hesitate to use [her] love-letters in case of definite breach; so, to carry out her scheme, the first procedure must obviously be to obtain possession of the compromising packet and destroy it . . .
One of the relics of his career in the cavalry was a tin uniform case, and this he kept under his bed very firmly secured to the brass frame-work. This, of all his receptacles, was the only one which was always kept locked. From this, Cremers deduced that as likely as not the documents of which she was in search were in the trunk, and she determined to investigate at leisure . . .
Cremers arranged one day for a telegram to be dispatched to Donston, informing him that some friend or near relative had met with a street accident, had been taken to Guy’s Hospital, and wanted to see him. Donston immediately started off on this fictitious errand. As he left the house, Mabel laughingly warned him not to get lost and run into Jack the Ripper . . . it may be proper to explain that these events coincided with the Whitechapel murders. On the day of his journey, two or three of them had already been committed – in any case sufficient to start talk and present the murderer with his nick-name. All London was discussing the numerous problems connected with the murders; in particular it seemed to everybody extraordinary that a man for whom the police were looking everywhere could altogether escape notice in view of the nature of the crime. It is hardly necessary to go into the cannibalistic details, but it is quite obvious that a person who is devouring considerable chunks of raw flesh, cut from a living body, can hardly do so without copious evidence on his chest.’
At this point Crowley departs from his lurid tale to relate an earlier incident involving the same three characters which had initially aroused the ladies’ suspicions.
‘One evening, Donston had just come in from the theatre – in those days everyone dressed, whether they liked it or not – and he found the women discussing this point. He gave a slight laugh, went into the passage, and returned in the opera cloak which he had been wearing to the theatre. He turned up the collar and pulled the cape across his shirtfront, made a slight gesture as if to say: “You see how simple it is;” and when a social difficulty presented itself, he remarked lightly: “Of course you cannot have imagined that the man could be a gentleman,” and added: “There are plenty going about the East End in evening dress, what with opium smoking and one thing and another” . . .
To return from this long explanatory digression, it was necessary in order to give the fair Cremers time to extricate the uniform case from its complex ropes, the knots being carefully memorised, and to pick the locks.
During this process her mind had been far from at ease; first of all, there seemed to be no weight. Surely a trunk so carefully treasured could not be empty; but if there were a packet of letters more or less loose, there should have been some response to the process of shaking. Her curiosity rose to fever pitch; at last the lock yielded to her persuasive touch; she lifted the lid. The trunk was not empty, but its contents, although few, were striking.
Five white dress ties soaked in blood.’
The magical rites of Jack the Ripper
As a footnote to his article Crowley offered his theory on how the Whitechapel murderer might have escaped detection. It was prompted in part by a speculative piece in the Pall Mall Gazette by Donston, who had hidden behind the pen name Tau Tria Delta.
‘After the last of the murders, an article appeared in . . . the Pall Mall Gazette, by Tau Tria Delta, who offered a solution for the motive of the murders. It stated that in one of the grimoires of the Middle Ages, an account was given of a process by which a sorcerer could attain “the supreme black magical power” by following out a course of action identical with that of Jack the Ripper; certain lesser powers were granted to him spontaneously during the course of the proceedings. After the third murder, if memory serves, the assassin obtained on the spot the gift of invisibility, because in the third or fourth murder, a constable on duty saw a man and a woman go into a cul-de-sac. At the end there were the great gates of a factory, but at the sides no doorways or even windows. The constable, becoming suspicious, watched the entry to the gateway, and hearing screams, rushed in. He found the woman, mutilated, but still living; as he ran up, he flashed his bullseye in every direction; and he was absolutely certain that no other person was present. And there was no cover under the archway for so much as a rat.
The number of murders involved in the ceremonies was five, whereas the Whitechapel murders so-called, were seven in number; but two of these were spurious . . . These murders are completely to be distinguished from the five genuine ones, by obvious divergence on technical points.
The place of each murder is important, for it is essential to describe what is called the averse pentagram, that is to say, a star of five points with a single point in the direction of the South Pole.’
From this point Crowley refers to himself in the third person, presumably in an effort to give his theory an air of scientific respectability.
‘The investigation has been taken up by Bernard O’Donnell, the crime expert of the Empire News; and he has discovered many interesting details. In the course of conversation with Aleister Crowley this matter came up, and the magician was very impressed with O’Donnell’s argument. He suggested an astrological investigation. Was there anything significant about the times of the murders? O’Donnell’s investigations had led him to the conclusion that the murderer had attached the greatest importance to accuracy in the time. O’Donnell, accordingly, furnished Crowley with the necessary data, and figures of the heavens were set up . . .
Crowley thought this an excellent opportunity to trace the evil influence of the planets, looking naturally first of all to Saturn, the great misfortune, then to Mars, the lesser misfortune; but also to Uranus, a planet not known to the ancients, but generally considered of a highly explosive tendency. The result of Crowley’s investigations was staggering; there was one constant element in all cases of murder, both of the assassin and the murdered. Saturn, Mars, and Herschel were indeed rightly suspected of doing dirty work at the crossroads, but the one constant factor was a planet which had until that moment been considered, if not actively beneficent, at least perfectly indifferent and harmless – the planet Mercury. Crowley went into this matter very thoroughly and presently it dawned on his rather slow intelligence that after all this was only to be expected; the quality of murder is not primarily malice, greed, or wrath; the on
e essential condition without which deliberate murder can hardly ever take place, is just this cold-bloodedness, this failure to attribute the supreme value of human life. Armed with these discoveries the horoscopes of the Whitechapel murders shone crystal clear to him. In every case, either Saturn or Mercury were precisely on the Eastern horizon at the moment of the murder (by precisely, one means within a matter of minutes).
Mercury is, of course, the God of Magic, and his averse distorted image the Ape of Thoth, responsible for such evil trickery as is the heart of black magic, while Saturn is not only the cold heartlessness of age, but the magical equivalent of Saturn. He is the old god who was worshipped in the Witches’ Sabbath.’
A method to his madness?
It was perhaps inevitable that the Ripper killings would become a fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and their spurious speculations. The royal connection proposed by author Stephen Knight in the 1970s involving Queen Victoria’s personal physician Sir William Gull, Prince Albert Victor and the Freemasons captured the public imagination to such an extent that many now believe it to have a basis in fact. Less well known, but equally persistent, is the idea that the victims were ritually slaughtered at predetermined locations to conform to a pattern of occult significance.
The cross
At the time of the killings it was widely believed that the Ripper was a religious fanatic who had set out to rid the streets of prostitutes in a personal crusade against the sin he saw as staining the heart of a Christian capital. An alternative theory, with almost equal support, was the belief that he was a Satanist who killed to obtain specific organs for use in black magic rituals. Whichever was the case, it is argued that he chose specific locations so that they would form a cross, either to scourge the district with the most potent symbol of the Christian faith or to denigrate it.
Such implausible theories are not new, but were given wide publicity at the time as an article from the Pall Mall Gazette dated 1 December 1888 revealed. This article is of particular interest because its author, Robert Donston Stephenson, is now considered a prime suspect in the Ripper killings.
When considering D’onston’s theory it should be remembered that at the time of its publication Emma Smith and Martha Tabram were thought to have been the first two victims and so when D’onston talks of drawing a line from victims three to six, he is referring to Polly Nichols and Catherine Eddowes. Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride are his fourth and fifth victims with Mary Kelly being number seven. The torso he refers to as having been discovered in the foundations of New Scotland Yard (then under construction) has subsequently been shown to have no connection to the Ripper murders, but at the time it was considered part of the series.
Ripperologists Jay Clarke and John Banks recently subjected D’Onston’s cross theory to analysis by a respected Canadian statistician and asked him to calculate the probability of finding four randomly positioned bodies in a city which formed a cross. According to the statistician the odds in favour of D’Onston’s assertion were one in 15,249,024. But either the professor’s basis for the calculation was flawed or Clarke and Banks were highly selective in their interpretation of his findings as mathematician Dan Norder proved quite the opposite in an article for Ripper Notes (October 2004), the international journal for Ripper studies. According to Norder, ‘When doing calculations of this sort, the size of the number alone in no way proves whether something was random or not. It just proves that there are lots of different possible outcomes.’
And he makes another important point which needs to be borne in mind when considering the conspiracy theories: ‘Looking at the map shows that the main roads, although somewhat irregular, mostly form the shape of a cross all by themselves. In other words, most of the features of the patterns people see in the crime scene locations were already present in the layout of the East End before the Ripper killed his first victim.’
The hidden pattern hypothesis
Other symbols and patterns projected onto the murder sites include an arrow whose point is obligingly directed at the Houses of Parliament, a pentagram (a five-pointed star) and a vesica piscis, which is a mouth-shaped ellipse, symbolic of the womb. Proponents of the arrow theory exclude the Eddowes murder, which disrupts their pattern, on the grounds that she might have been killed in mistake for Mary Kelly because she used a similar sounding ‘street name’ – an unlikely scenario in the light of the fact that Eddowes was ten years older and looked nothing like Kelly!
There is another fundamental flaw in the argument of those who see an occult significance where one does not exist and that is that although Catherine Eddowes is listed among the five canonical victims she is unlikely to have been a Ripper victim, and Mary Kelly, whom they discount, was probably his last. Taking Eddowes out of the sequence and adding Kelly disrupts the symmetry and so they are selective with their victims, which undermines their credibility at a stroke.
In their eagerness to uncover a conspiracy or hitherto unknown motive, the advocates of the hidden pattern hypothesis overlook the fact that city maps of the period were notoriously inaccurate; they were intended merely to indicate the relationship of the streets to one another. On all but the official civic engineers’ plans, distances were approximate. Consequently one cannot rely on them to prove a correlation between the location of the bodies and the pattern one might wish to superimpose over the area.
Once you start playing ‘join the dots’ you can make any series of random events and locations assume an unintentional significance provided that you are selective in choosing the pattern you wish them to conform to. Why stop at religious and occult symbols when there are equally good letters that can be formed by connecting the sites? Given time and a considerable degree of latitude, a resourceful conspiracy theorist might be able to form the initials of a member of the monarchy or perhaps even a high-ranking police official. But even if there was an esoteric meaning connecting the location of the murder sites, the mutilations or the timing of the killings, it is ultimately irrelevant as no serial killer merits having his delusions taken seriously. It is what he did and the effect he had on society that is worth considering, not his morbid fantasies.
The man who ‘saw’ the Ripper
It is not an exaggeration to say that today psychics are consulted on an almost routine basis when the authorities have exhausted all conventional avenues of investigation. But in Victorian England spiritualists, as they were then known, were regarded at best as being a novelty music-hall act or at worst as fraudsters preying on the weak-minded and bereaved. The fact that clairvoyant Robert James Lees had been consulted on several occasions by Queen Victoria did not make him a credible witness as far as Scotland Yard were concerned. When Lees offered his services as a psychic sleuth it is said that they laughed him out of the building. However, if the account published by ex-Scotland Yard officer Edwin T. Woodhall (author of Secrets of Scotland Yard) is to be believed, they were soon to regret their rash decision.
‘Speculation has always been rife as to Jack the Ripper’s identity,’ Woodhall began, ‘He was never brought to justice but it is a mistake to think that the police did not know who he was. It was proved beyond doubt that he was a physician of the highest standing who lived in a fine house in the West End of London. To most people he was the most refined and gentle of men, both courteous and kind. But he was also an ardent vivisectionist and a cruel sadist who took fierce delight in inflicting pain on helpless creatures.’
According to Woodhall, the identity of this real-life Jekyll and Hyde was revealed by Lees after he had finally convinced the police of the value of his visions.
Visions of murder
The first of the visions had occurred the day after the August Bank Holiday and involved the murder of Martha Tabram. During a trance Lees had ‘seen’ a man and a woman walking down a ‘mean street’ into a courtyard and noted the name George Yard Buildings and the time, 12.30, on a nearby clock. The man was dressed in a light tweed suit and carried a dark rainco
at. He had a black felt hat pulled down over his eyes and, judging by his steady walk, he was sober, unlike his companion, who staggered under the influence of drink. In the next instant he pressed his hand over the woman’s mouth, drew a knife and soundlessly slit her throat. When he had finished inflicting the mutilations he dragged her into a doorway and made his escape, wrapping himself in the raincoat to hide the bloodstains.
Lees was so unsettled by what he had ‘seen’ and so discouraged by the scepticism with which he had been rebuffed at Scotland Yard that he went abroad to recover, returning shortly after the third murder.
He had hoped that the vision was an isolated occurrence, but one day while travelling on a London omnibus with his wife, Lees was overwhelmed by the same oppressive sensation that had attended his earlier experience. The feeling intensified when a man boarded the bus at Notting Hill wearing the same tweed coat, black felt hat and dark raincoat Lees had seen in the vision. With no word of explanation to his wife, Lees left the bus at Marble Arch to pursue the man he knew to be the Ripper. Lees followed him through Hyde Park, but lost the trail when the suspect caught a hansom cab. Frantic that the murderer might escape, he summoned a policeman and urged him to follow, but the constable refused, offering only to make a note of the incident.
That night Lees was plagued by another terrifying vision and in the morning he went straight to Scotland Yard and urged the detectives in charge of the case to allow him access to the site of the latest murder. According to Woodhall’s version of events, they reluctantly agreed and a short time later at Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, Lees relived the murder of Mary Kelly.
The body of Mary Kelly.
Lees is vindicated
Once he had recovered sufficiently he began walking westward with the detectives in his wake. Finally he stopped in front of a large town house in the most prosperous part of the West End. Here, Lees insisted, was the home of the Whitechapel murderer. The detectives tried to persuade him that he must be mistaken as it was the home of an eminent physician. But Lees was adamant and to the astonishment of the detectives he described the inside of the house in considerable detail, although he had never been there.