by Paul Roland
During the trial serious doubts were raised regarding Ali’s guilt. Reporters who had been on the scene the morning of the murder contradicted the official police version of events while police officers gave conflicting statements. Then it emerged that Ali had not occupied the room to which the mysterious blood trail had led, but incredibly the jury found him guilty nevertheless. He was to spend 11 long years in prison before a concerted press campaign forced the authorities to acknowledge serious misgivings regarding the validity of the evidence and order his release.
A credible suspect
Meanwhile Frenchy No. 2 had been traced and questioned and his connection with the Whitechapel murders revealed by the New York daily The World:
‘There is a man named “Frenchy” who answers the description of Frenchy No. 2, and who was arrested in London about a year and a half ago in connection with the Whitechapel murders . . . During the past two or three years this man has been crossing back and forth between this country and England on the freight steamers that carry cattle. He is noted for his strength and physical prowess . . . The sailors on the cattle ships tell horrible stories of his cruelty to the dumb brutes in his care. When one of these animals would break a leg or receive some injury that necessitated its slaughter, “Frenchy”, they say, would take apparent delight in carving it up alive while the sailors looked on. No one dared oppose him, his temper was so bad. When he was arrested on suspicion that he was “Jack the Ripper” he knocked down the officer who tackled him and made things very lively for half a dozen men before they got him under control.’
But just when it appeared that the American authorities had finally collared Jack the Ripper the suspect was released, despite having been positively identified as Carrie Brown’s sullen and silent companion by Mary Miniter. It appears that Inspector Byrnes had lost faith in her reliability after having learned that she was a dope addict.
The reporters, however, scented a scoop and were not so easily put off. They traced Frenchy No. 2 to a lodging house and even managed to persuade him to give them an interview. Could this be the one and only time we hear the voice of Jack the Ripper?
‘The night of the East River murder I passed in this lodging house . . .’ he began. ‘My name is Arbie La Bruckman, but I am commonly called John Francis. I was born in Morocco 29 years ago. I arrived here on the steamer Spain April 10 from London.’
In reply to a question concerning his arrest in London La Bruckman answered, ‘About 11 o’clock one night a little after Christmas, 1889, I was walking along the street. I carried a small satchel. I was bound for Hull, England, where I was to take another ship. Before I reached the depot, I was arrested and taken to London Headquarters. I was locked up for a month, placed on trial and duly acquitted. After my discharge the Government gave me £100 and a suit of clothes for the inconvenience I had suffered.’
This was contradicted by a subsequent news item which stated that La Bruckman had been in custody for a month on suspicion of being the Ripper and that he was later discharged. There had been no trial. If there had been, all England would have read about it.
Could it have been La Bruckman?
This may be the source of the story published after the murder of Frances Coles in February 1891. ‘A policeman who saw the unfortunate woman a short time before the murder said that she was talking to a man who looked like a sailor. The police searched all the cattle ships but found no reason to arrest anyone. Late in the evening, a man was arrested on the docks and locked up on suspicion.’
Although there may not have been sufficient physical evidence to arrest La Bruckman, it is known that the company he worked for, National Line, had cattle boats in dock at London ports on dates coinciding with the Whitechapel murders.
But the suspicion that La Bruckman knew more about the Carrie Brown murder than he admitted persisted. Further investigations by the tenacious journalists uncovered the following story.
The clerk at the Glenmore Hotel, near the murder scene, remembered being accosted by a man answering La Bruckman’s description on the night of the murder. The man, who was in an agitated state, had blood on his hands, his shirtfront and his sleeves. When the clerk refused to give him a room for the night, he asked if he could use the rest room in the lobby to clean himself up, but again the clerk refused. Had Inspector Byrnes pursued this line of inquiry he might have cleared up both the Carrie Brown murder and the mystery of Jack the Ripper, but for reasons known only to himself he chose to prosecute Ali the Algerian and allow La Bruckman to slip through his fingers.
Byrnes’ complacency should have been shaken by the discovery of another mutilated corpse just a month after Ali’s conviction, but perhaps he did not relish having his assumptions questioned. The Morning Journal had no such reservations. ‘Is It Jack’s Work?’ asked their headline the morning after the body of a 45-year-old prostitute had been fished out of the East River. It is a question that remains tantalizingly unanswered to this day.
On The Track
The summer had come in September at last,
And the pantomime season was coming on fast,
When a score of detectives arrived from the Yard
To untangle a skein which was not very hard.
They looked very wise, and they started a clue;
They twiddled their thumbs as the best thing to do.
They said, “By this murder we’re taken aback,
But we’re now, we believe, on the murderer’s track.”
They scattered themselves o’er the face of the land –
A gallant, devoted, intelligent band –
They arrested their suspects north, east, south, and west;
From inspector to sergeant each man did his best.
They took up a bishop, they took up a Bung,
They arrested the old, they arrested the young;
They ran in Bill, Thomas, and Harry and Jack,
Yet still they remained on the murderer’s track.
The years passed away and the century waned,
A mystery still the big murder remained.
It puzzled the Bar and it puzzled the Bench,
It puzzled policemen, Dutch, German, and French;
But ’twas clear as a pikestaff to all London ’tecs,
Who to see through a wall didn’t want to wear specs.
In reply to the sneer and the snarl and the snack
They exclaimed, “We are still on the murderer’s track.”
They remained on his track till they died of old age,
And the story was blotted from history’s page;
But they died like detectives convinced that the crime
They’d have traced to its source if they’d only had time.
They made a good end, and they turned to the wall
To answer the Great First Commissioner’s call;
And they sighed as their breathing grew suddenly slack –
“We believe we are now on the murderer’s track.”
(George Sims)
Chapter 7: Summing up: A new Suspect
When conducting a murder investigation, it is common practice to begin with a thorough examination of the crime scene and a re-assessment of the trace evidence, the victim’s injuries and the witness statements before considering a possible motive and evaluating the key suspects. The procedure has changed little in over a century and is the same whether it is a current inquiry or a cold case. But in regard to the Whitechapel murders many amateur investigators continue to ignore the basic rules of detection. In their eagerness to prove their own pet theory, they turn the spotlight on their chosen suspect and in a sense ‘fit him up’ to take the fall instead of allowing the trail of evidence to lead wherever it takes them. This is the same approach favoured by the conspiracy theorists whose personal conviction invariably leads to the construction of an elaborate fantasy based on the selective use of the few facts which happen to support their alternative reality.
The truth of the matter is that, if we wa
nt to identify the Whitechapel murderer, we need to scrutinize the facts objectively and resist the temptation to speculate. We must be prepared to eliminate suspects who do not conform to the eyewitness descriptions and trust in the unerringly accurate psychological profiles provided by both Dr Bond, the forensic scientist, and modern FBI profilers, no matter how keen we might be on unmasking our preferred candidate for the notorious murders.
Identifying the victims
But first there is the nagging question of which victims are to be attributed to the Ripper and which to random street violence.
There is every reason to suspect that the unprovoked attack on 38-year-old Annie Millwood on 25 February 1888 by a man armed with a clasp knife may have been a faltering first step on the Ripper’s road to infamy. Annie was assaulted in White’s Row, just a few minutes’ walk from George Yard where Martha Tabram was murdered later that year at 5pm when darkness contrived to screen the stranger’s face. Annie was stabbed repeatedly in the legs and abdomen and, although she recovered after three weeks in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, she died on 31 March from natural causes, no doubt weakened by her injuries.
The second attack occurred shortly after midnight on 27 March after 39-year-old Ada Wilson answered her front door and was set upon by a man who demanded money. When she refused he stabbed her twice in the neck and would certainly have inflicted a fatal wound had he not been frightened off by her screams for help. Ada described her assailant as being aged about 30, 167cm (5ft 6in) tall with a sunburnt complexion and a fair moustache. He wore light trousers, a dark coat and a wideawake hat. Curiously, neither woman has even been considered as a possible Ripper victim, yet they cannot be excluded simply because the murder of the first ‘official’ victim, Polly Nichols, was still several months away.
Some historians are keen to keep Emma Smith in contention for victim number one, but if she was telling the truth, and there is no reason to doubt her story, she was attacked by a group of roughs and she can therefore be eliminated from the list.
At the time Martha Tabram was believed to be the second victim and it is true that she suffered a frenzied, motiveless assault, but the police surgeon was certain that a bayonet had made the fatal wound (the others having been inflicted with a pen knife), and a local constable had talked with a soldier near the scene who claimed to have been waiting for his comrade who had ‘gone off with a woman’. For these reasons Tabram could be excluded as it seems extremely unlikely that she was attacked by a man with a bayonet after the soldier had finished his business with her, although we will never know for certain what took place that night.
The five canonical victims
This leaves what are commonly known as the five canonical victims – Nichols, Eddowes, Stride, Chapman and Kelly. Of these Stride is doubtful as she was murdered by a single knife wound to the throat and was not mutilated. Even allowing for the possibility that the murderer might have been interrupted, it is significant that her throat was apparently cut from right to left, rather than left to right as the others had been, and that Dr Phillips, the police surgeon, testified that there were distinct differences between her murder and that of the other women. It has to be said, though, that Dr Blackwell disagreed with Dr Bond, contending that it was indeed the work of the same killer, the wound being inflicted left to right, just less forcibly.
But there are two aspects which weigh heavily against Stride being a Ripper victim. The first is that an eyewitness, Israel Schwartz, testified that he saw Stride being assaulted by a man at the spot where she was found just 15 minutes later and from his description it appeared to be a quarrel between a ruffian and his woman or a prostitute and her client which ended with her having her throat cut once Schwartz was out of sight. If so, the killer would have no reason to murder and mutilate a second woman only an hour later. Secondly, if this was the man who killed Stride why did he walk back to Whitechapel after killing Eddowes with the bloody knife and the fragment of her apron in his hand when he must have known that the police were swarming all over the area in the wake of the first murder? The two incidents are surely unrelated.
Unless there were two men – the Ripper and an accomplice who acted as a lookout. Schwartz made a statement to the police in which he described being chased by a second man who was standing on the opposite side of the road to the ruffian who had knocked the woman to the ground. If this second man acted as a lookout it would explain how the Ripper was able to evade arrest. But serial killers rarely work as a team and if these two had done so, what would have driven them to share such a terrible secret? Could they have been brothers? Or ex-army comrades (one armed with a bayonet and one with a short-bladed knife perhaps)? Did they have a score to settle with prostitutes for having given them venereal disease, or were they simply on a crusade to cleanse the streets? It is an intriguing theory, but the lone killer is still the more likely scenario. That said, there is a marked similarity between the ruffian Schwartz describes seeing in Berner Street and the ‘rough and shabby’ individual seen by Lawende near Mitre Square.
How the Ripper killed his victims
By examining the original post-mortem reports and the testimony given by the police surgeons at the various inquests, it is possible to learn how the Ripper subdued and murdered his victims.
Several historians have suggested that the lack of blood at the crime scenes could be due to the victims having been murdered elsewhere, perhaps even in a closed carriage, and their bodies transported to the location where they were discovered. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Four of the five canonical victims were found on their backs, the blood pooled around them and soaked into the back of their clothes, revealing that they had been attacked from the front. It appears that he took hold of them by the throat and throttled them while they were occupied raising their skirts. Then he lowered them to the ground (as evident from the lack of bruising to the back of the head) with their heads to his left and slit their throats from left to right down to the spinal column, which would have directed any arterial spray from the carotid artery away from him. It is thought that he then pushed their legs up and apart so he could kneel between their knees to carry out the mutilations.
Several of the women had notable bruising around the neck, discoloured faces and swollen tongues, indicating that they had been strangled, which would account for the fact that no one heard any cries for help. This being the case, their hearts would have stopped, which would account for the comparatively small amount of blood at the scene, most of it spilling from the neck wound. The murderer could then have passed through the streets in the early hours of the morning without attracting attention as he would have not have had any sizable amount of blood on his clothes.
Crime scene sketch of a victim
The significance of the mutilations
A close examination of the autopsy reports reveals that there is no evidence to support the widely held belief that the murders were the work of a surgeon. This rumour originated with the coroner Wynne Baxter, a notoriously opinionated minor public official who relished his new role as medical expert for which he was clearly unqualified. Although the police surgeons were not always in agreement, there was a consensus that the murderer demonstrated a degree of skill with a knife, but no more so than a butcher or medical student might possess.
The injuries to Polly Nichols showed no medical knowledge or skill whatever. Her throat had been severed down to the vertebrae in two places, suggesting that her murderer might have been trying to decapitate her, but the other wounds to her abdomen appeared to be random and to no particular purpose, which suggests a disorganized state of mind. These incisions, which were not aimed at any specific organ, had been inflicted with considerable force using a moderately sharp, long-bladed knife by a right-handed assailant.
Neither were there ritualistic elements in the murder of Annie Chapman. The placing of the intestines over both her shoulders was done simply to give the killer access to her viscera. As Krafft-Ebbing’s study P
sychopathia Sexualis has shown, it is a compulsive disorder of a certain type of sexual killer to wallow in the guts of their victims.
Had the Ripper been a surgeon or pathologist, he would have had ample opportunity to indulge his perversion in the privacy of the dissecting room or in the mortuary without having to risk his life and reputation disembowelling prostitutes on the streets of the East End. The uterus and its appendages, the upper portion of the vagina and part of the bladder had been removed with a single stroke of the knife, which suggests a degree of surgical skill or luck, but if he had been a practising surgeon surely he would have removed the organs intact and not left part in the body.
No medical knowledge
Little can be learnt from the autopsy on Elizabeth Stride other than the fact that her throat had been cut. She appears to have been the victim of a violent domestic quarrel or a client-prostitute dispute. But if she had been murdered by the Ripper it appears she was spared further mutilations by the timely arrival of potential witnesses.
The fourth canonical victim, Catherine Eddowes, suffered severe post-mortem mutilations, the removal of part of her womb and her kidney. The latter led Dr Brown to assume that the killer had murdered her to obtain the organ and so credited him with considerable medical knowledge.
However, it seems more likely that the murderer came upon the kidney by chance and took it as a macabre souvenir only after having wallowed in her intestines as he had done with Chapman. Even Dr Brown, who had been an enthusiastic advocate of the ‘mad doctor’ theory, had to concede, ‘Such a knowledge might be possessed by someone in the habit of cutting up animals’.
His colleague in attendance at the Eddowes post-mortem, Dr George Sequeira, agreed that it was not the work of an expert but of a man ‘not altogether ignorant of the use of the knife’.
As before, the cause of death was the slitting of the victim’s throat, but the most significant mutilation was the facial disfigurement. Her lower left and right eyelid had been cut through, as had the bridge of the nose, the tip being removed entirely, none of which appears to have symbolic significance nor serve an obvious purpose. If her eyes had been cut out or her ears removed, a number of things could be read into those mutilations, but odd, seemingly unrelated nicks and cuts suggest a random, teasing, tentative killer snipping here and there without a particular aim in mind. It is as if he is demonstrating his power over the lifeless woman like a spiteful predator tormenting its helpless prey without mercy. Her left ear lobe had been severed, but it is thought that this had been unintentional, perhaps caused by a slip of the knife when he had cut her throat.