On 31 December 1885, Edwin had some dental treatment. When Adelaide returned home, she told Mrs Doggett she had regularly given Edwin chloroform to help him sleep. Early the next morning, Adelaide sent the maid out for Dr Leach. She then woke the Doggetts, telling Mr Doggett, ‘Come down, come down. I think Mr Bartlett is dead.’ She said she had tried to revive him by pouring brandy down his throat. Dogget went to the body, found it stone cold. Edwin had evidently been dead for several hours. A nearly full glass of wine stood on the mantelpiece close to Edwin’s bed. Doggett thought it was brandy laced with ether. He also saw a glass half full of Condy’s fluid was on a tray near the table. Condy’s fluid was a disinfectant and deodorant. Doggett passed an unlabelled bottle on to the coroner’s office. There was on the mantelpiece also a bottle of chlorodyne, which Adelaide said Edwin had used to rub on his inflamed gums.
Doggett refused to register the death until a post mortem had been held. Dr Leach arranged for an autopsy, which Adelaide approved. It was carried out on 2 January at Charing Cross Hospital, but it failed to establish cause of death. Edwin’s stomach contained liquid chloroform, as if drunk straight out of the bottle. Eventually it was decided that Edwin had died as a result of the intake of chloroform. Adelaide admitted to having chloroform. She objected to Edwin’s attempts to have sex with her, and she had had to remind him of her pseudo-betrothal to George Dyson. Edwin had become insistent. She had got hold of the chloroform, intending to put drops on a handkerchief and hold it over his face. She had not actually used it at all, and had told Edwin what she had done on New Year’s Eve. She showed him the bottle and he had put it on the mantelpiece. Adelaide fell asleep, and woke to find Edwin dead.
At the inquest, Dyson explained how the chloroform was bought, making it clear that Adelaide was the instigator, and the jury recommended that Adelaide should be arrested. The jury passed a verdict of willful murder against Adelaide. Dyson was arrested and charged with being an accessory before the fact.
The trial of the twenty-eight-year-old George Dyson and the thirty-year-old Adelaide Bartlett opened at the Old Bailey on 13 April. Adelaide’s father instructed the prominent barrister Edward Clarke to defend her. The prosecution case was led by the Attorney General Sir Charles Russell. Once the charges were read, the prosecution withdrew its charges against George Dyson; the jury was asked to return a formal not guilty verdict on Dyson, and he was discharged.
Three possibilities were considered by the prosecution lawyers. Suicide was one, but that was considered unlikely. Misadventure was another, but that too was considered unlikely because the pain after swallowing the poison would have alerted the victim. The third, the only remaining, possibility, was that the poison was administered deliberately. The prosecution lawyers maintained that Adelaide had rendered her husband unconscious by putting drops of chloroform on a handkerchief, and then poured liquid chloroform down his throat.
When George Dyson gave evidence he said that Bartlett had some strange ideas, including the notion that he was terminally ill. If that was true, there was the possibility that Bartlett had committed suicide. Dyson also said that Adelaide had not asked him to conceal the fact that he had bought chloroform.
Dr Leach gave evidence that Adelaide had looked after her husband with great care and tenderness during his illness. He thought Edwin Bartlett was hysterical, unbalanced and this too supported the idea of his having committed suicide. Leach though Adelaide could not have poured the chloroform down Edwin’s throat as this would have made him vomit; he had eaten a large meal shortly beforehand. In fact Edwin had not vomited.
Dr Thomas Stevenson, senior scientific analyst to the Home Office, said that he knew of no recorded case of murder by administering liquid chloroform. Pouring it down the victim’s throat would have been very difficult, as it would very likely have gone down the windpipe. The autopsy showed that none had found its way into the windpipe. This tended to imply that Edwin Bartlett had taken the chloroform himself, while conscious.
For technical legal reasons, the defence was unable to call Adelaide to give evidence. Instead, her defence lawyer gave a closing speech lasting six hours. Edward Clarke pointed out the evidence that suggested suicide, and also the lack of motive for murder. When summing up, Mr Justice Wills mentioned that contraceptives had been found among Edwin’s belongings, and drew the inference from these that Edwin and Adelaide had led an active sex life. That being so, Adelaide would not have needed to repel Edwin’s sexual advances.
The jury was, even so, not persuaded. The jury had serious misgivings about Adelaide Bartlett. The foreman said, ‘although we think grave suspicion is attached to the prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered.’ The verdict was not guilty, and yet the jury evidently thought she might be guilty. There was applause in the court room. At the outset there had been strong public antipathy towards Adelaide, but by the time the verdict was reached, there was a general feeling that ‘not guilty’ was the right verdict.
What really happened to Edwin Bartlett is still not known. Edward Clark thought Edwin had committed suicide, after hearing his dentist use the word ‘necrosis’, which he may have equate with gangrene. Edwin poured chloroform into the wine glass while Adelaide was out of the room and drank it. When Adelaide later returned to the bedside, she poured brandy into the same glass. But it is not clear why Edwin would have poured the chloroform into a glass – perhaps out of habit? Dr Leach later wrote that he too though Edwin had committed suicide, but inadvertently; he had taken a dose of chloroform to distress his wife, perhaps after she revealed her intention of dosing him with it.
The idea that Adelaide murdered Edwin is consistent with some of the known facts. She may by this stage have seen married life with Dyson as preferable to married life with Edwin. Her apparent tenderness and solicitude could have been an elaborate defensive act, an act carefully sustained in the knowledge that her behaviour would one day be scrutinized. She may have given her husband brandy first. The hot taste of the brandy would to a great extent immunize his mouth against the taste of the chloroform, which she offered him in the next glass. It is also likely that the diseased and inflamed state of his mouth rendered Edwin less sensitive to the taste of the chloroform.
It is also possible, given that there were several different medicines with reach, that Edwin simply took the chloroform by mistake. On balance, that does seem the likeliest explanation, but it is a close run thing. It is intriguing to note that once she was released from Edwin Bartlett Adelaide did not marry George Dyson. Instead she went back to New Orleans. Behind her she left one of the most puzzling unsolved poisoning cases of all time.
Jack the Ripper
The Whitechapel murders rank among the greatest and best known unsolved crimes of all time.
In the autumn of 1888, several prostitutes were brutally murdered, most of them in dark alleys, in the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. There was widespread panic and the police made a huge effort to catch the killer, but he was never found, never even identified. Even after scores of historians, journalists and police investigators have explored and re-explored the case, and more than a century has passed, we are still no nearer to knowing who the killer was.
The infamous Jack the Ripper murders were really just one manifestation of a low-life nineteenth century East End of London. The awful slum conditions bred disease, poverty and violence. There were huge numbers of prostitutes, there was high child mortality, high incidence of sexual abuse of every kind – and lots of murders. Prostitutes were particularly vulnerable, then as now, and prostitute murders were two a penny. Jack the Ripper was responsible for only five of these murders – a drop in the ocean – and his reign of terror in the East End was surprisingly brief, yet his name became notorious unlike any other murderer’s before or since, a byword for gratuitous, sadistic violence. The Ripper murders made a huge impact on late Victorian England.
One minor mystery is exac
tly when the Ripper murders began. It is generally agreed that they happened within a fairly short time – but how short? Two early victims have been suggested: Emma Smith and Martha Turner. Emma Smith was described as ‘a drunken Whitechapel prostitute’ which might make her look like a classic Ripper victim, but there the similarities end. She was staggering home drunk to her lodgings in Spitalfields on 3 April 1888 when she was attacked. Before she died, twenty-four hours later, she was able to tell the police that she had been attacked by four men, the youngest about nineteen years old. She had been stabbed with something like a spike and robbed. It has never been suggested that any of the authentic Ripper murders was carried out by a gang.
The second possible early victim was Martha Turner, who was another prostitute. She was seen drinking with a soldier late one night before being murdered with thirty-nine stab wounds, nine in the throat, seventeen in the chest, thirteen in the stomach. It was a frenzied and vicious attack and looked as if it might have been done with two hands at once. Martha Turner was murdered on the night of 6-7 August 1888. Rather surprisingly, soldiers at the Tower of London had up until that time taken their bayonets with them when off duty. After the Turner murder that practice was stopped. All the soldiers at The Tower of London were lined up for an identity parade, but Martha Turner’s friend, who had seen her with the soldier earlier in the evening of the murder, either could not or would not identify the murderer. Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was in charge of the CID after the last Ripper murder and had the job of wrapping the case up, discounted these two murders; he did not believe they were the work of the maniac who committed the Jack the Ripper murders.
The uncontested Ripper murders began on 31 August 1888. Mary Ann Nichols, a Whitechapel prostitute, was found murdered in an alley. The police thought from witness accounts that she had approached a tall stranger with the line, ‘Want a good time, mister?’ She took him into the dark alley for sex and had her throat savagely cut. The police surgeon who examined her body said, ‘I have never seen so horrible a case. She was ripped about in a manner that only a person skilled in the use of a knife could have achieved.’ This idea that skill had been used was to return again and again. When no definite suspect was found, people began to speculate that the killer might perhaps be a butcher or a surgeon: but that was grasping at straws.
It was a horrible murder, but ‘one-off’ prostitute murders were relatively common, and the police naturally assumed it was one of these. But a week later another prostitute, Annie Chapman, was found dead in Hanbury Street close to Spitalfields Market. She had not only had her throat cut, she had been disembowelled, and her possessions as well as her entrails laid out beside her body. The thorough dissection of Annie Chapman suggested that the murderer had an interest, however warped, in anatomy.
Then, on 25 September, came the first letter from the Whitechapel murderer. It was sent to a Fleet Street news agency.
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing that the police have caught me. But they won’t fix me yet . . . I am down on whores and I won’t stop ripping them until I do get buckled. Grand job, that last job was, I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear from me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper stuff in a little ginger beer bottle after my last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope. Ha! Ha! The next job I do I shall clip the ears off and send them to the police, just for the jolly. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife is nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.
Yours truly, Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name, wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet they say I am a doctor now ha ha.’
Shortly afterwards, on 30 September, he murdered Liz Stride, another prostitute, in Berner’s Street. Like the others, she had her throat cut, almost certainly from behind, but was not mutilated in any other way. The police, probably rightly, assumed that Jack had been disturbed during this murder and had run off before finishing the job. To compensate, he killed again a few streets away, in Mitre Square. This fourth victim was Catherine Eddowes. She was disembowelled.
Panic gripped Whitechapel. Women began to equip themselves with whistles to raise the alarm and knives to defend themselves.
The murder of Catherine Eddowes introduced a new dimension. Not only was it much bloodier than all the others – so far – but a trail of blood led to a wall in a tenement stairwell where a strange cryptic message was inscribed in chalk. It read, ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing’. Fearing reprisal attacks on Jewish men, the head of the Metropolitan Police Force, Sir Charles Warren, had the message scrubbed off. In doing so, he may have destroyed some vital evidence. It would be useful to know, for instance, whether the handwriting was the same as that in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter.
Warren’s fears about reprisals were well-founded. All sorts of rumours were going round the East End about the identity of the murderer. One suspect was Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born doctor; it was rumoured he had been sent from Russia to incriminate expatriate Russian Jews. Nevertheless, the spelling of ‘Juwes’ may suggest something else – the involvement of freemasonry. The disembowelling too may be connected with Freemasons’ lore. The police were flooded with suspects nominated by the public, and the general atmosphere in the East End approached hysteria.
The Ripper’s final victim was Mary Kelly, a twenty-five-year-old prostitute, who was murdered on 9 November in her rented room in Miller’s Court. The following morning her landlord, Henry Bowers, called to collect her rent. He looked in through the window and saw the horrific sight of Mary’s dismembered body lying on the bed. ‘I shall be haunted by this for the rest of my life,’ he told the police. The previous evening Mary had been desperately trying to earn her rent. She was seen approaching strangers for business. The last one she was seen approaching was tall, dark and wore a deerstalker hat.
There were no more Ripper murders after the death of Mary Kelly, and that is in itself one of the great unsolved mysteries about them. Compulsive psychopathic killers tend to go on killing until they are stopped, yet the police had not apprehended anyone. There was no arrest, yet there were no more killings. One possible explanation is that the Ripper was prevented from continuing by his own death, that he committed suicide. This has led to the identification of Montagu John Druitt as the Ripper. He was last seen alive on 3 December 1888, four weeks after the Kelly murder. His body was found floating in the Thames a few days later. Druitt was a failed barrister who had fallen on such hard times that he had to resort to teaching to make a living. In favour of Montagu Druitt as the murderer are the history of mental illness within the family and Druitt’s acquisition of basic medical skills as a young man.
Druitt was born on 15 August 1857 at Wimborne in Dorset. His father William was a distinguished surgeon, a Justice of the Peace, a pillar of the community. Montagu Druitt was sent to Winchester in 1870 at the age of twelve. At school he was successful, except as an actor. Even the school magazine slated his performance as Sir Toby Belch. His great passion was for cricket. He went on to New College Oxford to read Classics, graduating in 1880. His decision to become a barrister seems to have been the beginning of a decline. He fell back on teaching at a private ‘cramming shop’ in Blackheath. He went on playing cricket. Interestingly, he is known to have been playing in matches the day before or the day after several of the murders – whatever that proves.
In 1888, Montagu Druitt was going to pieces, and finally killed himself in December. It may be that he even gave the police his address too. On 29 September 1888, the Ripper wrote from Liverpool, ‘Beware, I shall be at work on the 1st and 2nd inst., in Minories at twelve midnight, and I give the authorities a good chance, but there is never a policeman near when I am at work.’ After the
Catherine Eddowes killing he sent another letter from Liverpool: ‘What fools the police are. I even give them the name of the street where I am living.’ Was Jack the Ripper really living in the Minories, a street near the Tower of London? Druitt had a relative called Lionel Druitt, who qualified as a doctor in Edinburgh in 1877, and he had lodgings near The Tower. It was at 140 Minories. Lionel seems to have moved in as a junior partner of Dr Gillard in Clapham Road in 1886, but it may be that the Minories rooms were passed on to his cousin Montagu, who was four years younger than him.
It was quite common for upper and middle class young men to go ‘slumming’ in the East End. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins had done it when looking for material for their fiction; others did it when looking for illicit sex. A room in a lodging house in the area would have been useful for the purpose. The connection between Montagu Druitt and the Minories is tenuous, but it is the one address he mentions in his letter.
It is also intriguing that Lionel Druitt left for New South Wales in Australia in 1886, yet he was able to produce, in 1890, a tantalizingly elusive document entitled The East End Murderer – I knew him. Since he was out of the country at the time of the murders, he can only have picked up the key information from other family members. Unfortunately, though the title and author of this document are known, no copy has so far been traced. In spite of having a promising career in both medicine and cricket in England, Montagu’s brother Edward suddenly decided in 1889 to emigrate to Australia. Maybe, after his brother’s murder spree and suicide, England was no longer so attractive. In 1889, he doubtless met Lionel and told hem everything, giving him the material for the 1890 monograph.
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 21