Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Once errors creep into the literature they are repeated in book after book. This is because Ripperologists have always drawn heavily, sometimes exclusively, upon the work of their predecessors. Assertions of fact, however erroneous, thus travel down the years virtually unchallenged. A single example will suffice.

  It is more than fifty years since William Stewart’s Jack the Ripper: A New Theory was published. In this work we are told that Mary Kelly was three months pregnant at the time she was slain.11 Now, there is no reason to believe any unsupported statement in Stewart. He was an uncaring fictioneer and his book is one of the worst ever written on the subject. Even inquest testimony is reported wrongly. Sometimes he invents testimony for real witnesses. Sometimes he invents witnesses as well as testimony! Especially is this assertion about Mary Kelly suspect. For it was Stewart’s contention that the crimes were the work of a midwife and a pregnancy among the victims would have bestowed credibility upon his theory.

  In 1959 Stewart was followed by Donald McCormick. His Identity of Jack the Ripper sets out to be a factual study, but does McCormick query the fable of Mary Kelly’s pregnancy? Not a bit, he repeats it. Furthermore, he claims to quote the findings of Dr George Bagster Phillips, a Metropolitan Police surgeon, that Mary was ‘in the early stages of pregnancy and that she was healthy and suffering from no other disease except alcoholism.’12

  Such confident assertions sound convincing. Not surprisingly, they have found their way into numerous books and are still trotted out today as hard fact. But they are entirely made out of wholecloth. In 1987 original post-mortem notes came to light which proved that Mary was not pregnant when she died. Years before this, however, obvious questions should have been asked. Where did these writers come by their information? And were there credible sources for it?

  Faulty primary sources, dishonest research and the sheepish repetition of printed folklore have taken us very far from the truth about Jack the Ripper. I do not wish to imply that there have not been worthwhile books on the subject and happily acknowledge my debt to them.13 But this whole field of research has degenerated into a mass of conflicting claims and is now held in widespread and well-earned disrepute.

  In the early seventies the rash accusations of Ripperologists against all and sundry prompted a Bill Tidy cartoon. It shows Sherlock Holmes, backed by two stalwart constables and kneeling before a dismayed and distinctly unamused Queen Victoria. ‘I have reason to believe,’ he says, ‘that you are Jack the Ripper.’ The Truth sent up the industry again in 1988. Reviewing the credentials of suspects as diverse as Lord Tennyson and George Formby, its contributors eventually plumped for Sooty, an ‘evil little criminal mastermind’ who understood that being an eight-inch-high glove puppet of a bear he might pass through the cesspits, pubs and gutters of Whitechapel unnoticed.14

  It is time to attempt a rescue.

  When I began this book I realized that a new study of the Whitechapel murders would have to do two things. First, it must have the courage to dispense with the books and research the subject from scratch. And second, it must proceed without any preconceived theory. In short, the conclusions must follow from the facts and not the other way around.

  I have, of course, benefited from the work of other bona-fide students. But essentially my account rests upon a completely fresh overhaul of primary sources. A mass of documents in police, Home Office, inquest, court, hospital, prison, workhouse and genealogical records, some still closed to general public access, have been searched. And from them I have fashioned the most comprehensive and accurate reconstruction of the case ever placed before the public. Areas of research generally neglected in the literature have been explored. Victims, for example, are accorded as much priority as suspects in this book. I have also described and assessed the methods taken by the police to capture the criminal and explained their difficulties with both Home Office and press.

  A century ago the identity of Jack the Ripper aroused as much passion and debate amongst senior detectives as it does today amongst the world’s amateur sleuths. Sir Melville Macnaghten accused a barrister who threw himself into the Thames in December 1888. Sir Robert Anderson remained steadfast to his belief that the Ripper was a Polish Jew committed to a lunatic asylum in 1891, while in the opinion of Inspector Abberline, Jack the Ripper died on the scaffold in Wandsworth Prison in 1903, convicted under another pseudonym of the murder of his wife.

  On the strength of my findings the most important police suspects are identified and assessed. Some, like Montague John Druitt, are already well-known. Others, like Oswald Puckridge and Nikaner Benelius, have never been fully dealt with in any book before. In rejecting the names dangled before us by Macnaghten in 1894 I have challenged the whole drift of serious Ripper studies since 1959. This has not been prompted by any desire for sensation. I have simply followed where the evidence has led me.

  If you are looking for another shoddily-researched ‘final solution’, with a cast list of disgraced royals, Czarist secret agents, black magicians and deranged midwives, you had best put this book down now.

  If you prefer facts to journalism, if you want to know the truth about Jack the Ripper and are tired of being humbugged, read on!

  2

  Mysterious Murder in George Yard

  BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY, 6 August 1888. It was the last holiday of the summer. Some Londoners, rising early and determined to spend this last day in the country or by the sea, ventured out to Epping Forest, Rye House, Hampton Court, Kew or the Kent and Sussex coasts. But as the day wore on an increasingly dull and leaden sky presaged yet more rain. It seemed to have done little else that summer. Rainy, thundery weather had persisted until the end of July, and August had begun wet and changeable. Not surprisingly, then, most holiday folk elected to shelter in the capital. To its attractions they resorted in shoals.

  Tussaud’s, the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park, the People’s Palace in the East End, the South Kensington museums and the Tower all enjoyed brisk patronage. At Alexandra Palace holidaymakers gathered in their thousands in the drizzle to watch intrepid Professor Baldwin ascend in his balloon to 1000 feet and then parachute to the ground. More than 55,000 opted for Crystal Palace. There the entertainments ranged from organ recitals to military bands, from Keen the cyclist, matching his bicycle over 20 miles against horses, to Captain Dale, the ‘well-known Aeronaut’, from a monster fireworks display to a ‘Grand Fairy Ballet’. And when the day’s activities were done London’s rich night life, its pubs, theatres and music-halls, ensured conviviality and spectacle for those still anxious to postpone the damp journey home.

  Amidst the holiday crowds that day were Joseph and Elizabeth Mahoney, a young married couple. Their lives, like those of most East Enders, were hard. Joseph was a carman. His wife worked from nine o’clock in the morning to seven at night in a match factory at Stratford. And their combined earnings supported a frugal existence at No. 47 George Yard Buildings, a block of model dwellings occupied, as the East London Observer tells us, by ‘people of the poorest description’, in George Yard (present Gunthorpe Street), off Whitechapel High Street.

  The Bank Holiday thus came as a kind if brief respite, and in defiance of bad weather the Mahoneys made the most of it. It was not until about 1.40 on the Tuesday morning that the weary couple arrived home. They went straight up to their room but Elizabeth, after taking off her hat and cloak, slipped out again for some provisions for their supper. Every night the gas jets illuminating the wide, stone staircase in George Yard Buildings were turned out at eleven, so it was completely dark on the stairs as she descended to the street. She was away but a few minutes. It was perhaps about 1.50 when she returned, having purchased provisions from a chandler’s shop in nearby Thrawl Street, and after supper had been disposed of the Mahoneys went to bed. Elizabeth had seen no one in descending or ascending the stairs, and that night the couple slept undisturbed.

  Alfred George Crow was a licensed cab-driver. He, too, rented a lodging, No. 35, in Georg
e Yard Buildings. Crow got home that night at 3.30 a.m. Although he carried no light his eyes were good, and when he reached the first floor landing he saw someone lying there. It was not unusual to find vagrants sleeping on the landing so he took no notice of the silent figure and went straight up to his room, where he sought the comfort of his bed. Like the Mahoneys he heard no noise during the night.

  It was another tenant, waterside labourer John Saunders Reeves from No. 37, who discovered the murder. Because he had to be up early for work, Reeves retired at about six on the Bank Holiday evening. The next morning he left his lodging at about 4.45. It was already getting light as he descended the stairs. And on the first floor landing he was horrified to come upon the body of a woman, lying on her back in a pool of blood. A few details – the absence of blood from the mouth, the clenched hands and the disarranged clothes, torn open at the front – registered in his brain before he stumbled down into the street to find a policeman.1

  Reeves was soon back, leading PC Thomas Barrett 226H up the stairs to the landing. The body was that of a middle-aged woman, plump and about five feet three inches in height. Her hair and complexion were both dark. Her clothes, a black bonnet, long black jacket, dark-green skirt, brown petticoat and stockings, and pair of ‘side-spring’ boots, were old and worn. She lay on her back, her hands lying by her sides and tightly clenched, her legs open. ‘The clothes,’ Barrett told the inquest two days later, ‘were turned up as far as the centre of the body, leaving the lower part of the body exposed; the legs were open, and altogether her position was such as to at once suggest in my mind that recent intimacy had taken place.’2

  George Yard and neighbourhood. × marks the site of George Yard Buildings, where Martha Tabram was found dead, 4.45 a.m. on 7 August 1888

  The woman was plainly dead. Nevertheless, Barrett sent immediately for a doctor and Dr Timothy Robert Killeen of 68 Brick Lane arrived in George Yard at about 5.30 a.m. His hurried examination of the body revealed for the first time the awful extent of the woman’s injuries. She had been stabbed no less than thirty-nine times! The doctor concluded that she had been dead for about three hours and gave instructions for the body to be at once removed to the mortuary. Since there was no public mortuary in Whitechapel the police conveyed it to the deadhouse belonging to the workhouse infirmary in Old Montague Street.

  At the mortuary Killeen conducted a post-mortem examination. His findings, presented to the inquest jury on 9 August, described the woman’s fearful wounds in detail. Upon opening the head he had found an effusion of blood between the scalp and the bone. The brain was pale but healthy. There were at least twenty-two stab wounds to the trunk: ‘the left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung in two places, but the lungs were otherwise perfectly healthy. The heart was rather fatty, and was penetrated in one place, but there was otherwise nothing in the heart to cause death, although there was some blood in the pericardium. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was perfectly healthy, and was penetrated in two places; both the kidneys were perfectly healthy; the stomach was also perfectly healthy, but was penetrated in six places; the intestines were healthy, and so were all the other organs. The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth . . . there was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated. Death was due to hemorrhage and loss of blood.’3

  Killeen disagreed with Barrett on one point. He saw no reason to believe that sexual intercourse had recently taken place. But he did proffer some clues as to the modus operandi of the killer. There was no evidence of a struggle. One of the wounds, he contended, might have been made by a left-handed person, but the rest appeared to have been inflicted by a right-handed person. And two different weapons had been used. Now, much has been made of Killeen’s testimony on this last point. It is worded differently by different reporters. The East London Observer quoted the doctor thus: ‘I don’t think that all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument, because there was one wound on the breast bone which did not correspond with the other wounds on the body. The instrument with which the wounds were inflicted, would most probably be an ordinary knife, but a knife would not cause such a wound as that on the breast bone. That wound I should think would have been inflicted with some form of a dagger.’ In the Daily News his evidence is a little more specific: ‘In the witness’s opinion the wounds were not inflicted with the same instrument, there being a deep wound in the breast from some long, strong instrument, while most of the others were done apparently with a penknife. The large wound could have been caused by a sword bayonet or dagger.’4

  Inspector Edmund Reid, the ‘Local Inspector’ (Head of CID) in the Metropolitan Police’s H or Whitechapel Division, took charge of the investigation. From the outset the case promised to be a difficult one. The dead woman was not known to any of the tenants of George Yard Buildings. There was no clue to the author of the crime and no obvious motive for it. And despite the ferocity of the murder no inhabitant of the buildings had heard the slightest disturbance during the night. The last point is one of some significance. Inspector Ernest Ellisdon, in a report written only three days after the murder, explicitly stated that no blood was found on the stairs leading to the landing. This means that the victim was killed where her body was discovered. Yet, in a crowded tenement block, no one seems to have heard a sound. Francis Hewitt, the superintendent of the dwellings, occupied an apartment with his wife close to the spot where Reeves found the body. Indeed, for the benefit of one journalist, he took a foot rule and measured the distance between the two. They were only twelve feet apart. ‘And we never heard a cry,’ he told the reporter. Mrs Hewitt said that she heard a single cry of ‘Murder’ but that was early in the evening, and although it echoed through the building it did not seem to emanate from there. In any case, as the Hewitts explained, ‘the district round here is rather rough, and cries of “Murder” are of frequent, if not nightly, occurrence in the district.’ The Hewitts’ comment suggests a possible solution to the problem. But there is another – that the victim’s cries were stifled by strangulation before or during the knife attack. That, according to the Illustrated Police News, is what happened: ‘The difficulty of identification arose out of the brutal treatment to which the deceased was manifestly subjected, she being throttled while held down and the face and head so swollen and distorted in consequence that her real features are not discernible.’ Unfortunately, with the bulk of the police files now lost, it has proved impossible to corroborate this particular detail.5

  Hastily-compiled press reports soon apprised the general public of the tragedy. One of the earliest, printed in the Star, appeared on the day of the murder:

  A Whitechapel Horror

  A woman, now lying unidentified at the mortuary, Whitechapel, was ferociously stabbed to death this morning, between two and four o’clock, on the landing of a stone staircase in George’s-buildings, Whitechapel.

  George’s-buildings are tenements occupied by the poor laboring class. A lodger going early to his work found the body. Another lodger says the murder was not committed when he returned home about two o’clock. The woman was stabbed in 20 places. No weapon was found near her, and her murderer has left no trace. She is of middle age and height, has black hair and a large, round face, and apparently belonged to the lowest class.6

  The East End, accustomed as it was to everyday violence, was shocked by the ferocity displayed in this killing. Morbid sightseers visited George Yard Buildings to gaze at the crimson-stained flags where the body had been found. The victim, in the view of one local newspaper, had been ‘literally butchered’, the ‘virulent savagery’ of her killer ‘beyond comprehension’. Another spoke of the ‘feeling of insecurity’ occasioned by the realization that ‘in a great city like London, the streets of which are continually patrolled by police, a woman can be foully and horribly killed almost next to the citizens peacefully sleeping in their beds, without a trace
or clue being left of the villain who did the deed.’ Indeed such was the consternation in and about George Yard that a few days after the murder about seventy local men held a meeting and appointed a committee of twelve to watch certain streets, chiefly between eleven at night and one in the morning. The St Jude’s Vigilance Committee, as it was called, was the first of several spawned by the Whitechapel murders. It comprised both working men and students from Toynbee Hall and met once a week to receive reports and concert recommendations for the better order and security of the district. The honorary secretary was Thomas Hancock Nunn.7

  If the public hoped for clues to emerge at the inquest they were disappointed. Wynne E. Baxter, Coroner for the South Eastern District of Middlesex, was on holiday in Scandinavia, so it was George Collier, the deputy coroner, who opened the proceedings in the library of the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel Road, on the afternoon of Thursday, 9 August. He sat beneath a magnificent portrait of the Princess of Wales by Louis Fleischmann. Other paintings, royal portraits and landscapes, adorned the library walls in profusion. Collier was flanked on his right by Inspector Reid, smartly dressed in blue serge, and Dr Killeen, and on his left by the inquest jury. The general public had been excluded, but popular interest was reflected in the unprecedentedly large number of summoned jurymen who attended, twenty in all, and in the atmosphere that prevailed throughout the court. It was, commented the East London Advertiser’s reporter, ‘painfully quiet’.8