by Paul Adams
For the Fox sisters, however, their move away from Hydesville did not end the attention of the forces that were now apparently at work. The rapping noises continued to disturb the three girls and were now accompanied by other phenomena that included the eerie movement of objects. Margaret, Kate and Leah Fox continued to communicate with the noises and through a system of rapping were finally able to establish permanent contact with the spirit ‘entities’ that were making the sounds, proclaiming a new era of interaction with the departed.
On 14 November 1849, not quite two years since the Fox family had moved into their little Hydesville home, the first Spiritualist meeting took place at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. Before long the movement began to grow, but its spread was greeted with hostility and was denounced by the establishment. Despite this the circles that had formed around the three Fox girls began to develop and it soon became apparent that Margaret, Kate and Leah were not the only ones who were able to establish contact with spirits. The Kate Fox circle developed two new mediums, Mrs Tamlin and Mrs Benedict, who went on to become well known in their own right. In other circles sitters discovered that they too had the ability to cause phenomena. On 28 November 1849, Leah Fox became the first professional medium, charging sitters a fee for her services as an intermediary with the spirit world. At this stage the phenomena demonstrated consisted of rapping noises, movement of the table about which the sitters gathered – giving rise to the popular term ‘table turning’ – and psychic touches experienced by the sitters themselves.
The Fox sisters were public mediums for many years but as time went on their own reputations, as well as those of the many mediums who followed in their footsteps, came under attack as the new movement continued to be derided and dismissed as either hysteria or fraudulence by the scientific fraternity, newspapermen and the public alike. In 1861, Kate Fox became engaged to a New York banker named Charles Livermore and over the course of the next five years gave nearly 400 private séances in Livermore’s home. These sittings were significant as in several Kate achieved an alleged materialisation of Livermore’s dead first wife Estelle that convinced him of the genuineness of her mediumship. Kate herself travelled widely, visiting England and Russia, where she continued to expand the Spiritualist movement. However, the personal relationships between the three founding sisters of Modern Spiritualism deteriorated over the years, fuelled by Margaret’s descent into alcoholism. She managed to turn Kate and Leah against one another and, in 1888, the same year that Jack the Ripper stalked the East End of London, and some forty years after the Hydesville rappings began, made a confession denouncing the movement. A year later, Margaret issued a full retraction, but her actions caused much damage to the Fox sisters’ reputations. All three sisters died within three years of one another, Leah first in 1890; Kate followed her on 2 July 1892 and finally Margaret on 8 March 1893. The founders were gone but in their lifetimes they had seen the incredible growth of the movement and this was to go from strength to strength in the years to come.
The spread of Spiritualism outside of its native America was inevitable due to the activities of travelling mediums. In October 1852, Mrs W.R. Haydon was one of the first to arrive in England from Boston. She was a medium in the mould of the Fox sisters who demonstrated rapping phenomena and table turning. The popularity of the latter method of communication, the simplest involving the tilting of a specially built lightweight table to which questions were directed, became immense and quickly exploded into a craze. Society invitations were extended to include five o’clock tea and table turning. Many mediums followed Mrs Haydon and many diversities of spirit communication began to be represented. P.B. Randolph was a notable trance medium who arrived in 1857.
The early 1850s saw the first experimental organisation for the study and development of English mediumship. This was the Charing Cross Spiritual Circle, which in July 1857 was superseded by the London Spiritualist Union. Several other organisations developed but in time either fell by the wayside or were incorporated into other groups. As well as the London Spiritualist Alliance, inaugurated in 1884, English Spiritualism was consolidated by various other factors. In 1871, Kate Fox settled in England and gave many séances. Mrs Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) was an inspirational speaker and propagandist for the Spiritualist movement who visited England during the course of her extensive travels, as was Mrs Cora L.V. Richmond (1840-1923), who arrived in 1873 and spent several years in the country.
However, the single most important influence in England was the mediumship of Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) whose phenomena galvanised the entire spiritualistic scene in this country and his importance in the history of mediumship cannot be overstated. The New York scholar and theologian Professor George Bush was the first to investigate him, after which Home travelled to England, arriving in April 1855. Many Victorian Spiritualists were converted through experiencing his phenomena first hand and he impressed a number of notable persons of the day as to the genuineness of his abilities. These latter men included the Victorian scientist Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), noted for his work with optics and the inventor of the kaleidoscope, Vanity Fair novelist and journalist William Thackeray (1811-1863) and Lord Edward Robert Lytton (1831-1891), later Viceroy and Governor of India. The most famous aspect of Home’s mediumship was levitation but he also produced materialisations and the telekinetic movement of objects. His most famous feat of defying gravity was in December 1868 at Ashley House in London, where he is said to have levitated himself out of one first-floor room and entered another by floating in through the windows.
Nearly a century after the psychic feats of Home, the unlikely scenario that the Victorian world of Spiritualism had in fact solved the mystery of Jack the Ripper and that his arrest and imprisonment had been brought about by paranormal means surprisingly refused to go away. In 1970, journalist Fred Archer, former Editor of the Spiritualist newspaper Psychic News, published a book entitled Ghost Detectives in which he confidently supported the posthumous testament of Robert James Lees nearly forty years before: that the Whitechapel murders, the ‘crime mystery of a century’, had been solved by Lees, the ‘human bloodhound’ who had tracked the sadistic killer. Archer knew members of the Lees family well and they were able to relate some of the ‘more sensational aspects of their father’s career’, events the medium himself had apparently been reluctant to discuss during his lifetime. Despite this close relationship with the source, it was the journalist’s belief, as a convinced Spiritualist, that gave the accounts of Robert Lees and Jack the Ripper such credibility. Was it possible then that Archer was right, that Robert Lees did know the identity of the Whitechapel killer, that he was caught and the truth behind his apprehension was and remains a conspiracy of silence?
Robert Lees, born at Hinckley on the outskirts of Leicester on 12 August 1849, was in his late thirties during the ‘autumn of terror’. A former journalist on the Manchester Guardian, Lees had moved to London with his wife Sarah ten years before and was working on the staff of Tit-Bits magazine, a somewhat sensationalist weekly founded by Sir George Newnes in 1881. As with many of the mediums that were to flourish in the new era of Modern Spiritualism, Lees’ psychic powers were said to have manifested at an early age. His daughter Eva, one of fifteen children of whom three died in infancy, later claimed that her father was a deep trance medium by the age of twelve and while still a teenager had already given the grieving Queen Victoria a series of séances at Buckingham Palace, channelling for her the spirit of her beloved Prince Albert.
According to Fred Archer, Lees’ involvement with the Ripper crimes took place early in September 1888. Alone in his study the medium was ‘seized by a clairvoyant vision’ which gave him a supernatural insight on a deadly tableau being played out somewhere close by in the Victorian capital. Lees saw remotely a man leading a heavily drunken woman down a dark street, the only illumination being the glare from a nearby gin palace window by which the medium noted the man’s dark tweed suit
and the light raincoat he carried over one arm. Lees’ psychic powers allowed him to follow the couple as both turned into a narrow court and penetrate the blackness as they sought out a dark corner. As the woman drunkenly made to raise her skirt the man stepped forward, simultaneously clapping a hand over her mouth and slashing open her throat with a hidden knife. The killer quickly lowered the body to the ground and, with Lees a horrified voyeur, used the same knife to cut into the prone torso. The mutilations took only a few minutes after which the man wiped the blade on the woman’s clothes and, straightening up, he slipped on his overcoat, easily concealing his blood-soaked shirtfront, and casually walked back out into the street at which point, thankfully for the horrified medium, the psychic vision faded away and he found himself alone in the familiar surroundings of his home.
Shocked and sickened by what he had experienced, Lees regained enough composure to realise that he had been a premature witness to a crime that was yet to take place and hurriedly took a cab to Scotland Yard. Unfortunately for the gentle mystic, he was treated with derision by the duty sergeant and dismissed as a harmless crank, although the policeman went as far as to humour his persistence by making a note of when Lees said he saw the murder take place by recalling the time on the bar-room clock through the gin palace window. The following night, 8 September, Annie Chapman was slaughtered in the back yard at Hanbury Street. Accompanied by a manservant, the medium visited the murder site and was overwhelmed to find the same grim street and shadowy courtyard from his vision. Lees suffered a severe nervous breakdown and, debilitated both by the experience and his inability to make the authorities believe his story, he decided to take his family on a short holiday to the Continent, where, for a couple of weeks, he was untroubled by further visions.
On his return home from abroad the unwelcome and supernatural connection with the Whitechapel killer soon returned. While riding with Sarah Lees on a London omnibus, the couple had reached Notting Hill when Lees became aware of a man who had just stepped onboard – ‘a man of medium height wearing a dark tweed suit and a light overcoat’. By this time the unknown killer had acquired his famous and chilling title and Lees, who had scanned the newspapers for news of further crimes, was able to confidently whisper across to his wife, ‘That man is Jack the Ripper’. When the stranger got off at Marble Arch, Lees instructed his wife to continue home alone and set out to follow him. As the two men walked along Park Lane, Lees saw a policeman and, hurrying over, pointed out the man ahead. Not surprisingly, the constable was in no mood to believe the claims that the Whitechapel killer was in fact only 100 yards away and as Lees began arguing the stranger hailed a cab and was driven out of sight.
That night as he sat working, Robert Lees was again overpowered by a paranormal vision, this time the aftermath of another gruesome murder due to take place very soon. Lees was aware of a heavily mutilated body and saw the face terribly slashed, ‘one ear was completely severed, the other remained hanging by a thin shred of flesh’. Again the horrified man went to the police at Whitehall Place and insisted on an interview with a detective involved in the investigation. By this time Scotland Yard had received (on 29 September) a letter dated four days previously addressed to ‘Dear Boss’ in which the writer, again signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’, had threatened on his ‘next job’ to ‘clip the ladys [sic] ears off’ and send them to the police ‘just for jolly’. This time Lees’ description of the murdered woman, the head injuries and lacerated ears, made the policeman less likely to dismiss the psychic as a crank. The following night, the time of the ‘double event’, left the police with two more murders, and the cruel facial injuries inflicted on Catherine Eddowes seemed to confirm some aspects of Lees’ statement, although Archer states that an attempt was made to sever the ears of Elisabeth Stride, the first victim of the night, who was (as we have seen) found only with a cut throat. The responsibility of his foreknowledge again affected the psychic to the point that, on reading about the murders in the newspapers, Lees again suffered another nervous collapse.
A month later, Robert Lees was dining with two American friends in the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly when a third premonition took place. Certain that the Ripper had struck again, the journalist hurried to Scotland Yard and made a statement only a few hours before Thomas Bowyer twitched back the curtain at Miller’s Court and saw the terrible scene that sent him running for the police. According to Fred Archer, it was at this point that the Yard, unable to apprehend the killer and seemingly in internal disarray (Sir Charles Warren, the unpopular Chief of Police, had resigned on the day of Mary Kelly’s murder), finally approached Lees with a request that he use his powers to track down Jack the Ripper.
Accompanied by detectives the medium made his way through the streets of the East End, following a psychic trail only he could detect. Lees led the policemen across the capital until finally, at four in the morning, his ‘face worn and pallid, his eyes bloodshot’, he brought them to a large house in the West End of London and stated that the man that the whole of London sought was at that moment inside. The Scotland Yard inspector was dismayed as he recognised the address as that of a well respected and fashionable society physician, but Lees was adamant that this was the home of Jack the Ripper.
Undecided on whether to proceed further but having come this far, the un-named police inspector asked the medium to describe in detail the hallway that lay beyond the closed front door – if this was seen to be accurate then they would proceed with a thorough investigation of the doctor and his household. Using his powers of remote viewing, Lees immediately spoke of a black oak porter’s chair located to the right of the doorway, a stained-glass window over the staircase and, critically, a dog – a large mastiff – asleep at the foot of the stairs. As the vision faded the party approached the house and the inspector rang the bell. It was answered by a maid and as she showed the men through into the vestibule they saw that Lees’ description was accurate in every respect – only the dog was absent but when questioned the maidservant told them she had let the animal out into the garden only a few minutes before.
Now sure of his ground and confident as to the accuracy of Robert Lees’ psychic powers, the police inspector asked to speak with the mistress of the house and a gruesome story soon began to unfold. The eminent doctor had a sinister split personality given to periodic mood swings of violent and sadistic behaviour. Only through the actions of his wife and the servants had this brutal mania for inflicting pain been kept from becoming public knowledge – she had found him on one occasion torturing a cat in his study and he had to be physically restrained several times from beating his son and causing serious injury. Recently, the doctor’s wife had noticed with ‘a great dread’ that the terrible Whitechapel murders had all occurred on the nights that her husband had been absent from the house.
When confronted, the physician admitted to periods of memory loss during which he was unable to account for his actions. After one such blackout he regained consciousness at home with his shirtfront covered with blood and another time with scratches on his face. Soon a search of the house revealed the dark tweed suit and light overcoat that Lees had seen the murderer wearing in his first vision. Horrified that he may have committed the murders while in some strange altered state, the unnamed doctor begged them to kill him, unable to live with the knowledge that he was ‘a monster’. An impromptu ‘commission on lunacy’ held behind closed doors found the doctor criminally insane and he was sent to a private asylum on the outskirts of London. Robert Lees was quickly sworn to secrecy and it was commonly held that he became a pensioner of the Privy Purse as a reward for his psychic services (both to Queen Victoria and in the Ripper hunt) and for his discretion as to the true identity of Jack the Ripper, a pledge he fully honoured to the day of his death.
In summing up his account, Fred Archer concluded: ‘Why the hearing was held in private, and the Ripper’s identity kept secret, has never been satisfactorily explained. It has been claimed that he had highly
placed connections, which is not too unlikely. It has even been suggested that in his professional capacity he had attended on one or more members of the Royal family, but there is no evidence for this so far as I know’. So ends the crux of the case for Robert Lees and Jack the Ripper.
A secret Royal connection is a now familiar aspect of the Whitechapel case but in fact it was a theory that circulated in Ripper circles almost from the very beginning of the modern renaissance. In 1960, Dr Thomas Eldon Stowell, formerly of St Thomas’ Hospital in London, lunched with Colin Wilson and disclosed that through a personal investigation of the Lees story he was inclined to believe that the mysterious doctor tracked down by the psychic bloodhound was Sir William Gull, Physician in Ordinary to Queen Victoria. During the 1930s, Stowell had known Sir William’s daughter Caroline Acland, who told him that on one occasion a detective accompanied by a medium had visited her parents’ house at 74 Grosvenor Square in Mayfair and had asked ‘some impertinent questions’ that had upset Lady Gull. However, Dr Stowell did not believe that Sir William Gull was Jack the Ripper but rather that as a Royal physician he was involved in a conspiracy to shield the real killer and that the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, known as ‘Eddie’ and grandson of Queen Victoria, was actually the murderer. Over fifteen years later this ‘Royal Conspiracy’ theory achieved its widest audience through English journalist Stephen Knight’s 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution which presents a Masonic plot to cover up a clandestine marriage between Prince Eddie and a working-class girl, Annie Elizabeth Crook, and suggests the murders were carried out by Gull in collaboration with a coachman, John Netley, with the assistance of Sir Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard.