Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  When I was ten, the news was dominated by the Yorkshire Ripper, and I followed the case closely, with no idea that his nickname derived from an earlier murderer. It became an interest as I moved into my teens: I was fascinated by TV programmes on American serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and then the British killer Dennis Nilsen.

  It wasn’t a serious obsession: I didn’t go out of my way to study murderers. But I was always intrigued by the big question: what makes someone become, not just a murderer with a clear motive, but a serial killer, who strikes again and again, seemingly randomly? Where does that urge to kill come from?

  I did well at school, working hard for my O levels, putting up with the bullies who dubbed me ‘Half Mast’ because my trousers were always too short: my parents didn’t have enough money to buy me new ones each year. I was in the O-level class with the posh kids, but I was on free school dinners: I didn’t really fit in. I did my revision at my grandmother’s house, my favourite refuge. It was then that I realized nobody would ever fight my battles for me, and I developed a strong sense of having to look after myself.

  I wasn’t encouraged at home, where schoolwork wasn’t particularly valued. I started doing A levels in Chemistry, Biology and Music, but a spectacular row with my mother and stepfather sent me running to North Wales to live with my dad at the guest house he ran in Rhyl, North Wales. I was even unhappier living with my stepmother, so I went back to Birkenhead and went to college to carry on studying. My mother and stepfather had moved from the council house into a shop in Wallasey, and then when I was eighteen they returned to the terraced two-up, two-down opposite my grandmother. There was no bedroom for me, so I slept on a camp bed underneath the stairs in the living room, still spending a lot of time with my grandmother, whose health was declining (she died when I was 21). I was also playing the saxophone in a band, and devoting more time to this than to college work: I took two A levels, in Biology and Chemistry, and when the results came out I had an F (fail) for Biology and an O (O-level grade) for Chemistry. I stared at them: FO. At that moment, I felt the letters were spelling out a message to me, to give up my academic hopes and just get on with life.

  One thing that both my parents unconsciously handed to me was a desire to be my own boss. My dad ran his own guest house, my mum and stepdad made and sold soft toys on market stalls. I’d been helping them since I was thirteen, I knew everything I needed to know about making teddy bears and other popular stuffed toys, and I was soon running two market stalls of my own. It was my first taste of business success. I was nineteen, I had seven outworkers (women who made the toys), two stalls, and a business supplying soft toys as arcade prizes to all the concessions along the seafront at Rhyl.

  With my girlfriend, I was also soon buying property, jumping at the chance to buy a rundown place in Toxteth, Liverpool, then another one in Birkenhead, where we lived, then another one. The band took up all my spare time: we were punk rockers, and we went by the name of Dust Choir, which makes me cringe today. But it was good fun.

  Then I crashed and burned: I lost it all. My girlfriend split with me, and I was devastated because I did not see it coming. At the tender age of twenty-two I couldn’t deal with the rejection. I needed to get away, and with a mate we left Merseyside in an old red Escort van which I bought for £200 from a bloke in a pub, which needed a pair of pliers to keep the choke out, and which I had to rev up at traffic lights in case it stalled. I had £130, a suitcase of clothes and a tent. We more or less stuck a pin in a map and decided to go to Cambridge, because it sounded like it would be a beautiful place, which it is. But what I saw for the next few months was not the lovely city, but potato fields, where we worked as pickers, a car components factory, where I worked on a production line, and a campsite where we pitched the tent.

  Even the campsite did not last: when my mate bailed out and went back home, I couldn’t pay the site rent and I wasn’t allowed back to get my tent and my possessions. The van had been towed away by the police as it had no tax and MOT, and was, after the journey down, undriveable. I was, for a short time, truly homeless. I switched my shifts at the factory to mainly nights, and during the day dozed on a bus shelter seat, and occasionally in a trench halfway from the town centre to the factory. I was washing at the railway station and walking to work. In desperation one cold night I asked a couple of policemen in a police car to arrest me, just so that I could get warm: they declined. I was so rundown and filthy that I actually caught scabies, which was horrible, and I felt ashamed because to me scabies meant dirt and poverty. I must have been a bit smelly because my workmates at the factory showed me where there was a shower to clean myself up.

  It was a very bleak time, but when I look back it was important. It reinforced my need to be successful, to make something of myself, and my strong feeling that I would always have to do it myself, without any help. It also gave me a great empathy with people who find themselves at the bottom of the heap, with nobody to turn to and nowhere to live: eventually, years down the line, this helped me understand the dire poverty of the Ripper victims. I knew, as they knew, the overpowering drive for the basics of life: shelter and food.

  Luckily, I kept on working and with my wages could afford a bed and breakfast. I was soon back on my feet, raising the deposit to rent a house, which I shared with my new Spanish girlfriend. Eventually, I got some money from the properties in Birkenhead and decided to get back into studying, but this time a subject that would be relevant to me: Business Studies. I applied to various seats of learning, and in the end landed a place at the Polytechnic of North London in Holloway Road, a complete contrast with the tranquillity of Cambridge and my first introduction to the metropolis. For the first couple of weeks I commuted from Cambridge: a ridiculously long journey. I would doze on the four-hour coach journey and wake as it came into London down Commercial Road, through the heart of the East End. This was my first impression of the area, and I remember thinking it looked sad and rundown.

  I was soon living in London and having a great time, making good friends, girlfriends, finding the college work easy. I decided to go on to do a postgrad course in Management Studies at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), funding myself with grants and casual work. I was, like all students, permanently broke and always with an eye out for a cheap place to eat.

  That mission to eat cheap, often in the middle of the night after strumming guitars or arguing pretentious philosophy with my student friends, took me for the first time into the East End. We patronized the famous twenty-four-hour Beigel Bake at the north end of Brick Lane, where we could have, in those days, a delicious, filling, cream cheese bagel for the princely sum of 40p. And as we discovered this manna, at the same time I discovered the whole area, a place I knew nothing about but where, for some inexplicable reason, I felt at home. It was rough back then – it still is, in parts. But I loved the buzz, the coolness of the place. It spoke to me in a way no other area has ever chimed with me before. There were hookers and their pimps, knots of dodgy-looking men outside the pubs, and spicy, exotic smells drifting from the Asian restaurants and cafes. I was used to the rougher areas of Liverpool, but this was different in a way it is hard for me to explain. I loved the place, still do, and if it was not for family reasons I’d live there today.

  I can remember one particular evening when I went with my best mates Andy and Paul to celebrate Andy’s birthday with a curry in Brick Lane, our idea of the best possible night out. We’d had a tankful, we somehow got separated, and in my inebriated state I had no idea how to find my way back to Liverpool Street station. For some reason which now seems surreal, I found myself talking to a Spanish prostitute in Spanish (thanks to my Spanish girlfriend I knew a smattering of words) and she took me back to the station, where I dodged the barrier and ended up back at the flat where I was living. Her friendliness and willingness to help somehow typified the area for me.

  I knew nothing about Jack the Ripper at this stage. Yes,
like everyone else in Britain I’d heard the name. But I had no idea that I was walking the streets where his crimes took place. That would all come later. There was, though, a very strange moment in 1991, nine years before I first heard the Ripper story. I was walking down Commercial Road and at the junction with White Church Lane I had a very strong feeling that something had happened there. It was powerful enough to make me stop for a few seconds, and just absorb the feeling: I had no notion what it meant until years later.

  My life was going well. While I was at college I met a lovely girl, Lyndsay, and we became engaged, and even got to the stage of sending out the wedding invitations, and paying for the dress. But I realized that we had drifted apart, with her concentrating on her teaching career and me, after leaving college with my master’s degree, flat out pursuing a lucrative career with a software company which I helped to establish. I was greatly relieved when, after plucking up the courage to tell Lyndsay I didn’t think I could go through with the wedding, she sighed with relief and told me she felt exactly the same . . . I will always be grateful to her and her family, because they showed me, for the first time, what a normal happy family life can be like. They welcomed me into their home, and it was very different from my own childhood, with everyone getting on well and caring about each other.

  Soon afterwards, with business going great guns, I met and married my first wife, Feiruz, who was Ethiopian. It didn’t last: we were only married for three-and-a-half years.

  During this time I was still frequenting the East End, making it my regular stop to entertain the corporate clients of our business who flew in from Holland, Denmark, Africa and other countries, as well as from other parts of the UK. A curry in Brick Lane was a popular choice, as they always enjoyed seeing the East End of London, and I was happy for any excuse to go there.

  The business became the third largest supplier of software in the country, and I will give you a couple of examples of the way my brain works – not because I am bragging, but to illustrate how I think in a lateral way, seeing opportunities that others have failed to spot. This quirk, which has helped me so much in business, eventually helped me when I first encountered the shawl and started thinking deeply about the Ripper mystery.

  One Sunday afternoon I went to the Tate Gallery, purely as a visitor. I noticed that while they sold prints and souvenirs in the shop, they had no software. The following day I spoke to the buyer and did a deal to supply CD-ROMs of art and artists. In the same way, I read a news item about government plans to put computers into all schools, started work on it the following day and we became a major supplier of educational software to schools. Another time one of our customers told me he had acquired a large collection of titillating, but perfectly legal, photographs of semi-naked girls. I encouraged him to put them on disks, and I sold them into the Virgin and HMV stores on Oxford Street – but only after sitting up late into the night obscuring the nipples on the covers with a marker pen.

  When I decided to leave the company, I set up a software brokerage company. For three-and-a-half years we were very successful, but 9/11 put paid to it overnight, as some of our customers were badly hit. By then my marriage was foundering, I was in the process of buying a beautiful seventeenth-century malting house in the country, and I was considering setting up my next venture, a company running care homes for the elderly. I was on the brink of big changes in my life, but even bigger ones were in store . . .

  The first and most important (she’d kill me if I didn’t say that, and it’s true) was meeting my second wife, Sally. I went for a day out with a mate of mine, Mark, and he promised to take me somewhere interesting. Unlike half the population of London, I’d never heard of the restaurant School Dinners. How I’d avoided all the publicity about this place, where the waitresses dressed as if they were off the set of a St Trinian’s film and the food was all traditional British grub, I don’t know.

  But what first struck me about the place was not the ambience, but the woman who was at the reception desk who, when I remarked it felt a bit chilly in there, looked up and with a straight face said: ‘That’s because you’ve got no hair.’

  I laughed at the insult, and we spent the rest of the evening laughing and talking together. Sally McMullen owned the restaurant with her ex-husband, and they had seen every star you can name pass through, it was such a unique and popular venue.

  As we chatted I discovered that she came from a part of North Wales I knew well, and she had even been in the same school as my sister, at the same time. There was an immediate feeling that we were right together. Later that night, Sally suggested we go to a club in the Kings Road and as she and I danced together, another club-goer tried to make a play for her. She said: ‘Excuse me, I’m dancing with my future husband.’

  It was a prescient remark. In 1999, in the space of three weeks there had been big events in my life: I bought our golden retriever Goldie on a Friday, the following Friday I met Sally, and exactly a week later I moved to the malting house. Sally and I were so sure we belonged together that she moved in with me straight away. Shortly afterwards I was in the middle of buying my first care home, a stressful business.

  Then the next, vitally important, event happened. It was, on the face of it, nothing more than a pleasant night out, a trip to the cinema with Sally. We went to the Vue Cinema in Cambridge to see From Hell, a Johnny Depp movie in which he plays a police inspector who investigates the Jack the Ripper killings in Victorian London. The film shows some of the key locations in the Ripper story, notably Christ Church in Spitalfields and the Ten Bells pub. I had never realized until I saw it that my favourite area, the East End, was the location of these grisly murders about which I had only the vaguest idea.

  ‘How come I didn’t know about this?’ I asked myself.

  The strange feeling that I had been walking the same streets as this mysterious killer without knowing it, coupled with my inherent interest in crime, made me want to know a lot more. That night, watching the film, my continuing fascination – obsession, even – with the Ripper case was born. There have been four or five massive moments for me in the quest for the Ripper and this was the first.

  I started to read books about the case, and soon after seeing the film Sally and I went on a two-hour-long ‘Jack the Ripper’ walk around Whitechapel, one Saturday afternoon. We were conducted around the area and heard the story of the crimes, told by a Ripper expert who made a very good job of stoking my enthusiasm for the mystery, even if Sally made no attempt to hide her boredom: she was rolling her eyes, folding her arms, looking up at the sky. But for me, it was all fascinating. Yes, here was the Ten Bells pub I had seen in the film, here was the church, here the places where each of the victims’ bodies were found: real streets, real places.

  We were in a group of assorted people, including American tourists, but despite the varied company I could feel the deep affinity I had always felt for the East End, but now coupled with something darker, more intriguing. This was the biggest unsolved murder case ever: surely there had to be a key to it somewhere, some door that nobody yet had opened? I had a feeling, born I suppose of ignorance and arrogance, that I was going to find that door, that it was simply a matter of thinking about it all in a fresh way.

  Looking back, I’m astonished at my presumption. I now know that much better qualified people than me, professional historians, genealogists, forensic psychiatrists, senior policemen, have all tried and failed to give definitive answers to the big question: whodunit? But I have always enjoyed and risen to challenges, and this was a huge one.

  By the time I had bought and was running three care homes I was under a lot of stress: it was a fraught business, dealing with staff and, more importantly, making sure the needs of the residents were met. I was working long hours, and there were other worries in my personal life. I’d never wanted children before in any of my other relationships, but when Sally fell pregnant I was overjoyed. We were putting roller blinds up when she told me: ‘I think I’m pregnant
.’ I felt such a surge of joy. Tragically, within a week of the great news, she had a miscarriage and we lost the twins she was carrying. We then embarked on a frustrating round of IVF. To our lasting delight, she became pregnant with our son Alexander naturally, between IVF cycles, and we were thrilled when he made his appearance on my birthday in 2005.

  For me, Jack the Ripper was an escape route. I could shut off from the problems of the business and the worries about our battle for a baby by immersing myself in books and research. I didn’t take much notice of the books which expounded wild theories, but stuck to the ones that laid out the facts. I even rang Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, thinking they would have all the official paperwork on the case, but they told me the material was at the National Archives in Kew. I went there and viewed everything they had on microfiche. I even once handled some original documents, including a photograph of one of the victims, Elizabeth Stride. Seeing the grainy black and white image of her brought the case to life more than anything had before: this was a real person. But it’s true to say that I was much more fascinated by the detective work than I was about the social history of the area, and the plight of the women victims, at this stage. What drove me on was a deep-seated conviction that something, somewhere along the line, had been missed.

  But to understand my quest, it is vital to know the whole story of Jack the Ripper’s crimes.