Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  The police were also plagued by timewasters, whose stories had to be checked out just in case. Another medical student at the London Hospital, William Bull, confessed to the murder of Catherine Eddowes. He was drunk when he made the confession and it was soon established he was in bed at his family home when the murder happened. A whole slew of letters was sent to the police with suggestions of how to improve the investigation, theories about how the killer got away and the names of suspicious individuals. Some were interesting, but some were plainly ridiculous, including accusations that either Sgt William Thick or PC Edward Watkins was the Ripper. Some were malicious: people getting even with anyone they had a grudge against. Some writers claimed to have visions of the killer or that the entire mystery could be solved if they were allowed to use their psychic abilities to assist the police. One woman wrote of her conviction that the murders were committed by an escaped ape which, after committing his foul deed, would hide the murder weapon up a tree and then slink back to whichever private menagerie he had managed to sneak out from.

  Some of the information was undoubtedly given in good faith, as in the case of suspect G. Wentworth Bell Smith who lodged with a couple in the Finsbury area of London and would apparently recite religious tracts, espouse the evils of prostitution, claiming that these women should be drowned and, rather alarmingly, would stay out all night and return home in a great frenzy, foaming at the mouth. Again, sound alibis proved he was not the Ripper.

  Robert D’Onston Stephenson, an eccentric journalist and occultist who was staying at the London Hospital at the time of the crimes, wrote to the police regarding his own theories, namely that the Ripper was French and that the uterus of a prostitute was considered of some use to this Frenchman. Stephenson’s interest in the case turned him into a suspect himself years later, accused of using the organs of the mutilated victims for arcane rituals and occult practices. Those who espouse the case of Stephenson as the Ripper note that, with the exception of Mary Kelly, the murder locations make the sign of a (sacrificial) cross.

  By the time the Whitechapel murders came to a sudden halt, many individuals had been either arrested and released, or accused without serious evidence. A list of all the suspects who were considered by the police would have been very long. Hardly a day seemed to pass without some newspaper following up a suspect lead, but in the end, that is all they seemed to be: suspect.

  There was no shortage of ideas: as Inspector Frederick Abberline told one newspaper in 1892, four years after the killing ended: ‘Theories! We were almost lost in theories; there were so many of them.’

  As time went on, and no culprit was found, the public fascination with the case deepened. In the years since the Ripper roamed the streets, many, many more names have been put forward. It seems that after the passage of a certain amount of time, a good case can be made for almost anyone.

  Author Leonard Matters claimed in 1929 that a ‘Dr Stanley’ was the Ripper, killing prostitutes out of revenge for the death of his beloved son who died after contracting a sexually transmitted disease from a prostitute. The story hinged on an account of Dr Stanley’s own confession which Matters claimed he had seen in a journal published in South America. There is no evidence that Dr Stanley actually existed, and this is also the case with a later ‘doctor’ suspect. In 1959 another author, Donald McCormick, named the murderer as Dr Alexander Pedachenko, an insane doctor sent by the Ochrana (Tsarist secret police) in an effort to discredit the Metropolitan police.

  One theory that gained quite a lot of support was that the murderer was a woman, Jill the Ripper, probably a midwife who, through performing illegal abortions, had access to the women of the East End.

  With the evolution of television and other mass media, a welter of other Ripper suspects have appeared, the more sensational the name the more coverage that can be guaranteed. At the top of the suspect popularity pile must be Prince Albert Victor (or Prince Eddy), grandson of Queen Victoria. His candidacy as the Ripper has naturally captured the imagination of the public and media alike for many years, and the popularity of this theory has never completely diminished.

  Prince Eddy was first put forward in 1970 when Dr Thomas Stowell, a distinguished London physician, alluded to the Prince suffering from syphilis and claimed that the madness his illness induced caused him to venture into the East End and murder prostitutes. Involved was Sir William Gull, the Queen’s physician, who was charged with following Eddy around and after the night of the double event, Gull incarcerated Eddy, by now a deranged killer. Apparently the Prince escaped to commit one last crime (Mary Kelly) before being taken out of circulation.

  Despite the historical record stating that Eddy died of influenza in 1892, theorists have concluded that it was actually syphilis that brought about his end: plausible, because the death certificate of someone so close to the throne would have been written with care to avoid embarrassing the queen. But even though Buckingham Palace was able to supply his whereabouts on the nights of the Ripper murders from court records – on the night of Mary Kelly’s murder, the Prince was celebrating his father’s birthday at Sandringham – it was such a far-out idea that the media exposure was considerable. The combination of the biggest murder case ever and a member of the Royal Family was irresistible, and it struck a chord with the public, who love conspiracy theories.

  Within a few years, a new version of the royal hypothesis emerged, this time with the women being killed by Sir William Gull himself, in an attempt to prevent them from going public about a potentially monarchy-damaging scandal that involved the Prince. According to this theory, Mary Kelly was witness to a marriage between Eddy and a Catholic commoner, Annie Crook, and became the nanny to the couple’s secret daughter, Alice. Once the couple were separated on the orders of the Queen, Kelly supposedly exiled herself to the East End where she shared the story with several other prostitutes. Mary Kelly, as the focus of the assassination plot, was the last and most horribly butchered.

  Interwoven into the tale, as first told in a BBC TV series in 1973 and then in a bestselling book by Stephen Knight (Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, 1976), was Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner CID and willing collaborator, Walter Sickert, the British impressionist artist, plus a generous helping of Masonic ritual and references. So popular has this version of the case remained over the years, despite being roundly disproven, that it has spawned three feature films, including the Twentieth Century Fox blockbuster From Hell with Johnny Depp (the one that awakened my interest in the whole case) and a two-part television drama starring Michael Caine.

  Walter Sickert himself became a suspect in his own right in a number of theories, the most well-known being that put forward by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who invested her time and a lot of money in state-of-the-art forensic analysis in pursuing him as the Ripper.

  The next big case to enthral the public was that of James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant who was allegedly the victim of murder in 1889 when he was apparently poisoned by his young American wife Florence. Suddenly, Maybrick became a prime Ripper suspect when the so-called Diary of Jack the Ripper was released to the world in 1993. The diary, given to a man named Mike Barrett by a friend in 1991 was, to all intents and purposes – if the content is anything to go by – written by Maybrick himself, detailing the murders and his reason for committing them: a vengeful, arsenic-fuelled campaign against prostitutes in response to his wife’s perceived infidelities. Soon after the diary was discovered a watch appeared, inside which was scratched the initials of the canonical five victims, Maybrick’s signature and the words ‘I am Jack’.

  The ‘diary’ has been scrutinized and subjected to innumerable tests, as has the watch, with no firm conclusion and it is still hotly debated today. It could be a genuine diary written by Maybrick for his own reasons, or a modern hoax perpetrated around the Ripper centenary in 1988, or even a hoax made nearer the time of the murders themselves. Maybrick is still a popular suspect who continues to capture t
he public imagination.

  Mary Kelly’s former boyfriend Joseph Barnett has been put forward as the Ripper, killing prostitutes to deter Kelly from working on the streets. The plan failed and Barnett eventually butchered her in her own squalid room as the only way he could stop her. Unbelievably, having destroyed the woman he had tried so hard to protect, he went on to live an unremarkable life in the East End: not the usual pattern of a serial killer.

  One of the last people to see Kelly alive, her friend George Hutchinson, has also been accused of her murder and the detailed description he gave after the Kelly inquest of the man he saw accompanying her during the last hours of her life has been seen as a smokescreen to divert the investigation away from his own guilt. What was interesting about these two theories, Barnett and Hutchinson, is that they reintroduced characters directly related to the original events. A criminal profile of the Ripper that was created by the FBI in the centenary year, 1988, showed that Barnett seemed to fit many of the criteria and it signalled a new way of approaching the Ripper case, namely using modern forensic methods to treat the Whitechapel murders as a ‘cold case’, which is what Patricia Cornwell subsequently did. This is the route that I have now pursued with, I believe, considerably more success than anyone else, thanks entirely to the shawl.

  There have been many bizarre suggestions for Ripper candidacy. Lewis Carroll, William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army), Arthur Conan Doyle, King Leopold of the Belgians and former prime minister William Gladstone have had their names dragged in. Joseph Merrick, the famous ‘Elephant Man’, was suggested by a contributor to an internet site who attempted to make a good case, regardless of the pitfalls of naming such a distinctive character as the Ripper. Merrick resided at the London Hospital and thus would have access to surgical knives, he resented women because his appearance prevented meaningful relations with them and he went about unrecognized because he wore a hood in public . . .

  There are many more names, and many books detailing their credentials. But there are a few much more credible suspects, the ones the police who were working on the case at the time took seriously. These are the main rivals to Aaron Kosminski as serious contenders, and they remain the most likely to rival him. They were the ones the police considered very carefully at the time, and they have continued to be the preferred choices of most serious researchers. I had read about all of them before I spoke to Alan McCormack, and although at that time I favoured Deeming, I could have been persuaded by the arguments in favour of any of them. I never gave any serious consideration to the wilder theories, but these are the names which topped the police list then and, to this day, top the list of possible Rippers.

  All of these suspects were mentioned by senior police officials with direct links to the Ripper case. They are: Montague Druitt; Francis Tumblety; George Chapman; Michael Ostrog and ‘Kosminski’ (my man).

  George Chapman was mentioned by Inspector Abberline in a newspaper interview in 1903. This was the year that Chapman (real name Severin Klosowski) had been hanged as the ‘Borough Poisoner’ after cruelly killing three ‘wives’ in succession, usually to get hold of their money. Chapman was a barber-surgeon from Poland who had been living and working in Cable Street, Whitechapel in 1888. He later ran a barbershop from the cellar of the White Hart pub at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, where Martha Tabram was murdered on 7 August 1888 (the pub proudly promotes its connection to the case, and is a feature of the Ripper tours). In the interview that Abberline gave around the time of Chapman’s arrest and trial, he said:

  . . . there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when ‘Chapman’ went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by ‘Chapman’s’ wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored . . .

  It is hard to know whether Abberline really believed that Chapman was the Ripper or was just getting caught up in the heat of the moment, as he said in a later interview that the police were no nearer to knowing the killer’s identity in 1903 than they were in 1888. George Chapman, despite changing his method of killing (often thought unlikely for a serial killer according to today’s research into the psychology of serial killing) still has his supporters, and an alleged comment by Abberline to arresting officer Sergeant Godley after Chapman was apprehended – ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last’ – continues to fuel his candidacy, although this remark by Abberline was first reported only years later, in a book that came out in 1930.

  Fuelling the speculation, and as alluded to in Abberline’s newspaper interview, is the fact that Chapman moved to Jersey City in the USA in 1891, following which it has been claimed that several murders of a comparable nature to the Ripper crimes took place – in fact, there was only one murder of a prostitute that could have fitted the Ripper’s modus operandi. Chapman returned to Britain the following year to begin his poison murders. These are so different from the brutal, seemingly random violence of the Ripper that I find it hard to believe they were all the work of the same man.

  The next suspect to be named by a senior policeman at the time is ‘Dr’ Francis Tumblety, an American ‘quack’. Tumblety’s name had been linked with the Whitechapel murders as far back as 1888, mainly in the American press, but many subsequent researchers had missed the frequent references to his possible guilt that were made contemporaneously after he fled from London that year. Tumblety was an unusual character and always seemed to attract trouble. He had been linked to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and apparently had connections with Irish Fenian activities. He was a homosexual, or at least bisexual, and was arrested on 7 November 1888 for ‘acts of gross indecency’ with several other men, and was given bail for what was legally classed as a misdemeanour. Soon after, he skipped bail, left Britain and, via France, returned to his homeland under the alias of ‘Frank Townsend’. Once there, the press was full of stories about him being Jack the Ripper, something Tumblety – who enjoyed the notoriety – was more than happy to address, admitting that he had been a suspect and that he had been questioned by the British police but insisting he wasn’t guilty.

  His prominence as a worthy contemporary suspect was not truly appreciated until the discovery of a letter, written by former Special Branch Chief Inspector John Littlechild to journalist George R. Sims in 1913, which came to light in the early 1990s during a sale from the collection of crime historian Eric Barton. The letter’s provenance was sound and led many researchers scurrying back to the archives to find out more about this peculiar man.

  Tumblety is a credible suspect and high on the list of possible Rippers. There were many press articles in which associates and those who had crossed Tumblety made it clear that he had a great dislike of women. Littlechild himself mentions this in his letter, saying that Tumblety’s feelings against women were ‘remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record’. But, as with all the suspects, the evidence that exists today is well short of conclusive. For example, it is possible Tumblety was still in police custody on 9 November 1888, in which case it would have been impossible for him to have murdered Mary Kelly: some researchers dedicated to the Tumblety candidature have got round this by suggesting that Kelly was murdered by a copycat, and that Tumblety was responsible only for the other victims. As with George Chapman, the so-called Ripper-like murders in the USA in 1891–2
which led many to believe that Jack had crossed the Atlantic, have been blamed on Tumblety who spent the rest of his life there before his death in 1903. In his defence, it is unlikely that Tumblety, as a homosexual, would have murdered women as homosexual serial killers usually only target men. But this is all supposition.

  In 1894, six years after the murders, the Sun newspaper claimed it knew the name of the Ripper and that he had been convicted of malicious wounding in 1891, deemed insane and incarcerated at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane in Berkshire. The newspaper did not actually give the man’s name, but said the identity was known to Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan police CID, who had been appointed in 1889 after a career running his father’s tea plantations in India. Macnaghten took up his post at the height of Ripper mania, because the police and public did not know then that the killings were over, and there was still a state of alarm in the East End. He would certainly have been privy to all the information the police had gathered. After the Sun articles he wrote a memorandum, which was eventually put into the Scotland Yard files. The memorandum was not written for public consumption. In it Macnaghten exonerated the man alluded to in the newspaper, Thomas Cutbush, of the crimes and then, importantly, named the three men he felt more likely to have been the Ripper than Cutbush. He described them as, in his words:

  (1) A Mr M. J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31st Dec. – or about 7 weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane [probably a reference to homosexuality] and from private info I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.