So who was Jack the Ripper?
Well, the historical record does suggest a few clues. The witnesses tended to describe a white male, relatively young, in his twenties or thirties, of medium height or less and respectably dressed. Dr Gordon Brown, who carried out the postmortem examination of Kate Eddowes, was convinced that the murderer had demonstrated surgical skill as well as anatomical knowledge in his extraction of the left kidney. Certainly most of the doctors who saw the Ripper’s handiwork felt that some degree of anatomical knowledge had been involved. And the close geographical grouping of the crimes, together with the killer’s return to Whitechapel from Mitre Square, suggest a local man.
Can we go further? Can we put a name to the Ripper? The answer to that one, despite the blandishments of the Ripperologists, is an emphatic no.
The police investigated hundreds of suspects. It is sometimes said that there was a principal suspect but this implies a consensus of view that simply did not exist within the detective force. Some suspects were more interesting than others but different officers held different theories. Many police records from the period have been lost but enough survives for us to identify some of the main suspects. Indeed, as a result of intensive research over the last thirty years we probably know more about these men than the police did at the time.
One of the most interesting police suspects was Aaron Kosminski, a poor Jewish barber committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. Interesting because his appears to have been the only case in which the police procured evidence to link a suspect with any of the crimes. Sir Robert Anderson certainly came to believe that Kosminski was the Ripper and refers to him in his memoirs, published in 1910. By Anderson’s account Kosminski was identified by a witness, the “only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer”, but the police were unable to charge him because the witness, also Jewish, refused to give evidence against a fellow-Jew.
Unfortunately, the more we learn about Kosminski the less likely a suspect he seems. Most of the documentation is lost but the clues we have suggest that the witness was Joseph Lawende, the man believed to have fleetingly seen the Ripper on the night of the double murder, and that he did not identify Kosminski until 1890–91, about two years after the event. A great deal of research has been conducted into identification evidence of this kind since Anderson’s time and it has taught us that at periods of a year or more after the original sighting it is worthless. There are other doubts about whether Kosminski can have been the Ripper. We have no clear evidence that he possessed anatomical knowledge. And although he spent more than twenty-five years in asylums (he died in Leavesden Asylum, near Watford, in 1919) the doctors who monitored his progress there explicitly and repeatedly described him as a harmless patient.
Melville Macnaghten, who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1889 and became Head of CID in 1903, held to a different theory. In his view the Ripper was Montague John Druitt, a man who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames shortly after the Miller’s Court tragedy. However, Macnaghten’s data on Druitt is now known to have been seriously flawed. He thought, for example, that he was a doctor. In reality Druitt was a schoolteacher and barrister. No one has ever proved a connection between Druitt and the crimes, or even the East End. On the other hand there is evidence to suggest that he spent his summer vacation on the south coast in 1888 and hence may not have been in London when Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols died. Thus, on 1 September, the day after Polly was murdered, Druitt was in Canford, Dorset, playing for the local cricket team against Wimborne.
George Chapman (real name Severin Klosowski), executed in 1903 for the murder of Maud Marsh, fits what we know about the Ripper better than either Kosminski or Druitt. Ex-Chief Inspector Abberline undoubtedly believed that Chapman and the Ripper were the same man and after the trial he congratulated Inspector Godley, who had apprehended Chapman, with the words: “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!”
Before coming to London in 1887 Chapman was trained as a surgeon in his native Poland. In 1888 he lived in Cable Street, within walking distance of the murder sites. His appearance matches descriptions of the Ripper well. And he was violent and cruel. Chapman was fascinated with weaponry and adorned his walls with swords and firearms and he terrorized a succession of female consorts, threatening one with a knife, another with a revolver and physically abusing several. Maud Marsh was the third “wife” he poisoned to death between 1897 and 1902.
If Chapman was the Ripper he must have abandoned the knife in favour of poison and some writers have not found a change of modus operandi as dramatic as this credible. The fatal flaw in the case against Chapman, however, is the simple fact that not a scrap of tangible evidence was ever adduced to connect him with a single one of the Ripper crimes.
Perhaps the most important document to come to light in recent years is the Littlechild letter. Discovered in 1993, it is a letter written by Ex-Chief Inspector John Littlechild, onetime Head of the Special Branch, to the journalist George R. Sims in 1913, and it introduced us to a police suspect hitherto unknown to researchers: an American quack doctor named Francis Tumblety.
Tumblety was in London at the time of the murders. On 16 November 1888 he was charged at Marlborough Street Police Court with homosexual offences and bailed to appear at the Central Criminal Court, but he violated bail and fled, first to France, and then back to America.
Littlechild considered Tumblety a “very likely” Ripper suspect and an interesting circumstantial case can indeed be alleged against him. He had pretensions to medical knowledge, he was a known misogynist and he collected anatomical specimens. His collection included, according to one who saw it, jars containing wombs from “every class of women”, and it will be remembered that in two of the Ripper murders the womb had been extracted and taken away.
Yet Tumblety, no less than Kosminski, Druitt and Chapman, must be exonerated. It is clear that the police had no hard evidence implicating him in the killings for had they possessed such information they would have charged him with the murders or, after his flight, sought his extradition. In important respects, furthermore, Tumblety does not fit the Ripper evidence. In 1888 he was fifty-six years of age, far older than any of the men seen with victims. And the murderer would appear to have been a much smaller man. Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes are known to have both been about five foot tall. Mrs Long, who saw Annie with a man, almost certainly her murderer, thought that Annie’s companion was only a “little taller” than she was, and Joseph Levy, Lawende’s companion on the night of the double murder, estimated the man they saw talking with Kate Eddowes to have been only “about three inches” taller than Kate. Tumblety, however, was tall, perhaps six foot in height. Someone who knew him said that he “looked like a giant”.
The only sensible conclusion one can draw from the existing evidence is that the police investigation failed and its failure left detectives grasping at straws. It is impossible to find a credible case against a single one of their suspects.
We should not judge the police too harshly. In most murder cases victim and killer are known to each other and careful inquiry into the past and circumstances of the victim will usually suggest suspects and motives. This was not so in the Ripper’s case. He was an example of that still fortunately rare phenomenon, the murderer of strangers, and such killers are exceedingly difficult to detect. Even today their crimes often go unsolved and modern aids to detection like fingerprinting, the biochemical analysis of blood, DNA fingerprinting and psychological profiling were unknown or undeveloped in 1888. The Ripper’s crimes were facilitated, moreover, by the character of the area in which he worked and the kind of victim he targeted. The Victorian East End was an intricate warren of tiny courts, alleys and backyards, impossible for the police to patrol effectively, and the Ripper’s victims readily played into his hands. Most of them were poor middle-aged women, deprived of male support by bereavement or separation, and for such women casual prostitution was often an instrument of survival. A
t the height of the Ripper scare prostitutes fled the district or took refuge in workhouse casual wards, but on any normal night in Whitechapel and Spitalfields large numbers of them could be found soliciting on the streets, eager to sell their bodies and conduct clients to secluded alleys and backyards for the price of a drink or a doss.
Given the failure of the police investigation in 1888 it is extremely unlikely that the Ripper can be unmasked now. Speculative theories will continue to assail us but any proposed solution to the mystery will only carry conviction if it presents a suspect who matches what we know about the Ripper and, crucially, is backed by authentic evidence linking him to the crimes. So far very few of the reckless accusations cast about by Ripperologists have satisfied the first criteria, none the second. As Jonathan Goodman has amusingly observed, the search for Jack the Ripper has come to resemble a horse race in which Chapman is the dubious favourite against a “current line-up of no-hopers, none of appropriate pedigree and most of them zebras in horses’ clothing.”
More than anything else, however, it is the riddle of the killer’s identity that lies at the root of our perennial fascination with the case, it is the very facelessness of Jack the Ripper that keeps his legend alive. If the mystery were to be solved, if some diligent and lucky scholar could prove, for argument’s sake, that the Ripper was John Smith, an obscure Whitechapel slaughterman, the rest of us would probably lose interest in him altogether. As it is, our inability to unmask him enables writers and film makers to make of him what they will. And because of that the mystery of Jack the Ripper looks set to remain, after more than a century, the classic whodunnit.
THE MURDER OF MARGERY WREN
(Margery Wren, 1930)
Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullett
This unsolved case from 1930 is taken from the casebook of the British pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947) hailed as the “greatest medical detective of the century”. Spilsbury’s professional links with the Home Office began in 1910, when he was called in to examine the mutilated remains of Cora Crippen, wife of the infamous doctor who had since fled London with his mistress, Ethel le Neve. It was the first of a long series of cases in which Spilsbury was retained by the Home Office over a period of nearly forty years. The rather forlorn case of Miss Wren, robbed in her seaside shop and left for dead, is included in the bestselling biography of Spilsbury published by Browne and Tullett in 1951. Douglas G. Browne was a kinsman of Hablot Knight Browne, better known as Phiz, who illustrated the works of Charles Dickens. Tom Tullett was chief of the Daily Mirror’s crime bureau, who claimed to be the only journalist to have been a detective in the CID.
If there are degrees of wickedness in murder, only a shade less atrocious than the killing of children is the deliberate battering to death of elderly women living alone. These crimes are almost always committed for gain. In the majority of cases the murderer picks out some one known to him—a woman keeping a small shop, or with a reputation for hoarding money—but the evidence shows that there is also a type of monster who sets to work, by a system of trial and error, to find a suitable victim. Though murder may not always be intended, whether it results or not seems to be a matter of indifference to this class of criminal. From his point of view the victim is usually better dead; and only too often, the hammer or poker having silenced her, the bloody task is completed.
Such brutes are always with us, as the newspapers show, and their crimes recur with terrible frequency in Spilsbury’s records. Some of these cases have been mentioned. Among those occurring in this middle period of his career two stand out—the murders of Miss Wren at Ramsgate and of Mrs Kempson at Oxford.
The Wren case, which in its shocking details differs little from a score of others, is remarkable for the character and behaviour of Miss Wren herself. She was eighty-two, and she had a small sweetshop in Ramsgate. She possessed some house property, and had money in the bank. Like so many people of her age and class, she kept cash in tin boxes and other receptacles stowed away in various hiding-places. This dangerous habit got known, as it usually does, and her hoards, no doubt, were much exaggerated, the more so because she lived like the traditional miser, in squalor and discomfort.
About six o’clock on 20 September 1930, a girl of twelve who lived opposite the shop was sent across the street to buy a blancmange powder. The shop door was locked; peering through the window, the girl saw Miss Wren sitting in her back room. When eventually the old woman came to the door blood was streaming down her face, and she could only whisper; but though, in fact, she was suffering from injuries that might have killed her on the spot, she went behind the counter and fetched a number of packets for the child to choose from. The girl ran back to her parents, and to their horrified inquiries Miss Wren gave the unlikely explanation that she had fallen over the fire-tongs.
She was taken to hospital, where she lingered for five days. She had been savagely attacked, and on the third day Scotland Yard was called in. As her mind wandered she made rambling and contradictory statements, from which glimpses of the truth emerged, to the nurses and the police, and to the magistrate who, later, waited beside her bed. It was an accident; a man had attacked her with the fire-tongs; he had a white bag; it was another man with a red face; it was two men; then, again, it was an accident with the tongs. Once she admitted that she knew her assailant, but she would not name him. “I don’t wish him to suffer. He must bear his sins …” Just before the end she said, “He tried to borrow ten pounds.” More than this they could not get from her, and to Superintendent Hambrook, who was in charge of the case, she was the most determined, inflexible woman he ever met. On the afternoon of the 25th she died, still keeping her secret.
Performing the postmortem on the following day, Spilsbury enumerated eight wounds and bruises on the face, and seven more, lacerated or punctured, on the top of the head. In addition, there had been an attempt at strangulation. The injuries were undoubtedly inflicted with the tongs which figured in the poor woman’s stories, and on which hairs were found.
The circumstances of this murder suggest that it may not have been premeditated, as it so often seems to be in similar cases. Miss Wren was seen alive and well at five-thirty, and she usually kept her shop open after six. At that hour, in September, with Summer Time in force, it was not dark. There were people going up and down the street, and children playing. If violence was intended it was an extremely rash project. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the murderer came for money, and, like all his type, was prepared to go to great lengths to get it. It was probably he who locked the shop door. Perhaps disturbed by another caller—for no money seems to have been taken—he escaped by the backyard. Apart from the evidence of Miss Wren’s admissions, it is clear that he knew of her habits, and was familiar with the premises.
At the inquest certain persons were referred to by letters of the alphabet. Superintendent Hambrook says that there were six suspects, of whom A, B, and C were able to clear themselves. One of the remaining three D, E, or F, was the murderer. Miss Wren knew which, and the police may know too. But it has never been possible to pin the crime on him.
THE ZODIAC KILLER
(Zodiac Killings, 1968)
Colin Wilson
One evening just before Christmas 1968, a teenaged courting couple parked their car by a reservoir in the hills above San Francisco Bay, California. Minutes later, they were murdered in cold blood by a gun-wielding maniac. The killer was to become notorious throughout the United States as “Zodiac”. Six months later he struck again, but this time one of his victims survived and described the killer. Impatient at the inability of the police to catch him, the killer sent letters and a coded message to three different newspapers. Once deciphered, the cryptogram made chilling reading, but it took the police no nearer to the killer’s identity. After five murders, the killing stopped, but the mocking letters continued. The British author Colin Wilson (b. 1931) writes prolifically on crime, the occult and the paranormal.
It w
as the perfect night for young lovers: calm, moonlit and cold enough outside for the inside of the estate car to seem the most delightful place in the world. David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen were out on their first date on the night of 20 December 1968. They had spent most of the evening at the high school Christmas concert in nearby Vallejo, a small town about twenty miles (thirty kilometres) north-east of San Francisco, California. Now, at eleven-fifteen p.m., they had just parked near a concrete pump-house above Lake Herman reservoir. The heater blew warm air, the radio played pop music, and the seventeen-year-old boy and sixteen-year-old girl began to get better acquainted.
Suddenly, a man appeared at the window, and David Farraday found himself looking straight down the barrel of a gun. As the youth opened the door and started to climb out, the gun exploded. David Farraday fell dead instantly with a bullet wound behind his left ear. Bettilou flung open her own door and began to run. In the moonlight, it was impossible for the gunman to miss her; five shots ploughed into her back and she collapsed seventy-five yards (sixty-eight metres) from the car.
Only a few minutes later, another car drove past the pump-house. The woman driver saw the two bodies clearly in the headlights, but she did not stop; on the contrary, she put her foot down on the accelerator and drove fast towards the next town, Benicia, about six miles (nine kilometres) away, where she was going to meet her children from the Saturday evening cinema. A few miles further along the road she saw, with relief, the red, flashing light of an oncoming police car. Within minutes, two deputy sheriffs and a detective sergeant were on their way to the pump-house on the Vallejo–Benicia road.
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Page 59