London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City
Page 4
In 1888 itself, four men were sentenced to death for committing murder: Henry Bowles for the murder of his wife, Hannah; James White for killing his wife, Catherine; William Pierrepoint for the murder of Sidney Pierrepoint, his youngest son; and Levi Bartlett for murdering his wife, Elizabeth. All the cases have one common denominator - the victim and the accused were related by blood or by marriage. Modern criminology has shown us that most murder victims are killed by someone close to them: a spouse, lover or acquaintance - stranger murder is extremely rare. Therefore, the story of Peter Mann's murder and the evidence from the four men convicted of homicide in 1888 confirms a pattern across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some murders, however, were much less straightforward - at least in the way in which they were carried out or in how the perpetrators attempted to cover up their crimes. The following is a case in point.
In September 1875, a cab carrying Henry Wainwright (a brush maker) and Alice Day (described as a'young dressmaker' in the trial record)' was stopped by police on the insistence of Alfred Stokes, another brush maker who lived at Baker's Row, Whitechapel. When they searched the couple the police were horrified to find parcels containing human remains. Stokes had become suspicious when Wainwright had asked him to come to his premises in Whitechapel to help him move some parcels and tools. Stokes and Wainwright were employed as managers at Martin's Limited, a firm of brush makers in Whitechapel. Stokes was at first unable to help his colleague as he found that the parcels were too heavy for him. He then noticed a peculiarly unpleasant smell, which Wainwright dismissed as merely `cat's or dog's dirt' Stokes was persuaded to carry the parcels up to the street while Wainwright hailed a cab. His suspicions aroused, Stokes took the opportunity of his co-worker's absence to examine one of the packages. `I felt as if I must do, he told the Old Bailey court, `I opened it, and the first thing I saw was a human In November 1875 Henry Wainwright and his brother Thomas stood trial at the Old Bailey charged with murder. The victim was Harriet Lane and the brothers were convicted - Henry of her murder and Thomas as an accessory. The papers were fascinated by the arrest and trial of a seemingly uncharacteristic pair of defendants, as the brothers were outwardly respectable traders. Both men denied the crime, with Thomas blaming his sibling and Henry suggesting the killer was some as yet unnamed third party.' Henry was executed and Thomas sentenced to seven years of penal servitude. The case was to claim another victim in 1892 when William Wainwright, also a brush maker and the brother of Henry and Thomas, blew his brains out with a revolver in a first class carriage of the North London Railway.' Once again the Wainwright murder case was unusual, both for the class of the defendants and the dismembering of the corpse.
Before we turn to the events of the late summer and autumn of 1888 let us pause to consider some of the other murders that took place in East London in that year. In February, a young Russian Jewess was murdered by her husband whom she had abandoned some months before for another man. Her new lover had heard her screams and had arrived in time for her to point in the direction of the escaping killer before she died. Her throat had been cut `from ear to ear'. A crowd pursued the culprit across Commercial Road until a policeman appeared. On seeing the officer the man `immediately cut his own throat with a shoemaker's knife' and he `expired on his way to London Hospital"
The next murder to draw the attention of the press was the murder of Emma Smith in April. Emma's death has been linked to the Ripper murders - her case notes are contained within the Metropolitan Police files on the Whitechapel killings. However, it seems highly unlikely that Emma was an early victim of the Ripper. Emma Smith, a 45-year-old prostitute who had enjoyed better times in her youth, almost survived the attack that killed her. She had managed to crawl home at which point her landlady, Mary Russell, helped her to get to the London Hospital. Smith told Russell that she `had been shockingly maltreated by a number of men and robbed of all the money she had' One of the men had been a youth of 19. Smith had been seen by another witness at 12.15 a.m. talking to a man near Farrant Street. It would seem that this was a dangerous place for women to loiter late at night (a `fearfully rough quarter' was how she described it) as this witness (who is not named in the newspaper report of the inquest) had `herself been struck in the mouth a few minutes before by some young men'.' At half past one Smith was making her way down Whitechapel Road when she noticed a group of men ahead. She crossed the road to avoid them but they followed her into Osbourne Lane and about 300 yards from her home in George Street they attacked and `outraged' (raped) her. Smith was also robbed of all her money.
According to the reports `a blunt instrument had been inserted into her vagina with great force and had ruptured the perineum" She died in hospital of peritonitis as a result of her wounds. Smith, an alcoholic who `acted like a madwoman' when she was drunk, seems to have been the victim of a random gang attack by a group of likely drunken men who were perhaps unaware (or unconcerned) that they had inflicted fatal wounds on their victim.' The coroner, Dr Wynne Baxter, stated that `such a dastardly assault he had never heard of, and it was impossible to imagine a more brutal case'.10 Baxter's imagination was about to be stretched to the limit. Emma Smith's murder does fit the pattern of the later `Ripper' in one clear way: all five (or six) women murdered in the summer and autumn of 1888 were street prostitutes in their forties (with the exception of Mary Kelly who was in her twenties) who had been married, lost their families and legal occupations through addiction to drink and had ended up in poverty and degradation as a result. Drink had its part to play in the next East London murder to fill the column inches of the London press in 1888.
In August a dock labourer was brought before the Thames Police Court accused of trying to kill his wife and her brother. Richard Patterson had stabbed his wife, Annie, four times with a carving knife when John Barry intervened to save his sister from further injury. Patterson then turned on him and `stabbed him in eight places'. The wounded pair were taken to London Hospital and made a full recovery; in the meantime Patterson made himself scarce. At the hearing it became clear that Patterson had been drinking and this clearly fuelled the argument that resulted in the violence." On the previous night Patterson had apparently attacked his wife with a paraffin lamp that had struck her head and required a plaster. At his trial it emerged that Patterson had been teetotal for several months but had started drinking heavily that evening, and while Annie was not drunk she was far from sober herself. The pressures of marriage at this time often resulted in domestic violence and this would seem to be a fairly typical example of a marriage breaking down; Barry testified that Annie's husband was affectionate `except when he was drinking"'
Even as the Ripper murders were dominating the headlines another `ghastly discovery' was made in the capital. Contractors working on the new police headquarters on the Thames Embankment found the trunk of a woman in a cellar on the site. The trunk was quickly associated with other body parts found a few weeks earlier, fished out of the Thames near Lambeth and at Pimlico." The doctor examining the parts at the mortuary on Ebury Street believed that it would not be hard to match the limbs found there with the new discovery in Westminster as it was likely that both belonged to a woman of `no small stature'. The Birmingham Daily Post, took the opportunity of the ongoing Ripper enquiry to once again point out the ineptitude of the Metropolitan Police: `They have no clue, and there seems very little possibility of their obtaining one, in which case publicity would be the best detective; but this they appear to ignore,.14 So far the authorities had a torso and two arms and the Central News Agency speculated that the victim was a woman in her late twenties or early thirties and, fascinatingly for their readership, she `belonged to the middle, or possibly even the upper, grade of society"5 This revelation followed an examination of the clothing that the torso had been wrapped in, which proved to be made of black broche silk, quite unlike the material of the cheap dresses worn by the Ripper's victims. At the post-mortem a third arm - found in front of the blind school in Lambeth - was rul
ed out as belonging to the main body. In any other year the mysterious appearance of a dismembered body in the Thames would have kept the newspapers busy for weeks but in October 1888 they were wrapped up in a much bigger media event. Before we look in detail at the police file on the Whitechapel murders we will consider modern theories of serial murder and sexual homicide.
THE RIPPER IN CONTEXT: SERIAL KILLERS IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH
The Ripper murders were different to what we might refer to as `conventional' murders because they were both serial and sexual in nature. Sexual murder is a form of paraphilia (defined as sexually deviant or abhorrent behaviour, it is taken from the Greek - literally abnormal love) 16 and in the late nineteenth century was termed `lust murder' by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his 1893 study, Psychopathia Sexualis.l' In this work Krafft-Ebing noted that:
Just as maniacal exaltation easily passes to furibund destructiveness, exaltation of the sexual emotion often induces an impulse to expend itself in senseless and apparently harmful acts ... Through such cases of infliction of pain, during the most intense emotion of lust, we approach the cases in which a real injury, wound, or death, is inflicted on the victim. In these cases, the impulse to cruelty, which may accompany the emotion of lust, becomes unbounded in a psychopathic individual; and at the same time, owing to defect of moral feeling, all normal inhibitory ideas are absent or weakened.18
His late nineteenth-century analysis is echoed by more recent criminological studies which have stated that the `lust murderer harbors deep-seated, erotically charged fantasies in which his attacks and slayings sate, although incompletely and temporarily, the need for more sexual violence'. Such killers usually mutilate their victims, targeting the genitalia in particular.'9 Lust murder, or more properly erotophonophilia, arguably requires three or more killings with a 'cooling off' period in between victims `indicating the premeditation of each sexual offense"'
However modern criminologists and law enforcement agencies choose to define it, the Ripper murders clearly involved some level of sexual perversion. The Ripper killings also appear to have been an example of picquerism, which can be defined as a desire to cut and stab the flesh of the victim, in particular the breasts and genitals." This was one of the key elements that raised the Whitechapel murders above the normal staple of Victorian crime and its reporting. The second element was the serial nature of the murders - somewhere between five and nine in the space of four months to two years (depending upon how many murders we ascribe to the same individual).
Criminologists have also recently identified two different, but overlapping (in terms of their behaviour) types of lust murderer; the organized non-social killer and the disorganized asocial type. The former exists within society and manipulates or abuses others to satisfy his sexual appetite. He is aware that what he is doing is wrong but has little or no regard for other people. Typically he is cunning and leaves few non-deliberate clues for the police at the scene of his crimes. Such killers revisit the scene of their crime, both to satisfy their lusts (by reliving the murder), and to see how the investigation is proceeding. His victims are usually strangers, are often of a similar type (such as age, occupation, lifestyle, or even hair colour). Being socially able he may engage his victims in conversation, to the degree that he could lure them into a place of his choosing." According to some writers such killers are not visibly suspicious, or at least do not draw overt attention to themselves by their appearance or behaviour. In short, the organized non-social killer is not easy to distinguish - importantly he does not look like a monster.
The second or asocial type of killer is much less cognizant of his actions. He is likely to be unable to relate to others and will typically be a loner, or outcast, and is often sexually incompetent. His murders are more often frantic and less well planned. It is possible that, as a result of the randomness of his attacks, the victim could be either a stranger or someone he knows and the age or type of victims is much less important here. This type of killer is most likely to attempt to mutilate or disfigure his victim (both for sexual excitement and to try to conceal the identity of the murdered person).23 He will also revisit the scene but will not involve himself in the police investigation. This person is a more classic `fit' for the Whitechapel murderer because of the mutilations but he would also have found it much harder to evade arrest, even in the dark alleys and courts of the East End. It may be the case that `Jack' was a composite of both personality types and so we will keep these conflicting profiles of sexual killers in mind as we look at the actions of the Whitechapel murderer as they may help us understand the sort of person that may have perpetrated these crimes. While it is not the purpose of this book to identify a contemporary protagonist in the Ripper murders it is useful to reflect on the sort of person that carried them out - this in itself helps us to undermine or reject many of the names that have been put forward as Ripper suspects in the past 100 or so years.
However we differentiate between types of lust murders we need to be clear that, unlike many other murderers who act on the spur of the moment or `in a fit of passion, sadistic murderers intend to kill their victims. This might seem straightforward and obvious but most murder is not as baldly intentional as it may appear on the surface. Sadistic killers `kill with rage, but with rage that is often remarkably controlled - that is, aware of risks and, hence, In Italy, 1879, a murderer who displayed this sadistic rage - and whose modus operandi is similar to that of Jack- was arrested, tried and imprisoned. Vincenz Verzini (b. 1849) murdered or attempted to murder three women and mutilated their corpses. Verzini confessed and in doing so we can gather some idea of his motivation. According to Krafft-Ebing the `commission of them gave him an indescribably pleasant (lustful) feeling, which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation ... It was entirely the same to him, with reference to these sensations, whether the women were old, young, ugly, or beautiful'. Verzini did not rape his victims but he did display what criminologists have termed vampiric tendencies, in that he drank the blood of the women he killed.25 He also `carried pieces of the clothing and intestines some distance, because it gave him great pleasure to smell and touch them'.26
Since the Whitechapel murderer was never caught we can only speculate as to his personal motivation but even at the time the police were aware that some form of perverted sexuality was involved. Sir Robert Anderson noted in his memoirs: `One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type' 27 Was `Jack' another Verzini? It is certainly possible that he was motivated by the same desires. Another killer studied by Krafft-Ebing echoes some of the mutilations and the type of victims that were to be associated with the Ripper killings. Gruyo, aged 41 at his trial, murdered six street prostitutes over a ten-year period in the late nineteenth century. `After the strangling he tore out their intestines and kidneys per vaginam. Some of his victims he violated before killing, others he did Recent research has argued that sadistic sexual murderers are generally young men, between 20 and 30 years of age.29 Gruyo would have been in his early thirties when he started killing. Interestingly, most of the witness statements relating to the Whitechapel killer suggest he was in his early to mid-thirties. It is extremely difficult to generalize about serial killers but research has suggested that the motors of serial violence are present in individuals from childhood, sometimes manifesting themselves in acts of cruelty to siblings, peers and animals. The sadistic sexual nature of the Ripper killers was one factor that marked them out from the normal diet of murder stories in the Victorian press; the other was that there were several of them over a three-month period. This was new for the Victorian public and made the killings much more frightening and titillating as a result.
Arguably `Jack' was not the first serial killer, after all, Burke and Hare, the body-snatchers of Edinburgh, killed 16 people in 1828. According to Philippe Chassaigne the first serial killer was a Frenchman named Martin Dumollard. While in his forties, Dumollard went to Lyons and lured young wo
men into quiet areas of the city and attempted to rape and kill them. He denied murder but was convicted of killing three women (several escaped him and it is probable he killed more) and was executed in 1862. In Spain, between 1870 and 1879, a man named Garayo murdered six women, committing necrophilia on the corpses, while in Italy Callisto Grandi butchered four young boys aged between 4 and 9 in the space of two years in the mid-1870s. None of these murderers mutilated their victims but all fit Chassaigne's definition of a serial killer. To qualify as a serial murderer in Chassaigne's view a killer has to meet `at least one of three criteria: the systematic selection of the same type of victim on each occasion, a sexual element in their crime, and sadistic rituals in conducting it'.30 In the case of the Whitechapel murders we will see that at least two, if not all three, elements were in evidence. So `Jack' may not have been the first serial killer but he was the first in Britain to fit a profile that modern criminologists would agree separates him from the ranks of what Pieter Spierenburg has termed `multiple' killers." `Jack's crimes were not simply multiple murders; they had a pattern and an underlying logic - however perverse.
Another factor that we should consider when analysing the murders of 1888 is geography. One of the more interesting revelations of the modern study of serial killing is the relationship between the killer, his victims and the environment in which the murders occur. The work of David Canter quite clearly demonstrates that in looking to identify a serial murderer we need to pay close attention to the location and pattern of his crimes.32 Canter demonstrated that killers such as Peter Sutcliffe (the `Yorkshire Ripper' who murdered 13 women in and around Bradford and Leeds in Northern England in the 1970s and early 1980s) had a discernable pattern to their killing sprees. With the assistance of the police and a research student, Canter plotted the sites of Sutcliffe's murders and the area in which he lived and worked. In doing this Canter was able to show that Sutcliffe had started his series of killings close enough to his home for it to be familiar territory but not so close as to draw attention to himself as a suspect. As he gained in confidence, in Canter's analysis, the murderer was able to range further afield in search of suitable victims (Sutcliffe, with one exception, chose prostitutes to kill - possibly as an homage to his nineteenth-century predecessor: he was found to have studied the Whitechapel murders in detail). It is crucial for the killer to be able to find sufficient `easy' targets within his killing zone. Naturally for some killers, like Fred West or Dr Shipman, the problem is solved by victims making themselves available in other ways (as guests or patients), but for killers like Sutcliffe (or indeed `Jack') victims had to be found on the streets.