The ink of the Diary was readily soluble in the extractant and only a small amount of insoluble black residue was left on the paper. The chromatogram showed only a partial separation: much of the ink remained on the baseline but there was a strip of partially resolved coloured components, and a few colourless fluorescent spots. This pattern is characteristic of inks based on a synthetic dye called nigrosine, which is a complex mixture of substances but one which has been used in many inks at least since the 1940s. There was nothing to suggest the presence of iron.
Then I learned from another well respected scientific analyst, Dr Nicholas Eastaugh, that in tests on the ink which he had taken from several parts of the Diary he had, indeed, found iron and that the observation that the ink was ‘freely soluble’ was unsupported. With the help of the Science Library in London it took very little time to establish that nigrosine was patented in 1867 by Coupier and was in general use in writing inks by the 1870s! Indeed, there is a statement in one of the standard reference works Pen, Ink and Paper, published in 1990, by Dr Joe Nickell (who was later asked to testify against us). It confirms my concern over the fallibility of experts.
…Subsequent writing fluids which were not of the corrosive iron-gall variety included …certain other coloured inks (made possible by the discovery of aniline dyes in 1856) as well as nigrosine ink (first produced commercially in 1867).
One of the key reasons Dr Baxendale dismissed the Diary was, quite simply, inaccurate. We lost confidence in the value of his report and agreed, in writing, with his request that it would not be used in my book or ‘for any purpose whatsoever’. That restriction has now been removed by mutual agreement.
Dr Eastaugh, who then became our chief scientific adviser on the ink, paper and binding of the Diary, is primarily a specialist in identifying and dating materials used on Old Masters and manuscripts. He has worked for the Museum of London, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and Christie’s. He said straight away that documents as potentially important as the Diary I had brought him were rare.
Dr Eastaugh examined the Diary at his studio in Teddington, south-west London. It lay in distinguished company. On his desk was a 16th century painting by Bruegel the Elder, the provenance of which he was hoping to establish. He would begin by studying the ink to establish the Diary’s age and, if possible, when it was applied to the paper. Later he would attempt to date the paper itself. Dr Eastaugh also proposed an investigation of what was left of the missing pages, and to examine some black powder that had been found deeply embedded in the ‘gutter’ between the pages of the Diary.
The most crucial tests were carried out with a proton microprobe. This employs ‘a non-destructive method of exciting atoms in a small target area on a page with an accelerated beam of protons, in order to detect, to the parts per million, what chemicals are present in inks, papers, parchments and pigments tested,’ Dr Eastaugh told me. Minute samples of ink, painstakingly lifted from the Diary were prepared and mounted on slides before being taken into the Star Wars world of the laboratory. Such a device was used by the Crocker National Laboratory in California to determine how the Gutenburg Bible was printed and to investigate the Vinland Map, which appears to be Mediaeval in origin. According to Geoffrey Armitage, Curator of Maps at the British Museum, the map is ‘still controversial’.
These were the first of a number of laboratory tests conducted over the next four years, not only by us but by a group determined to prove the Diary a forgery. The conflicting results were bewildering. But at that early stage in our quest Dr Eastaugh seemed encouraging. ‘The results of various analyses of ink and paper in the Diary performed so far have not given rise to any conflict with the date of 1888/9.’
As my confidence grew, my attention turned to the kind of man who might have written the Diary. There seemed to be three likely possibilities. It could be an old forgery by someone who knew Maybrick was the Ripper and wanted to destroy him; it could be the work of a modern forger; or it could be genuine. In an attempt to throw some light on the personality of the man behind the Diary I first went to see Dr David Forshaw, who was then a specialist consultant in addiction at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London. (At the time of Jack the Ripper the hospital was better known as the notorious Bedlam lunatic asylum.)
Dr Forshaw was born in Liverpool and has completed three years’ research into forensic psychiatry in London; he holds a diploma in the History of Medicine from the Society of Apothecaries and has published extensively on psychiatry and addiction. He is now a consultant at Broadmoor Hospital, where Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, is serving a life sentence.
I did not ask him to prove that the author of the Diary was Jack the Ripper but to assess whether, in his view, the writer had genuinely committed the crimes described or whether he could indeed be merely a sick or cynical forger. Dr Forshaw spent several months examining the Diary, eventually producing a 15,000 word report, excerpts of which will be presented later. But his conclusions focused my mind more and more on the significance of the personality of the Diary writer and the psychopathology of the Diary itself. Here Dr Forshaw said:
A thorough examination of the Diary and its provenance are essential components of deciding if it is authentic. If such an examination proves indecisive and all falls back on the content, then I would argue in that case, on the balance of probabilities from a psychiatric perspective, it is authentic.
From the beginning, it was my instinctive response to the psychopathology of the Diary that convinced me it was genuine. I could not believe that the violent mood swings, the anguish and the nauseating pleasure of cannibalism was the writing of, as some claimed, a money-conscious con man, a Maybrick/Ripper expert or even of a member of the Maybrick family with a lust for revenge. I did not believe that any one man or woman could master the scientific knowledge needed to make and fade the ink, the understanding of arsenic addiction revealed in the Diary and, at the same time, accumulate all the historical data to make the progression of events fit the known facts of the case.
In 1997, five years older and wiser, I also went to see Professor David Canter, now Professor of Psychology at Liverpool University, whose book, Criminal Shadows won the Golden Dagger Award. Probably the country’s best-known expert on the profiling of serial killers, he was immensely reassuring and confirmed that my earliest ‘gut’ response to the Diary’s emotional ebb and flow was not simply a case of wishful thinking. In fact, he has found it valuable source material for his students. He told me that, ‘To have forged the Diary would require a great degree of sophistication. To have spotted Maybrick as a suitable villain is, in itself, a sophisticated choice. He is not the most obvious villain. I like the Diary’s triviality; I like the way in which the end appears to be almost artificially rehearsed and pre-written — it expresses a controlled tying-up of ends before death and is psychologically correct. It is most unlikely that any forger could create such a story, which is so deceptively banal yet which covers such a wide understanding of the necessary historical and medical matters. The forger would not have been able to resist embellishing the plot with the wealth of available material. The only people who might be capable of such sensitivity and knowledge would have to be one of those Ripperologists connected with the project.’
In the 122 years since that Autumn of terror, the evidence surrounding the Whitechapel murders is as confused as ever. Very little hard documentary material has emerged for us to state with total confidence exactly what happened. Evidence was contradictory, few people wore watches to be sure of precise times, roads were dimly lit and press statements were understandably unreliable. Jack the Ripper struck at a time when newspapers were thirsting for sensation. The new banner headlines whipped up a hysterical panic never known before. Better education and improved technology led to a newspaper circulation war. The Ripper’s gruesome crimes and taunts to the authorities — and their apparent inability to stop him — were headline news.
Where did he come from? What drove
him on to kill and kill again? Why did he mutilate his victims? What compulsion made him leave clues? All this was the stuff of Victorian gothic horror, at a time when Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been scaring audiences at London’s Lyceum Theatre.
Despite the greatest manhunt Britain had ever seen, the killer was never captured. The Ripper remained an obsession, spawning penny dreadfuls, scholarly investigations, novels and music hall verse. An entire literary and theatrical industry is based on his awful exploits. In the years that followed, memoranda emerged and books were written; documents vanished and came mysteriously to light again. With each new ‘discovery’ came a flood of theories. In 1959, the late journalist, Daniel Farson, was shown a document by Lady Aberconway, daughter of Sir Melville Macnaghten, who became Assistant Chief Constable CID at Scotland Yard in 1889. This document was a transcribed copy of her father’s original notes, written in 1894. Two versions of the document exist and a third has been described. In the version that Farson saw, the Assistant Chief Constable named for the first time the three men who, he said, were suspected by Scotland Yard in 1888. They were Montague John Druitt, Kosminski and Michael Ostrog.
MONTAGUE JOHN DRUITT
Druitt, described erroneously as a doctor, was a barrister, but had also become a schoolteacher at Mr Valentine’s school in Blackheath by the time of the murders. He was mysteriously dismissed and was found drowned in the Thames at Chiswick in December 1888, his pockets full of stones. The body had been in the water for about a month. Macnaghten named Druitt as a suspect largely because his body was discovered soon after the Kelly murder, the assumption being that Druitt’s mental state had collapsed just before his suicide. Macnaghten also claimed that he had access to ‘private information’ that Druitt’s own family believed him to be the killer and that Druitt was ‘sexually insane’. He added that ‘the truth will never be known.’
By contrast, in 1903, Inspector Abberline of the Metropolitan Police, who had been in charge of detectives investigating the Whitechapel murders, said: ‘I know all about that story but what does it amount to? Simply this. Soon after the last murder in Whitechapel the body of a young doctor was found in the Thames but there is absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was found at that time to incriminate him.’ Nevertheless Montague John Druitt remains among the front-running suspects.
KOSMINSKI
Sir Robert Anderson (Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police CID at the time) does not name Kosminski, but in speaking of the Ripper says: ‘In saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact’. Kosminski was a misogynist with homicidal tendencies who had become insane from years of indulgence in ‘solitary vices’. He was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then, in 1891, to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum when, it was said, ‘he goes about the streets and picks up bits of bread out of the gutter.’ However, in the police evidence against him, dates, times and places are wrongly listed.
In 1987 there came to light some pencil notes by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who had also played a leading role in the Whitechapel investigation. These were comments, written in about 1910 in the margins and on the endpapers of his own personal copy of the memoirs of Sir Robert Anderson. Published in the Daily Telegraph, Swanson’s marginalia identified Anderson’s own, unnamed suspect: Kosminski. Nevertheless the marginalia contained inaccuracies which only served to fuel rather than end the debate.
MICHAEL OSTROG
The remaining police suspect was the Russian sneak thief and confidence trickster, Michael Ostrog. Little is known about him beyond his appalling criminal record and his being habitually cruel to women. It is probable that suspicion fell on him largely because he carried surgical knives and instruments when he roamed the streets of Whitechapel. He was ‘wanted’ in October 1888 (not for the Whitechapel crimes) but his whereabouts at the time of the murders was never established.
Macnaghten also stated with apparent authority that the Whitechapel murderer had claimed five victims and five victims only, contradicting the belief of the public and many fellow policemen alike that there had been at least two more.
Of course, there have been a number of other suspects.
THE DUKE OF CLARENCE
In the 1970s when the great surge of Ripper books really began, several writers produced a sensational new candidate. The public loves a royal scandal, which is probably why Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, and grandson of Queen Victoria, has become the best-remembered suspect.
This story arose in November 1970, from an article in The Criminologist by Dr Thomas Stowell. He based his arguments on the alleged private papers of Sir William Gull, physician to the Queen, who treated the Prince for syphilis and said that he died of softening of the brain. (He, too, is on the suspect list along with Dr Barnardo and Lewis Carroll!). These papers were never expertly examined and are now missing. However, it is known from diaries and court circulars of the time that the Prince was in Yorkshire, Scotland and the royal retreat of Sandringham in Norfolk, at the time of the murders.
DR. FRANCIS TUMBELTY
In 1993, while I was hard at work exploring the background to the Maybrick Diary, policeman Stewart Evans and press officer Paul Gainey discovered the Littlechild letter naming an ‘American quack’, Francis Tumbelty, as a hitherto unknown police suspect. Their book, Jack the Ripper, the First American Serial Killer appeared in 1995. Chief Inspector John Littlechild, head of Special Branch, was a greatly respected detective in 1888 and this letter, written 24 years later, suggests that the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letters which gave the name of Jack the Ripper to the world were not written by Jack at all, and names the alleged authors.
Curiously, research into the Littlechild letter was to present some interesting similarities with the information I was receiving about James Maybrick. Both focused heavily on Liverpool and America — as did police enquiries at the time. But, at the end of the day, in a book of 274 pages only 40 relate to the alleged connections between Tumbelty and Whitechapel. He is a fascinating man with a murky history but the hard evidence against him is thin.
In 1997, the finger of suspicion was pointed at Jimmy Kelly, the Broadmoor escapee and lover of Mary Kelly (no relation) in a book by Jim Tully; horse-breeder Terry Saxby was compiling evidence at his home in Australia to support his belief that Henry Tabram, estranged husband of Martha, was the man, while Andy and Sue Parlour launched their own publication, written by Kevin O’Donnell, Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Murders.
The entire Ripper industry and its magazines, such as Ripperana and Ripperologist, have been built on such speculation. Meetings of the Cloak and Dagger Club are held in the City Darts public house, Whitechapel; the first national conference was organised in Ipswich in 1996. The regular lunches hosted by the internationally renowned true crime book specialist, Camille Wolfe, at her house in Portobello Road, London, are a forum for civilised discussion. Daily groups of amateur sleuths trail behind professional guides around the backstreets of Whitechapel and The London Dungeon attracts some two and a half thousand visitors per day to its Jack the Ripper Experience and, not surprisingly, there is a strong lobby by various women’s movements who protest at the commercial exploitation of the ‘unfortunates’.
The internet is buzzing with theories and, interestingly, the results of a surfers’ poll conducted in January 1997 placed James Maybrick at the top of the list of 29 Ripper suspects.
As Philip Sugden, the academic, himself proposes: ‘eye witness testimony is at best treacherous’. In fact, after 500 pages based on impeccable original source material, Mr Sugden admits:
Sadly, by the end of my study two things had become painfully apparent… First, there was no single police view on the matter. Different officers espoused different theories… The second conclusion is… none of their theories seems to be based on tangible evidence linking a suspect to the crimes… History can take us no further. Perhaps psychology can…
So my attention was now
focused. I knew that I had a unique opportunity. So far everyone had tried to solve the Whitechapel murders by examining unreliable evidence. I had a document, which tallied in some ways with what was known and differed in others. This no longer troubled me. Suppose the Diary was right. Suppose the police, the witnesses and the Ripperologists had all been wrong!
* * *
By July 29th 1992, Michael Barrett and I had signed a contract with Robert Smith of Smith Gryphon publishers. We were in business! A publication date was set for October 1993. A formidable prospect.
Towards the end of November 1992, Paul Feldman burst on the scene. He was a film and video maker, working on a documentary based on his then belief that Montague John Druitt was Jack the Ripper. Like me, he sought the advice of Paul Begg, Keith Skinner and Martin Fido who warned him, without breaking their confidentiality agreement, that he should not go ahead until he knew the facts about a ‘remarkable new document’ that had come to light. They told him, at that stage, that they ‘could not fault it’. Paul went to see Robert Smith who would not reveal the Diary’s author. But, little by little and with some inspired guesswork, Paul linked the name of James Maybrick to the Diary. Eventually the two men re-met and discussed the video and film rights on my book. At this stage Paul would have been very happy had the Diary vanished altogether leaving him free to revert to his original researches into the Druitt theory. So before signing any contract he decided to invite Anna Koren, a leading international document examiner, who also works for the Israeli Ministry of Justice, to fly to England and examine the Diary. He did not tell her of its content or its claim to fame. I shall tell the story of that extraordinary meeting later. It resulted in Paul Feldman’s overnight conversion and in December 1992 he bought the video rights to my book with an option on a film.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick Page 5