Controversy also surrounds the brass rings that Annie had, according to friends, been wearing.
Inspector Abberline noted: ‘The deceased was in the habit of wearing two brass rings (a wedding and a keeper); these were missing when the body was found and the fingers bore the marks of their having been removed by force.’ At the time the press referred to two and three rings.
Again the Diary explains the possible motivation behind these actions. Maybrick, it claims, removed the rings because they reminded him of his wife, to whom he refers time and again in the Diary as ‘the whore’.
Begin with the rings,
one ring, two rings
bitch, it took me a while before I could wrench them off. Should have stuffed them down the whore’s throat. I wish to God I could have taken the head. Hated her for wearing them, reminds me too much of the whore.
One ring, two rings
A farthing one and two…
This story was changed in the telling and became a ‘pile of rings and coins’. Later this was embellished by various authors and the coins became ‘two new farthings’.
A journalist, Oswald Allen, wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1888: ‘A curious feature of this crime is that the murderer had pulled off some brass rings, with some trumpery articles which had been taken from her pockets and were placed carefully at her feet.’ These facts were later confirmed by Inspector Edmund John James Reid who was head of CID in Whitechapel in 1888. At the inquest into Alice McKenzie, murdered in 1889 he said that he had ‘held a watching brief as coins found under her body were similar to those in Annie Chapman’s case.’
So what of the farthings?
THE FARTHINGS
The farthings were also reported in the press immediately after the murder but not at Annie Chapman’s inquest. Martin Fido wrote to me, ‘it is my speculation that the initial silence on these coins was police strategy to try to hold back information that would only be known to a guilty suspect.’
The A-Z of Jack the Ripper authors say that there ‘were almost certainly two farthings…’ On the other hand, Philip Sugden does not mention the farthings at all.
Newspaper reports of the pills found by Annie’s body seem to have amused Maybrick, perhaps because of his own hypochondria.
The pills are the answer
end with pills. Indeed do I always not oh what a joke… Am I not indeed a clever fellow? It makes me laugh they will never understand why I did so.
A distinctive aspect of the second killing was the actual ‘ripping’ of the victim’s body. Dr George Bagster Phillips, a police surgeon who conducted or attended post-mortems on four of the women, believed the murderer must have been a doctor. Since then the medical prowess of the killer has been hotly disputed.
But most doctors agree now that although the lower end of Annie Chapman’s uterus and cervix had been detached with a single, clean slash through the vaginal canal the rest of the operation was extremely inept. I wondered about the educational role of Liverpool’s Museum of Anatomy!
The coroner, Wynne Baxter, put forward an ingenious theory prompted by a press report, that an American doctor had been visiting London hospitals with a plan to export preserved uteri for which he was prepared to pay a high price. Such a macabre trade could, the coroner argued, suggest a motive for the crime. But the medical press refuted this idea promptly. On October 1st the curator of the Pathological Museum had given the market price for whole and partial corpses:
For one corpse complete . . . . . . . . . . . .£3.5s.0d
For one thorax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5s.0d
For one arm, one leg, one
head and neck and
abdomen net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15s.0d
It is therefore nonsense, the curator said, that large sums were being offered for complete bodies. His message was clear. There was not enough profit in such a trade to offer a motive to the Whitechapel killer. The Diary — written 109 years ago — provides a credible motive for the first time and one with which, tragically, we are today all too familiar. Jack the Ripper was a cannibal.
I took some of it away with me. It is in front of me. I intend to fry it and eat it later ha ha. The very thought works up my appetite.
Few people have tasted human flesh and fewer still would ever admit it. Whether the uterus, bladder or vagina are edible is not common knowledge. These organs are largely muscle and could well be difficult to swallow. But Maybrick’s apparent pleasure in the idea was to be supported during the trial of the Russian Ripper, Andre Chikatilo, in 1992. ‘I like to nibble on a uterus,’ he testified. ‘They are so pink and springy, but after nibbling them I throw them away.’
After Annie Chapman’s death, 16 East End businessmen formed themselves into the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Under the presidency of builder George Lusk, they demanded brighter street lights and better policing of the area. On September 14th a telling letter signed JFS was printed in the Pall Mall Gazette:
Yesterday at 11 a.m. a gentleman was seized and robbed of everything in Hanbury Street. At 5 p.m. an old man of 70 was attacked and served in the same manner in Chicksand Street. At 10 p.m. today a man ran into a baker’s shop at the corner of Hanbury Street and King Edward Street and ran off with the till and its contents. All these occurred within 100 yards of each other and midway between the scenes of the last two horrible murders.
If all this can happen now, when there is supposed to be a double police patrol in the area and where plain clothes policemen are said, literally, to jostle one another in the streets, the ease with which the murderer conducted his dissection and made his escape ceases to be at all wonderful.
Soon afterwards the Times suggested yet another theory: that the killer might not, after all, be a member of the working class and was lodging somewhere quite respectable in the area. The Diary tells them exactly where — Middlesex Street.
The Diary also accurately reflects with wry humour on another popular feeling, no doubt based more on bigotry than evidence, that only a foreigner could commit such crimes. In Whitechapel, foreign meant Jewish and so the police were, with reason, anxious about a growing anti-Semitism.
I have read all of my deeds they have done me proud. I had to laugh, they have me down as left-handed, a Doctor, a slaughterman and a Jew. Very well, if they are to insist that I am a Jew then a Jew I shall be. Why not let the Jews suffer? I have never taken to them.
On September 22nd, the magazine Punch published a cartoon by Tenniel (illustrator of Alice in Wonderland) that amused Maybrick, with his love of word games. It showed a policeman, blindfolded and confused by four villains.
The caption: ‘BLIND-MAN’S BUFF. Turn round three times and catch whom you may!’
I could not stop laughing when I read Punch there for all to see was the first three letters of my surname. They are blind as they say. I cannot stop laughing it amuses me so shall I write them a clue…
May comes and goes
In the dark of the night
he kisses the whores
then gives them a fright
The Jews and the Doctors
will get all the blame
but its only May playing his dirty game.
If the Diary was indeed written by Maybrick it is convincing; Punch would have been quite appropriate reading for a Victorian merchant.
The same rhyme contains another clue. In 1889 Florie had sent a telegram to Brierley which has never appeared in print. On May 8th she wrote: ‘Recalled owing to May’s critical state.’ May was another nickname in family use which we found, not in a book, not in the press, not in the trial reports but hidden among the Maybrick papers at Kew!
The idea was already growing in Maybrick’s mind that he could use the current anti-Semitic mood as a diversionary tactic to throw the police off the scent when he committed his next murder. Then, as so often happens in the Diary, he suddenly switches mood.
I am fighting a battle within me. My disire [sic] for revenge is overwhel
ming. The whore has destroyed my life. I try whenever possible to keep all sense of respectability… I miss the thrill of cutting them up. I do believe I have lost my mind.
It is at this point that Inspector Abberline is first mentioned in the Diary.
Abberline says, he was never amazed
I did my work with such honour
For Maybrick, as for many people, Abberline represented the force of law. Throughout the Diary he refers to the police as ‘headless chickens’. He is revelling in their fruitless attempts to find him but as the story progresses Abberline becomes the bogeyman, the hangman, haunting Maybrick’s nightmares.
I see thousands of people chasing me, with Abberline in front dangling a rope.
It is at these moments of heightened emotions released from inner chaos that the Diary becomes most believable. The mood swings become ever more uncontrolled — a familiar side effect of drug-taking. One moment he speaks of ‘cutting’ and the next he is by his parents’ grave.
I miss Edwin. I have received but one letter from him since his arrival in the whores country. The bitch is vexing me more as each day passes. If I could I would have it over and done with. I visited my mother and father’s grave. I long to be reunited with them. I believe they know the torture the whore is putting me through.
Apart from this moment in the Diary we have found only one other obscure written reference, buried deep in the gargantuan reports of Florie’s trial, to the fact that James’ mother and father are dead and buried together.
Equally the effect of drugs is beginning to concern him — he is afraid for his beloved children.
I am beginning to think less of the children, part of me hates me for doing so.
But for Florie there is no compassion. He allowed her every opportunity to meet her ‘whoremaster’ and paradoxically revelled in thoughts of what they might be doing.
The whore seen her master today it did not bother me. I imagined I was with them, the very thought thrills me. I wonder if the whore has ever had such thoughts?
That September Maybrick took out the first and larger of two more insurance policies. It was for £2,000 of life insurance for himself with the Mutual Reserve Fund Life Association of New York. Presumably he had fooled the company, since friends noticed a dramatic deterioration in his physique about this time. He was ageing rapidly, and John Aunspaugh even doubted that he would see out the year. Maybrick’s terror of illness and death was becoming a reality.
_______________
*Here and throughout the book an asterisk indicates that a line in the Diary has been crossed out.
TO MY ASTONISHMENT, I CANNOT BELIEVE I HAVE NOT BEEN CAUGHT
The night of Saturday September 29th 1888 was miserably wet. At about 11 p.m., 44-year-old, Swedish-born Elizabeth Stride, known as Long Liz, was seeking shelter from the rain outside the Bricklayers’ Arms in Settles Street. She was seen by John Gardner and his friend Best, both labourers, being fondled by a respectably dressed man in a black morning suit and overcoat. A little later old Matthew Packer claimed that a man accompanying a woman who could have been Elizabeth Stride had bought some black grapes from his shop in Berner Street. Matthew Packer was just one of many unreliable witnesses whose story and description of the couple he had supposedly seen changed every time he gave new statements to the police. Even so, the story of the grapes — and the ‘blood-stained’ stalk found in the yard by Liz Stride’s body — was widely circulated and publicised. The Diary does not mention the grapes.
The International Workingmen’s Educational Club at 40 Berner Street was a socialist club largely patronised by immigrant anarchists and intellectuals. That Saturday night about 150 people had gathered on the first floor to hear a discussion, led by Morris Eagle, on ‘The necessity for Socialism among Jews’. By 11.30 p.m. only a few people remained behind, and the sound of Russian folk music could be heard on the night air.
The police interviewed a number of so-called witnesses of varying reliability. One, William Marshall, who later identified Liz Stride’s body, said that at about 11.45 p.m. he had seen her talking to a man in Berner Street. The man kissed the woman and Marshall overheard him say ‘you would say anything but your prayers’ — they then walked on towards Dutfield Yard.
At the inquest on October 5th he described the man he had seen as about 5’6”, middle-aged, rather stout, of clerkly appearance and decently dressed wearing a round peaked cap. Marshall said that he appeared to be not a manual worker and had a mild voice with an English accent.
Constable William Smith also thought he had seen Elizabeth Stride at about 12.30 a.m. while on his beat. She was, he said, with a well-dressed man, who was wearing a black coat, hard felt hat and white collar and tie. He also noticed a flower pinned to her jacket.
After Mrs Fanny Mortimer of 36 Berner Street heard the ‘heavy stamp’ of Constable Smith passing outside, she went to her front door and stood there listening to the music from the club which was three houses away.
Beside the club building, through a wicket door between a pair of wooden gateposts, was a dark passage leading to an unlit yard used by van and cart builder Arthur Dutfield. Mrs Mortimer said that during the time she was at the door she saw no one enter or leave the yard.
She did see a man carrying a black bag walk down the street but he was identified and belonged to the club. Nevertheless the image of ‘the black bag’ became forever linked to the legend of Jack the Ripper.
At 12.45 a.m. Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian immigrant, walked past the gateway of Dutfield’s Yard. He gave a statement to the police on Sunday, September 30th at Leman Street police station.
In a retrospective memo on October 19th, Chief Inspector Swanson described how Schwartz claimed that turning the corner from Commercial Road he saw a man accost a woman who was standing in the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard and try to pull her into the street. She screamed three times but not very loudly and the assailant shouted ‘Lipski’ apparently to a second man standing on the other side of the street. Lipski was a Polish Jew who had been convicted of murder the year before and could well have been used as a term of abuse to the very Jewish-looking interloper Schwartz. He told the police that at this point he escaped, followed by the second man.
The attacker Schwartz described as about 5’ 5”, 30 years old, with a fair complexion, full face, dark hair and a small brown moustache. He was wearing a dark jacket and trousers and an old black peaked cap. Schwartz then crossed to the far side of the street where the second man was lighting his pipe. He was a little older — about 35, about 5’11” with light brown hair, dark overcoat and an old black hard felt hat.
Meanwhile the Star newspaper had tracked Schwartz down and printed a interview with him on October 1st. This time he did not refer to the screams. The article differed in several significant details from Inspector Swanson’s report. In the Star’s report, Elizabeth Stride was thrown on to the pavement, the second man is described as having red moustaches and carrying a knife, not a pipe. In this account, the cry of ‘Lipski’ was made by this second witness, not the attacker, as he rushed forward to defend Stride. At this point Schwartz fled.
Despite the rain and the darkness of the night, police took Schwartz’s surprisingly detailed evidence seriously and it was judged that of all people he might indeed have been the only person to have seen Jack the Ripper. However, Inspector Abberline reported to the Home Office on November 1st that Schwartz, who spoke no English, had needed an interpreter to tell his story.
Schwartz was believed as a major witness but his utter confusion graphically demonstrates the risk in attaching blind importance to contemporary records. We cannot be sure what really happened.
The Diary account is subjective — not surprisingly. It does not record any of this detail but describes only the killer’s emotional recollections of the killing. For instance, clutched in Elizabeth Stride’s left hand was a packet of cachous, lozenges eaten to sweeten the breath. Amidst this carnage the detail that is so poignantly
recalled is not the sweets themselves but the lingering smell on Liz Stride’s breath. He writes:
I could still smell her sweet scented breath
The entry is distraught and distorted.
To my astonishment I cannot believe I have not been caught. My heart felt as if it had left my body. Within my fright I imagined my heart bounding along the street with I in desperation following it.
I would have dearly loved to have cut the head of the damned horse off and stuff it as far as it would go down the whores throat. I had no time to rip the bitch wide, I curse my bad luck. I believe the thrill of being caught thrilled me more than cutting the whore herself. As I write I find it impossible to believe he did not see me, in my estimation I was less than a few feet from him. The fool panicked, it is what saved me.
The ‘fool’ who interrupted the murder was Louis Diemschutz, a seller of cheap jewellery. He too described in the Star of October 1st how he had arrived in Dutfield’s Yard at 1 a.m. with his pony and cart. Although it was too late to save Liz Stride’s life, his appearance clearly stopped any further butchery.
As he drove into the yard the pony veered towards the left wall to avoid an obstruction in their path. Diemschutz leant down and prodded the sodden bundle with his whip. It was the body of Elizabeth Stride. And somewhere in the shadows was her murderer.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick Page 12