Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  The first seriously twisted, lycanthropic, sadistically pathological sexual-lust murder on the record in modern Britain occurred in 1867 in Alton, Hampshire, a pastoral little paradise of an English market town, about fifty miles southwest of London’s ugly, teeming slums. It was not a serial murder per se, but it set the tone for things to come.

  It was a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon, August 24. Eight-year-old Fanny Adams was out playing with her seven-year-old sister, Lizzie, and a friend, eight-year-old Minnie Warner. The little girls merrily made their way to a nearby grassy knoll called the Hollow, located in Flood Meadows, a green park on the River Wye that separated the center of the small town from the hop gardens that surrounded it. The park abutted Tanhouse Lane, where the girls lived, and was a familiar playground to them.

  While playing on the green they were approached by twenty-nine-year-old Frederick Baker, a lawyer’s clerk in the town. The clean-shaven Baker, who looked younger than his age, was a respectable gentleman, well-known in the town. He had been a member of a literary institute for twelve years and was a Sunday school teacher, the secretary of a debating society and a director of a penny savings bank. He might have even been a familiar figure to the girls. It had been reported that “he was known as a prowler among children” and that he habitually handed out halfpennies to them like crumbs to gathering flocks of pigeons.14

  According to Minnie’s testimony, Baker came up to them in the park at around two p.m. and said, “Ah, my little tulips, what are you playing at?” He gave two of the girls a halfpenny each to race each other, and then gave them all halfpennies to walk into the fields to pick berries with him. After that he told Lizzie and Minnie to go home and spend their money, and he lifted Fanny up in his arms, saying, “Come with me, and I will give you two pence more.”

  Fanny struggled in Baker’s arms, crying out, “My mother wants me to go home,” but Baker carried the girl off into the hop gardens bordering the park. Perhaps Fanny was more petulant than frightened. Neither Lizzie nor Minnie was particularly alarmed by what had just happened; it must have looked playful to them, and very few Victorian-era children would have dared to question their elders, which the young gentleman Mr. Baker clearly was.

  When Lizzie and Minnie returned home, they said nothing to their mothers about Fanny not being with them. It was only after four o’clock when Fanny still had not returned, that Lizzie told her mother about the young man who had given them halfpennies and carried Fanny away. Her mother began a frantic search. This was before phones. It was going to be a word-of-mouth hue and cry in a town about the size of twenty city blocks, with a river, bridges, parks and hop fields for local breweries. About four thousand people lived in the Alton parish.

  At around five p.m., Fanny’s mother, with Minnie in tow, was joined in the search by a woman who had earlier that day seen Baker in the area, near the hop gardens, walking alone toward the town, although she did not know him by name. Suddenly they spotted the young man walking in the same direction again, from the hop gardens toward the town. Minnie and the woman recognized him.

  They confronted him, the woman demanding, “What have you done with the child you took away?”

  Baker politely replied that he had left the children at play. He had not carried anybody off. When he was asked if he had given the children money, he admitted he had indeed. The woman asked Minnie if that was the young gentleman who had given them pennies.

  Minnie replied, “Yes, he gave me two pennies.”

  “No,” corrected Baker, “three half-pence; and to the other two I gave a halfpenny each.”

  But when he was now asked for his name, Baker suddenly became impatient and curt, saying, “Never mind my name, you will find me at Clement’s office.” The women had found Baker so polite and unperturbed that when he became curt at their last question, they apologized for having spoken so disrespectfully to a gentleman. They resumed the search while Baker continued toward the town.

  Later, witnesses were found who had seen Baker with the girls in the park, while others encountered him there alone later. Another witness saw him washing up in a creek. Nobody noticed anything particularly unusual about his behavior, except for one witness who stated that it appeared to him as if Baker was trying to avoid him.

  That day Baker had been at work at his desk in the lawyer’s office all morning, but at around eleven a.m. he stepped out for a drink. He returned, worked another hour or so and left in the early afternoon for lunch. He returned briefly to his desk at around three thirty p.m. and then left again, not coming back to the office until nearly six p.m. His fellow clerks noticed he had been drinking since morning, although that was not entirely unusual for him. He was excited and animated after lunch, but that was how he got when he drank. Baker remained working in the office until seven p.m., and then he and his colleagues went out for pints at the local pub.

  According to witness testimony, as Baker chugged down his beer,

  He said that a woman had told him that he had taken away a child, but he had told her that he knew no more about it than that he had given her some halfpence. He also said, “If the child is murdered or anything, I suppose I shall be blamed for it.”

  He afterward said, “I think I shall go away on Monday”; and asked the witness if he would go with him. When the witness asked what kind of work he could do in another town, Baker replied, “Well, I can go as a butcher.”

  That evening at eight thirty, while looking in one of the hop gardens, a searcher caught a glimpse of the girl’s light blond hair. When he looked closer he couldn’t believe what he was seeing: there was a severed child’s head resting on a hop pole. Fanny Adams had been found.

  A brief witness summary that appears in the court record reveals the scale of the horror the search party now faced:

  Thomas Gates deposed to finding the head of the child in the hop-garden. It was lying exposed. He also found the trunk of the body, about sixteen yards from the head. He also noticed that the body was cut open and cleaned out.

  Charles White corroborated the foregoing statement, and stated that he also found a girl’s hat in the hedge, near where the remains were lying.

  Harry Allen, a coach maker, deposed to finding a heart and an arm, in a field adjoining the hop-garden. They were under the hedge, covered with some hedge clipping. Witness also found the lungs.

  Thomas Swain, a shoemaker, deposed to finding the left foot in a clover field on the opposite side of the Hollow.

  Joseph Waters, a police constable, deposed to finding an eye near the bridge, over Brood Flood, on the Alton side, at the bottom of the river Way. Police constable Masterman found a second eye in the same river.

  William Henry Walker, a painter, living at Alton, deposed to finding the stone produced, covered with blood, hair, and small piece of flesh.

  The physician performing the autopsy reported:

  There was a fracture of the skull. I found contused wounds, and two bruises, one on the right and the other on the left side of the head. The right ear was severed from the head, and there was a cut extending from the forehead above the nose to the end of the lower jaw, dividing the muscles and vessels of that part. The wound behind the head would cause death. Both eyes were cut out. On the left side a cut extending from above the ear to the end of the lower jaw, entering the cheek and dividing the muscles and vessels as far as the angle of the mouth . . . I found incisions piercing the walls of the chest, the largest incision three inches in length, the second two, and the third one. There was a cut in the armpit dividing the muscles. The forearm was cut off at the elbow joint. The left leg nearly cut off at the hip joint. In front deep incision dividing the muscles and vessels of the thigh. The left foot cut off at the ankle joint. A deep incision in the right side, entering the chest between the fourth and fifth ribs. A cut under the armpit in the right side, not dividing the muscles. The right leg was torn from the trunk at the part of t
he body where the sacrum joins the thigh. The whole of the contents of the pelvis and chest were completely removed. I found five incisions in the liver, three in the lungs, the heart cut out and separated from its large vessels, the spleen also separated, the sternum cut away and missing. I found a dislocation of the spine between the lumbar and dorsal vertebrae. The private parts were missing. They have not been found.

  Baker was still drinking with his office buddies in the pub when people started drifting in from the search with news of the murder and that Baker was being sought. One villager came up to Baker and said straight out, “They say you murdered a girl and cut her head off and the police are after you.” Advised to go down and report to the police, Baker replied that if the police wanted to speak to him they would have to come for him, which is precisely what they did.

  When taken into custody Baker insisted he was innocent and stated that he was willing to go anywhere they wanted him. A knife was found on his person and taken from him. He admitted to giving the children halfpennies and stated that he was in the habit of doing so when out for a walk. Police noticed that Baker’s trousers and socks were very wet, to which he said it was his habit to step through water when out for a walk. But he could not account for the recently dried bloodstains on his trousers and on the cuffs of his shirt. (Forensic science in that era was still unable to distinguish human blood from animal blood after it had dried.)

  In the meantime, police searched his desk at work and found his journal. There was a fresh entry for August 24, 1867: “Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot.”

  Baker’s lawyer, Mr. Carter, would later argue that he intended to write, “Killed, a young girl. [Today] it was fine and hot.” The lawyer said, “‘A child drowned in King’s Pond,’ is another entry. Suppose it had been ‘Drowned a young child in King’s Pond.’ . . . The word ‘fine’ occurs in the diary 162 times, leaving only 74 days, though running over January, February, and March, which, according to the diary, were not fine.”

  Carter argued that Baker was insane; the nature of the crime itself showed that whoever did it must have been mad. The defense called witnesses to attest to Baker’s mental health and his family history. Baker had grown up in the nearby town of Guildford. His family and acquaintances from Guildford testified that he had been a sickly and nervous child troubled by headaches and continually in the care of a doctor. He bled frequently from the nose. He was not sent to school until the age of twelve. At sixteen, he had typhus.

  Working for a lawyer this last year, he often came home and said his duties were more than his head was able to bear. After breaking up with a girlfriend in 1865 he became despondent and talked of suicide. His nephew was in a mental asylum. His own father had had a violent outburst four years earlier and was still hospitalized.

  An acquaintance who grew up with Baker in Guildford stated, “His manner was peculiar. He would make grim faces. He would break off in the middle of a conversation and go off laughing. I knew of his engagement with a young woman. He told me it was broken off. After that I have seen him walking along the street at the rate of five miles an hour . . . He had previously told me he would destroy himself. I never heard him threaten violence to anyone but himself.”

  The family physician testified that Frederick’s father had shown violent behavior:

  As a child the prisoner was very weakly. If I spoke to him on any subject he would blush and his lip would quiver. He was very sensitive . . . Just four years ago his father had an attack of acute mania. He was violent. He had delusions. On the day I saw him first he had attempted to strike his daughter with the poker, but he was restrained. He had also attempted to do violence to another woman. For the last year or two before he left Guildford I noticed a difference in the prisoner. I always thought him weak-minded, and that would be increased by the taint of insanity that was in the family.

  He changed from being a very weak man to something swaggering. He had the look of an intemperate man. Homicidal mania is of two kinds. A man might murder his keeper, or he might have an intense desire to commit murder on any one. Both arise from disease of the mind.

  In summing up his plea for Baker’s insanity, his attorney argued:

  Everyone who had heard of the case, or read it in the newspapers, must have said, “The man must be mad.” Could they see any motive, any cause, anything impelling him to this act, anything like premeditation or forethought; could they see any of the ordinary circumstances that attend ninety-nine cases of murder out of a hundred? It was suggested that the crime was due to sexual desire, gratified or not gratified, and the murder was committed to hide the minor offense . . . The extraordinary, extravagant, and un-paralleled mutilation in the case, and the scattering of the members broadcast, did away with all notion of concealment.

  The jury felt otherwise. He was convicted of murder and hanged December 24, 1867. Commentators at the time wrote:

  The very phrase “fine and hot,” found in the diary of this besotted and depraved wretch, is a sufficient key to his whole character. That sensuality combined with cruelty—the probable elements at work in the yet undetected assassin of Eliza Grimwood—may tend to the production of a state of mind bordering upon dementia we freely grant; but the mind may be diseased, and monomaniacally influenced, without a man’s being absolutely distraught. Frenzied indulgence in the most hideous passion may be perfectly compatible with a capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.

  That the wretch is a murderer is shown by the evidence; but that he is a madman we decline to admit. He is a monster. He satisfied first his carnal and then his bloodthirsty lust. He is of the same mental caliber as [Renwick Williams] who late in the last century, prowled about the streets of London, attacking only well-dressed young ladies, and piercing them on one particular part of the back—as bad as the ruffian known by the name of the “Hackney monster,” who infested the suburban fields about fifty years since, assaulting only schoolgirls and young children—as the French vampire, the monstrous soldier, who, in 1848, used to lurk about the cemeteries of Montmartre and Pere La Chaise, satisfying his ghoul-like appetite on corpses—as Sawney Bean, in fine, who could not eat all the victims he had murdered, and so salted their mangled limbs down for winter consumption. Baker was not mad. He was simply a monster.15

  From this commentary, it is clear that by then the press had already put the murder of Fanny Adams within the context of previous pathological murders and assaults, some of them sexual serial offenses, like those of the London Monster and the Vampire of Montparnasse. The pathological nature of these crimes did not elude the press.

  As for the eight-year-old victim, the term “Fanny Adams” became British naval slang for tinned mutton rations, which disgruntled sailors joked were the butchered remains of the girl.16 The term evolved over the century to “sweet Fanny A.,” to “sweet F.A.,” to “F.A.,” which eventually became a Commonwealth military euphemism for “fuck all.”17

  At twenty-nine Frederick Baker was in that average age range when serial killers begin their killing. The only difference between him and a typical serial killer was that he did not get an opportunity to kill more than once. Had he perpetrated his first murder in densely populated London, with its anonymous crowds, instead of a small town where he was immediately recognized, he very likely would have gone on to kill again, just like Jack the Ripper twenty-one years later.

  III

  The New Age of Monsters: The Rise of the Modern Serial Killer

  TEN

  Raptor: Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders, 1888

  I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.

  —ANONYMOUS LETTER TO THE PRESS SIGNED “JACK THE RIPPER,” SEPTEMBER 26, 1888

  He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times.

  —DR.
THOMAS BOND, LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE SURGEON, PROFILE OF THE WHITECHAPEL UNSUB, NOVEMBER 10, 1888

  Even though he is mistakenly claimed by many to have been the “world’s first serial killer,” Jack the Ripper is nonetheless the Mount Everest of serial killers.1 He is a serial killer’s serial killer, with multiple “copycat” serial killers modeling themselves on what they thought Jack the Ripper was. It is safe to say that hundreds of books have been written about the Whitechapel murders or feature a fictional Jack the Ripper. At this writing Goodreads.com lists 358 currently available books “shelved” under “Jack the Ripper.”2 A recent search for “Jack the Ripper” in the “books” category on Amazon.com returns 1,985 results. Ask any person at random to name infamous serial killers, even if they have no particular interest in the phenomenon, and they will most likely rattle off Jack the Ripper first, followed by Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler and Jeffrey Dahmer before they slow down. These are the “whales,” and Jack the Ripper stands among them as Moby-Dick, glimmering on the distant horizon of history and still to this day unidentified. All the rest of the herd—the Zodiac Killer, the Green River Killer, Andrei Chikatilo, the Hillside Stranglers, Ed Kemper, Arthur Shawcross, and so on—despite some of their astronomical body counts, are B- and C-listers compared with Jack the Ripper.

  No serial killer has spawned a genre and industry of his own except Jack the Ripper. There are legions of ripperologists worldwide, comprising an obsessive subculture of armchair detectives and historians, sometimes even professional profilers, attempting to definitively identify and solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper, the ultimate cold case.

  It is beyond the scope of this book to address the multiple theories about Jack the Ripper, some of which are very compelling, some completely harebrained, but all earnestly argued. The best I can do for you here is to pull back from the trees and gaze out at the forest itself. And the forest, but for the extraordinary violence, appears comparatively mediocre in terms of numbers: five or six murders, committed between early August and early November of 1888. (The dates are so close together that the murders could perhaps be classified as constituting a “spree series.”) Unlike his legend, Jack the Ripper’s actual killing “career” appears to be rather brief.