by Paul Begg
The uproar was probably all for nothing, for the throat injury she had sustained was rather superficial, and subsequently it was discovered that Annie had been hiding coins in her mouth. This led the police to assume that she had attempted to rob the man, who had obviously remonstrated with her and, following her scream, made a run for it. In truth, the wound may well have been self-inflicted, but, despite this, Annie never recanted her story. The man never came forward to give an account of himself, and thus the case was dropped. The police were obviously circumspect about the whole issue, and no official record of any investigation survives. However, they were of the belief that Annie Farmer might well have known her attacker, hence her reluctance to give any information that might have led to his discovery.3
Another Ripper scare erupted following the discovery of the body of Catherine (a.k.a. Rose) Mylett in Clarke’s Yard, Poplar High Street on 20 December. The Mylett case was a peculiar one – at her inquest, four doctors stated that the evidence pointed to death by strangulation, as there were signs that a cord had been used around her neck. Dr Thomas Bond, directed by Robert Anderson to make a late examination, changed his opinion from homicide to ‘natural causes’, and the whole affair led to some rather acrimonious exchanges between the officials.4 Anderson appeared to be wilfully pushing for a non-homicide verdict, as there were no signs of a struggle. Coroner Wynne Baxter also favoured death by natural causes, but in the face of weighty medical opinion a verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ was given. The evidence to suggest that Mylett was killed by Jack the Ripper was flimsy at best, even non-existent, but perhaps it was more the timing of the homicide, combined with the nature of the crime scene and the character of Mylett herself, rather than the way it was done that made the public at least show concern that Jack the Ripper had attempted another outrage.
Alice McKenzie, like Mary Kelly before her, had a mysterious past. It is believed she was born around 1849 and was brought up in Peterborough, moving to the East End sometime before 1874. She was known by many as ‘Clay Pipe Alice’ on account of her regular habit of smoking a pipe. She had scars on her forehead and was missing part of a thumb, the result of an industrial accident some years previously. In about 1883, she had got together with a man named John McCormack, an Irish porter who had been doing casual work for Jewish traders in Hanbury Street, and together they lodged at various doss houses in the district over the years before settling at ‘Mr Tenpenny’s’ lodging house at 52 Gun Street, near Spitalfields market.5
Between 3.00 and 4.00 on the afternoon of 16 July 1889 McCormack had returned to the lodging house after his morning’s work. He found Alice there and, having money, he gave her 1s 8d, the 8d for the rent and the rest to do with as she saw fit, before going to bed. It was the last time he would see her, and it would later transpire that she left without paying the deputy for their bed.6 At 7.10 p.m., a blind boy named George Dixon claimed that Alice had taken him to a pub near the Cambridge music hall on Commercial Street. He heard Alice ask someone if they would stand a drink, and the reply was ‘yes’. After remaining a few minutes, he was led back to Gun Street and left there.7
Elizabeth Ryder, the deputy of Mr Tenpenny’s, saw Alice between 8.00 and 9.00 p.m. at the lodging house; Alice was on her way out, and it was noted that she had some money in her hand. It was believed for a while that she had gone out with a fellow lodger named Margaret ‘Mog’ Cheeks, and, according to Mrs Ryder, both women had not returned to the house when she checked at 3.30 the following morning, 17 July.8 The final sighting of Alice McKenzie was made at 11.40 p.m. by a Margaret Franklin in Flower and Dean Street, where she was sitting on the steps of her lodging house with two friends. Alice passed by, seemingly in a hurry, and when asked how she was, merely replied, ‘All right, can’t stop now,’ before turning into Brick Lane.9
At 12.50 a.m., PC Walter Andrews found the body of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley, a narrow thoroughfare which ran off Whitechapel High Street. Blood had flowed from two stabs in the throat, and her abdomen was superficially mutilated. What made this latest victim a contender for the next Ripper murder was the opinion of some of the medical officials. Although Dr George Bagster Phillips, a doctor who by sheer experience of the Whitechapel murders was probably well informed enough to confidently assert that this was not the work of ‘Jack the Ripper’,10 Dr Thomas Bond disagreed,11 and his opinion was shared by the new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, James Monro, who stated, ‘I need not say that every effort will be made by the police to discover the murderer, who, I am inclined to believe, is identical with the notorious Jack the Ripper of last year.’12 Robert Anderson, inconveniently on holiday at the time of McKenzie’s murder, did not share this opinion and later wrote that it was committed by ‘another hand’, at the same time suggesting that Monro had changed his mind as he had intimated to Anderson that it was ‘an ordinary murder and not the work of a sexual maniac’.13
The last of the Whitechapel murders took place on 13 February 1891 after a considerable lull. The victim, thirty-one-year-old prostitute Frances Coles, was found at 2.15 that morning by PC Ernest Thompson in Swallow Gardens, a rather pleasant name for what was effectively a grim railway arch that ran between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street, not far from the Tower of London. As PC Thompson approached the railway arch, he believed he could hear footsteps walking at a normal pace east towards Mansell Street. When he found Frances Coles, she was still alive and opened one eye as he bent to examine her.14 She apparently died on the ambulance, the result of a large cut in her throat.
The movements of Frances on the day of her death were well documented on account of her undertaking a lengthy pub-crawl with James Sadler, a ship’s fireman with whom Frances had been before and who reacquainted himself with her the day before her death. The night of 12 February was not a happy one by all accounts, and both of them got very drunk visiting numerous public houses. After Sadler was attacked and robbed by a small group of ruffians in Thrawl Street, the couple had an argument and parted, reuniting at their lodging house in White’s Row, Spitalfields, several hours later. Frances was found drunk and crying, and Sadler was bloodied from a fight he’d had at the London docks; now very drunk, he had tried to be readmitted to his ship but was refused and found himself in an abusive confrontation with some men who promptly beat him up as a result. He left Frances drunkenly sleeping at a table in the lodging house, the last time he saw her alive, but returned around 3.00 a.m. so drunk he could barely speak. He was turned away again. The night became too much for him, and he went to get his wounds attended to at the London Hospital, spending the remainder of the night there.15
Sadler immediately became prime suspect for the murder, and he was arrested on 15 February and charged the following day, but thanks to the testimony of favourable witnesses in the absence of hard evidence, as well as good legal representation by the Seamen’s Union, charges against him were dropped on 2 March, before the case even went to court. Whether Sadler did murder Frances Coles will probably never be known, but one thing is for certain: he was not ‘Jack the Ripper’, as he was at sea on the fateful nights of the previous murders.
And so ended the Whitechapel murders. But their legacy carried on long after the death of Frances Coles, as the police continued to make enquiries and file reports for many years after, and the press somehow managed to keep the story ticking over, despite the lack of new crimes. The taunting letters from potential ‘Jack the Rippers’ had begun to dwindle to a trickle compared to the frenzied days of 1888, but it seems appropriate to mention the last recorded communication, which was sent on 14 October 1896:
Dear Boss
You will be surprised to find that this comes from yours as of old Jack-the-Ripper. Ha. Ha. If my old friend Mr Warren is dead you can read it. You might remember me if you try and think a little. Ha. Ha. The last job was a bad one and no mistake, nearly buckled, and meant it to be the best of the lot & what curse it, Ha Ha I’m alive yet and you’ll
find it out. I mean to go on again when I get the chance wont it be nice dear old boss to have the good old times once again. You never caught me and you never will. Ha Ha.
You police are a smart lot, the lot of you could nt catch one man Where have I been Dear Boss you’d like to know, abroad if you would like to know, and just come back. Ready to go on with my work and stop when you catch me. Well good bye Boss wish me luck. Winters coming ‘The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing’ Ha Ha have you heard this before.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper16
Police reports and communications discussing this latest missive – and ultimately dismissing it – would become the final official documents in the Whitechapel murders file.
Part Two
THEORIES
10.
Murder and Motive
Jack the Ripper has often been described as the ‘world’s first serial killer’. This is frankly not true, as there are many examples throughout history of serial murder stretching back through the centuries. However, he might more accurately be described as the first ‘modern’ serial killer; that is to say, not only did extensive news coverage at the time make the murders known to much of the civilized world, but also the sheer weight of theorizing about the Ripper’s identity over the ensuing years would make it de rigueur to analyse the behaviour and possible motives of not just Jack the Ripper, but also those killers that came before and after.
In his memoirs, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who became assistant chief constable of the Metropolitan Police in 1889, was moved to write that even by 1913 not many people outside of the legal and medical professions had much of a concept of ‘motiveless murder’, or ‘killing for its own sake’.1 Individuals disposed to this sort of behaviour were deemed by medical authorities as far back as the mid-nineteenth century to be suffering from ‘moral insanity’, described by one doctor in 1855 as ‘a form of mental derangement which consists in a morbid perversion of the feelings, affection and active powers, without any illusion or erroneous state impressed on the understanding; it sometimes coexists with an unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties’.2 Such lack of moral conscience coupled with an outward normality would later been seen as elements of psychopathy. The press of 1888 were having difficulty coming to terms with the concept of murder for mere personal gratification, but one correspondent attempted to set the record straight early on:
It may interest your readers to learn in connection with the Whitechapel murders that a number of parallel cases occurred some seven years ago near Bochum in Westphalia. The murderer was in the habit of lassoing women, and treating them in exactly the same manner as his confrère of Spitalfields. After many fruitless efforts on the part of the police to catch the perpetrator of the outrages, they at last arrested a gipsy, who was duly sentenced to death and beheaded. Unfortunately, a few days after his execution the murders recommenced! The assassin had the impudence to write to the magistrate of the district that he meant to kill a certain number of victims and would then give himself up. The papers applied to such a murder the expressive term of lustmord (pleasure murder).3
The British Medical Journal also published a brief article in which ‘an eminent surgeon’ speculated that those individuals who were not of the medical profession ‘are prompted rather by a desire to account for them (the murders) – that is to say, to find some motive for them – than by any knowledge of the subject’.4 The London Evening News, perhaps unable to understand this concept, treated the report rather disparagingly but chose to mention an important point, namely that laymen had ‘treated the occurrences as though they were unprecedented in the annals of crime’ but that the eminent surgeon stressed that ‘it seems desirable to point out that such is by no means the case’.5
Nonetheless, for many there simply had to be a reason for the Whitechapel murders in order for people to attempt to come to terms with what was happening in the world’s most powerful city. An early correspondent, and probably the most prominent one, was Lyttleton Forbes Winslow, a noted and distinguished medical man who, having grown up at his father’s asylums (and running them after his death in 1874), had a formidable experience of the insane. In September 1888 he wrote to The Times:
I think that the murderer is not of the class of which ‘Leather Apron’ belongs, but is of the upper class of society, and I still think that my opinion given to the authorities is the correct one – viz., that the murders have been committed by a lunatic lately discharged from some asylum, or by one who has escaped. If the former, doubtless one who, though suffering from the effects of homicidal mania, is apparently sane on the surface, and consequently has been liberated, and is following out the inclinations of his morbid imaginations by wholesale homicide.
He also wrote to Scotland Yard in November 1888, stating that the murderer was a ‘homicidal lunatic’ and put his services at the disposal of the government.6 It is difficult to say how much notice the police took of Winslow’s claims, but early suspects were those with some medical background or history of insanity or both. The former category was no doubt influenced by Dr George Bagster Phillips’s assertion that the murderer of Annie Chapman possessed significant anatomical skill, added to which was coroner Wynne Baxter’s announcement at the end of the Chapman inquest that an American doctor had apparently been offering £20 for specimens of uteri with the intention of giving them away with a medical publication he was producing.7
One early suspect who fitted both criteria was Oswald Puckeridge, born at Burpham, near Arundel in Sussex, in 1838. He became a chemist and married Ellen Buddle in 1868, and they had a son. Oswald suffered bouts of insanity and was often a patient in mental hospitals, generally being discharged after a few days. The record shows a subsequent series of admissions and discharges over the next few years, at one point it being noted that he was a ‘danger to others’. It is not known when or by whom Puckeridge came to the attention of the police in 1888, or how seriously they took him as a suspect, but he was obviously someone who needed to be investigated. The only mention of him was contained in a report by Sir Charles Warren:
A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on 4 August. He was educated as a surgeon and has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.8
The same report mentioned Jacob Isenschmid, who had come to the attention of the police at around the same time. He was born in Switzerland in 1843, married Mary Ann Joyce in 1867and had five children. On 11 September 1888, Dr Cowan and Dr Crabb of Holloway, North London, informed the police that they believed Isenschmid to be the Whitechapel murderer. Police learned that he had been lodging with a Mr Tyler at 60 Milford Road, Holloway, since 5 September and that he was frequently out of the house and was missing on the night of Annie Chapman’s murder. He had later left his wife following an argument. By 17 September, he had been confined to Fairfield Road asylum, Bow, where Sergeant William Thick learned that he had told a number of women in Holloway that he was ‘Leather Apron’. He had been maintaining a living by collecting sheep’s heads, feet and kidneys from the market, which he dressed and sold in the West End, and perhaps this casual work explained his absences from his lodgings.9
Two days later, Inspector Abberline reported that Isenschmid was known to a publican named Gehringer of Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, and that he was known locally as the ‘mad butcher’. Significantly, he was believed to be the man with a bloodstained hand seen by Mrs Fiddymont and others at the Prince Albert following the murder of Annie Chapman and that this would be confirmed as soon as the doctors thought he was fit to appear for identification.10 It is unclear whether any confirmed identification was made by Mrs Fiddymont, and Isenschmid was subsequently returned to Colney Hatch asylum.
Another early suspect of note was the volatile Charles Ludwig, a German hairdresser, who had come to London from Hamburg in 1887 or 1888 and found employment with Mr C. A. Partridge in the Minories, lodging with a German tailor named Johann
es in Church Street, Minories, until his disorderly habits made him unwelcome, and he moved to a hotel in Finsbury. His landlord presented the press with a rather alarming picture of him:
He is … a most extraordinary man, is always in a bad temper, and grinds his teeth in rage at any little thing which puts him out. I believe he has some knowledge of anatomy, as he was for some time an assistant to some doctors in the German army, and helped to dissect bodies. He always carries some razors and a pair of scissors with him, and when he came here again on Monday night last he produced them. He was annoyed because I would not him sleep here, and threw down the razors in a passion, swearing at the same time.11
In the small hours of Tuesday 18 September 1888 he accompanied prostitute Elizabeth Burns to Three Kings Court, Minories, which led to some railway arches. There, he pulled a knife on her, and her cries of ‘Murder!’ attracted a police officer from his beat. He dismissed Ludwig and walked Miss Burns to the end of his beat, where she said, ‘Dear me, he frightened me very much when he pulled a big knife out,’ and explained that she was too afraid to make the complaint in Ludwig’s presence. Johnson searched unsuccessfully for Ludwig and alerted other constables to the situation.