The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper

by Paul Begg

  Another case in point was suspect Severin Klosowski, also known as George Chapman, a serial poisoner hanged in 1903 for the murder of three of his wives. Klosowski was a barber-surgeon who, at the time of the murders, had a business in Cable Street, St George-in-the-East, and later, in 1890, in the cellar of the White Hart public house at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard. Again, it was the words of a prominent officer, this time Inspector Frederick Abberline, which brought Klosowski into the frame. In an interview in the Pall Mall Gazette the week before Klosowski’s execution, Abberline spoke at length about him and his own suspicions while at the same time disagreeing with any notion that the murderer had died or was in an asylum:

  there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when ‘Chapman’ went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by ‘Chapman’s’ wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored.16

  On the face of it, this interview appeared to suggest that Abberline was all-out to cast Klosowski in the role of the Ripper. However, the following week, in response to great interest in the story, Abberline was approached again, but this time he said that Scotland Yard was ‘really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago’. He again dismissed the rumours surrounding the lunatic in the asylum and the Thames suicide:

  ‘I know that it has been stated in several quarters that “Jack the Ripper” was a man who died in a lunatic asylum a few years ago, but there is nothing at all of a tangible nature to support such a theory.’

  Our representative called Mr Abberline’s attention to a statement made in a well-known Sunday paper, in which it was made out that the author was a young medical student who was found drowned in the Thames.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Abberline, ‘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. A report was made to the Home Office about the matter, but that it was “considered final and conclusive” is going altogether beyond the truth.’17

  Abberline, perhaps as roundly qualified to talk about these murders as Anderson, Macnaghten, Swanson or anybody else, appeared to blatantly close the door on almost everything they said. Such anecdotal information, perhaps tainted by the passage of time or failing memories, shows how problematical such theorizing could be, and the continuing research into Aaron Kosminski as being the ‘Kosminski’ spoken of, as well as Druitt and Klosowski, shows the desire for clarity when addressing these important names. After all, they were named or hinted at by men in a position to know. Or, in the words of Chief Inspector John Littlechild when referring to Major Griffiths: ‘He probably got his information from Anderson who only “thought he knew”.’

  Littlechild, head of the Secret Branch from 1883 until his resignation ten years later, said those words at the end of a letter written to George Sims on 23 September 1913:

  I was pleased to receive your letter which I shall put away in ‘good company’ to read again, perhaps some day when old age overtakes me and when to revive memories of the past may be a solace.

  Knowing the great interest you take in all matters criminal, and abnormal, I am just going to inflict one more letter on you on the ‘Ripper’ subject. Letters as a rule are only a nuisance when they call for a reply but this does not need one. I will try and be brief.

  I never heard of a Dr D. in connection with the Whitechapel murders but among the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr T. (which sounds much like D.) He was an American quack named Tumblety and was at one time a frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of police, there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a ‘Sycopathia Sexualis’ subject he was not known as a ‘Sadist’ (which the murderer unquestionably was) but his feelings toward women were remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record. Tumblety was arrested at the time of the murders in connection with unnatural offences and charged at Marlborough Street, remanded on bail, jumped his bail, and got away to Boulogne. He shortly left Boulogne and was never heard of afterwards. It was believed he committed suicide but certain it is that from this time the ‘Ripper’ murders came to an end.18

  The content of the letter took on a similar pattern to previous claims by police officials in that it was a blend of verifiable fact and peculiar inaccuracy. Littlechild was referring to Dr Francis Tumblety,19 an eccentric character to say the least, flamboyant in his public appearances and yet, according to his acquaintances, possessed of a secretive nature in regard to his personal life. However, if one thing could be said of him, then that was that his life was rarely without controversy, often of his own making. As an adolescent, he had sold pornographic literature to canal-boat passengers, earning him a reputation of being uneducated and disreputable. He later set himself up as an herb doctor and travelled extensively, putting himself forward as an Irish Nationalist in an election campaign.20 His abilities as a ‘doctor’ were called into question following the death of a patient. Tumbelty made many claims – that he was familiar with Abraham Lincoln and served in the American Civil War as a surgeon – although later he was implicated in the assassination of the president in 1865. Any proof of Tumblety’s eminence often came in the form of documents of dubious provenance, and his grasp of reality was tenuous to say the least. He was later involved in a lawsuit against an acquaintance which was subsequently discredited, the acquaintance later suing Tumblety for sexual assault.

  Tumblety was in London when the Whitechapel murders took place. With his penchant for attracting trouble, he was arrested on 7 November 1888 and charged with acts of gross indecency with several men. Apparently homosexual, or at least bisexual, he was also alleged to have an unhealthy mistrust of women, particularly of the ‘unfortunate’ class.

  Jumping bail, he fled to France and thence to America, where his arrival was met with great interest, and he was soon being suggested as a suspect for the murders. In fact, Tumblety became a notorious celebrity in his home country and was literally all over the papers. He was given plenty of chances to answer his accusers and was interviewed by the New York World:

  My guilt was very plain to the English mind. Someone had said that Jack the Ripper was an American, and everybody believed that statement. Then it is the universal belief among the lower classes that all Americans wear slouch hats; therefore, Jack the Ripper must wear a slouch hat. Now, I happened to have on a slouch hat, and this, together with the fact that I was an American, was enough for the police. It established my guilt beyond any question.21

  In Littlechild’s opinion ‘the murderer undoubtedly was a sadist’, and Tumblety wasn’t one, but there were plenty of reasons why someone might have suspected him; perhaps the alleged bitter feelings towards women more than made up for the lack of sadistic tendencies, as well as the aforementioned plump file on him compiled by Scotland Yard, suggesting that the authorities must have held some store in his candidacy for the Ripper. Tumblety’s ‘psychopathia sexualis’ was probably a reference to his homosexual proclivities as much as anything else but may have been seen by Littlechild as a root cause of sexual murder. The cessation of the crimes owing to Tumblety’s ‘suicide’ was an
unfortunate aberration, as Francis Tumblety died in 1903.

  Again, the ‘Littlechild Letter’ fitted into the box filled by other anecdotal exchanges which were not always necessarily for public of official consumption (Anderson notwithstanding). As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and the Whitechapel murders began to recede in time, the task of collating this disparate and contradictory material became the main activity of those seeking to establish the murderer’s identity, and as the police officers involved in the case began to pass away, that task was taken over by a growing band of armchair detectives keen to give ‘Jack the Ripper’ a name that everyone could see.

  12.

  Naming Names

  In 1923 William Le Queux published the book Things I Know about Kings, Celebrities and Crooks,1 which contained a most original theory relating to Jack the Ripper. Le Queux was an Anglo-French freelance writer whose considerable literary output comprised of espionage and spy scares, as well as sensational gossip. He also claimed to be a member of the Crimes Club (‘Our Society’) and a good friend of George Sims. In Things I Know, he announced that ‘the identity of Jack the Ripper has been disclosed and will be found for the first time disclosed in Chapter XVII’. Le Queux claimed to have been given a number of documents taken from the St Petersburg home of Grigori Rasputin, the so-called ‘Mad Monk’, who was murdered in 1916. The documents, typed in French, included a manuscript called ‘Great Russian Criminals’, in which Jack the Ripper was named as a Dr Alexander Pedachenko, assisted by a friend called Levistski and a young woman named Winberg. The motive for the murders was to show up the inadequacy of the British police force.

  The story very much leaned on the characteristics of the then-favoured Ripper archetypes, the doctor and the foreigner, and the whereabouts of the documents he referred to have never been ascertained. What is also worth mentioning is that Rasputin had apparently never shown any interest in the Whitechapel murders during his lifetime and could not speak French. The whole theory amounted to very little, and certainly, with no concrete proof to back it up, the premise smacked of Le Queux’s penchant for sensation and gossip. And so Ripper theorizing entered into a new genre, that of producing a hypothesis based on anecdotal and esoteric material that might or might not have existed, whereby if one was to accept the theory put forward, one had to take the author’s claims as true. One such theorist was Leonard Matters.

  Matters was an Australian-born journalist and veteran of the Boer War who went on to become managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald. Travelling widely as an international reporter, he later served as a Labour member of parliament for Kennington in London. Highly respected, he chose to write on the Ripper case in the People in 1926 following information he had gleaned whilst in Buenos Aires.2 The source was an anonymous article written by an ex-student of one ‘Dr Stanley’, who had been summoned to the doctor’s death bed, only to hear him confess to being Jack the Ripper. The story has it that Dr Stanley’s son had contracted syphilis from Mary Jane Kelly on Boat Race night in 1886 and subsequently died of the disease. His enraged father, a brilliant London doctor, set about murdering Kelly and her friends as revenge before settling in South America in 1908. Matters’s extended version of this theory was published in 1929 as The Mystery of Jack the Ripper.3

  Although Matters had supposedly put a name to the Ripper, the story had little going for it in the way of reliable corroboration. Apart from the ex-student’s article (published in a Spanish-language journal), the only other source to back this theory came from a ‘Mrs North’, who claimed to have known the doctor in 1888. It would be very easy to dismiss Matters’s theory as yet another dubious anecdotal story, frustratingly backed up by material that could not be found, if it were not for an account published in an American newspaper twenty-five years earlier, when the actor John T. Sullivan claimed that Jack the Ripper was a physician who had developed a homicidal mania and had escaped from a private sanatorium in a London suburb, after which he fled to Buenos Aires.4 Sullivan’s suspect was ‘Dr E’ as opposed to a ‘Dr S’, but the similarity with Matters’s story is intriguing nonetheless.

  The Mystery of Jack the Ripper was the first full-length treatment of the Ripper case. It was divided into two sections titled ‘Fact’ and ‘Theory’ and, despite some reservations, is still considered the first important book on the subject. Having been written in the 1920s, Leonard Matters’s book also allowed the reader some insight into the East End of that time from the on-the-spot descriptions of the murder sites. The most notable inclusion was Miller’s Court, and in fact he was the last writer on the subject to see Mary Kelly’s former home before it was demolished a mere three days after his visit in 1928. What was regrettable was that Matters would have had access to residents of the East End and others who would have been alive at the time of the murders and yet he chose not to take advantage of the availability of such oral history. His reasoning behind this was that he believed that such accounts would be riddled with inaccuracies and erroneous hearsay, despite the inevitable mistakes in his own account (as he invariably had to rely on secondary sources). Such stories would, of course, have proved fascinating years later and could have added important observations by significant witnesses and police officers. It is strange that none of the earliest commentators and authors on the crimes appear to have bothered to seek out these people, a great opportunity sadly lost.

  Around the same time, another fascinating document was produced which appeared to fly in the face of the continuing trend of finding a motive for the crimes: a manuscript for an autobiography of one James Willoughby Carnac, which was, to all intents and purposes, the autobiography of Jack the Ripper.5 In the manuscript, Carnac outlined his early life in north London, his motives and drives to murder in the autumn of 1888 and ultimately the reasons for the cessation of the crimes. The whole story does appear to be a work of fiction and, according to introductory notes, was written around 1929. Certain information in the manuscript regarding the murders was obviously part of the general feeling of the day, such as Martha Tabram’s inclusion as a genuine Ripper victim, and some elements seemed to have been lifted from observations included in The Mystery of Jack the Ripper. Arguably, the writing of the Carnac autobiography may well have been influenced by the release of Matters’s ground-breaking book, but what set this manuscript apart was the author’s lack of real motive for committing the crimes; the killer was obviously of unsound mind, but there was no sense of revenge, or hatred of women, religious mania or otherwise. It was original because the killer committed his deeds because he felt compelled to do so, and coldly explained it all to the reader. Debate about the true authorship of the manuscript would begin when it came into the public domain eighty years after it was written, but as a work of Ripper fiction, at least, it was significant.6

  Before the outbreak of the Second World War, two studies published within two years of each other attempted to change thinking regarding the identity of the Ripper by claiming that the murderer was female. This was not an entirely unique proposition as the suggestion that ‘Jack’ could have been ‘Jill’ had already been put forward by Sidney Godolphin Osbourne in 1888 and was also proposed by Surgeon Lawson Tait, who suggested that the killer might be a strong woman who worked as a slaughterhouse cleaner. She could, he suggested, have concealed her bloodstains by rolling up her skirt and walking through the streets covered by a heavy petticoat.7

  The idea of the Whitechapel murderer as slaughterhouse worker was not picked up by Edwin T. Woodhall when he published Jack the Ripper: Or When London Walked in Terror in 1937.8 As a former police officer, Woodhall felt he was well placed to give his sage views and unique insight into the murders, stating that he was not an ‘author turned detective’ like his contemporaries, but a ‘detective turned author’.9 Unfortunately, as an overview of the Ripper story, his effort had little merit.

  Before the official files were accessible to researchers, no Ripper-based book was without significant errors. However,
the severity of such errors varied. Woodhall’s version claimed to be ‘a true, honest, and as far as it is humanly possible – authentic account of the world-known “Jack the Ripper Mystery”?’, before dating his introduction ‘1837’. Despite being an obvious mistake on the part of the typesetter, this did not bode well. Although Woodhall claimed to have referred to the memoirs of Anderson and Macnaghten, as well as Leonard Matters’s book and numerous articles and newspaper accounts, one wonders whether he had actually read any of them. Non-existent witnesses were mentioned, Mary Kelly’s name was initially given as ‘Taylor’, Martha Tabram’s and Elizabeth Stride’s injuries sounded like a compilation of those received by other victims, and Annie Chapman’s head had been cut off and placed on her chest! It was no doubt written with a sensationalist market in mind.

  Woodhall’s own suspect for the Ripper crimes was Olga Tchkersoff, believed to be an immigrant from Russia whose sister, Vera, was lured by Mary Jane Kelly into a life of prostitution, later dying from the effects of an illegal abortion. Predictably, Tchkersoff avenges herself of her sister’s death and other supposedly resulting misfortunes by murdering prostitutes, culminating in her ultimate quarry, Kelly. Whether Olga Tchkersoff actually existed is open to question and, as Woodhall claimed that his information came from a number of sources, the answer is probably that she did not, considering the author’s alarming inability to get even well-reported contemporary facts correct. In fact, Woodhall seemed to have a thing about foreigners in general, but perhaps this was a sign of the times. It can be argued that perceptions of Jack the Ripper reflect the time periods from which they were generated, and in this instance Woodhall made a number of damning references to the immigrants of the time, describing them as ‘the foreign scum of the earth’ who were being ‘dumped into the great cities of this country’, conjuring up images of the neo-fascist sensibilities of Oswald Mosley, who was particularly active in the East End during the pre-war 1930s.10 Woodhall would become virtually ignored by future researchers; in the forthright opinion of Richard Whittington-Egan, writing in 1975, Woodhall’s book was ‘badly written, shoddily researched, grossly inaccurate, it contributes nothing of importance’.11