The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper

by Paul Begg

  Then in 1991, a discovery was made which sent tremors through the world of Ripper studies, breaking the boundaries of that relatively specific research field to become a controversial international media event of its own. The background story of what became known as the ‘Maybrick Diary’ made the events surrounding Joseph Sickert’s eccentric claims of royal conspiracies seem tame by comparison. It is without doubt one of the most highly controversial affairs in a field that thought it had heard it all. In fact, so tortuous and contentious were the multifarious events surrounding the ‘diary’ that they generated an independent study of their own.18

  In 1991, unemployed Liverpudlian Michael Barrett was given a journal by a close friend, Tony Devereaux, in a pub and told to ‘do something with it’. The journal appeared to be an old photo album with numerous pages cut out at the beginning. The remaining pages were written upon, detailing a peculiar series of events which culminated in the confession: ‘I give my name that all know of me, so history do tell, what love can do to a gentle man born. Yours truly Jack the Ripper. Dated this third day of May 1889.’ Barrett, apparently intrigued, attempted to discover the identity of its author and finally came across James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant who had been poisoned by his wife in 1889 and for which she endured a long prison sentence. It was a prominent criminal case in its time, presided over by Justice Stephen, father of sometime Ripper suspect James Kenneth. The ‘diary’ (as it shall be called hereafter) suggested that Maybrick had perpetrated the Whitechapel murders in a fit of insane rage as a response to his wife’s perceived infidelities, all fuelled by an uncontrollable addiction to arsenic. Further research revealed specific information in the diary which confirmed his identification, from the pet names of Maybrick’s two children to their residence at Battlecrease House in Aigburth, Liverpool. Unsure of how to progress, Barrett took the diary to a literary agency, and, excited about the prospect of a publishing scoop, they set wheels in motion to have the diary published.

  That is the original story behind the discovery of the Maybrick Diary, put as simply as possible. However, before anybody would commit to publicizing it, it had to be tested for authenticity. And this is where the whole story becomes very complicated. In the months that followed, experts in ink and paper dating, handwriting, criminal psychology and, of course, ‘Ripperologists’ would pore over the text and conduct numerous debates over the veracity of the document. Publishing rights were bought by Smith Gryphon (with author Shirley Harrison commissioned to write the book)19 and Paul Feldman, a businessman who had been partly responsible for bringing the 1990 movie The Krays to the screen, acquired video rights. The stage was set for a war unprecedented in such a small arena. Complicating matters was the discovery of a pocket watch, the interior of which was engraved with the initials of the five ‘canonical’ victims of Jack the Ripper, the words ‘I am Jack’ and the supposed signature of James Maybrick himself. This too went for testing with seemingly more consistently favourable results showing that it was contemporary with the 1880s.

  Following earlier hints in the press, the proper media eruption took place on 23 April 1993, when it seemed that all the national papers were plastered with headlines about the ‘new’ discovery. The alleged diaries of notorious historical characters had become a sore point for journalists following the press attention on the so-called Hitler Diaries in 1983, a publishing faux pas of gargantuan proportions20. Despite giving tremendous publicity to the Maybrick Diary, the press was guarded, and the Observer even went as far as to call the document ‘bogus’ from the outset.21

  The unfurling saga of the Maybrick Diary generated a series of disasters for many concerned, as well as litigation, accusations of foul play, threats of violence and, in one case, suspected murder. Press attention kept the controversy afloat, though a film based on the Maybrick story contained within the diary was planned, but after tests on the diary proved inconclusive, its backers pulled out. Paul Feldman, who had become a staunch supporter of the diary, eventually produced a video documentary which told the story of the diary and the resulting investigation. In one sequence, a round table of experts including Colin Wilson, Donald Rumbelow, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Martin Howells, as well as Feldman and Shirley Harrison, are shown in debate, with Messrs Begg and Fido particularly in full swing. Feldman himself, passionately committed to the idea that Maybrick was indeed the Ripper, was later involved in a notoriously angry confrontation with diary sceptic Melvin Harris at a book launch party.

  Regrettably for those clinging on to the notion that the diary was at least promising, Michael Barrett would later drop the bombshell that he had forged it, putting the story back into the headlines. He subsequently retracted his statement, but matters took another twist when Anne Graham (Barrett’s estranged wife) also claimed that the diary had been in her family for many decades, further adding confusion and disagreement to the already bubbling pot. Barrett later said that his claim of forgery was merely to ‘get at’ Anne, as the two were going through an acrimonious divorce at the time. Subsequently, it has become impossible to go into any real depth about the diary without getting drawn into a myriad of claims and counter-claims, and Maybrick’s candidacy as the Ripper is still hotly debated twenty years on.

  What the Maybrick Diary presented to the avid researcher was a rarity; usually a theorist would find a suspect and use the facts to build a case, or use the facts to direct them to a suspect. But, as with Macnaghten’s memoranda or Swanson’s marginalia, the theory presented itself to the researcher. Name and motive were already in place, and the difficulty lay in making sure that all the information added up. Unfortunately, in situations such as this, it never completely does, and with the Maybrick Diary we had the opinions of experts divided over the provenance and date of creation of the document offset with the more positive deductions surrounding the watch.

  As the Maybrick debacle ground on, a slew of new studies on the Whitechapel murders emerged. A. P. Wolf produced Jack the Myth,22 a work which attempted to demolish what the author saw as damaging assumptions served to a gullible public by the old guard of ‘Ripperology’, with Colin Wilson receiving a large proportion of the author’s ire. In the process, Elizabeth Stride was removed from the ‘canonical’ five victims (her lover Michael Kidney was the culprit in this case) and Thomas Cutbush, the suspect mooted by the Sun but exonerated by the Macnaghten memoranda in 1894, was held responsible for the other Ripper crimes. A. P. Wolf importantly set no store by the old canards of the Ripper story, and his approach could be seen as ground-breaking, regardless of whether one agreed with his suspect theory. It showed a willingness, all too lacking in studies of the Whitechapel murders at that time, to deconstruct the case and not to get too precious about the established thoughts of other commentators, which had become set in stone and taken for granted over the years: hence Wilson’s place in the firing line.

  The same could be said for Philip Sugden’s highly respected book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper.23 Sugden was not actually a true-crime enthusiast who had spent years studying the Ripper, but a historian who had turned his attention to the Whitechapel murders and felt that the subject had become shrouded in myth and unreliable documentation and, as a result, resolved to cast a critical eye over the events of 1888 to produce a truly unbiased account of the crimes and times. In this, he was hugely successful, and the book is still lauded as possibly the best account of the murders to date. Although some have said that the book might discreetly lean towards Severin Klosowski as the killer, ‘the best of a bad lot’ in Sugden’s view, as an unsensational account it was enormously successful.

  Sugden’s book also contained some quite cutting criticism of the way Ripper studies had been going previously. Several years later he very critically wrote of the average Ripperologist that ‘First he decides who he wants Jack the Ripper to be. And then he plunders the sources for anything that will invest his candidate with a veneer of credibility.’ Few people outside the field at that time took R
ipperology seriously – it was considered akin to the study of UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle and other oddities; during the rush of books on the subject in 1987, one journalist was moved to write:

  Not until you read the dispassionate inquest testimony and compare it with the pathetic heaps of rags and flesh in the faded police photographs, are you brought face to face with the messy, stinking reality of what the Ripper did. These latest books prefer to titillate. They dip their pens in the blood of the five mutilated women as lovingly as the slaughterer’s thin-bladed knife.24

  Sugden attempted to bring Ripperology out of the ‘fringe’ and give it academic kudos. However, his criticism was in some ways undeserved, as there were many Ripper authors before him who had been trying to do exactly that.

  A new and important suspect, in the form of the previously unconsidered figure of Francis Tumblety, re-emerged courtesy of Suffolk police officer Stewart Evans’s acquisition of Chief Inspector John Littlechild’s 1913 letter to George Sims. As we know, Tumblety ultimately fled to America, where he was considered a celebrity and a possible Ripper suspect, albeit a curious one, and it is odd considering his profile in the USA at that time, that he was never given any attention later. Subsequent research led to the publication of The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper,25 which, along with a great amount of detail on Tumblety’s life, also highlighted several facts that could well link him with the Ripper murders: apparently he had a dislike of women; he had once boasted of his collection of uteri, linking him perhaps with the American doctor mentioned by Wynne Baxter at the Annie Chapman inquest; the possibility that he was a mysterious American lodger who had left some bloodstained shirts in his room in Batty Street in the East End after the double murder. There were, of course, as with any suspect theory, frustrating discrepancies.

  The considerable media attention afforded Maybrick and Tumblety re-energized interest in the Ripper story; serious television documentaries began to appear with greater regularity, and more books would be published which presented new suspects, including contemporary witness George Hutchinson, taking a lead from Bruce Paley by naming a significant witness in the original case.26 Paul Feldman was able to give his own lengthy account of the Maybrick investigation, truly nailing his colours to the mast, convinced that Maybrick was indeed the author of the diary and therefore undoubtedly Jack the Ripper,27 and James Tully gave us James Kelly’s less unorthodox candidacy for the Ripper crimes.

  The 1990s saw the emergence of a number of periodicals such as Ripperana (1992),28 Ripperologist (1994)29 and Ripper Notes (1999),30 containing articles written by researchers and experts on the case. Some touched on Victorian social history and other famous crimes, but they were vital to the development of the study of the Ripper crimes. The articles were often studious and well researched and gave authors the perfect platform to develop new theories and, importantly, present new and often ground-breaking information to their peers. Such periodicals, published by enthusiasts, would not prove limiting to the researcher, and ideas could be freely shared and peer-reviewed, bringing the often derided study of the Whitechapel murders and their social milieu into a respectable, academic arena. An even wider audience was available to the internet website Casebook: Jack the Ripper,31 started by Stephen P. Ryder in 1996. It was not a gimmicky site, but a resource that grew quickly, offering the browser access to impartial information about theories, victims, letters, documents and Victorian London, and it soon picked up international awards and accolades. Its mission statement was clear:

  In the past 110 years, the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ has become synonymous with evil and misogyny, eliciting images of foggy nights and gas-lit streets in the minds of millions worldwide. The mass media and entertainment industries are largely responsible for the popularity of the subject, but they are also to blame for many of the myths and misconceptions which have crept in among the facts of the case. Sloppy research performed by those motivated by personal dreams of fame and greed has only added to the mire. Though this situation has recently been aided by the valiant efforts of a handful of diligent researchers, the myths persist, the lies are repeated, and the facts of the case remain hidden beneath a cloud of confusion. It is our hope that the information provided by Casebook: Jack the Ripper will help scatter this cloud and, perhaps, finally allow a glimpse into that most elusive aspect of the mystery: the truth.

  By the time Casebook arrived, ‘Ripperology’ was a veritable minefield – even in its early days, the website held the equivalent of 8,900 pages of text and over 450 photographs and illustrations. Rare documents from the early days of Ripper studies were transcribed in full, relevant chapters from the memoirs of police officers and others became available at the click of a mouse. A band of dauntless transcribers saw to it that Casebook now contained a library of contemporary and relevant press reports from around the world, and all of it word-searchable. As if these resources were not important enough to the budding researcher and theorist, a message board, or forum, was added, where enthusiasts could discuss the case in a medium that was more direct than post and cheaper than telephone. Suddenly, anybody with even so much as a passing interest in the Ripper could communicate easily and, as in the periodicals, new information and theories could be shared among a like-minded ‘community’. The website would be used by students studying social history as well as the casual, curious surfer and would be a concept much emulated in the field.32

  In 1999, author M. J. Trow proposed a new suspect, philanthropist and brewing heir Frederick Charrington. Despite his family connection, he was a teetotal extremist who often picketed pubs and music halls. He conducted tent-meeting crusades in the East End and built a huge mission hall, where he distributed free teas to the poor, and in 1887 started a campaign against prostitution, noting down the identities of clients visiting brothels and threatening to reveal their names. It was widely known that the disreputable lodging house keepers who permitted prostitution on their premises were more afraid of Charrington than of the police, and one house even had his portrait on the wall so that they could recognize him should he turn up unannounced. Trow’s theory presented Charrington as the Ripper, citing his disapproval of prostitution as a main motive and suggesting that his suspect was merely ‘street cleaning’. What was important about this proposition is that Trow did not believe that Charrington was the Ripper in the slightest. In a presentation to the Cloak and Dagger club and later in a print article33, Trow said that Frederick Charrington was ‘a good man doing a difficult job at a difficult time and no more Jack the Ripper than I am’. What Trow had done was pick a person and use facts and supposition to put them in the frame – the whole exercise was intended as a valuable demonstration of the ease with which an innocent man might be framed as Jack the Ripper, effectively summing up the activities of most theorists of the preceding hundred years.

  The internet radically changed the world of ‘Ripperology’, granting access to information at the tap of a keyboard and supplying information that previously would have taken researchers months of legwork and expense to accumulate. By the end of the millennium, more information found its way to the researcher, when all the surviving information retained in the Scotland Yard and Home Office files of the Public Record Office were made truly accessible to all and Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner produced The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Source Book.34 The result of many years of transcribing the documents first-hand, it gave everybody the chance to go back to basics, see the words of the official reports made by policemen, politicians and others, to hear their thoughts and get as rounded an account of their investigation as possible. With the surviving official records now on the bookshelves, that thrust towards the importance of contemporary facts was given a much-needed boost, showing the world that the Ripper story was not beholden to the world of cranks and sensation seekers, but could now be considered as an important field of study for the true crime enthusiast, the social historian and the academic alike.

  15.

 
The Appliance of Science

  The artist Walter Sickert had been skirting the fringes of culpability for the Whitechapel murders for decades until American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell decided to follow her criminologist nose and declare him to be the Ripper. Cornwell’s wealth, success and high profile ensured that her investigation into this marginal player would gain enormous coverage. In fact, it probably became the most publicized example of Ripper sleuthing ever.

  In a move that would become repeated by others in the following years, Cornwell undertook her own investigation, using modern investigative methods and the help of several experts in the field of forensics. She had been struck by the imagery of a number of Sickert’s paintings which depicted women often as though they were dead or even mutilated. Cornwell believed that Sickert fitted the psychological profile of a sex killer, the trigger being a childhood operation to treat a fistula in his penis, resulting in deformity and impotence. The clues to his guilt were in the paintings, but Cornwell was able to go further than most. Not only was she able to finance DNA testing on Ripper letters kept at the Public Record Office (with the intention of finding matches on known Sickert correspondence), but she also began buying the paintings.