by Paul Begg
Tests on the letters drew a blank, with no matches found in the nuclear DNA. But then testing was done for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which proved more positive. Unfortunately, mtDNA is no guarantee of proof. Stephen P. Ryder, in his Casebook dissertation on Cornwell’s theory, stated simply that:
Finding an mtDNA match between two samples does not mean that one person left both, but that only a certain percentage of the population could have left both …
In this case, the mtDNA ‘sequences’ found indicate, according to Cornwell, that only 1% of the population of the U. K. could have left the DNA found on those Ripper letters, and that the person who left DNA on Sickert’s correspondence was a member of that 1% population. (Other DNA experts, when asked to comment on this analysis, state that the actual percentage could range anywhere between 10% and 0.1% of the contemporary population). In 1901 there were nearly 40 million people in the United Kingdom. That means that Sickert, if we assume it is his mtDNA that was found, and that Cornwell’s figure of 1% is correct, was one of approximately 400,000 people whose mtDNA shared those same sequences.1
Such odds were hardly conclusive of one man’s guilt, and Cornwell’s theory was slowly pulled apart by sceptics, often savagely, and with no small amount of personal rancour, which Cornwell most certainly did not deserve. It was noted that there was no proof that Sickert had ever had an operation for a penile fistula, though there was the possibility that he had suffered from an anal fistula. What’s more, Walter Sickert was certainly not impotent or sexually backward; if anything, he was known for being rather promiscuous. In other words, he was not sexually scarred and incapable, and thus this reason for him killing prostitutes need not have entered the equation. Critics also stated that there was no evidence to suggest that Sickert was in London at the time of the murders. Cornwell hit back with the claim that there was no evidence to suggest he wasn’t. Unfortunately there was: several pieces of evidence quoted by Sickert’s biographer Matthew Sturgess put the artist in France from late August until the beginning of October 1888.2
Obviously there was more to Cornwell’s theory, and she eventually published her investigation in Portrait of a Killer,3 a huge seller, which was not perhaps surprising considering the combination of crime fiction’s most successful novelist and the world’s greatest crime mystery. An inevitable documentary also appeared on BBC television, with Cornwell shown at the heart of the investigative process, surveying the East End streets, joining the forensic teams as they worked and flying round the world in her pursuit of the ‘real’ Jack the Ripper. She didn’t mind getting her hands dirty either, handling a range of rather intimidating knives and cutting up large slabs of offal in order to demonstrate which kind of weapon could have been used to inflict the injuries on the Ripper victims. Donald Rumbelow was not convinced and not too happy either. The unfortunate by-product of naming a prominent individual as Jack the Ripper had manifested itself in the vandalism of graves, notably those of Sir William Gull at Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex and James Maybrick in Liverpool. Rumbelow argued that
Out there, there is an element that is going to believe this nonsense that Sickert was the Ripper. Some lunatic will go in the Tate or somewhere else and slash a canvas because he was Jack the Ripper. This is the sort of thing – this is the sort of nonsense – which actually triggers this behaviour and there is this element out there who’ll believe it.4
Patricia Cornwell’s belief in Sickert as the Whitechapel murderer was, in her own words ‘a given’, and there was some merit in her attempt to drag Sickert’s candidacy away from his royal conspiracy connections, making him a suspect in his own right, investigated separately from the information and misinformation that had gone before via Joseph Sickert, Stephen Knight and Melvyn Fairclough. But then the other players in the original story had been effectively exonerated, leaving Sickert as a ‘last man standing’.
The research behind Portrait of a Killer coincided with the early appearances of the American TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,5 which followed the fictional investigations of a team of Las Vegas forensic scientists as they unravelled the circumstances behind mysterious and unusual deaths and other crimes using state of the art technology. It essentially brought the deductive reasoning of popular fictional detectives into the twenty-first century, and its slick production values revived interest in crime investigation drama in much the same way as The X-Files had inspired a resurgence of fascination for the paranormal in the 1990s.6
Also, satellite broadcasting had come into its own, offering literally hundreds of TV channels worldwide, many of which specialized in particular themes. Following on from Patricia Cornwell’s ‘forensics-heavy’ investigation, a trend in Ripper theorizing would gradually become apparent, chiefly manifesting itself in documentaries. Previously, these films had covered known information, often just relying on a retelling of the Whitechapel murders story with relevant reconstructions, graphics and comment from experts in the field. The sudden interest in forensic science as a vehicle for entertainment would see an increase in documentaries which would appear to show the presenter as investigator, perhaps earnestly sifting through evidence, claiming to have ‘reopened the case’ and coming up with their ‘definitive’ solution. Invariably, this ‘evidence’ would be known to keen students of the case already, but the fact that TV treatments of the case had to appeal to a wider audience meant that very often the material was cited as being new or exclusive.
Another good example of the growing interest in solving the Ripper mystery using now obligatory modern methods came with the claims of a former police officer, Trevor Marriott: ‘Mr Marriott, who worked on many murder investigations during his career in the police, has subjected the facts to forensic dissection and has used proven modern investigative techniques to attempt to solve the mystery.’7
Like many theories, Marriott’s attempt to name the Ripper was full of holes. Settling on the notion that the killer was a merchant seaman, he undertook research into finding correlations between ships berthed at the London docks and the nights of the Ripper murders, which threw up several possibilities. Although inconsistent records did not permit Marriott to name a definitive individual, his suspicion rested upon Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed in 1896 for the murder of Juliana Hoffman in New York and who had confessed to his lawyer that he was Jack the Ripper. The investigation also attempted to dispel some long-held beliefs; it was always assumed that the murderer removed the victims’ organs at the scene of crime, whereas Marriott, convinced that this could not have been so owing to the time frames available, claimed that the organs were removed by somebody while the corpses were lying outside the mortuary. The difficulty involved in tracing these organs and removing them under very tight circumstances was investigated thoroughly by Marriott, who consulted with pathologists and even attended dissections of corpses to demonstrate his point. If anything, he was thorough in his pursuit of the truth in that respect. But his early decision to look into the idea of a merchant seaman as a suspect came from his belief that nobody had looked at the case from this angle before; it was a mistaken belief, for, as we have seen, seamen and workers at the docks and riversides, owing to their ease of transit and often disreputable characteristics, had been very much in the frame from the earliest days of the investigation. Edward Knight Larkins tried repeatedly to direct the police to a number of individuals who may have been on boats berthed at the docks at the time of the murders, and even Queen Victoria had suggested searching the boats in her telegram to the government following Mary Kelly’s murder.
Trevor Marriott, as a former detective,8 also tried to use his investigative experience to go back to the original case and work from a modern police perspective. Not only was he branching into the now-obligatory world of ‘cold case’ investigation, but he was also deconstructing the evidence to find new interpretations of it. One significant notion was that the bloody apron piece in Goulston Street was not deposited by the murderer of Catherine Eddowes, but by Eddowes her
self after using it as a makeshift sanitary towel. With claims like this, expounded in books, internet forums and, later, lecture tours, Marriott attempted to challenge preconceived ideas of the Whitechapel murders and their investigation. Once again, a theorist would claim some form of ‘ownership’ of the case.
A recurring theme in the new methodology behind Ripper theorizing was ‘profiling’. The FBI character profile of 1988 had by now been joined by visual and geographical profiling, the latter pioneered by British investigative psychologist David Canter, who declared: ‘Criminals reveal who they are and where they live not just from how they commit their crimes, but also from the locations they choose.’9 These methods were used in a documentary10 which eventually put together the face of Jack the Ripper, apparently based on thirteen contemporary witness statements. The resulting image received considerable publicity, mainly because it resembled Lord Lucan or Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury, which partially took the sting out of the enterprise for those not fully conversant with the content of the original broadcast. Nonetheless, the claims of the investigators were evidence that the concept of ‘ownership’ of the identity of the Ripper was still going strong, almost as if nobody else had ever tried:
Laura Richards, head of analysis for Scotland Yard’s Violent Crime Command, analysed evidence from the case using modern police techniques and has been able to form the most accurate portrait of the Ripper ever put together.
She said: ‘For the first time we are able to understand the kind of person Jack the Ripper was. We can name the street where he probably lived; and we can see what he looked like; and we can explain, finally, why this killer escaped justice.11
The project did not name a name – it probably did not intend to – but according to Laura Richards he was somebody from the lower classes, poorly educated and what he did was by choice, reacting to events that had shaped him early in his life. The geographical profiling techniques suggested that the Ripper lived in the Flower and Dean Street area of Spitalfields, confirming his status as a poor, local man.
Another theorist who chanced his arm at identifying the murderer during this period was M. J. Trow. Trow had written a number of books on true crime, as well as historical biographies and crime fiction,12 and his The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper used an interesting exercise whereby he listed all of the main suspects and rated them with marks for eligibility.13 Following a challenge from his publisher,14 Trow began to look into a potential suspect, one that had not been considered before, and settled on Whitechapel workhouse mortuary attendant Robert Mann. Using the FBI profile, as well as geographical and offender profiling techniques as a key, Trow noted that Mann worked in a job that gave him access to dead bodies, where perhaps he could glean information about anatomy and surgical procedure and, as victims Tabram, Nichols, Chapman and McKenzie had ended up in his mortuary, gloat over his handiwork. Mann was born in the immediate area and, as an inmate of the Whitechapel Union workhouse, was well placed geographically to commit the murders. Trow stated that Alice McKenzie was the last true Ripper victim and that her injuries were significantly less violent because Mann was weak and terminally ill. A book was produced,15 outlining the case in full, as well as a TV documentary tie-in,16 as was becoming customary.
But there were problems with the hypothesis, and it was on the internet that the greatest dissenters made their voices heard, calling Mann a ‘non-starter’ and picking out significant flaws and inaccuracies, which were later acknowledged by Trow himself. In answering his critics, he was apologetic, but felt that some of the criticism was unfounded:
I repeat I cannot prove that the strange, enigmatic mortuary attendant was definitely Jack the Ripper. All I can say is that he is closer than most other possibles and, at the very least, a starter! 17
The case of Robert Mann’s candidacy as the Ripper showed how much a blanket media promotion could bend a ‘proposition’ into a ‘solution’. The title of the book treatment of the theory, Quest for a Killer, basically described what it was, the author’s search for the identity of Jack the Ripper. The television documentary called itself Killer Revealed, suggesting that the quest had actually come good and the mystery was solved. And herein lay the very marked distinction between the way publishing and television had come to treat the theorist. Whilst publishing always has its eye on the next ‘best-seller’, it does have the capacity to recognize the merit of serious books like the A to Z and Ultimate Sourcebook; it appears that television has a harder time coming to terms with this concept and should realize that it can get away with just telling the story. It rarely seems to be interested in maybes and conjecture, preferring a theorist to put their cards on the table (or putting the cards on the table for them) to ensure that yet another Ripper scoop will pull in the biggest audience.
The present authors had direct experience of this when they wrote Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Story, a two-part documentary for Channel 5 in the UK.18 The idea was to produce a lengthy treatment covering the entire story of the Whitechapel murders without suspect bias, the unique selling point being extensive computer-generated imagery (CGI)19 of the crime scenes merged with live action; the audience would at last get to see the events surrounding the murders portrayed in an accurate setting. However, it became a continual struggle to get the commissioning editors to understand that you could tell the real story and provide information about suspects without choosing one in particular, and that it would still make valid television. We chose to concentrate on the contemporary suspects Druitt, Tumblety, Kosminski and Klosowski (George Chapman) and attempted to give them an equal hearing. In the end, the involvement of an independent script editor and some choice editing pushed Kosminski to the fore, and subsequently the documentary was accused of promoting Aaron Kosminski as the chief suspect, much to our dismay. The publishing world was much more forgiving, and the book which resulted from work done on the documentary was allowed to remain impartial, concentrating on the story, crime locations and the local geography of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. That said, the working title of the book, Jack the Ripper: Crime Scene Investigation, was enthusiastically seized upon by the publishers, who saw a good opportunity to tap into the continuing popularity of the American crime series, finally calling the book Jack the Ripper: CSI Whitechapel.20
Attempting to completely document the theories and suspects which have appeared in the first two decades of the twenty-first century is an onerous task. In fact, it is an impossible one. Perhaps the main reason for this is the exploitation of technology – self-publishing using internet-based processes and retail outlets21 has become increasingly popular for those authors and researchers with a theory to sell when conventional publishing routes have proved fruitless. The downside of this is that there is little or no ‘filter’, and anybody with even the most wayward theory can put it into the public arena. Similarly, without recourse to proofreaders and editors, some publications lack a basic grasp of grammar and, worse still, can be little more than ‘cut-and-paste’ rehashes of material purloined directly from internet dissertations or Wikipedia.
The upside of the new methods of output is that much great research is shared, especially in dedicated Ripper publications and message boards. Part of this comes when a theory is posited on a forum, making it immediately open to peer-review; with so many being able to join the debate, facts are wheeled out, obscure material is brought to the attention of all, and more research is instigated to either prove or disprove the argument. What becomes apparent is the breadth of study undertaken by contributors, and many appear to concentrate on various aspects of the case; the police, the local geography, the victims, specific suspects and more, all combining to make ‘Ripperology’ a vast and formidable subject for study. Some may not necessarily specify an area of interest but perhaps a concept; whereas as some hold rigidly to the contemporary official files as source material, others feel that these important documents are there to be questioned, leading some to believe that not all the statements given by polic
e or witnesses can be relied upon. The urge to analyse these sources in such a way is perhaps understandable; however, it can become counterproductive. It is generally agreed that newspaper reports of the time could not always be relied upon to get the facts right, thanks to mistranscriptions or the overzealous reporting of some journalists, but to declare that the only remaining information we have to confirm any events in the Ripper case is also highly flawed leaves us with nothing concrete whatsoever to go on. The concept of a single killer is also up for grabs, with accusations of press and police complicity in creating the man-monster that was Jack the Ripper when, in all probability, there was no such individual and the murders were wholly, or at least in part, unrelated. Eleven true Ripper victims? Five? Three? What does one believe?
Electronic ‘Ripperology’ still produces its theorists, and the sheer weight of information and opinion that can be shared in any twenty-four hours makes for a veritable minefield. But among this information overload is plenty worth noting, and two examples of suspect-based research have proven very interesting, seeing as they choose to re-examine contemporary figures in the case. The first is that of Charles Le Grand, a criminal of long standing who posed as a private investigator at the time of the Whitechapel murders and who, along with partner J. W. Batchelor, figured prominently during the investigation surrounding the murder of Elizabeth Stride. Employed by the Mile End Vigilance Committee and also working alongside a number of newspapers, Le Grand and Batchelor interviewed the Berner Street fruiterer Matthew Packer and were believed to be responsible for the story that a grapestalk was found at the murder scene. The police were not impressed by Le Grand’s meddling. He was first considered as a suspect in 1998,22 and since then articles about him and his candidacy have appeared in the main Ripper periodicals.23 Researcher and writer Tom Wescott, very much responsible for building a thorough picture of the often confusing events surrounding the Berner Street murder and the people involved, was one of several looking into the life and activities of this most enigmatic and colourful suspect, and a colossal amount of information has been posted on the message boards as a result, making interesting links and dispelling a few myths into the bargain.