Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (33 page)

19

An Inspector Calls

I 
n February 1889 Inspector Abberline was called upon again, this time by the Dundee Police to investigate the case of William Henry Bury.

It seems that Bury had walked into the Dundee police station and claimed that his wife had been murdered by a burglar. When the police went to his basement flat, he showed them her body, which, according to Bury, had been placed in a trunk by the burglar, but not before she had been strangled and mutilated, with her abdomen sliced open and intestines removed.

The Dundee Police were naturally very suspicious and thought the crime was so similar to the Whitechapel murders that there was every possibility Bury might just be Jack the Ripper. They made a quick call to Scotland Yard and asked if they had any information on this man. Scotland Yard took their enquiry very seriously and immediately drafted Inspector Abberline onto the case. Abberline set forth for Dundee and interviewed Bury without delay. After listening to his side of the story for a very short while, Abberline came to the conclusion that Bury was what he described as ‘demented’.

As Abberline delved deeper into Bury’s background, facts started to appear, which reiterated his belief that Bury was demented, to say the least.

William Henry Bury was born on 25 May 1859 in Stourbridge, Worcestershire. He came from an ordinary working-class family, his father being a fishmonger. Bury had a normal schooling without any problems, and by the age of 14 went to work in a local horse butcher’s shop. The wages and the small town way of life, however, didn’t appeal to Bury, and he soon moved to a nearby town. It was, however, London that he had heard so much of and wanted to go to, so in November 1887, at the age of 28 he finally packed his bags and moved to Whitechapel, where he had been told his skills with a knife would pay him handsome dividends.

Whitechapel, however, wasn’t quite the place he thought it would be, and most butcher’s shops were run and staffed by either Jewish or Polish immigrants. Bury would have to bide his time before he could put his skills with the knife to good use.

It didn’t take long for Bury’s meagre savings to run out, and so when he was offered a job as a sawdust collector by a man named James Martin, whom he had met in a pub, Bury jumped at the chance, especially as Martin had also offered him a room in his house in Quickset Street.

What Martin had failed to tell Bury was that he also ran a brothel at his house, employing several prostitutes. When Bury found this out, far from fazing him, he quite liked the idea, and within a few weeks he had befriended Ellen Elliot, one of the prostitutes. As unlikely a liaison as it might have seemed, the couple were soon married and moved out of the brothel and into their own lodgings, courtesy of a small inheritance from Ellen’s parents.

Ellen was happy for the first few weeks of her marriage, thinking that her squalid life was now behind her and she could settle into a new life of domestic bliss. This, however, was not to happen, for she soon found out that Bury was a drunkard and a thief. What little money she did have, Bury soon stole and used it on alcohol and prostitutes. In February 1888 Bury accosted 38-year-old Annie Millwood, in Spitalfields, and asked her to have sex with him, but when she asked him for money, which he didn’t have, he suddenly became very violent and attacked her with a knife. Bury slashed at Annie Millwood’s legs and genitals, and it was a miracle that she survived. By the time the police arrived on the scene, Bury had long gone, and it wasn’t until much later that she identified him as the man that had attacked her that night.

A few weeks later, on 28 March, a penniless Bury went out looking for someone to rob. He had heard that Ada Wilson, an elderly seamstress who lived nearby, was supposed to have a hidden stash of money at her house. Bury forced his way into Ada Wilson’s home, attacked her, and forced her to hand her money over to him. The money, however, was nothing like as much as he had expected, and in a mad rage he then stabbed her twice in the throat. Fortunately for her, as with his first victim, she survived and gave the police a good description of him.

Bury’s wife, meanwhile, was going through quite a disturbing period, for not only was her husband staying out until the early hours of the morning, she had also heard that he was stealing and still going with prostitutes; if that wasn’t bad enough, she then discovered that he was sleeping with a knife under his pillow. On the night of 7 April, he came home drunk as usual, and when she tried to remonstrate with him, he took the knife out of his pocket and attempted to cut her throat. Luckily for her, he was so drunk that she managed to fight him off.

Despite this attack on his wife, and the attacks on the other women, Bury still somehow managed to evade arrest. He was still having sex with prostitutes and had now contracted syphilis, which in turn he had passed on to his wife Ellen.

Whether it was the syphilis that was now affecting his mind, or whether it was his madness getting worse, he was becoming more violent and unpredictable by the day. On 20 December 1888, Bury approached Rose Mylett, who was yet another prostitute, and after being turned down by her – which he saw as a huge insult to him – he strangled her and left her body in Clarke’s Yard.

Bury thought that someone had seen him commit this murder, and he was also aware that the police were looking for someone of his description in regard to the other attacks on prostitutes. He realised that he had to get as far away from London’s East End as he could, before the police put two and two together and arrested him. He told his wife that he had been offered a job in Dundee, and had to move there immediately. For some reason, which seems incomprehensible, Ellen decided to go with him, even though she knew he was a liar and a thief, and had tried to slit her throat.

In January 1889, Bury and his wife travelled to Dundee on the London packet steamer
Cambria
. Just a couple of weeks later, on 5 February, Bury strangled Ellen in their basement flat in the city. He then mutilated her body, slicing open her abdomen and removing her intestines. He then placed her body in a trunk.

This is when Bury decided to go to the police and make up his preposterous story about the burglar breaking in and murdering his wife. This was also when the Dundee Police decided to call Inspector Abberline in.

Abberline was astounded by the facts that Bury related to him, and began to believe that he might indeed be the elusive Jack the Ripper. Abberline obviously had a better method of coaxing information out of suspects than the Dundee Police did, for not only had Bury admitted to attacking women in London, but he also changed his story regarding his wife and her death in Dundee.

Bury now changed his original story, which he had recounted to the police, and now told Abberline that he had awoken from a drunken stupor to find his wife had been strangled. On an inexplicable mad impulse he took a large knife and plunged it into her abdomen several times. He couldn’t explain to Abberline why he had done it, but he said that he thought he might be suspected of being Jack the Ripper, so he put the body in a large box and kept it there for several days before going to the police with his invented story.

Bury’s trial was short and, after listening to Abberline’s evidence, the jury found Bury guilty of the murder of his wife, and on 24 April 1889 he was sentenced to death and hanged a few days later. Bury showed no contrition for his crimes. In perhaps the most feeble gallows speech on record, he eschewed the traditional plea for forgiveness or rant of defiant innocence, merely sneering at the hangman and saying, ‘I suppose you think you are clever to hang me’.

In 1889 the
New York Times
cited William Henry Bury as the Whitechapel murderer, Jack the Ripper. Although two messages referring to Jack the Ripper were chalked on a door to Bury’s house, it was presumed by both Abberline and Scotland Yard in general that Bury had put them there himself. The Metropolitan Police did not see Bury as a serious suspect, and the British press appeared to agree with them, and took little notice of the
New York Times
’ opinion

In summing up the case for William Henry Bury being Jack the Ripper, there are certainly a great deal of similarities between his modus operandi and that of the Ripper. There was also the fact that he had lived briefly in the East End of London. The Ripper murders had started shortly after he arrived, possibly with the death of Martha Tabram, and they ended with the death of Mary Kelly shortly before Bury left for Scotland. Those are the main facts which link Bury’s name to Jack the Ripper.

The facts against him being the Ripper are, firstly, that Inspector Abberline certainly didn’t think he was, and neither did Scotland Yard. On the whole it seems rather unlikely that the killer who had so confounded the Metropolitan Police during the autumn of 1888 would have then committed such a ham-fisted crime as the Dundee murder only a few short months later.

As a postscript to the many and varied Ripper suspects that have been mentioned in this book, I did say that I was a little surprised that no one had, as yet, come up with the rather absurd theory that Inspector Abberline himself could be the Ripper.

Today, as I write this (November 2011), that absurdity has actually happened. An 84-year-old Spanish writer, Jose Luis Abad, has claimed in his book
Jack the Ripper: The Most Intelligent Murderer in History
, which has been published in Spain, that Inspector Abberline was the killer.

It seems that Jose Luis Abad is a handwriting expert and has compared Abberline’s writing with that in the Ripper’s diary, which surfaced in Liverpool in 1992. The diary was attributed to a Liverpool cotton dealer called James Maybrick, who many still believe to be the murderer, while other experts say the diary is a hoax. Jose Abad, however, is adamant that the diary is real, but he claims that the author was Abberline, and not Maybrick. Jose Abad says: ‘I have no doubt Abberline was the Ripper. Handwriting does not lie.’

One can only wonder what the future will unearth regarding this latest accusation!

20

Retirement Beckons

W 
ith the Ripper case coming to an unsuccessful ending, and the investigation into a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street, which became known as the Cleveland Street scandal, becoming politically sensitive, Abberline was starting to feel very low in regard to his career. It had been discovered that Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, the second in line to the throne, was a frequent client at the Cleveland Street brothel, and in order to prevent a scandal the investigation was hushed up and the proprietor of the brothel allowed to leave the country.

There were suggestions that Abberline publicly voiced his misgivings about the way the cover-up was handled and that this may have upset his superiors. Whatever the truth, the Cleveland Street scandal was the last significant case Abberline investigated for the Metropolitan Police. Although still only 46 years old, Abberline began to feel the strain of police work that was seemingly going nowhere. His wife Emma, fearing for his health, began badgering him either to apply for a steady desk job or, failing that, to consider a change of career altogether, as he continued to work sometimes into the early hours of the morning. A significant part of Emma’s wish came true, for Abberline was promoted to chief inspector at the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, and given a desk job there.

Desk work, however, might have been what Emma wanted for her husband, but it certainly wasn’t what he wished for. He was a man of the streets, and always had been. Maybe it was in deference to his wife’s wishes that he stayed and endured the course for another two years, before announcing his retirement from the force in January 1892.

Abberline actually retired from the Metropolitan Police on 8 February 1892. He retired on a full pension, after twenty-nine years’ service. During the course of his police career he had received eighty-four commendations and awards. He was 49 years old.