Complete History of Jack the Ripper (23 page)

In Stephen Knight’s overheated imagination the rings and farthings
were additional proof of his theory of a Masonic Ripper. According to this writer the clues pointing to such a conclusion were abundant in the Chapman murder. Annie had been divested of all metals such as rings and coins. So is a Mason before he is initiated to any degree. And brass is the sacred metal of the Masons because the Grand Master Hiram Abiff of Masonic legend was a worker in brass. He it was who supervised the moulding of the two hollow brass pillars commanding the entrance to Solomon’s temple. When Annie’s killer placed her brass rings at her feet, contends Knight, he did so because, side by side, they simulated the appearance of the two hollow brass pillars in cross-section! Then there were the mutilations. In Masonic myth Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the three murderers of Hiram Abiff, were themselves killed ‘by the breast being torn open and the heart and vitals taken out and thrown over the left shoulder.’ This, said Knight, explained why Annie’s intestines had been placed on her shoulder.
¹⁴

The truth was very different. Neither rings nor farthings were found at Annie’s feet and hers was certainly not a ritualized Masonic killing.

We have only four
authentic
eyewitness accounts of the appearance of the body in the backyard. The first, written on the same day, was contained in a confidential report of Inspector Chandler to his superiors. Then, four days later, James Kent, one of the men called in by John Davis, gave his highly coloured version to the coroner. Finally, Inspector Chandler and Dr Phillips both made depositions at the inquest on 13 September. Not one of these accounts mentions any rings or farthings placed by Annie’s feet. The inquest depositions of Chandler and Phillips are very detailed and would unquestionably have recorded the presence of these articles had they been there but both men speak only of a piece of coarse muslin, a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb in a paper case. In addition to this evidence we have Abberline’s report of 19 September in which he explicitly states that the rings had been missing when the body was found and that inquiries had been made at pawnbrokers and dealers throughout the district in the hope that the murderer had tried to pawn or sell them believing them to be gold.
¹⁵
The sum of the genuine evidence, then, is quite clear. The rings were not recovered and the only items discovered by the feet of the body were a muslin handkerchief and two combs.

Pressmen were not admitted to premises in which a murder had
just been committed. And, except in the context of coroner’s inquiries, they were not made privy to the details of police investigations. It cannot be emphasized too strongly, therefore, that however valuable the newspapers might be as sources of contemporary comment and for information on the public aspects of the subject like inquest hearings or street scenes they are not credible sources for the details of the crimes themselves and should not be used as such.

Knight’s theory that several of the Ripper victims were mutilated in accordance with Masonic ritual received worldwide publicity. He – and those who have followed him – insist that the killer of Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes, a later victim, consciously replicated the form of execution willed upon himself by Jubelo, in Masonic tradition one of the murderers of Hiram Abiff, the Masonic Grand Master and builder of Solomon’s temple: ‘O that my left breast had been torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over my left shoulder.’
¹⁶
This is not true. In the cases of both Chapman and Eddowes the intestines, not the heart and chest contents, were lifted out, and they were placed over the right, not the left, shoulder. One suspects that, in reality, this act had no especial significance. For if the killer was kneeling by the victim’s right side and holding the knife in his right hand he would have lifted her entrails out in his left, and her right shoulder, immediately before him, would have been as convenient a place as any to deposit them so that he might proceed with the other abdominal mutilations.

The Masonic theory fares no better when applied to Mary Kelly, generally regarded as the Ripper’s last and certainly his most extensively mutilated victim. Kelly’s heart was, indeed, cut out but it was either taken away or, since the murderer maintained a fierce fire, burned by him. The other viscera and detached flesh were left in various places – under her head, by her right foot, between her feet, by her right or left side, and heaped on a bedside table, in short almost everywhere
except
over her left shoulder. Only by a shameless selection of evidence can the Masonic theory be invested with apparent credibility. Thus, for example, Melvyn Fairclough, attempting to resuscitate Knight’s hypothesis as recently as 1991, points to the fact that Kelly’s right thigh was denuded of skin and flesh. This, he assures us, is a Masonic allegory, ‘a reminder of the initiation of a Master Mason when the candidate, in reference to his two previous initiations, says: “And my right leg bare”. As he utters these words he has to roll up his trouser leg. With Kelly they
rolled away the flesh.’ Unfortunately, he neglects to explain, or even to mention, that Kelly’s
left
thigh too was stripped of skin, fascia and muscles as far as the knee.

Knight’s theory, in sum, was a colossus built on sand.

The speculations of Ripperologists have often taken us very far from the truth. Unfortunately, without ready access to the primary evidence it is very difficult for the reader with a genuine interest in the crimes to get back to the facts. The reported appearance of Annie’s killer is a case in point.

My readers will already know that the only person who caught a glimpse of the murderer was Mrs Long, the market woman who saw him talking to Annie outside No. 29 at 5.30. Yet previous writers have claimed not one, but
three
, sightings of the killer. They can be summarized as follows:

The only genuine sighting in this list is the last. So whence the others?

The myth of Mrs Darrell was created by two factual errors. One was made by author Donald McCormick.
¹⁷
He discovered a reference to Mrs Darrell in the contemporary press, probably in the
Times
of 13 September 1888, but incorrectly copied the time of the sighting as 5.00 instead of 5.30. I have checked five news reports of Mrs Darrell’s sighting.
¹⁸
All of them give the time 5.30. Now this, of course, was the time of Mrs Long’s sighting and I am sure that with my discerning readers the penny will already have begun to drop. Mrs Darrell
was
Mrs Long.

The original source of the confusion must have been a mistake by one of the press agencies which botched the name of the witness but in every other respect reported her experience accurately. The details credited to Mrs Long in police records, and given by her to the coroner, are identical to those attributed in the press to Mrs Darrell. Even the words overheard by the witness – the man’s laconic ‘Will you?’ and the woman’s answer ‘Yes’ are the same in both. There is no doubt, then, that the many writers who have recorded Mrs Darrell’s
sighting have duplicated that of Mrs Long, another cautionary tale in the use of newspaper evidence.

The man in the passage is an even more mysterious character than Mrs Darrell. He first made his appearance in print two days after the murder in the
Daily Telegraph
:

A day later
The Times
proffered a slightly different version:

This description of a suspect seen entering the passage of No. 29 at 2.00 a.m. cannot be reconciled with the evidence of Mrs Long, which places the murderer and his victim outside the house at 5.30, and Leonard Matters, the first important author on the murders, was frankly baffled by it. His successors have fared no better. ‘I am inclined to believe that this description was entirely made up out of some policeman’s head,’ wrote a mystified Tom Cullen, ‘for there is no record of any man’s having been seen entering the passage of No. 29 Hanbury Street at 2.00 a.m. on the morning of the murder. Certainly no witness ever testified to this effect.’
²⁰
Most writers on the case have quoted the description without understanding to whom it referred. A few have opted to avoid any reference to it at all. No one has satisfactorily explained it.

At the time the
News
speculated that the prostitute referred to in the police telegram was not Annie Chapman but one Emily Walter or Walton: ‘That description applies, as well as can be gathered, to the man who gave the woman Emily Walton two brass medals, or bright farthings, as half-sovereigns when in a yard of one of the houses in Hanbury Street at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, and who then began to ill-use the woman. The police attach importance to finding the man . . .’
²¹

Emily’s adventure is known to us only from newspaper reports. She told the police that early on the morning of the murder she had been accosted by a man in Spitalfields. Although he had presented her with two half-sovereigns, as she had supposed at the time, his manner had been violent and threatening. Eventually her screams had scared him off. Later Emily discovered that the ‘half-sovereigns’ were but brass medals. She evidently gave a description of the man to the police and conceivably this was the one circulated in the telegram. The earliest report of the Emily Walter affair, however, tends to cast doubt upon this explanation for it gives the time of her encounter as 2.30 not 2.00, and does not positively identify the house in which it allegedly took place as No. 29: ‘It is said that this woman [Walter] did accompany the man, who seemed as if he would kill her, to a house in Hanbury Street, possibly No. 29, at 2.30 a.m.’
²²
One also wonders whether the whole story of Emily Walter was a newspaper fiction. She was not called as a witness before the inquest and there is no official record of her in the police or Home Office files.

It will be noted that there are significant differences between the two published texts of the police telegram. The
Times
version suggests a much more likely solution to the mystery. It begins: ‘Description of a man who entered a passage of the house at which the murder was committed of a prostitute at 2 a.m. on the 8th.’

Now, since Annie was killed at about 5.30 most students of the case have taken the time of two o’clock to relate to the man’s entry into the passage. But two was an important time in the Chapman case. Abberline and Swanson both record it as the time at which Annie was turned out of the lodging house. Mrs Long did not volunteer her evidence until three days after the date of the telegram so when the police drafted it two o’clock was the last time at which Annie had been seen alive. It was for precisely this reason that detectives, visiting common lodging houses on the day of the murder, made inquiries about men who had entered after two. The first sentence of the
telegram should therefore probably be amended thus: ‘Description of a man who entered a passage of the house at which the murder was committed of a prostitute
after
2 a.m. on the 8th.’

The whole sense of the sentence is now altered. The time and date are correct for the murder itself and no time or date is specified for the man’s entry into the passage. The telegram simply records the description of a man seen (date and time not given) in the passage of the same house in which a prostitute was murdered after two on the morning of 8 September.

Having clarified the text of the telegram, we are in a position to solve the mystery. We know from police records that on the day of the murder they interviewed every occupant of No. 29. On that occasion Mrs Richardson surely told them about the trespasser Mr Thompson and herself had encountered on the premises about four weeks back. She referred to him again at the inquest: