Complete History of Jack the Ripper (4 page)

On present evidence it would be unfair to attribute any of these atrocities to Chapman. The Camden attack, as Melvin points out, occurred before he went to America. And he may also be out of the reckoning for the Carrie Brown murder. It is true that Chapman emigrated to New York in 1891 but as late as 5 April, less than three weeks before the murder, he was still in London and was recorded
there in the national census. The few crumbs of information we have about Chapman in America do suggest that he was based in Jersey City at the time of the Elizabeth Senior murder, but there is no evidence to connect him with the crime.

R. Michael Gordon attempts to put Chapman in the frame for a full score of killings. The Thames torso murders appear on the charge sheet as well as those of Chapman himself and Jack the Ripper. This is frankly preposterous. We cannot seriously accuse anyone – not even a man as bad and dead as Chapman – of crimes like those of the Ripper without clear and positive evidence to back us up. And it is important to understand that direct evidence against Chapman exists only for the three poisonings that took place between 1897 and 1902. Abberline, Godley and Neil all, admittedly, expressed the conviction that he was also Jack the Ripper. But not one of them produced tangible evidence to substantiate their allegations. For this reason, if for no other, the case that Chapman and the Ripper were one is decisively hulled below the waterline.

The lack of credible evidence is the bane of Ripperology. Without it the Ripperologist necessarily resorts to coincidence and conjecture. But coincidence is never enough and all too often a baited trap for the unwary. Mr Gordon, for example, notes the fact that the Ripper’s Hanbury Street victim, her daughter and Chapman’s 1894 mistress all bore the name Annie Chapman, and he speculates that Dark Annie’s daughter and Chapman’s mistress were one and the same person. ‘If true, Klosowski may have been playing a dangerous egotistical game with this direct link to his Ripper past,’ he writes dramatically, ‘. . . it would be well beyond simple coincidence with the Ripper murders. It is an open risk the Ripper would have delighted in.’
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This all sounds too good to be true and it is. The full name of the woman Chapman lived with at Tottenham was Sarah Ann Chapman. Their child – a boy Sarah called William Klosowski Chapman – was born in Edmonton Workhouse on 8 August 1895. In 1903 Sarah Ann was still living in Tottenham, at 9 Hartington Road. She had nothing to do with the Annie Chapman slain by the Ripper in 1888. Dark Annie’s daughter was Annie Georgina Chapman. She married Edward Pryke, a cowman, in Croydon on 10 February 1895 and died in 1958.

The most important document relating to the identity of Jack the Ripper discovered in recent years is the Littlechild letter.
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This letter, written by Ex-Chief Inspector John G. Littlechild to the journalist George R. Sims in 1913, came to light in a small collection of Sims
correspondence bought by Stewart Evans, a leading authority on the Ripper case, in 1993. Stewart recognized its significance immediately. For Littlechild had been in charge of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard in 1888 and in that capacity would have worked in close and regular personal contact with men like Chief Inspector Swanson, appointed by Sir Charles Warren to oversee the Ripper inquiry.

Littlechild made reference to the notorious ‘Dear Boss’ letter, signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ and sent to the Central News in September 1888. Although the writer was never conclusively identified the police came to the conclusion that the letter was a hoax, the time-wasting prank of an irresponsible journalist. Anderson and Macnaghten, in published memoirs, wisely declined to venture names. Littlechild, writing privately to Sims, was a great deal more forthcoming. ‘With regard to the term “Jack the Ripper”,’ he wrote, ‘it was generally believed at the Yard that Tom Bullen [Bulling] of the Central News was the originator but it is probable [Charles] Moore, who was his chief, was the inventor. It was a smart piece of journalistic work.’ Very probably Anderson and Macnaghten had one or other of these names in mind but we still do not know the basis for their suspicions.

In his comments on the identity of the murderer himself Littlechild introduced us to a suspect hitherto unknown to researchers: an Irish–American quack doctor named Francis Tumblety. Tumblety was in London during the autumn of 1888. On 16 November he was brought before Marlborough Street Police Court charged with homosexual offences and was bailed to appear at the Central Criminal Court, but he violated bail, fled to France and there, under the alias Frank Townsend, boarded a steamer bound for New York. He died in St Louis in 1903.

An interesting circumstantial case can be alleged against Tumblety. Littlechild undoubtedly regarded him as a ‘very likely’ suspect. He was reputedly a misogynist. He had pretensions to medical knowledge. And he collected anatomical specimens. Colonel C. A. Dunham, an American lawyer who knew Tumblety, recalled in 1888 having once seen the doctor’s anatomical museum. It contained, he said, ‘a dozen or more jars containing . . . the matrices [wombs] of every class of women.’ This was the organ, of course, that was extracted and taken away in two of the Ripper murders. Furthermore, to those who believe that Mary Kelly was the last Ripper victim Tumblety’s arrest and flight might provide a neat explanation for the cessation of the crimes.

In other respects, however, Tumblety does not fit the bill. He was
fifty-six years old in 1888, far older than any of the men reportedly seen in the company of victims, and he seems to have been a man of much greater physical stature than the Ripper. Mrs Long, who saw Annie Chapman, the Hanbury Street victim, talking with a man shortly before she was killed, said that the man stood only a ‘little taller’ than Annie, and Joseph Levy, one of the witnesses thought to have seen the Ripper standing with Kate Eddowes, said that he was only ‘about three inches taller than the woman’. Annie and Kate were both about five feet in height. Tumblety was a great deal more prepossessing than that. He was five feet ten inches to six feet tall, in those days a very good height indeed. ‘A titanian stature, with a very red face and long flowing mustache, he would have been a notable personage in any place and in any garb,’ said one who knew him. ‘He looked like a giant,’ commented another.

There is, finally, the matter of evidence. Littlechild’s suspicions against Tumblety seem to have been partly grounded in the doctor’s homosexuality and in his own belief that those given to ‘contrary sexual instinct’ were also prone to cruelty. Certainly there was never any substantive evidence to connect Tumblety with any of the murders. Had that been the case the police would have charged him with it or, after his escape, sought his extradition.

It is by no means impossible that Tumblety had something to do with the origins of the story Coroner Baxter picked up of an American seeking specimens of the uterus. But Littlechild’s letter persuades me less that Tumblety was the Ripper than that the police investigation ended in abysmal failure, leaving detectives grasping at straws.

Littlechild had never heard of Druitt, Macnaghten’s principal suspect, and he clearly didn’t share Anderson’s views. ‘Anderson,’ he told Sims, ‘. . . only
thought he knew
’ (Littlechild’s emphasis). In the end it is this diversity of opinion amongst informed officers that is most telling. In print and in private they contradicted one another repeatedly. In their later years some, like Ex-Detective Inspector Edmund Reid and Sir Henry Smith, acknowledged frankly that the Ripper had beaten them. Others expressed preferences for named suspects, but no theory commanded general acceptance. Abberline and Godley accused Chapman. Anderson and Swanson opted for Kosminski. Macnaghten always held tenaciously to his belief that Druitt had been the killer. And Littlechild ventured a case against Tumblety. Only Anderson insisted categorically that the case had been
solved. But neither he nor anyone else ever produced acceptable evidence of guilt.

Unfortunately, given the circumstances, the police failure was all too predictable. The murderer was a stranger to his victims so inquiries into their social relationships yielded no clue to his identity or motive, and in 1888 modern aids to detection like fingerprinting, DNA testing and psychological profiling were unknown or undeveloped. Then, too, the character of the district favoured the hunters much less than the hunted. A bewildering jumble of streets, alleys, courts and yards, the Victorian East End was impossible to patrol effectively, and the victims themselves, prostitutes all, contributed to the difficulties of the police by their eagerness to conduct clients into dark and secluded spots for sex. Abberline and his team were also overwhelmed by the sheer volume and labour of their inquiries. In this context it is worth remembering, as James Monro had complained, that London then ordinarily had ‘proportionately fewer men employed in the investigation of crime’ than any comparable city in Britain. In the Metropolitan Police the percentage of men engaged in detective work to those in other duties was 2.42. In Manchester it was 2.7, in Liverpool and Glasgow 3.5, in Dublin 3.6 and in Birmingham 4.5.
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Today the Ripper stirs human imagination worldwide. He is the basis for one of the greatest and blackest of popular legends. More than any other factor it was the failure of the police to catch him that led to our present fascination with the case. Myth feeds on the gaps in history. And in the case of the Ripper’s identity it is less a gap than a yawning pit into which Ripperologists, novelists and film-makers can toss any theory they like as long as they are not required to substantiate it.

It is exceedingly unlikely that the murderer will be unmasked now. But I would not wish to end on so negative a note.

The first book I ever read on the Whitechapel murders was
The Identity of Jack the Ripper
by Donald McCormick, bought at a local bookshop in 1962. McCormick’s account was semi-fictional journalese rather than history, but it was a cracking good read all the same and it set me on the trail that led to this book. Anyone who cares to compare McCormick’s book with the present one, or with
The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook
recently edited by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner, will readily appreciate the tremendous advances that have been made in our knowledge of this subject. They are a
product of the efforts of many different researchers. No, the research has not enabled us to name Jack the Ripper. But its achievements, surely, are much more important than that. It has documented the birth of a legend of global impact, it has taught us a great deal about the early history of the CID, and it has illuminated the social conditions in which ordinary people lived, worked and died in outcast London more than a century ago.

I wrote this factual study of the Ripper case, now issued for the third time, as an antidote to the sensational identity theories and irresponsible journalism then in print. Its success demonstrates that many readers share my own fascination for the past and believe, with me, that real events that happened to real people can be far more absorbing than anything to be found in fiction.

J
ACK THE
R
IPPER
! Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cries of newsboys – ‘Whitechapel! Another ’orrible murder! Mutilation!’ – and silent, cruel death, personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag.

The Victorian murderer who slew a handful of women in London’s East End has become a worldwide symbol of terror, his fame celebrated in story and song, on the stage and on film, in art and in opera, his tale told in languages as diverse as English and Russian, Spanish and Swedish, German and Japanese. Robert Bloch, the American author of
Psycho
, has said that Jack the Ripper belongs to the world as surely as Shakespeare. It is not an undue exaggeration.

Why our perennial fascination with the Ripper case? After all, tragic and gruesome as his crimes undoubtedly were, they are by no means unique or even spectacular in the lengthening roll of serial murder. The victims were comparatively few. They were drawn from only one small class of the population. And they were slain within an area less than a single square mile in extent.

True, they have their niche in history. In 1888 they embarrassed Lord Salisbury’s second Conservative administration, contributed to the resignation of Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and, by spotlighting the living conditions of the poor,
inaugurated a brief period of redevelopment in Spitalfields, at the heart of the murder district.

More important for our own day, perhaps, the Ripper heralded the rise of the modern sexual serial killer. He was not the earliest such offender. But he was the first of international repute and the one that first burned the problem of the random killer into police and popular consciousness.

The Ripper’s contemporaries were baffled by the lack of conventional motive, whether gain, jealousy or revenge, in his crimes. Casting about for an explanation, some turned to the far past. ‘It is so impossible to account . . . for these revolting acts of blood,’ commented one, ‘that the mind turns as it were instinctively to some theory of occult force, and the myths of the Dark Ages rise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables which have been accumulated throughout the course of centuries take form, and seize hold of the excited fancy.’ Others, sensing that the Ripper’s origins lay in the social and economic upheavals of the new industrial age, glimpsed the future. ‘Suppose we catch the Whitechapel murderer,’ queried the
Southern Guardian
, ‘can we not, before handing him over to the executioner or the authorities at Broadmoor, make a really decent effort to discover his antecedents, and his parentage, to trace back every step of his career, every hereditary instinct, every acquired taste, every moral slip, every mental idiosyncrasy? Surely the time has come for such an effort as this. We are face to face with some mysterious and awful product of modern civilization.’
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