Complete History of Jack the Ripper (50 page)

Let us consider the facts.

Openshaw decided that the postal kidney was part of a left human kidney, Brown that it was the kidney of a human adult. These claims are not unreasonable. As Nick Warren has recently explained, it should have been possible in 1888 for professional medical men to distinguish a human kidney from those of common domestic animals on morphological grounds. And since a kidney may shrink by up to 1 cm. in length between the ages of thirty and seventy, it may also have been possible for them to have determined whether the kidney had been taken from an adult. It should be noted, however, that kidneys afflicted by Bright’s Disease, as this is said to have been, are pathologically contracted anyway.

Could the kidney have been sent by a medical student as a prank? Perhaps it could. But there is an important objection to this theory. Bodies delivered to hospitals for dissection were charged with preserving fluid (formalin). The organ received by Lusk had not been treated in this way. It had been preserved in spirit.

Major Smith mentions two circumstances which seem to link the postal kidney specifically with Kate’s murder. The right renal artery is generally about three inches long, the left a little less but not shorter than two and a half inches. Now, Smith tells us that about two inches of left renal artery remained in Kate’s body and that only about one inch was attached to the postal kidney. Moreover, according to Smith, the right kidney left in Kate’s body had been found in an advanced stage of Bright’s Disease and the left kidney sent to Lusk was in ‘an exactly similar state’.

One hesitates to take Smith at his word. His book, written so long after the event, is inevitably unreliable. And a press statement by Dr Brown, discovered by Stewart Evans, casts real doubt upon his account of the kidney. In his statement Brown would not confirm that the postal kidney was part of a left kidney and contended that it had not been immersed in spirit for more than a week. Furthermore, he asserted that no portion of renal artery adhered to the postal kidney because the organ had been ‘trimmed up’.

If accurately reported this statement effectively refutes Smith. But therein lies the rub. Is it accurately reported? Contemporary newspapers are frequently as misleading as later police memoirs. And it is certainly possible to find press support for Smith. A
Daily Telegraph
report of 20 October 1888, for example, says: ‘it is asserted that only a small portion of the renal artery adheres to the kidney, while in the case of the Mitre Square victim a large portion of this artery adhered to the body.’

On the matter of Bright’s Disease time has vindicated Smith. Dr Sedgwick Saunders, quoted by the
Evening News
in October 1888, flatly contradicts him in saying that ‘the right kidney of the woman Eddowes was perfectly normal in its structure and healthy, and by parity of reasoning, you would not get much disease in the left.’ But Dr Brown’s recently discovered inquest deposition proves that Smith was right and Saunders wrong. Brown told the inquest that Kate’s right kidney was ‘pale, bloodless, with slight congestion of the base of the pyramids’. These symptoms, as Nick Warren points out, unquestionably do indicate Bright’s Disease.
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In the end the evidence fails to persuade either way. The postal kidney could have been genuine. On the other hand we cannot
prove
that it had not been extracted from some other person recently autopsied. Experts continue to disagree and the jury is still out.

If the kidney really was Kate’s the accompanying letter was written by her murderer. Yet, although the subject of several amusing exercises in graphology, it has inspired only one detailed study by a serious handwriting expert – that by Thomas Mann, a charter member of the World Association of Document Examiners.
²³

Mann’s most important conclusion is that the author of the Lusk letter was a semi-literate person. The script exhibits a cramped style of writing – vertical strokes are retraced, letters are crowded together, often very little space separates one word from another. It is a product of finger movement rather than forearm or whole-arm movement. With finger movement letters are formed almost entirely by the action of the thumb and the first and second fingers. It is a method of writing that permits only slight lateral freedom and is characteristic of the semi-literate, of those who have not the assured command of the pen and easy arm motion of the practised penman. Other telltale signs indicate a semi-literate author. Numerous ink blots attest to someone little concerned with legibility and clarity and relatively unskilled in the use of his writing instrument. There is no punctuation.
‘Kidne’, occurring in the middle of a sentence, is capitalized while ‘it’, beginning the sentence ‘it was very nise’, is not. Separate ideas are run together ungrammatically. The sentence ‘prasarved it for you’ is incomplete. ‘Catch me when you can’ should probably be ‘Catch me if you can.’ And more than one seventh of the words in the letter are spelled incorrectly.

There are, admittedly, some indications of rudimentary learning. By no means all the spelling errors are phonetic. The words ‘knif’ and ‘whil’ prove that the writer had sufficient education to know of the silent k and h. And conversely, he could not phonetically have arrived at the correct spelling of a word like ‘piece’. The setting out of the letter, too, suggests some formal training in writing because it generally follows the correct form as taught in copybooks of the period. Notwithstanding such indications, however, Mann does not believe that the writer was an educated person disguising his handwriting so as to appear semi-literate.

Disguised writing is necessarily slowly drawn. Only by writing so slowly that one is consciously in control of each stroke of the pen is it possible to prevent one’s natural, idiosyncratic characteristics from appearing in the script. But, Mann tells us, such conscious attention to the process of writing is almost always detectable: ‘The strokes of slowly drawn writing become tremulous in appearance; they lose the clean-cut edges of quickly written lines. Furthermore, a stroke normally produced by one quick motion may, in drawn writing, be composed of several distinct movement impulses – i.e., minute changes of direction will be noticeable in a stroke which could appear firm if it were written with normal speed.’ After a careful examination of the Lusk script, Mann believes that it was written more slowly than average handwriting. Difficulty in moving the pen is not surprising in finger movement and the generally heavy pressure exerted by the writer of the Lusk letter may also indicate a relatively slow speed. However, apart from a few exceptions (for example, in the tails of ‘hell’ and ‘nise’), the pen strokes do not, in Mann’s judgement, exhibit the halting or hesitating quality characteristic of deliberate disguise. Occasionally, indeed, the writing displays evidence of having been so rapid that the ink track failed to register, as in the e of ‘Kidne’ and the L, u and s of ‘Lusk’ at the end of the letter. A disguised hand, finally, is almost certain to be inconsistent with itself in its features or qualities. This is not true of the Lusk script. Throughout it exhibits many subtle idiosyncrasies which are habitually repeated. Mann details
no less than twenty-six of them. ‘All elements considered,’ he writes, ‘the indices of speed and internal consistency in the script do not support the hypothesis of generally disguised handwriting; and, on the other hand, these indications do accord with the hypothesis of a semi-literate penman.’

So much for the handwriting. What about nationality and dialect? Well, it is certainly worthy of note, given the debate about whether the murderer was a foreigner or not, that the author of the Lusk letter was probably of British origin. The abbreviation ‘Mr’, written with the r raised above the line, is a peculiarity of English handwriting, and ‘tother’, used as a contraction of ‘the other’, was common to Scotland, Ireland, England and America. More specifically, the words ‘prasarved’ and ‘Mishter’ may reflect a Cockney dialect because William Matthews, in his study
Cockney Past and Present
, produces evidence to show that in Cockney speech ‘er’ was commonly pronounced ‘ar’ as in ‘clerk’ until late in the 19th century and that ‘sh’ was widely substituted for ‘s’. The possibility of an Irish author has already been mooted.
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The Lusk letter may have been written by the murderer, it may not. Given our present state of knowledge we can only keep an open mind on the subject.

Sue Iremonger, a member of the World Association of Document Examiners, is at present engaged in a fresh study of the Ripper letters. She believes a communication of 6 October to be in the same hand as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and does not think either of them could have been produced by Best’s flattened Waverley nib. The results of her research will be fascinating. However, despite some published claims to the contrary
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it should be remembered that only the Lusk letter can be directly linked – and that but tenuously – to the murderer. For this reason comparisons between the handwriting in the Ripper correspondence and that of some suspect or other are almost invariably futile. Yet Ripperologists, eager to invest their fantasies with a veneer of credibility, will continue to make them. Besides which the idea of the Ripper brazenly taunting his enemies with insolent jibes and lines of sleazy doggerel is just too good for fictioneers to relinquish. At the beginning of its second century the myth of the murderer-scribe is probably too firmly entrenched in popular legend to be touched by anything written here. As Arthur Koestler, the wise Hungarian writer and essayist, understood only too well, ‘nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.’

‘W
E HEAR STARTLING NEWS
of abounding sin in this great city. Oh God, put an end to this, and grant that we may hear no more of such deeds. Let Thy gospel permeate the city, and let not monsters in human shape escape Thee.’
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Such was the earnest prayer of Mr Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle on the morning of Sunday, 30 September 1888, only hours after the bodies of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes had been found in the East End.

The news of the double killing was already sweeping through the metropolis. By eleven that same morning, one reporter tells us, it seemed ‘as if the entire population of the East End was out of doors.’
²
Both murder sites had been cordoned off by police but thousands of ghoulish sightseers choked the approaches to Mitre Square and congregated outside Dutfield’s Yard. At one time Berner Street resembled a sea of heads from end to end. Windows overlooking the sites were thrown open and seats at them openly sold and eagerly sought. On the fringes of the crowds costermongers, selling edibles from bread and fish to fruit, sweets and nuts, and newsvendors, proclaiming the latest particulars, did spectacular trade. And because many East Enders were illiterate or unable to understand English fascinated audiences clustered round anyone fortunate enough to have procured a paper and willing to read aloud the news of the hour.

Mitre Square and Berner Street continued to attract crowds for several days. The same hysterical scenes that had been witnessed after Dark Annie’s murder were re-enacted and, as the excitement
subsided, the same terrors were re-awakened. In the East End, after dark, they emptied all but the most illuminated and populous thoroughfares. It is probable that, given the circumstances, some lodging house deputies allowed regular customers to stay even if they did not possess their doss money. But many women were, as was the custom, mercilessly turned out into the streets. Some of these fled westwards to better-lit quarters of the metropolis. Others sought shelter in the casual wards and both in the City and throughout the East End boards of guardians noted substantial increases in female admissions during the first two weeks in October. But even on the first few nights after the double murder, when the panic was at its height and temperatures plummeted to freezing, groups of these miserable and forlorn-looking creatures might still be seen in the darkness and cold, touting at street corners or under the glare of lamps, or huddling in doorways to screen their ill-clad bodies from the biting wind. Their plight was summed up by one of their number, rebuked after accosting a rescue officer near Shoreditch Church: ‘Good heavens! What
are
we to do? At one o’clock last night Mother Morris came down into the kitchen, and she says, “Now then, you girls who haven’t got your doss money – out you go,” and all of them as hadn’t got enough was forced to turn out and go into the streets shuddering at every shadow, and expecting every minute to be murdered. What
are
we to do?’ Some of these women, more spirited than their comrades, were determined to go down fighting. ‘Afraid? No. I’m armed. Look here,’ one told a reporter, pulling a knife out of her pocket. ‘I’m not the only one armed. There’s plenty more carry knives now.’
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A noticeable reduction in the number of prostitutes out after dark was not the only effect of the murders. Respectable women, even men, began to shun the East End. There was a rumour that emigrants, en route for the West, were refusing to be located in Whitechapel. And traders complained of a loss of business. On 3 October Mr R. Rycroft told a meeting of the parish vestry of St Mary, Whitechapel, that trade had fallen off in the district by nearly 50 per cent during the past month. Presumably the problem was exacerbated in the middle of October when parts of the metropolis, including the East End, were enveloped in a dense, smoke-laden fog. About that time more than 200 Whitechapel traders, through Samuel Montagu, memorialized the Home Secretary for an increase in the number of police in the district. ‘The universal feeling prevalent in our midst,’ they declared,
‘is that the Government no longer ensures the security of life and property in East London and that, in consequence, respectable people fear to go out shopping, thus depriving us of our means of livelihood.’
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