Complete History of Jack the Ripper (6 page)

The falsehoods and absurdities in this yarn have been exposed in many books and there is no need to repeat them here. Even Joseph Sickert, who told Knight the story in the first place, denounced the Jack the Ripper part of it ‘a hoax . . . a whopping fib’ in 1978. What is disconcerting about the whole episode, however, is the attitude of Stephen Knight himself. His research is now known to have uncovered evidence which proved that the story was untrue. Yet he shamelessly chose to suppress it.

Later Joseph Sickert retracted his confession and supplied further material to Melvyn Fairclough, who used it in his book
The Ripper and the Royals.
It included three diaries supposedly written by Inspector Frederick George Abberline between 1892 and 1915 and given by him to Walter Sickert in 1928. Abberline is well known to students of the Ripper case. In 1888 he co-ordinated the hunt for the murderer in Whitechapel and he died in Bournemouth in 1929. I do not know whether the diaries have been subjected to competent forensic examination. I do know they are not true bill. The diaries, which incriminate a galaxy of public figures, including Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir William Gull and James K. Stephen, Prince Albert Victor’s tutor at Cambridge, conflict with Abberline’s known views on the identity of Jack the Ripper. On one page, reproduced by Fairclough, the detective’s name is incorrectly signed ‘G. F. Abberline.’ Still more telling, biographical notes on four of the murder victims, set down in the diaries, supposedly by Abberline, appear to have been cribbed, sometimes almost word for word, from a research article published in
True Detective
in 1989!
⁹

It is in this context that we must view the recent ‘discovery’ of the alleged Jack the Ripper diary.

This document is a black-and-gilt calf-bound volume containing sixty-three handwritten pages. It is signed ‘Jack the Ripper’.

The owner of the diary is Mike Barrett, a one-time scrap-metal dealer who lives in Liverpool. It was Barrett who brought the diary to the offices of Rupert Crew Ltd., a London literary agency, in April 1992. Its commercial potential was obvious. The publishing rights were snapped up by Smith Gryphon Ltd and on 7 October 1993 the diary hit the bookshelves amidst a blaze of hype. ‘7 October 1993,’ ran the pre-launch publicity, ‘the day the world’s greatest murder mystery will be solved.’

Unfortunately, it isn’t solved. And the diary is an impudent fake.

Forensic examination of the diary is as yet inconclusive. There seems no doubt that the volume itself is genuinely Victorian. This, of course, proves nothing. Family and business archives contain many used and partly used Victorian diaries, ledgers and notebooks. They frequently come on the market and can be bought at market stalls and from antiquarian book dealers. Significantly, the first forty-eight pages of the Ripper diary are missing, apparently cut out with a knife. Rectangular stains on the flysheet suggest that the volume was originally used for mounting photographs.

Tests on the ink have been made. It should be noted, however, that there is little difference between Victorian iron-gall blue-black ink and modern permanent blue-black ink and that comprehensive and diverse tests are necessary to distinguish the two. In any case it is not difficult to age ink artificially. Amalia and Rosa Panvini, the forgers of the Mussolini diaries in 1967, used modern ink. Nevertheless, they fooled the experts by baking the diaries at low heat in a kitchen oven for half an hour, a process which aged the ink so perfectly that no scientific test was able to fault it. The evaluation of the Ripper diary will doubtless continue. But at least two out of three experts who have already made tests on the ink have concluded that it is of later than Victorian age.

The diary has no pedigree before May 1991. Mike Barrett says that it was given to him at that time by a friend, a retired printer called Tony Devereux, and that Devereux refused to account for its history or explain how he came by it. Devereux died a few months later. His family insist that he never mentioned the diary to them.

All this raises a crucial question. If the diary is genuine where has it been for the last century? No one knows. It purports to be the diary of James Maybrick, a wealthy cotton merchant, and identifies Maybrick as the Ripper. Maybrick will already be familiar to devotees of true crime. He died at Battlecrease House in Aigburth, a suburb of Liverpool, in May 1889, and his wife Florence was accused of poisoning him with arsenic extracted from flypapers. Florence was convicted and sentenced to death but her sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life. She was released in 1904 and died in the United States in 1941. Battlecrease House still stands. It has been speculated that the diary may have been found under the floorboards during rewiring work in 1990 or 1991. But neither the present owner of the property nor the electricians involved have any knowledge of such a discovery.

The diary itself contains nothing to persuade me that it was written by the Whitechapel murderer. Like most charlatans, its author gives little substantive information to check. What there is is scarcely impressive.

The diarist repeats, for example, the myth that the murderer left two farthings with the body of Annie Chapman. He makes several errors in recounting the murder of Mary Kelly in her lodging at 13 Miller’s Court. We are told that the various parts of her body were strewn ‘all over the room’, that her severed breasts were placed on the bedside table and that the killer took the key of the room away with him. None of these statements are true. They are errors that were published in the Victorian press and have been repeated in books many times since. But the real murderer would have known better. The diarist’s claim to have penned the famous ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter and postcard sent to the Central News in 1888 does nothing for his credibility. As I will demonstrate in this book, there is no reason whatever to suppose that these communications were written by the murderer. Besides, the handwriting of the letter and postcard does not match that of the Maybrick diary.

Presumably the hoaxer pitched upon Maybrick because his death in 1889 would neatly explain the mysterious cessation of the Ripper crimes. In other ways, though, he is an unlikely choice. Contemporary evidence suggests that the Whitechapel murderer was a man in his twenties or thirties, a man who lived in the East End of London and possessed some degree of anatomical knowledge. None of this fits Maybrick. He was a fifty-year-old cotton merchant and lived at Battlecrease House at the period of the murders. Yes, he may have made regular visits to Whitechapel, but there is no evidence of it.

There is a further difficulty. If Maybrick wrote the diary, why does the handwriting in this volume not conform to that in known examples of his hand? Sue Iremonger, a forensic handwriting examiner, was unable to match the diary with the handwriting and signature in Maybrick’s will or with the signature on his marriage certificate.
¹⁰

By now it should be obvious that we are dealing with a transparent hoax. The unacceptable provenance of the diary, the missing front pages, the factual inaccuracies and the implausibility of Maybrick as a Ripper suspect – even without forensic tests we have learned enough to set a whole belfry of warning bells ringing. A reading
of the diary still leaves me baffled as to how any intelligent and reasonably informed student of the Ripper case could possibly have taken it seriously. There were those well versed in the subject, men like Nick Warren, Tom Cullen and Melvin Harris, who saw through the hoax from the beginning. Yet it is astonishing how many experts were fooled and allowed their names to be used in the promotional literature. They remain there, preserved like flies in amber, warnings to the complacent and the credulous.

Once errors creep into the literature they are repeated in book after book. This is because Ripperologists have always drawn heavily, sometimes exclusively, upon the work of their predecessors. Assertions of fact, however erroneous, thus travel down the years virtually unchallenged. A single example will suffice.

It is more than fifty years since William Stewart’s
Jack the Ripper: A New Theory
was published. In this work we are told that Mary Kelly was three months pregnant at the time she was slain.
¹¹
Now, there is no reason to believe any unsupported statement in Stewart. He was an uncaring fictioneer and his book is one of the worst ever written on the subject. Even inquest testimony is reported wrongly. Sometimes he invents testimony for real witnesses. Sometimes he invents witnesses as well as testimony! Especially is this assertion about Mary Kelly suspect. For it was Stewart’s contention that the crimes were the work of a midwife and a pregnancy among the victims would have bestowed credibility upon his theory.

In 1959 Stewart was followed by Donald McCormick. His
Identity of Jack the Ripper
sets out to be a factual study, but does McCormick query the fable of Mary Kelly’s pregnancy? Not a bit, he repeats it. Furthermore, he claims to quote the findings of Dr George Bagster Phillips, a Metropolitan Police surgeon, that Mary was ‘in the early stages of pregnancy and that she was healthy and suffering from no other disease except alcoholism.’
¹²

Such confident assertions sound convincing. Not surprisingly, they have found their way into numerous books and are still trotted out today as hard fact. But they are entirely made out of wholecloth. In 1987 original post-mortem notes came to light which proved that Mary was not pregnant when she died. Years before this, however, obvious questions should have been asked. Where did these writers come by their information? And were there credible sources for it?

Faulty primary sources, dishonest research and the sheepish repetition of printed folklore have taken us very far from the truth
about Jack the Ripper. I do not wish to imply that there have not been worthwhile books on the subject and happily acknowledge my debt to them.
¹³
But this whole field of research has degenerated into a mass of conflicting claims and is now held in widespread and well-earned disrepute.

In the early seventies the rash accusations of Ripperologists against all and sundry prompted a Bill Tidy cartoon. It shows Sherlock Holmes, backed by two stalwart constables and kneeling before a dismayed and distinctly unamused Queen Victoria. ‘I have reason to believe,’ he says, ‘that you are Jack the Ripper.’
The Truth
sent up the industry again in 1988. Reviewing the credentials of suspects as diverse as Lord Tennyson and George Formby, its contributors eventually plumped for Sooty, an ‘evil little criminal mastermind’ who understood that being an eight-inch-high glove puppet of a bear he might pass through the cesspits, pubs and gutters of Whitechapel unnoticed.
¹⁴

It is time to attempt a rescue.

When I began this book I realized that a new study of the Whitechapel murders would have to do two things. First, it must have the courage to dispense with the books and research the subject from scratch. And second, it must proceed without any preconceived theory. In short, the conclusions must follow from the facts and not the other way around.

I have, of course, benefited from the work of other bona-fide students. But essentially my account rests upon a completely fresh overhaul of primary sources. A mass of documents in police, Home Office, inquest, court, hospital, prison, workhouse and genealogical records, some still closed to general public access, have been searched. And from them I have fashioned the most comprehensive and accurate reconstruction of the case ever placed before the public. Areas of research generally neglected in the literature have been explored. Victims, for example, are accorded as much priority as suspects in this book. I have also described and assessed the methods taken by the police to capture the criminal and explained their difficulties with both Home Office and press.

A century ago the identity of Jack the Ripper aroused as much passion and debate amongst senior detectives as it does today amongst the world’s amateur sleuths. Sir Melville Macnaghten accused a barrister who threw himself into the Thames in December 1888. Sir Robert Anderson remained steadfast to his belief that the Ripper
was a Polish Jew committed to a lunatic asylum in 1891, while in the opinion of Inspector Abberline, Jack the Ripper died on the scaffold in Wandsworth Prison in 1903, convicted under another pseudonym of the murder of his wife.

On the strength of my findings the most important police suspects are identified and assessed. Some, like Montague John Druitt, are already well-known. Others, like Oswald Puckridge and Nikaner Benelius, have never been fully dealt with in any book before. In rejecting the names dangled before us by Macnaghten in 1894 I have challenged the whole drift of serious Ripper studies since 1959. This has not been prompted by any desire for sensation. I have simply followed where the evidence has led me.

If you are looking for another shoddily-researched ‘final solution’, with a cast list of disgraced royals, Czarist secret agents, black magicians and deranged midwives, you had best put this book down now.

If you prefer facts to journalism, if you want to know the truth about Jack the Ripper and are tired of being humbugged, read on!

B
ANK
H
OLIDAY
M
ONDAY
, 6 August 1888. It was the last holiday of the summer. Some Londoners, rising early and determined to spend this last day in the country or by the sea, ventured out to Epping Forest, Rye House, Hampton Court, Kew or the Kent and Sussex coasts. But as the day wore on an increasingly dull and leaden sky presaged yet more rain. It seemed to have done little else that summer. Rainy, thundery weather had persisted until the end of July, and August had begun wet and changeable. Not surprisingly, then, most holiday folk elected to shelter in the capital. To its attractions they resorted in shoals.