The Cases That Haunt Us (7 page)

25 Sept 1888

Dear Boss,

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.

Good luck.

yours truly
Jack the Ripper

Don’t mind me giving the trade name

There was a second postscript attached sideways, and this was the part written in red crayon:

Wasn’t good enough to post this before I get all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha.

This became known forever more as the “Dear Boss” letter, and the first appearance of “Jack the Ripper,” a name that quickly superseded the “Whitechapel Murderer” in public dialogue and private nightmare.

The other communication, referred to as the “Saucy Jacky” postcard, was also written in crayon and read:

I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, youll hear about saucy Jacky s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

Jack the Ripper

So the phantom monster had finally communicated with the world and given out his bloodcurdling name. Or had he?

Let me say here that although the police were immediately suspicious of the communications, many Ripperologists, after careful consideration, continue to believe that the “Dear Boss” letter and “Saucy Jacky” postcard are authentic. After some analysis of my own, I go with Scotland Yard and believe them to be fakes.

The process we use to evaluate communications from UNSUBs, such as ransom notes and letters to the police, is known as psycholinguistic analysis. It is not a handwriting analysis—we can get other experts to do that for us when we think we need it—but rather stresses the actual use of language, the style, and of course, the underlying message.

Of all the self-styled Jack the Ripper “copycats” over the years, perhaps the most famous and notorious was the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, who bludgeoned and stabbed women, mostly prostitutes, in the north of England from 1975 through 1980. There had been eight deaths, three other women had escaped, and the case had become the largest manhunt in the history of British law enforcement when I happened to be in England to teach a course at the Bramshill police academy, their equivalent to Quantico, about an hour outside London. The police had already conducted literally tens of thousands of interviews.

As might be expected in a case of this enormity, both the police and the media had received a number of letters purporting to be from the Ripper. They were all evaluated, but I don’t think the police placed much evidentiary value on any of them. But then a two-minute tape cassette arrived by mail to Chief Inspector George Oldfield, taunting the police and promising to strike again. Just as the “Dear Boss” letter had been reprinted in newspapers throughout England, the Oldfield tape was played everywhere—on television and radio, on toll-free telephone numbers, even over the PA systems at soccer matches—in the hope that someone would recognize the voice and identify the
UNSUB
.

I’d heard a copy of the tape back at Quantico, and after classes at Bramshill one evening, they asked me what I thought. I asked them to describe the scenes to me. It seemed the
UNSUB
maneuvered to get his female victims into a vulnerable position, then, like the Whitechapel Murderer, he’d blitz-attack them, in this case with a knife or hammer. And as in Whitechapel, he’d mutilate them after death. I thought the voice on the tape was pretty articulate and sophisticated for someone who got his ultimate satisfaction out of life from killing and mutilating prostitutes, so I said, “Based on the crime scenes you’ve described and this audiotape I heard back in the States, that’s not the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that.” In my business, it is extremely important to be able to evaluate any and all behavioral clues so that the police do not waste their time and always limited resources. With a serial offender, wasted time equals wasted lives.

The actual perpetrator of these crimes would not communicate with the police in this fashion. He’d be an almost invisible loner in his late twenties or early thirties with a pathological hatred of women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver since he seemed to get around the countryside quite a bit. When thirty-five-year-old truck driver Peter Sutcliffe was arrested on a fluke on January 2, 1981, then admitted and was proved to be the Yorkshire Ripper, he bore little resemblance to the individual who had made and sent the tape. The impostor turned out to be a retired policeman who had a grudge against Inspector Oldfield.

I suspect something similar was going on with the “Dear Boss” letter. But the letter is clever and legitimate enough that it has led on a lot of people for over a hundred years. So, like the Oldfield tape, I believe it had to be forged by someone who knew how the game was played. The most likely candidate would be a reporter, a conclusion we can arrive at from several directions.

First, the boss referred to is not the boss of the police but the boss of the Central News Agency. While it would not be unusual for a certain type of sexually oriented predator to communicate with the press, to blow his own horn and let the world know how he thinks of himself and what he wants to be called, we would expect this communication to be with an individual newspaper. We know, for example, that both the
Star
and
News
, among many other papers, were publishing regular and lurid details of the Whitechapel murders. On the other hand, it takes a fair amount of sophistication for an offender not associated with the business of journalism even to realize that a news agency exists that supplies the various papers. This type of insider information would be particularly beyond the range of the type of largely disorganized, emotionally deficient individual that the behavioral clues had shown this killer to be.

This is further underscored, in my opinion, by the use of language in the letter. Psycholinguistically speaking, the “Dear Boss” letter is a performance, a characterization by a literate, articulate person of what a crazed killer should sound like. It’s too organized, too indicative of intelligence and rational thought, and far too “cutesy.” I don’t believe an offender of this type would ever think of his actions as “funny little games” or say that his “knife’s so nice and sharp.”

Rather, this all points to someone who knows how to use language and knows the system and wants to get the message out as quickly as possible, rather than giving an individual news organization an exclusive. And when we look at journalism in Victorian England, we find it to be a freewheeling, sensationalistic business in which truth and restraint were often sacrificed in service of a big story.

Everyone had a vested interest in the Whitechapel murders: the people of the East End who were the potential targets; the rest of London who had had their confident, insular world shaken; the police, who had been tested as never before; the government, which was increasingly embarrassed; and of course, the press. The Whitechapel murders sold papers and kept journalists employed. How much more mileage could they get out of the Jack the Ripper murders?

And it wasn’t solely a matter of commerce for the press, either. The agenda for some was more complex. As Martin Fido points out, this was the time of the London County Council elections, and the radicals were attempting to take over the East End and make their mark. The year before, on November 13, 1887, the Metropolitan Police under the leadership of Sir Charles Warren had put down a massed demonstration by the unemployed in Trafalgar Square. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. The Whitechapel murders became a ready-made issue for the radical press. The fear generated became a way for them to say, “Look at the conditions here! What is being done? What would be done if this were happening in the West End?” The mainline papers had to pick up the story or be left behind.

So the “Dear Boss” letter, being made public so soon after the Double Event, helped keep the case in the forefront. Yet I remain in agreement with Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dr. Robert Anderson and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who believed the writer to be an enterprising journalist. In fact, they both believed they knew the identity of the man.

And just as significant as any of these considerations is that, like the Yorkshire Ripper almost a century later, this type of
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would not communicate with the police in this manner. Unlike the organized antisocial type, this individual would not want to proclaim himself this way, particularly not talk about future crimes. This type thinks only of what he is doing at the moment. And he would not have come up with a nickname for himself, particularly such a flamboyant one. In my twenty-five years of experience, all of the serial offenders who communicated with the press or police and proposed names and identities for themselves leaned much more to the organized, antisocial side of the continuum than the disorganized, asocial side. I therefore believe that by disseminating the “Dear Boss” and “Saucy Jacky” communications, the police and press were actually hindering the investigation, diverting attention away from the real
UNSUB
.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention to the case chronology, another important consideration for any investigator or analyst, you may have noticed that the “Dear Boss” letter was dated September 25 and postmarked September 27. The Double Event took place on the night and morning of September 29 to 30. And the writer does refer to “clip[ping] the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly.”

Catherine Eddowes’s right earlobe was, in fact, sliced off. Was this a lucky guess? Probably. So much was done to Eddowes that the writer could have mentioned just about anything and have been right. If it was the real guy, wouldn’t he more likely have mentioned some of the major mutilations he intended to inflict? And of course, he did not send the ear to the police.

As far as the timing, arriving just a day before the Double Event, this again may have turned out to be a lucky guess, but not an uneducated one for someone paying close attention, as an enterprising newspaperman would. The Nichols murder had taken place on a Friday. The Chapman murder had occurred a week later on a Saturday. There had been no murders for the next two weekends, so if one was going to happen at all, the weekend of September 28–29 would be a likely time. Also, with no murders in that stretch of time, the story was starting to get cold, so if you wanted to revive it, this would be the moment.

The “Saucy Jacky” postcard then, which was posted on October 1, was an attempt to “catch up” with what had actually happened and authenticate the first communication: the “double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off …” People believe what they want to believe, and for a public anxious to know the monster they were dealing with, this was just the kind of authentification they needed.

Of course, in one important sense, the “Dear Boss” letter became a real and self-actualizing part of the case. Because even if the communication was not authentic, it ensured that this series of crimes would be immortalized. Without the Jack the Ripper identity, I doubt whether this offender would have so captured history and the public imagination.

“
FROM
HELL”

The frenzy was still intense. In addition to the stepped-up police patrols, locals had formed their own protective organizations. The most highly visible was probably the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, which was headed by George Akin Lusk, a builder who specialized in the restoration of music halls. Lusk attained a high profile for himself by writing about the case in the
Times
.

On October 16, Lusk received a package in the mail: a small cardboard box wrapped in brown paper and bearing a London postmark. In the box was half a kidney, soaked in wine to preserve it. Wrapped around the kidney was a crudely written letter:

From hell

Mr Lusk

Sor

I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

signed Catch me when

you can

Mishter Lusk.

Lusk assumed the organ and letter to be a hoax, possibly by a medical student or group of students with easy access to an anatomy lab. But he was persuaded by friends to hand it over to authorities for analysis. Dr. Thomas Openshaw of London Hospital believed it to be human, and from an individual of about forty-five and suffering from Bright’s disease, not an inconsistent finding in a chronic alcoholic. A number of other experts had a chance to examine the kidney, with mixed opinions as to its authenticity in the Eddowes murder. That authenticity, however, has never been ruled out, and much of the scholarship over the years suggests that the kidney may actually have belonged to the victim.

I can’t speak to the forensic likelihood of the kidney’s having come from Catherine Eddowes’s body, but the accompanying letter is certainly intriguing. Despite the apparent differences in handwriting (possibly attributed to an increasingly fragmented psyche), many of the Ripperologists and other students of the case who believe the “Dear Boss” and “Saucy Jacky” communications to be authentic believe the same of the Lusk letter, and vice versa. I’m not so sure. Handwriting experts are divided on the matter, so I can’t rely on them for help.