The Cases That Haunt Us (8 page)

I think it is highly significant that even after the frenzy created by the Jack the Ripper pseudonym, the writer of the Lusk letter does not use it. Even after he is tagged with such a “glamorous” title, he does not take it on himself. Since I believe the Boss and Jacky letters to be fakes, I’m intrigued by the possibilities for this one. Though I said I didn’t believe this type of offender would feel the need to communicate with the public, it is possible that the Boss letter, especially arriving so soon after the Double Event, may have compelled the disorganized killer to come out and “set the record straight,” to keep control, as it were. He may have sent the piece of kidney to authenticate himself after the ear mention in “Dear Boss.” In other words, he wouldn’t have felt a need to communicate until someone else claimed credit and tried to define his personality and identity for him.

His own sense of identity and emotional orientation is more accurately portrayed by where he says the letter is coming from: “From hell.” The style of the writing itself is virtually an illiterate parody of the cleverer and more sophisticated style of the first letter, as if the writer is trying unsuccessfully to show himself equal to the wit and flair of the pretender. I might add that Donald Rumbelow, a former police officer, a gifted author, and one of the greatest experts on the case, agrees with the assessment that of all the communications, the Lusk letter is the only one likely to be genuine.

Some of the letter’s critics claim that the spelling—“Sor,” “prasarved,” “Mishter”—suggests “stage Irish” dialect; in other words, an educated person’s attempt to sound colloquial. Although that’s possible, to me the spelling suggests someone not terribly familiar with English writing, most likely an uneducated immigrant, who is writing it the way he hears it.

That the letter was sent not to the police, not to the press, but to a local ad hoc community leader is also significant, because I believe strongly that this type of disorganized offender is going to be operating only within his own circumscribed zone of comfort. This is a concept we’ll develop in more detail shortly.

It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that a disorganized offender who, we’ve already established, has a perverse sense of curiosity about the inside of the human body, might try to satisfy that curiosity by eating some of it. And as to the closing salutation, “Catch me when you can,” that can have two meanings. One would be an obvious taunt to the police from someone who has found that he can repeatedly get away with murder. The other would be a cry for help, similar to the “For heAVens Sake cAtch Me BeFore I Kill More I cannot control myselF” message scrawled on a wall by Chicago murderer William Heirens with his victim’s lipstick. One of Heirens’s other victims, a six-year-old girl, was found cut up in pieces in a suburban sewer.

Could I be mistaken about the authenticity of the Lusk letter? Sure. A lot of the experts disagree with me. But what I can say is that unlike the communications that came before it, this one is consistent with what I would expect from the type of
UNSUB
I suspect Jack the Ripper to have been.

PROACTIVE
IDEAS

There was much speculation about the best way to catch this elusive and unprecedented killer, some of it from ordinary citizens, some from “experts.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose first Sherlock Holmes novel,
A Study in Scarlet
, had been published the previous year, speculated that the killer might be a man disguised as a woman. A midwife walking around Whitechapel in the early-morning hours with a bloody apron would arouse little suspicion.

A few years later, in 1894, Conan Doyle suggested to an interviewer how Holmes would have attempted to crack the case. One of his techniques would have been to reproduce the “Dear Boss” letter and invite the public to respond. This is a highly legitimate proactive technique, which Special Agent Jana Monroe of my unit used successfully in the Rogers murder case in Florida when a billboard reproduction of the killer’s handwriting led to a swift ID. To give the Metropolitan Police their due, however, they did reproduce the “Dear Boss” letter on posters that were placed throughout the East End, but the technique came to nothing. As I don’t believe the letter to be authentic, I’m not surprised.

One newspaper reader, as described by Donald Rumbelow in his landmark
Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook
, suggested in a letter that police search the “Saucy Jacky” postcard; since “no two persons’ thumbs are alike, the impression of one suspected person’s thumb should be taken and microscopically examined.” Rumbelow reports that the letter was filed away and that it would be seventeen years before the first fingerprint conviction.

When the press began circulating the idea that the killer could be a depraved doctor or medical student, Rumbelow writes how one person suggested placing the following advertisement in newspapers the Ripper might see:

Medical Man or Assistant Wanted in London, aged between 25 and 40. Must not object to assist in occasional post mortem. Liberal terms.

Although I do not believe the Ripper to have been a medical man, he certainly had the curiosity, and this is the kind of ploy that might just have brought him out.

Dr. Forbes Winslow, a flamboyant physician and amateur detective who believed the killer to be a homicidal maniac goaded on by a religious mania, suggested having wardens from lunatic asylums patrolling with the police since they would be much more likely to recognize such tendencies in an individual. He also proposed a newspaper advertisement reading:

A gentleman who is strongly opposed to the presence of fallen women in the streets of London would like to cooperate with someone with a view to their suppression.

The police would then gather in hiding at the prearranged meeting place and grab whoever showed up.

“
BLACK
MARY”

On the morning of Friday, November 9, Thomas Bowyer, an Indian army retiree known to friends and neighbors as Indian Harry, was dispatched by his boss, local merchant John McCarthy, to collect rent at a house he owned at 13 Miller’s Court. It was almost right next to Spitalfields Market and a short walk from both Goulston Street to the south and Hanbury Street, site of the Chapman murder, to the northeast. With the kinds of tenants who lived in such buildings as McCarthy’s, collecting the rent was a regular ordeal for both landlord and renter.

The entrance to Miller’s Court was a narrow, dingy passageway next to McCarthy’s candle shop. Bowyer knocked on the door of Mary Jane Kelly, also said to have been known as Ginger, Fair Emma, and Black Mary to her various friends and clients. She was a streetwise, twenty-four-year-old Irish girl and by most accounts was quite pretty, though no photographs of her are known.

It was about 10:45 in the morning when Bowyer called on her, a good time to find her in. He knocked several times without response and began to suspect she didn’t have the rent money and was avoiding him. He tried without success to spring the lock, but there was a long-broken windowpane that had never been fixed. Inside it, an old coat had been hung in place of a proper curtain for some measure of privacy. He pushed aside the coat and peered in. The room was only ten by twelve feet, and the sight that met Thomas Bowyer’s eyes was one of such unmitigated horror that he was virtually paralyzed. A body was lying on the bed, but it was so mutilated, so torn apart, with so much of the flesh ripped off and the insides strewn across the bed and onto the floor, that the dimensions of the body, the outlines of its form, could no longer be discerned.

When the hideous sight had finally registered in his brain, Bowyer raced down to McCarthy’s shop. McCarthy went back up with Bowyer, glanced in the broken window himself, then immediately dispatched Bowyer to the Commercial Street police station.

He returned with Inspector Walter Beck and Detective Constable Walter Dew. Dew was a tough straight-shooter known as Blue Serge because of the suit he wore habitually. He would go on to fame as the detective who caught the notorious poisoner Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. But the image he saw at 13 Miller’s Court was so emotionally harrowing that it haunted him the rest of his life. Since this was the first indoor scene, where good evidence could be collected, a conscientious effort not to disturb it was made, and not until 1:30 P.M., when Superintendent Thomas Arnold arrived, was the door finally broken in.

The bed and surrounding area were saturated with blood. The body, as described by Dr. George Bagster Phillips, showed what had to be the final escalation of the killer’s homicidal mutilating frenzy. The face was cut apart and the head just about severed. The breasts had been cut off, abdomen ripped open, and the internal organs thrown about the room. Much of the remaining body, including the pubic area, right thigh, and right buttock had had the flesh removed down to the bone. The heart was missing from the scene. Not only had the killer attempted to desex this victim, he’d gone all the way to dehumanize, to depersonalize her. Some of the doctors who either visited the scene or studied the body in autopsy estimated that the mutilation had taken as long as two hours, though the cause of death, the severing of the carotid artery, had taken place far sooner.

It is difficult for normal people to conceive of an act this depraved as a sexual fantasy, but our research shows that it is. Part of the fantasy is destroying the victim to the extent that the offender feels that he becomes her sole possessor. The mutilation murderer James Clayton Lawson Jr., who teamed up with rapist James Russell Odom, whom he met in California’s Atascadero State Mental Hospital, explained his 1970s killings of young women whom Odom had just raped with forthright candor: “Then I cut her throat so she would not scream… . I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person and destroy her so she would not exist. I began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her breasts off. After this, all I remember is that I kept cutting on her body.”

When pressed about the details of his involvement with the victim as distinguished from Odom’s, Lawson insisted, “I did not rape the girl. I only wanted to destroy her.”

This, I think, is what investigators were seeing at 13 Miller’s Court.

Inspector Frederick Abberline arrived and inspected the room. He concluded from the smoldering remains in the fireplace that the killer had burned clothing in there, as well as using the flames for illumination for his work.

For about a year before the murder, Mary Jane Kelly had been living on and off with a Billingsgate Market fish porter named Joseph Barnett. Life with him wasn’t uniformly harmonious. In July 1888, he’d lost his job because of theft, and at the end of October, he’d moved out of the room they shared because Mary had invited another prostitute to share the premises. He did, however, continue to visit her almost daily, sometimes giving her small amounts of money. There are also stories that he wanted to get her out of the street trade.

He last saw her between about 7:30 and 8:00 on the evening of Thursday, November 8, when he came by the room. Mary was in the company of her friend Lizzie Allbrook. Around eleven, someone thought they saw her in the Britannica pub with a young man. About forty-five minutes later, Mary Cox, another prostitute who lived in Miller’s Court, saw Mary with a different man, with a blotchy face, mustache, and hat. She was noticeably drunk. Between twelve and one, several other Miller’s Court residents heard her singing.

At two, she approached George Hutchinson, an unemployed laborer whom she knew, and asked for the loan of sixpence. Hutchinson was broke, so had to turn her down. Hutchinson saw her approached by another man as she walked away, and they were both laughing. He thought he heard the man say something like “You will be all right for what I have told you.”

Hutchinson couldn’t see the man’s face, but followed the pair back to Miller’s Court. He heard Mary say, “All right, my dear, come along, you will be comfortable.”

Approximately 3:45 A.M. on Friday morning, three women in Miller’s Court thought they heard a scream of “Oh, murder!” from the direction of number 13. If it was Mary Kelly who uttered that scream, they would have been the last words she ever spoke.

Joseph Barnett was subjected to four hours of intense questioning by the police. They took his clothing and examined it for bloodstains and other clues. They were satisfied he was not the killer. Recently, however, he has again emerged as a suspect, most prominently in the work of Bruce Paley, whose book
Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth
was published in 1995. The theory is that he murdered the other women to scare Mary into giving up prostitution, and that he finally killed her in a mad frenzy when it became clear that she had tired of him and would not take him back. During his interrogation by police, Barnett admitted that he frequently read Mary newspaper accounts of the Whitechapel murders.

This theory offers an explanation of why the murders stopped, because they did, with Kelly’s death. Proponents of Barnett’s candidacy also point out that he was skilled with knives, had some rudimentary knowledge of anatomy, was a local who felt comfortable in the area and could therefore probably approach local hookers without alarming them, and generally fits the eyewitness descriptions. Barnett would, obviously, have easy access to Kelly’s room, and it could be more than coincidental that the “Dear Boss” letter mentions ginger beer bottles and such bottles were found in the room.

Paley also cites the analysis I did at the time of the 1988 television series, as well as more general research about serial predators that has come out of my unit at Quantico in showing how Barnett fits the profile. This could be true in certain ways—age, race, dysfunctional childhood with no father, comfort zone, triggering emotional event such as the loss of his job, for example—but these are the superficial characteristics, true of a lot of people. They’re almost boilerplate for a certain type of offender. You have to get into the specifics to see if it really fits. And I have never seen, nor do I believe someone would, in this manner, brutally kill women he knows, even vaguely, to scare his own partner and “teach her a lesson.” Particularly, on the night of the Double Event, a guy of this type would have been scared off by the first one. He would never have gone after Liz Stride.