The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (14 page)

The London docks were very much a focus for investigation even before Larkins’s Portuguese sailor theory hit the desks of Scotland Yard. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson’s report detailing police efforts following the double murder noted the work of the Thames Police as they made enquiries into sailors at the docks and rivers, making a particular effort regarding the presence of ‘asiatics’, which resulted in upwards of eighty people being detained.
²⁰
As early as September 1888 the
Daily Telegraph
hoped that the detective service was energetic enough to ‘direct the persistent, unrelaxing, inexorable inquiry which should be made in every court and alley, not only in Whitechapel but in maritime London, among the waterside characters and on board every vessel in the docks’.
²¹
In the aftermath of the double event it was reported that ‘every vessel that has left the harbour since the hour of the commission of the last crime has been thoroughly overhauled’.
²²

In early October 1888, the police reacted with great interest to a telegram sent from New York from somebody who called himself ‘Dodge’, suggesting that the murderer was a Malay cook named ‘Alaska’. This enigmatic character (who was never traced) had claimed to have been robbed of all he had by a ‘woman of the town’ and that ‘unless he found the woman and recovered his property, he would kill and mutilate every Whitechapel woman he met’.
²³
Intensive investigative activities in the world’s busiest port were therefore taking place almost from day one, a fact apparently unknown to many who subsequently advanced what they thought were original ‘seaman’ theories. One recent commentator wrote, ‘I suspected that Jack the Ripper may have been a merchant seaman. I could
find nothing to suggest that the police pursued this line of inquiry at the time.’
²⁴

Even the police themselves were not exempt from suspicion during these tentative forays into identifying the murderer. Somebody calling himself ‘An Accessory’, who wrote to the City Police on 19 October 1888, stated that:

The crime committed in Mitre Square City and those in the district of Whitechapel were perpetrated by an Ex Police Constable of the Metropolitan Police who was dismissed from the force through certain connection with a prostitute. The motive for the crimes is hatred and spite against the authorities at Scotland Yard one of whom is marked as a victim after which the crimes will cease.
²⁵

PC Edward Watkins was also suspected by an anonymous correspondent from Trowbridge, who suggested that the authorities ‘keep an eye on him’, later adding: ‘Please be careful and keep this quiet not let him know you are watching him.’
²⁶
Another name familiar to the case was Sergeant William Thick, the well-respected and prominent officer who has become probably the best-known police character after Frederick Abberline. Thick was suspected by Henry T. Haselwood in a letter to the Home Office of 14 October 1889:

I beg to state that through the information I have received I believe that if Sergt. T. Thicke otherwise called ‘Johnny Upright’ is watched and his whereabouts ascertained upon other dates where certain women have met their end, also to see what deceace he is troubled with, you will find the great secreate this is to be strictly private and my name is not to be mentioned.

A note made on a covering letter made the police opinion very clear: ‘I think it is plainly rubbish – perhaps prompted by spite.’
²⁷
Even police suspects had to have a motive or disease which caused them to kill, it seems, but other correspondents merely felt that the culprit dressed as a policeman to evade capture without necessarily offering a reason why they were killing in the first place.

Or was the Whitechapel murderer a religious fanatic, exacting brutal punishment upon the fallen women of Whitechapel? So thought Edgar Sheppard MD, who wrote to
The Times
, believing that the murderer might not necessarily have been an escaped or recognized lunatic, but that he was on ‘a mission from above to extirpate vice by assassination. And he has selected his victims from a class which contributes pretty largely to the factorship of immorality and sin.’
²⁸
Whitechapel and neighbouring Spitalfields would have been seen as the epitome of ‘immorality and sin’ – the police estimate of around 1,200 prostitutes was a staggering statistic for so small a district and enquiries were made to ascertain the number of disreputable houses in the area. In reply to a query from the Home Office on the very subject, Sir Charles Warren stated that:

during the last few months I have been tabulating the observations of Constables on their beats, and have come to the conclusion that there are 62 houses known to be brothels on the H or Whitechapel Divn and probably a great number of other houses which are more or less intermittently used for such purpose.
²⁹

And so, any such fanatical religionist would be well placed in such a district to conduct their own unique brand of ‘street cleaning’.

In late 1889 the figure of Lyttleton Forbes Winslow re-emerged. He had been persistent in his attempts to get the police to employ his apparently expert services but was constantly rebuffed. He had convinced himself that he knew the identity of the Ripper and, facing persistent indifference from the investigating authorities, he went on to expound his theories to the newspapers. By now he actually had a suspect, who, it emerged, was one G. Wentworth Bell Smith, who had been lodging at the house of Mr and Mrs Callaghan of Sun Street, Finsbury, since August 1888. Mr Callaghan had noted that Smith was in the habit of writing reams of religious tracts and had delusions about women, prostitutes in particular, whom he said should be drowned. Smith also claimed to have performed ‘operations’ on them. Apparently he would stay out at all hours of the night, wearing silent, rubber-soled shoes, and on his return would collapse on the sofa and foam at the mouth. The Callaghans logically considered him to be insane.
³⁰

The theory surrounding Wentworth Bell Smith was discussed by the police, and the story of a man answering to his description, acting suspiciously in the Finsbury area between the murders of Tabram and Nichols, was investigated by Inspector Abberline and detailed in a report circulated by Donald Swanson.
³¹
Forbes Winslow eventually published his memoirs in 1910, the first book to discuss the Ripper correspondence at length which printed facsimiles of letters that he had claimed were sent to him personally.
³²
One letter, apparently written on 19 October 1888, predicted that the next murder would take place on 8 or 9 November (subsequently the date of the Kelly murder). Forbes Winslow obviously accepted such letters as genuine; however, enquiries found that the address given by the sender, 22 Hammersmith Road,
did not exist. It was also noted that the date on this letter, ‘Oct. 19th 88’, was actually ‘89’, the last digit being altered to make the date more relevant to the murders.
³³
It is fair to say that only Forbes Winslow could have made such a ‘convenient’ adjustment and, allied to his conviction that once he had made public his theories on the Ripper the murders ceased (he believed Alice McKenzie was a genuine Ripper victim), the whole scenario began to appear as a seemingly desperate attempt to be recognized for solving the case. Unlike Edward Knight Larkins, who was prepared to alter a theory to reflect new discoveries, Forbes Winslow could be seen as an early example of a theorist who was obviously willing to manipulate facts to suit a theory.

Speculation about a religious motive got off on a new tack when word got around, via the press, that a similar series of murders had been committed in Austria a few years before. A Galician Jew by the name of Mosheh Ritter had been sentenced to death for outraging a young Christian girl named Francis Mnich in Krakow and then instructing a Pole named Stochlinski to murder and mutilate her. Each time the verdict was reversed by a higher court on the grounds that the evidence was not sufficient, and Ritter was finally let go. So whoever the actual murderer was might have escaped to carry on his dreadful butchery in the East End.

The interesting feature of the Ritter case was that witnesses had come forward at the trials to testify that among fanatical Jews it was held that, if ever a Jew succumbed to temptation and had illicit intercourse with a Christian woman, it was his duty to atone for the offence by killing her and carrying out atrocious sexual mutilations. However, no such authorization is given in the Talmud. The press made a link between this case and a more sinister motive:

In various German criminal codes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as also in statutes of a more recent date, punishments are prescribed for the mutilation of female corpses with the object of making from the uterus and other organs the so-called ‘diebalichter’ or ‘schlafslichter’, respectively ‘thieves’ candles’ or ‘soporific candles.’ According to an old superstition, still rife in various parts of Germany, the light from such candles will throw those upon whom it falls into the deepest slumbers, and they may, consequently, become a valuable instrument to those of the thieving profession.
³⁴

Thieves’ candles also played an important part in the trials of robber bands at Odenwald and in Westphalia, in 1812 and 1841 respectively. They were heard of at the trial of the notorious German robber Theodor Unger, who was executed at Magdeburg in 1810. It was on that occasion discovered that a regular manufactory had been established by gangs of thieves for the production of such candles. Their use was believed to have survived among German thieves, as was proved by a case at Biala, in Galicia, in 1875.
³⁵

It wasn’t just elements of the arcane that were suggested as motives for the murders; some went as far as to use spiritualism in their endeavours to track down the killer. Following the death of Alice McKenzie, Stuart Cumberland, a medium and ‘thought reader’, published a description of the Ripper in his own illustrated Sunday publication, the
Mirror
. It was accompanied by a drawing of the supposed murderer, the appearance of whom came to Cumberland in a dream.
³⁶

A story first published in the
Chicago Sunday Times Herald
in April 1895 said that spiritualist and medium Robert Lees had tracked the Whitechapel Murderer to the home of an eminent London physician. Lees, dogged by visions and premonitions,
claimed to have attempted to use his gifts to help the police during the autumn of 1888 but was rejected as a ‘crank’ a number of times. However, on one occasion he was apparently accompanied in his endeavours by a police officer:

After an earnest appeal from the inspector, Lees consented to try and track the Ripper, much in the same way as a bloodhound pursues a criminal. All that night Lees traversed swiftly the streets of London. The inspector and his aids followed a few feet behind. At last, at 4 o’clock in the morning, the human bloodhound halted at the gates of a West End mansion. Pointing to an upper chamber where a faint light gleamed, he said: ‘There is the murderer you are looking for.’

‘It is impossible,’ returned the inspector. ‘That is the residence of one of the most celebrated physicians in the West End; but, if you will describe to me the interior of the doctor’s hall, I will arrest him.’
³⁷

Apparently, the interior of the mansion matched Lees’s description. The doctor in question was examined and certified insane. However, such was his profile that, to avoid embarrassment, a fake funeral was arranged and an empty coffin interred in Kensal Green cemetery, whilst the physician himself was placed in an asylum under the false name of Thomas Mason, alias ‘No. 124’.

But even the full-blown use of black magic was suggested. In December 1888, self-styled occultist Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson (writing as ‘one who knows’) sent a suggestion to the
Pall Mall Gazette
, blatantly putting forth the idea that the Whitechapel murders were committed by a Frenchman; his reasoning was that the word ‘Juwes’ as found on the wall in Goulston Street probably said ‘Juives’, the feminine French
form of ‘Jews’, and that prostitute murder was ‘considered to be almost peculiarly a French crime’. The motive was indulgence in ‘unholy rites’, in that the sexual organs missing from the victims could be used with other ingredients in black magic rituals and that the locations of the murders – except Mary Kelly’s – formed a perfect sacrificial cross.
³⁸

Sir Arthur Diosy, later a member of ‘Our Society’,
³⁹
was aggrieved by this suggestion, mainly because he claimed to have had similar ideas as early as October 1888.

According to him, among the quests of these people in the East is the elixir vitae, one of the ingredients of which must come from a recently killed woman. Diosy got quite excited when he heard of the bright farthings and burnt matches which he said might have formed the ‘flaming points’ of a magical figure called a ‘pentacle’ at each angle of which such points were found, and according to ritual certain ‘flaming’ articles had to be thus disposed. Diosy said later that he had paid a visit to Scotland Yard to place his theories before the authorities, but had been received without enthusiasm, as one can well understand.
⁴⁰

As for Stephenson, he later became a Ripper suspect himself.
⁴¹
In 1890 he was living in Southsea with his lover, the novelist Mabel Collins, and it was here that he met Collins’s friend Baroness Vittoria Cremers. After first finding Stephenson inoffensive, Cremers would later become uncomfortable in his company and on one occasion she saw him drawing an upside-down triangle on his door, apparently to keep out an evil presence. In the late 1920s or ’30s, Cremers told journalist Bernard O’Donnell
⁴²
that she once went into Stephenson’s room without him knowing and under the bed she found seven
neck-ties in a tin case that were stained with what appeared to be dried blood. Cremers became convinced, along with Mabel Collins, that Stephenson was Jack the Ripper. The ties later supposedly came into the possession of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who boasted that they had belonged to the Ripper. He went on to name the man as Stephenson.
⁴³