The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (53 page)

He made a feeble motion with his hand. “I have come to the inescapable conclusion, Watson, that self-delusion is essential to our well-being — as essential as a healthy spleen or liver. It allows us to live with ourselves, you see; it enables us to go on, filtering out the poison that is painful truth.” He made a derisive sound. “Fortunately, we as a species seem to be endowed with an infinite capacity to disregard that which is evident. It has been our salvation, you see. We would never have come this far otherwise. We would never have survived.”

With almost unsettling calm he resumed his seat and tented his fingers before him in the familiar manner, a bleak, brooding look in his eyes.

Watson could only regard him with bewilderment and anxiety. He did not really understand any of it.

Then Holmes, suddenly becoming aware of his friend’s discomfort, and realizing he was the cause of it, shook off his mood. Smiling engagingly, he clapped his hands together loudly, a sharp, startling, punctuating sound — a note of finality, Watson thought. Almost gratefully he took it as a cue and rose to make his departure. But Holmes lifted a hand, causing him to pause a moment.

“You do see,” said Holmes, “why all of this must remain confidential, do you not? And why I must ask you to avoid the temptation of putting any of it to paper? You do realize that it must never,
never
see the light of day. You do understand that, naturally.” His voice had an intense quality to it.

Watson nodded. “Yes, more’s the pity. Of course I do. You have my word on it.”

Holmes seemed satisfied. After a moment’s further reflection, he
smiled. “Of course, should the temptation ever become so great that you must reduce your thoughts to writing after all, you will have the decency to withhold it from publication until well after I am gone, will you not? After
all
of those involved are gone. And, might I suggest, until after you are gone as well? Fifty years should be an appropriate interval, I should think. I have no plans to tread the boards longer than that. No great harm shall be done after fifty years.”

He reached for his violin, but hesitated. “Best make it one hundred to be sure,” he said. “Yes, one hundred should do nicely. No one shall care then. No one shall even be interested.”

Nodding his response, Watson struggled into his coat and reached for his hat and stick. He turned at the door and looked at his friend one last time.

“You
do
know!” he whispered fiercely. “You
do
know which one it was, after all, don’t you?”

Holmes glanced up at him quizzically. When he spoke, it was in a quiet, even tone. “There are some things it is best
not
to know, old fellow, some things it is best not even to question.”

Subdued and reflective, Watson took his leave, and Holmes began a mournful tune on the Stradivarius, the strains of which filled the rooms of 221B Baker Street for the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. A haunting, melancholy tune it was, strange and surreal, without melody, without beginning or end. A tune that one heedless of the passage of years might imagine hearing beneath the muffled clip-clop and clatter of a ghostly passing hansom cab, should one have occasion to be in the vicinity of Portman Square on a particularly foggy evening and just happen to turn the corner into a gaslit Baker Street of enduring memory.

“We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow.”

—
Sherlock Holmes, The Retired Colourman

F
ew events in the annals of violent crime, not even the murders of kings or the assassinations of major political or religious figures have aroused as much interest over the years as the deaths in London in the autumn of 1888 of five common prostitutes.

Their killer has captured the imagination as no other ever has, becoming one of the most written about, most speculated about, most thoroughly investigated of all time. Even those gentle souls among us who may not be all that well versed in the subject of murder, or personally acquainted with individuals who have homicidal tendencies — those of us who might have to pause a moment or two before being able to identify any one of a number of other well-known murderers in history who have been responsible for far more deaths, or for more important ones, and whose violent acts have had a far greater impact
on the times in which they lived — even we instantly recognize the name Jack the Ripper. Yet as well known as he is, virtually nothing is known about him.

This, in part, explains our continuing morbid fascination with him: The fact that his identity remains a mystery. This, and of course the unspeakable horror of his crimes, for it is a curious phenomenon that the human animal is, at one and the same time, both repelled and attracted by horror.

But there is more to it than that, of course. There is the sheer audacity of the man and his single-mindedness of purpose: His uncanny ability to stalk his victims and do his grisly work — all in the face of the most elaborate efforts to prevent him from doing so, making fools of the authorities in the process, which in itself is enough to gain him a measure of public approbation. Let’s face it, there has to be grudging admiration for the man, despite his crimes, despite his obvious insanity, despite the sheer evil and repugnance of his deeds. And, in spite of ourselves.

After all, he got away with it.

Down through the years, literally
hundreds
of books have been written about the Ripper and his crimes, and the magazine and newspaper articles number in the thousands. There are individuals who have spent lifetimes pursuing the mystery, who have immersed themselves in every aspect of it, who have become authorities in the most trivial details of the crimes and the victims of them. Yet little new light has been shed over time, little the “experts” can agree upon. Indeed, as the years go by, the theories seem to become wilder, the list of suspects longer and more fantastic, the controversy ever deeper, the mystery ever more tantalizing. And the known facts more problematic. Even the number of murders actually committed is a subject for debate: Some say five, or eight, some say eleven, a few say as many as fourteen.

All we can ever be reasonably certain of is that a single individual
was responsible for the five murders and mutilations committed between August 31 and November 9, 1888 — those of Mary Anne Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Beyond that, there is hardly a fact that is not in dispute (including whether the man was indeed a man — more than one “expert” has theorized that he was a she).
¹¹⁷

What little we know about the killer has been pieced together from the often conflicting descriptions provided by witnesses who saw him (or thought they saw him, or merely said they saw him), and by police officials and medical examiners who made certain inferences — educated guesses, if you will (and some of them
not
so educated) — based on his modus operandi and on the postmortem examinations of his victims.

This is what we know: He had a mustache, he was five feet six or seven, seemed to be left-handed, seemed to have had a familiarization with the Whitechapel district,
may
have had some knowledge of human anatomy, and
may
have been a member of the upper classes. (If he smoked, his cigarettes were
not
custom-made and gold-tipped as far as is known.)

That is
all
we know. Incredible as it may seem, after all the years of research and investigation and all the hundreds of studies, that — and
only
that — is all we really know about him. And even then there is disagreement. Valid arguments can be made and ample “evidence” submitted to refute most of the above.

Some think, because of the killer’s apparent knowledge of anatomy, he was a physician or surgeon. Others think that because he was not all
that
skilled with a knife, he could not have possibly had medical training. He could have been a butcher or slaughterer (there were several in the area). He could have been a cork cutter or a shoemaker. He had demonstrated enough skill with a blade to suggest that he at least had had experience as a deer hunter, a theory that lends support to those
who believe he was a member of the upper classes. (All “gentlemen” of the period were assumed to know how to “gralloch” — i.e., disembowel — a deer.) And he could have been none of these things.
¹¹⁸

It has been theorized by armchair psychiatrists that the killer was probably someone who contracted a venereal disease from a prostitute, had become mentally deranged, and committed the crimes out of revenge — to put right the wrongs that were done to him. Or he was a religious nut whose self-appointed mission in life was to rid the world of fallen women and “excoriate the evil from their bodies.”

Some years ago, as an exercise, the FBI put together a profile of the Ripper, and as educated guesses go, it is probably as good as we are going to get: He was a white male, single, in his mid or late twenties, of average intelligence, who in all probability lived alone. “He was not accountable to anyone” and could therefore come and go as he pleased at all hours. He lived in the area of the killings and had an intimate knowledge of its geography. He would not have reacted well with people. He would have been a loner. He would have engaged in erratic behavior. He would have preferred nocturnal activities. In all probability, he was of unsanitary personal habits. He hated women and was probably intimidated by them. He most likely had an unhappy childhood, was probably raised by a woman alone, and may have been sexually molested by that woman. He was, the profile concluded, a “predatory animal.”

Over the years, several candidates have been put forward — Scotland Yard’s computer printout lists 176 individual suspects — but few of them have stood the test of time and none has survived close scrutiny. After all is said and done, after all the research and all the theorizing, we are no closer to an answer now than we were one hundred years ago. Quite simply, we do not know who the killer was.

As to whether anyone ever did know... that is another question.

There is persistent evidence of an official conspiracy of silence — a cover-up at the highest levels — the purpose of which, one must assume, was either to conceal the identity of the killer or, what is more likely, to hide from the public the depth of ineptitude displayed by the police and various government officials involved in the case, from the cabinet ministerial level on down.

Scotland Yard’s files on the Whitechapel murders were supposed to have been officially sealed until 1992 (coincidentally, the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Prince Eddy, if anyone cares to read anything into that). Instead, they were opened to the public in 1988, the one hundredth anniversary of the murders. However, there were some who claimed to have had access to those files earlier, and those individuals indicated that much appeared to be missing. A few went so far as to state that the records seemed to have been
deliberately
purged of essential information, of anything that was of any real value and could possibly lead to the identification of the killer. Time after time we were told of lost archives, stolen letters, purloined documents, mysterious disappearances of pertinent material, files that were purposely destroyed or systematically “sanitized” or simply “misplaced.” While this state of affairs has surely been overdrawn and overdramatized, some of it just as surely has taken place. Careful searches, for example, have failed to reveal the whereabouts of the original detailed postmortem report of Catherine Eddowes, prepared by Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, the City Police surgeon. It is not enough to blame it all on “inefficient record keeping” and “crude file indexing” or the “insufficient budgets” of the agencies responsible for securing the files, as has been the case.

Moreover, private notes and diaries belonging to individuals who were retired officials, or who were otherwise personally involved in the investigations of the murders, or had information pertaining to them, have on several recorded occasions “disappeared” — in at least a
few cases within days of an individual’s death. Dr. Thomas Stowell’s files were destroyed within
hours
of his death by his son, who never explained why and refused to discuss the matter at all. Sir Melville Macnaghten’s personal files — he headed the CID and had firsthand knowledge of Scotland Yard’s entire investigation — simply “vanished” shortly after his death.

So the possibility of a cover-up cannot be dismissed lightly. The question then remains, why bother to go to such pains unless there was something to hide, something the government, or at least certain highly placed officials within the government, did not wish to have revealed? (It is a question of the trout in the milk, to quote Holmes quoting Thoreau.)

There is another source of frustration: Much of the information that has come down to us is not merely incomplete, but incorrect. For example, the so-called “writing on the wall” found in the passage off Goulston Street following the murder of Catherine Eddowes. As has been pointed out by Richard Whittington-Egan (
A Casebook on Jack the Ripper
), at least seven different versions of that message exist (an indication of how difficult it sometimes is to establish even simple facts of the case). And each version is from a “reliable,” respected source, one of them being no less a personage than Sir Henry Smith, who actually saw the original message before it was ordered removed.
¹¹⁹