The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (79 page)

Yet Tumblety, no less than Kosminski, Druitt and Chapman, must be exonerated. It is clear that the police had no hard evidence implicating him in the killings for had they possessed such information they would have charged him with the murders or, after his flight, sought his extradition. In important respects, furthermore, Tumblety does not fit the Ripper evidence. In 1888 he was fifty-six years of age, far older than any of the men seen with victims. And the murderer would appear to have been a much smaller man. Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes are known to have both been about five foot tall. Mrs Long, who saw Annie with a man, almost certainly her murderer, thought that Annie’s companion was only a “little taller” than she was, and Joseph Levy, Lawende’s companion on the night of the double murder, estimated the man they saw talking with Kate Eddowes to have been only “about three inches” taller than Kate. Tumblety, however, was tall, perhaps six foot in height. Someone who knew him said that he “looked like a giant”.

The only sensible conclusion one can draw from the existing evidence is that the police investigation failed and its failure left detectives grasping at straws. It is impossible to find a credible case against a single one of their suspects.

We should not judge the police too harshly. In most murder cases victim and killer are known to each other and careful inquiry into the past and circumstances of the victim will usually suggest suspects and motives. This was not so in the Ripper’s case. He was an example of that still fortunately rare phenomenon, the murderer of strangers, and such killers are exceedingly difficult to detect. Even today their crimes often go unsolved and modern aids to detection like fingerprinting, the biochemical analysis of blood, DNA fingerprinting and psychological profiling were unknown or undeveloped in 1888. The Ripper’s crimes were facilitated, moreover, by the character of the area in which he worked and the kind of victim he targeted. The Victorian East End was an intricate warren of tiny courts, alleys and backyards, impossible for the police to patrol effectively, and the Ripper’s victims readily played into his hands. Most of them were poor middle-aged women, deprived of male support by bereavement or separation, and for such women casual prostitution was often an instrument of survival. At the height of the Ripper scare prostitutes fled the district or took refuge in workhouse casual wards, but on any normal night in Whitechapel and Spitalfields large numbers of them could be found soliciting on the streets, eager to sell their bodies and conduct clients to secluded alleys and backyards for the price of a drink or a doss.

Given the failure of the police investigation in 1888 it is extremely unlikely that the Ripper can be unmasked now. Speculative theories will continue to assail us but any proposed solution to the mystery will only carry conviction if it presents a suspect who matches what we know about the Ripper and, crucially, is backed by authentic evidence linking him to the crimes. So far very few of the reckless accusations cast about by Ripperologists have satisfied the first criteria, none the second. As Jonathan Goodman has amusingly observed, the search for Jack the Ripper has come to resemble a horse race in which Chapman is the dubious favourite against a “current line-up of no-hopers, none of appropriate pedigree and most of them zebras in horses’ clothing.”

More than anything else, however, it is the riddle of the killer’s identity that lies at the root of our perennial fascination with the case, it is the very facelessness of Jack the Ripper that keeps his legend alive. If the mystery were to be solved, if some diligent and lucky scholar could prove, for argument’s sake, that the Ripper was John Smith, an obscure Whitechapel slaughterman, the rest of us would probably lose interest in him altogether. As it is, our inability to unmask him enables writers and film makers to make of him what they will. And because of that the mystery of Jack the Ripper looks set to remain, after more than a century, the classic whodunnit.

(Margery Wren, 1930)

Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullett

This unsolved case from 1930 is taken from the casebook of the British pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947) hailed as the “greatest medical detective of the century”. Spilsbury’s professional links with the Home Office began in 1910, when he was called in to examine the mutilated remains of Cora Crippen, wife of the infamous doctor who had since fled London with his mistress, Ethel le Neve. It was the first of a long series of cases in which Spilsbury was retained by the Home Office over a period of nearly forty years. The rather forlorn case of Miss Wren, robbed in her seaside shop and left for dead, is included in the best-selling biography of Spilsbury published by Browne and Tullett in 1951. Douglas G. Browne was a kinsman of Hablot Knight Browne, better known as Phiz, who illustrated the works of Charles Dickens. Tom Tullett was chief of the
Daily Mirror’s
crime bureau, who claimed to be the only journalist to have been a detective in the CID.

If there are degrees of wickedness in murder, only a shade less atrocious than the killing of children is the deliberate battering to death of elderly women living alone. These crimes are almost always committed for gain. In the majority of cases the murderer picks out some one known to him—a woman keeping a small shop, or with a reputation for hoarding money—but the evidence shows that there is also a type of monster who sets to work, by a system of trial and error, to find a suitable victim. Though murder may not always be intended, whether it results or not seems to be a matter of indifference to this class of criminal. From his point of view the victim is usually better dead; and only too often, the hammer or poker having silenced her, the bloody task is completed.

Such brutes are always with us, as the newspapers show, and their crimes recur with terrible frequency in Spilsbury’s records. Some of these cases have been mentioned. Among those occurring in this middle period of his career two stand out—the murders of Miss Wren at Ramsgate and of Mrs Kempson at Oxford.

The Wren case, which in its shocking details differs little from a score of others, is remarkable for the character and behaviour of Miss Wren herself. She was eighty-two, and she had a small sweetshop in Ramsgate. She possessed some house property, and had money in the bank. Like so many people of her age and class, she kept cash in tin boxes and other receptacles stowed away in various hiding-places. This dangerous habit got known, as it usually does, and her hoards, no doubt, were much exaggerated, the more so because she lived like the traditional miser, in squalor and discomfort.

About six o’clock on 20 September 1930, a girl of twelve who lived opposite the shop was sent across the street to buy a blancmange powder. The shop door was locked; peering through the window, the girl saw Miss Wren sitting in her back room. When eventually the old woman came to the door blood was streaming down her face, and she could only whisper; but though, in fact, she was suffering from injuries that might have killed her on the spot, she went behind the counter and fetched a number of packets for the child to choose from. The girl ran back to her parents, and to their horrified inquiries Miss Wren gave the unlikely explanation that she had fallen over the fire-tongs.

She was taken to hospital, where she lingered for five days. She had been savagely attacked, and on the third day Scotland Yard was called in. As her mind wandered she made rambling and contradictory statements, from which glimpses of the truth emerged, to the nurses and the police, and to the magistrate who, later, waited beside her bed. It was an accident; a man had attacked her with the fire-tongs; he had a white bag; it was another man with a red face; it was two men; then, again, it was an accident with the tongs. Once she admitted that she knew her assailant, but she would not name him. “I don’t wish him to suffer. He must bear his sins . . .” Just before the end she said, “He tried to borrow ten pounds.” More than this they could not get from her, and to Superintendent Hambrook, who was in charge of the case, she was the most determined, inflexible woman he ever met. On the afternoon of the 25th she died, still keeping her secret.

Performing the post-mortem on the following day, Spilsbury enumerated eight wounds and bruises on the face, and seven more, lacerated or punctured, on the top of the head. In addition, there had been an attempt at strangulation. The injuries were undoubtedly inflicted with the tongs which figured in the poor woman’s stories, and on which hairs were found.

The circumstances of this murder suggest that it may not have been premeditated, as it so often seems to be in similar cases. Miss Wren was seen alive and well at five-thirty, and she usually kept her shop open after six. At that hour, in September, with Summer Time in force, it was not dark. There were people going up and down the street, and children playing. If violence was intended it was an extremely rash project. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the murderer came for money, and, like all his type, was prepared to go to great lengths to get it. It was probably he who locked the shop door. Perhaps disturbed by another caller—for no money seems to have been taken—he escaped by the backyard. Apart from the evidence of Miss Wren’s admissions, it is clear that he knew of her habits, and was familiar with the premises.

At the inquest certain persons were referred to by letters of the alphabet. Superintendent Hambrook says that there were six suspects, of whom
A, B,
and
C
were able to clear themselves. One of the remaining three
D, E,
or
F,
was the murderer. Miss Wren knew which, and the police may know too. But it has never been possible to pin the crime on him.

(Zodiac Killings, 1968)

Colin Wilson

One evening just before Christmas 1968, a teenaged courting couple parked their car by a reservoir in the hills above San Francisco Bay, California. Minutes later, they were murdered in cold blood by a gun-wielding maniac. The killer was to become notorious throughout the United States as “Zodiac”. Six months later he struck again, but this time one of his victims survived and described the killer. Impatient at the inability of the police to catch him, the killer sent letters and a coded message to three different newspapers. Once deciphered, the cryptogram made chilling reading, but it took the police no nearer to the killer’s identity. After five murders, the killing stopped, but the mocking letters continued. The British author Colin Wilson (b. 1931) writes prolifically on crime, the occult and the paranormal.

It was the perfect night for young lovers: calm, moonlit and cold enough outside for the inside of the estate car to seem the most delightful place in the world. David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen were out on their first date on the night of 20 December 1968. They had spent most of the evening at the high school Christmas concert in nearby Vallejo, a small town about twenty miles (thirty kilometres) north-east of San Francisco, California. Now, at eleven-fifteen p.m., they had just parked near a concrete pump-house above Lake Herman reservoir. The heater blew warm air, the radio played pop music, and the seventeen-year-old boy and sixteen-year-old girl began to get better acquainted.

Suddenly, a man appeared at the window, and David Farraday found himself looking straight down the barrel of a gun. As the youth opened the door and started to climb out, the gun exploded. David Farraday fell dead instantly with a bullet wound behind his left ear. Bettilou flung open her own door and began to run. In the moonlight, it was impossible for the gunman to miss her; five shots ploughed into her back and she collapsed seventy-five yards (sixty-eight metres) from the car.

Only a few minutes later, another car drove past the pump-house. The woman driver saw the two bodies clearly in the headlights, but she did not stop; on the contrary, she put her foot down on the accelerator and drove fast towards the next town, Benicia, about six miles (nine kilometres) away, where she was going to meet her children from the Saturday evening cinema. A few miles further along the road she saw, with relief, the red, flashing light of an oncoming police car. Within minutes, two deputy sheriffs and a detective sergeant were on their way to the pump-house on the Vallejo–Benicia road.

The young couple were both dead, and the warmth of their bodies told Detective Sergeant Leslie Lundblad that they had died recently. But beyond that there seemed to be no clues. David Farraday’s wallet was intact in his pocket. Bettilou Jensen lay exactly as she had fallen, and her clothing was undisturbed. This, however, did not entirely rule out sex as a motive—it was conceivable that the killer had been disturbed by the passing car and taken refuge temporarily behind his victims’ car until it had gone. The woman driver had, it turned out, shown very good sense in not stopping to investigate.

There were two more possible explanations. The most obvious was jealousy. David Farraday was a good-looking young man; Bettilou was a pretty girl. Perhaps some rejected lover had followed them as they drove towards the lovers’ lane. The other possibility was rather more disturbing: that the killer was not a rejected lover, merely a reject—and a man who hated
all
lovers.

Lundblad’s investigations soon disposed of the jealousy theory. David and Bettilou were ordinary high-school students. Both had good scholastic records and David was a scout and a fine athlete. Neither had any “secret life” to investigate. It became clear to Lundblad that the two victims must have been chosen at random. Their killer had probably been hiding near the pump-house—a well-known resort for young lovers—waiting, like a hunter, for someone to arrive. It seemed probable that he had parked his car out of sight and sat in it until David’s estate car had arrived. Even that was only a guess; the ground was frozen too hard to show tyre tracks. Only one thing seemed clear: sooner or later, this hunter of human beings would probably experience the urge to kill again.