Who Was Dracula? (13 page)

Since the Lyceum company was well known for their professionalism and rapid scene changes, it's easy to understand that Mansfield had made enemies at the theater. The stagehands might have been deliberately dragging their feet in protest of the American upstart.

Mansfield's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
premiered at the Lyceum on August 4, 1888. William Winter, the theater critic and friend of Mansfield, attended the premiere and thought Mansfield was slightly off his game from “nervous excitement.”

He acted with intrepid spirit and, generally, with amazing vigor. . . . Jekyll was invested with poetic sentiment; Hyde as embodied as loathsome and venomous, [and] very awful. . . . [Mansfield] did not win the public heart; hearts are not won by horrors, but he made it clear that he was a unique actor and one entirely worthy of high intellectual consideration.

Privately, Winter offered sharper critiques, telling Mansfield there was too much of “Jekyll's misery, and misery never was popular, on stage or off.” He also advised the actor, “I wish you would get a new wig.” The London production received positive reviews, although the
Times
found the usual quibbles with his acting:

As Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Mansfield does not strike one as an actor of remarkable resource; as Mr. Hyde, however, he plays with a rough vigor or power which, allied to his hideous aspect, thrills the house, producing a sensation composed of equal measure of the morbidly fascinating and the downright disagreeable.

Ultimately, the play was not remembered because of the unhappy man of science, the grimacing villain, or the actor's histrionics. The Mansfield
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
became a legend just nights later, when an incredible event, “the morbidly fascinating and the downright disagreeable,” suddenly intruded. It was the real Mr. Hyde, London's most notorious murderer.

—

On Monday, August 6, 1888, Martha Tabram was drinking in White Swan pub on Whitechapel High Street in the notorious East End of London. Tabram was thirty-nine years old, one of the area's regular prostitutes, and she had spent the evening winding her way from pub to pub in the company of another prostitute, Mary Ann Connelly, and two unidentified clients who wore soldiers' uniforms. Just before midnight the ladies and their soldiers separated, and Tabram was last seen leading her client up George Yard.

At 4:50 a.m., a workman was starting his day; as he walked out into George Yard, he noticed the body of a woman on a landing. He called to a constable, Thomas Barrett, who noticed that the body was lying in a pool of blood. A local doctor was called to examine the body and discovered thirty-nine knife punctures all over the lady's body, neck, and abdomen. The cuts suggested that two distinct knives had been used. The
Illustrated Police News
reported the crime on August 18:

The wound over the heart was alone sufficient to kill, and death must have occurred as soon as that was inflicted. Unless the perpetrator was a madman, or suffering to an unusual extent from drink delirium, no tangible explanation can be given. . . .

Testimony suggested that Tabram's murder had taken place between two and four-thirty a.m. The police called an inquest and soldiers housed at the Tower of London and Wellington Barracks were reviewed and questioned, but the crime went unsolved.

Today it's still debated whether Martha Tabram was actually the first victim of Jack the Ripper, or whether her murder preceded Jack's actual crimes. The number of wounds was extraordinary, and to many researchers this murder has suggested the first step of an important crime spree.

Weeks later, on August 31, at twelve-thirty in the morning, another local prostitute, Mary Ann Nichols (known to the locals as Polly), was seen leaving the Frying Pan, a local pub. She walked to a local lodging house but was put out because she didn't have four pence for a bed that night. She drunkenly boasted that she'd soon have the money and wandered out into the street. At two-thirty a.m., she was seen by a friend, lazily watching a fire at a dry dock and leaning against a wall. Just over an hour later, a local cart driver noticed a woman lying on her back in the road, about half a mile from where Nichols had last been seen alive. Her clothes were disarranged and her upper body was still warm. Blood oozed from a wound at her neck.

An examination revealed that her throat had been savagely cut from left to right, with the windpipe, gullet, and spinal cord sliced through. Her abdomen had been slashed open, with a number of small stab wounds, including cuts on her body. Residents nearby never heard a disturbance and could offer no clue to the mystery.

The murderer struck again in the same area, on September 8. Prostitute Annie Chapman was spotted in conversation with a dark man in a deerstalker cap. The man asked her, “Will you?” and Annie replied, “Yes.” It was five-thirty a.m. Within half an hour, her body was found by a workman, lying next to a fence. Her face was bloody and her throat had been deeply cut. Her stomach was cut open and she was disemboweled, with her intestines, uterus, and bladder completely removed. The examining physician estimated that the specific knife-work required anatomical knowledge and could not have been accomplished in less than fifteen minutes.

The press took notice of the savage, apparently random nature of the crimes, which seemed the work of a madman. Unfortunately, the East End was rife with crime, and murders were not uncommon. It took Jack the Ripper to demonstrate the murder rate by committing crimes that were out of the ordinary.

—

News of the crime spree filled newspapers and fueled debate by the authorities and the public. Analyzing the victims, London coroner Wynne Baxter later made a sensational judgment, setting the tone for a century of speculation:

The injuries were made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. His anatomical knowledge carries him out of the category of a common criminal, for that knowledge can only have been obtained by assisting at post-mortems or by frequenting the post-mortem room. Thus the class in which search must be made, although a large one, is limited.

Of course, an experienced surgeon could hardly be expected to be a murderer. Baxter's suspicions perfectly suggested Stevenson's novel or the current play at the Lyceum: a kindly, respected “Dr. Jekyll” was leading a mysterious double life, consorting with criminals in the East End.

On September 11, a letter appeared in the
Star
:

You, and every one of the papers, have missed the obvious solution of the Whitechapel mystery. The murderer is a Mr. Hyde, who seeks in the repose and comparative respectability of Dr. Jekyll security from the crimes he commits in his baser shape.

Mansfield's play ended on its announced schedule on September 29. The next night, the Whitechapel Murderer struck again with astonishing violence.

On September 30, 1888, at about twelve-thirty a.m., prostitute Elizabeth Stride was seen chatting with a man; fifteen minutes later, a witness watched an argument between two people on the street, in which the man apparently threw the woman to the ground. At one a.m., Stride's body was found. Just forty-five minutes later, prostitute Catherine Eddowes's mutilated body was found about six streets away. Both women had their throats slashed. Catherine Eddowes had also suffered slashes to her cheeks, ear, and nose, and she had been disemboweled. In a passageway about a third of a mile away, the police discovered a bloody rag and a portion of Eddowes's bloodstained apron. On the wall was a chalked message: “the Juwes are The men That will not be Blamed for nothing.”

Meanwhile, the press had become aware of a letter, apparently sent from the murderer, written in blood-red ink:

Dear Boss, I keep hearing the police have caught me but they won't fix me just yet. . . . 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.

Jack the Ripper

On October 3 an accusation appeared in a letter in the
Daily Telegraph
.

The perpetrator is a being whose diseased brain has been inflamed by witnessing the performance of the drama of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, which I understand is now wisely withdrawn from the stage. If there is anything in this, let the detective consider how Mr. Hyde would have acted, for there may be a system in the demonic actions of a madman in following the pattern set before him.

The following day, the
Pall Mall Gazette
continued that thought.

Possibly the culprit is [a doctor, who] has seen the horrible play, lives in Bayswater or North London . . . goes out about 10 p.m. straight to Whitechapel. Commits deed. Home again to breakfast. Wash, brush up, sleep. Himself again, Dr. Hyde.

A popular Jack the Ripper myth has persisted that Mansfield was forced to withdraw his play because of the controversy generated by his portrayal of Hyde and even may have been questioned by the police. In fact, a week after the double murder, he acknowledged the “continued and great demand,” bringing back the play in repertory for several nights a week. A few days later, as the inquests into the murders proceeded, Mansfield publicized a benefit show for October 10, raising money for the poor women of the East End. For the benefit, he announced the London premiere of his comedy
Prince Karl
. The murderous
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
would never have suited this purpose.

Bram Stoker was monitoring the controversies swirling around the Lyceum productions and advised Mansfield against introducing a new play at his benefit, which would come across to critics as a “bid for favor” and reduce the importance of the play—sound show business advice, which Mansfield ignored.

Henry Irving returned from his vacation and saw a performance of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
at the Lyceum, afterward taking the actor to dinner at the Garrick Club. Mansfield grumbled about the disappointing box office and complained of the “tremendous strain imposed . . . by the acting of such painfully difficult parts.” It was a naive and arrogant conversation to offer the great Henry Irving. Irving listened and then responded drily, “Ah, yes, interesting. Very. But Mansfield, my boy, if it isn't wholesome, I wouldn't do it.”

Richard Mansfield should have laughed. Instead, he sulked.

Overall,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was only a moderate success for Mansfield in London, and the play's problems stemmed from his acting and his carelessness as a producer, not from controversy. If anything, the Whitechapel murders prolonged interest in the play. Years later Mansfield privately blamed Henry Irving—he had become hypersensitive to Irving's criticisms and irrationally imagined that Irving was pulling strings behind the scenes to engineer his failure in London. He ended the season in debt to Irving—rent and other expenses—for over 2,000 pounds ($10,000). William Winter, who knew both Mansfield and Irving, felt that the American actor's paranoia and failure to take responsibility were his shortcomings.

—

Bram Stoker recorded that Mr. and Mrs. Mansfield dined at the Beefsteak Room in the Lyceum during a return visit to London; this must have been after Mansfield's marriage in 1892. The actor played
Jekyll and Hyde
throughout his career and introduced a number of important plays in America, including George Bernard Shaw's
Arms and the Man
and
The Devil's Disciple
, as well as the first American production of Henrik Ibsen's
Peer Gynt
.

Today, Mansfield is remembered not for his work in the spotlight, but the spotlight of suspicion that briefly illuminated him in the Ripper case. He was never really a suspect so much as a confusing footnote to the story.

The suspect, it's now been revealed, was Francis Tumblety.

THE SUSPECT, “DISTINGUISHED PEOPLE”

D
espite the speculation, the East End murders didn't end when Mansfield finished playing in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
Several teasing letters arrived at the Central News Agency and the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and researchers still debate whether these letters from “Jack” were authentic or manufactured by reporters to fuel the sensational story. The last letter, delivered on October 16, 1888, arrived with a box containing half a human kidney. “I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman, prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. . . .”

Jack's final murder was the most spectacular. Mary Jane Kelly was twenty-five years old and had attempted to stop prostitution, living with Joseph Barnett in a small room in the area. When Barnett lost his job, she returned to walking the streets to earn their rent. Friends recalled that she'd been frightened by the Whitechapel murders; she had Barnett read her the latest revelations from the newspaper and had planned to leave London.

After a night on the streets, Mary Kelly emerged from her small room in Miller's Court at about eight on the morning of November 9, 1888. A friend passed her in the street and asked why she was up so early. Kelly said that she was sick from “the horrors of drink.” About two hours later she was seen at the Britannia public house, imbibing with some other people. Forty-five minutes later her landlord told his associate, Thomas Bowyer, to knock on her door and ask her for some of the long-overdue rent. There was no response, but Bowyer noticed a broken pane of glass in the window, so he pushed back the curtain and peered into the room. He first saw two lumps of flesh piled on the bedside table, and then he recognized Kelly's mutilated corpse sprawled across the bed.

When the police arrived and entered the room, they discovered a scene more the “work of a devil than of a man.” Mary Kelly's throat had been savagely sliced open, her face was hacked beyond recognition, and her body had been meticulously sliced up, with various organs and body parts carefully arranged around the bed or piled on the nearby table. Her clothes had been burned in the fire grate.

The official report suggested that she had been murdered some time around two a.m, belying the witnesses who saw her on the streets the next morning. The distinctive Jack the Ripper murders apparently ended with this bloody climax—there's never been a good reason proposed for the crimes, or any reason why they stopped. Of course, the case has become infamous and inspired endless speculation and theories—but nothing more than speculation. A definitive solution is probably lost to time.

—

Dracula
was dedicated “To My Dear Friend, Hommy-Beg,” Manx slang for “Little Tommy.” That was Stoker's friend, the novelist Thomas Hall Caine.

Ironically, the powerful force of Stoker's vampire has imparted a curse on Caine, the same way that Jack the Ripper imparted a curse on Mansfield, virtually obliterating a successful career and turning him into a footnote—or, more properly, a line of dedication.

Thomas Henry Hall Caine was born in Cheshire in 1853. His father, a shipsmith, was from the Isle of Man, and when little Tommy was five he was sent to the island to stay with his grandmother, where he was indoctrinated into the Manx language and folklore.

He returned to his family in Liverpool, an undersized, odd little boy with wide dark eyes and red hair. He was always a bit of a loner and an intellectual. Before he was ten years old, he lost two of his sisters, one to “water on the brain” and one to whooping cough, and he developed a dread fear of disease—made all the worse when cholera swept though Liverpool in 1866.

Caine was apprenticed to the office of an architect and slowly developed a talent for writing. When he was still a teenager he returned to the Isle of Man, reveling in the hospitality of his aunt and uncle, and accepted a job as an assistant schoolteacher. When he returned to Liverpool, two years later, it was with the resolve to write a novel or a play. In 1874, when he was twenty-one, he first met Henry Irving, then a young touring actor attempting the role of Hamlet. Caine was writing theater criticism for the Liverpool newspaper and contributed an article, “Irving's Influence on the Theatre of His Day,” which led Caine to lecture on Irving's performance in
Hamlet
. Their meeting formed a parallel to Irving's later meeting with Stoker—another young writer, this time in Dublin, who also publicized the actor, pledged his friendship, and fell under his spell.

That same year, 1874, Caine met a curious character, a self-proclaimed “American Doctor” named Francis Tumblety, who had set up shop in Liverpool and offered herbal cures that, he claimed, were authentic secrets of the American Indians. Caine's preoccupation with his health drew him to Tumblety in search of cures, and they immediately formed a friendship.

—

Dr. Francis Tumblety was clearly something of a quack. He was apparently born in 1833 in Canada, the youngest of eleven children, and named after his father, Frank, who was an Irish immigrant. When the boy was still young the family moved to Rochester, New York. A boyhood friend remembered him as selling books and papers on the packet ships, boarding as the ships approached the Erie Canal and offering his wares. He was “a dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared-for, good-for-nothing boy” who traded in equally dirty merchandise. Evidently he sold nasty pornographic booklets and pictures to passing crew and passengers.

When he was seventeen he left Rochester, then turned up in Detroit, Toronto, and Saint John, New Brunswick, practicing as a doctor. He probably had received no training at all, except for some work at a local drugstore. Tumblety boasted that he was the “electric physician of international reputation” and promoted himself with pretentious newspaper advertisements or by walking about town with an imperious manner in outlandish, elaborate clothing. He usually favored some mysterious combination of military uniforms, bright-colored trousers, boots with spurs, a breast filled with medals, and headwear with plumes. He wore a long brush mustache that, some portraits show, was sometimes twisted and waxed to ridiculous, long horizontal tips. He could be seen parading on the streets mounted on a snow-white horse and followed by a pack of hound dogs.

Tumblety's practice—whether it was based in fraud or actual experience—was surprisingly modern in its philosophy. He condemned surgeons with a “horror of cutting,” criticized the popular use of metals in medicine, such as arsenic and mercury, and condemned the long-standing practice of bleeding patients. Instead, he insisted that herbal remedies offered the only necessary cures. A promotional poem explained:

Our Father—whom all goodness fills,

Provides the means to cure all ills;

The simple herbs beneath our feet

Well used, relieve our pains complete.

He expanded his business to a number of cities and developed an herbal cure that supposedly eliminated pimples, one of many dubious patent medicines that were then in fashion. Tumblety must have made a small fortune, for he lived lavishly and seldom exhibited a need for money. He might have been thought of as a silly, greedy, and antisocial dandy, a pompous self-promoter, or a harmless buffoon—many of his acquaintances summarized him this way—but there were also dangerous aspects to his personality and he was surrounded by a series of unrelenting lawsuits and threats.

In Saint John, his inept medical treatments led to the death of a well-liked locomotive engineer, and an inquest was convened. By the time Tumblety was proved guilty of manslaughter, he had already left the country and settled in Boston. In Washington during the Civil War, his ostentatious use of army regalia and boasts about his connection to General McClellan's staff, earned him criticism from actual military men. He sued a music hall for ridiculing him and may well have engineered the episode for the sake of publicity. He manufactured testimonials from well-known people and was caught doing it. He was arrested and briefly jailed for wearing a military uniform.

Shortly after Lincoln's assassination, Tumblety was arrested as a possible collaborator and jailed for two days. When he later wrote about the incident, in a self-serving, self-published booklet called “Kidnapping of Dr. Tumblety, by Order of the Secretary of War of the U.S.,” it seems that the confusion was caused by the name J. W. Blackburn, an alias used by Tumblety that was also the name of a Confederate spy who had been plotting to spread yellow fever through the northern states.

Tumblety moved his operations to Europe, favoring London, and boasted of his friendship with important American and British celebrities. His genuine fame, combined with his ability to exaggerate, make it impossible to evaluate these claims. Was he really a regular guest of President Lincoln? Was he a personal friend of Charles Dickens? Certainly, he had been able to charm a young, impressionable writer in Liverpool named Hall Caine.

—

Tumblety's acquaintances recorded the herb doctor's intense hatred of women. One colonel, who had been treated to an elaborate dinner at Tumblety's hotel room in Washington, D.C., noticed that no women had been invited and asked why. “His face instantly became as black as a thunder cloud.” The doctor snarled that he would “sooner give you a dose of quick poison than take you into such danger.” He proceeded with a lecture on the dangers of women, and fallen women in particular.

He invited the party of gentlemen into his office and opened the wooden cases, displaying a grotesque museum of glass jars filled with anatomical specimens. He seemed to specialize in the wombs “of every class of woman.”

Other associates noticed that he considered women responsible for all the ills of society and felt they could not be trusted. He once explained to a visitor that he had married early to a beautiful woman who was a number of years older than he was. Just after the wedding he noticed her tendency to flirt with other men and he grew suspicious. Passing through the worst part of town one day, Tumblety noticed his wife entering a house of ill repute with another man, and he left her.

Tumblety's story of his marriage sounds as exaggerated and carefully crafted as his advertising claims, but associates recalled him habitually mumbling, “No women for me.” He was uncomfortable around women throughout his life and was believed to be homosexual. He sometimes hired young men as employees who were well paid to accompany the quiet, moody boss; Tumblety was reportedly illiterate and he required a bright amanuensis. At other times, he hovered around the post office, seeking the company of the clerks, or gravitated to groups of young soldiers.

Letters from Tumblety show that Caine was clearly courted and, simultaneously, squeezed for any available money. When Tumblety left for London, he wrote to Caine, explaining that he planned to manufacture his pills in England, and encouraging him to invest in the project: “There is no place in the world like England for good pills. The English people all indulge in eating late suppers which produces costiveness and they must have cathartic pills.” On another occasion, he boldly demanded money from his young friend: “Don't trifle with my patience any longer. Send me two pounds to the above address, no more, nor no less, a paltry amount than two pounds and our friendly correspondence shall go on. . . .”

Challenged, Caine sent the two pounds, but avoided investing in the doctor's business ventures. As Tumblety seemed to never want for money, his admonishment must have been a test of loyalty. Caine was also finagled into writing a booklet for Tumblety, and he accepted invitations to visit him in London. These visits only encouraged more desperate letters or pleading telegrams in response: “Come here tomorrow evening. I must see you,” or “Dear boy wire at once. . . . Wire, wire, wire, wire, wire, wire.” In another letter after Caine's visit, Tumblety wrote: “You have proved yourself feminine and I feel under a great obligation and hope some time to be able to make some recompense.” Caine told a friend that he found his visit to Tumblety “arduous.”

Francis Tumblety left London for New York in August 1876, encouraging Caine to join him there. He followed, months later, with a pleading letter from San Francisco: “It gives me infinite pleasure to hear from you and I should dearly love to see your sweet face and spend an entire night in your company. I feel such melancholy when I read your amiable letter. . . . It only stimulates the affection I have for you.”

Caine must have been relieved when the letters dissolved away shortly after that. There's no record that they corresponded after this brief, intense friendship. Tumblety returned to England just over ten years later, settling in London, and it's possible that he contacted his old friend. Hall Caine's fame as a novelist would have proved irresistible to him.

—

Tumblety became a sort of tourist attraction in cities throughout Europe and across America. A Chicago lawyer recalled his jaw-dropping appearance on a city street:

I never saw anything quite equal to it. He had an enormous Espian shako [a tall military hat with a plume] on his head, an overcoat, the front of which was covered with decorations, earrings in his ears and by his side a very black negro, fantastically got up in a parti-colored dress that appeared to be a blending of the flags of all nations. A great crowd followed him but he didn't appear to notice them. . . .

In 1880 in New York, Tumblety brought a lawsuit, claiming that one of his bright young men had been given power of attorney and had then disappeared with some of the doctor's funds. When he was called to court and asked from what institution he had graduated, Tumblety steadfastly refused to answer. The case collapsed. The employee then brought a suit against the doctor, “charging atrocious assault, and the evidence collected in this case was of the most disgusting sort.”

In 1888 he traveled back to Liverpool and then on to London. He was now in his fifties and had stopped wearing military outfits, favoring sharp British-style clothing instead. Authors Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey, who researched Tumblety in their book
The Lodger
, claim that he took up lodgings at 22 Batty Street in the East End (perhaps in addition to other rooms in the city). His presence in the dirty squalor of Whitechapel was a marked contrast to his usual lavish hotels and may have signaled an especially sinister change in his lifestyle or tastes.