Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Nine. The Dark Lantern

During the reign of George III, robbers ruled the high roads and byways, and most villains could buy their way out of trouble with a bribe.

London was protected by night watchmen armed with staves, lanterns, and wooden noisemakers called rattles that made a startling clack-clack-clack sound when the head was spun. It wasn't until 1750 that times began to change. Henry Fielding, better known as an author than a magistrate, gathered a faithful group of constables under his command. With?400 allotted by the government, Fielding formed the first squadron of "thief-takers."

They broke up gangs and other scoundrels who terrorized the lives of Londoners. When Henry Fielding was ready to move on, he was followed by his brother John, in whose case justice was truly blind. Sir John Fielding had lost his eyesight and was famous for wearing a bandage over his eyes when he confronted prisoners. He was said to recognize criminals by voice.

Under Sir John Fielding's supervision, the thief-takers were headquartered on Bow Street and became known as the Bow Street Patrol and then the Bow Street Runners. At this stage, policing was somewhat privatized, and a Bow Street Runner might investigate the burglary of a resident's town house for a fee or simply find the perpetrator and coax him to agree on a settlement with the victim. In an odd way, criminal and civil law were combined, because while it was unlawful to commit bad deeds, order could be restored and a lot of fuss and bother could be avoided through dealmaking.

Better to have half of one's belongings returned than none at all. Better to give back half of what one had stolen than to lose it all and end up in prison. Some Bow Street Runners retired as wealthy men. Nothing much could be done about riots and murders, which were rampant, as were other evil deeds. Dogs were stolen and killed for their hides. Cattle were tortured by "bullock-baiting," and sporting mobs chased the pain-crazed animals until they collapsed and died. From the late 1700s until 1868, executions were public and drew tremendous crowds.

Hanging days were holidays, and the gruesome spectacle was considered a deterrent to crime. During the days of thief-takers and Bow Street Runners, violations of the law punishable by death included horse stealing, forging, and shoplifting. In 1788, thousands gathered at Newgate to watch thirty-year-old Phoebe Harris burned at the stake for counterfeiting coins. Highwaymen were heroes, and admirers cheered them on as they dangled, but the convicted upper class were ridiculed no matter their crime.

When Governor Joseph Wall was hanged in 1802, onlookers fought over the executioner's rope, buying it for a shilling per inch. In 1807, a crowd of 40,000 gathered to watch the execution of two convicted murderers, and men, women, and children were trampled to death. Not every prisoner died quickly or according to plan, and some of the agonal scenes were ghastly. The knot slipped or didn't catch just right and instead of compression of the carotid causing unconsciousness fast, the strangling prisoner flailed violently as men grabbed his kicking legs and pulled down hard to hasten death along. Usually the condemned man lost his pants and twisted and writhed naked in front of the screaming mob. In the old days of the axe, a refusal to place a few coins into an executioner's hand could result in bad aim that required a few extra chops.

In 1829, Sir Robert Peel convinced government and the public that they had a right to sleep safely within their own homes and walk the streets without worry. The Metropolitan Police were established and headquartered at 4 Whitehall Place, its back door opening onto Scotland Yard, the former site of a Saxon palace that had served as a residence for visiting Scottish kings. By the late seventeenth century, most of the palace had fallen to ruin and was demolished, and what remained was used as offices for British government. Many well-known figures once served the crown from Scotland Yard, including the architects Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren and the great poet John Milton, who at one time was the Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. Architect and comic writer Sir John Vanbrugh built a house on the old palace grounds that Jonathan Swift compared to a "goose pie."

Few people realize that Scotland Yard has always been a place and not a police organization. Since 1829, "Scotland Yard" has referred to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, and that remains true today, although the official name now is "New Scotland Yard." I suspect the public will continue to hold to the belief that Scotland Yard is a group of sleuths like Sherlock Holmes and that a London uniform officer is a bobby. Perhaps there will always be books and movies with provincial police who are stumped by a murder and deliver that delightfully hackneyed line, "I think this is a job for Scotland Yard."

From its earliest days, Scotland Yard and its uniformed divisions were resented by the public. Policing was viewed as an affront to the Englishman's civil rights and associated with martial law and the government's way of spying and bullying. When the Metropolitan Police were first organized, they did their best to avoid a military appearance by dressing themselves in blue coats and trousers and topped themselves off with rabbit-skin stovepipe hats reinforced with steel frames just in case an apprehended criminal decided to knock an officer on the head. The hats also came in handy as footstools for climbing over fences and walls or getting into windows.

At first, the Metropolitan Police had no detectives. It was bad enough having bobbies in blue, but the idea of men in ordinary garb sneaking about to collar people was violently opposed by citizens and even by the uniformed police, who resented the fact that detectives would get better pay and worried that the real purpose of these plainclothesmen was to tattle on the rank and file. Developing a solid detective division by 1842 and introducing plainclothes officers in the mid-1840s entailed a few fumbles, including the unenlightened decision to hire educated gentlemen who had no police training. One can only imagine such a person interviewing a drunk East End husband who has just smashed his wife in the head with a hammer or taken a straight razor to her throat.

The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was not formally organized until 1878, or a mere ten years before Jack the Ripper began terrorizing London. By 1888, public sentiment about detectives had not changed much. There remained misgivings about police wearing plain-clothes or arresting people by artifice. The police were not supposed to trap citizens, and Scotland Yard strictly enforced the rule that plain-clothes policing could take place only when there was ample evidence that crimes in a certain area were being committed repeatedly. This approach was enforcement, not prevention. It delayed Scotland Yard's decision to order undercover measures when the Ripper began his slaughters in the East End.

Scotland Yard was completely unprepared for a serial killer like the Ripper, and after Mary Ann Nichols's murder, the public began to cast its eye on the police more than ever, and to criticize, belittle, and blame. Mary Ann's murder and inquest hearings were obsessively covered by every major English newspaper. Her case made the covers of tabloids such as The Illustrated Police News and the budget editions of Famous Crimes, which one could pick up for a penny. Artists rendered sensational, salacious depictions of the homicides, and no one - neither the officials of the Home Office nor the policemen nor the detectives and brass at Scotland Yard nor even Queen Victoria - had the slightest comprehension of either the problem or its solution.

When the Ripper began making his rounds there were only uniformed men walking their beats, all of them overworked and underpaid. They were issued the standard equipment of a whistle, a truncheon, perhaps a rattle, and a bull's-eye lantern, nicknamed a dark lantern because all it really did was vaguely illuminate the person holding it. A bull's-eye lantern was a dangerous, cumbersome device comprised of a steel cylinder ten inches high, including a chimney shaped like a ruffled dust cap. The magnifying lens was three inches in diameter and made of thick, rounded, ground glass, and inside the lamp were a small oil pan and wick.

The brightness of the flame could be controlled by turning the chimney. The inner metal tube would rotate and block out as much of the flame as needed, allowing a policeman to flash his lantern and signal another officer out on the street. I suppose that flash is a bit of an exaggeration if one has ever seen a bull's-eye lantern lit up. I found several rusty but authentic Hiatt amp; Co., Birmingham, bull's-eye lanterns that were manufactured in the mid-1800s, precisely the sort used by the police during the Ripper investigation. One night I carried a lantern out to the patio and lit a small fire in the oil pan. The lens turned into a reddish-orange wavering eye. But the convexity of the glass causes the light to vanish when viewed from certain other angles.

I held my hand in front of the lantern and at a distance of six inches could barely see a trace of my palm. Smoke wisped out the chimney and the cylinder got hot - hot enough, according to police lore, to brew tea. I imagined a poor constable walking his beat and holding such a thing by its two metal handles or clipping the lantern to his leather snake-clasp belt. It's a wonder he didn't set himself on fire.

The typical Victorian may not have had a clue about the inadequacy of bull's-eye lanterns. Magazines and penny tabloids showed constables shining intense beams into the darkest corners and alleyways while frightened suspects reel back from the blinding glare. Unless these cartoonlike depictions were deliberately exaggerated, they lead me to suspect that most people had never seen a bull's-eye lantern in use. But that shouldn't come as a surprise. Police patrolling the safer, less crime-ridden areas of the metropolis would have little or no need to light their lanterns. It was in the forbidden places that the lanterns shone their bloodshot eyes as they blearily probed the constables' beats, and most Londoners traveling by foot or in horse-drawn cabs did not frequent those parts.

Walter Sickert was a man of the night and the slums. He would have had good reason to know exactly what a bull's-eye lantern looked like because it was his habit to wander the forbidden places after his visits to the music halls. During his Camden Town period, when he was producing some of his most blatantly violent works, he used to paint murder scenes in the spooky glow of a bull's-eye lantern. Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly, who shared his house and one of his studios, observed him doing this on more than one occasion, and later described it as "Dr. Jekyll" assuming the "mantle of Mr. Hyde."

The dark blue woolen uniforms and capes the police wore could not keep them warm and dry in bad weather, and when days were warm, a constable's discomfort must have been palpable. He could not loosen the belt or tunic or take off his military-shaped helmet with its shiny Brunswick star. If the ill-fitting leather boots he had been issued maimed his feet, he could either buy a new pair with his own pay or suffer in silence.

In 1887, a Metropolitan policeman gave the public a glimpse of what the average constable's life was like. In an anonymous article in the Police Review and Parade Gossip, he told the story of his wife and their dying four-year-old son having to live in two rooms in a lodging house on Bow Street. Of the policeman's twenty-four-shillings-a-week salary, ten went to rent. It was a time of great civil unrest, he wrote, and animosity toward the police ran hot.

With nothing more than a small truncheon tucked into a special pocket of a trouser leg, these officers went out day after day and night after night, "well nigh exhausted with [our] constant contact with passionate wretches who had been made mad with want and cupidity." Angry citizens screamed vile insults and accused the police of being "against the people and the poor," read the unsigned article. Other better-off Londoners sometimes waited from four to six hours before calling the police after a robbery or burglary and then publicly complained that the police were unable to bring offenders to justice.

Policing was not only a thankless job but also an impossible one, with one sixth of the 15,000-member force out sick, on leave, or suspended on any given day. The supposed ratio of one policeman to 450 citizens was misleading. The number of men actually on the street depended on which shift was on duty. Since the number of policemen on duty always doubled during night shift (10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.), this meant that during day shift (6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.) and late shift (2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) there were only some 2,000 beat officers working. That is a ratio of one policeman to every 4,000 citizens, or one policeman to cover every six miles of street. In August, the ratio got even worse when as many as 2,000 men took vacation leave.

During the night shift a constable was expected to walk his beat in 10 to 15 minutes at an average pace of two and a half miles per hour. By the time the Ripper began his crimes, this requirement was no longer enforced, but the habit was deeply ingrained. Criminals, in particular, could tell a constable's regular leathery walk quite a ways off.

The greater London area was seven hundred square miles, and even if the police ranks doubled during the early morning hours, the Ripper could have prowled East End passageways, alleys, courtyards, and back streets without seeing a single Brunswick star. If a constable was drawing near, the Ripper was forewarned by the unmistakable walk. After the kill, he could slip into the shadows and wait for the body to be discovered. He could eavesdrop on the excited conversations of witnesses, the doctor, and the police. Jack the Ripper could have seen the moving orange eyes of the bull's-eye lanterns without any threat of being seen.

Psychopaths love to watch the drama they script. It is common for serial killers to return to the crime scene or insert themselves in the investigation. A murderer showing up at his victim's funeral is so common that today's police often have plainclothes officers clandestinely videotape the mourners. Serial arsonists love to watch their fires burn. Rapists love to work for social services. Ted Bundy worked as a volunteer for a crisis clinic.

When Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin to death in New York's Central Park, he sat on a wall across the street from his staged crime scene and waited two hours to watch the body discovered, the police arrive, and the morgue attendants finally zip up the pouch and load it into an ambulance. "He found it amusing," recalled Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor who sent Chambers to prison.

Sickert was an entertainer. He was also a violent psychopath. He would have been obsessed with watching the police and doctors examining the bodies at the scenes, and he might have lingered in the dark long enough to see the hand ambulance wheel his victims away. He might have followed at a distance to catch a glimpse of the bodies being locked inside the mortuaries, and he might even have attended the funerals. In the early 1900s he painted a picture of two women gazing out a window, and inexplicably titled the work A Passing Funeral. Several Ripper letters make taunting references to his watching the police at the scene or being present for the victim's burial.

"I see them and they cant see me," the Ripper wrote.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren did not care much about crime, and he didn't know much about it, either. He was an easy target for a psychopath with the brilliance and creativity of Walter Sickert, who would have enjoyed making a fool of Warren and ruining his career. And in the end Warren's failure to capture the Ripper, among his other blunders, brought about his resignation on November 8,1888.

Drawing public attention to the deplorable conditions of the East End and ridding London of Warren may be the only good deeds Jack the Ripper did, even if his motivation was somewhat less than altruistic.