The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

JACK THE RIPPER by Philip Sugden

The identity of Jack the Ripper, who slaughtered six prostitutes in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888, remains the greatest unsolved crime mystery of the Victorian age. The case is thick with theories. Candidates for the killer have ranged from known criminals to luminaries of Court and Social; he (the assumption has to be that the Ripper was male) is said to have moved in several unlinked (and, one is tempted to add, ever-decreasing) circles: medicine, midwifery, butchery, sorcery, Freemasonry, to name but a few. The late twentieth century has thrown up some likely and unlikely suggestions, including Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, an American quack called Tumblety, and even James Maybrick, the unlikely author of the disputed “Ripper diary”, who stumbles into the frame from another Victorian puzzle, that of his own lingering death in Liverpool six months after the last Ripper murder (qv, Florence Maybrick elsewhere in this volume). This review of the case and the clues comes from the historian Philip Sugden (b. 1947), who published his authoritative full-length survey of the facts in his book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (Robinson, London 1994).

“Hunt the Ripper” is almost as old a game as the murders themselves.

In 1888, at the height of the Ripper scare, Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told Sir James Fraser, his counterpart in the City of London: “We are inundated with suggestions and names of suspects.” And four years later Chief Inspector Abberline, the man who had coordinated the police investigation on the ground, remembered it as a time of despair. “Theories!” he snorted in an interview for Cassell’s Saturday Journal, “we were lost almost in theories, there were so many of them.”

Today, more than a century on, little has changed. The identity of Jack the Ripper is almost a British obsession and the production of new and improbable theories a cottage industry for amateur sleuths. The term “Ripperologist” is now widely used to describe these theorists and may one day find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. Some genuine researchers and an entirely respectable periodical devoted to the murders acknowledge the term, but in common parlance it has come to denote the Ripper charlatan or crank. Unfortunately, too many of the contributors to the steadily growing stack of Ripper books have been written by authors of this stamp and they have taken us away from, not towards, the truth. For there is an important distinction between the methods of the historian and the archetypal Ripperologist. The historian sets out to recover the facts by patient research and the rigorous evaluation of primary sources, and his conclusions follow upon the evidence he has uncovered and studied. The Ripperologist works in the reverse order. First he decides who he wants Jack the Ripper to be. And then he plunders the sources for anything that will invest his candidate with a veneer of credibility. In doing so, inevitably, he perverts, if not suppresses, evidence that conflicts with his theory, and in the worst instances he has not scrupled to buttress his case with “evidence” that has been completely invented. The historian seeks truth. The Ripperologist is too often only intent upon selling a theory and his business is confidence trickery.

In 1910 Dr L. Forbes Winslow was falsifying evidence on the Ripper and he was not the first of his kind. However, since the early 1970s, when alleged royal connections with the case stimulated fresh public interest, the potential rewards for marketable theories-and consequently the temptations to fake evidence-have grown. Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, published in 1976, was a worldwide bestseller. In Knight’s tale the victims were murdered to prevent them revealing that Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson, had married a Catholic, and the principal killer was none other than Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen herself! It was based upon “revelations” made by the artist and picture restorer Joseph Sickert, but only two years after Knight’s book came out Sickert pulled the rug out from under his feet by admitting that the story had been “a hoax… a whopping fib”. In 1991 extracts from fake Abberline diaries were published and in 1993 another fraudulent diary, this one purporting to be that of the Ripper himself, was marketed amidst huge publicity. Few readers appear to have been deceived. But in all this welter of speculation and falsehood there is a real danger that the few facts we know about Jack the Ripper will be lost and it is important that we keep them before us.

Let’s recall them now.

Because the Ripper was never caught we cannot be certain how many murders he perpetrated. Detectives and surgeons involved in the case themselves disagreed on the true total of his victims, estimates ranging from four to nine. Both Robert Anderson, Head of CID, and Abberline, the senior Yard man on the spot, opted for a tally of six. This was, and is, a common view, and it is the one adopted here, but it is important to understand that the existing evidence permits lower or higher figures to be plausibly argued. All six victims were prostitutes and all were slain within a single square mile of the East End of London in the late summer and autumn of 1888.

The first murder now widely attributed to the Ripper was that of Martha Tabram, found dead on the first floor landing of George Yard Buildings, a tenement block in George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street, on the morning of Tuesday, 7 August 1888. Martha had been stabbed frenziedly to death. Dr Timothy Killeen, who conducted the post-mortem examination, found thirty-nine stab wounds on her body. Two different weapons appeared to have been used. Most of the wounds could have been inflicted with a penknife but there was a deep wound in the breast which Dr Killeen felt could only have been made by a strong, long-bladed weapon like a dagger or bayonet.

The number of wounds and the use of more than one weapon suggest the possibility that more than one attacker was involved but the mysteries surrounding Martha’s death were never dispelled. Just over three weeks later, on the last day of August, another woman was killed.

The second victim was Mary Nichols, known to her friends as Polly, a hard-drinking forty-three-year-old Londoner. Like Martha Tabram before her she was living apart from her husband and, also like her, was supporting herself by soliciting on the streets. At about one-twenty on the morning of her death, 31 August, Polly was turned out of a common lodging house in Thrawl Street because she couldn’t afford fourpence to pay for a bed. She was wearing a new black straw bonnet trimmed with black velvet and, as she left the house, told the deputy to keep her bed for her until she raised the money. “I’ll soon get my ‘doss’ money,” she said laughing, “see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now!” About an hour later she was seen, very drunk, on the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road. And not much more than an hour after that she was dead. Her body was discovered at about three-forty by a carman walking to work along Buck’s Row (present Durward Street), Whitechapel.

Charles Cross, the carman, may have disturbed and scared away the killer because medical opinion placed the time of death only minutes before he arrived on the scene. Even so Polly had sustained horrific injuries. Her throat had been cut down to the spinal column and her abdomen ripped open, exposing her intestines. A post-mortem examination was made by Dr Rees Llewellyn. He concluded that the wounds had been inflicted with a strong-bladed knife and that the murderer had exhibited “rough anatomical knowledge”. No further clues came to light. Police made numerous inquiries in the neighbourhood but the killer seemed to have vanished without leaving, as Chief Inspector Swanson reported, “the slightest shadow of a trace”.

A week later he struck again. On this occasion the victim was a forty-seven-year-old widow named Annie Chapman. Annie supplemented meagre earnings from crochet work, antimacassars and flower selling with casual prostitution. Her fate was strikingly similar to that of Polly Nichols. Expelled from a common lodging house in Dorset Street because she lacked the money for a bed, Annie was on the streets in the early hours of Saturday, 8 September, and just before six her dead and mutilated body was found in the backyard of No. 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. The throat had been ferociously severed, the abdomen laid open and the womb, together with parts of the vagina and bladder, extracted and carried away by the murderer. The pitiful contents of Annie’s pocket-two combs and a piece of coarse muslin-were found carefully arrayed by her feet.

It was the Hanbury Street murder that yielded what appeared to be the first important clues to the identity of the killer. Dr Phillips, the police surgeon who carried out the post-mortem, told the inquest that in his view the culprit had displayed both anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. And this time there was a witness. At five-thirty, shortly before Annie was killed, Mrs Elizabeth Long saw her talking to a man outside No. 29. Unfortunately, she only saw the man’s back. But she remembered that he was only slightly taller than Annie (Annie was about five feet tall), that he was wearing a dark coat and brown deerstalker hat and that he was of “shabby genteel” appearance. She thought he was a foreigner over forty years old.

The macabre slaying in Hanbury Street plunged Whitechapel and Spitalfields into panic.

For some days afterwards excited crowds gathered about the murder sites in Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street, turning furiously upon anyone they fancied to blame. Several times police had to rescue innocent eccentrics from the hands of lynch mobs. After dark the streets were deserted except for patrolling constables and homeless vagabonds. And in Mile End a vigilance committee was established to raise a reward for the capture of the murderer.

The CID investigated numerous suspects. The most famous at this stage of the murder hunt was John Pizer, known throughout the neighbourhood as “Leather Apron”. Pizer was an unemployed shoemaker. He fell under suspicion because of his reputation for bullying local prostitutes and after the Nichols murder newspapers linked him with the crime in a series of lurid articles. Terrified of mob vengeance, Pizer took refuge at his brother’s house in Mulberry Street. The police arrested him there on 10 September but subsequent questioning soon established that he had sound alibis for the dates of the murders. Indeed, when Annie Chapman was killed Pizer was hiding at his brother’s house, afraid to venture out. “I will tell you why,” he informed the inquest, “I should have been torn to pieces!”

By the end of the month the East End had recovered its nerve. But then, on the morning of Sunday, 30 September, two women were slain, only one hour and some three-quarters of a mile apart.

The first was Elizabeth Stride, a widow and well-known prostitute, whose last place of residence was a common lodging house in Flower and Dean Street. At about twelve-thirty on the fatal morning PC William Smith, on patrol in Berner Street, off Commercial Road, saw her talking with a man. Her companion looked about twenty-eight years old, stood five foot seven or eight inches tall, and sported a small dark moustache. He was respectably dressed in a black diagonal cutaway coat and dark deerstalker and he was carrying a parcel wrapped up in newspaper. Fifteen minutes later another passer-by, Israel Schwartz, actually saw a man throwing Elizabeth down on the pavement outside Dutfield’s yard in Berner Street. Schwartz, too frightened to intervene, cowardly scurried away. But he later furnished the police with a good description of the assailant: “Age about thirty, height five foot five inches, complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak.” Elizabeth’s body was found in the passage communicating between Berner Street and Dutfield’s Yard at about one. Her throat had been cut from left to right, as in the cases of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, but there were no other mutilations.

Just forty-five minutes after the discovery in Berner Street an even more gruesome one was made in Mitre Square, within the eastern boundary of the City of London. City PC Edward Watkins patrolled the square at one-thirty and found it deserted. Entering it again at one forty-four, however, he discovered the dead body of a woman in the darkest and southernmost corner. The throat had been ferociously severed from left to right, the head and face cruelly slashed, there were severe abdominal injuries and the left kidney and part of the womb had been cut out and taken away. “She was ripped up like a pig in the market,” said PC Watkins later, “I have been in the force a long while but I never before saw such a sight.”

The Mitre Square victim was a forty-six-year-old charwoman and prostitute named Kate Eddowes. What is thought to have been the last known sighting of her alive occurred at one thirty-five. Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveller, was leaving the Imperial Club in Duke Street when he noticed a couple standing at the entrance of a passage which led from Duke Street into Mitre Square. The man looked “rather rough and shabby”. He was five foot seven or eight inches in height, of medium build and appeared to be about thirty years old. The clothes included a pepper-and- salt coloured jacket, a reddish neckerchief and a grey cloth cap with a peak. Lawende thought he looked like a sailor. Ten minutes after this sighting Kate’s body was found in the square.

A piece of Kate’s apron, still wet with blood, was found discarded a few streets away in the entry to Nos. 108-119 Wentworth Model Dwellings, Goulston Street. Just above it, written in white chalk on the right-hand side of the doorway, were the words:

The Juwes are

The men That

Will not

be Blamed

for nothing.

If this message was written by the murderer-and it probably was-it was the only tangible clue he ever left behind. Its correct interpretation, however, is problematical. On the face of it it suggested that the killer was a vengeful Jew and for this reason Sir Charles Warren, afraid that it might provoke retaliatory attacks upon the Jewish community, ordered it to be erased before daybreak. Nevertheless, the prevailing police view at the time was that the message was a deliberate red herring, intended to throw them off the scent of the real culprit.

The great disparity in the injuries inflicted upon Elizabeth Stride and Kate Eddowes has led some writers to contend that they were slain by different men. This is not impossible. But Elizabeth may have escaped mutilation only because her killer was disturbed by Louis Diemschutz, the man who found the body, and it is now generally believed that the Ripper walked into the City to find a second victim when his desire to mutilate the first had been thwarted. If so his return to Whitechapel, where he discarded the piece of Kate’s apron, undoubtedly suggests that he lived in the East End.

After the double murder the police unwittingly increased apprehension in the East End by giving publicity to a letter received by the Central News Agency. This letter, purportedly sent by the murderer, was written in red ink and promised further killings. “I am down on whores,” it ran, “and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled.” The letter was dated 25 September, five days before the double killing, and was signed “Jack the Ripper”. The police posted facsimiles of the letter-and a postcard written in the same hand-outside police stations in the hope that someone might recognize the handwriting but the scribe was never traced. There is nothing in the content of the documents, however, to suggest that they were really written by the murderer. The police themselves came to regard them as hoaxes and many years later a suspicion existed at the Yard that Tom Bulling and Charles Moore, two journalists at the Central News, had been responsible. Whatever the identity of the hoaxer, the only significance of the letter now is that it gave the murderer the gruesome nickname by which he seems destined to be remembered: Jack the Ripper.

The horrific murder of Mary Kelly in her room at No. 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, on Friday, 9 November 1888, was the last generally attributed to the Ripper.

Mary was a young Irish prostitute. At the time of her death she was more than six weeks in arrears with her rent and when last seen, at about two on the fatal morning, was soliciting in Commercial Street. A casual labourer named George Hutchinson saw her meet a well-dressed client there and take him to Miller’s Court. The man had a large moustache curled up at the ends. He was of Jewish appearance, dark, about thirty-four or thirty-five years old and five foot six inches in height. His attire was impressive. Hutchinson remembered a dark felt hat, a long coat with the collar and cuffs trimmed in astrakhan, a large gold watch chain displayed from the waistcoat and a horseshoe pin affixed in the tie. He was carrying a small parcel in his left hand.

At about four two residents in Miller’s Court thought they heard a scream of “Murder!” Some seven hours later the landlord’s assistant, calling at No. 13 for rent, discovered Mary’s body. It lay on the bed, naked except for the remains of a linen undergarment. She had been appallingly mutilated. The throat had been severed, the face hacked beyond recognition, the breasts cut off and the abdomen laid open. The viscera had been extracted and deposited in various places around the body. The flesh from the abdomen and thighs had been stripped away and placed on a bedside table. The heart had been cut out through the abdominal cavity. It was never recovered.

There were similar murders in the East End after 1888 but these are now generally regarded as copy crimes. After Miller’s Court, seemingly, the Ripper vanished, as “if through a trapdoor in the earth”, as one contemporary quaintly termed it.

Some serial killers have claimed far more victims than the Ripper but few have terrorized a community so completely as he did the East End of 1888. Partly this was because his crimes were grotesque, partly because they were so concentrated in time and place. “No one who was living in London that autumn will forget the terror created by these murders,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, ex-Head of CID, many years later. “Even now I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys: ‘Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel.’ Such was the burden of their ghastly song; and, when the double murder of 30 September took place… no servant-maid deemed her life safe if she ventured out to post a letter after ten o’clock at night.”

So who was Jack the Ripper?

Well, the historical record does suggest a few clues. The witnesses tended to describe a white male, relatively young, in his twenties or thirties, of medium height or less and respectably dressed. Dr Gordon Brown, who carried out the post-mortem examination of Kate Eddowes, was convinced that the murderer had demonstrated surgical skill as well as anatomical knowledge in his extraction of the left kidney. Certainly most of the doctors who saw the Ripper’s handiwork felt that some degree of anatomical knowledge had been involved. And the close geographical grouping of the crimes, together with the killer’s return to Whitechapel from Mitre Square, suggest a local man.

Can we go further? Can we put a name to the Ripper? The answer to that one, despite the blandishments of the Ripperologists, is an emphatic no.

The police investigated hundreds of suspects. It is sometimes said that there was a principal suspect but this implies a consensus of view that simply did not exist within the detective force. Some suspects were more interesting than others but different officers held different theories. Many police records from the period have been lost but enough survives for us to identify some of the main suspects. Indeed, as a result of intensive research over the last thirty years we probably know more about these men than the police did at the time.

One of the most interesting police suspects was Aaron Kosminski, a poor Jewish barber committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. Interesting because his appears to have been the only case in which the police procured evidence to link a suspect with any of the crimes. Sir Robert Anderson certainly came to believe that Kosminski was the Ripper and refers to him in his memoirs, published in 1910. By Anderson’s account Kosminski was identified by a witness, the “only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer”, but the police were unable to charge him because the witness, also Jewish, refused to give evidence against a fellow-Jew.

Unfortunately, the more we learn about Kosminski the less likely a suspect he seems. Most of the documentation is lost but the clues we have suggest that the witness was Joseph Lawende, the man believed to have fleetingly seen the Ripper on the night of the double murder, and that he did not identify Kosminski until 1890-91, about two years after the event. A great deal of research has been conducted into identification evidence of this kind since Anderson’s time and it has taught us that at periods of a year or more after the original sighting it is worthless. There are other doubts about whether Kosminski can have been the Ripper. We have no clear evidence that he possessed anatomical knowledge. And although he spent more than twenty-five years in asylums (he died in Leavesden Asylum, near Watford, in 1919) the doctors who monitored his progress there explicitly and repeatedly described him as a harmless patient.

Melville Macnaghten, who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1889 and became Head of CID in 1903, held to a different theory. In his view the Ripper was Montague John Druitt, a man who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames shortly after the Miller’s Court tragedy. However, Macnaghten’s data on Druitt is now known to have been seriously flawed. He thought, for example, that he was a doctor. In reality Druitt was a schoolteacher and barrister. No one has ever proved a connection between Druitt and the crimes, or even the East End. On the other hand there is evidence to suggest that he spent his summer vacation on the south coast in 1888 and hence may not have been in London when Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols died. Thus, on 1 September, the day after Polly was murdered, Druitt was in Canford, Dorset, playing for the local cricket team against Wimborne.

George Chapman (real name Severin Klosowski), executed in 1903 for the murder of Maud Marsh, fits what we know about the Ripper better than either Kosminski or Druitt. Ex-Chief Inspector Abberline undoubtedly believed that Chapman and the Ripper were the same man and after the trial he congratulated Inspector Godley, who had apprehended Chapman, with the words: “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!”

Before coming to London in 1887 Chapman was trained as a surgeon in his native Poland. In 1888 he lived in Cable Street, within walking distance of the murder sites. His appearance matches descriptions of the Ripper well. And he was violent and cruel. Chapman was fascinated with weaponry and adorned his walls with swords and firearms and he terrorized a succession of female consorts, threatening one with a knife, another with a revolver and physically abusing several. Maud Marsh was the third “wife” he poisoned to death between 1897 and 1902.

If Chapman was the Ripper he must have abandoned the knife in favour of poison and some writers have not found a change of modus operandi as dramatic as this credible. The fatal flaw in the case against Chapman, however, is the simple fact that not a scrap of tangible evidence was ever adduced to connect him with a single one of the Ripper crimes.

Perhaps the most important document to come to light in recent years is the Littlechild letter. Discovered in 1993, it is a letter written by Ex-Chief Inspector John Littlechild, one-time Head of the Special Branch, to the journalist George R. Sims in 1913, and it introduced us to a police suspect hitherto unknown to researchers: an American quack doctor named Francis Tumblety.

Tumblety was in London at the time of the murders. On 16 November 1888 he was charged at Marlborough Street Police Court with homosexual offences and bailed to appear at the Central Criminal Court, but he violated bail and fled, first to France, and then back to America.

Littlechild considered Tumblety a “very likely” Ripper suspect and an interesting circumstantial case can indeed be alleged against him. He had pretensions to medical knowledge, he was a known misogynist and he collected anatomical specimens. His collection included, according to one who saw it, jars containing wombs from “every class of women”, and it will be remembered that in two of the Ripper murders the womb had been extracted and taken away.

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.