A Criminal History of Mankind (77 page)

What had happened is that, for a large proportion of the population, the old violent world of the
Newgate Calendar
had been left behind. The industrial revolution had created wealth, and wealth has created a new sense of security - a feeling that domestic stability is the very foundation of existence. The typical novel of the eighteenth century was about wanderers and vagabonds:
Tom Jones
,
Robinson Crusoe
,
Peregrine Pickle
,
Gil Bias
. The typical novel of the nineteenth century has a solid, four-square domestic setting. The Victorians loved to read about substantial, respectable people: Squire Brown and Bishop Proudie, Mr Pickwick and John Halifax, Gentleman. Their ideal seemed to be a world rather like that of Tolkien’s hobbits, drowsing in their warm hobbit holes, or John Betjeman’s small boy tucked up in bed, ‘safe inside his slumber-wear’. Dickens catches the feeling better than anyone in his descriptions of Christmas, whether the setting is the farm at Dingley Dell or Bob Cratchit’s shabby four-room cottage. All this explains why the typical Victorian murder is not the ‘bread and butter’ crime, but murder committed for domestic security.

It also explains the rise of socialism. The poor of the eighteenth century had taken it for granted that they were not born ‘gentlemen’, and accepted their lot; but the poor of the nineteenth century wanted to know why they lacked a home and regular income when everybody else - even the Bob Cratchits - seemed to have them. This is what created the sense of ‘alienation’ observed by Marx, and the unrest that led to riots.

What the Victorians failed to notice - even perceptive Victorians like Dickens - was the increasing number of alienated individuals -‘outsiders’ like Lacenaire, who no longer felt themselves a part of society. The first literary expression of the phenomenon occurred in 1888; it was in the October of that year that a sketch called
Hunger
appeared in the Danish literary monthly
My Jord
. Its author, a twenty-year-old Norwegian named Knud Pedersen, described a man living alone in a bleak room in Christiana (Oslo) almost delirious from hunger. He speaks of himself as ‘an exile from existence’, as isolated as a city dweller in a jungle. Two years later, Pedersen expanded the story into a novel, changed his name to Knut Hamsun, and achieved overnight fame. But his novel was regarded as an indictment of an uncaring society; no one recognised it for what it was, the first ‘outsider’ document.

But it was in that same year, 1888, that England was suddenly shocked into an awareness of the alienated ‘loner’. In the early hours of 31 August, a carter on his way to work noticed a bundle lying on the ground in Bucks Row, in the Whitechapel district of east London. It proved to be a woman, whose skirt had been pushed up around her waist, and the man’s first thought was that she had been raped - an indication of the increasing frequency of this crime. He touched her face and realised she was dead. At the mortuary, it was seen that the woman had been disembowelled. She proved to be a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, who had been wandering around trying to find someone to give her a few pence for a bed in a doss house.

A week later, another body was found in the back yard of a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, in the same area. The body was in a rape position, with the legs apart and the knees raised. She had been killed - like Mary Ann Nicholls - by strangulation and then having her throat cut; then the killer had cut her open from the chest downward and removed some of the inner organs. The mutilations seemed to reveal a certain medical knowledge - or at least, a knowledge of where the organs were located.

London became aware that there was a sadistic maniac on the loose. The first murder had caused shock; this caused a sensation. It was recollected that another woman had been murdered in the George Yard Buildings, Whitechapel, in early August, stabbed thirty-nine times. The murders caused the same universal fear that had been experienced in 1811 at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. The police made dozens of arrests - anyone who was denounced by the neighbours as eccentric was a suspect; dozens of unbalanced men walked into police stations declaring that they were the killer. In late September, the murderer acquired a nickname when the Central News Agency received a letter threatening more murders: ‘I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled’; it was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. Confessions to being ‘Jack the Ripper’ continued to pour in, mostly from drunks and mental defectives.

Two days after the ‘Ripper’ letter was received, the killer struck twice on the same night. In the back yard of an International Workers Educational Institute in Berner Street he cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute called Elizabeth Stride, but was interrupted by the arrival of a horse and cart and escaped from the yard as the alarmed driver rushed into the club. He walked half a mile or so towards the City, picked up a prostitute called Catherine Eddowes, who had just been released from the Bishopsgate police station where she had been taken in drunk and disorderly, and took her into the corner of Mitre Square. A police constable who passed through the square every quarter of an hour found the body lying there. The face had been badly mutilated; the left kidney and entrails had been removed and taken away. The next morning, before the news had had time to reach the newspapers, the Central News Agency received another ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter, regretting that he had been interrupted, and so could not send the victims’ ears as promised. (There had been an attempt to remove the second victim’s ear.)

Six weeks later, on 8 November 1888, the Ripper committed his last murder. This time he picked up the woman - a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly - outside her lodgings in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street. She was killed in her room at about 2 a.m. - neighbours heard a cry of ‘Murder’ at this time but paid no attention - then the Ripper spent the remainder of the night mutilating her, burning rags in the grate to provide light. When she was found the following morning, the head had been almost severed from the body. Some of the entrails had been hung over a picture frame. The heart lay beside her on the pillow, but her breasts were on the table. One arm had been almost removed, and the killer had spent some time cutting the flesh from the face - including the nose - and the legs. These mutilations must have taken him at least an hour.

Then the murders ceased. The killer was never identified, although Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Commissioner of Police, later declared that the chief suspect had been a young and unsuccessful barrister named Montague John Druitt, who had committed suicide by drowning three weeks after this last murder. There have been many other candidates, from a sadistic midwife to the heir to the throne, the Duke of Clarence. But most of the books about the Ripper are based upon what is probably a false assumption: that the Ripper must have been known to many people as a maniac, and that he (or she) would have stood out from the crowd as an unusual personality. The truth is probably that the Ripper was some anonymous unknown, a street sweeper or market porter, whose sadistic obsession was totally unsuspected by those who knew him. But the assumption tells us a great deal about the impact of the murders. They seemed to be a deliberate outrage, like some terrorist bombing, an ‘alienated’ man screaming defiance at society and taking enormous pleasure in the shock he produces. The double murder, followed by the elaborate mutilation of the last victim - the photograph makes it look like a butcher’s carcase - gives the impression of someone shouting: ‘There - what about that?’

The odd thing is that the Victorians were only dimly aware that these were sexual murders. No contemporary newspaper refers to them as sex crimes, although the murderer is often described as ‘morally insane’. Bernard Shaw said jokingly that the killer was probably a social reformer who wanted to draw attention to the appalling conditions in the East End of London; but the comment was more apposite than he realised. The Ripper was clearly a man who was insanely obsessed with blood and stabbing and who was particularly fascinated by the womb. He was obsessively neat - the bodies were always carefully arranged, sometimes with the contents of the pockets placed symmetrically around them. But the most significant thing about him was that he felt totally
separated
from society. Like Lacenaire, he probably experienced a state of detachment, a sense of unreality, which vanished only when he killed or daydreamed about killing. Although he was probably indifferent to the social conditions in the East End of London, he was nevertheless an extreme product of Marx’s ‘alienated’ society.

The most sensational American case of the same decade was in some ways more remarkable than that of Jack the Ripper. Hermann Webster Mudgett was born in 1860 in New Hampshire, became a medical student at eighteen, got married, and practised his first swindle - an insurance fraud involving the faked death of a patient - while still at medical school. He practised medicine in Mooers Forks, New York State until 1886, then moved to Chicago, where he became ‘H. H. Holmes’. There he began his career of murder, killing a friend, Dr Robert Leacock, for his life insurance. He married a second time - bigamously - but ran into trouble when he forged his wife’s uncle’s signature. He became an assistant in a drug store run by a Mrs Holden on 63
^rd
Street, Englewood, and in 1890 became a partner. There was some talk about rigged books and prosecution, and Mrs Holden vanished. Holmes became sole owner of the store. He was soon doing so well that he built himself a house opposite - it later became known as ‘murder castle’; one of its peculiarities was a chute leading to the basement; others were glass pipes with which he could flood rooms with gas, and peep holes into all the rooms. One of his tenants, Dr Russell, was killed with a blow from a chair; the body was sold to a medical school which apparently asked no questions about the injuries.

A Mrs Julia Conner and her daughter moved into the house, and Mrs Conner became pregnant by Holmes, so her husband left her. Mrs Conner died in the course of an operation for abortion, and Holmes poisoned the daughter, afraid she might talk about her mother’s death.

Holmes next killed a companion on a fishing trip, discovering he was carrying a great deal of money; the man - named Rodgers - was killed with blows from an oar. A southern speculator named Charles Cole was also killed for his money - his skull was so damaged by the blow that his corpse was useless to the medical school. After that, Holmes killed a domestic servant called Lizzie because he was afraid the janitor was about to run away with her and he wanted to retain his services. Holmes was preparing to ship this corpse to the medical school when his secretary, Mary Haracamp, walked into the room together with a pregnant woman named Sarah Cook. Holmes swiftly pushed them into the tiny room he called ‘the vault’, to be suffocated.

A girl named Emily Cigrand became his new secretary and also his mistress. When she told him she was getting married, Holmes lured her into the ‘vault’ and ordered her to write a letter to her fiancé breaking off the engagement. The girl wrote the letter, but Holmes nevertheless turned on the gas and watched her die a lingering death. His later confession makes it clear that he was now beginning to take considerable pleasure in watching people die.

Ten more victims followed within months. Holmes began using poison; the motive was normally to extort money, but when - as in most cases - the victims were women, they usually became his mistresses too. One of these mistresses was a girl called Minnie Williams, from whom Holmes had swindled several thousand dollars. Holmes murdered her sister Nannie in the vault, and also somehow persuaded her brother to make him the beneficiary of an insurance policy; the brother was later shot ‘in self defence’. By that time, Minnie had also been murdered; she had confessed to an insurance representative that a fire in the ‘castle’ had been deliberate arson.

Soon afterwards, Holmes acquired a partner in crime, a man named Benjamin Pitezel. This may seem out of character; but in fact, Holmes planned to murder Pitezel from the beginning. Their first joint venture in crime landed Holmes in jail for the first time. He bought a drug store in St Louis, mortgaged the stock, then let Pitezel remove it. He spent ten days in jail before being bailed out by his current ‘wife’, a girl named Georgiana Yoke. It was in prison that Holmes met the famous train-robber, Marion Hedgepeth, and confided in him that he had worked out a perfect insurance swindle. It involved insuring a man’s life, getting him ‘killed’ in an accidental explosion, and substituting another body for that of the victim. Hedgepath gave Holmes the name of a crooked lawyer to deal with the insurance company, and Holmes promised to give him five hundred dollars if the plan was successful.

In August 1894, the police were called to a house in Philadelphia where a body had been discovered; it was that of a man who had apparently died in an explosion involving chloroform. The corpse was, in fact, Pitezel. Holmes was the beneficiary, and the insurance company paid up ten thousand dollars. But he failed to pay either Hedgepeth or the crooked lawyer. Hedgepeth denounced Holmes; the insurance company realised they had been defrauded, and Holmes was suddenly a wanted man.

In fact, Holmes was engaged in disposing of the rest of Pitezel’s family, Mrs Pitezel and her five children. He had somehow persuaded Mrs Pitezel to allow him to take three of the children to ‘join their father’. Fortunately, he was located while Mrs Pitezel and two of the children were still alive. He was taken back to Philadelphia, where a post mortem had revealed that Pitezel had died of chloroform poisoning. A detective named Geyer succeeded in tracking down the remains of the three missing children, two girls in Toronto - buried in a cellar - and the nine-year-old boy in a house near Indianapolis, where only a few charred bones were left.

After he had been sentenced to death, Holmes published a full confession of his murders - twenty-seven in all. This is so horrifying that it has been suggested that the confession was partly fabricated - although Holmes had made no attempt to suggest he was insane and it is difficult to imagine any other motive. Moreover, where it was possible to check, the confession was found to be accurate. He claimed to have starved the janitor to death in the ‘vault’; in fact, bricks had been torn from the wall by someone attempting to dig his way out. He claimed that Nannie Williams had marked the door of the vault by kicking it in her death struggles; this footprint was found. He claimed that he had killed Pitezel by tying him up and burning him alive with benzine, in spite of his screams for mercy; the injuries were consistent with this, and since the later inquest showed that Pitezel had died from chloroform poisoning, they must have been inflicted before death. Holmes declared in his confession that he committed his crimes ‘for the pleasure of killing my fellow beings, to hear their cries for mercy and pleas to be allowed even sufficient time to pray...’ Instruments of torture were found in the ‘castle’, including a rack, barrels of acid, a dissecting table and surgical knives. One room had been lined with asbestos, and the gas pipe that entered it seemed to be designed as a kind of blow torch.