Complete History of Jack the Ripper (65 page)

In these wet and muddy streets sexual intercourse would normally have been performed against a wall or fence. Alone with her client in a dark and sheltered spot, the woman stood with her back to the wall and raised her skirts. In such a place and such a position she was completely vulnerable to attack. And before she could utter a cry, the Ripper seized her by the throat. He strangled her, at least into insensibility, and lowered her to the ground with her head towards his left.

A number of circumstances indicate that the murderer strangled his victims before resorting to the knife. In most cases no screams were heard. We also know that the women were lying on their backs when their throats were cut and that there was relatively little spillage of blood. The wounds bled out on the ground beside or under the neck, much of the blood accumulating beneath the body and being soaked up by the back of the clothes. Then, in some cases, direct evidence of strangulation was recorded of the bodies. Martha Tabram was found with her hands clenched and her face swollen and distorted. Polly Nichols had a bruise on one side of the neck and an abrasion on the other. Her face was discoloured and her tongue slightly lacerated. Annie Chapman’s face was livid and swollen, her tongue swollen and protruding. She, too, had marks on the neck, a bruise on the right side and several scratches in the corresponding position on the left. They were, thought Dr Phillips, the impressions of the murderer’s right thumb and fingers.

The throats of the prostrate women were severed from left to right down to the spinal column. Typically the Ripper worked from the right side of the victim. In at least four cases (Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes) the close proximity of the left side to a gate,
fence or wall probably precluded any attack from that quarter. But by kneeling to the right of the victim’s head while cutting the throat the Ripper also ensured that the flow of blood from the left carotid artery was directed away from himself.

The abdominal mutilations were inflicted after death. In 1903 Inspector Reid insisted that the Ripper never took away any bodily parts from his victims.
¹⁰
But this is a good example of how grievously our memories can deceive us. In truth three women were served thus. Annie Chapman’s uterus, together with parts of her vagina and bladder, were carried off by the murderer. In the case of Kate Eddowes it was the uterus and left kidney. And Mary Kelly’s heart was cut out and never recovered.

In no case did the murderer leave a weapon or other clue at the scene of the crime.

Sitting quietly in retirement at his home on the Sussex coast, Walter Dew often reflected on these most gruesome murders. What puzzled the old detective most was the Ripper’s ability to evade vigilant police patrols. ‘I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes,’ he reminds us in his memoirs. ‘I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then by the man’s amazing elusiveness.’
¹¹

Dew and his colleagues were blamed and denigrated for their failure at the time. The charges are still thoughtlessly bandied about by amateur criminologists today. But it is a harsh judgement. If all the historical circumstances are taken into account it is not difficult to understand why the Ripper remained uncaught.

By retiring with the Ripper into secluded byways where they were unlikely to be seen the victims themselves greatly facilitated his crimes. Even at the height of the panic, when prostitutes fled the district or sought shelter in casual wards, the most desperate of their kind might still be seen soliciting for the price of a doss or a drink. A fatalism born of despair possessed such women. Detective Inspector Moore, interviewed in 1889, understood their plight only too well: ‘I tell many of them to go home, but they say they have no home, and when I try to frighten them and speak of the danger they run they’ll laugh and say, “Oh, I know what you mean. I ain’t afraid of him. It’s the Ripper or the bridge with me. What’s the odds?” And it’s true; that’s the worst of it.’
¹²

The Ripper’s escapes from the scenes of his crimes are surprising but not inexplicable. No one knew what he looked like. And although
he may well have been bloodstained there is no reason to depict him scuttling through the streets in clothes that were saturated with blood. In fact, his modus operandi suggests otherwise. We know that the Ripper severed the throats of his victims from the opposite side of the head to the first escape of arterial blood. It is probable, too, that the victims were first strangled. Certainly the abdominal mutilations were inflicted after death. These circumstances all point to the likelihood of the killer remaining very little bloodstained. Then the character of the district worked to his advantage. A warren of dark, evil-smelling courts, alleys and yards, it was impossibly complex for any police force to patrol adequately. The murderer may even have effected escapes through private houses. For, as we learned in the case of Hanbury Street, many tenements in the area were never locked. Any fugitive could duck in by the front door and leave by the back.

The police investigation ultimately failed because the Victorian CID were simply not equipped to deal with ‘motiveless’ murders of this kind. Inquiries into the histories of the victims afforded no clues. Traditional methods of detection, resting heavily upon rewards and informants, were almost useless in a hunt for a lone killer. Even in our own day, with all the advantages of fingerprinting, the biochemical analysis of blood, DNA fingerprinting and psychological profiling, the capture of such offenders is often a matter of luck. Back in 1888 the luck always ran with the Ripper.

Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, in their
Jack the Ripper A to Z
, one of relatively few sane books on the case, contend that the police investigation was ‘professional and competent’.
¹³
Bearing in mind that we must judge the police by the standards of their own time, not by those of our own day, I would not wish to dissent from that view. Indeed, the dedication and diligence of the investigation on the ground is worthy of admiration.

Nevertheless, in one respect the criticisms of the Victorian press were probably justified. The
Telegraph
spoke at the time of a lack of imagination in the detective department, and a study of the Whitechapel crimes certainly does suggest a want of innovative spirit at the Yard. For detectives not only failed to exploit fully the advantages of photography, the one important aid to detection then available, but they evinced no disposition, in the midst of the most important murder hunt of the century, to explore new methods of criminal investigation.

The potential of the popular press, then beginning to come into
its own on the strength of Education Acts of 1870, 1876 and 1880, went largely unrecognized. CID policy on the press has already been explained. It rested upon some sound principles. But there can be little doubt that, on balance, the possibilities of this increasingly influential institution were undervalued. Opportunities were lost. To take just one example, although police rightly repudiated the sketches Richardson showed to Packer and published after the double murder, why was it beyond them to couple a professional artist with one or more reliable witnesses of their own in order to produce a more accurate impression of the murderer?

Most telling is the absence of any reference to fingerprinting in the Whitechapel murder files, even though the pioneers of this technique had been trying to promote their discoveries for over a decade. Herschel, who had employed fingerprinting as a means of identification in India, had advocated its use in a letter to the Registrar General as early as 1877, and Faulds, who had discussed fingerprint classification in
Nature
in 1880, had been trying to interest a suspicious Scotland Yard in the method since 1886. The subject came up again in the midst of the Ripper hunt. Learning that the Jack the Ripper postcard bore a bloody thumbprint, Mr Frederick Jago, a correspondent of the
Times
, observed that the ‘surface markings on no two thumbs are alike’ and urged that the thumbs of suspects be compared through a microscope with the print on the card.
¹⁴

One might reasonably have expected this most baffling of murder mysteries to have called forth advances in the techniques of criminal detection. 1888 did prompt some police soul-searching. Standing Orders on the discovery of murdered bodies were tightened up after the Nichols murder and post-mortem examinations were conducted in the presence of more than one surgeon after that of Annie Chapman. But there was little genuine reappraisal of police methods. And what there was looked back, to tracker dogs, pardons and rewards, not ahead, to photography and fingerprinting.

What of the Ripper himself? Well, historical records tell us a good deal about him.

First, are we dealing with one man or two?

Cases of
folie à deux
, a madness shared by two people, are relatively uncommon in the annals of serial murder but they do occur. Perhaps the most notable recent examples were Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, the ‘Hillside Stranglers’ who raped and murdered a dozen girls in California in the late 1970s.

The only tangible evidence that Jack the Ripper had an accomplice comes from Israel Schwartz. As he told it, the man he saw attacking Liz Stride in Berner Street called out ‘Lipski!’, apparently to a second man across the way, who then saw Schwartz off. Unfortunately, although the substance of this story may well be true the correct interpretation of the facts observed is greatly in doubt. Did the murderer call out to the second man, for example, or to Schwartz himself? And was the second man really an accomplice? Or was he, like Schwartz, a scared bystander who hurriedly left the scene to escape involvement? Under interrogation even Schwartz was not certain.

No other witness is known to have seen a murder victim in the company of more than one man immediately preceding the crime. The nearest to it is Sarah Lewis. She saw a man loitering outside Miller’s Court on the night Mary Kelly was killed. A short, stout man, who wore a black wideawake hat and was looking up the court ‘as if waiting for someone to come out.’ This man may, of course, have been an accomplice, on watch outside while his confederate slew Mary in No. 13. However, there is nothing conclusive to connect him with the murder. And a more reasonable explanation is that he was George Hutchinson, the labourer, for by his own account Hutchinson was waiting outside Miller’s Court at precisely this time.

Certainly the Ripper may have had an accomplice, someone whose function it was to stand at a distance and warn him of impending danger. But, intriguing as the ‘two man’ theory of the murders undoubtedly is, it must at present be set aside. Typically this type of offender works alone and the evidence for the second man in the case is altogether too flimsy.

Our study of the facts enables us to tear away at least part of the murderer’s mask.

Three out of the six probable Ripper murders, those of Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes, took place at weekends. Another two occurred on public holidays. Martha Tabram died on the night of August Bank Holiday, Mary Kelly on the morning of the Lord Mayor’s Show. All six were committed between the hours of midnight and six a.m. We can infer, then, that the murderer was probably in regular work and free of family accountability, i.e., that he was single.

The statements of witnesses who gave descriptions of men seen with one or other of the victims are invaluable but must be used
with care. Some, like Mrs Long, were good witnesses but only had a partial view of the suspect. Others, like Packer, appear to have been dishonest. Several reported sightings too far ahead of the crime for us to presume a likelihood that they saw the murderer.

A study of the best (Long, Smith, Schwartz, Lawende, Levy and Hutchinson) suggests that the murderer was a white male of average or below average height in his twenties or thirties. The man Lawende saw with Kate Eddowes was reportedly ‘rather rough and shabby’. But three witnesses – Mrs Long, PC Smith and Israel Schwartz – described men of ‘shabby-genteel’ or ‘respectable’ appearance. And Hutchinson’s suspect looked positively affluent. John Douglas of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit has suggested that the killer may have intentionally dressed up to persuade potential victims that he had money and thus relieve himself of the task of initiating contact with them.
¹⁵
Whatever, the evidence is that we will not find our man amongst the labouring classes or indigent poor.

Two of the six victims (Tabram and Nichols) were killed in Whitechapel, two (Chapman and Kelly) in Spitalfields, one (Stride) in St George’s-in-the-East and one (Eddowes) in the City. But all of the murder sites are within a single square mile.

This close grouping of the killings, together with the killer’s apparent familiarity with the district, undoubtedly suggests that he was a local man. Can we, then, as Professor Canter suggests, plot the murder sites on a map and simply plump for some central spot within the area circumscribed by the sites as the likely location of his home?
¹⁶
Frustratingly, we cannot.

The Ripper’s earliest crimes are certainly likely to have been close to home. The trouble is that the historical data does not permit us to say what his earliest crimes were. As already noted, the Tabram murder was probably predated by other offences. These may have been rapes or unsuccessful attacks, or even crimes that were not sex-related. The point is that by the time the Ripper turned to murder he may already have become a relatively experienced and confident criminal, striking further afield to minimize the chances of being recognized. Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with their large populations of needy prostitutes, would have been rich hunting grounds for such a miscreant.