London Urban Legends (23 page)

That the murders themselves took place is not in doubt; that there was one killer, the enigmatic Jack in his cape and top hat carrying a surgeon’s leather bag, is an unproven idea that has developed into a cultural icon. Historian Jan Bondeson wonders in an article in ‘History Today’ whether the moral panic over the prostitute murders in 1888 created a myth of a single killer. He reports that ripperologists disagree on the number of victims that Jack took, and that two may have been murdered by partners or ex-partners. The violent death of Polly Nichols, Jack the Ripper’s first victim, caused a moral outrage, like his Spring-heeled forebear and the Mohawks, and a number of other deaths – Emma Smith, Martha Turner and Rose Mylett – were, at first, also attributed to Jack the Ripper. These deaths have not made it into the ‘canonical five’ murders for which most ripperologists think Jack the Ripper was responsible; Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Annie Millwood, Ada Wilson and Annie Farmer were all suggested Jack the Ripper victims or survivors, but have since been discounted from the ripper-orthodoxy. Another victim, the aptly named ‘Fairy Fey’, was allegedly found on 26 December 1887, ‘after a stake had been thrust through her abdomen’, but there are no records of a murder in Whitechapel over the Christmas period of 1887.

The authorities were unsure whether Rose Myatt had been murdered at all or whether she had choked to death whilst drunk. Writing about the death, Robert Anderson, the officer in charge of the investigation, thought if there had not been a Ripper scare, no one would have thought she had been murdered.

With the mythology of the Ripper has grown the idea that the killer has never been brought to light because of a conspiracy amongst the powerful. Leonard Matters, described by Alan Moore as ‘the first ripperologist’, in his appendix to
From Hell: the Dance of the Gull Catchers
, named a Dr Stanley as the Ripper in his book
The Mystery of Jack the Ripper
, published in 1929. Stanley – not his real name – murdered and mutilated London prostitutes in revenge for his son’s death from syphilis before fleeing to Argentina. Dr Stanley was no ordinary doctor, having a large aristocratic practice which no doubt protected him.

Prince Albert Victor, the grandson of Queen Victoria, was named as a possible Ripper suspect in the 1960s, after he was driven mad and angry as a result of catching syphilis from a prostitute. This rumour has evolved into the idea, popularised in Alan Moore’s graphic novel and the film it inspired, that the Ripper was Sir William Gull, surgeon to Queen Victoria and a Freemason, another secretive group seen by some to be above the law. The conspiracy now is that Albert Victor had an affair with a woman which the Ripper victims found out about and were murdered by an insane Gull to cover up the truth.

Other suspects include the Duke of Clarence, Sir John Williams, who was obstetrician to Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice, and sensitive, creative types such as Lewis Carroll and painter Walter Sickert. Each suspect appears in a new book and with the continued growth in popularity of Ripper lore and the deepening of the myth, new and even more unlikely suspects are investigated all the time. After a long look comparing Jack the Ripper crime scene photographs and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, writer Dale Larner has concluded that van Gogh was, indeed, Jack the Ripper. John Morris takes the idea of Sir John Williams being the Ripper, driven to insanity after not being able to have children, and transfers the crimes to his wife, Lizzie Williams, in his book
Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman
. Bram Stoker, author of
Dracula
has never been in the frame for being Jack the Ripper, but The History Press book
The Dracula Secrets: Jack the Ripper and the Darkest Sources of Bram Stoker
, suggests that Jack the Ripper was, sort-of in a round-about-way, Dracula. That through ‘a secret code’ found in ‘previously unpublished letters’, Stoker wove details of Ripper suspect Francis Tumblety into his novel. This ‘ripper code’ was inspired by Stoker’s relationship with Sir Thomas Hall Caine, to whom he dedicated
Dracula
. Caine also had a relationship with Tumblety, and Tumblety was fingered as a Ripper suspect in the book
Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer
. Tumblety was arrested in 1888 for ‘gross indecency’, and was possibly gay. Did this drive him to murder and mutilate women? I must confess that I have not read any of the above books; these theories are taken from promotional websites, press releases and news reports, so I have no idea whether each author is sincere, cynically milking the myth for money or undertaking a conceptual exercise in how evidence can be bent into the strangest proofs.

As well as Jan Bondeson, in 1986 Peter Turnbull published his book
The Killer Who Never Was
, putting forward the no-Ripper hypothesis. Ripperologist and tour guide John G. Bennett published
Jack the Ripper: The Making of the Myth
in 2011 which, while not denying the single-killer hypothesis, did much to disembowel the countless scabbed-over theories about the original murders. Retired murder-squad detective Trevor Marriott brought his experience into investigating the Jack the Ripper killings and concluded that there was no Jack. If the evocative name Jack the Ripper had not been attached to the Whitechapel killings, the theory would have been forgotten a long time ago. He decided that at least two of the women ‘were killed by the same hand’ and the others, if they were related at all, were copycat killings. ‘The urban myth was created by an overzealous newspaper reporter sending a mysterious letter signed Jack the Ripper. The police certainly never believed in a killer known as Jack the Ripper.’

These theories are a little way from the Mohawks’ dangerous rakes, but nearer the fantastical attacks of Spring-heeled Jack. It is the idea of a rich and debauched individual committing murder and mutilation and escaping justice because of their privilege, that all of these blade-wielding figures, fact or fiction, share. The actual, certain evidence for the Whitechapel killings is the bodies of the victims. The theories and the name Jack the Ripper came in the hysteria afterwards, a hysteria that still bends thought. There may have been one murderer, or each killing could have had its own sad story, but the idea of a Victorian killer named Jack the Ripper has such gravity to it that people cannot resist its pull.

Our old cat died last night
Me wife says to bury it out of sight
But we didn’t have a garden;
We was livin’ in a flat
So what was I to do with the body of a cat,
Then a big brown paper bag I spied
I put our old dead kittycat inside.
And now I’m off down the street with the body in the bag,
The body in the bag, ta ra ra.

‘The Body in the Bag’ by Charles O’Hegarty

J
AN HAROLD BRUNVAND
often mutters in his books that one should ‘never trust a dead cat story’. So consider yourself warned while I tell you the tale of the single ‘lady scholar’ working at the British Museum who fended off loneliness by sharing her lodgings with a cat. This is a story Brunvand collected for his 1983 book
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
, which may be why a ‘lady scholar’ isn’t just a scholar. She smuggled the cat into her room, bribed the maid to keep quiet and lived with the cat over winter. In time, though, the cat died and with no garden in which to bury the cat, our scholar neatly and secretly parcelled the cat up to put into the building’s incinerator. She was interrupted by the establishment’s proprietor and thought, ‘this will never do’, and so headed off to the British Library. (This would have been when the library was within the British Museum.) She saw a good place along the way to get rid of the cat – a culvert – but this time a policeman came round the corner just when she was about to do the deed.

Some days you just can’t get rid of a dead cat, so she took the parcel to the museum and, at lunchtime, was stopped by the guard letting her know that she had forgotten her package. ‘This is getting funny,’ she thought to herself. She had failed to leave her dead pet on the bus and on the tube, so in desperation rang her friend who told her to come to her, as there was a local pet cemetery in which she could inter the cat.

When she arrived, perhaps filled with guilt at the way she had tried to abandon the cat’s remains, she opened the parcel to have one last look at the cat and found … a leg of mutton.

The first part of this legend makes it into Mark Barber’s book
Urban Legends Uncovered
, albeit in a dishevelled state, with a ‘young lady’ who worked at the British Museum living in a one-bedroom flat with her beloved cat. Not wanting to bin it and with nowhere to bury the cat she set out to inter it in the nearest pet cemetery, which was 10 miles away. She put the cat in a box and the box into a large carrier bag. On the way to this distant animal graveyard she popped into a clothes shop that she did not visit very often, due to it being so far out of central London. While in the shop and looking at a couple of dresses, she put her bag down for a second and when she reached for it again, the bag was gone.

Then there was a disturbance outside the shop: a woman had fainted on the street. Our bereaved cat owner saw that the unconscious woman had her missing bag clutched to her chest, with the head of her dead cat poking out of the top of it. The passed-out woman was a known shoplifter who had been operating in the area for months.

This second version of the dead cat story is as classic an urban myth as babies in microwaves and hairy handed hitchhikers. Its purpose is clear as a revenge fantasy for those who have been robbed, and versions of it appear all over the western world. Whilst dead cats are very popular, often it is a bag of collected dog excrement that is snatched in a park, or a urine sample in a whisky bottle stolen by a thirsty thief. It is a stray old alley cat of a story that crops up, occasionally mangy and reeking, to the party. It is easy to understand the ubiquity of this story, as everyone wishes ill on the person who has snatched their bag or picked their pocket. Some years ago my wife had her bag snatched on Whitechapel High Street while on the way home from a gig. She had been to her dance class before that and the bag contained only her worn dance kit. A few days later, a friend imagined the thief getting back to his crime den with nothing but a used women’s dance outfit and his boss making him wear the worthless costume and dance on a table for him as a punishment.

Managing to swap a dead cat for a tasty piece of dead sheep is a different outcome, and has the cat-carrier inadvertently becoming the thief themselves. The constant attempts to dispose of the package end with something far more valuable than a departed pet for one and, presumably, a frustrated roast dinner elsewhere in London for the other.

The mistaken theft crops up a lot in British folklore. A chestnut of a tale that is as common as the dead cat tale is the story of the valuable thing left on the mantelpiece (not the most inspiring title for an urban myth, but please bear with me).

One version of this tale starts with Peter, who is on a business trip in London, discovering that his gold watch is missing while he is travelling back to his hotel on the last tube train.

On the platform is a young man grinning at him and Peter decides that this man must be the thief. He leaps up from his seat and grabs the young man by the lapels of his suit, only for the tube doors to close in front of him, tearing the man’s suit lapels off.

Back at his hotel room Peter phones the police to report the theft and then phones his wife to let her know his gold watch is gone. His wife says, ‘I’m glad you rang. Did you know you’d left your watch behind on the dresser this morning?’

Other versions have the ‘robbed’ man wrestling his wallet from the thief, only to find it at home, or the more genteel version with an elderly lady going into town by train with £5. She dozes off during the journey and when she wakes, there is another sleeping woman in the carriage. She then goes into her bag to check her shopping list, finds her £5 is missing and, on impulse, checks the bag of the sleeping woman. There, at the top of the bag, is the £5 note. She removes it quietly and decides not to confront the woman or report her, so leaves her sleeping in the train compartment. With her shopping done, her husband meets her at the station and asks, ‘However did you get all that stuff? You left your £5 note on the mantelpiece.’

Both dead cat stories, the accidental theft and the bag-snatcher, are intertwined. In another version the dead cat is taken while the woman has lunch with a friend. The thief faints in the toilets whilst checking her ill-gotten gains and the cat owner finds the theft and the cat package she was trying to lose. As the thief is stretchered away the woman passes the repackaged cat to the paramedics with the words, ‘I think this is hers.’

The trope of wandering London looking for a place to leave a dead cat because you do not have a garden is older than this urban legend. It was recalled by Eric Winter in a musical song he recorded in the journal
Sing
on 5 July 1960. The song ‘The Body in the Bag’ by Charles O’Hegarty is a cockney music-hall song about a frustrated man who is trying to leave a cat somewhere. The lyrics mirror the troubles of our British Museum lady scholar: