London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (5 page)

Serial killing and sexual homicide (for that is how we must view the Ripper attacks) are crimes far beyond the already heinous crime of murder. Both are forms of behaviour that have come under close study by criminologists and psychologists from the late nineteenth century onwards. Therefore, this chapter will offer a brief analysis of current criminological theories as far as they pertain to serial killers. This will hopefully help us to better contextualize the Whitechapel murders. We will then move on to look in some depth at the series of murders of prostitutes in East London in 1888. In doing this work, I will rely primarily on the Metropolitan Police case files held at The National Archives in Kew and in the pages of the British press. It is necessary to point out at this stage that the former does not represent a complete source of information: the police archives have been the victim of pilferage and the pressures of space, and in consequence much information has been lost. As for the newspapers it is always wise to treat reportage with some caution.

Finally, although it is not the aim of this chapter, or indeed this book, to engage in the whodunit school of ripperology, I hope that by thinking a little about the nature of murder and how we as a society deal with it, it may be possible to see how conflicting information, popular culture and prejudice can be combined to create `folk devils' on whom to lay the blame for brutal murders by sick individuals. As Christopher Frayling has eloquently pointed out, the myth making about the Whitechapel killer began even before the full series of murders had finished and the archetypes of the mad doctor, slumming gentleman and Jewish immigrant have persisted to this day. By looking at the case files we can at least begin to deal with truth rather than fiction. This chapter looks at the murders from the point of view of what the evidence can tell us, not how we might use selective pieces of evidence to fit up a likely suspect.

MURDER WILL OUT! HOMICIDE IN THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

In 1866 the newspapers carried the story of the murder of a former music-hall singer fallen on hard times, named Peter Mann. Mann had a reputation for drink and violence and had lost his position in the theatre as a result. One Sunday night in June he had been drinking with his brother, his wife Ellen and her father when a quarrel erupted and Mann hit Ellen and `knocked her down'. Her father intervened and a brawl ensued, during which Mann received a fatal wound. His father-in-law, a 77-year-old Irish labourer, Patrick Harrington, was accused of the murder and was remanded in custody at Thames Police Court. At the Old Bailey on 9 July 1866, Harrington was found guilty of killing Peter Mann but on the intervention of the judge the charge was reduced to manslaughter on account of the provocation of the attack on his daughter. Harrington was sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment.' The story was interesting because of the link to the music hall - some readers of the newspapers may well have seen Mann on stage - and because of the unusual intervention by the judge in defence of the accused. Without either of these elements the story was hardly newsworthy in a period when murder and indeed domestic violence was not uncommon. Throughout Victoria's long reign there were more than 2,500 trials for unlawful killing (meaning murder or manslaughter) heard before the Old Bailey courtroom, 453 of these in the decade in which the Ripper murders took place. Of the 453 between 1880 and 1890, almost 36 per cent were murder trials (162) and 58 per cent resulted in guilty verdicts, with almost a quarter of defendants being sent to the gallows.

In 1888 itself, four men were sentenced to death for committing murder: Henry Bowles for the murder of his wife, Hannah; James White for killing his wife, Catherine; William Pierrepoint for the murder of Sidney Pierrepoint, his youngest son; and Levi Bartlett for murdering his wife, Elizabeth. All the cases have one common denominator - the victim and the accused were related by blood or by marriage. Modern criminology has shown us that most murder victims are killed by someone close to them: a spouse, lover or acquaintance - stranger murder is extremely rare. Therefore, the story of Peter Mann's murder and the evidence from the four men convicted of homicide in 1888 confirms a pattern across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some murders, however, were much less straightforward - at least in the way in which they were carried out or in how the perpetrators attempted to cover up their crimes. The following is a case in point.

In September 1875, a cab carrying Henry Wainwright (a brush maker) and Alice Day (described as a'young dressmaker' in the trial record)' was stopped by police on the insistence of Alfred Stokes, another brush maker who lived at Baker's Row, Whitechapel. When they searched the couple the police were horrified to find parcels containing human remains. Stokes had become suspicious when Wainwright had asked him to come to his premises in Whitechapel to help him move some parcels and tools. Stokes and Wainwright were employed as managers at Martin's Limited, a firm of brush makers in Whitechapel. Stokes was at first unable to help his colleague as he found that the parcels were too heavy for him. He then noticed a peculiarly unpleasant smell, which Wainwright dismissed as merely `cat's or dog's dirt' Stokes was persuaded to carry the parcels up to the street while Wainwright hailed a cab. His suspicions aroused, Stokes took the opportunity of his co-worker's absence to examine one of the packages. `I felt as if I must do, he told the Old Bailey court, `I opened it, and the first thing I saw was a human In November 1875 Henry Wainwright and his brother Thomas stood trial at the Old Bailey charged with murder. The victim was Harriet Lane and the brothers were convicted - Henry of her murder and Thomas as an accessory. The papers were fascinated by the arrest and trial of a seemingly uncharacteristic pair of defendants, as the brothers were outwardly respectable traders. Both men denied the crime, with Thomas blaming his sibling and Henry suggesting the killer was some as yet unnamed third party.' Henry was executed and Thomas sentenced to seven years of penal servitude. The case was to claim another victim in 1892 when William Wainwright, also a brush maker and the brother of Henry and Thomas, blew his brains out with a revolver in a first class carriage of the North London Railway.' Once again the Wainwright murder case was unusual, both for the class of the defendants and the dismembering of the corpse.

Before we turn to the events of the late summer and autumn of 1888 let us pause to consider some of the other murders that took place in East London in that year. In February, a young Russian Jewess was murdered by her husband whom she had abandoned some months before for another man. Her new lover had heard her screams and had arrived in time for her to point in the direction of the escaping killer before she died. Her throat had been cut `from ear to ear'. A crowd pursued the culprit across Commercial Road until a policeman appeared. On seeing the officer the man `immediately cut his own throat with a shoemaker's knife' and he `expired on his way to London Hospital"

The next murder to draw the attention of the press was the murder of Emma Smith in April. Emma's death has been linked to the Ripper murders - her case notes are contained within the Metropolitan Police files on the Whitechapel killings. However, it seems highly unlikely that Emma was an early victim of the Ripper. Emma Smith, a 45-year-old prostitute who had enjoyed better times in her youth, almost survived the attack that killed her. She had managed to crawl home at which point her landlady, Mary Russell, helped her to get to the London Hospital. Smith told Russell that she `had been shockingly maltreated by a number of men and robbed of all the money she had' One of the men had been a youth of 19. Smith had been seen by another witness at 12.15 a.m. talking to a man near Farrant Street. It would seem that this was a dangerous place for women to loiter late at night (a `fearfully rough quarter' was how she described it) as this witness (who is not named in the newspaper report of the inquest) had `herself been struck in the mouth a few minutes before by some young men'.' At half past one Smith was making her way down Whitechapel Road when she noticed a group of men ahead. She crossed the road to avoid them but they followed her into Osbourne Lane and about 300 yards from her home in George Street they attacked and `outraged' (raped) her. Smith was also robbed of all her money.

According to the reports `a blunt instrument had been inserted into her vagina with great force and had ruptured the perineum" She died in hospital of peritonitis as a result of her wounds. Smith, an alcoholic who `acted like a madwoman' when she was drunk, seems to have been the victim of a random gang attack by a group of likely drunken men who were perhaps unaware (or unconcerned) that they had inflicted fatal wounds on their victim.' The coroner, Dr Wynne Baxter, stated that `such a dastardly assault he had never heard of, and it was impossible to imagine a more brutal case'.10 Baxter's imagination was about to be stretched to the limit. Emma Smith's murder does fit the pattern of the later `Ripper' in one clear way: all five (or six) women murdered in the summer and autumn of 1888 were street prostitutes in their forties (with the exception of Mary Kelly who was in her twenties) who had been married, lost their families and legal occupations through addiction to drink and had ended up in poverty and degradation as a result. Drink had its part to play in the next East London murder to fill the column inches of the London press in 1888.

In August a dock labourer was brought before the Thames Police Court accused of trying to kill his wife and her brother. Richard Patterson had stabbed his wife, Annie, four times with a carving knife when John Barry intervened to save his sister from further injury. Patterson then turned on him and `stabbed him in eight places'. The wounded pair were taken to London Hospital and made a full recovery; in the meantime Patterson made himself scarce. At the hearing it became clear that Patterson had been drinking and this clearly fuelled the argument that resulted in the violence." On the previous night Patterson had apparently attacked his wife with a paraffin lamp that had struck her head and required a plaster. At his trial it emerged that Patterson had been teetotal for several months but had started drinking heavily that evening, and while Annie was not drunk she was far from sober herself. The pressures of marriage at this time often resulted in domestic violence and this would seem to be a fairly typical example of a marriage breaking down; Barry testified that Annie's husband was affectionate `except when he was drinking"'

Even as the Ripper murders were dominating the headlines another `ghastly discovery' was made in the capital. Contractors working on the new police headquarters on the Thames Embankment found the trunk of a woman in a cellar on the site. The trunk was quickly associated with other body parts found a few weeks earlier, fished out of the Thames near Lambeth and at Pimlico." The doctor examining the parts at the mortuary on Ebury Street believed that it would not be hard to match the limbs found there with the new discovery in Westminster as it was likely that both belonged to a woman of `no small stature'. The Birmingham Daily Post, took the opportunity of the ongoing Ripper enquiry to once again point out the ineptitude of the Metropolitan Police: `They have no clue, and there seems very little possibility of their obtaining one, in which case publicity would be the best detective; but this they appear to ignore,.14 So far the authorities had a torso and two arms and the Central News Agency speculated that the victim was a woman in her late twenties or early thirties and, fascinatingly for their readership, she `belonged to the middle, or possibly even the upper, grade of society"5 This revelation followed an examination of the clothing that the torso had been wrapped in, which proved to be made of black broche silk, quite unlike the material of the cheap dresses worn by the Ripper's victims. At the post-mortem a third arm - found in front of the blind school in Lambeth - was ruled out as belonging to the main body. In any other year the mysterious appearance of a dismembered body in the Thames would have kept the newspapers busy for weeks but in October 1888 they were wrapped up in a much bigger media event. Before we look in detail at the police file on the Whitechapel murders we will consider modern theories of serial murder and sexual homicide.

THE RIPPER IN CONTEXT: SERIAL KILLERS IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH

The Ripper murders were different to what we might refer to as `conventional' murders because they were both serial and sexual in nature. Sexual murder is a form of paraphilia (defined as sexually deviant or abhorrent behaviour, it is taken from the Greek - literally abnormal love) 16 and in the late nineteenth century was termed `lust murder' by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his 1893 study, Psychopathia Sexualis.l' In this work Krafft-Ebing noted that:

Just as maniacal exaltation easily passes to furibund destructiveness, exaltation of the sexual emotion often induces an impulse to expend itself in senseless and apparently harmful acts ... Through such cases of infliction of pain, during the most intense emotion of lust, we approach the cases in which a real injury, wound, or death, is inflicted on the victim. In these cases, the impulse to cruelty, which may accompany the emotion of lust, becomes unbounded in a psychopathic individual; and at the same time, owing to defect of moral feeling, all normal inhibitory ideas are absent or weakened.18

His late nineteenth-century analysis is echoed by more recent criminological studies which have stated that the `lust murderer harbors deep-seated, erotically charged fantasies in which his attacks and slayings sate, although incompletely and temporarily, the need for more sexual violence'. Such killers usually mutilate their victims, targeting the genitalia in particular.'9 Lust murder, or more properly erotophonophilia, arguably requires three or more killings with a 'cooling off' period in between victims `indicating the premeditation of each sexual offense"'

However modern criminologists and law enforcement agencies choose to define it, the Ripper murders clearly involved some level of sexual perversion. The Ripper killings also appear to have been an example of picquerism, which can be defined as a desire to cut and stab the flesh of the victim, in particular the breasts and genitals." This was one of the key elements that raised the Whitechapel murders above the normal staple of Victorian crime and its reporting. The second element was the serial nature of the murders - somewhere between five and nine in the space of four months to two years (depending upon how many murders we ascribe to the same individual).