London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (6 page)

Criminologists have also recently identified two different, but overlapping (in terms of their behaviour) types of lust murderer; the organized non-social killer and the disorganized asocial type. The former exists within society and manipulates or abuses others to satisfy his sexual appetite. He is aware that what he is doing is wrong but has little or no regard for other people. Typically he is cunning and leaves few non-deliberate clues for the police at the scene of his crimes. Such killers revisit the scene of their crime, both to satisfy their lusts (by reliving the murder), and to see how the investigation is proceeding. His victims are usually strangers, are often of a similar type (such as age, occupation, lifestyle, or even hair colour). Being socially able he may engage his victims in conversation, to the degree that he could lure them into a place of his choosing." According to some writers such killers are not visibly suspicious, or at least do not draw overt attention to themselves by their appearance or behaviour. In short, the organized non-social killer is not easy to distinguish - importantly he does not look like a monster.

The second or asocial type of killer is much less cognizant of his actions. He is likely to be unable to relate to others and will typically be a loner, or outcast, and is often sexually incompetent. His murders are more often frantic and less well planned. It is possible that, as a result of the randomness of his attacks, the victim could be either a stranger or someone he knows and the age or type of victims is much less important here. This type of killer is most likely to attempt to mutilate or disfigure his victim (both for sexual excitement and to try to conceal the identity of the murdered person).23 He will also revisit the scene but will not involve himself in the police investigation. This person is a more classic `fit' for the Whitechapel murderer because of the mutilations but he would also have found it much harder to evade arrest, even in the dark alleys and courts of the East End. It may be the case that `Jack' was a composite of both personality types and so we will keep these conflicting profiles of sexual killers in mind as we look at the actions of the Whitechapel murderer as they may help us understand the sort of person that may have perpetrated these crimes. While it is not the purpose of this book to identify a contemporary protagonist in the Ripper murders it is useful to reflect on the sort of person that carried them out - this in itself helps us to undermine or reject many of the names that have been put forward as Ripper suspects in the past 100 or so years.

However we differentiate between types of lust murders we need to be clear that, unlike many other murderers who act on the spur of the moment or `in a fit of passion, sadistic murderers intend to kill their victims. This might seem straightforward and obvious but most murder is not as baldly intentional as it may appear on the surface. Sadistic killers `kill with rage, but with rage that is often remarkably controlled - that is, aware of risks and, hence, In Italy, 1879, a murderer who displayed this sadistic rage - and whose modus operandi is similar to that of Jack- was arrested, tried and imprisoned. Vincenz Verzini (b. 1849) murdered or attempted to murder three women and mutilated their corpses. Verzini confessed and in doing so we can gather some idea of his motivation. According to Krafft-Ebing the `commission of them gave him an indescribably pleasant (lustful) feeling, which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation ... It was entirely the same to him, with reference to these sensations, whether the women were old, young, ugly, or beautiful'. Verzini did not rape his victims but he did display what criminologists have termed vampiric tendencies, in that he drank the blood of the women he killed.25 He also `carried pieces of the clothing and intestines some distance, because it gave him great pleasure to smell and touch them'.26

Since the Whitechapel murderer was never caught we can only speculate as to his personal motivation but even at the time the police were aware that some form of perverted sexuality was involved. Sir Robert Anderson noted in his memoirs: `One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type' 27 Was `Jack' another Verzini? It is certainly possible that he was motivated by the same desires. Another killer studied by Krafft-Ebing echoes some of the mutilations and the type of victims that were to be associated with the Ripper killings. Gruyo, aged 41 at his trial, murdered six street prostitutes over a ten-year period in the late nineteenth century. `After the strangling he tore out their intestines and kidneys per vaginam. Some of his victims he violated before killing, others he did Recent research has argued that sadistic sexual murderers are generally young men, between 20 and 30 years of age.29 Gruyo would have been in his early thirties when he started killing. Interestingly, most of the witness statements relating to the Whitechapel killer suggest he was in his early to mid-thirties. It is extremely difficult to generalize about serial killers but research has suggested that the motors of serial violence are present in individuals from childhood, sometimes manifesting themselves in acts of cruelty to siblings, peers and animals. The sadistic sexual nature of the Ripper killers was one factor that marked them out from the normal diet of murder stories in the Victorian press; the other was that there were several of them over a three-month period. This was new for the Victorian public and made the killings much more frightening and titillating as a result.

Arguably `Jack' was not the first serial killer, after all, Burke and Hare, the body-snatchers of Edinburgh, killed 16 people in 1828. According to Philippe Chassaigne the first serial killer was a Frenchman named Martin Dumollard. While in his forties, Dumollard went to Lyons and lured young women into quiet areas of the city and attempted to rape and kill them. He denied murder but was convicted of killing three women (several escaped him and it is probable he killed more) and was executed in 1862. In Spain, between 1870 and 1879, a man named Garayo murdered six women, committing necrophilia on the corpses, while in Italy Callisto Grandi butchered four young boys aged between 4 and 9 in the space of two years in the mid-1870s. None of these murderers mutilated their victims but all fit Chassaigne's definition of a serial killer. To qualify as a serial murderer in Chassaigne's view a killer has to meet `at least one of three criteria: the systematic selection of the same type of victim on each occasion, a sexual element in their crime, and sadistic rituals in conducting it'.30 In the case of the Whitechapel murders we will see that at least two, if not all three, elements were in evidence. So `Jack' may not have been the first serial killer but he was the first in Britain to fit a profile that modern criminologists would agree separates him from the ranks of what Pieter Spierenburg has termed `multiple' killers." `Jack's crimes were not simply multiple murders; they had a pattern and an underlying logic - however perverse.

Another factor that we should consider when analysing the murders of 1888 is geography. One of the more interesting revelations of the modern study of serial killing is the relationship between the killer, his victims and the environment in which the murders occur. The work of David Canter quite clearly demonstrates that in looking to identify a serial murderer we need to pay close attention to the location and pattern of his crimes.32 Canter demonstrated that killers such as Peter Sutcliffe (the `Yorkshire Ripper' who murdered 13 women in and around Bradford and Leeds in Northern England in the 1970s and early 1980s) had a discernable pattern to their killing sprees. With the assistance of the police and a research student, Canter plotted the sites of Sutcliffe's murders and the area in which he lived and worked. In doing this Canter was able to show that Sutcliffe had started his series of killings close enough to his home for it to be familiar territory but not so close as to draw attention to himself as a suspect. As he gained in confidence, in Canter's analysis, the murderer was able to range further afield in search of suitable victims (Sutcliffe, with one exception, chose prostitutes to kill - possibly as an homage to his nineteenth-century predecessor: he was found to have studied the Whitechapel murders in detail). It is crucial for the killer to be able to find sufficient `easy' targets within his killing zone. Naturally for some killers, like Fred West or Dr Shipman, the problem is solved by victims making themselves available in other ways (as guests or patients), but for killers like Sutcliffe (or indeed `Jack') victims had to be found on the streets.

As Canter studied the geography of the Yorkshire murders he found that a clear pattern, not unlike a spider's web, defined the activities of the killer. At the heart was Sutcliffe's home that he shared with his wife Sonia who was seemingly oblivious to his homicidal nature. Canter was fortunate that Sutcliffe's identity and address was known; the same can not be said for the Whitechapel murderer. However, Canter has attempted to apply the same process of geographical profiling to the 1888 case. If one plots the murder sites of all those listed in the police files (which we shall come to presently) it is immediately apparent that, with one exception (Alice McKenzie - who was not considered to be a Ripper victim by most experts), they are clustered around either side of the Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street. Anyone taking a walking tour of the murder sites will quickly realize the close proximity of all of the places in which the victims' bodies were discovered. This suggests, if we subscribe to Canter's thesis, that the killer either lived or worked somewhere close to the heart of this district. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that `Jack' was an outsider; someone who frequently visited Whitechapel but did not live there, but it is unlikely. It is much more plausible to argue that the killer knew the geography of the area very well and so was able to make his escape quickly and without drawing too much attention to himself in the process. This of course assists those researchers (like Mei Trow) who have put forward local characters such as Robert Mann as key suspects in the Ripper case. The Whitechapel murderer, whoever he was, killed fewer women than Sutcliffe and he did not need to stray too far from his base because of the abundance of common prostitutes operating in Whitechapel.

So, we now have the beginnings of a profile of the Whitechapel murderer that we can use in conjunction with the available `evidence' from the period. It is likely that Jack the Ripper was male, and was either what modern criminologists would term an organized non-social killer or a disorganized asocial one, or some combination thereof. Again, we might expect him to be in his twenties or early thirties and to be physically strong. His motivation was sexual and he was likely to take trophies, to revisit the scenes of his crimes or attempt to recreate them at some later date. Importantly he probably knew the area in which he killed and knew it well enough to avoid capture. Did he know his victims personally? This is a question that has dogged investigators and given rise to some of the conspiracy theories mentioned in the previous chapter. It is likely that if he was a local man and one that frequented the local public houses, shops and streets, then he could have been acquainted with one or more of the women he killed. However, it is more likely that he was a loner, someone who did not integrate well in society, who would have shunned company and the brash entreaties of street whores to buy them a drink or more. The truth about murder and murderers is often much more mundane than the pages of the newspapers would have us believe. The Victorian press chose their murder stories carefully to excite and shock their readership; in the events of the late summer and autumn of 1888 they had a veritable jamboree of murder news to regale their audiences with as we shall see.

THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS

For many the story of the Ripper murders is well known. Countless books, television documentaries and films have all described in grisly detail the brutal murders of five East End prostitutes in the late summer and autumn of 1888. Most of these focus on the killings and use them to identify a suspect rather than explain the killings and the society in which they occurred. This search for the killer is as fascinating in what it reveals about the present as it is futile in its objective of unmasking a long dead killer. We will probably never know the truth: most evidence that has survived has long been corrupted by decades of grubby and, occasionally, light fingers while police investigation techniques have developed beyond recognition since the 1880s. It is fair to state that had `Jack' had struck in the twenty-first century he would have been caught with modern forensics and CSI, just as Stephen Wright was arrested and convicted in Ipswich in 2008. However, as we will see in Chapter 8, the Victorian police had very little technology to assist them in their search for the killer.

The police file on the Whitechapel murders contains the names of nine women: Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, Mary Kelly, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles. However, debates rumble on about the identification of the victims almost as much as about the killer. Only five are accepted as being victims of the Ripper (Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly) although Martha Tabram may well represent his first attempt at `ripping'.

Emma Smith's murder received little publicity; street violence of this nature was not uncommon in the rougher parts of the capital, even if (as we have seen) her murder was particularly callous and vicious. Coincidentally another resident of George Street, Whitechapel, was the next person to meet with a brutal murder in the summer of 1888. Martha Tabram (or Turner), like Smith before her, was a common street prostitute and on the night she died had been out drinking in The White Swann public house on Whitechapel Road with her friend Mary Ann Connolly. Tabram and Connolly, nicknamed `Pearly Poll', had attracted the attention of two soldiers and the foursome enjoyed an evening of drinking and flirtation. At a quarter to midnight they split up, Martha going off with one of the men while Poll took her companion to the nearby Angel Alley. At 4.45 a.m. on 7 August, a local man, John Reeves, came across the body of Martha Tabram on the first floor landing of George Yard Buildings, a stone's throw from Whitechapel High Street.33 The body had been spotted earlier by a cab driver who lived in George Yard but he had taken little notice since it was fairly common for drunks to sleep off the excesses of the night there.34 Reeves informed the local policeman, PC Thomas Barrett, who told the inquest into Tabram's death that when he found her she was lying on her back, her clothes `turned up as far as the centre of the body, leaving the lower of the body exposed; the legs were open, and altogether her position was such as to at once suggest in my mind that recent intimacy had taken The constable called for a doctor, Dr Keeling, who established that Tabram had been stabbed no less than 39 times and estimated the time of death at around 2.30 a.m. PC Barrett had spoken to a soldier - a Grenadier Guard - in Wentworth Street close by the murder scene at 2 a.m. The soldier said he was waiting for `a chum who had gone with a girl' Barrett visited the Tower of London to see if he could identify the guardsman he had seen. He picked out two men, both of whom could account for their whereabouts that night.36 The soldiers were also paraded before Mary Connolly but she told the police that the men she and Tabram had picked up had white cap bands. This determined that they were Coldstream Guards rather than Grenadiers and another identity parade was arranged. At this, Connolly did pick out two individuals; one was able to prove he was with his wife that night and the other was registered as being in the barracks. The case against the soldiery seems to have gone cold at this point.