The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (54 page)

But there are still more theories. In 1987, Martin Fido fingered “David Cohen” – the name given to an unknown Jewish madman incarcerated in Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in December 1888. He died there in October the following year. The last murder known for sure to have been the Ripper’s occurred on 9 November 1888. Fido believes that “Cohen” was identified by Joseph Lawende, a witness who had seen a man talking to the Ripper’s fourth victim Catherine Eddowes shortly before she was murdered. But Lawende refused to testify against a fellow Jew, knowing that he faced the hangman’s rope, so the police detained “Cohen” under the Lunacy Act instead to keep him off the streets. Fido also believes that the police were convinced of his guilt but rivalries between the Metropolitan and City Police have obscured his real identity. It is a nice theory but hardly satisfying as nothing more is known about “Cohen” – other than he was a foreign-born Jew, a tailor living in a homeless shelter in Whitechapel aged 23 in 1888, who was extremely violent and had to be kept in a straitjacket. However, his wild assaults on other patients, his shouting and dancing, his noisy acts of vandalism, his inability to take care of himself and his need for restraint all seem at odds with the Ripper who slipped unnoticed in and out of the shadows, cutting up his victims with the practised skill of a surgeon.

In 1991, Northamptonshire police officer Paul Harrison concluded that Joseph Barnett, the common-law husband of the Ripper’s last known victim Mary Kelly, was Jack. Harrison contends that Barnett was a sensitive man who thought he could save Mary from the streets. Instead she dragged him down into the gutter with her. An earlier, unrelated murder of a prostitute had persuaded her to suspend her activities as a streetwalker. When she started again, he was driven half-mad with jealousy. He tracked down other prostitutes she knew and killed them in the most gruesome way possible, hoping to scare her back off the streets. When this failed, he murdered and mutilated her. Having rid himself of the source of his psychological problems, Harrison maintains, Barnett had no reason to kill again. But Harrison draws a comparison between Barnett and the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Dennis Nilsen. Neither Sutcliffe nor Nilsen stopped killing until they were caught, but Barnett went on to live a long and untroubled life as a costermonger. As far as I am aware, there is little outlet for the Ripper’s raging bloodlust in the retail fruit trade.

In 1992, David Abrahamsen, a fellow of the American College of Psychoanalysts, brought his psychological insight to bear on theory that Prince Eddy and his Cambridge tutor J. K. Stephen were the murderers. From the psychological point of view, Stephen Knight had already explained how Prince Eddy and J. K. Stephen fitted into the Ripper plot.

Ripperology was revivalized in 1993 with the publication of
The Diary of Jack the Ripper
. This concluded that the author of the diary, said to be a 49-year-old Liverpudlian cotton-merchant James Maybrick, a substance abuser with a history of domestic violence, was Jack the Ripper. For several years Ripperologists debated whether the diaries were fake. However, in his 1997 book
Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter
, Paul Feldman, who believes the diaries are genuine, tied Maybrick into Stephen Knight’s conspiracy theory.

In 1994, Melvin Harris resurrected the story that the journalist and devil-worshipper Roslyn D’Onston – or Dr Roslyn D’O Stephenson – was the Ripper. D’Onston himself wrote to the police in 1888 accusing Dr Morgan Davies, a surgeon at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. A failed doctor and a drug addict, D’Onston was said to have killed the women to give his journalistic career a fillip. It was said that his stories in the newspapers carried details about the murders that were never released by the police. In 1890, he became involved with Mabel Collins, the editor of
Lucifer
, the magazine of the Theosophical Society. He later went into business with Baroness Vittoria Cremers, who revealed in the 1920s that she had found neckties caked with dried blood in D’Onston’s room. She said he had told her that they belonged to Jack the Ripper. They eventually found their way into the possession of the Satanist Aleister Crowley, who claimed that D’Onston was indeed the Ripper and that his ritual murders were done for magical purposes in an attempt to become invisible. Crowley himself claimed in court to have killed many times for the purposes of black magic. He was never prosecuted. The case against Onston was effectively dealt with and dismissed by Stephen Knight, but still it persists.

In 1995, Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey dismissed the Ripper diary and came up with a new suspect – Francis J. Trumblety, a Canadian woman-hater and fraudster who was arrested in America in connection with the assassination of President Lincoln. After his release, he moved to England. In 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, he was in London, lodging in Whitechapel, Evans and Gainey maintain. On 2 December 1888, he was arrested for unnamed sexual offences. Released on bail, he headed for Le Havre where he took a ship back to New York. The New York police were alerted and kept an eye on him. Detectives were also despatched from England. But Trumblety gave them all the slip and went on to continue his murderous campaign in Jamaica and Nicaragua. He returned to New York in 1891, where he killed again. All this was covered up, Evans and Gainey say, because the Metropolitan Police were embarrassed that they had had the Ripper and released him. Trumblety, they maintain, “killed for no apparent motive other than enjoyment”. In which case, after a couple of years of murderous pleasure, he must have stinted himself for the last 12 years of his life. He died in Rochester, New York, in 1903, without, apparently, sating his bloodlust again.

In 1996, former private eye Bruce Paley again accused Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly’s common-law husband, of the crime. Paley claims Barnett fits the FBI’s psychological profile of a modern serial killer. Most are white males in their twenties or early thirties. Barnett was 30 at the time of the murders. They come from dysfunctional families, though it would be hard to find a family that was not dysfunctional in the Whitechapel area in the late 19th century. According to top FBI psychological profiler Robert K. Ressler, serial killers come from families where the mother is cold and unloving, while the father is usually absent. Barnett was six when his father died and his mother had disappeared by the time he was 13. Paley says that she possibly abandoned her family. This fits with Ressler’s theory that the most important single factor in creating a serial killer is a sense of loneliness and isolation consolidated between the age of eight and 12.

Serial killers often suffer from a physical defect. Barnett had a speech impediment. Serial killers tend to be intelligent men, stuck in jobs below their capabilities. Barnett was a fish porter, though he was well spoken and had had some schooling. A serial killer’s first crime tends to be precipitated by a period of stress. Barnett had lost his job shortly before the killings started, forcing Mary to return to prostitution. This gave Barnett a motive for killing her, and it could have given him a reason for venting his wrath on other prostitutes. As a fish porter, he would have been a familiar figure on the streets of the East End in the early morning and, through Mary, he would probably have been known to all the victims. Being a fish porter also meant he was skilled with a knife, boning and gutting fish.

However, according to the FBI, serial killers tend to have been emotionally or sexually abused as a child and come from a family where drugs or alcohol were abused. It is not known if this was the case with Barnett. They also continue to kill until they are caught. But for following 38 years, Barnett led a blameless life. Although he certainly continued having relationships with women – electoral rolls show that he lived with a common-law wife for at least seven years – he never felt that murderous rage well up inside him again. And, it seems, in all that time he never ever felt the urge to tell anyone of his crimes or record the fact that he was the world’s most notorious killer for posterity.

In 1997, James Tulley used the same psychological profiling methods to identify the Ripper. But he absolved Barnett and picked one James Kelly instead. In 1883, Kelly had stabbed and killed his wife. He admitted the crime and was sentenced to death, but was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor. In January 1888, he escaped and hid out in the East End of London, before fleeing to France at the end of the year. He returned to England in 1892 to sail to the US. In 1896, he gave himself up at the British Consulate in New Orleans. Instead of having him arrested, the vice-consul arranged for him to work his own passage back to Liverpool. Arriving in England, he absconded again, this time heading for Canada. In 1901, he surrendered himself at the British Consulate in Vancouver, but again he gave the authorities the slip. For the next 26 years he travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, spending more and more time in England. Eventually in 1927, he turned up at the gates of Broadmoor, where he surrendered himself once more. He died in the asylum two years later. Tulley says the authorities kept quiet about Kelly because they had let the Ripper escape in the first place. The fact that they made no effort to apprehend him in North America or when he was back in Britain, Tulley says, was part of the cover-up. Once again, there is no indication that Kelly killed again in the 39 years he was at liberty after the Ripper murders, even though he was a dangerous fugitive from justice. It seems you can kill five prostitutes in a couple of months, then give it up just like that, cold turkey.

In 1998, South Wales magistrate Bob Hinton again used those self-same psychological profiling methods. But he came up with George Hutchinson, a witness who gave a detailed description of a man he said he saw with the Ripper’s last victim Mary Kelly the night she died. Again Hutchinson was a white male, at 28 in the right age group, and as a barman and labourer in the right sort of menial job. With those criteria, the East End of London in the 1880s must have been brimming over the serial killers. Hutchinson certainly knew Kelly and admitted giving her money – presumably for services rendered. His own testimony put him at the scene of the crime. Hinton also says that senior policemen discounted Hutchinson as a witness – a point that Stephen Knight covered in his book 22 years earlier. Hinton systematically trashed Hutchinson’s evidence and believes that he stopped killing because Mary Kelly “the object of his obsession [was] obliterated”. Hinton was not sure when Hutchinson died, but says he must have been either the George Hutchinson who died in Newark in 1929, the George Hutchinson who died in Bradford in 1934 or the George Hutchinson who died in Darlington in 1936. So again Hutchinson lived at least another 41 years without feeling the urge to kill again, or tell anyone that he was Jack the Ripper.

In 1999, Stephen Wright, reviewing all the literature from an American angle, concluded like others that the Ripper’s diary was a hoax. He dismissed all the other theories, then claimed to be the first to finger George Hutchinson as the Ripper. Maybe Hinton’s book had not crossed the Atlantic when Wright was at work, but Wright makes no more convincing a case than Hinton does. The most recent theory is that Walter, the pseudonymous author of the Victorian pornographic classic
My Secret Life
, was the Ripper. The clues, apparently, are all in the book. Walter is now thought to be Henry Spencer Ashbee, who left his huge collection of erotica to the British Museum.

In 2002, Patricia Cornwell published
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed
. In it she dusted off the Stephen Knight theory, but concluded that Walter Sickert was the sole killer. The clues were all in his paintings. Although she spent a reputed $6 million on research, the book was widely discounted. She had hoped to prove her case with DNA taken from one of his paintings, which she cut up, but has failed to do so.

However, new books are being written about Jack the Ripper all the time. Each develops a theory more off the wall than the last. It is a wonder that no one has yet suggested that Jack the Ripper was an alien who abducted East End prostitutes to perform bizarre anatomical experiments on them. Perhaps it is coming.

England – Jack the Stripper

As in the case of Jack the Ripper, the file on Jack the Stripper has never been closed. He killed six women in 1964 and left their naked bodies in the River Thames or along its banks.

The first body was found under a pontoon at Hammersmith on 2 February 1964. The victim had been strangled and the remnants of her underwear had been shoved down her throat. She was small, five foot two, and apart from her stockings she was naked.

The body was identified as that of Hannah Tailford. She was 30 years old and lived with her boyfriend in West Norwood. She had a three-year-old daughter, an 18-month-old son and was pregnant at the time of death.

By day, she worked as a waitress or a cleaner. At night she supplemented her meagre wages by working as a prostitute on the streets of Bayswater. Her record showed four convictions for soliciting.

She had disappeared from her flat ten days before her body was found, though a man and his wife said they saw her on Charing Cross Road, just two days before. She was depressed and suicidal. They tried to cheer her up.

Forensic experts concluded that she had been dead for just 24 hours when she was found, and they believed that she may have been drowned in a bath or pond before she was dumped in the river. Tide tables showed that she must have entered the Thames at Duke’s Meadow in Chiswick, a popular spot for courting couples as well as for prostitutes and their clients.

By interviewing over 700 people in London’s underworld of vice, the police discovered that Hannah had been a star turn at sex parties and that she often attended kinky orgies in Mayfair and Kensington. A foreign diplomat known for his perverted tastes had been one of her clients, but he had been out of the country at the time of her disappearance.

This left the police with little to go on. They believed that Hannah had been attacked and sexually assaulted. Her knickers had been shoved in her mouth to stop her screaming as she was killed. But they could not even prove that she had been murdered and the inquest recorded an open verdict.