The Other Teddy Roosevelts (5 page)

“Keep prostitutes off the streets?” laughed a nearby policeman. “You might as well try to keep the sun from rising.”

“It’s that, or prepare yourselves for more murders.”

“It’s not my decision to make,” replied Hughes. “You’ve been working on this case at my request, and I’ve been your sole contact, so you can be forgiven for thinking that I’m in charge…but in point of fact we have more than 500 police officers working around the clock on the Ripper murders. I’ll have to go through channels before we can get it published.”

“What if I just took it to the papers, and said that I hadn’t told you what I’d planned?”

“You’d be on the first ship back to America, and I doubt that your presence would ever be tolerated in England again.”

That’s no great loss in a land that worships royalty and
allows something like Whitechapel to exist,
thought Roosevelt. Aloud he said, “All right, John—but hurry! The sooner this is made known to the press, the better.”

Hughes picked up the letter and stared at it. “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

“So will we all,” replied Roosevelt.

***

Nothing happened.

A day passed, then a week, then three. The police again began suggesting that the Ripper might have been killed by some other member of the criminal class—there were enough stabbings and bludgeonings in Whitechapel and on the waterfront to write
fini
to a dozen Rippers.

Even Roosevelt relaxed his guard. He spent a day birding in the Cotswolds. He made a speech to the Royal Zoological Society, and another to Parliament. He found the time to write three articles and more than one hundred letters.

And still, he couldn’t rid himself of the nagging feeling that this was the calm before the storm, and that he possessed some small but vital piece of the puzzle that could help him prevent another murder.

On the evening of November 8, he sat down to write a letter to his wife.

***

My Dearest Edith:

It has been almost six weeks since the fiend last struck, and most of the authorities here have convinced themselves that he is dead, possibly by his own hand, possibly murdered. I don’t agree. There was no pattern or regularity to his prior killings. The first and second were separated by nine days, the second and third by 22 days, the third and fourth by no more than an hour. Since there has been no pattern, I don’t see how they can conclude that he’s broken one.

As I mentioned in previous letters, some of the police still lean toward Prince Albert Victor, which is simply beyond the realm of possibility. All of their other suspects also seem to come from the upper classes: a doctor, a lawyer, a shipbuilder. They mean well, the London Metropolitan Police, but they simply lack American practicality as they go about this most important and onerous task.

I may not send this letter to you at all, because I do not want the details to cause you dismay, but I need to clarify my thinking by putting things down on paper.

I begin with the question: what do we know about Jack the Ripper?

It’s true that there is an eyewitness account that makes him a head taller than myself, and thoroughly emaciated, but it was made by an hysterical woman whose veracity cannot be relied upon. Still, it’s all the police have to go on, and that is the man they are searching for.

But that is all we know empirically. The rest comes from logic—or the science of deduction, to borrow from Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective who has made such an impact here in the past year.

And what can I deduce?

First, he has at least a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. The nature of the mutilations implies that he takes pleasure in removing certain internal organs—and he was able to tell a kidney from other organs in near-total darkness on the night of September 30.

Second, he is trying to delude us into thinking he is illiterate. That letter of his is a masterpiece of misdirection—for if he is a doctor, or if he has even studied medicine for a year, how could his spelling, diction and penmanship be so indicative of a barely literate man?

Third, he must possess an intimate knowledge of White-chapel. The only time he was seen he eluded his pursuers, and being unseen the other times also implies familiarity with his surroundings.

Fourth, these murders must be planned in advance—a theory I have not shared with the police, because none of them would accept such a notion. But damn it, he
had
to know when and where he would kill each of his victims! Because if he didn’t, then how did he get fresh clothing, and without fresh clothing, how did this man, who must have been soaked in the blood of his victims, escape detection as he walked through the streets of Whitechapel on his way back to wherever he goes when his foul work is done? He must have had a clean set of clothes hidden within yards of his victim, and that implies premeditation.

Fifth, and this is the one that I cannot begin to answer: even though they have been alerted, even though they know the Ripper is lurking in the darkness, he is nonetheless able to approach his victims with complete impunity. Do they know him? Does he appear so wealthy that they feel it is worth the risk? What leads otherwise cautious women to allow this fiend to approach them? There has been no sign of a struggle at any of the murder scenes. No victim has tried to run from him.

Why?

Roosevelt pulled out his timepiece and opened it. It was 3:40 AM, and he realized that he had fallen asleep.

He looked at the letter, read it over, frowned, and began writing again.

Why? Why? Why?

Suddenly there was a pounding on his door.

“Theodore, wake up!” shouted Hughes. “He’s struck again! It’s the worst yet!”

***

Room #13, 26 Dorset Street, was a scene straight out of hell.

Marie Jeanette Kelly—or what remained of her—lay on a blood-soaked bed. Her throat has been slashed. Her abdomen was sliced open. Both her breasts were cut off. Her liver and entrails had been ripped out and placed between her feet. Flesh from her thighs and her breasts had been put on a nearby table. Her right hand was stuck in her belly.

“My God!” exclaimed Hughes, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief.

“He was crazy to begin with, but this is past all imagining,” said another officer. “He didn’t cut her organs out, like the others. He reached in and
pulled
them out with his hands!”

“He had to be drenched in blood,” said Roosevelt. “Surely someone saw him, if not here, then walking the street, or trying to hide until he could change into a clean outfit.”

“Nobody saw a thing, sir,” said the officer.

“They
had
to!” exclaimed Roosevelt. “They couldn’t have missed him.” He frowned and muttered: “But why didn’t it register?”

Roosevelt paused, motionless—and then, slowly, a grin crossed the American’s face. The officer stared at him as if he might soon start running amuck.

The American turned and walked to the door.

“Where are you going, Theodore?” asked Hughes.

“Back to my room,” answered Roosevelt. “There’s nothing more to see here.”

“I’ll be seeing it in my nightmares for the next thirty years,” said Hughes grimly.

***

Roosevelt went to his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out his pistol, filled it with cartridges, and put it in the pocket of his buckskin coat.

Then he took his pen out, and added a few lines to the letter he had been writing to Edith.
I curse my own blindness! I could have prevented this latest
atrocity. I knew everything I had to know more than a month ago,
but I didn’t put it together until tonight.

I am going out now, to make sure this fiend never kills
again.

***

Roosevelt sat in the dark, his pistol on his lap, waiting.

Finally the knob turned, and a short, burly figure entered the room.

“Hello, Jack,” said Roosevelt, pointing his pistol at the figure.

“Jack? Who’s Jack?”

“We both know what I’m talking about,” said Roosevelt calmly.

“I just come back from helping poor Liza Willoughby!”

“No,” said Roosevelt, shaking his head. “You just got back from murdering Marie Jeanette Kelly.”

“You’re daft!”

“And you’re Jack the Ripper.”

“You’ve done lost your bloody mind!” yelled Irma the midwife, finally stepping out of the shadows.

“The Ripper had to live in Whitechapel,” said Roosevelt, never lowering the pistol. “He had to know the area intimately. Who knows it better than a woman who lives and works here and makes dozens of house calls every week?”

He watched her reaction, then continued.

“The Ripper had to have some knowledge of anatomy. Not much —but enough to know one organ from another. Your letter fooled me for awhile. I thought
it
was the misdirection, but I was wrong: you need no formal schooling for your work.” He paused. “Are you following me so far?”

She glared at him silently.

“There were two things that bothered me,” continued Roosevelt. “Why would these women let the Ripper approach them when they knew he was killing prostitutes in Whitechapel? They’d been warned repeatedly to watch out for strange men. But then I realized that you’re a trusted, even a necessary, member of the community. They were all looking for Jack, not Jane.

“The other thing I couldn’t figure out,” he said, “was how the Ripper could walk around in blood-spattered clothing without drawing everyone’s attention. I made the false assumption that the killer had picked the spots for his murders and hidden fresh clothing nearby.” Roosevelt grimaced. “I was wrong. Those murders were so deranged I should have known there couldn’t be anything premeditated about them. Then, when I was at Marie Kelly’s apartment tonight, I saw how you ripped out her intestines with your hands and I
knew
how much blood you had to have splashed on yourself, it occurred to me that I’ve never seen you when you
weren’t
wearing blood-stained clothes. After all, you do nothing all day but deliver babies and perform abortions; there’s nothing unusual about a midwife’s clothing being bloody.”

“So maybe a midwife killed all them women!” yelled Irma. “Do you know how many midwives there are in Whitechapel? Why pick on me?”

“That’s what’s been haunting me for six weeks,” answered Roosevelt. “I knew everything I had to know right after you killed Catherine Eddowes, and yet I couldn’t piece it together until I realized that a midwife was the likely killer. You made a major blunder, and it took me until tonight to realize what it was.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Irma, curiosity mingling with hatred on her chubby face.

“You told me you heard a woman scream, and then the Ripper knocked you over while he was escaping from the scene of the crime.”

“He did!” said Irma. “He come running out of the darkness and—”

“You’re lying,” said Roosevelt. “I should have known it immediately.”

“It’s God’s own truth!”

He shook his head. “I found you on the ground less than a minute after we heard Catherine Eddowes scream. The Ripper knocked you down just before I got there, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

Roosevelt grinned in triumph. “
That’s
what I missed. It would have taken the Ripper five minutes or more to disembowel poor Catherine and arrange her innards on the ground the way he did. Surely she couldn’t have screamed four minutes into that. She was dead before he started.” The grin vanished. “That was
you
screaming. What better way to escape from the scene of a murder than to have a solicitous policeman escort you to a hospital? If there were any contradictions in your statements, we would write it off to hysteria. After all, you’d just come face to face with Jack the Ripper.”

She glared at him balefully.

“Before we put an end to this, perhaps you’ll tell me why you did it?”

“I told you before,” said the midwife. “I honor the commandments.
They
broke ‘em all! They were all sinners, and God told me to rid the world of ‘em!”

“Did God tell you to disembowel them, too?” asked Roosevelt. “Or was that your own idea?”

Suddenly a butcher knife appeared in her hand. She held it above her head, screamed something unintelligible, and leaped toward him. Roosevelt never flinched. He kept the pistol trained on her and pulled the trigger.

She fell backward, a new red blotch appearing on the front of her blood-stained dress.

She tried to get up, and he fired once more. This time she lay still.

***

My Dearest Edith:

Please destroy this letter after you have read it.

I have faked the symptoms of the malaria I contracted some
years ago on a trip to the Everglades, and have been relieved of
my unofficial duties here. I will be put aboard the next ship to
America (quite possibly on a stretcher if you can imagine that!)
and within a very few days I will once again be able to hold you
and the children in my arms. And I’m pleased to see that Harrison
defeated that fool Cleveland without my help.

My work here is done. I would have preferred to arrest the
fiend, but I was given no choice in the matter. Jack the Ripper is
no more.

If I make that fact public, two things will happen. First, I
will probably be arrested for murder. Second (and actually more
important, for no jury would convict me once they have heard my
story), Whitechapel will remain a blight upon the face of England.
Whereas a conversation I had a few days ago has convinced me that
as long as the British authorities think the madman is still at
large, they might do something positive about eradicating
Whitechapel’s intolerable conditions. If that is so, then it may
actually be serendipitous that only I (and now you) know that the
Ripper is dead.