Jack the Ripper (18 page)

This rendition of events pushed the aged, unwell Gull into the limelight. Stowell’s theories had cast the doctor in a minor role, in
loco parentis
after the homicidal Eddy’s apprehension. Now, he was reimagined as the killer, obeying Masonic imperatives (perhaps originating at government level with Lord Salisbury) to slaughter the small clutch of ladies of the night who knew not only that the wilful, hedonistic Eddy had married a common Catholic woman, Annie Elizabeth Crook, in 1885, but also that he had then had a daughter, Alice, by her, thereby rather upsetting the applecart of royal primogeniture. Mary Jane Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s final victim, had, indeed, been a witness at the notorious wedding – or so the story went – and, when she realised that this placed her in a position of unlikely influence, she attempted to blackmail the government, suggesting that they buy her silence. Gull’s murder spree was the establishment’s brutal response to Kelly’s impudent demands, and her associates went down with her, one by one: on reflection, it seems amazing that Mary Jane should have remained in Spitalfields, in her little one-room hovel off Dorset Street, assimilating the highly-publicised and extremely unpleasant serial assassinations of her friends and confidantes without, apparently, exhibiting much in the way of anxiety. Gull’s un-Hippocratic mission terminated automatically with Kelly’s murder, and, for good measure, the clues he had left at the scenes of the crimes had been packed with esoteric connotations, comprehensible only to the
cognoscenti
– the misspelled code-word ‘Juwes’, which jumped out from the enigmatic Goulston Street Graffito, for example, actually alluded to three key figures of Masonic lore, although it appeared at face value to be not much more than a semi-illiterate approximation of the word ‘Jews’, written on a doorjamb which happened to be positioned at the street-market heart of the East End’s Jewish community. This was, all in all, an eccentric and somewhat charmless scheme, festooned with sideshow excitements, bit-part players and, lingering on the palate for some while afterwards, a powerful undertone of paranoid sensibility. Somewhere along the line, the trusty reputation-blackener which was the Cleveland Street Scandal found its way into the story, as did, for the first time, the artist Walter Sickert. Eddy’s death scene now came with visibly-putrefying fingernails, this being, it was suggested, a sign of poisoning.

The detailed planning and execution which characterised this theory – given voice in the 1977 book by Stephen Knight,
Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution
– seemed on more sober reflection to have been excessive: it was overkill, to put it crudely. Supposing that Eddy had entered into marriage in 1885 (and of this there was no record whatsoever), then he had done so without Queen Victoria’s permission, and in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act (1772). This made the marriage an illegal one, liable to immediate and unfussy cancellation, so there was very little here – legally speaking – which merited the concoction of an elaborate multiple-murder plan by the establishment, supposedly running scared. The story was off-wavelength in other ways, too, and there is evidence to suggest that Knight himself knew that the foundations of his solution were, in fact, terribly shaky. A solid debunking of this second-generation Royal Conspiracy theory did not prevent its being taken into the public consciousness, however, and Ripperology’s fantasists, all starting from Knight’s cynical headspace, maintained their grip on the discipline for another decade.

Times gradually changed, however.
Glasnost
and
perestroika
altered the face of Ripper studies as the centenary of the crimes approached, and, with crabby old conspiracy theories quickly shedding their relevance, so Eddy’s star inevitably faded. There was one last hurrah, which came in 1991 in the form of Melvyn Fairclough’s
The Ripper and the Royals
, a portmanteau of ambitious plots and manoeuvrings in which a raving Eddy lived on, incarcerated among the ghosts of Glamis Castle, into the 1930s. Fairclough’s book belonged naturally to an era which had already passed without ceremony, however – the author himself repudiated his story a few years after its publication.

In this way, Eddy was, finally, permitted to step down from Ripperology’s first rank. He had been an unlikely figurehead in frightened times, but he jarred with the discipline’s democratisation, and he showed his age. Stowell’s enthusiasm had come to nothing; Knight’s visions had blurred; both men were dead. Fairclough’s abandonment of Eddy’s platform brought the era of royal intrigue to a forlorn end, and nothing seems likely, now, to revive responsible interest in a theory which, eventually, failed to adapt to its changing environment. The marginalisation of the idea’s central figure inevitably followed.

And so Eddy’s right out there on the horizon now, and his stock is lower than ever, but his hands are quite unbound and his curious little eyes twinkle back at us. And, below the perfectly-kept moustache, that’s a smile, and the taste of
crème de menthe
on his lips.

Jack the Ripper was not the world’s first serial killer. Gesina Gottfried in Germany; Helene Jegado, Charles Avinmain and Eusebus Pieydagnelle in France; Italy’s Vincenz Vezeni and Americans Jane Toppan and Jesse Pomeroy all preceded him. In fact, it is arguable whether Jack was even East London’s first serial homicide. ‘A murderer who is such by passion and by wolfish craving for bloodshed as a mode of unnatural luxury cannot relapse into inertia,’ wrote Thomas De Quincey in his 1827 dissertation on the Ratcliffe Highway murders of December 1811; in which two families were butchered just south of where the Ripper later killed Elizabeth Stride. Note the prescience of De Qunicey’s words; he not only foretells what is to come but also describes what these human werewolves are; men and women who kill for sexual pleasure, pure sadism, fame megalomania, a messianic purpose or vengeance against a gender or group of people.

But the Ratcliffe Highway murders had been largely forgotten when the Ripper emerged onto the same stage, seventy-seven years later. What distinguished him from those who had gone before is that his crimes coincided with the growth of the tabloid press, which requires a constant infusion of sensational stories in order to sell their wares. Thus Jack the Ripper became the first serial killer to be widely publicised: ‘…as each murder was committed we wrote up picturesque and lurid details…one evening Springfield would publish a theory, next night Charley Hands would have a far better one and then I would weigh in with another theory in the Globe,’ recalled the journalist William Le Queux. It was Le Queux, and his ilk, who made the Ripper what he is today; the symbol of silent butchery the world over, as he stalks the gaslit streets of East London, cutting down one prostitute after another, a demonic force erupting out of the fog with all the fury of Hades.

Images from the
Illustrated Police News
.

The reality is that Jack never struck on a foggy night and the eruptions were very likely fuelled by alcohol; an estimated 68 per cent of serial killers have drink or drug problems. Lost in a fast shuffle were the victims – a group of women subsisting amongst the poorest of the poor of Whitechapel and Spitalfields – ‘who [had] no home except the kitchen of a low lodging house; to sit there, sick and weak, bruised and wretched; to be turned out after midnight to earn the requisite pence, anywhere and anyhow; to come across your murderer and caress your assassin,’ said the
Daily Telegraph
, in one of the few pieces of decent journalism marking these murders. It was the victims’ so-called betters, the upper classes of Britain, who created the parlour game of ‘name the Ripper’. By doing so, they diverted attention away from the conditions of which the
Daily Telegraph
complained and made common cause with the mythmakers.

Such is the aura that has been created around these crimes, that people seem to believe that Jack the Ripper walked between the raindrops, leaving the cream of two police forces floundering in his wake. In the eyes of the mythologists, he cannot, therefore, have been any ordinary person. So, it is no surprise that in the era of Watergate he spawned his own grand conspiracy theory, one which over a twenty-year period dragged into its purview a representative selection of the British ruling class of the late nineteenth century: Prime Minister Salisbury, Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren and his Chief of Detectives Sir Robert Anderson, the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Randolph Churchill, Lord Euston, Lord Arthur Somerset, James Kenneth Stephen (the son of an eminent Judge), Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, the artist Walter Sickert and last, but oh-so-certainly not the least, Prince Edward Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, heir presumptive to the throne. Peering through the curtains is the future King George V and, in a variant on the story, his Father Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, is involved.

I have left it to my colleagues to examine for you the individual cases of Gull, Sickert and Prince Eddy, along with those of seven other candidates who have merited their own individual chapters. In this particular essay I will be concentrating on four men, who, likewise, have received their share of attention as possible Rippers: the aforementioned James Stephen, Robert Donston Stephenson, Aaron Davis Cohen and George Hutchinson.

Stephen was inducted into the lexicon of Ripper suspects by author Michael Harrison, in 1972. The purpose of Harrison’s book was to debunk the case against the Duke of Clarence: ‘…I couldn’t leave the reader high and dry so what I did was find somebody I thought was a likely candidate,’ he told the BBC. There are good Ripper suspects and there are bad Ripper suspects (the majority), but Mr Harrison is surely unique in accusing somebody simply to entertain an audience. A man’s posthumous reputation was clearly of no concern to him, as he crumbled Jim Stephen’s good name to pieces in the palms of his hands. Unhappily, in Harrison’s wake, along came a number of other writers to spin Stephen into their own pet theories: he and Clarence had committed the murders together, or he supported and succoured the Prince while he carried them out, or he was part of a plot to cover up the birth of an illegitimate royal baby – one fathered by Clarence – alternatively one sired by the future King Edward VII (see above). It is all rather like seeing a man put into the stocks and watching him being pelted with rotten fruit and eggs.

There is not even the ghost of a semblance of a fact to link James Stephen with the Jack the Ripper Murders, and he fails the profile of the killer prepared by the FBI’s experts in the 1980s almost completely.

Born in 1859, a scion of the powerful Stephen family, the inordinately handsome James Kenneth was a Cambridge don at twenty-six, president of the Cambridge Union and tutor and friend to the Duke of Clarence. He published two books of poetry and on leaving university became a barrister. A brilliant orator with a magnetic personality, success seemed to stretch out almost endlessly before him. Then it all went horribly wrong. In 1886, he suffered brain damage in an accident and from then on it was all downhill. His behaviour became increasingly erratic and in 1892 he died in a Northamptonshire mental home.

A tragic end to a young and promising life and there is no reason to suppose that during his decline he took to the streets to murder poor women in the night or connive in their butchery. He exhibited no signs of violent behaviour, matches no description of the killer and had no known knowledge of the streets and alleys of Whitechapel. He may have been a misogynist; it is possible to infer such from some of his poetry. He was indeed a close friend of the young Prince Eddy and may have been gay. It is even plausible that the two men were slightly more than friends. So what? These are no more the criteria for a serial murderer than any other lifestyle.

Michael Harrison believed that Stephen was acting out a poem called ‘Kaphoozelum’. Or rather he wasn’t because the actual poem is innocuous. However, the name itself is derived from a piece of doggerel about the murders of ten prostitutes in ancient Jerusalem. But why then were there not ten Ripper victims? Oh but there were said Mr Harrison. To Smith, Tabram, Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly, he added four fringe victims: Annie Farmer and Rose Mylett (November and December 1888), Alice Mackenzie (1889) and Frances Coles (1891). But that makes eleven. No sweat; Harrison counted Stride and Eddowes as one as they were on the same night. Facts! It is very unlikely that Smith, Mylett, Mackenzie and Coles were Ripper victims, and Annie Farmer definitely not. She wasn’t even murdered; she suffered a minor injury to the throat, possibly self inflicted, whilst attempting to bilk a client. Not exactly meticulous research but it perhaps sums up Michael Harrison’s approach.