Jack the Ripper (19 page)

He also thought it significant that these eleven, sorry ten, crimes took place during university vacations or half-term holidays. Specious might be a better word. They would only become important if there was some good reason to think that Stephen had committed the crimes in the first place, and there isn’t. If the wellspring of the case against him is bone dry, then all the derivatives fall too, because there is nothing tangible on which they can be based.

Our next suspect, Robert Donston Stephenson, is, I am afraid, not much better. According to his proponent, the late Melvin Harris, the killer was a black magician who was seeking to obtain the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer’s gallows, candles made from human fat and a preparation concocted from certain portions of the bodies of prostitutes, whose murders had to take place on sites which, taken together, formed a cross on the map. Stephenson, allegedly a black magician of great drive and determination, who had vanquished witch doctors in Africa, set out to achieve this.

Well of course he didn’t. Stephenson was no more Jack the Ripper than I am; or a black magician, or any of the myriad creatures of daring-do, who visited him at the bottom of a glass. But once again, we can see that people want to see the Ripper as someone extraordinary, even if in this instance the only thing out of the ordinary about the suspect is his fantasies. Now, of course, deviant fantasies are signposts in the development of a serial killer and they are often heavy drinkers too, but in Stephenson’s case, they point to a man who was merely pathetic and lived in his imagination the life he was unable to live in reality. Many people do, but most do not actively pretend to be the hero of their daydreams.

Stephenson was born in Hull, in 1841, which would make him forty-seven in 1888, rather old for a serial killer to erupt; rather older too than the man described by witnesses as being in the company of Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly, shortly before their murders. Although neither point is actually decisive, they do mount up.

The evidence is that, up to 1868, Stephenson was either unemployed and living with his parents, or working as a Customs Officer in Hull. His own, much more fanciful account of his life has him studying chemistry, medicine and the occult in western Europe, campaigning with Garibaldi in Italy, as a surgeon, and combating black magic in Cameroon. At best, none of this can be factually established and at worst some, Cameroon for instance, is provably false. In 1868, he was discharged by the Customs for living what they termed ‘an immoral life’. Their records state that he had also been suffering from ‘brain fever’, meaning meningitis (I prefer the original definition!).

Judging from what scanty records there are, Stephenson seems to have spent the next twenty years living a hum-drum life in London, which included getting married and changing his name to Roslyn D’Onston. He claimed to have prospected for gold in California, including killing a man for seducing his cousin’s girlfriend and seeking the Indian rope trick in India. There is anecdotal testimony that he may actually have visited India. At some point along the line, he appears to have divested himself of his wife. Precisely how he maintained himself is unclear, but he does seem to have scraped a living of sorts as a freelance journalist.

July 1888 finds him in the London hospital, Whitechapel, being treated for neurasthenia. The proximity of the hospital to the murders has led to speculation that he could have crept out at night to commit the murders, but his incarceration there obviously has equal weight as an alibi. Specifically, the ward he was in was apparently one which was locked up at night. On 26 December 1888, Stephenson visited Scotland Yard to voice his suspicions that the Ripper was a doctor at the hospital, named Morgan Davies. A surviving document indicates that Stephenson was motivated by the reward money on offer for the killer’s conviction. The detective who interviewed him, an Inspector Roots, knew Stephenson personally and portrayed him to his superiors as a virtual alcoholic; it figures. In fact, earlier that month Stephenson had persuaded the
Pall Mall Gazette
to publish an article on the Ripper Murders, entitled ‘Who is the Whitechapel Demon (by one who thinks he knows)’, in which he outlined his black magic theory. This is alleged to have been a veiled confession to the murders, fulfilling his need to tell the world what he had done and why, with his subsequent accusations against Dr Davies a cunning ploy to divert attention away from himself. Others may think that drink money was a more feasible imperative.

But this is not the end of the story. The year 1890 found Stephenson/D’Onston living with a female writer named Mabel Collins. Collins wrote to her friend (and former lover) Baroness Vittoria Cremers, ‘[He is] a great magician who has wonderful magical secrets.’ He was also now passing himself off as a Cavalry officer. Cremers eventually moved in with them and the trio opened up a cosmetics business.

Years later, in the 1920s, Cremers said that she had found a number of ties encrusted with dried blood in a trunk in Stephenson’s room, claiming that he had repeated his story of Davies being the Ripper, adding that the Doctor had concealed the organs he had removed from the victims between his shirt and tie.

Ultimately Mabel and Stephenson split up. There seems little doubt that the Baroness engineered this to get Collins back, by using Stephenson’s Ripper fictions against him, inventing the story of finding the ties to make her frightened of him.

The last known act of Stephenson’s life was the publication of a religious work called
The Patristic Gospels
in 1904. When and how he died is unknown.

There is no real case against Robert Stephenson, aka Roslyn D’Onston, as Jack the Ripper. When one peers carefully behind the black magician façade, the real self-image is of a man who yearned to be a hero, actually defeating black magic, not a sadistic serial killer, cutting a swathe through the female population. He had normal relations with women and would not simply have ceased killing and settled back into domesticity after 1888, if he had been the Ripper.

The case of Aaron Davis (or David) Cohen is much more straightforward. He was arrested in the East End on 6 December 1888, as a ‘lunatic wandering at large’. Details are not plentiful, but he may have behaved in some deranged way in a brothel. Such may be inferred from court documents on the 7th. Thames Magistrates Court referred Cohen to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary for observation and on the 21 December he was committed to Colney Hatch lunatic asylum. He died there on 20 October 1889, from ‘exhaustion of mania and pulmonary phthisis’/

According to the assessments of both institutions, Cohen was ‘suicidal, dangerous to others, very violent, continually spitting and tore down a lead pipe and window guard in the ward [infirmary]; tore his clothes, kicked passers-by, was highly excitable, unclean, incoherent and rambling and required constant supervision [asylum].’

Initially, it was very difficult to get him to take food, which accounted for him being ‘exceedingly thin’ (Colney Hatch).

In the records, Cohen is described as a ‘Tailor…a young foreign Jew with dark brown eyes.’ One assumes that he himself provided the authorities with his name and occupation as the asylum’s casebook lists his relatives as ‘unknown’.

It has to be said that Cohen, brought to the fore by Ripper-expert Martin Fido in the 1980s, is a viable suspect. He was apprehended a month after the murder of Mary Kelly and, discounting Mylett, Mackenzie and Coles as Ripper victims (virtually all writers do), the murders ceased after his incarceration, at least in London. Cohen fits the basic profile, FBI expert John Douglas remarking that the killer would either have been Cohen or somebody like him. His behaviour and demeanour were violent and he may have posed a threat to the females in the brothel, in which he was apparently arrested. Martin Fido consulted Dr Luigi Cancrini, Professor of Psychology at the University of Bologna, who had given a paper on the Ripper’s psychopathology. Dr Cancrini told him that Cohen and his behaviour fitted his reading of the murderer.

These are the pros and they are weighty ones. But there is also one major con, laid out for us by Dr P.T. d’Orban, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital, who remarks that Cohen’s extreme mania would have undermined the control needed to commit the murders and get away afterwards. This echoes a point made in my 1995 work
Jack the Ripper: Anatomy of a Myth
, in which I describe Cohen as too obviously a lunatic.

Our final candidate is an unemployed labourer named George Hutchinson. Research, although taken very painstakingly by his advocates, has not conclusively pinpointed him. Ripper expert Bob Hinton believes that he was the George Hutchinson born in Shadwell, East London, in December 1859; the son of a licensed victualler. Hutchinson is listed as a barman working in a pub in Clerkenwell in the 1881 census. By 1888, he was unemployed and living in the Victoria Working Men’s Home, Commercial Street, Whitechapel. Commercial Street is central to the Ripper crimes. Two of the streets in which murders took place, Hanbury Street (Annie Chapman) and Dorset Street (Mary Kelly), ran off it and Gunthorpe Street (Martha Tabram), then George Yard is the next street along.

On the morning of 9 November 1888, the hideously mutilated body of Mary Jane Kelly was found in her room in Miller’s Court, a cul-de-sac off Dorset Street. At Mary’s inquest on 12 November, a witness named Sarah Lewis spoke of seeing a man standing outside a lodging house in Dorset Street, opposite the entrance to Miller’s Court, at about 2.30 a.m. on the 9th. The man was looking up the Court as if waiting for someone to come out. Lewis, and a woman who lived above Kelly, named Elizabeth Prater, both claimed to have heard a cry of ‘murder’ shortly before 4.00 a.m.

Hours after Lewis gave her inquest testimony, George Hutchinson came forward to say that at about 2.00 a.m. on 9 November, Kelly had approached him in Commerical Street and asked him for sixpence. Being penniless he declined, and watched as she then went off and picked up a well-dressed man, who she took back to Miller’s Court. Hutchinson told the police, ‘I then went to the Court to see if I could see them but I could not. I stood there for about three quarters of an hour to see if they came out. They did not so I went away.’ As far as we know, the police did not ask Sarah Lewis whether Hutchinson was the man she had seen, although it seems highly likely that he was. The fact that he came forward, following the inquest, suggests that he was frightened of being thought of as the murderer and went to the police to clear himself. Certainly, nobody takes all of Hutchinson’s statement at face value; the description which he gave of Kelly’s client was ridiculously over-elaborated and at the very least greatly exaggerated.

But this has led to the accusation that Hutchinson was not merely frightened of becoming a suspect, but was in fact the Ripper himself, and was looking to throw the police off his scent by portraying himself as an innocent bystander. This theory has gained its share of adherents in recent years. Bob Hinton, who is a very able crime historian, is one; the late Stephen Wright, an American writer, and last year Ben Court and Caroline Ip, the writers of the splendid
Whitechapel
mini-series, are also among them.

Hinton speculates that Hutchinson became obsessed with Mary Kelly and was stalking her. In the convoluted insanity, which grips the mind of the stalker, something, or somebody, has to be responsible for preventing him from being with the object of his desire. In this case, it was the fact of Mary being a prostitute and he blamed this on her sisters-in-trade, whom he slew into perdition. But when she continued to reject him, his love turned to hate and he turned his knife on her.

There is a fact about Kelly’s murder, hitherto overlooked, which does make this thesis credible. This type of killer will turn the victim’s head away from themselves – cover the face even – so that those dead, accusing eyes cannot appear to be following them, especially when they leave. This happened in the cases of Chapman, Stride and Eddowes. But when we look at the photograph of Mary’s remains, her face is turned towards her killer, looking up at him as if she is at long-last treating him with the respect he believes he deserves. What this suggests is that the hatred apparent in this murder was deeply personal.

Now the buts. In the diseased mind of a serial killer, any form of rebuff, no matter how trivial, can have this effect. Moreover, the evidence points to Mary having only returned to prostitution when Joe Barnett moved out at the end of October, i.e. after the other murders. This enormously weakens a hypothesis never strong on hard evidence in the first place. In fact, it only really becomes credible if Mary Kelly was not actually a Ripper victim. In that case, it can be argued that in the stalker’s eyes, Barnett had previously been the obstacle to her returning his affections (ironically Barnett himself gains plausibility as Mary’s killer if she was not murdered by the Ripper).

It is argued that Hutchinson snugly fits into the FBI’s profile. Yes and No.He fits the most basic categories, but these can be applied to literally thousands of men in the East End of that time. But we have no evidence of him being violent, or a danger to women, and after November 1888 he simply fades into obscurity.

But perhaps the most important thing about Aaron Cohen and George Hutchinson is that they surely came from the sort of background from which Jack the Ripper did actually originate. Ordinary and mundane; not rich, powerful or exciting.

Is he in this book? Yes, I believe that he is amongst the ten specific candidates assessed for you by my colleagues. But I will not attempt to prejudice your minds by revealing which one I think he is.

Begg, P., Fido, M. & Skinner, K.,
The Jack the Ripper A–Z
(Headline, 2010)

Fairclough, M.,
The Ripper and the Royals
(Duckworth, 1991)

Fido, M.,
The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987)

Harris, M.,
Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth
(Virgin Books, 1987)