This is the full-text of A.P. Wolf's Jack the Myth, originally published by Robert Hale in 1993. It is reprinted here in its entirety, with new revisions, by the kind permission of A.P. Wolf. You may start reading it from the beginning, or you can jump to specific chapters by clicking the links below.
Chapter 1
Claims and counter claims fly back and forth between these various protagonists because they do not like it when their much vaunted theories are challenged. For instance if one author relates the rumour that sperm was found in the anal passage of Mary Jane Kelly, then it is immediately shot down by another because it ruins his own well-thought-out theory that the Ripper was unable to achieve an erection and used his knife instead.
Anyone viewing the horrific photograph showing the little that remained of Mary Jane Kelly after her murder will immediately realize that this sort of question is academic anyway. Once again if the original post-mortem report is read it is obvious that such questions are firmly rooted in the minds of the 'Ripperologist's' and not in reality. Dr Thomas Bond makes no mention in either of his two extensive reports of any signs of sexual contact.
And while this serious scientific analysis and discussion goes on and on, concerning buggary and questions such as 'is it easier to slit the throat of a woman you are about to have sex with when she has her back or front to you?', Jack the Ripper ducks and darts down the dark alleys of Whitechapel laughing his head off. Getting further and further away from his would be armchair pursuers while they compare notes about intestines being ripped out of vaginas and ask whether Jack the Ripper was really the Duke of Clarence, a secret Russian agent or even a black magician bent on creating a murderous pentagram to achieve the 'supreme power', whatever that is. It is a pathetic situation that has only grown worse as time has gone by, and will probably not improve in the future if one of the latest volumes on the 'Ripper' is anything to go by, where the following are all paraded before us as possible Jack the Rippers:
- King Edward VII
- Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence
- Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister
- Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister
- Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, Statesman
- Sir William Withey Gull, Queen Victoria's physician
- Dr Thomas Barnado, founder of Barnado's Homes
- Helen Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society
- Frank Miles, Royal Academy artist
- Walter Sickert, artist
- A midwife
It is worth mentioning that all these eminent Victorian public figures have been - and in some cases still are - considered serious candidates for the role of the Ripper by various writers. A more than ample demonstration of the fantasy that has been created over the last hundred years or so by the Ripperologists. The 'A to Z of Jack the Ripper' by Begg, Fido and Skinner is an admirable book amongst this deluge of fantasy, as it does stick to factual information, but even so the book doesn't dismiss the fantasy entirely. For in a discussion of Stephen Knight's book 'The Final Solution' the authors say: 'In the end there is not a single piece of solid historical evidence adduced to support the sensational and controversial elements of Mr Sickert's story (upon entirely which Knight had based his story). Nonetheless Stephen Knight holds a honoured place in the annals of Ripper research.'
For those who are not familiar with Knight's story it is based upon the premise that Prince Albert Victor had married a Catholic prostitute who was carrying his child. This was known to a small group of Whitechapel prostitutes who attempted to blackmail the government and consequently Lord Salisbury, the prime minister of the day, set out to murder these prostitutes with the help of fellow Freemason Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria's physician-in-ordinary. It is a marvelous piece of fiction but does not stand up to a critical examination of its facts. Particularly in regard to Annie Elizabeth Crook - alleged grandmother of Knight's informer, Joseph Sickert - the supposed Catholic wife of Prince Albert Victor and mother of his child. Most importantly it has been shown that Annie Elizabeth Crook was not a Catholic, and even if she had been then the marriage between herself and Prince Albert Victor would have been null and void under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. Therefore it was not really necessary for Lord Salisbury and other high-ranking Freemasons to start murdering a gang of Whitechapel prostitutes.
Joseph Sickert himself is a very questionable source anyway, claiming to be the illegitimate son of artist Walter Sickert - without any visible proof whatsoever - who, as we we have seen is also a suspect for our Ripperologists, and is once again being paraded in front of us as Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwall in the latest best seller. Nobody seems to have alerted the latest Jack author to the fact that her theory of Walter Sickert being the Ripper was written up in 1990 by Jean Overton Fuller in 'Sickert and the Ripper Crimes', and it was shot out of the water then as a complete and utter pack of lies and fantasy, as no doubt it will be now.
There are even more serious flaws to Knight's story, his attempts to link the mutilations carried out on the prostitutes with Freemasonry ritual are woefully inadequate and he was very selective with the facts he chose to use to back up his story. When the facts are carefully analysed it can be seen that Stephen Knight wrote his books around his theory and not around the facts, but this still allows him, according to the Ripperologists a place of honour amongst them.
So it seems the myth is just as important as the reality, after all. Jack the Myth rather than Jack the Rip.
It is the man we must concern ourselves with and not the myth. When we do that, when we throw all the mystery and self-inspired fantasy, then we can get to grips with our Jack the Ripper. Not to say that we can catch him - though it is early days yet in our investigation and who knows by the time we reach the end we may have snapped us our man?
35 Dorset Street
Crossingham's Lodging House, 35 Dorset Street is an address full of mystery, coincidence and very likely the solution to the identity of Jack the Ripper.
In any investigation, whether brutal murder is discussed or simple theft, there may well a certain amount of coincidence present and often it can be quite safely dismissed as that - circumstantial events that inexplicably coincide. But when there are just too many, then any investigator should pause for thought and ask themselves what exactly is going on.
There is no doubt that if the police in many of the last century's greatest murder hunts, like the Yorkshire Ripper or Ted Bundy case, had taken the curious coincidences that appeared during their investigations more seriously they would have caught their killers a lot quicker. Coincidence certainly resulted in the execution of the American mass murderer Ted Bundy who tried to explain away the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against him as pure coincidence and amazingly enough the police and the courts went along with him... to a certain extent. For four long and terrible years Bundy murdered many - the exact number is not known but is thought to be somewhere between twenty and forty - young girls at his pleasure and without a lot of hindrance from what must have been a remarkably inept police force. The police were already aware that a series of brutal rapes and murders in the Seattle area had been committed by a handsome college type driving a battered brown Volkswagen, in fact even his name was known and the murders were named after him: the 'Ted Murders'. But Ted had moved to Salt Lake City and had begun murdering and raping there as well as in Colorado. Again hordes of witnesses mentioned the brown VW and the college type, and one would have thought that when a policeman arrested the young college type at the wheel of a battered, brown VW for jumping a red light and he gave his name as Ted Bundy some lights would have clicked on in the upstairs of the police department. Especially when a search of Ted's car revealed that Ted was equipped with handcuffs and panty hose with holes cut out for the eyes. But no, Ted was released on his own recognizance that same night with the police believing him to be some kind of harmless and amateur thief. A very bad piece of police work which was to cost an unknown number of young girls (some believe as many as twenty) their lives - raped and murdered in horrifying circumstances. This could have been avoided had the police acted on the obvious: that when Ted Bundy was in Seattle young girls were raped and murdered by a man named Ted driving a brown VW, that when Ted Bundy was in Salt Lake City young girls were raped and murdered by a man named Ted driving a brown VW, that when Ted Bundy was in Colorado young girls in Colorado were raped and murdered by a man named Ted driving a brown VW. Bundy's ex-girlfriend had even informed the police that he was their man but the officers who subsequently interviewed him couldn't believe that this nice young law student could be the mass murderer they were seeking.
Even more remarkable was the case of Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Yorkshire Ripper', who murdered thirteen women over a period of five years in the north of England in the 1970's. The police effort to catch the killer was massive but Sutcliffe eluded them until quite by chance he was picked up by a routine police patrol in a red-light area because his car carried stolen number plates. Subsequently police records revealed that as early as August 1969 Sutcliffe had attacked and beaten a prostitute around the head with a stone wrapped in a sock, and one month later he was caught by police crouched in the garden of a house with a hammer clutched in his hand (many of the murdered women were battered with a hammer). His car had been logged twice by police officers investigating the murders in various red-light areas, his name had been on the police computer as one who frequently picked up prostitutes in the murder area - many of his victims were prostitutes - and just like Bundy he had even been interviewed at length by murder detectives, but just as in the case of Bundy the police were satisfied that Sutcliffe was not their killer.
It is rather frightening to realize that the massive police effort mounted to trap the Yorkshire Ripper totally failed to pick up the six references in their own information systems which would have pointed them directly to Peter Sutcliffe. It would have been possible to explain away two references to the same man as coincidence in the murder inquiry but six references had to mean that Sutcliffe was their man.
Sad to say, though, that even today most murderers tend to be caught by pure luck rather than good police work. In the case of Jack the Ripper there are also far, far too many coincidences, and over a hundred years later it is impossible to believe that, firstly, the police did not react to these startling coincidences at the time. For if they had, they would have surely caught the Ripper, but then as we have seen the modern police forces of the world seem almost as reluctant to react to the information under their control. Secondly, why, when we are discussing one of the most popular literary subjects of the last hundred years have legions of writers and researchers not gradually tumbled to these glaringly obvious coincidences that leap out of the pages of their own books?
But back to 1888 and 35 Dorset Street after that slight diversion into the world of modern murder. In 1888 it is thought that there were as many as 233 common lodging houses in the Whitechapel area, and this is quoted to show that Crossingham's Lodging House, 35 Dorset Street, was not the only common lodging house available to the poor and needy of that grim area of London at the time of the murders. The cost of a bed in one of these boarding houses was four pence a night, which was about the same as what one of the more than 1,200 working prostitutes of the area could expect to earn from a 'trick'. Four pence was also what the slaughter men could earn for each sheep they killed and dressed in the hell that was the nearby underground slaughter yard north of St Paul's where the poor animals were first thrown live into a pit to break their legs before having their throats cut.
Life was 'cheap' in Whitechapel in those days amongst the almost million impoverished inhabitants crammed into a few dirty square miles, and many of the prostitutes were badly mishandled by their clients, beaten up, disfigured and some even had their throats cut. The cry of 'murder!' was so common that it was simply ignored, as was amply demonstrated by a certain Francis Hewitt when giving evidence at the inquest into the murder of Martha Tabram, who some consider to be the first Ripper victim. Martha Tabram was done to death not twelve feet from Hewitt's bedroom window. With his wife he heard a cry of 'murder!' but explained that: 'the district around here is rather rough and cries of murder are of frequent, if not a nightly occurrence in the district'. So together they ignored the cry for help and Martha Tabram was brutally murdered.
The mid to late Victorian era was a time of brutal violence. Over 11,000 people died yearly from acts of violence and in what was proudly known as the age of 'assertive masculinity' the poor and needy of London were commonly referred to by their betters as 'surplus population'. Surplus they were indeed when one considers that almost 60% of all children of the area died before they were five, and when one of this surplus population happened to be a female she could expect little help from the criminal justice system. In just one sad example a man attacked a girl in broad daylight and beat her so severely that one eye was gouged out and her nose and skull broken. Not satisfied with that he then kicked her as she lay bleeding on the ground and finally threw her over a parapet. For this horrific attack the man was jailed for a mere year. A boy who spun a top on the public highway received the same sentence. Perhaps even more horrific in that age of 'assertive masculinity' was the attack on Jane Shore at a fair in broad daylight by a gang of five men who beat and brutally raped her while a crowd of onlookers cheered them on. Yes, life was cheap but with the advent of Jack the Ripper life was to become cheaper than it ever was before.
Most Ripper authors take their starting point for the murders as Mary Ann Nichols who was killed on Friday 31 August at 3a.m. in Buck's Row, Whitechapel; and most of these authors are adamant that no other murder before this was the work of the Ripper. This is clearly open to disagreement.
On Tuesday 6 August 1888 at about 5a.m. PC Barrett was summoned by a John Reeves to examine the mutilated body of a woman he had found lying in a pool of blood on the landing of his lodgings at 37 George Yard Buildings. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times all over her torso, special attention having been paid to the reproductive organs by the killer.
Despite intensive police activity the killer of the prostitute, Martha Tabram (or Turner as she was also known) was never apprehended. Since then the brutal murder has been put down as an isolated case unconnected with the later series of murders attributed to the Ripper. Her death is seen as not matching the 'form' of the Ripper because her throat wasn't cut and she wasn't mutilated in the same fashion as the other victims... but what was the 'form' of the Ripper?
We only have to look at the case of Long Liz Stride, murdered on the 30 September 1888, where only her throat was cut and no other mutilations were carried out. This doesn't match the 'form' of our Ripper either, but no matter the other experts insist that Long Liz was indeed a victim of the Ripper - he was merely disturbed before he could finish the grisly job.
It seems rather naive to claim Long Liz as a victim of the Ripper because her throat was slit and then to go on and totally dismiss Martha Tabram as a possible victim of the Ripper because she had only been ripped apart by a knife wielding maniac who had inflicted multiple wounds all over her torso, and had attempted by all accounts to cut the reproductive organs out of her body.
No, this was not a simple revenge murder or a vicious disagreement between drunken prostitute and 'trick', this was the handiwork of a maniac out of control, judging by the number of stab wounds. So how many Jack the Rippers were there running around on the streets of Whitechapel in 1888?
The whole conception of what the Ripperologists are fond of calling the 'form' of Jack the Ripper is fairly spurious anyway. What they seem to claim is that a killer has a method of killing and never varies it, a weird sort of 'hallmark' that identifies his work immediately. In other words our Ripperologists are quite prepared to dismiss one or other of the possible victims of Jack the Ripper because the assault was carried out with a different type of weapon, a rounded knife as opposed to a pointed knife and so on. A glaring example of this can be found in Colin Wilson's and Robin Odell's book 'Jack the Ripper, Summing Up and Verdict' where the murder and mutilation of Alice McKenzie a.k.a. Claypipe Alice is discussed. Her body was discovered at 1a.m. on the 17 July 1889 in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, throat stabbed and various cutting and stabbing mutilations to her lower torso. One of the doctors, Thomas Bond, who had previously examined other Ripper victims, called to examine the body, immediately pronounced without hesitation: 'I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel Murders.'
That is the fist-hand testimony of a professional police surgeon with 'hands on' knowledge of the case he is talking about in 1889. One hundred years later our two armchair Ripperologists Odell and Wilson claim that this murder could not possibly have been the Ripper's work because the woman had been stabbed and not cut.
This curious obsession with the 'form' of a killer cannot really be defended anyway. After all a clever killer would not have any 'form', and what of the 'form' of other mass murderers.
It is worth briefly mentioning just a few examples now although we will be returning to the subject in a later chapter. The 'Dusseldorf Murderer', Peter Kurten, held the region around the city of Dusseldorf in Germany in absolute terror for almost twenty years, raping, mutilating and murdering so many victims that he himself could give no accurate estimate. He had no 'form', his victims ranged from 10-year-old girls to middle-aged men and he variously strangled them, cut their throats, beat them with a hammer or stabbed them with either scissors, knife or screwdriver. The so-called 'Black-Out Ripper', Gordon Cummins, who murdered women during the black-outs in London in 1942 doesn't fit in with our Ripperologists' idea of a mass murderer either. His first victim was strangled, the second had her throat slit and her stomach mutilated with a tin opener, the third and fourth strangled and mutilated with a razor blade. The 'Yorkshire Ripper' variously employed a screwdriver, hacksaw blade, hammer and knife to murder and mutilate his victims.
If we do dismiss this question of 'form' for the moment then it seems likely that Martha Tabram could after all have been a victim of the Ripper, but whether she was the first will always be open to question, for it is highly unlikely that the Ripper began his terrible career with full-blown murder accompanied by vicious mutilations.
On the night of her murder Martha Tabram had been drinking in the White Swan (some claim it was the Angel and Crown) with another prostitute, Mary Ann Connelly, and two soldier clients (they were later cleared of any complicity in the murder), and it is Mary Ann Connelly that we must interest ourselves in because her place of residence was Crossingham's Lodging House, 35 Dorset Street.
Mary Ann Connelly was a well known figure in Whitechapel, better known to her clients and the police as Pearly Poll and she had been associating with Martha Tabram for about six months, but it is not only her address that is interesting. Mary Ann Connelly and two other prostitutes, both also resident at 35 Dorset Street, gave statements in the next two murders ascribed to the Ripper. After the deaths of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman, all three prostitutes were interviewed by an Inspector Reid and they all implicated a man they were all familiar with. It follows that if Mary Ann Connelly and her two friends suspected someone that they knew personally as being the Ripper, then this suspicion must have first been aroused by the murder of Martha Tabram, and later compounded by the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman. Interestingly enough Walter Dew - the detective who later caught Crippen - noted in his diary that 'Pearly Poll' - who was Mary Ann Connelly - vanished out of the Whitchapel area for days after the murder of her friend, convinced that she would be the next victim.
What is of greater significance is that there is now a link, however slight, between the murders of Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman and that link is 35 Dorset Street.
That link becomes even stronger when we investigate the murder of Annie Chapman the Ripper's next victim, for Dark Annie as she was known actually lived at Crossingham's Lodging House, 35 Dorset Street.
It is now obvious that we are dealing with a group of prostitutes, all of whom were known to each other and all whom entertained suspicions about the identity of Jack the Ripper. The random factor - that the killer picked his victims at random and as opportunity presented them - employed by many previous authors starts to slip away as quickly as their all powerful Ripper.
After the murder of Annie Chapman, rumour was rife in Whitechapel that a mysterious individual known as 'Leather Apron' was responsible for the series of murders and the police took up the trail. One of the first clues came from a Timothy Donovan who claimed that he not only knew Leather Apron well but had once turned him out of his lodging house because he had attacked a woman there... and which lodging house was Timothy Donovan the keeper of?
Crossingham's, 35 Dorset Street.
Another resident of 35 Dorset Street, a Mr West, also confirmed that he knew Leather Apron by sight and had observed him hanging around the lodging house in the weeks leading up to the series of murders. Now the coincidences are building up to a point where they cannot be denied or explained away. Remember we are talking about an area of London with over 1,200 working prostitutes and 233 lodging houses, and the laws of chance will simply not explain away the facts that all the prostitutes murdered up till now knew each other, and that they were all, in one way or another, connected to 35 Dorset Street. Also, the police acting on evidence from the keeper of that same lodging house soon after arrested a former lodger called John Pizer aka Leather Apron.
The police eventually let Pizer walk free, even after the man admitted to having hidden himself since the murder of Annie Chapman, was identified by independent witnesses as someone they had seen threatening to knife women, and after discovering a collection of formidable knives at his home. This somewhat strange individual who was known to one and all as 'Jack' was able to provide an alibi for his whereabouts on the nights in question, an alibi with which the police were surprisingly and suspiciously quickly satisfied.
Now we have the problem of Elizabeth Stride, Long Liz, who is the subject of the next chapter, and the problem rests on whether we accept her as the third or fourth victim of Jack the Ripper, or as a victim of Jack the Ripper at all. It is very tempting for this writer to accept that Stride was murdered by the Ripper, as a few days before her death she was actually living at 35 Dorset Street and her boyfriend, Michael Kidney, was still living there when she died. If she was a victim of the Ripper then it would truly continue the remarkable coincidences attached to this address and convincingly demonstrate that 35 Dorset Street was linked to the Ripper case. Sadly the temptation has to be avoided, as facts disclosed in the next chapter strongly indicate that Stride was not a Ripper victim.
Catherine Eddowes the fourth, or fifth, victim of the Ripper was found murdered shortly after Long Liz Stride on Sunday 30 September 1888 at 1.45 a.m. in Mitre Square. At first sight there seems to be no link between Catherine Eddowes and 35 Dorset Street, but there are a number of factors concerning her case which do lead us in that general direction:
Firstly the bloody sink that was discovered by the police in Dorset Street following the trail of the Ripper that night, and secondly the behaviour of Catherine Eddowes on the day before her murder. She had recently returned from hop-picking in Kent with her boyfriend, John Kelly, and not being able to afford a bed in a lodging house took herself off to a casual ward in Shoe Lane where she could get a bed for the night. This was standard practice for the prostitutes of Whitechapel who couldn't find the four pence for a night at a lodging house.
The superintendent of the casual ward told the East London Observer on 13 October 1888 that Eddowes had said to him: 'I have come back to earn the reward offered for the apprehension of the Whitechapel murderer. I think I know him.'
This rather astonishing claim has been largely dismissed since then, but it seems rather odd for Catherine Eddowes to have made such a claim on 28 September and then just two days later to fall victim to the Ripper or the Whitechapel Murderer as he was then known. A day before her murder she pawned a pair of boots at a shop in Church Street for two shillings and sixpence but curiously gave her name as 'Jane Kelly'. Later in the day she was arrested for drunken behaviour and placed in the cells of Bishopsgate Police Station. On her release, forty-five minutes before she was murdered, she gave her name as 'Mary Ann Kelly' and her address as 6 Fashion Street. How curious it was that literally moments before her deadly encounter with Jack the Ripper she used the exact name of the next victim of the Ripper... Mary Jane Kelly, or as she was fond of calling herself, Mary Ann Kelly.
Catherine Eddowes entire behaviour on the day before her murder was a little bit mysterious, disappearing for most of the day on a supposed mission to visit her daughter and borrow some money as she was broke as was her boyfriend John Kelly. But as her daughter had moved and Eddowes didn't know where she was living this doesn't sound very plausible, and then later on turning up in Aldgate so blind drunk - pretending to be a fire engine by all accounts - that she was immediately arrested by a police officer who had difficulty in keeping her standing.
Remember she was supposed to have had no money. Her behaviour and her claim that she knew who Jack the Ripper was, plus her use of the next victim's exact name seems to strongly indicate that Catherine Eddowes did indeed entertain suspicions about the identity of the Ripper and perhaps this is what led to her violent murder. It is worth mentioning in passing that Catherine Eddowes was murdered and mutilated not ten feet from the front door of a police constable living in Mitre Square and, as already stated, just forty-five minutes after being released from the custody of the police.
The last murder attributed to the Ripper, that of Mary Jane Kelly on Friday 9 November 1888 between 3.30 and 4.00 a.m. at 13 Miller's Court, well and truly continues the amazing string of coincidences. For 13 Miller's Court was in fact part of 26/27 Dorset Street and the building directly across the street was none other than Crossingham's, 35 Dorset Street.
On the evening of her death Mary Jane Kelly had spent some of the time in the company of Lizzie Albrook who actually worked at 35 Dorset Street.
On the night of Kelly's murder Sarah Lewis, who was returning to her 'doss' in Miller's Court at 2.30 a.m. saw a man leaning against the wall of 35 Dorset Street staring across the road at the entrance to Miller's Court. The trail keeps coming back to 35 Dorset Street. An even later murder of a prostitute, Frances Coles, in 1891, that the Ripperologists dismiss as the work of the Ripper, is also of interest as she too lived at 35 Dorset Street.
Why have all the Ripperologists up till now totally ignored the relevance of 35 Dorset Street when it is so obvious that 35 Dorset Street is a vital clue to the identity of Jack the Ripper? One can, with a little sympathy, understand the reluctance of the police in 1888 to carry out intensive investigations into any activity connected with Dorset Street as the street was considered to be one of the most dangerous in the whole of London. The police were likely to be set upon by the local roughs and toughs and savagely beaten, unless they went in with a considerable force of men. But the Ripperologists sat safely in their armchairs a hundred years later do not have the same excuse. Colin Wilson and others have said in their books that the Ripper was probably a very ordinary man and have then gone on to largely ignore this very ordinary man, They fail even to present vital background material on such important ordinary men as Michael Kidney, Elizabeth 'Long Liz' Stride's boyfriend, a man well known for his violent behaviour, or Timothy Donovan, keeper of Crossingham's Lodging House who appeared regularly in court during 1888 charged with violent assaults and eventually murdered his wife in 1904. He killed then so he may have killed before and he certainly had the right address.
Instead the Ripperologists have presented us with elaborate chapters where, variously, dukes, distinguished doctors, black magicians, Russian secret agents, kings and prime ministers, and poets and painters are all tramped before us as likely candidates for the role of the Ripper. Ignoring their ordinary man they instead devote several chapters to outline the hideous mutilations inflicted on the Ripper's victims, and the supposed psychology behind these mutilations and murders which have been described by Colin Wilson as the first sex murders as we know them. But where is their ordinary man, and were the crimes of Jack the Ripper really sex murders?
