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Robert Hale 1993 (hardcover)
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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 10 - Telling Tales out of School
To try and clear up this mess we can take a closer look at some of the facts we have already taken into account but this time push them into a direction which might help to clear the air.
1/ Thomas Cutbush was first confined to the Lambeth Infirmary on 5th March 1891. This means his behaviour sometime in February must have become so alarming that he had come to the attention of the police and then the courts who eventually had him committed because he represented a grave danger to the general public.
2/ Frances Coles was murdered in Whitechapel on 13th February 1891.
3/ The Home Office started to shut down their file on the Ripper murders in March 1891, the last entry being a request for extra payments to be met for police patrols in the Whitechapel area.
4/ Scotland Yard started to run down their investigation in February/March 1891 as their files show. The only continued interest was in trying to vainly prove that Thomas Sadler had murdered the prostitute Frances Coles.
However one looks at it, the facts are inescapable. There is a solid link between Thomas Cutbush and the coincidental events that took place in February and March of 1891. Remember Kosminski was already locked up by 4th February 1891 so he couldn’t possibly have murdered Frances Coles on the 14th February. This event - when the police must have thought to some degree that they finally had the Ripper, or at least a good ’fit-up’ for him, under lock and key - must have thrown the entire Metropolitan force into a total panic, which was why it was so important to them to prove that Thomas Sadler had murdered Frances Coles.
Anybody could be Jack the Ripper, as long as it wasn't Thomas Cutbush.
The inquest into Frances Coles’ murder was another elaborate farce with the police objecting to a Mr. Albert Bachert taking his place as a reserve juror because as a member of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee - formed during the Ripper murders to help prompt the police into some kind of action - as they, the police, knew he would not be satisfied with the police claims that this was not a Ripper murder. The police were absolutely determined - come hell or high water - to bury Jack the Ripper even if it meant sticking their own heads in the sand so that they couldn’t see him anymore.
They seemed prepared to have anyone as the killer as long as it wasn’t Thomas Cutbush. The Scotland Yard files make it plain that the Metropolitan Police were determined to get Sadler for the murder even if it meant chasing him to the grave. Over a year after Sadler had been cleared of the crime, Scotland Yard were still recording his daily movements in the hope of nailing him for something or the other. But Thomas Cutbush was allowed to slip into the obscurity of an early death in the securest prison in the land. Macnaghten said that Cutbush was ’found to be insane, and sentenced to be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure’ after he had stabbed just one woman in the bottom with a knife. Make no mistake, what Macnaghten is talking about here is that Cutbush was sentenced to be detained for the rest of his natural life, if it was Her Majesty’s pleasure, and it usually was.
Let us see how other various suspects - who were all at one time or another considered as serious suspects by the police for Jack the Ripper - fared when they faced the wrath of the Victorian criminal justice system.
John Pizer, another Ripper suspect received six months for stabbing someone in the hand.
Charles Ludwig, yet another Ripper suspect, actually attempted to stab a prostitute and later attacked a man at a coffee stall with a knife and was merely remanded in custody for a week.
Both of these suspects were well known to and by the police as insane.
More importantly perhaps is the almost equally complicated case of Colicott - or perhaps ‘Colocitt’ as the newspaper reports of the time indicate - who apparently also stabbed women in the bottom with some kind of sharp instrument - which may well have been scissors - a fair indication one would have thought that the chap was not quite all there; and hence for exactly the same crimes as Thomas Cutbush this man, Colicott, received what amounted to nothing more than a caution - being bound over for a £200 surety - when he appeared in court.
It seems rather harsh that if all Thomas Cutbush really did was to stab a woman in the bottom - or as Macnaghten so charmingly puts it: ‘jobbing girls in the behind’ - that he was sentenced to be confined to Broadmoor for the rest of his natural life. Even the most sceptical amongst us must surely agree that the sentence handed down was vastly disproportionate to the fairly mediocre crime committed.
This type of sentence is usually only handed down by a court of law when the said charged person is felt to be an immediate and positive threat to public security and safety. It is not normally handed down for ‘jobbing’ a girl’s backside. That much is obvious from the court’s treatment of Colicott - who did exactly that - and the others, so what set Thomas Cutbush apart?
Only one fact: he was the nephew of a senior serving police officer of Scotland Yard who was himself not of sound mind.
That is it. No more than that.
That little crack in the complicated machinery of the complicated criminal justice system of the Victorian age does point a long finger at the police force that investigated Thomas Cutbush, and the courts that sentenced him. No, the police must have, in reality, known a hell of a lot more about the dangerous activities of Cutbush for such a sentence to have been sought and then passed. After all the state punishment for a criminal who had murdered but was found to be insane was to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
But back to the ‘Convalescent Police Seaside Home’ at Brighton. It might seem somewhat superfluous to say that a police convalescent home is there for policemen to convalesce, but given the sort of disinformation we have been spoon-fed with from some very high ranking and presumably highly intelligent police officers perhaps it is not out of place. We have already seen that Thomas Cutbush’s uncle, Executive Inspector Charles Henry Cutbush, was a very seriously ill man, suffering from acute depression and a disturbing paranoia, and it can’t have made him or his desperate superiors leap about with joy when his nephew was eventually apprehended for running round Whitechapel, covered in mud, and trying to stab women. It seems eminently more logical to believe that either the strange reference to the police seaside home occurs because the man capable of identifying Jack the Ripper was actually at the seaside home because of his ill health, and that means he must have been a policeman. There can be no disputing the fact that Inspector Cutbush was in desperate need of a spell in a convalescent home, and it must not be forgotten that Inspector Cutbush was actually removed from active duties during this time period and shoved behind a desk where he was less likely to cause embarrassment. The good inspector’s paranoia was obviously blossoming during this period, and a normal spiral of decline in such circumstances would indicate that following his removal from active duties the police convalescent home would be his next port of call before being removed from duties altogether. It was at this point that he probably shot himself.
Or equally so one could believe that the Ripper suspect in company with a police officer was sent down from London to spend some time away from the capital where his identity might become known to the press, and this would only have been necessary if the suspect was a policeman… or the near relative of a policeman.
Whatever the case, it is obvious that this suspect could not have been Kosminski as the various police chiefs have claimed. Kosminski was already confined when Frances Coles was murdered on the 14th February 1891 and there can be now absolutely no doubt that something had occurred after this murder in late February or early March that made Scotland Yard and the Home Office close their files on the Ripper murders. The only thing that happened in the entire Ripper case after the murder of Frances Coles was that Thomas Cutbush was taken into custody and eventually placed in the Lambeth Infirmary on the 5th March from where he quickly escaped and started stabbing woman until being re-arrested on the 9th March. And after that he was sentenced in April to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Broadmoor… and Jack the Ripper simply walked out of history and died.
For those who are not prepared to believe that a police force is capable of wholesale deceit - even in very serious cases where extremely violent and criminal acts are concerned - when it comes to protecting one of their own, a case which came to light in Germany in 1991 will serve as a convincing example.
The modern German case is also a striking illustration - and perhaps very relevant to our present case - of just how a criminal bent on no good, and with a relation highly placed in the police force that is seeking him can successfully avoid capture and continue his crimes unmolested.
A series of particularly brutal rapes and assaults took place in and around the university grounds of Essen in the Rhine-Ruhr area. The student victims described the same attacker in each case to the local police, and there was a massive hunt for the rapist who police feared would soon turn to murdering his victims because of his callous and vicious brutality. The Essen police staked out areas where they knew the rapist operated, they had police officers as decoys and used just about every method of detection available to a modern police force to catch their man before he eventually murdered someone. But the rapist was clever, so damned clever that he seemed to know on any given night exactly where the police would be operating and took himself off to another area of the massive university complex and raped a victim there. No matter how often the police changed their tactics the rapist moved exactly with them and the police eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that the rapist must be one of their own officers. No one else could have been privy to the secret details of their operation, so they began to investigate their own officers involved in the case.
Unbeknown to the Essen police, in the nearby town of Bochum a girl had gone to the local police and informed them that she and several of her girlfriends believed her ex-boyfriend to be the rapist as he fitted the police identikit picture perfectly and was well known to them for his often perverse, strange and sometimes brutal habits with the opposite sex. Far from welcoming the co-operation of the well-meaning girl in what was a very serious criminal investigation the local police dismissed her out of hand, and she was then subjected to a long and absolutely reprehensible campaign by various local police officers to make her withdraw her accusations against the man she had implicated. When this campaign became so extreme that the girl started to fear for her own safety she moved completely out of the Rhine-Ruhr area to begin a new life. It was only quite by chance, months later, when she was telling her story to a group of friends in a bar that an off-duty detective heard it and asked her to repeat the story in front of his senior officer.
They in turn contacted the Essen police who were appalled by what they heard because the rapist had continued to attack and rape students long after the girl had gone to the Bochum police, but they were even more appalled when they found out that the man implicated by the girl was none other than the son of a very senior police officer in the Bochum police force.
One would have thought that this would have been the end of the sad tale, but no, far from it, for when the Essen police attempted to investigate the circumstances of the girl’s claims they were met with open hostility from the Bochum police force, but eventually they won through and consequently found overwhelming evidence that the local police had manifestly interfered with witness statements, misplaced and ‘lost’ files intentionally, and had indeed been harassing the girl because of her accusations against the son of one of their fellow officers.
Until the very last the Bochum police proclaimed the innocence of their colleague’s son but he was eventually arrested by the hard-headed Essen police officers and charged with the multiple rapes. It transpired later that the boy’s father, the very senior Bochum police officer, had been quite happily feeding his son day-to-day information about the activities of the Essen police trying to trap the rapist enabling him to go out and attack a girl somewhere else that night. He had even done this after his son had been accused of the rapes.
History doesn’t seem to change much when it comes to the world of crime or police cover-ups. The same sad elements are there in the Essen case of 1991 and in the Thomas Cutbush case of 1881. One hundred years later and nobody seems to have learnt from the experience, least of all the police. Of course the Jack the Ripper case could have been political dynamite in comparison to the Essen/Bochum case - mainly because of the total hostility of the press to the Metropolitan Police in the late 1880’s - where if the Bochum police had simply and honestly faced the facts it would have meant the early retirement of one of their senior officers and the justified incarceration of his son, though one can’t help wondering how much confidence the people of Bochum now have for their local police force after that disgusting fiasco. But the dismal parallels between the two cases are still there:
Missing files, illegible or tampered documents and evidence, suppression of witness testimony, persecution of completely innocent parties in an effort to protect a patently guilty person, and the almost unbelievable defence of a criminal maniac by senior police officers because that criminal maniac was related to a senior police officer.
It may or may not be pertinent to note that the senior police officer involved in this case was not from the investigating force but from the force whose operating territory extended to the borders of and sometimes within the operating territory of the investigating force. Bochum and Essen are in fact part of the same sprawling industrial heartland of the Rhine-Ruhr region and both towns are so closely linked that they run almost together as one urban centre. This then offers a very useful insight perhaps into the operating techniques and protocols - both official and ‘unwritten’ - of the City of London force and the Metropolitan force whose territories were also squeezed together in a similar manner; and then taking into consideration the infancy of the police force in the 1880’s one can easily imagine a far more parlous state of affairs in a major criminal investigation in which two major police forces are operating at the same time, and in the same area. That situation becomes far more parlous when some kind of vested interest is taken into the equation, a vested interest perhaps not so dissimilar as in the modern Essen/Bochum case.
Modern policemen - both serving and retired - seem somewhat reluctant to come to terms with what role vested interest might play in a criminal investigation, both then and now, and tend to be fairly dismissive of the question, perhaps quite rightly so when that criminal investigation concerns a fairly minor offence such as theft or common assault where a serving policeman’s close relatives may be safely ignored when they commit such an offence and pose no threat to that officer’s career or the good name of his force. However I would respectfully suggest to those same police officers that when the criminal investigation involves mass murder or serial rape then we are looking at a very different animal indeed, one that is both unpredictable and extremely dangerous to all concerned. For this is truly when vested interests can become the unexplainable killing fields of ambition, greed, security, and vital self preservation.
It is under these very circumstances that the police force of any town or county becomes a ‘closed shop’.
One should carefully ponder the sobering fact in the Essen/Bochum case that if the off-duty detective had not overheard the girl’s story by chance in a bar then the serial rapist may well have forever escaped justice and could even be raping girl’s today, with the tacit agreement of the police force that was protecting him.
The true identity of Jack the Ripper may well hinge on just such a simple situation.
There is much that can be learnt from this modern case of wholesale corruption on the part of an entire police force where it closes rank to protect the vested interests of one of its senior officers, totally regardless of whether that senior policeman’s son was guilty or innocent of the charges alleged against him. The Bochum police force were unconcerned with the substance or veracity of the charges brought against the son of one of their senior officers, the fact that they were allegations against the son of a police official was enough for those charges to be dismissed out of hand. In other words such serious charges when made against the close relative of a senior police official serving in the same force in which those charges have been levied carry no weight and will not be investigated in the normal manner. And that is without reservation.
And that is an extremely valuable and relevant observation in examining the behaviour of the combined police forces investigating the crimes of Jack the Ripper.
The fact that Charles Henry Cutbush, the very senior policeman at Scotland Yard, was taken off the Ripper case and ended up pushing paper in a mundane department speaks volumes.
He was patently culpable.
Throughout the entire period of the Ripper crimes, there is an underlying current of constant police disinformation and deliberate suppression of facts and evidence, particularly when that evidence concerned the possible identity of Jack the Ripper.
During the inquest into the circumstances of Catherine Eddowes’ murder - she was found murdered and mutilated in Mitre Square, Whitechapel on 30th September 1888 - the solicitor acting for the Metropolitan police, Mr Crawford, stopped Joseph Lawende as he was about to describe her killer to the inquest by saying:
‘Unless the jury particularly wish it, I have a special reason for not giving details as to the appearance of this man.’
Therefore Joseph Lawende, perhaps the only man to have ever had a good view of the Ripper, was not permitted to describe the killer’s appearance to a court of law. This was obviously to prevent the press from publishing a description of the Ripper. But since when did it ever hurt a murder enquiry to publish a description of the murderer they are actively hunting. We all know now that the first criteria in a murder enquiry - when the identity of the victim is known - is to establish a valid description of the suspected murderer, but not it seems in the case of Jack the Ripper.
The press latched onto this immediately. The ‘Yorkshire Post’ reporting that:
‘The police apparently have strict orders to close all channels of information to members of the press.’
The ‘Evening News’ claiming that:
‘The police are extraordinarily reticent with reference to the Mitre Square tragedy.’
Across the Atlantic Ocean even the ‘New York Times’ felt the police: ‘…devote their entire energies to preventing the press from getting at the facts.’
All in all a rather perverse situation with the police working hard to suppress information - rather than generating information which is the essential key to any murder investigation - that may have eventually led to the identification of the murderer, and seemingly determined to keep something of vital importance covered up. Whatever that ‘something’ was never became known but newspaper accounts of the time make it plain that Joseph Lawende was the likely key to it. He was guarded by two detectives, the police were paying all his expenses and they had also imposed a pledge of secrecy on him.
Could it just possibly be that Lawende’s eyewitness testimony may have harmed the ‘traditions’ of Sir Robert Anderson’s and Macnaghten’s old department who ‘never told tales out of school’?