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Robert Hale 1993 (hardcover)

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 12 - The Thomas Cutbush you wouldn’t like to meet.

We do know that Thomas Cutbush was insane, and no stranger to either the knife or the immediate area of Jack the Ripper’s crimes but what about his motive? It was for this very purpose that all the other killers and their motives were profiled in length in earlier chapters so that at least we would be in a position to profile possible suspects and their motives at this stage.

In this way it was possible to say earlier on that Liz Stride’s killer was probably Michael Kidney but it was highly unlikely that he was Jack the Ripper. He just didn’t fit the profile of the full-blown psychotic, a paranoid schizophrenic, who hears voices ordering him to kill, voices from demons or even God ordering him to kill - but Thomas Cutbush does. Cutbush was without a doubt a full-blown psychotic and it wasn’t because he had contracted syphilis in 1888 and his brain had become affected as Macnaghten maintained. We all know now that syphilis has a particularly slow influence on the functions of the body and mind, and if Cutbush had contracted the disease in 1888 it certainly wouldn’t have ‘affected’ his brain in the same year, or for many years later.

It would be true to say that he would have experienced some minor discomfort, and most certainly been well aware that he had been infected with this dread disease by his activities in consorting with prostitutes, as the very early symptoms of syphilis are patently and painfully obvious to the sufferer.

No, Cutbush’s problems were a lot deeper than the onset of venereal disease, though that to probably played a major role in his later actions.

Thomas came from a family with obvious sanity problems. He was insane, his uncle - perhaps the only male role model in Thomas’ life - suffered from paranoid delusions to such an extreme that he eventually committed suicide by shooting himself in the head while his daughter looked on.

And this single act on the part of Thomas’ uncle speaks to us across the void of more than a hundred years and tells us much about Thomas, his uncle and the rest of the family. For a man who has had enough of anything may well be driven to locking himself into his private room and then shooting himself in the head, but for Charles Henry Cutbush to have actually shot himself in the kitchen and in front of one of his daughters shows a man driven beyond the edge of all things normal and reasonable.

It is the last desperate act of a purely desperate man whose mind has caved in to some great anguish. He wanted a witness to watch his sacrifice. Now why was that?

Whose guilt was being assuaged here, his own or his nephew's?

The female influence in the life of Thomas Cutbush was little better with both his mother and aunt described by Macnaghten as of ‘very excitable disposition’ upon who little ‘reliance’ could be placed. The inference being that they too suffered from some form of dementia and obviously exercised little or no control over the activities of the wayward Thomas.

It appears that Cutbush’s father died while he was very young - though present research on this area of the Cutbush family is on-going and some reports do seem to indicate that the father may have deserted the family while Thomas was still a boy - leaving him in the dubious care of what sounds like his fairly demented aunt and mother.

Thomas was described as ‘always being a spoilt child’ by Macnaghten.

From this short family background it is possible to draw a few conclusions about his character: ‘spoilt’ would seem to indicate that Thomas was a child who was doted upon by his mother and aunt, but certainly not by his father who did in fact beat the boy and the suggestion is that it is these beatings that led to the early separation of his parents and his subsequent upbringing by two excitable women. As an only child with no father figure but instead two closely related females to guide and nurture him he would have been very much the ‘loner’, and if he had turned to his uncle in search of a reliable father figure then it probably would not have been a rewarding experience given that man’s own mental instability. In fact it is not hard to see that Charles Henry Cutbush with his rants and raves about the Catholics of England trying to poison him and his family may very well have played a crucial and certainly contributory role in the development of his nephew’s own growing insanity.

It seems that no matter where Thomas might have turned for the attention he obviously needed he was met by some form of madness or another.

Cutbush’s mental state is obvious from Macnaghten’s memorandum where the Chief Constable wrote: ‘… he (Cutbush) believed that people were trying to poison him. He wrote to Lord Grimthorpe, and others, and also to the Treasury, complaining of Dr Brooks, of Westminster Bridge Rd. whom he threatened to shoot for having supplied him with bad medicines.’ Now isn’t that remarkable?

Executive Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush sincerely believed that he was being poisoned by the Catholic population of Great Britain and lo and behold his deranged nephew has a similar belief.

It was uncle Charles’ habit to carry his pistol with him at all times supposedly to protect himself from a sudden onslaught of Catholics, and what does Thomas his nephew threaten to do when he is angry about his treatment at the hands of a doctor? Shoot him, that’s what.

This is powerful and persuasive evidence indeed that the young Thomas had been influenced by his demented uncle; and that then is but a very small step to a fragile situation of complicity on the part of uncle and nephew in the crimes that took place in Whitechapel not just in 1888 but in the entire late Victorian period we are discussing here, from perhaps as early as 1886 right through to 1891 when Thomas was finally incarcerated in Broadmoor. I believe this complicity existed, and not only that, but that the police forces investigating these crimes were aware of this complicity either sooner or later during that investigation. But more of that presently.

Thomas Cutbush can easily be classified as a paranoid schizophrenic today simply by his belief that he is being poisoned and then writing letters to all and sundry, regardless of their connection to his imagined persecution mania. One could understand Cutbush complaining to a medical council or hospital about his supposed mistreatment at the hands of a doctor but the Treasury or Lord Grimthorpe?

Lord Grimthorpe was a formidable Victorian, perhaps the archetypal Victorian, a force to be reckoned with on any stage of the Victorian world, a man who was light years ahead of his contemparies when it came to mechanics, design, technology, alternative thinking and the written word. It is very difficult to imagine just why Thomas Cutbush would write to him. A clue might well be that the good lord wrote lengthy tracts on ecclesiastical politics, covering such contentious issues as to the acceptability of marriage to one’s dead wife’s sister. He was also a prominent member of the Church of England who took a vitriolic stand against any and every form of the ‘High Church’ and strongly opposed revision of the King James Bible. In other words he stringently opposed the ritualised ceremony of the Catholic Church, and without claiming that he was a rabid anti-Catholic he most certainly had no time for them and was well known for his extreme stance. Perhaps it could have been this very anti-Catholic stance that attracted the male side of the Cutbush family for there is no doubt that they were rabid anti-Catholics and would have viewed Lord Grimthorpe as a champion of their cause.

However Lord Grimthorpe did have another interesting string to his bow and that was medicine. He was also a champion of the recently emerged ‘Homeopathy’ school of thought, and homeopathy is of course a ‘system of complementary medicine in which disease is treated by natural substances - in minute doses - that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease’.

Now, young Thomas felt that his doctor had poisoned him with ‘bad medicine’ and as there had been much coverage of Lord Grimthorpe’s views on the subject of homeopathy in the popular press - including a large cartoon of the lord - in 1888 this could well have been the reason for Thomas’ letter. Unfortunately as we do not possess the letter we are unable to say whether Thomas wrote his letter in a negative or positive fashion, but as he did threaten to shoot his doctor in this series of letters we may assume safely it was of the negative art.

Whatever it does give us a good view into the internal workings of the young man’s mind and his behaviour.

It is well worth looking at another case of Ripper-like crimes as it allows us an even better insight into the behaviour of Thomas Cutbush.

Edward Gein had a similar upbringing in the USA in the 1900’s - his father either dead, or departed for newer pastures, and being dominated by his obsessive mother who religiously rammed down her obviously half-simple son’s throat the notion that sex and women in general were evil and sinful things. But when his mother died, simple Ed Gein decided to investigate the things his mother had tried to teach him to despise. He bought serious medical books and spent years studying the female body as portrayed in these type of books which present the human form dissected into its various individual components. From books he moved onto bodies which he dug up out of the local graveyard and kept at his isolated farm, and then he took his macabre interest over the next hurdle and started to kidnap women from the local area. These were brought back to the farm and simple Ed murdered and mutilated them, cutting out their organs to store in his fridge and making souvenirs from other parts of the body. When he was eventually caught it was obvious that Edward Gein did not really know that he had done a terrible wrong and he spent the rest of his life, until 1984, living a model life as a prisoner in various lunatic asylums.

Gein gives us a remarkable insight into the mind of Thomas Cutbush, for the two men not only shared remarkably similar childhoods, they also shared an obsession with reading medical books. Remember what Macnaghten said in his memorandum: ‘He (Cutbush) is said to have studied medical books by day… scribble drawings of women in indecent postures were found torn up in Cutbush’s room.’

Pornography would not have been as easily available to Cutbush as it was to Edward Gein some fifty years later and Gein certainly supplemented his collection of medical books with pornography. But the jump from medical books to pornography in both their cases is of great importance and shows us what forbidden path Cutbush was following in the months leading up to the Ripper crimes.

An unhealthy progression from ‘allowed’ medical pictures of naked women displaying their ‘forbidden’ internal and external parts to ‘forbidden’ pornography where the women are ‘allowed’ to show their ‘forbidden’ parts. And what comes next?

Obviously in Gein’s case what came next was a dangerous desire to possess those forbidden organs so familiar to him to him from the medical books he had long studied, so it seems highly likely that Thomas Cutbush too would have also been obsessed with the same desire to possess these forbidden parts of a female form that he could only fantasize about with the help of his medical books and self-made pornography.

It seems that Edward Gein was incapable of viewing his victims in their totality, instead he saw them as bits and pieces - organs - and there is absolutely no evidence that he ever sexually abused his victims, dead or alive. Yes he murdered and mutilated them but without any sexual motive whatsoever, and this perhaps brings us yet another step closer to a fair portrait of Jack the Ripper - or Thomas Cutbush.

An important difference must be that Thomas Cutbush was suffering from syphilis. This means he had, at some stage, taken his experiments with medical books and pornography further than Edward Gein, but with catastrophic results.

Edward Gein was a man who was forced to study medical books as his only method to learn about the ‘forbidden and sinful’ reproductive organs of the female species, as he never had the chance to explore the normal and natural avenues that childhood offers to most of us in this universal quest for the unknown.

He was a man who was brought up by a mother who perversely hated her most vital biological function and hence taught her impressionable son that the act of sex, or the essential female partner in sex and procreation is evil and sinful.

This is a vicious dead end of hate that has only one narrow escape channel and that is the murder and mutilation of women. The mother teaches her son that woman are sinful, she teaches him that sex is sinful and when he begins to learn - by studying remote textbooks - that he has been brought up to hate the very thing that created him then he finds himself in a bitter wilderness that offers no apologies for his very existence. He is damned. Along with the rest of the human race he is damned and his answer is to attack that which is responsible: the reproductive organs responsible for bringing sin into the world. And if he goes to church or has his Bible there by his side he can find solace for his convictions and kind words to fuel his mad ambitions.

Thomas Cutbush would have been in an even more terrifying predicament than Edward Gein for Cutbush had discovered the awful truth: that the reproductive organs of women were sinful and did bring sin and disease into the world, for after contact with a prostitute he was diseased, unclean, and he would - just like Edward Gein - have fully understood the message encoded in Corinthians (6:13-17):

‘The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body… Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her body?’

What a concept this must have been for a young and very confused Thomas Cutbush. Earth shattering.

Thomas had sinned. He had united the body of Christ with a prostitute and the ‘saviour of the world’ had contracted syphilis, but then he would have known what to do about it:

‘Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.’ (Colossians 3:5)

This is exactly the type of thinking that went hand in hand with the total religious suffocation and intense Bible thumping of the late Victorian period. It was an age of assertive masculinity where a gang of men could publicly rape and beat a girl while a crowd of onlookers cheered them on, and to viciously assault a girl was considered no more serious than spinning a top on the public highway.

This was a very dangerous brew indeed and the only wonder is that there were not hundreds of Jack the Rippers running around London in 1888.

Killers with a mission. Highly dangerous paranoid schizophrenics conditioned by family, church and society to view the female form as a bundle of sinful organs, and with the burning conviction that they are some sort of saviour who has to rid the world of this evil. We are able to see exactly this type of thinking in the behaviour of dozens of later murderers.

But before that let us see what else can be found out about Thomas Cutbush from other sources. The ‘Sun’ newspaper - not to be confused with the present day Sun - tells a very different story than does Macnaghten in his notes and also provides in its extensive reports of February 1894 awfully persuasive evidence that Thomas Cutbush was indeed Jack the Ripper.

Thomas Cutbush came from a very unhappy home where his father beat his mother so often that the two were separated while Thomas was still a child. In his younger days he took to wandering the streets of Whitechapel all night long, entering and leaving the house by climbing through the windows. Neighbours often spied him leaping over fences and clambering over high walls with the agility of a monkey. During the day he confined himself to his room, hardly ever speaking to his hysterical mother and aunt, and studied medical books. Later this was to be his pattern of behaviour as well, right through the period when the Ripper crimes were committed.

Although Cutbush managed to find employment at the time preceding the Ripper murders it did not last long because he was always dismissed rather rapidly. The reason for his dismissal was his strange and sometimes aggressive behaviour. Rather than working he would spend hours looking at himself in the mirror - interestingly this was also one of Peter Sutcliffe’s many vanities - and when an old man commented on this Thomas Cutbush promptly threw him down a long stairway where he lay concussed and bleeding. Cutbush told the crowd who gathered around the unconscious old man:

‘Poor gentleman, he has fallen downstairs.’

It was only when the ‘poor gentleman’ recovered some weeks later that he was able to tell his employers it was in fact Cutbush who had pushed him down the stairs and Cutbush was yet again dismissed.

Fellow workers had often noticed that Cutbush had blood on his sleeves and when detectives investigated his room they found waistcoats and coats that had been hidden, stuffed up the chimney, with suspicious stains which Cutbush had attempted to remove with turpentine. They also found various obscene drawings in red ink which he had made, one in particular of a naked woman with her body ripped open and her intestines exposed.

Further questioning by the detectives revealed that Cutbush had once attacked a servant girl in the house and on another occasion had grabbed his aunt and attempted to slit her throat with a knife.

From Macnaghten’s statements concerning Thomas Cutbush one gets the impression that he was a weak, sickly individual but that this is far from the truth is born out by his escape from Lambeth Infirmary on the 5th March. In the infirmary he was stripped of all his clothes and placed in an escape-proof room watched over and guarded by four male attendants, notwithstanding such strict security - which also makes one wonder what it was all about if Cutbush wasn’t really a dangerous individual - he suddenly sprang from the bed, knocked all four men down and disappeared out of a supposedly escape-proof room in a matter of seconds. Still stark naked he scrambled over the infirmary wall - specifically designed to not allow patients to do that very thing - and raced through back gardens and yards using his incredible agility to scale walls and fences, dashed into the back door of a house and re-emerged on the street a few moments later, fully dressed in stolen clothes to join in the hue and cry for the naked lunatic that had just escaped from Lambeth Infirmary.

Perhaps the simple reason the police never caught Jack the Ripper was that they were on the streets of Whitechapel while Jack was in the gardens and back yards of Whitechapel, and he was flying.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.

Continue to Chapter 13...