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 13 - 'The Twins of Terror'
Now we are beginning to see a very different type of Thomas Cutbush than
Macnaghten and others would have us believe. Not only was he dangerously
psychotic, he was also a powerful, physically dangerous man possessed of
almost unbelievable speed and agility. After all it is not everybody who
could knock out four guards and make good their escape from a secure mental
institution while stark naked. Hardly the physical behaviour of a man in the
last stages of syphilis as Macnaghten would have us believe.
But his dramatic escape also shows us another important characteristic of
Thomas Cutbush, he was damn cunning and clever to boot.
He was undoubtedly a maniac, but a maniac who could think incredibly fast on
his feet, as his command performance showed. Now this means he may have been
a man very difficult to track through the warrens and backyards of
Whitechapel, especially for the policemen whose beat was anyway the streets
of Whitechapel.
Given Cutbush’s incredible agility - as attested to by numerous witnesses
and neighbours - it is not difficult to imagine that this strange young man
may have been quite capable of moving throughout the district without
actually using the normal thoroughfares, and that this peculiar cat-like
skill when combined with his obvious fast thinking on his feet - amply
demonstrated by his joining of the very crowd that was hunting for him -
does appear to make him a very dangerous fellow indeed.
A good indication of just how dangerous the activities of Thomas Cutbush
actually were is obvious from his trial when he appeared in court for the
stabbings on the two ladies, for both counsel for the defence and
prosecution stated their earnest belief that Thomas Cutbush was indeed Jack
the Ripper, but they were ignored by the judge and Thomas Cutbush was not
even allowed to plead.
Now isn’t that strange?
The only man in the entire course of the Ripper saga who is actually
presented to a court of law as Jack the Ripper - by not only the prosecution
but also his own defence counsel - and the judge refuses to accept a plea
from the defendant and instead quickly sentences him to be detained at Her
Majesty’s pleasure in Broadmoor for the rest of his life.
One perhaps feels the court doors banged on Cutbush with somewhat
over-zealous speed.
As they did too in the inquest into the murder of Mary Jane Kelly which
ended up more like a West End farce than an East End inquest, where the
inquest was brought to an abrupt halt before even important witness
testimony and other crucial evidence could be heard.
The Coroner in his summing up to the jury - in his efforts to bring the
inquest to a hasty end - had some strange remarks for them, well worth
quoting in full: ‘They (the jury) have nothing to do with prosecuting a man
and saying what penalty he is to get. It is quite sufficient if they find
out what the cause of death was. It is for the police authorities to deal
with the case and satisfy themselves as to any person who may be suspected
later on. I do not want to take it out of your hands. It is for you to say
whether at an adjournment you will hear minutes of the evidence, or whether
you will think it is a matter to be dealt with in the police courts later
on, and that this woman, having met her death by the carotid artery having
been cut, you will be satisfied to return a verdict to that effect.’
The jury went along with him, so the Coroner did in fact take it out of
their hands. What possible harm could have come from allowing the jury full
access to all the information that the police possessed at the time?
And surely it is the inherent task of any inquest to provide full
explanation of a person’s death when that explanation is available.
One feels the Coroner was rushing the jury and brushing the evidence aside
in his hasty efforts to bring the inquest to a rapid close.
Why?
The answer to that question might just be found in the sudden u-turn taken
by the Home Office and Metropolitan Police at this moment in time to offer
’Her Majesty’s Gracious pardon’ to - and I quote: ’Any accomplice not being
a person who contrived or actually committed the murder who shall give such
information and evidence as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of
the person or persons who committed the murder.’
When the Secretary of State was pressed in the House of Commons to explain
why a pardon was being offered in the case of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly
when no such pardon was offered in the other Whitechapel murders his
subsequent answer is also worth quoting in full:
‘I should be quite prepared to offer a pardon in the earlier Whitechapel
murders if the information before me had suggested that such an offer would
assist in the detection of the murderer. In the case of Kelly there were
certain circumstances which were wanting in the earlier cases, and which
made it more probable that there were other persons who, at any rate after
the crime, had assisted the murder.’
And if the Coroner had not stopped the Mary Jane Kelly inquest so abruptly
we would today know what those ‘certain circumstances’ were.
That these ‘certain circumstances’ never led to the arrest of Jack the
Ripper is obvious, as a consequence of which we find ourselves in another
one of those confusing episodes deliberately created by the police
investigating this case seemingly designed to do just that… confuse us,
confuse the jury at Kelly’s inquest and confuse the press.
Just like Macnaghten’s memorandum and the Police Seaside Home saga this is
another ‘bloater’ from the police of the time that gives one serious pause
for thought.
What the heck was going on here?
But we will return to this mysterious episode in the final chapter, for now
we must examine a much later case involving a similarly disturbed young man
which will truly illustrate exactly what sort of person our young Thomas
Cutbush really was.
Richard Chase was born into a home where there was a good deal of friction
between his mother and father. Eventually leading to a separation in 1972
when Richard was twenty-two years old, and he too was a child fond of
locking himself up in his room all day then wandering the deserted streets
of Sacramento at night. After his parents split up he divided his time
between them and his behaviour became even stranger, lying in bed for hours
in a trance-like state and then exploding into sudden violent acts like
smashing his mother over the head with a telephone.
He complained of imaginary illnesses, his head was swelling and the bones
were breaking through the skin of his body. Voices began to tell him what
to do but he resisted them, at first. His mother heard him telling himself:
‘I’m not going to do that!’
When he went to stay with his grandmother in Los Angeles in 1973 he wandered
aimlessly about the house asking himself: ’Are you a good boy?’
‘Yes,’ he would reassure himself. ’You’re a good boy.’
After his grandmother sent him home his father took him to a psychiatrist
who reported:
‘He has a psychiatric disturbance of major proportions.’
Richard Chase had obviously been studying his medical books as the doctors
who examined him reported that he had a good understanding of medical terms.
But then he disappointed them by explaining that someone had stolen his
pulmonary artery and his blood had stopped flowing. He was further diagnosed
as a ’chronic paranoid schizophrenic’.
When his mother turned up to collect Richard - directly against the doctor’s
advice who wanted to detain the highly disturbed young man - they described
her as ’highly aggressive, hostile and provocative’.
The schizophrenic son had a schizophrenic mother.
Back at home by 1976 Richard was sleeping with oranges by his head so that
his brain could directly absorb the vitamin C while he slept. Then he
started beating his mother again and was moved out to a small apartment of
his own by his father who was unwilling to take the boy under his own roof.
It was here that he started to drink blood obtained from live rabbits he
bought in the neighbourhood; when that didn’t satisfy him he began injecting
himself with rabbit blood and became violently ill.
‘Bad rabbit,’ he explained to his father.
Once again taken to hospital he admitted drinking blood to prevent ’his body
falling apart’ and the doctors diagnosed him this time as an ’acute paranoid
schizophrenic’. In other words his schizophrenia was blowing up rapidly,
reaching full strength and he imagined that someone was poisoning him.
Richard escaped from the hospital but was quickly recaptured again, and when
brought back to the hospital his condition ranged from long catatonic
periods to noisy bouts of disruptive aggression.
After a year of heavy medication he was judged fit to be released to his
parents. This was to prove a terrible and terrifying error of judgement on
behalf of the hospital staff for they had just launched on the unsuspecting
public a vicious killer who was later to be known as the ‘Vampire of
Sacramento’.
Back at home he became obsessed by the idea that someone was poisoning him,
his mind was controlled by others and his organs kept moving around his
body. The only way to cure all these ills was to shoot and kill animals in
the area and drink their blood and eat their organs.
A sort of weird kind of replenishment as he saw it, instant organ transplant
without the worry or pain of expensive operations.
He took to roaming the streets at night in his quest for other people’s
pets, which he kidnapped to take home and brutally slaughter. At this time
he also started collecting newspaper articles about vicious killings, got
hold of a gun and started randomly taking shots at people out of his car,
killing one man as he sat on his lawn.
He was found by many people sitting in their houses or gardens and when
chased off disappeared at alarming speed, springing through windows and
scaling high fences and walls with great agility.
Sound familiar?
What happened next was so obvious that is should never have been allowed to
happen - but Richard the ‘dangerous acute paranoid schizophrenic’ had been
protected by his schizophrenic mother even after killing her cat in front of
her and drinking its blood.
He brutally murdered and mutilated a woman after breaking into her house.
The crime was a carbon copy of the Jack the Ripper murders, even down to the
removal of the same internal organs. Four more people were to die in the
same horrifying circumstances before the police caught up with Richard
Chase.
When police searched Richard’s apartment they were confronted by a virtual
house of horrors with body parts and organs spilling out of cupboards and
fridges, cups and jugs full of blood all over the place, and in his
notebooks they found crude drawings of internal organs.
Once in custody his hallucinations only deepened and he was convinced that
he had been given venereal disease by the police and that officers were
poisoning him.
It is a sad case which could have been prevented but the parallels that it
offers to the case of Thomas Cutbush are truly astonishing.
Let’s examine them again:
The broken home.
Violent father who deserted his family.
Hysterical or schizophrenic mother.
The conviction that they are being poisoned.
The conviction that they have venereal disease.
The study of medical textbooks.
Locking themselves in their rooms all day.
Roaming the streets at night.
The peculiar and abnormal speed and agility.
The crude drawings.
Attacks directed against close female relatives.
And finally the funny speech mannerisms.
One can imagine Thomas Cutbush asking himself, ‘Are you a good boy?’ and one
can imagine Richard Chase throwing someone down the stairs and explaining
‘Poor gentleman he has fallen down the stairs.’
The well recorded evolution of Richard Chase’s madness gives us an
incredible view right into the mind and soul of Thomas Cutbush, particularly
when it is considered that the two young men were exactly the same age when
their ‘problems’ began.
Even the claim that Thomas Cutbush had contracted syphilis from a prostitute
in 1888 by Macnaghten must be challenged under the circumstances of Richard
Chase’s case, for Chase thought he had syphilis, but he also thought the
police had infected him with the disease.
The truth of the matter is that Richard Chase had genuine problems at
achieving erection - hence his nickname while still at college, ‘no dick
richie’ - and had probably never had successful sexual intercourse with a
woman, despite the fact that he may have appeared to have done so with some
of his victims.
And this will be explained.
Richard Chase did not have syphilis but imagined that he had, and I do
believe this important criteria would also apply to Thomas Cutbush.
Although separated by over one hundred years of history the two young men
are indisputably linked by their illness and the consequences of that
illness on the people that surrounded them.
Even a lay man with no knowledge of mental illness would be able to see that
what happened with Richard Chase is exactly what happened with Thomas
Cutbush, and that then gives us a way forward, for if the evolution of
Richard Chase’s madness culminated in the ritualised slaughter of women and
the removal of organs from their bodies then there is no reason to think
that the evolution of Thomas Cutbush’s madness would be any different. They
had the same progressive illness, and this particular illness when given
encouragement by seemingly helpless and hapless female relatives, twinned
with the absence of a male role model in the household is a pack of dynamite
just waiting for some innocent victim to light the fuse. That pack of
dynamite becomes thermonuclear when there is also a deranged and mentally
unstable nearby role model and strongly related male suffering from exactly
the same illness and delusions, a role model just like Charles Henry
Cutbush.
Thomas and Richard’s personalities, backgrounds, family history and
subsequent erratic and dangerous behaviour are just like mirror images,
perfect fits, the twins of terror as it were, as indeed also are Richard
Chase’s crimes a perfect fit for the crimes of Jack the Ripper.
Therefore at exactly the time when the murdered and mutilated remains of
prostitutes were being found in Whitechapel we do have Thomas Cutbush
reaching the most dangerous stage of his advanced state of acute paranoid
schizophrenia - with his uncle advancing with him - where it seems that he
would have begun to take his study of the human form through his medical
books a stage further, and actually gone out and started butchering women
for his strange collection of desires.
Thomas was there, he had the motive, and he had the provocation but most
importantly of all he was more than mad enough to have done the job… and
very quickly at that.
Jack was nimble and Jack was quick.
