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.

• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15

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.

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.