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 15 - House of Cards
To briefly summarize where this complicated trail has led us.
It is a perilous place in which we find ourselves today, with critics,
pained researchers and an entire cadre of enthusiasts just waiting to hammer
us into the ground for daring to poke one’s head out of that ground.
But perhaps not so quite a perilous place as it was in 1888, for then it was
a place over-ripe with dishonesty, disinformation and often downright
deceit.
I, for one, see no difference between the failure of the Metropolitan Police
Force of Scotland Yard in our modern age to successfully apprehend the
killers of certain individuals within certain minorities in our community
than the failure of the Metropolitan Police Force of Scotland Yard in 1888
to apprehend the killer of a number of prostitutes.
Somewhere at its insidious work in both situations is a specific form of
institutionalised bias and hatred based on an abhorrence for a particular
type of fellow human being, whether that human being be a coloured person or
a working prostitute. And that is the rub, both modern or old.
And I think that speaks volumes about the intricate and intrinsic hidden
nature of policing and how that policing is largely dependant on particular
senior officials working within a police force at any one time.
Much can be hidden by a ‘force’ with a vested and protected interest in the
reputation of its senior officers, and much can also be revealed by that
same police force to one of its own even a hundred years later providing
that ex-serving officer will not harm or damage the reputation of the
‘force’ he once served.
Macnaghten and other senior police officials referred to the ‘unwritten rule
of their service’ and that was specifically ‘not to tell tales out of
school’.
Believe it or not that unwritten rule still holds sway today and we are
faced with a situation right at this very moment in time where ex-serving
police officers are probably sitting on vital information that could well
reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper.
Simply because they do want to tell tales out of school.
Regardless of all that it still might be possible to put an honest
interpretation on the events and people we have been discussing here.
Firstly the extremely grey areas we have uncovered in the police
investigation into the crimes of Jack the Ripper which still till this day
have never been adequately explored or explained:
The Macnaghten Memorandum.
The Police Seaside Home.
The Royal Pardon.
We should follow the three points historically as that gives us a better
perspective.
The Royal Pardon.
What a wonderfully unique thing this is. Never before or never since the
murder of Mary Jane Kelly has a royal pardon been issued or granted for a
capital offence. (I am ignoring piracy etc, as the pardon used thus was a
device of war) For that reason alone I would vouch that this royal pardon
was issued because the person that it was directly aimed at was a high
ranking serving police officer in the Metropolitan Police Force who
possessed familial knowledge of the murder’s actions.
I see no other circumstances that could or would warrant the issuing of such
a rare royal pardon. In any other circumstances it would be unjustified.
Some critics maintain that this was nowt but a political sop to make up for
the earlier failure to offer a reward in the hunt for Jack the Ripper,
however I see no link between the two, chiefly because the granting of Her
Majesty’s Gracious Pardon required the involvement of both parliament and
crown whereas the subject of a reward required the involvement purely of the
officials concerned; and the Home Secretary’s words make it absolutely clear
that the granting of such a pardon had been only motivated by the provision
of new evidence in the case pertaining solely towards Mary Jane Kelly. In
other words this evidence had not been available in any of the other
Whitechapel murders and hence no reward was forthcoming but when the
evidence was revealed there was still no reward offered but instead this
quite unique royal pardon. This evidence must have been crucial and
substantial.
The Police Seaside Home.
It beggars belief to suppose that the police took a suspect all the way from
London to Brighton, and then brought a witness all the way from London to
Brighton in an attempt to identify the suspect, and then the police took the
pair of them all the way back to London from Brighton.
This is like something from Winnie the Pooh.
This is the most nonsensical piece of nonsense I have ever heard from a
group of senior police officials. There can be only one reason and one
reason alone why a suspect or a witness was dragged all the way from London
to the Police Seaside Home at Brighton and that is the suspect or the
witness was a police officer or a very close relative to one.
Macnaghten’s Memorandum.
This contentious document was obviously written by Macnaghten as a clever
piece of deception, specifically designed to take the heat away from his own
department - and himself as head of that department. It is claimed by all
that Macnaghten wrote this memorandum in response to a series of articles
that appeared in the Sun newspaper naming Cutbush as the Ripper and noting
that his uncle was a senior policeman at Scotland Yard.
I believe that claim to be false.
Macnaghten obviously wrote his memorandum in direct response to another
memorandum from an even higher department than his own, and the original
memorandum would have probably read like this:
‘Macnaghten…
What the devil is going on with this Cutbush affair in the Sun. They are
claiming the fellow is Jack the Ripper and mention Exec. Supt, Charles
Cutbush. See what you can do to clear this mess up.’
Macnaghten would not have simply arrived at his desk one day and said to
himself ‘Ho hum, I better write a memo about this Cutbush business.’
He would have written it in response, as are all memorandums written.
As Macnaghten does say in his memorandum, Charles Henry Cutbush has now
retired, so problem solved, and Thomas Cutbush is nothing but a harmless
lunatic now locked away safely in Broadmoor, problem solved again.
What a nice tidy desk Macnaghten had on that day.
Now, as a researcher in this case, had I stumbled across just one of these
three grey areas of the police investigation into the Ripper crimes, I may
have paused for a few moments thought and then passed it over as a minor
aberration in the case. However when all three are taken in a block then I’m
afraid they drive a solid wedge right into the police investigation and the
whole thing collapses like a fragile house of cards.
Each single one of these grey areas strongly indicates the involvement of a
police official in the actual crimes of Jack the Ripper rather than in the
investigation of those crimes.
Nobody is saying that a policeman actually had his hand on the knife, but I
am saying that a policeman may have had his hand on the trigger.
And that trigger was Thomas Hayne Cutbush.
And that policeman was his uncle, Charles Henry Cutbush.
There has been a fault line that runs right through the middle of my
argument - concerning Executive Superintendent Cutbush’s complicity in this
case - practically cutting it in half, and that has been that Charles Henry
Cutbush played no official role whatsoever in the investigations of Jack the
Ripper, instead pushing paper behind the desk of some obscure department at
Scotland Yard.
This may well have been true of Charles Cutbush’s later career where he
appears to have been squeezed behind a desk in an obvious attempt to lessen
the impact of his paranoia, and then later discharged from the force
altogether in what is politely known as ’early retirement’, however the
recent publication of two documents - emanating from ‘H’ Division, the
Whitechapel division in early 1888 - both carrying Cutbush’s name, rank -
Superintendent - and signature is a significant step forward in placing
Charles Henry Cutbush right in the centre of the investigation and also the
Ripper’s territory. This step forward becomes quite a leap when it is
considered that the said documents are actual reports on the murder of the
prostitute, Martha Tabram, who many feel was the first victim of Jack the
Ripper.
Therefore Executive Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush was indeed directly
and personally involved in the murder investigation and would have been
privy to intimate details of those investigations during the entire period
in which those crimes were committed.
We should once again make ourselves keenly aware that it was at this very
time that Charles Henry Cutbush was of unsound mind having been diagnosed as
paranoid.
Whatever else we may deduce from this bizarre and often tangled series of
events I believe it would safe to assume that Charles Henry Cutbush and his
nephew, Thomas Hayne Cutbush, would have been fuelled by the same mad and
bad ambitions and those ambitions may well have involved some madcap
enterprise directed against the Catholics of the area who they believed were
poisoning them.
It cannot have honestly helped Charles Henry Cutbush’s paranoid feelings
towards the Catholics of England when Henry Matthews - the very first Roman
Catholic cabinet minister for many hundreds of years - was appointed in 1886
to the premier policing position in the entire kingdom, that of Home
Secretary. The rankle that Cutbush and many other senior officials felt at
this appointment became obvious during the course of the Ripper
investigation.
Charles Henry Cutbush had been finally betrayed by the force and government
he had served so loyally and so long.
There is still much to do, but I am not the man to do it. I have taken
Thomas Hayne Cutbush from the obscurity that legions of writers and
researchers would condemn him, and given him new legs to walk through the
complicated world of Jack the Ripper, and his uncle walks with him.
There are still two very promising avenues of research available which I
believe would reward the tenacious and competent researcher immensely.
Firstly find out exactly what happened to Thomas Cutbush between November
1888 and March 1891. Was he confined to a lunatic asylum somewhere in the
Greater London area? Or was he perhaps a long time guest of the Police
Seaside Home at Brighton along with his uncle?
This information could prove crucial to the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Secondly a painstaking search should be made for Executive Superintendent
Charles Henry Cutbush’s police pension records, for I believe they will
reveal astonishing facts about the life and death of Charles Cutbush and his
relationship with and to his nephew, Thomas. These pension records should
contain details of his mental illness and the condition of his body at
death. And it is in this particular regard that I believe the true identity
of Jack the Ripper will be revealed.
For Jack the Ripper was a man familiar to the knife and so it would appear
was Charles Henry Cutbush.
