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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.
To peer through, or even into the host of Jack the Ripper suspects - an incredible 139 different candidates according to the latest volume and no doubt climbing steadily by the month - is a daunting task that can only lead to defeat if one is really serious about trying to track down the killer. A lifetime's work of false trails leading to nowhere in dusty reading rooms. When the sheer size of the market in potential suspects is considered one can only throw their hands up in the air in despair and deep dismay, then move quickly onto a mystery which might at least offer the chance of a solution.
And this is what the whole game of name Jack the Ripper is about. The Ripperologists don't know who Jack the Ripper was either but they are on fairly sure ground when they assume it must have been someone who was actually living in London in 1888 whose name has come down to us with history, whether it be a statesman, doctor or a fish gutter doesn't matter, all that is important is the name. All these names are thrown into a hat and one peers in and says 'yes, in there is the name of Jack the Ripper'... and the more names the better. The principle being that if you are given three darts to hit the bull's-eye you'll probably fail but if you've got 139 darts to throw, then the chances are you'll be on target at least once.
As a useful exercise I recently had a group of three readers pick out a personality living in London in 1888 - with absolutely no connection to the Jack the Ripper story - and then make a good case for them as a likely candidate for Jack the Ripper. Two failed but the third produced a previously unknown but highly credible suspect in Bram Stoker, and by joining a few plausible threads together produced a theory and a suspect that could have joined the other 139 honorably.
It is an almost hopeless situation where the real facts are rare and speculation is rife. As we have seen, some authors are prepared to base their theories on the speculation of someone who is an admitted liar, and this speculation then goes on to become the basis for a worldwide bestseller on the subject but nevertheless the author is acclaimed by fellow Ripperologists as holding 'an honoured place in the annals of Ripper research'. This is exactly what happened in the case of Stephen Knight's book 'Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution' with its anti-authoritarian and anti-masonic themes. The claims that the Ripper murders were a Freemasonry conspiracy carried out by Prince Albert Victor, Lord Salisbury and Sir William Gull make riveting reading, it is true, but as we already saw in the first chapter the claims are based purely on information from Joseph Sickert, who claims his grandmother, Annie Crook, was married to Prince Albert Victor. As the editors of 'The Jack the Ripper A to Z' point out in the strongest terms, stories coming from Mr Sickert should be treated with a good deal of caution.
This point of view can only be sympathized with in view of Joseph Sickert's claims made in national newspapers in 1984 that the Yorkshire Ripper had attempted to murder him. Clearly there is a large element of fiction and fantasy involved in the entire Sickert and Knight affair as Sickert himself confirmed in an article in the Sunday Times in 1977 where he admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.
Unfortunately it is a sad fact of life today that the book market is much like the newspaper market and to sell it is necessary to have headlines that scream out some outrageous plot at its readers. If our Jack the Ripper does prove to be a lowly labourer or fish porter then nobody is going to take a blind bit of notice, but if we can come up with a - let's say a Royal Academy painter - and weave a complete and utter fantastic story around them with the required amount of gore, sex and violence thrown in, plus a little bit of modern forensic and profiling magic, then we can sit back and bathe in the glory of yet another 'final solution' or 'case closed'. Facts or the truth do not matter anymore, it seems, in the solution of the Ripper mystery. It is an open market, and as we are seeing in our new century a highly lucrative one at that.
This is obvious from the volumes that have been steadily appearing over the years, and we will but take three of them as classic examples of their genre.
'Murder and Madness, The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper Based on Heretofore Unrevealed Information from Scotland Yard' by Dr David Abrahamsen certainly wins the race for the longest title of any Jack the Ripper book, it is also high on the list for the most humorous volume as well, the problem being that is it supposedly deadly serious. It is a bewildering tale by a forensic scientist - he is described as a leading expert on the criminal mind - which has Prince Albert Victor Edward and his tutor JK Stephen running around Whitechapel in drag taking out their sexual resentments against prostitutes by ripping them to pieces. Abrahamsen does not produce one single piece of evidence to substantiate his wild and ridiculous claims, apart from the noteworthy facts that JK Stephen smoked a pipe and Prince Albert was in the habit of dressing in collar and cuffs.
'Elementary my dear Watson,' one can almost hear Holmes say.
If this forensic scientist had bothered to check his facts he would have rapidly found out, from the court circulars of the time he is writing about, that Prince Albert was out of London in the company of family and friends on every single occasion that the Ripper struck. If that's not bad enough he then delves deeply into the subject of sex crime and his somewhat flippant speculations about the subject leave one cold and frightened. Frightened that a forensic scientist - who might sit in judgment of a person's guilt or innocence - can honestly believe this sort of mumbo-jumbo stuff in the late 1990's. He claims that many men who have sex with prostitutes are doing so because of an infantile fixation with their mothers, and that many prostitutes ply their trade as revenge against a weak father figure.
In fact the Hite Report on Male Sexuality shows that most men are quite honest about their reason for commercial sex, and various straightforward reasons are given for having sex with prostitutes: to gain sexual experience, to lose their virginity, to gain sexual independence and because of the chances it offered for uninvolved emotionless sex. Other men found it too unemotional and never repeated the experience and the vast majority of men seemed to find that having sex with a prostitute was no different than wining and dining a date to get her into bed. Just a shortcut.
Regarding his comments about prostitutes revenging themselves on weak father figures perhaps the good doctor would do well to visit Prague and question the thousands of young girls that have flocked into the city to sell their bodies. It is the only way for them to earn a living in their economically devastated country.
Abrahamsen regards sexual perversion as an erotic expression of hate with perverted sexual behaviour being the result of psychological castration - whatever that means - and classifies certain homosexual behaviour as a perversion. He might be interested to learn that between 43 and 48% of all males have had sexual relations of some kind with another male while a teenager or boy.
After blithely assuring his readers that they all possess the impulse to kill, he then links the sexual drive - supposedly in both sexes - to emotions of hate and murder, as though biological reproduction and pure pleasure have nothing to do with the urge to copulate.
Worse is to come. The prostitutes, he continues, that were so viciously mutilated and slaughtered by the Ripper were secretly attracted to the maniac with a knife. Why?
Well it is obvious when you think about it. As he explains it the Ripper had already killed some of their kind and when something like this happens to a prostitute then the others just flock around the killer begging to be cut apart and murdered.
His startling theories are only matched by his intimate sexual knowledge. The reader is informed of the great secret that homosexuals often indulge in anal intercourse, and they will wear women's clothes as the good doctor maintains this will cause them to orgasm. Perhaps the key that really unlocks Abrahamsen's secret door to the solution of the Ripper mystery is when he points out that the wonderful fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty is nothing less than a necrophiliac's fantasy.
Perhaps even stranger - considering the title of his book - is the fact that the 'Heretofore Unrevealed Information from Scotland Yard' remain just that, 'unrevealed'.
'The Ripper and the Royals' by Melvyn Fairclough is yet another extension of Stephen Knight's book, again based largely on evidence supplied by Joseph Sickert. But this one has HRH Duke of Clarence, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir William Gull, JK Stephen and coach driver John Netley carrying out the bloody murders in yet another Freemason conspiracy. The plot reaches right from 1888 to today with national newspapers, Special Branch detectives, Crown Prosecution Service and the Yorkshire Ripper all involved in the elaborate farce. The secret diaries of Inspector Abberline are revealed to the author but not the reader and very senior police chiefs of the time act as lookouts for the killers. One can visualize the scene as the Duke of Clarence and Lord Randolph Churchill, covered in blood and gore, creep past the hundreds of police constables stationed in Whitechapel at the time of the murders:
'Evening your Highness... Evening my Lord, nice evening to butcher a whore if I say so myself, gentlemen.'
The Duke of Clarence lives on after his death, as does Mary Kelly, and the Royal Ripper looks set to be the final solution to end all final solutions. One is left with the feeling that the only character missing from the entire farce has been Brian Rix.
All well and good, but again one has to question the author's motives in including the gruesome photographs of the Ripper's victims. The reproduction of Catherine Eddowes' picture showing her naked, brutalized and propped up against a wall is bad enough but why include the already widely circulated picture of the remains of Mary Kelly, legs spread wide displaying her ripped and bloody reproductive organs.
And finally to the latest effort to smash into the Ripperologist's comfortable little world, the highly expensively when not well researched - at a cost of some six million dollars - and much publicized 'Portrait of a Killer - Jack the Ripper - Case Closed' by Patricia Cornwell, which once again tediously claims Walter Sickert - the painter we met earlier - as Jack the Ripper. It is early days yet for this volume but one should be naturally suspicious of American authors - as in the case of Dr Abrahamsen - whose name on the cover of the book dwarfs the fairly lengthy title. When the dust settles on this one it is my sincere belief that everyone will finally realize that poor old Sickert murdered nothing except paint.
This effort from Cornwell is part of the genre we will examine later where an author picks out a suspect from the hat and then come hell or high water will make that suspect fit into Jack's clothes, even when they are the wrong size.
Is there a way out of this dreadful morass that threatens to engulf any serious effort to discover the identity of Jack the Ripper? Possibly, just possibly. If, from the very start, one is prepared to establish well accepted criteria in known criminal behaviour - particularly in what we now term as 'serial murder' case - and to reexamine what the last hundred or so years should have taught us about the activities of such criminals then it might be possible to apply these lessons to the case of Jack the Ripper.
Surely with the increase of our knowledge into these types of crime - through increasingly sophisticated police and forensic techniques - we must be in a better situation to solve this mystery than ever before? Surely the unique insight that we now possess into the workings of the human mind, particularly that of criminals, and more particularly that of murderers, must mean that we are closer and not further away from the truth of the matter? The only stumbling block must be the wild theories of the Ripperologists and it is for this reason that they must be ignored at the start of this journey into the unknown. Later it will be necessary to consider their various theories.
One of the first points that confronts anybody looking into cases of murder, particularly serial murder, is that a large number of the actual killers have been interviewed as suspects - or even witnesses - by police investigating the murder but would eventually be ruled out for a variety of reasons. Only later when confronted by overwhelming evidence - usually obtained by luck - would the police realize that this was in fact their man. This holds true for some of the most notorious mass murderers of all time.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Ted Bundy, two of the best known cases, have already been extensively covered in a previous chapter but there are a host of other murderers sharing this common factor. Robert Hansen was also mentioned earlier in another connection, and he was also interviewed by police investigating the killings of twenty women who had been hunted down and shot in the woods around Anchorage, Alaska. The local police were disinclined to really suspect Hansen because he was well known to all in Anchorage as a successful and respectable member of the business community. Later, however, when the police were desperate to catch the killer they contacted the FBI Academy Psychological Profiling Team - who specialize in profiling just such mass murderers - and gave them a description of the multiple murders, they were told by the FBI specialists that the killer was probably a respected member of the business community. This still, for reasons unknown, didn't result in Hansen's arrest and it was only when one of his victims eventually managed to escape - as Hansen was attempting to load her on to his private airplane where he was going to throw her out without a parachute - and tell her story to the police that he was detained and eventually charged.
Raymond Morris was interviewed by police looking for the killer of several young girls in Staffordshire, England, in the mid 1960's but they were quickly satisfied with the alibi his wife provided. Later the number of his car was noted by a witness when Morris tried to drag another girl into his car and this time the police found child pornography in the house and were able to show that his wife was lying about her husband's movements. False alibis, usually supplied by family or close friends, are a painfully recurrent theme in these cases of brutal murder.
Van Zon murdered his way through Amsterdam and the rest of Holland in the mid 1960's - no one is really sure of his eventual toll - and he killed both men and women without compunction. He came to the attention of the Dutch police when his wife went to them and accused him of attempting to murder her. As he was already on probation for some other minor sexual offence they didn't take the accusation very seriously and merely locked him up for a month. After his release he carried straight on with his killings, and four more victims were to die before he was eventually arrested for almost killing a woman by beating her around the head with a lead pipe.
One of the two 'Hillside Stranglers', Bianchi, was twice interviewed by the Los Angeles police in their efforts to end the reign of terror that claimed as many as ten young girls in the late 1970's. Two more girls were killed before the trail led back to Bianchi once again.
The 'Boston Strangler', Albert De Salvo, had been in police custody and jailed for fairly minor sex offences - in other words he was well known to the Boston police.
After the series of thirteen horrific rapes and murders between 1962 and 1964, however, the police were unable to make the connection between the killings and De Salvo, until someone finally remembered him from previous offences. Even then the police thought that De Salvo was only guilty of rape and it wasn't until he was admitted to a mental institute where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and went on to confess to the murders in such detail that there could be no denying that De Salvo was indeed the Boston Strangler.
In 1922 the local police of Dorset, England, carried out a murder investigation which still stands today as a shining example of how a murder should not be investigated. A woman's body was found in a field near to Boscombe. She had been beaten to death with a hammer and sexually assaulted. The most promising evidence was the imprint of a car tyre which was identified as a Dunlop Magnum on the near side rear wheel, and the testimony of a man who had seen a grey-green touring car driven by a man in a chauffeur's uniform in the area. The police went on to interview every chauffeur in the Bournemouth area and eventually came to one Thomas Allaway who drove a grey-green touring car for his employers. Three of the wheels of this car were indeed fitted with Dunlop Magnum tyres but the all important near side rear wheel was fitted with a Michelin so the police asked Allaway if he had changed the tyre recently. When he replied no, the police went away quite happily accepting his alibi that he had been visiting the local pub at the time of the murder. Meanwhile a clerk at the local post office told the police that she remembered a chauffeur who had been sending telegrams to women asking them to catch the next train to Bournemouth. Allaway had lured his victim, Irene Wilkins, down to Bournemouth with a telegram promising work. An engineer who had travelled down on the same train as the murder victim informed the police that he had seen her collected from the station by a chauffeur driving a grey-green touring car. This should have clinched the case by now but the police went on to display even more incompetence. The engineer, Frank Humphris, saw the same car again two weeks later and managed to get its number this time. But still the police didn't act. The clerk at the post office recognized the chauffeur - who was fond of sending telegrams to ladies - again six weeks later and followed him outside to take the number of his grey-green tourer. Still the police did nothing. Later the intrepid female clerk and her work mates showed more diligence than the police and followed the chauffeur home on his next visit and passed the address onto the police. Still nothing.
It was only when Allaway absconded from his employers with their cheque book and started passing dud cheques that he was finally arrested. Once in their custody even the police found it hard to defy the barrage of evidence that pointed towards Allaway as being the killer of Irene Wilkins, so they reluctantly hauled themselves off to check his car again, opened the boot and found..?
A Dunlop Magnum tyre.
Allaway had read about the tyre track left at the scene of the murder in the local paper and changed the tyre.
Even with this powerful evidence - for the tyre matched the track found at the scene - the police still had trouble presenting a watertight case at court, and it was only when Allaway was asked to write out the same words as appeared on the murder telegram and made the exact same three spelling mistakes that the jury knew they had their man.
As well as illustrating our theme that suspects who have been in the hands of the police at some time ultimately prove to be the murderer this case is a classic example of a police force and system that was still in its infancy thirty-four years after the Ripper murders.
Six years after the Ripper murders France was to experience a similar spate of terrible crimes when a killer travelled the countryside strangling, raping and disemboweling young girls and castrating young boys. The killer's description was well known to the French police. He was described as having a twisted upper lip marked by a scar, a bloodshot right eye and of unkempt appearance with shaggy black beard and long hair. The killer attempted to attack a servant girl on a lonely road but a passing labourer managed to beat him off and later alerted the police.
The police managed to capture this strange individual but after examining his identity papers allowed him to go free. The description of the man leaves no doubt - the disfigurement to his face must have been severe as he had shot himself in the face with a pistol - that he was an unusual-looking individual and he had just attempted to attack a girl. But the police let this strange man on his way and he went on to kill three more victims. Joseph Vacher was eventually taken into custody when he attempted to attack a large woman in a forest and had the tables turned on him when she gave him a good thrashing and handed him over to the police.
As a fairly regular, but minor sexual offender, Colin Pitchfork was well known to the Leicester police and when a young girl was murdered in Enderby he was interviewed by police. They did not really suspect him but were carrying out routine investigations into all sexual offenders of the area in a process of elimination. His alibi and manner satisfied them and they closed his file as a suspect. If they had probed just a little bit further they would have surely caught Colin Pitchfork before he went on to commit the second murder. For not only was he on police files as a sexual offender he had also been treated for his sexual disorder at the Carlton Hayes Hospital, outside of which the body of the first victim, Lynda Mann, was found. This connection should not have been missed by a modern police force in 1983, but it was. After the second murder Pitchfork was finally arrested after a friend admitted that he had stood in for Pitchfork, during the massive blood-testing operation the police carried out to find the killer.
Obviously it cannot be taken for granted that every murderer has been interviewed and subsequently released by the police because of a cast-iron alibi, police incompetence or other reasons, and then later is shown to be the killer. But there is an awfully persuasive pattern in all the murder investigations we have followed up to now, and make no mistake we are discussing some of the most infamous mass murderers of the last century. The pattern is clear: original police suspicions are lulled by a false alibi usually given by family or close friends, or alternatively by the suspect himself who seems able to convince the police of his innocence merely with his manner, and then later a piece of luck usually shows the police that their suspicions were after all well-founded. One also has to say, that there seems to be a continuing pattern of police incompetence of murder investigation right through the last century, sometimes - as in the case of the search for the killer driving a grey-green tourer with a Dunlop Magnum tyre - of an appalling level.
This then gives us our first criterion: that the Ripper was most likely to have been a named suspect at some time in the original police investigation and had probably been interviewed by the police to eliminate him from the murder enquiry.