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 8 - A Lonely Boy… Thomas Cutbush
Paul Begg in his otherwise excellent book ‘Jack the Ripper: The uncensored
facts’ states:
‘Cutbush need not detain us. He was not Jack the Ripper.’
So with one line Thomas Cutbush is dismissed from the Jack the Ripper story
by - and it must be said because Begg refreshingly sticks to facts - one of
the foremost writers on the subject when Cutbush really deserves at least a
chapter and to do justice to history we will give him one.
In 1895 an Executive Superintendent of Scotland Yard sat down in his
kitchen, pulled out the pistol he always carried on his person and shot
himself in the head while his daughter looked on. He had suffered from
severe and acute depression for a number of years, and had been diagnosed as
a paranoid who was suffering from strange delusions, one of which was that
he was convinced that the Roman Catholics of Great Britain were poisoning
him and his family, and were responsible for the headaches that had plagued
him for many years. His name was Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush and he
was Thomas Cutbush’s uncle. It is conceivable that his nephew was partly
responsible for Superintendent Cutbush’s years of depression, paranoia and
eventual suicide as no senior police officer likes to have a black sheep in
the family, particularly when that black sheep is a violent, criminally
insane lunatic who likes to stab women with a knife.
Thomas Cutbush was twenty-two years old when, in 1888, he suddenly abandoned
his work of canvassing the Whitechapel area for a business directory and
started to act very strangely indeed, wandering the streets of Whitechapel
late at night and returning home in a dirty and muddy condition. Eventually
his behaviour became so alarming that he was locked away in Lambeth
Infirmary as a lunatic on the 5th March 1891 but he managed to escape almost
immediately and then subsequently stabbed one woman, Florence Grace Johnson,
and attempted to stab yet another before being arrested on the 9th March
1891. He was judged to be criminally insane and sent off in April to
Broadmoor where he died in 1903.
Macnaghten throws more light on Thomas Cutbush’s history in his
‘confidential memorandum’:
‘The case referred to in the sensational story told in the ‘Sun’ in its
issue of 13th inst, & following dates is that of Thomas Cutbush who was
arraigned at the London County Sessions in April 1891, and on a charge of
maliciously wounding Florence Grace Johnson and attempting to wound Isabelle
Frazer Anderson in Kennnington. He was found to be insane, and sentenced to
be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure. This Cutbush, who lived with his
mother and aunt at 14 Albert St. Kennnington, escaped from the Lambeth
Infirmary (after he had been detained there only a few hours as a lunatic)
at noon on 5th March 1891 - He was rearrested on 9th idem. A few weeks
before this, several cases of stabbing, or ‘jobbing’ girls behind had
recurred in the vicinity, and a man named Colicott was arrested, but
subsequently discharged owing to faulty identification. The cuts in the
girl’s dresses made by Colicott were quite different to the cut made by
Cutbush (when he wounded Miss Johnson) who was no doubt influenced by a wild
desire or morbid imitation. Cutbush’s antecedents were enquired into by
Ch.Inspr. (now Supt.) Chis (name now illegible), by Inspr. Race and by P.S.
McCarthy CID - (the last named officer had been specially employed in
Whitechapel at the time of the murders there-) and it was ascertained that
he was born, & had lived, in Kennington all his life. His father died when
he was quite young, and he was always a ‘spoilt’ child. He had been employed
as a clerk and a traveller in the Tea trade at the Minories, & subsequently
canvassed for a Directory in the East End, during which time he bore a good
character. He apparently contracted syphilis about 1888 and, - since that
time - led an idle and useless life. His brain seems to have become
affected, and he believed that people were trying to poison him. He wrote to
Lord Grimthorpe, and others, - also to the Treasury. - complaining of Dr
Brooks of Westminster Bridge Rd, whom he threatened to shoot for having
supplied him with bad medicine. He is said to have studied medical books by
day, & to have rambled about at night, returning frequently with his clothes
covered with mud; but little reliance could be placed on the statements made
by his mother and aunt. Who both appear to have been of a very excitable
disposition. It was found impossible to ascertain his movements on the
nights of the Whitechapel murders.’
So here is the man whose name Macnaghten wanted to clear as a suspect in the
Ripper murders. Cutbush was quite obviously criminally insane, another
classic ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ suffering typical delusions that people
were trying to poison him, writing letters to all and sundry - mainly to
high officials in government - spending his days reading medical books or
alternately drawing pictures of women in indecent postures and threatening
to shoot his own doctor… and he liked to stab women. It makes one almost
pity Macnaghten’s chief suspect, MJ Druitt whose only crime or inclination
to crime was to throw himself into the River Thames with a load of stones in
his pockets. Macnaghten’s memorandum is a monumental disaster of police
work and even over a hundred years later it is impossible to believe that a
Chief Constable of Scotland Yard could have expected anyone to accept his
utterly fantastic proposal that someone like Druitt was a more likely
candidate for the Ripper than Cutbush. It, quite honestly, defies
explanation.
Macnaghten goes on to present his evidence as to why Cutbush could not have
been the Ripper. Firstly to the knife that Cutbush used to stab the women
after his escape from the Lambeth Infirmary, Macnaghten ridicules the ‘Sun’
report of the 14th February 1894 which claimed that the knife was the very
one used in the Ripper murders. As he quite rightly points out this cannot
have been the case as the knife was not purchased by Cutbush until February
1891, two years and three months after the Ripper murders. But that doesn’t
prove anything apart from the ‘Sun’ was wrong about the knife. Obviously
Cutbush would not have been allowed to retain any sort of weapon when he was
confined to the Lambeth Infirmary as a lunatic, and equally so if he had
been in the habit of stabbing women previously he may have lost his knife or
simply thrown it away. The evidence of the knife is no evidence at all, and
as I stated in an earlier chapter one has to be very careful when discussing
the ‘M.O.’ of serial killers and the weapons they use, for they do very
often change the weapons and sometimes even carry more than one weapon upon
their person. Hence it would be quite wrong to exclude suspects and victims
because a different weapon was used in a number of murders committed by the
same person.
Macnaghten’s second point is one that the Ripperologists have clung to with
single minded devotion since he wrote it in 1894 and that is: ‘It will be
noticed that the fury of the mutilations increased in each case, and
seemingly, the appetite only became sharpened by indulgence. It seems, then,
highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November
‘88, and had been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl
behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards’.
Well, on the face of it that seems to be a reasonable point, that a murderer
would simply not stop murdering and be content with some lesser criminal
activity. But there are comparisons which we can make today which Macnaghten
could not as he did not possess the knowledge or information that we do now
about such killers, and what these comparisons show is that some killers do
indeed vary their behaviour and it cannot be taken for granted that a killer
must always go on killing.
In a previous chapter we mentioned several of these killers but it is worth
looking quickly at some of them again just to prove the point. The ‘Boston
Strangler’ simply stopped killing women after his thirteenth victim and
began to rape them instead, and Colin Pitchfork raped and murdered a
Leicestershire girl in 1983 and then was content to expose himself to young
women for almost two and a half years until he murdered again. Often the
problem is that we simply do not understand the complicated mechanism that
triggers a killer into killing. The case of Colin Pitchfork illustrates this
only too well because he admitted he raped and murdered the two girls
because they had not acted like the hundreds of other girls he had exposed
himself to. The girls were supposed to walk past him and continue on their
way but neither did, instead they backed away from him - cutting of his
prearranged flight path back to his nearby vehicle. Somehow this behaviour
triggered that dangerous ’something’ in Pitchfork which resulted in the
deaths of the two girls. If they had walked past and simply ignored him they
would both be alive today. It can be even simpler that that. Kurten the
’Dusseldorf Murderer’ was in the habit of walking up to women in broad
daylight and demanding sex with them. Surprisingly some agreed, no doubt
through fear, and after sex he walked off leaving the women terrified but at
least alive. However if a woman said ’no’ to him the consequences were truly
dreadful, with the woman strangled, battered or stabbed to death within
seconds. One servant girl he approached and asked for sex replied, ’I’d
rather die!’
‘Die, then!’ he said and stabbed her.
Obviously Kurten’s behaviour was much more complex than just that, but it
does show that some killers need to be triggered into the act and others can
simply give up killing for a lengthy time period -such as two and half years
- or forever as in the case of the ‘Boston Strangler’.
So Macnaghten’s point is not really a valid one, and it is anyway based on
the rather shaky premise that the Ripper murders ceased after the death of
Mary Jane Kelly in November 1888. But what of the evidence in the last
chapter, from the Home Office and Scotland Yard files, that the police were
still actively engaged in the hunt for the Ripper for three years after this
date, and there were a number of unexplained murders of prostitutes in the
Whitechapel area after November 1888 which some senior police officials and
others saw as the work of the Ripper. On 16th July 1889 the body of the
prostitute Alice Mckenzie was found by a police constable in Castle Alley,
Whitechapel, she had been knifed twice in the throat and her killer had made
several mutilations to her torso but had probably been disturbed by the
arrival of the constable. Dr Thomas Bond who examined the body said:
‘I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel
Murders viz: sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully &
resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation, each mutilation indicating sexual
thought & a desire to mutilate the abdomen & sexual organs. I am of the
opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the
former series of Whitechapel Murders.’
The right Honourable Henry Matthew, Home Secretary at the time, in a
comment to the press concerning the murder of Alice Mckenzie also confirms
that he believed she had been killed by the Ripper. Monro the Metropolitan
Police Commissioner at the time also felt that this was another Ripper
murder and moved fifty-six extra police officers into the Whitchapel area to
supplement the 102 plain-clothes men he already had patrolling the vicinity,
so one again is left in some confusion by the conflicting opinions of the
men in charge of the Ripper investigation.
An even later murder in February 1891 was also attributed by many of the
senior officials involved to the Ripper, that of Frances Coles who was found
still alive but with her throat cut and the police constable who found her
actually heard a man running away from the scene. Although the police did
their utmost to convict a ship’s fireman, Thomas Sadler, he was eventually
discharged and the verdict given of murder by person or persons unknown.
Macnaghten makes it quite clear in his memorandum that he remained convinced
that Sadler was the murderer, but he may have held this opinion simply
because it suited his own theory that the Ripper murders had ceased in 1888.
Equally so it was another line of defence for his favoured Thomas Cutbush, a
person who he seems to have decided to protect regardless of the
circumstances.
It is useful at this stage to look again at the behaviour of some of the
more notorious mass murderers of the last hundred years in relationship to
Macnaghten’s statement about a murderer not simply giving up murder. But
this time without the prejudice of assuming that Jack the Ripper stopped
killing in 1888 because, as we will see, a one or two year gap between
killings is not at all unusual for these peculiar types of criminal.
Ludwig Tessnow brutally mutilated, murdered and dismembered two young girls
in Southern Germany in 1897 and it wasn’t until 1900 that he did the same to
two young boys. In between he had satisfied his desire to mutilate and kill
by hacking sheep to pieces. Australian serial killer, Arnold Sodeman, who
escaped detection for many years because of his outward ‘respectability’,
murdered a girl in 1930, another one in 1931 and then let five years slip by
before he finally murdered June Rushmer and was caught. The ‘Southside
Slayer’, Timothy Spencer, murdered Carol Hamm in Arlington, Virginia, in
January 1984 and then remained dormant for three years until he suddenly
went on a spree of murder and mutilation that accounted for four more women.
A series of murders that took place around the Italian city of Florence show
a killer with no predictable pattern of behaviour or timing except that he
or she likes to kill on a night when the moon is obscured by cloud. It is
interesting to note that this too is a killer with a bent to savagely stab
and then mutilate the reproductive organs of women, even duplicating Jack
the Ripper‘s habit of removing organs from the body of the victim. One
should also note that this particular serial killer uses an entire variety
of weapons, from guns to blades and an unknown sharp instrument of some
nature with which the victims are mutilated.
Murders have taken place in August 1968, September 1974, June 1981, October
1981, June 1982, September 1983, July 1984 and September 1985. As can be
seen in this particular case a time period between murders committed by the
same individual - who just happens to be in this case a serial killer of
the exact nature of Jack the Ripper - can be as long as six years.
Richard Francis Cottingham declared war on the prostitutes of New York and
New Jersey between 1977 and 1980 and murdered and mutilated women in his
various hotel rooms but it is important to note that there was indeed a
two-year gap between his first and second killing.
These few examples show that one must be extremely careful when trying to
explain the behaviour of men who murder. It is plainly not good enough for
modern criminologists - or Ripperologists - to support a theory as outdated
as Macnaghten’s - as many of them do - and perhaps it would be better to say
once again that we still simply do not understand the mechanisms that
provoke a murderer to murder. As we have just seen a killer can go out and
commit brutal murder, with just as much savagery as Jack the Ripper, and
then slide back into his normal role in society for as long as six years,
before whatever it is that provokes him to murder in the first place occurs
again. In fact a killer can stop killing - the Boston Strangler demonstrates
that, as does, perversely enough, Colin Pitchfork. The young girls that
Pitchfork murdered made the simple mistake of backing away from him,
shutting off his all important escape route. If they hadn’t done this he
would definitely not have murdered them. He only resorted to murder when the
circumstances that he had carefully and painstakingly created to simply
expose himself were dramatically altered by the victim’s unusual behaviour.
Pitchfork himself admitted this to the police when he told them that he had
exposed himself to more than a thousand females but only felt obliged to
murder two of them because they ‘provoked’ him to attack - rather than
‘motivated’ him, and this a highly crucial observation to be made in the
world of murder and the policing of those crimes. In his own words
concerning the first murder:
‘This is the thing I don’t understand about flashing. One per cent of the
time you get someone who goes mad and screams and you have to disappear
quick. But all the others walk by you. Just walk by you and ignore you. But
she turned and ran into a dark footpath. She backed herself into a corner…
if she’d walked by, the situation would’ve disappeared.’
And on the second murder:
‘I tried to get ahead. I tried to get set, but she was on top of me. I
didn’t even have time to open me bloody trousers. I prefer to do it in a way
that satisfies me… they always have room. No matter where I was exposing
meself. No matter where. They always have room to walk by me. It’s the
easiest way. You shock them. They walk by you and then you got your exit
route clear, and go where they come from…’
This second girl also backed herself into a corner, just like the first and
died as a result. Pitchfork’s thinking on the subject makes chilling
reading, for what he is really saying is: ‘It’s my game. Play it my way and
you live. Break the rules, even slightly and you die.’
The problem was that the two young girls didn’t know what game they were
playing and didn’t understand the warped rules. There is an important lesson
here for police and parent’s in Pitchfork’s confession. After all, if the
girls of the area had been advised by their parents, school and local police
to simply walk past a ‘flashing’ man and ignore him the tragic deaths may
not have occurred.
Obviously we are talking about two very different killers here, Jack the
Ripper and Colin Pitchfork, as can be seen from the chapter where various
types of serial killers were profiled. Pitchfork clearly belongs to the
‘Duffy’ type of killer who seeks sexual thrill and kills mainly to avoid
recognition, however in Pitchfork‘s case this may have been vastly more
complicated in that he plainly feared recognition of his true ‘self‘, as a
‘flasher‘, hence his victims who chose to ignore the sight of him exposing
himself were patently not recognising him as such, girls who reacted did
recognise him and then had to die as a consequence. But Pitchfork can still
teach us much about Jack the Ripper - and Thomas Cutbush - for he is also a
classic example of a killer who can give up killing and return to a much
more mundane criminal act such as exposing himself for two and half years.
Pitchfork can also perhaps help to give us an insight into the mentality of
a killer like Jack the Ripper because of the strange ‘trigger’ mechanism
that caused him to kill. One can easily imagine that most killers need to be
triggered into the act, most often perhaps by a particular victim type who
strikes a complicated chord in their weird chemistry, however this was not
the case with Pitchfork, the trigger for him was to be recognised for what
he was and what he was doing, thus turning him very quickly from a simple
and sad flasher to an extremely dangerous and violent individual prepared to
murder and mutilate young girls.
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Jack the Ripper may well had
some sort of complicated and ritualised set of trigger mechanisms that
‘provoked’ him to kill, rather than motivated him to kill, and those
triggers could have been every bit as simple as Pitchfork’s set of rules.
‘It’s my game. Play it my way and you will live. Break the rules, even
slightly, and you die.’
Perhaps his victims recognised him for what he was and what he was doing and
then paid a dreadful price for that recognition.
Pitchfork admitted to the police that for eight months after the first
murder he committed no offences whatsoever but then started exposing himself
again for a further two years and four months before murdering again. This
clearly doesn’t fit into any acceptable pattern that has been established by
criminologists and psychologists governing the behaviour of killers, but it
does clearly and irrefutably demonstrate that Macnaghten’s statement - that
‘It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly
stopped in November ‘88, and been content to recommence operations by merely
prodding a girl behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards ‘ - is patently
wrong. One cannot rule out a pattern of behaviour on the part of a serial
killer where he commits murder and then later reduces his violence to some
lesser offence - like exposing himself, killing sheep instead or stabbing
women in the buttocks with a knife.
Moreover it is highly interesting to note that the interval of time given by
Macnaghten between ‘his’ last Ripper killing and Cutbush’s reappearance on
the streets of London with a knife and Colin Pitchfork’s self admitted gap
between murders is exactly the same in both cases: two years and four
months.
