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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.
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.