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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.
Why was it so vitally important for Macnaghten to defend Thomas Cutbush against the accusations that he might have been Jack the Ripper?
One would have thought under the trying and difficult circumstances of the case that the Metropolitan Police would have been more than happy to have had such a prime suspect thrown at them. Cutbush was a knife wielding maniac with severe paranoid delusions, his movements could not be vouched for on the nights of the murders - in other words his family were either unwilling or unable to provide an alibi for him on the nights in question - he was known to haunt the streets of Whitechapel late at night when almost all the murders were committed, he had an extensive and proven knowledge of the murder area, he had a long history of vicious assaults on women including his own family; and therefore it is almost impossible to believe that any senior officer involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper would have dismissed such a pristine suspect without a damn good reason for doing so.
However a valid reason for the dismissal of Thomas Cutbush as a genuine suspect for Jack the Ripper - both then and today - has never surfaced, and that in itself is awfully persuasive evidence that he could well have been Jack the Ripper. For other suspects floated by authors or Ripperologists are rapidly shot down in the shooting gallery that is now the world of ‘Ripperology’, for instance in the real world the latest - revitalised - subject for the Ripper, Sickert, the harmless and ineffectual Victorian painter who enjoyed some dubious fame as a totally unconvincing suspect in the 1960's and 1970's, didn’t last five minutes, and this is true for almost every suspect who is eventually elevated to the lofty heights of the publishing world. Thomas Cutbush is still standing, and has stood perhaps the ultimate test, that of time. For ten years now, hundreds of earnest researchers have searched for that evidence of dismissal, in vain.
When one sifts through all the meagre facts that are left to us a over a hundred years later it does appear that at least one senior police officer did in fact rate Cutbush as a serious suspect for Jack the Ripper, and his reward for doing so was to be cast out of the police service, perhaps for breaking the ’Unwritten Rule of the Service’. But we will come to that presently.
In more modern times we sadly often see the opposite side of the police coin where suspects are ‘fitted up’ by the police to achieve some sort of weird ‘killing rate’ of their own - for after all the real killer is still walking the streets and nothing apart from some short term positive publicity for the police is the real result - producing the sad litany of cases that continually surface where so-called ‘killers’ - quite often harmless individuals with learning difficulties - have been falsely imprisoned by the police for as much as thirty years only to be released on appeal when the evidence against them has been found to have been coerced, defective or just plain fabrication.
But it is not often that we see or hear a chief constable standing up to defend the reputation of a complete and utter criminal maniac like Thomas Cutbush. Make no mistake, the equivalent situation today would have someone like the Chief Constable of Yorkshire rushing into print in a bid to exonerate a killer like Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. For the very evidence that Macnaghten dismisses so easily in Cutbush’s case is exactly the same crucial evidence that was used to convict Peter Sutcliffe. Macnaghten’s defence of Thomas Cutbush is certainly unique in police history.
Macnaghten was obviously defending his own reputation and police department, and not just Thomas Cutbush. It was already bad enough that a close relative of a very senior police officer - who was himself intimately involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper - was patently guilty of attacking women with a knife, but the slightest hint that Thomas Cutbush could have been Jack the Ripper may well have brought the entire façade of Scotland Yard crashing down to the ground. Especially if it had come out as well that Executive Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush of Scotland Yard was himself suffering from severe anti-social delusions as well.
One aspires to look back on personalities and individuals in history with a degree of kindness and respect but there is no escaping the fact that Charles Cutbush, the senior policeman, was patently insane. A very senior police officer today who professed the earnest belief that he was being slowly poisoned by the immigrant population of Manchester would not last long in his job, and when it was found to be his habit to be armed at all times with a heavy revolver to defend himself against such immigrants one would hope that the authorities would quickly section the man and have him locked up for the safety of that immigrant population.
The newspapers of the time would have had a field day. Don’t forget the radical press of the day turned the Ripper murders into a carnival spectacular where the police were mercilessly and openly mocked, ridiculed day after day for their miserable failure to catch the murderer. It was not just the radical press either, the heavy weight conservative newspapers also joined the vitriolic campaign, and almost daily during the 1888 murders there were headlines screaming for the resignation of Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. At mass meetings all over London crowds gathered to hear speeches highly critical of the police and their methods. Sir Charles Warren and the Home Secretary Henry Matthews were singled out when resolutions were passed saying: ‘It is high time both men should resign and make way for some other officers who would leave no stone unturned for the purpose of bringing the murderer to justice…’
This unprecedented public criticism of the authorities must have pushed a few alarm bells in Scotland Yard and government, and when the press followed it up with scathing comments like this one from the Press Agency then for sure it seemed someone’s head would roll: ‘With each fresh murder in the Whitechapel series public alarm has been accentuated and unless something can be done to restore confidence in the detective powers of the police panic will be the result.’
Sir Charles Warren was pushed into a very tight corner indeed and when he ultimately did resign on the day before Mary Jane Kelly was murdered the press was jubilant with headlines like: ‘Whitechapel has avenged us!’
If the press could have got hold of a connection between the Metropolitan police force and the murderer - no matter how small - all hell would have broken loose and the confidence of the public in the still fledgling police force would have been well and truly shattered. There is no doubt that the press would have been running headlines the very next day screaming out about a police conspiracy or cover-up. Hot waters indeed and perhaps this is what James Monro, Metropolitan Police Commissioner meant when he later told one of his grandsons that the solution to the Ripper case was a ‘hot potato’.
A ‘hot potato’ is no exaggeration and this must be the reason that Macnaghten had for defending Thomas Cutbush. The deletion of, or perhaps the deliberate erasure in his memorandum of the name of one of the senior police officers that Macnaghten asked to look into the Cutbush story is also a tad suspicious. The document reads in this section: ‘Cutbush’s antecedents were enquired into by Ch.Inspr. (now Supt.) Chis…’
Perhaps Chief Inspector (now Superintendent) Charles Henry Cutbush? That we will never know, but it would have been the sensible and logical thing for Macnaghten to do, to ask the uncle of Thomas Cutbush for more information about his nephew, and this he must have done. The problem here is that he probably did not get a very sensible or logical answer from Superintendent Cutbush but instead a barrage of incoherent ravings about the Catholic population of Great Britain.
Even more confusing, and also suspicious, is Macnaghten’s single reference in his memorandum to Executive Superintendent Cutbush of Scotland Yard where he refers to him as the ‘late Supt. Executive’. Macnaghten signed his memorandum on the 23rd February 1894 which is strange as Superintendent Cutbush did not shoot himself until 1896 - so it is claimed, however recently discovered material strongly indicates that he did in fact shoot himself in 1895. Of course Macnaghten may have meant ‘late’ of his department and that Superintendent Cutbush may have taken early retirement, perhaps due to his paranoid delusions? The significance of this will be seen a little later.
And what of the other officers involved in pursuing information about Thomas Cutbush? Inspector William Race actually arrested Cutbush and up till then had been seen as a first-class detective with scores of good arrests to his name. However after the Cutbush affair his career took a sudden downward turn, his expected promotion to superintendent was blocked by his superiors for no apparent cause and instead he was downgraded - because of ill health and depression brought about by his unfair treatment during the Cutbush affair - to be eventually thrown out of the police force with a reduced pension.
Police Constable John McCarthy, the other policeman involved in the Cutbush case, seemed to have fared somewhat better, being promoted to sergeant in the same year that Macnaghten wrote his memorandum about Cutbush. Oddly enough he was transferred at some time, again the record of the date of this transfer in the Scotland Yard files has become ‘illegible’, McCarthy’s rise in the force continued apace after being made a sergeant, four years later he was an inspector, six years later a chief inspector and another six years later a superintendent.
Curious isn’t it that of the three police officers heavily involved in the Cutbush case two should suffer severe bouts of depression leading in one case to suicide and in the other to enforced early retirement while the other one should go on to become some sort of super cop?
Further than that, it does appear from the sources that are still available, that Inspector Race was actually being penalised by his superiors for having cleared the man named Colicott - who you will remember as the young man originally arrested for stabbing women with a knife but subsequently cleared of the attacks made by Cutbush - which then cleared the way for Race to arrest Thomas Cutbush. Macnaghten glosses this fact over quite neatly in his memorandum by claiming that Colicott was discharged ‘owing to faulty identification’, which in police terms really means he was the wrong man.
One instinctively feels from what Macnaghten writes that he desperately wanted Colicott to be the ‘right’ man for the crimes and Cutbush to be the ‘wrong’ man, and this could be the clue behind Inspector Race’s sudden fall from grace. He had, it seems - in a completely honest fashion cleared the suspect Colicott and in doing so unwittingly broken the ‘Unwritten Rule of the Service‘.
It is also a matter of intense regret that the Home Office and Scotland Yard files covering the period of Cutbush’s arrest and the subsequent investigation by the three police officers are missing. Coincidence? Or perhaps another aspect of the ‘Unwritten Rule of the Service’.
Again it rests on Macnaghten’s defence of Thomas Cutbush, for Cutbush very evidently did not deserve or need Macnaghten’s unswerving support. The man was, after all, a maniac who liked cutting women with a knife, he was sentenced by a court of law for being a maniac who liked cutting women with a knife and he went to Broadmoor on Her Majesty’s Orders for the rest of his natural life because he was considered far too dangerous and unbalanced to ever again mix with normal society.
But that still doesn’t make Thomas Cutbush Jack the Ripper.
One curious episode in the story of Jack the Ripper came to light when the grandson of Chief Inspector Donald Swanson - who was directly in charge of the Ripper investigation - published notations his grandfather had made in a copy of Sir Robert Anderson’s memoirs ‘The Lighter Side of My Official Life’. Amongst the several comments made on the Ripper case by Swanson is:
‘After the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent by us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified… On suspect’s return to his brother’s house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day and night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards - Kosminski was the suspect - D.S.S.’
This comment has promoted much confusion amongst the Ripperologists ever since, and not without good reason. For the ’Seaside Home’ that Swanson refers to was in fact the ’Convalescent Police Seaside Home’ located at West Brighton and opened in March 1890.
The question naturally is what the devil were the police up to in sending a homicidal maniac who they firmly believed was Jack the Ripper to a police convalescent home by the seaside seventy miles away from London? Were they hoping the sea air would prompt a suitable confession? One can imagine the scene today where Peter Sutcliffe is escorted down to the seaside resort of Blackpool to spend some days of comfort in a superbly appointed Police Home, where one of his victims awaits him to identify him.
It just wouldn’t happen now, and it shouldn’t have happened then.
It surely would have been a simple matter to have had the man identified in London. Why then drag him and the witness all the way down to Brighton?
Whatever the eventual outcome of the Jack the Ripper affair - and the influence that any volume may or may not have on that outcome - there are certain key elements that must not be diminished or pushed aside in their importance to a gainful understanding of the events and people who played them out back then in Victorian London. These key elements are plainly marked out for us today by the highly unusual behaviour of the police to what really should have been quite normal and everyday circumstance.
Macnaghten’s puzzling memorandum is without a doubt a central and elemental key, but perhaps even more crucial is the transfer of this suspect and witness from London to the Seaside Home at West Brighton. It stinks. Over one hundred years later it still smells.
But was it, as Swanson claims, Kosminski that was hauled off to Brighton to be identified? Swanson is obviously mistaken when he says that the suspect, Kosminski, died shortly after admission to Colney Hatch as we know that Kosminski was still alive when Swanson actually wrote his comments in Anderson’s memoirs in about 1910 and did not die until 1919.
That Swanson cannot really have considered Kosminski to be the Ripper is obvious from one of his private papers where he has added the name of Frances Coles to his list of Ripper victims - for she was murdered after Kosminski was under lock and key. If it was really Kosminski why was it necessary to take him and the witness to Brighton? But what if it wasn’t Kosminski? What if it was someone else?
Sir Robert Anderson doesn’t give much away in his memoirs about the Jack the Ripper case but there are a few statements that do make one pause for thought. For example:
‘Scotland Yard can boast that not even the subordinate officers of the department will tell tales out of school, and it would ill become me to violate the unwritten rule of the service… I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer… But no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer.’
What was Anderson trying to say here? For if the suspect had been identified as Kosminski and if the Metropolitan Police knew that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper what possible harm could it have done for anybody to say so? Why would Anderson’s old department suffer if he disclosed the identity of Jack the Ripper? And Anderson’s somewhat sly reference to telling tales out of school could be plainly interpreted as the ‘police looking after their own’. So yet again we are faced with a case of deliberate confusion and disinformation from a highly placed senior police official, but this time with a nasty edge of smugness to it.
One begins to plainly see that the violation of Sir Robert Anderson’s inviolable ‘Unwritten Rule of the Service’ may well be the key that unlocks the door to the identity of Jack the Ripper.