No.

154 February 2017

Paul Williams on
THE CRIMES AND KIN
OF THOMAS CUTBUSH
ADA WILSON VS THE MURDER OF DEAR RIP
ROSE BIERMAN ELIZA GRIMWOOD Your Letters and Comments
by Daniel Cazard by Jan Bondeson
VICTORIAN FICTION
MURDER MOST FOUL HANDLING INFORMATION by Francis Thompson
with Tim Mosley and OVERLOAD IN RIPPEROLOGY
Scott Nelson by Nina and Howard Brown BOOK REVIEWS
Ripperologist 118 January 2011 1
 Ripperologist 154
February 2017

EDITORIAL:
NO NEWS IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD NEWS
Adam Wood

THOMAS CUTBUSH: HIS CRIMES AND KIN

Paul Williams

WILSON VS BIERMAN - A VICTORIAN RASHOMON

Daniel Cazard

MURDER MOST FOUL, PART TWO

Scott Nelson and Tim Mosley

THE RIPPER OF WATERLOO ROAD:

THE MURDER OF ELIZA GRIMWOOD IN 1838
Jan Bondeson

HANDLING INFORMATION OVERLOAD IN RIPPEROLOGY

Nina and Howard Brown

DEAR RIP
Your Letters and Comments

VICTORIAN FICTION: FINIS CORONAT OPUS

By Francis Thompson

REVIEWS

Ripperologist magazine is published by Mango Books (www.mangobooks.co.uk). The views, conclusions and opinions expressed in signed articles, essays, letters and other items
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No News is Not
Always Good News
ADAM WOOD, Executive Editor

The concept of ‘fake news’ has become a big story in recent months, but of EXECUTIVE EDITOR
course the concept of invented stories or those carrying factual inaccuracies Adam Wood
is far from new. EDITORS
There are innumerable instances of falsehoods or, perhaps more accurately, Gareth Williams
Eduardo Zinna
misinterpretations attached to the Whitechapel murders, often starting with
newspaper reports which contained inaccurate statements subsequently accepted REVIEWS EDITOR
as fact. Paul Begg

One such claim is that Thomas Cutbush, the man hinted at by the Sun newspaper EDITOR-AT-LARGE
in 1894 as the killer, was related to the Metropolitan Police’s Supt. Charles Cutbush, Christopher T George
who committed suicide two years later. The claim was originally made by Melville COLUMNISTS
Macnaghten in his memorandum, written in response to the Sun’s allegations, Nina and Howard Brown
when he stated that “Cutbush was the nephew of the late Supt. Executive.” In more David Green
recent years, however, researchers attempting to confirm this have drawn a blank. ARTWORK
Was Macnaghten mistaken, or did he have knowledge which we have so far failed Adam Wood
to discover?
This issue of Ripperologist opens with an article from Paul Williams, who has Ripperologist magazine is free
taken a detailed look at the Cutbush family in an attempt to find the so-far elusive of charge and supplied in digital
format.
proof of a familial link.
Back issues from 62-153 are
And the very final entry by Paul Begg in his Reviews column in these pages available in PDF format.
looks at a book published primarily for journalists, but the thrust of which equally
An index to Ripperologist magazine
applies to researchers. The Chicago Guide To Fact-Checking urges reporters to can be downloaded from
go back to the original source of a news story, and the same applies to historical ripperologist.biz/ripindex.pdf
authors. Paul cites a case highlighted by Joanne Vigor-Mungovin in her book
To be added to the mailing list, to
Joseph, whereby several sources have incorrectly stated that Joseph Merrick had a submit a book for review or to place
brother named John Thomas, the mistake being repeated until it has been accepted an advertisement, get in touch at
as true. It wasn’t until Joanne checked John Thomas Merrick’s birth certificate that contact@ripperologist.biz.
the inaccuracy was exposed. We welcome well-researched
Chris George will take a more detailed look at the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ articles on any aspect of the
Whitechapel murders, the East End
in the next issue of Ripperologist. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the current
or the Victorian era in general.
edition, which sees the welcome return of Dear Rip, our letters page, featuring
a very interesting debate between Tom Wescott and Daniel Cazard in response
to the latter’s article on Martha Tabram in Rip 153. If you have any thoughts on
anything which appears within these pages, we’d love to hear from you!
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

Thomas Cutbush:
His Crimes and Kin
By PAUL WILLIAMS

The name of Thomas Cutbush is of paramount

importance in the historical search for Jack the Ripper.
Without him we would not know the names of three
significant police suspects, considered by the Chief
Constable, Sir Melville Macnaghten, to be more likely
candidates than Cutbush. Macnaghten penned an
internal memorandum, in response to allegations in
The Sun that the unnamed Cutbush was the infamous
killer. Both memo and articles are full of errors and
speculation. This essay attempts to unravel the true
story of Thomas Cutbush and asks not if he should be
suspected of being Jack the Ripper but if he committed
any crime at all.
Thomas Hayne Cutbush was born at 10 Hurley Road,
Lambeth, London, on 29 June 1865, the first child of
Thomas Taylor Cutbush and Kate, nee Hayne. Following
the birth of the second child, William Ernest on 6
September 1866 at 14 Albert Street, Newington, Thomas
Taylor moved to New Zealand. On 10 December 1867, he
married Agnes Ignes Stoddard at St. John’s Presbyterian
Church in Wellington. She died on 17 July 1870 and he
remarried on 24 September that year to Frances Augusta Sir Melville Macnaghten
Evelyn Watson (1852-1940). The first of their five
1 Supplement to the Wellington Evening Post, 19 May 1872 states
children was born in Wellington in January 1872 then that Thomas Taylor Cutbush was removed from the voters list because
they moved to Australia before May.1 For a brief period he had left the colony. He arrived in Sydney on the You Yangs on 30
he ran a shop selling perfume and fancy goods in Collins March 1875, New South Wales Government, Inward Passenger Lists.
Street, Melbourne but was unexpectedly asked to repay 2 Melbourne Advocate, 1 June 1872, p. 14.
a start-up loan and was made bankrupt in June 1872.2 3 The Age, 18 September 1880, p. 4, lists the bankruptcy. Victoria
After a spell in Sydney working as a commercial traveller, Public Record Office, Index to Outbound Passengers, lists TT Cutbush,
born 1856, travelling to Fiji in January 1886. For the fraud charge see,
a second bankruptcy and a fraud charge, he travelled from
Record and Emerald Hill and Sandbridge Advertiser, 14 November 1879,
Melbourne to Fiji in January 1886.3 He died on 19 August p. 3.
1886.4 4 This date is given in the pedigree for the 1891 Cutbush v Cutbush
William Cutbush died in infancy on 30 March 1869, case, reprinted in Simon D. Wood, “Occam’s Razor”, Ripperologist, 125,
leaving Thomas Junior to be brought up by his mother 30-52. At the top of the pedigree it is noted that Frances, F E Swan
(the later married name of Frances) gave an affidavit. Also see Sydney
and her family. The 1871 census lists them at 14 Albert
Morning Herald, 4 November 1887, p. 5, which noted that he suffered
Street, with Kate’s parents, John a furniture dealer, his from consumption. Some sources state that the death was in Wellington
wife Anne, a servant Sarah Green, a lodger called John but this is unconfirmed and unlikely.
Kirk and his son, George.5 John Lewis Hayne came from 5 Newspaper adverts in 1864, 1869, 1870 and 1871, indicate that
Watlington, Oxfordshire, as did Sarah, and moved with his lodgers were a regular feature of the household.

2
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Marriage of Thomas Taylor Cutbush and Kate Hayne, Ripper suspect Thomas Cutbush’s parents
family to the United States after the birth of his daughter
Clara in 1837. Kate and a brother, John, were born in
America, then the family returned to Oxfordshire around
1848, where another daughter was born.6 They moved to
London sometime between 1851 and 1861. John senior
was declared bankrupt in May 1861.7
Kate married Thomas Taylor Cutbush on 29 September
1864. Both gave their address as Albert Street. This was in
Newington but the boundaries with Kennington changed
during the nineteenth century. The marriage certificate
describes Kate as a minor, with full being crossed out.
Census returns give dates of birth ranging from 1841-
1844, indicating that she was at least twenty when
married. In the 1871 census, she used her maiden name
and said that she and Thomas were visitors as opposed to
residents. In 1881, she stated that she was widowed.
At the time of the 1881 census the family were still
at 14 Albert Street, with Clara Hayne and two lodgers.8
Thomas’s job was given as commercial clerk. The details
of his employment history are unknown. He is said to have
worked at a tea merchants in the Minories and canvassed
the East End. Researcher Chris Scott identified a tea
merchant called Thomas R. Bone at 44 The Minories in
1881, who was still there in 1891.9 The Sun reported that
Cutbush obtained a job at a firm in the immediate district
of the Whitechapel murders on 24 July 1888 and stayed
there until November that year.10 Broadmoor records
indicate that his last job was as a clerk in a merchant’s
office.
When both of Thomas’s maternal grandparents passed
away, John in 1882 then Anne in 1886, Clara and Kate
remained at the house. Sometime around 1889, possibly
as early as 1887, Thomas began displaying signs of mental
illness.11 He studied a lot, including medical works such
as The Lancet and stayed up late reading. Then he became
strange and never went out at night, except to post letters
and sometimes for a walk but never after midnight. The
illness was attributed to excessive study. Broadmoor
records noted that the condition was hereditary, but no
3
ancestor of Cutbush’s is known to have been diagnosed
insane.
He was treated by Dr Walter John Brooks who practised
at 137 Westminster Bridge Road. Cutbush claimed
that the medicine made him worse and he developed a
delusion that the doctor was trying to poison him. The
Sun reprinted a letter, allegedly written on fly-paper by
Cutbush, in which he said that he went to a surgeon’s shop
and obtained medicine that gave him spots on his face and
a terrible pain.12
The Sun spoke to Brooks, without naming him. He said
that Cutbush visited him, complaining that he suffered
from a constitutional disease. Macnaghten stated that this
was syphilis, with the inference that Cutbush associated
with prostitutes. One of the Sun’s witnesses, referred to
as SY, explicitly said that Cutbush associated with fallen
women.
Four or five years before his interview, c.1889, Brooks
was shown a letter from Cutbush to the authorities
complaining about him. On 15 November 1890, the
doctor received a letter from SY. Cutbush had intended to
buy a pistol from SY, with the intention of assassinating
the doctor. Brooks went to the police who sent him to
the workhouse, where he was advised that Cutbush had
escaped.
6 There may have been an earlier child also called John Samuel.
He was baptised in Watlington in 1838, with the same combination
of parents. That father was described as a tailor and this is the same
occupation given at the birth of Lucy Haines, following their return from
the USA.
7 Morning Advertiser, 22 May 1861, p. 2.
8 The entry for Clara only has an initial that could be read as E, and
the age is 7 years out. I have not found an E Hayne born in 1844.
9 Casebook Forums, Suspects, Cutbush, Thomas, Broadmoor
Archives Finally Open, 118, posted 26 November 2008.
10 The Sun, 14 February 1894, Casebook, Press Reports, accessed 4
February 2017.
11 When admitted to Broadmoor on 23 April 1891 the records gave
the length of the existing attack as two and a half years, which would
date it to October 1888.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
SY said that Cutbush called on him in 1891 and asked
for a pistol to shoot the doctor. The reporters also spoke to
D.G, a lawyer whom Cutbush consulted about prosecuting
Brooks. Unless Cutbush escaped from a workhouse twice,
we must believe that Brooks waited nearly three months
before taking the letter to the police. It is also interesting
that Cutbush’s request for a pistol from SY occurred after
SY wrote to Brooks.
Lord Grimthorpe, from Vanity Fair, 2 February 1889
Clara Hayne said that about the time of Cutbush’s
illness Lord Grimthorpe proposed a bill to stop doctors
prescribing their own medicine and Cutbush presented
his own case to him. Macnaghten stated that Cutbush
wrote to the authorities asking them to support the bill.
He dated the correspondence to November 1888. Hansard
does not show such a bill being discussed, there were
amendments to the 1868 Pharmacy Act discussed in the
House of Lords in 1888 but Grimthorpe did not contribute
to them. The reference may be to a series of letters that
Grimthorpe wrote to The Times advocating the rights of
doctors to practice homeopathy. The first was published
on Christmas Eve 1887.13 In this Grimthorpe suggested a
4
bill but he that was in favour of doctors having freedom.
There was a flurry of responses, some from people who
only gave their initials. One called himself a phlebotomist
and referred to Grimthorpe’s past folly in making the
will of a watchmaker called Dent in 1860. According to
a ‘phlebotomist’ Grimthorpe had to be fighting, whether
it was against doctors, clock makers, architects or trade
unionists.14
Grimthorpe (1816-1905), real name Edmund Beckett
(sometimes also referred to as Dennison), was a lawyer
and horologist who became a Baron in 1886. He designed
the mechanism for the palace of Westminster clock, now
known as Big Ben, in 1851. A watchmaker called Edward
Dent (1790-1853) was commissioned to make the clock
in 1852, but died and his stepson completed the project.
When the bell developed a crack, Grimthorpe turned to
the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. This is in the Guinness Book
of Records as the oldest manufacturing company in the
UK, occupying the site at 32-34 Whitechapel Road from
1738 but is due to close in May 2017.
George Mears (1820-73) recast the Big Ben bell on 10
April 1858. It cracked in September 1859. Grimthorpe
blamed the Bell Foundry and was sued by Mears for
libel.15 Grimthorpe admitted his mistake and agreed to
pay expenses.16 He continued to criticise the foundry
publicly and in 1879 they threatened to sue him again.17 In
1881 a second libel case was brought by Robert Stanibank
who had succeeded Mears as proprietor of the foundry.
The court found that one of three letters was libellous
and applied to the plaintiff and the other two, though also
libellous, did not so apply.18
In 1784 a committee of All Saints Church, Maidstone,
which included a man called Cutbush, agreed to hire the
Whitechapel Bell Foundry to cast eight new bells.19 There
were several families called Cutbush in Maidstone and, at
least one of them, were clockmakers.20
12 The Sun, 14 February 1894, available on Casebook.
13 The Times, 24 December 1887, p. 10.
14 The Times, 4 January 1888, p. 10.
15 An example of one of Dennison’s letters is in Daily News, 14
October 1859, p. 4. The technical details of the dispute are described in
The Engineer, 6 January 1860, p. 11.
16 Evening Standard, 31 December 1859, p. 4.
17 The Times, 18 January 1879, p. 11.
18 See The Times 28 June, 1881, p. 4 and Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July
1881, p. 6.
19 W. R. Gilbert, Memorials of the collegiate and parish church of All
Saints in the King’s Town and Parish of Maidstone, Wescomb and Smith,
1866. Several men called Cutbush were churchwardens at All Saints.
20 They included John Cutbush, regarded as one of the finest early
cricketers.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
In 1828 Thomas’s great uncle, Luke Flood Cutbush,
married Matilda Mears, daughter of Thomas Mears then
proprietor of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and father of
George. When Matilda died, Luke Flood married her sister,
Mary. Their daughter, also Matilda, was baptised on the
same day, 15 November 1833, and in the same church, St
Mary’s Whitechapel, as George Mears, then aged 13.21
On 18 April 1867 Luke Flood Cutbush and other
members of the family, including George Mears, presented
a petition to the Lord Chancellor asking for powers to grant
building and leases on the property at 272 Whitechapel
Road, which had been owned by Thomas Mears.22 Later
this became a night shelter for the Salvation Army.
It is unknown if Thomas Cutbush was aware of the
connection to Lord Grimthorpe when he wrote to him.
The departure of Thomas Taylor Cutbush may indicate
that Thomas had little contact with the Cutbush side of
the family but it is possible that he deliberately targeted
Grimthorpe, perhaps even writing to The Times in January
1888 as a ‘phlebotomist’.
On 15 March 1891, Thomas Cutbush appeared at
Lambeth Police Court. Described incorrectly as age 27
he was charged with feloniously wounding Florence
Grace Johnson, aged 16, who lived with her parents at 11
Fentiman Road, Lambeth. Johnson did not testify but her
statement was read. Ten days earlier she and an unnamed
female friend were walking along Kennington Park Road.
When they were near Prince’s Square Johnson felt a blow,
and looked around to see a man running away. She returned
home to find her garments cut and an examination at
Kennington Lane Police Station established that there
was a wound. She subsequently went to Peckham House
Lunatic Asylum and identified Cutbush as the man who
assaulted her.
The sworn statement of Isabella (Isabel in most
press reports) Fraser Anderson, who said she had been
assaulted in a similar manner, was also read. She was
a dressmaker, the daughter of a carpenter, living at 5
White Hart Street, Kennington. She believed Cutbush
was the man responsible. Inspector Chisholm asked
for, and obtained, a remand. Cutbush had recently been
transferred to Peckham as a lunatic after escaping from
St. Saviour’s Union Workhouse. He declined to comment.23
Florence Johnson’s father, Edward, was a wholesale
chemist druggist living in Kennington like Cutbush. Two
of his sons were assistants in the same business. Also,
Isabella Anderson’s brother worked as a junior clerk.
Given his interest in prescriptions it is possible that
Cutbush knew the Johnson family prior to the assaults.
The father of one of the victims wrote to the authorities,
suggesting that Cutbush was the Ripper. Extracts from this
were reprinted by the Sun. The writer was given the alias,
5
F K. He can be tentatively identified as Edward Johnson on
the basis that his initials E J immediately precede F and K
in the alphabet. The other option is Fraser Anderson, the
father of Isabella, whose first name does match the given
initial.
FK alleged that the knife used by Cutbush and the
Ripper was the same and that a man in a light overcoat
was seen talking to one of the Ripper victims before their
death. The Sun linked this to an unidentified body found in
Backchurch Lane on 10 September 1889. This torso was
not connected by the police to the Ripper murders and
most commentators believed that the torso killer was a
separate individual.
The knife was described as a formidable weapon with a
sharp blade nearly six inches long and tapered to a point
and having a sword hilt. It had a stain believed to be blood
and was said to be the sort of weapon used in the earlier
stabbing incidents. Macnaghten’s commented that it was
purchased in Houndsditch in February 1891.24 If so, it was
not Jack the Ripper’s knife.
On 23 March 1891 Thomas Cutbush reappeared
in court, charged on remand with wounding Johnson
and with attempting to stab Anderson. Angus Lewis
opened the case, saying that Cutbush had lived in the
neighbourhood for some years. On Thursday, 5 March,
it became necessary for his relatives to place him under
restraint and he was taken to the workhouse. Before he
could be removed to the asylum, he escaped, stealing
clothing from a neighbouring property. After stabbing
Johnson, around 19:00, he returned home about midnight
and told his aunt where he obtained the clothes. She
sent them back. He went out in the morning and on the
following evening, Saturday, 7 March, he tried to stab
Anderson who was walking with a friend in Kennington
Park Road. On 8 March Inspector Race went to Cutbush’s
house and retrieved a knife, which Clara Hayne said she
had taken from Cutbush’s pocket. Cutbush was committed
for trial.25 Whilst in the waiting room he was reported to
have said, “I could not have committed the offence I am
charged with. I read of a man in the newspapers stabbing
girls at Clapham about five weeks back and he is the man
you want.”
That man was John Edwin Colocott. He was charged on
21 January 1891, under the name of Edwin Colocitt, with
cutting and wounding, with intent to commit harm, on
21 London Metropolitan Archives, Whitechapel St Mary, Register of
Baptism, p93/mry1, Item 075.
22 The Times, 18 June 1867, p. 3.
23 Morning Post, 16 March, 1891, p. 6.
24 Report by Melville Macnaghten, Evans and Skinner, Sourcebook, p.
647.
25 Morning Post, 24 March 1891, p. 3.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
the bodies of Maude Kerton, Christina Grey, and Victoria
Chaiter by stabbing them with some sharp implement
between 8 and 16 January.26 Kerton, a domestic servant
from 11 Binfield road, Lambeth, testified that, on the night
of Saturday 17 January, she saw Colocott on the other side
of the road.27 He crossed over and stabbed her in the back.
It was not a serious wound. He was remanded on bail,
supplied by his father. The following week he returned to
court. A police officer, 428W, testified that he saw Colocott
run behind a woman on 20 January and raise his hand.
He did this to five or six women and was then arrested.
He attempted to escape and several people shouted that
he had dropped something but nothing was found.28 Alice
Clark from Brixton also testified that he had stabbed
the girl. He was remanded on bail then, on 3 February,
committed for trial.29
On 19 February, he was charged with maliciously
wounding Maude Kerton. The Times account of the trial
also refers to an attack on Annie Elizabeth Lewis of 7
Stockwell Park Road at about 09:45 on 8 January. Per
the census, Annie was aged 17 and from Cheltenham.
The court heard that there had been several instances
of a man stabbing women from behind in Clapham and
Brixton earlier that year and in the previous year. Extra
police were summoned and the local tradesmen also kept
watch. On 20 January, a furniture dealer, Charles Myers of
130 Clapham Road, saw Colocott strike at a young woman
who was not injured. The defence tried to prove a case
of mistaken identity, arguing that several other victims
had failed to identify him. The jury found him guilty of
occasioning actual bodily harm, with a recommendation
for mercy because of his weak intellect.30 Judgment was
withheld until March. Colocott was fined two sureties of
£100 each to come up for judgment when called upon.
He appears to have been at liberty when Anderson and
Johnson were attacked. Macnaghten noted that the cuts
made by Colocott and Cutbush were very different.
On 17 March 1891, Dr Gilbert of Holloway Gaol
considered Colocott to be deficient in intellect but not
sufficiently so to justify a certificate for detention in
a lunatic asylum. At this hearing the defence counsel
referred to the Cutbush case and asked that sentence
be deferred until the outcome was known.31 The court
agreed, before the outcome of the Cutbush case, that his
father and uncle would each provide bail of £100 and that
the father would provide a personal attendant to ensure
the prisoner’s safe conduct and prevent a reoccurrence.32
The father was John Thomas Colocott, a jeweller who had
also worked as a travelling buyer.
On 14 April 1891, age incorrectly given as 27, Cutbush
appeared at the same Newington Court. Mr De Michelle,
for the prosecution, said that the only issue was whether
6
Cutbush was fit to plead. The jury took the special oath,
required for such cases, and Dr Gilbert, the same man
who examined Colocott, testified. He had been observing
Cutbush since 14 March and gave an opinion that he
was practically insane or at any rate sufficiently so not
to understand the charge. The jury found that Cutbush
was insane and unfit to plead and he was ordered to be
detained during her majesty’s pleasure.33 This does not
mean guilty but insane. It means that Cutbush was mad
and unable to understand the proceedings. He could not
be tried.
Two days after the trial Cutbush’s lawyer, George
Kirk, wrote to the press to complain that they gave the
impression that his client was guilty. He claimed to have
witnesses to establish Cutbush’s innocence and was
advised by counsel that acquittal was almost certain. Kirk
was lodging at 14 Albert Street at the time of the 1871
census. He came from Kegworth and returned there to
marry Sarah Hutchinson before moving to Lambeth. He
worked from 1A Paternoster Row. Various newspaper
advertisements indicate that he dealt with property
auctions.
Kirk’s initials are one away from those of H L, a witness
interviewed by the Sun. H L said that he brought his wife
back to the street where he lodged and she was appalled
at the sight of Cutbush. George Kirk is known to have
lodged with the family and been in touch with them after
he brought his wife to Lambeth. HL also told the Sun that
Cutbush was very frightened when the witnesses were
taken to identify him at the asylum. The clear implication
is that HL was present at the identification, although he
could have remembered a report in Lloyds Weekly on 19
April 1891 which stated that Cutbush denied knowing
anything of Whitechapel and was very frightened when
the women identified him at the asylum.34 The Sun claimed
that both counsels at the trial were briefed on the Jack the
Ripper connection.
26 St James Gazette, 22 January 1891, p. 14. Chaiter was probably the
Victoria Emma Charter from Bourne Cambridgeshire who was living in
Lambeth at the time of the 1891 census.
27 Address was given in South London Press, 24 January, 1891, p.11.
28 Evening Standard, 29 January 1891, p. 3. Also The Globe, 29
January 1891, p. 6.
29 Morning Post, 4 February 1891, p. 8.
30 Morning Post, 20 February 1891, p. 6. H0140, Piece 130.
31 The Times, 19 March 1891.
32 Morning Post, 21 March 1891, p. 2.
33 Morning Post, 15 April 1891, p. 4.
34 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 19 April 1891, p. 9.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
After the arrest, some torn pieces of cardboard were
found in Thomas’s overcoat pocket and, when pasted
together, were found to be diagrams of women. One
represented the trunk of a woman with the walls of the
stomach thrown open and the intestines exposed and
another was drawn in red ink. Macnaghten described
them as two scribble drawings of women in indecent
postures, torn up. The head and body of one had been cut
from a fashion plate and legs added to show naked thighs
and stockings. This makes it sound more like pornography
than a serial killer’s artwork.
Inspector William Race
Inspector Race deposed that when arrested Cutbush
said “Is this for the Mile End job? I mean the public house
next to the syndicate (synagogue) where I just missed her
that time. They took me to be of the Jewish faith and I got
away.”35 The Sun reported that in the middle of September
1888, a prostitute said that she had been speaking to Jack
the Ripper in the bar of a public house near a synagogue.36
Following this an article headed “Another Jack the Ripper
Scare” appeared in a daily paper. The article has not been
found, perhaps because the name Jack the Ripper was not
in the public domain until the end of September 1888.
The synagogue may have been the one at 39 Dunk Street,
Whitechapel, with the public house being the Halifax Head.
An interview given by Clara Hayne to Lloyds elaborated
on, and contradicted some of the information given in
the original court hearing. In view of Cutbush’s declining
mental health the family summoned the authorities with
the intention of sending him to the asylum as a paid
7
patient. HL said that Cutbush was arrested after seizing
a female relative by the throat and attempting to cut
her with a large knife. The woman gave information but
became sorry afterwards. Several secondary sources state
that this was his mother.
After his escape from the infirmary, Cutbush went in his
stolen clothes to Hyde Park Corner, where he knew he was
likely to see his mother. She got on a bus and he followed
it. She then boarded a tramcar. He tapped on the window
and she did not recognise him. That was about 20:20. He
proceeded to the City Temple where he spoke to Mr Clark,
the sexton at 21:05. Mrs Clark gave him some water and he
spoke to her about the evangelist Dr. Joseph Parker (1830-
1902), whose lectures he used to attend. Mrs Clark saw
Cutbush in Fleet Street, just before 22:00. Next, he went
to the Salvation Army barracks in Queen Victoria Street
and asked if he could lie down. They told him he should
have arrived earlier. He stayed on the embankment until
midnight and then came home. There was nothing in his
pockets except some tobacco and he had no money to
purchase a knife. The infirmary had removed his last half-
a-crown. His mother proposed sending him to Margate,
with ten shillings, and he seemed content with that.
Disturbed by a noise outside he left.
On the Saturday night, 7 March, Kate Cutbush received
a letter from a man at Camden Town who met Thomas
the previous night and was concerned about him. Thomas
wanted the writer of the letter to hide him as men were
trying to kill him. The Sun found this man, referred to as
Mr K or W K, and obtained a statement from him. Cutbush
made long rambling comments about being wanted for a
serious charge. He said people thought he was Jack the
Ripper but he was not. He claimed to be in the medical
profession. The incident occurred at about 22:30.
That night Anderson was attacked at 22:15. She
complained to a clerk called Robert Smith who gave chase.
He could not identify Cutbush. A milkman named John
Barton said that Cutbush ran into a dairy on Princes Road
on the night of the attack. Cutbush said that he had been
larking with some girls and that some young men wanted
to pitch him in. Barton allowed him to hide in a coal cellar.
Clara Hayne said that Cutbush was at Cottons Wharf in
Tooley Street between 21:00 and 22:15, returning home
between 00:15 and 04:00. Then he was back at 13:00
until dinner. When he slept, Clara took the knife out of his
pocket. He wandered about until 07:30 on the Monday
morning when he was arrested by the police. When Clara
heard of the charges she asked him how he got the knife.
35 Ibid.
36 The Sun, 17 February 1894, Casebook, Press Reports, accessed 17
July 2013.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
He said he bought it in the Minories and she afterwards
identified the shop. She gave the knife to the police on the
Sunday and swore that it was bright then, with no stain.
Lloyds spoke to Mrs Dickinson who owned a gunshop
in the Minories near the Tower of London where Thomas
Hoskins Cutbush, father of Luke Flood Cutbush, once
worked. Dickinson said she sold Cutbush the knife on
7 March. Cutbush said he wanted the knife because
he was going aboard a ship with foreign sailors and to
protect himself against some men who were after him.37
If Dickinson was correct, and her statement conflicts with
Macnaghten’s comments, Cutbush could not have stabbed
Florence Johnson with that same knife.
Sergeant McCarthy said that after his remand Cutbush
said to his mother, “I am all right, they can’t do anything
with me. The sheath was only found on me.” The aunt then
said, “Tom, we have given the knife to the police. Do tell
us where you bought it?” Cutbush replied, “Oh, you booby.
They only found the sheath on me.”38
Without the opportunity to cross-examine the
witnesses we can only speculate what a jury would have
made of the contradictory evidence offered by Haynes,
Race, Barton, Johnson, Anderson, Dickinson and Clarke,
if indeed the reported testimony was repeated in court.
The only definite fact to be derived from the trial is that
Thomas Cutbush was determined insane. His family had
reached this conclusion, without telling the press their
reasons, and Doctor Gilbert’s confirmation saved them the
expense of the private asylum.
After Thomas was sent to Broadmoor, Kate Haynes
obtained an inheritance that should have gone to him, and
failed to declare his insanity. On 16 June 1892, various
newspapers printed a notice requesting any person
interested in Cutbush v Cutbush, 1891, C. 4182, to state
their claim. This related to properties at 6 and 7 Field-Gate
Street, Whitechapel, which were part of a portfolio owned
by the Cutbush family. They were almost directly opposite
the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The notice specifically
requested contact from Thomas Taylor Cutbush, known
to have left for New Zealand and moved to Melbourne. In
1885 he was believed to be living in Pickles Street, Port
Melbourne. His representatives had until 7 November
1892 to prove their claim. Failing that on 11 November
Judge Chitty would make an order.39
Exact details of the case are unknown. It was brought
by Eliza Cutbush (1846-1911), granddaughter of Thomas
Flood Cutbush and daughter of his son Edward (1819-
90). The defendants were Rosa Elizabeth Cutbush (1837-
1911), William Robert Stokes (1841-1925) and Fasham
Venables. Rosa Elizabeth, nee Scarborough, was Edward’s
second wife. Stokes was Elizabeth’s cousin. His mother
Ann Cutbush was the daughter of Thomas Flood Cutbush
8
and sister of Edward. Fasham Venables (1828-1897),
whose original surname was Nairn-King married Matilda
Cutbush, daughter of Luke Flood Cutbush whose baptism
we mentioned earlier. All those involved were related to
Thomas and he was eventually served with a notice of
judgment.
The acting solicitors were Paterson Sons and Candler
of 26 Bouverie Street. A contract for the sale of real
estate was agreed, the money paid and the chief clerk’s
certificate made. At the time of executing the conveyance
Thomas’s lunacy was discovered. On 2 August 1893 Judge
Chitty made a landmark ruling that Clara Hayne be made
guardian ad litem. Cutbush appeared and submitting to be
bound, declared a trustee within the Trustee act 1850, and
appointed a person to be named in the order to convey in
his place40 Clara was referred to as AB, which is the alias
given to Cutbush by the Sun.
The obvious interpretation of the case is that Thomas
Taylor Cutbush had a claim on the Cutbush family
properties, which passed to his son and original wife. At
the time of the 1881 census Clare Hayne received income
from property, suggesting that she had experience to
advise Kate on related issues. When Clara died in 1909,
her share in two Oxfordshire properties went to Kate. One
was in the village of Watlington where John Hayne came
from, so it can be assumed that these were inherited. As
John was alive in 1881 Clara’s property income came from
other sources.
The Sun alleged that Cutbush was guilty of eleven
homicidal offences. Firstly, it claimed that Cutbush stabbed
six girls, stating that he was charged with stabbing either
four or six. This is incorrect. In relation to the series of
stabbings in 1890/91, Colocott was suspected of four and
charged and convicted of one. Cutbush was charged with
two and considered unable to plead.
The second allegation concerned an assault by Cutbush
at his place of work. One day an elderly employee
commented on Cutbush’s habit of anointing himself with
potions. Shortly after this the employee was pushed
down the stairs by Cutbush and taken to hospital. Only
when he recovered consciousness was the truth known.
This was just after the last of the Whitechapel murders
by eight months, presumably the death of Mary Kelly in
November 1888.41 No other record of this incident has
been discovered. It is interesting that the Sun gave an
37 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 26 April 1891, p. 10.
38 Ibid.
39 Evening Standard, 16 June 1892, p. 7.
40 Solicitors Journal, Vol 37, 1893, p. 685. The ad litem document was
reprinted by Wood, p. 50.
41 The Sun, 14 February 1894, available on Casebook, accessed
12 February 2017.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

exact date for the commencement of the employment, but

the allegation is unproven. If we accept it then we must
also accept that Cutbush’s habit of self-prescribing began
during or prior to this 1888 appointment, although his
fall-out with Dr Brooks appears to have been later.
There is no record of Doctor Brooks complaining about
Cutbush’s conduct, prior to the Sun’s article. D G said that
he believed Cutbush intended to assault him but there is
no record of him complaining. D G also told S Y that the
police believed Cutbush was Jack the Ripper.
Neither D G or S Y can be identified. D G was a lawyer
who specialised in criminals and lunatics and saw several
people at his offices. There were various lawyers living in
Albert Street, per the census returns.42 Lord Grimthorpe
was a qualified lawyer but he ceased regular practice in
1880. The two lodgers at 14 Albert Street in 1881 were
a schoolmaster and an ironmonger, respectively. The
schoolmaster, John Henry Broderick, was back in his
native Wales by 1911.
The Sun described S Y as a literary man, who had written
some works. He claimed to have worked with Cutbush in
The blotchy faced man seen with Mary Kelly
an office, and knew that Cutbush associated with fallen
women. He was also aware that Cutbush broke a window Henry D. Thatcher wrote to the Sun in response to the
when returning home late to the house one night. This first articles. He owned a tobacconist at 198 Kennington
could indicate a family connection. One possibility is that S Park Road and reported that five years ago, Cutbush used
Y was Thomas’s uncle, John Samuel Haines. His occupation to purchase tobacco from him, always around 23:00.
was given as clerk in 1891 and 1871 but as a surveyor in Cutbush spoke about being poisoned by a doctor and said
1881. He named one of his children Clara and another he had contacted the public prosecutor and MPs, including
Ernest. Mr Labouchere. Sometimes he carried letters ready to
The Sun visited Broadmoor where Dr Nicholson, the post. He then offered Thatcher some poison to kill a cat.
Superintendent was astounded by the Jack the Ripper Labouchere responded to the Sun, saying that the matter
connection. Cutbush’s Broadmoor files mention an should be investigated.
incident in which he attacked a patient, and that he In response to the Sun’s comments, perhaps prompted
occasionally talked about ripping people up. There is no by Labouchere’s intervention, Sir Melville Macnaghten
evidence that the staff at Broadmoor regarded him as a wrote his much-quoted internal memo. He dismissed the
serious threat. The diaries of Charles Coleman, attendant Sun’s claims, being especially critical of the Backchurch
who later became chief attendant, mentions other inmates Lane connection, then summarised inquires made into
committing acts of violence but not Cutbush.43 Cutbush’s antecedents by police officers.45 He tells us that
The Sun stressed that Cutbush matched some Cutbush was born in Kennington in 1865 and lived there
descriptions of Jack the Ripper. David Bullock raised the all his life. He worked as a clerk and then as a traveller in
possibility that a man seen washing bloodstained hands the tea trade. Around 1888, he came to believe incorrectly
in Kennington on the morning of Mary Kelly’s murder was that he had contracted syphilis. In November that year, he
Thomas Cutbush.44 The correspondent who reported this developed a delusion that Dr Brooks had tried to poison
sighting made it clear that the man was a stranger to the
locality. William Marsh testified that he saw a man with
the appearance of a clerk with Elizabeth Stride shortly 42 The 1891 residents did include Charlie Chaplin at number 38 and
Police Constable Thomas Mee next door to Cutbush at 12.
before her death, although he estimated the man to be
43 Charles Coleman’s diaries make few references to Cutbush,
middle aged. It is also possible to speculate that Cutbush Forester Chapter 12.
had a blotchy face, due to his homemade prescriptions, 44 D. Bullock, The Man Who Would be Jack, Robson, 2012, p. 137.
like the man seen entering Mary Kelly’s house on the night Evening News, 12 November 1888, available on Casebook.
of her death. This man was also described as 35 and stout, 45 Report by Melville Macnaghten, 23 February 1894, available on
unlike Cutbush. Casebook.

9
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

The Aberconway version of Macnaghten’s memorandum, outlining the case against Thomas Cutbush
© Adam Wood / Christopher McLaren

10
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
him. He wrote several letters to the authorities asking
them to support a bill from Lord Grimthorpe making it
illegal for medical practitioners to dispense their own
medicines. He was said to have studied medical books by
day and rambled about at night. His movements at the time
of the Whitechapel murders were unknown. It is unclear if
the Police made inquiries in 1888, or if the question was
asked in 1891 or 1894.
Macnaghten incorrectly said that Thomas’s father died
when he was young. As Kate Cutbush described herself
as a widow in 1881 it appears that the family initiated
this falsehood. The Sun were aware not only that Thomas
Taylor went abroad but that he had bigamously remarried.
Macnaghten ignored those comments, indicating perhaps
that he relied on an early police file. It also shows that the
Sun had access to up-to-date family information, perhaps
from a relative.
Macnaghten said that Edwin Colocott was arrested for
four stabbings in London in 1891 and discharged due
to faulty identification. There is no record of Colocott’s
conviction being overturned. Moreover, if the police had got
it wrong about Colicott then there is a possibility that they
also got it wrong about Cutbush who was also accused on
eyewitness testimony and, unlike Colicott, had a witness
ready to propose an alibi. The only thing certain is that the
attacks stopped after Cutbush’s arrest. Macnaghten may
have been right that there was an imitator of Colocott, but
it cannot be proved that this was Thomas Cutbush. It is not
difficult to imagine that someone who copied a crime after
reading about it, may have done the same before.
The reasons for suspecting Thomas Cutbush of being
Jack the Ripper are:
1. He was accused of inflicting a minor stab wound on
a woman two and a half years after the five canonical
Ripper murders and in a different suburb.
2. Drawings of mutilated women were found on his
person.
3. He was alleged to use prostitutes.
4. He suffered from a delusion that he had contracted
syphilis.
5. In Broadmoor, he assaulted an attendant and it
was alleged that he assaulted other people prior to
his committal.
Not one of these is convincing in isolation. Collectively
they are reasons for suspicion, but Cutbush stands
accused without firm evidence. The same is true of the
two uncleared men named by Macnaghten as more
likely suspects. Similarities exist between Cutbush and
Kosminski. Both were alleged to be violent by family
members and sent to an asylum in 1891. Both stayed there
until they died. Both were recorded as being violent in
11
the asylum. Neither was convicted of any violent offence,
in fact they only had one conviction between them and
that was when Kosminski failed to muzzle his dog.46 Both
have tarnished reputations due to allegations, based on
uncertain evidence and inconsistent statements, that were
never tested in court.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THOMAS CUTBUSH
AND SUPERINTENDENT CHARLES CUTBUSH
In his memo Macnaghten commented that Cutbush
was a nephew of the late Superintendent Executive.
This is believed to refer to Charles Cutbush who retired
from the Metropolitan Police on 23 August 1891 and
committed suicide on 5 May 1896. Late in this context
means former. Apart from Macnaghten’s words the two
men are connected by the surname, insanity, the fact that
they lived within half a mile of each other at the time of
the 1881 census, and the curious detail that Thomas
Cutbush lived in Kennington, South London and the father
of Charles Cutbush came from Kennington in Kent. Despite
this they were not related. The family tree of both men has
been traced to their great great-grandfathers, without an
ancestor in common. More significantly the great-great-
grandfather of Thomas Cutbush was illegitimate, meaning
that there could not be a natural blood relationship.
The will of Richard Chicehely, written in 1771 said that
if his daughter Ann Cutbush, died without leaving children,
her share of the estate passed to Thomas Hoskins an infant
living with him. Ten years earlier, on 11 June 1761, Ann
had married Edward Cutbush (1742-1843) in Chatham.
On 19 February 1784 described as a widow Ann gave
permission for her natural son Thomas Hoskins, a minor
aged 20, to marry Clarrisa Flood, age 16.47 The implication
is that Thomas Hoskins was the son of Ann but not Edward
Cutbush. Interestingly four of the five men who came after
in the family line took the maiden name of their mother
as a second name. This was a trait sometimes seen in the
family of Charles Cutbush too.
Just as Kate Cutbush lied about being a widow on the
1871 census so Ann Cutbush lied at the time of her son’s
marriage. Edward Cutbush went to Philadelphia, where
the famous Bell of Liberty was made by the Whitechapel
Bell Foundry under a previous name. There he bigamously
remarried on 3 September 1770, like his descendant
Thomas Taylor, whose wife came from Philadelphia.48
46 Lloyds Weekly, 15 December 1889, p. 12.
47 Ancestry.com. London and Surrey, England, Marriage Bonds and
Allegations, 1597-1921 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.
com Operations, Inc., 2011. Ms 10091/151.
48 Edward married Anne Marriatt. Their son Their sons Edward and
James both became famous chemists. The life of James is described in
E.F. Smith, James Cutbush, An American Chemist, J. B. Lippincott, 1919.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
It is possible that nephew meant illegitimate son and
that Macnaghten had access to information that Charles
Cutbush, not Thomas Taylor Cutbush, was Thomas’s
father. The difficulty with this is that Charles Cutbush did
not move to London until 1869, after Thomas’s birth.
However, his father was in Lambeth in the 1850s and
it is possible that he contacted the extended family. A
stronger argument against Charles being Thomas’s father
is that the timing of Thomas Taylor Cutbush’s departure
suggests a response to the birth of William, not Thomas.
Consent for marriage of
Thomas Hoskins Cutbush to Clarrisa Flood
It is probable that both Cutbush lines were connected
by a common ancestor in the seventeenth century but this
cannot explain Macnaghten’s comment. Perhaps Thomas
Cutbush believed that he was a relative of Superintendent
Charles Cutbush, and mentioned this in his correspondence
or in discussions with George Kirk following his arrest. If
this information was in the dossier sent by the Sun to the
police then Macnaghten may well have accepted it as fact,
especially as he knew that Charles Cutbush retired on the
12
grounds of ill health just a few months after Thomas was
committed to Broadmoor.
Details of the direct line of descent for both men are
given below.
DIRECT MALE ANCESTORS
OF THOMAS HAYNE CUTBUSH
Great-Great-Grandfather:
Thomas Hoskins Cutbush (c.1764 to 1828)
Thomas Hoskins Cutbush became a keeper of the
Tower of London. He married Clarrisa Flood, daughter of
the Magistrate Luke Flood, on 15 February 1784. Banns
were read for his marriage to Margaret Williams the year
before. It has not been possible to confirm his real father
as the evidence indicates this was not Edward Cutbush.
Great Grandfather:
Thomas Flood Cutbush (1784-1846)
Tom Flood was baptised at St Mary’s, Whitechapel on
30 November 1784.49 He married Sophia Cope on 23 May
1803 at St Thomas, Southwark. Their first four children
shared the same name as those of his grandson Thomas’s,
although the order was different. Sophia gave birth to a
boy first followed by three girls then another boy.
Following Sophia’s death in 1836 Thomas Flood
remarried the following year to Sarah May at St. Andrew’s
in Enfield and then again to Elizabeth Blake on 16 April
1842. He was buried in Dover on 2 September 1846.
Grandfather: Thomas Cutbush,
(c. 1807-1866)
Thomas was a plumber, painter and glazier, born in
Mile End on 22 April 1807. He married Ann Taylor on 25
February 1836 and had four children, three girls all older
than Thomas Taylor. Ann was the daughter of Mr G. Taylor
of Enfield.50 Thomas left effects less than $600 to his wife,
who was then still living.51
Father: Thomas Taylor Cutbush (1844-1886)
Thomas Taylor was a mercantile clerk, born in Enfield
on 24 July 1844. He married Kate, nee Hayne, on 29
September 1864. The reasons for his abrupt departure
and bigamy remain unexplained.
49 London Metropolitan Archives, St Mary, Whitechapel, Register of
baptisms, Oct 1774-May 1792, P93/MRY1/011
50 Oxford Journal, 5 March 1836, p. 4
51 England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, 1867, p. 215.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
DIRECT MALE ANCESTORS
OF CHARLES HENRY CUTBUSH
Great-Great-Grandfather: William Cutbush
Very little is known about this individual, except that
he married a woman called Elizabeth. Possibly this was
Elizabeth Martyane in Sandhurst, Kent, on 17 May 1741.
The location fits but the date is a few years earlier than
might be expected.
Great Grandfather: John Cutbush (c.1752-1841)
John married Ann Couchman in Sandhurst on 17
September 1779.
Grandfather: James Cutbush (c.1781-1852)
James was born in Sandhurst. He married Lucy Jeater
in Greenwich on Christmas Day. He was a victualler, then
became a respected nursery and seedsman. He died on
27 May 1852. His brother, William (1788-1854) founded
a famous nursery at Highgate and other locations, W
Cutbush & Sons. This was then run by his son James (1827-
1885).
Father: Charles Cutbush (c.1816-1854)
Charles was born in Kennington in Kent, and baptised
there on 17 November 1816. He worked as a seedsman.
He married Amelia Stokes in Hythe on 4 May 1838.52 He
became insolvent in 1852.53 The notice states that he
was foreman to James Cutbush, and lists the places he
had traded. It adds that he latterly resided at the New
Inn, Westminster Road, Lambeth and then at 48 Hercules
Building, Westminster Road, Lambeth. This places the
father of Charles Cutbush in Lambeth before Thomas
Cutbush was born. The move may have been temporary
due to proceedings at the Insolvent Debtors court which
took several months.54 He died in Eltham in 1854.
13
Charles Cutbush (1844-1896)
Charles Cutbush was born in Ashford, Kent, in 1844 and
baptised on 27 March that year. He married Ann Dowle in
Dover on 6 October 1867. The couple had seven children.
At the time of the marriage he was a painter, but joined
the Metropolitan Police in December 1869. In 1871 the
family was living at 141 North Street, St. Georges. That
year he was put in charge of a divisional office and became
an inspector two years later. He was commended by the
Secretary of State for services rendered to the suppression
of night-houses in Panton Street and adjacent streets. He
became a Superintendent in 1879. In 1881 the family were
at 36 St Paul’s Road, Newington. Sometime after 1884 they
moved to 3 Burnley Road, Brixton. His retirement was
announced on 24 August 1891.55
He shot himself at home, on 5 March 1896. Dr. White
said that he had been treating Cutbush for insomnia and
depression and that he was also subject to delusions.
Cutbush was said to have left the police due to an affection
of the brain.56
Seven years later his alleged nephew Thomas Cutbush
died in Broadmoor.
52 Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA/U3/282/1/D/4.
53 Kent Gazette, 24 August 1852, p. 1.
54 Morning Chronicle, 5 November 1852, p. 7, indicates that he was
due to appear that day at the court.
55 Morning Post, 24 August 1891, p. 6.
56 Worcester Journal, 14 March 1896, p. 7.

PAUL WILLIAMS is the author of Howls of Imagination (Heart
of Albion, 2005), The Mystery Animals of the British Isles:
Gloucestershire and Worcestershire (CFZ Press, 2009), and short
fiction in magazines and anthologies, and has written several
articles for Ripperologist. He is currently seeking a publisher for an
extensive study of all Jack the Ripper suspects.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Wilson vs Bierman
- A Victorian Rashomon
By Daniel Cazard
There was tension in the house. The households, one
above the other, were seemingly ruled by a female
hand. On the ground floor, a woman of about 20 years
of age, living on her own but reportedly married;
above her, a possibly younger woman living with
her mother. Whatever civil pleasantries had been
exchanged between ground and first floor occupants
when first they had met had gained a substantial
amount of ice since. The first floor was patiently
awaiting the ground floor to be vacated, and it wouldn’t
be long now. Two ordinary households that didn’t get
along too well, nothing that wouldn’t drown in the
sea of time along with millions of other quarrelling
neighbours. It needs murder, or the attempt of, to be
be remembered 128 years later.
That not all was peachy at 19 Maidman Street, even
before a man attacked Ada Wilson, the occupier of the
ground floor flat, becomes blatantly clear with some in
between-the-lines reading of the account of what had
occurred that late March day as told by the upstairs
neighbour, Miss Rose Bierman. The two tales, given by
Mrs. Wilson and Miss Bierman, respectively, are not only
wildly differing in respect to some very basic and decisive
details, but they also allow us a very brief, somewhat
titillating peek into a rather undesirable relationship.
Neighbourly problems are rarely one-sided.
I’m mentioning this, in the form of a short opening,
because what information we gained by a mere few words
would have been different had the two been, say, best
friends.
According to Wilson, she’d heard a knocking at her
door late at night on March 28th, 1888. She’d answered
it to find a man aged about 30, 5’ 6’’ tall, with a sunburnt
face and a fair moustache, dressed in a dark coat and light
trousers, and all that under a wideawake hat. He drew a
clasp knife and terrifyingly and dramatically demanded
money or else she’d only have moments left to live. When
Mrs. Wilson refused, he used the knife on her throat. She
14
screamed for help and stumbled out onto the passage
while people came to her help and the man escaped.
Rose Bierman remembered a different scenario. Here,
it is best to cite what she told the reporter with the Eastern
Post and City Chronicle three days later:
Ada Wilson, the injured woman, is the occupier of
the house, but at the time of the outrage she was
under notice to quit. I knew Mrs. Wilson as a married
woman, although I had never seen her husband. Last
evening she came into the house accompanied by a
male companion, but whether he was her husband or
not I could not say. She has often had visitors to see
her, but I have rarely seen them myself, as Mrs. Wilson
lives in the front room, her bedroom being just at the
back, adjoining the parlour. My mother and I occupy
two rooms upstairs. Well, I don’t know who the young
man was, but about midnight I heard the most terrible
screams one can imagine. Running downstairs I saw
Mrs. Wilson, partially dressed, wringing her hands
and crying, ‘Stop that man for cutting my throat! He
has stabbed me!’ She then fell fainting in the passage.
I saw all that as I was coming downstairs, but as soon
as I commenced to descend I noticed a young fair man
rush to the front door and let himself out. He did not
seem somehow to unfasten the catch as if he had been
accustomed to do so before. He had a light coat on, I
believe. I don’t know what kind of wound Mrs. Wilson
has received, but it must have been deep, I should say,
from the quantity of blood in the passage. I do not
know what I shall do myself. I am now ‘keeping the
feast,’ and how can I do so with what has occurred
here? I am now going to remove to other lodgings.1
1 www.casebook.org/witnesses/rose-bierman.html
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
So according to Miss Bierman, Mrs. Wilson had not
answered a knocking, but had brought her assailant home
with her. That’s quite an alternate detail right there. She
also noted that the door had been closed, again differing
15
from Wilson’s account. And she described all this, as it had
been seen by her, descending down the stairs, witnessing
the attacker fleeing. The memories of the two women also
differed in the description of the man: Wilson describing
a dark coat and light trousers, the man being sunburnt,
while the coat was a light one with Bierman, and she
described the man as ‘fair.’2 Note also that Miss Bierman’s
presence is altogether absent in Mrs. Wilson’s version.3
Before we decide whom we’d rather believe, let’s have a
look at what Miss Bierman is really saying. Besides acting
as witness to the attack, she clearly liked to talk about
the victim herself. And, as good gossip will have it, sex is
featuring prominently.
Mrs. Wilson had brought the fellow home. Which, by
the way, she was in the habit of doing - bringing fellows
home. Who they were Rose couldn’t say, for Mrs. Wilson’s
bedroom looked out to the rear of the house. And she was
only partially dressed. Oh, yes, and she was about to be
evicted. Yes, she probably needed money.
2 To be fair, while ‘fair’ alone could be read as referring to skin tone,
it might have been a mistake on behalf of the recording reporter, since
the word was also used by Wilson to describe the man’s moustache.
3 One should keep in mind here that as we don’t have a full word-
for-word account of Wilson’s version, details might be missing from
what she’d said originally, such as an inclusion of Bierman’s presence on
the stairs.
9 and 10 Maidman Street, 1974. Courtesy Rob Clack
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

So much information within so few words supposed a stranger. I’d conclude from this that he could have had
to be about the attack. One thing that strikes me is Rose no certain knowledge about who would answer that door,
mentioning why she couldn’t tell who the men were whom not even had he followed and observed Wilson. It could
Mrs. Wilson brought home with her. She couldn’t, because have been a strong, towering husband. It could have been
she had no view into Mrs. Wilson’s bedroom, you know, two even stronger brothers with fast legs. He could have
the place where one would find out, as opposed to looking ended up having the living excrement beaten out of him.
out the window when they’d come or leave. It might make And let’s not forget that it wasn’t Miller’s Court, at least
you suspect that she really wanted the bedroom in the not in this sense. It was a house, with at least one floor
story. above it. And, indeed, there had been other occupants, one
Let’s keep in mind that she didn’t tell all this to a friend of them who later stated that she had seen him.
(although she might have as well). Nor did she stand
outside in the street chatting with neighbours about
Wilson (which she might have done as well). No, she told
all this to a reporter, her version of events soon to be
released for all of London to read, potentially the entire
world, and now in 2016 we still have this insight into Mrs.
Wilson’s private life.
Skipping ahead, one aspect of this might already induce
us to believe Miss Bierman. Bringing men home habitually,
the bedroom, the man possibly having been there before
– she was clearly insinuating. Not only wasn’t all that
exactly flattering, the fact that Mrs. Wilson brought these
men home while being married, and that she was about to
get thrown out of the house, was all tossed out there for
the public to pick up, pretty much exposing Mrs. Wilson.
I’d think some people might want to answer such a thing
by means of a libel suit. I don’t have any information about
such having emerged from what increasingly looks like,
at least, a silent feud, but it can hardly been assumed that
Mrs. Wilson was amused.
So in the end, the decision as to whom to believe is
really about whether Miss Bierman was a mean-spirited
liar, or whether her account of events, spicy emotions or If we then deliver a verdict in favour of Bierman, we’d
not, told the truth. have the man already inside, not knocking, and we wouldn’t
be able to tell for sure whether money had indeed played
We have learned that ‘seamstress’, which Mrs. Wilson
any part in this, while we do have a potential motive for
gave as her occupation, was regularly used as code by
Wilson making up her version: she wouldn’t have wanted
women who’d been forced to resort to soliciting men. We
to be seen as a woman suspected of being a prostitute,
have to tread carefully here. I can only imagine how those
who had brought her attacker home with her.
real seamstresses who knew about the code must have
hesitated when asked to name their trade. It does tally Which is what then makes the whole case interesting
neatly with the information provided by eager, nifty Rose, to us, as a woman meeting a man and leading him to a
though. And with the hypothetical threat of legal response private spot, to then being attacked by him, bears some
to libel or slander in mind that could have been initiated semblance when thinking of the later murders, most
by a woman who quite clearly would have welcomed the strongly with the one where this private spot would
money – at least the detail of her coming eviction would indeed be the home of the victim.
have been verifiable – I tend to put more of my trust into

Rose Bierman’s version.
DANIEL CAZARD is a writer, who is currently working on his second
As always, we also have to consider the perpetrator’s
first novel, and has a draft of another second first novel waiting for
point of view. When we look back at the two versions of completion, and also works on a rather large project about the ‘Jack
events, Miss Bierman’s appears a good deal less ludicrous the Ripper’ murders, about which he won’t say another word until
than Mrs. Wilson’s. Otherwise we’d have a man, who it’s finished, out there and consumed by the public. He currently
lives in Cologne, Germany, thinking he might still learn why before
is either extremely desperate or quite plainly daft, or leaving, and mostly behind his desk, in the constant hope that
possibly both. In Mrs. Wilson’s own words the man was someone will bring him food from his kitchen.

16
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Murder Most Foul
Part Two
By TIM MOSLEY and SCOTT NELSON
Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
In Part One of this article in Ripperologist 153, we
pondered what sort of man the Ripper was. What drove
him to do what he did? After outlining some initial motives
and reasons, including psychopathy, sexual deviancy and
criminal insanity, among others, we now continue with
analyses of additional personality traits that may have
resulted in the killing, mutilation and public display of his
unfortunate victims.
EVIL
Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?
The Shadow radio program
The most chilling fact about serial killers is that they
can be rational and calculating. As the ‘British Jeffrey
Dahmer’ Dennis Nilsen put it, ‘a mind can be evil without
being abnormal.’1 And some people, for whatever reason,
are simply evil. This condition more often manifests itself
in ways other than serial killing, but surely many killers
and possibly some serial killers have in the past been
motivated by pure evil and nothing more:
In fact, just having the bodies of his victims around
him made Dahmer feel thoroughly evil.
I have to question whether or not there is an evil
force in the world and whether or not I have been
influenced by it.
Jeffrey Dahmer2
It is impossible to regard a murderer’s brain without
an involuntary tingle of curiosity. What shocking
poisons did this unique lump of flesh distill, to so
subvert the mind of its owner and warp his will to
evil?3
The classic 1956 film The Bad Seed portrayed the
17
crimes of a murderous little girl who had apparently
been born evil. Like many criminals, she kept her true self
well hidden behind a public facade. No other explanation
for her behavior was ever presented in the film, but one
forensic expert offers the following hypothesis on this
sort of behavior today:
If evil is to be found in the brain, then it is probably
there from the very earliest years of life, and involves
something very basic in the individual’s personality.4
Anyone who has ever seen the 1973 film The Exorcist
knows what horrors ‘demonic possession’ can wreak
upon a person of otherwise good character. Occasionally,
the subject of demonic possession has arisen to account
for the Ripper’s horrifically evil nature and the sudden
starting and stopping of the murders. Following is what
the Holy Scriptures have to say on the matter:
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he
walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding
none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I
came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept
and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him
seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and
they enter in, and dwell there, and the last state of that
man is worse than the first.
Luke 11:24 – 26
To many Londoners, the Ripper was the devil himself.
He savaged at least five women with an unmatched frenzy,
1. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
2. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
3. Maples, William & Browning, Michael: Dead Men Do Tell Tales:
The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist, Crown
Publishing Group, 1995.
4. Maples, William & Browning, Michael: Dead Men Do Tell Tales:
The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist, Crown
Publishing Group, 1995.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
attacked in darkness, eluded police, disappeared as by
magic, and even sent a note signed ‘From Hell.’ He was evil
incarnate, and some say he ushered in the age of the serial
killer, many of whom surpassed him in number of victims
but none of whom was more brutal. Yet some certainly
have tried, and they, too, have adopted the demonic cloak.
For many of a religious persuasion, Satan is known as
the Father of Evil. He bears the blame for much of what
happens in the world today, as we are seen to approach
the ‘End Days’ foretold in the Book of Revelation. For
Christian, Jew, and Muslim alike, Satan is always present,
ready to strike in a moment of inattention or weakness
on our part, and to plant the seeds of Evil where they
may best grow and flourish. And, as with the Bad Seed,
children are not spared:
Children become, while little, our delights,
When they grow bigger, they begin to fright’s.
Their sinful Nature prompts them to rebel,
And to delight in Paths that lead to Hell.
John Bunyan, Book for Boys and Girls (1686)5
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both barely ten
or eleven years of age, viciously murdered a two-year old
boy, James Bulger, in one of the most heart-rending and
horrifying crimes of the 20th century. Yet nothing in their
pasts had indicated that they were capable of committing
such a crime. When questioned as to their motive, the
prosecutor of the case simply characterized them as ‘evil’
in his presentation to the media.
While on the twin subjects of evil and children, we
make note to expand the latter category to include young
adults, the intent being to consider the question whether
or not the Ripper could have actually been much younger
than has been popularly thought. As we have seen earlier,
teenagers and young adults have in modern times been
quite capable of committing crimes of Ripper-like violence.
And, as all men know, once the hormone flood begins at
puberty, sexual thoughts may occupy a teenager’s brain to
the exclusion of all else.
As many a young man, especially in the last two
centuries, has visited a prostitute for his sexual initiation,
it is unlikely that the victims would have ever suspected
someone of such tender years approaching them, even in
the autumn of 1888. Some conventional Ripper suspects
such as George Chapman and Aaron Kosminski were only
in their early twenties when the Whitechapel Murders
occurred; is it really so great a stretch to shave off a
few more years, given that an oppressive and miserable
life may rapidly harden a boy into a man, in spite of his
physical youth? Children and young adults can be quite
cruel as a matter of routine, and, as we have seen, they
18
can assuredly be evil as well; could one possibly have been
clever - and evil - enough to have become history’s most
infamous serial killer?
Evil has always simultaneously fascinated, attracted,
and repelled us. There are many atheists and agnostics
today. Still, those who in 1973 denied the existence of the
Living God were all too ready to accept and believe the
concept of demonic possession after viewing a mere film.
Yes, evil is found throughout the world; the only question
is where:
One of the most impressive aspects about evil is its
sheer banality. There is a persistent relationship
between even the most terrible crimes and the
commonplace, everyday things that make up normal
life.6
If the Ripper was truly evil, he would not have hesitated
to kill, being only limited by time. The subsequent
mutilations and abandoning of the victims where they
lay may have been the result of a rational and calculating
mindset.
POLITICAL AND/OR IDEOLOGICAL
You have to admit that the timing of JtR is interesting,
coming as it did with Warren on vacation, Monroe’s
resignation, Anderson’s Swiss ‘health trip’,
Superintendent Arnold and Inspector Reed’s annual
leave, and parliament in recess. That’s what I call a
power vacuum. Somebody put a lot of thought into the
Whitechapel Murders.
Simon Wood7
For some religious leaders and their fervent followers,
any activities they deem necessary to further their cause
for survival and welfare - including terror, dispossession
and murder - are entirely justified. Fenian leader Jeremiah
O’Donovan Rossa expressed similar views concerning
Irish Home Rule in 1888. Even Conan Doyle acknowledged
the ‘Irish Question’ in his fiction:
I assure you that our most pan-Germanic Junker
is a sucking dove in his feelings toward England as
compared with a real bitter Irish-American.8
5. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
6. Ubelaker, Douglas & Scammell, Henry: Bones: A Forensic Detective’s
Casebook, New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
7. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
8. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

Today’s strife in the Middle East and Ukraine, the

ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the
atrocities committed in Syria and Iraq and the various
‘political statements’ such as that made by a mailbox
bomber, all show us that political and ideological conflicts
are real, and often violently bloody. With such a history in
review, can anyone doubt that the Ripper could have been
politically or ideologically inspired? Rabbi Meir Kahane,
who founded the Jewish Defense League in the 1960s,
declared in 1980:

Vengeance is a fundamental Jewish concept that is

a precept, injunction, commandment for the Jew...
Vengeance becomes, thanks to the gentilized and
perplexed era in which we live, a maligned thing...
Let the government of Israel, which is responsible for
the lives of its citizens, make the streets, buses, shops
and homes of the Ishmaelites [Palestinians] perpetual
places of terror and stark insecurity...Wipe away the
bitter degradation of God’s name that is symbolized
by Arab refusal to bow to Jewish sovereignty. A truly
Jewish government is one that understands the need
to...burn out the desecration by removing, burning out
the evil that is the Arab nation in our midst.9

Indeed, one theory that has appeared on the Casebook

message boards is that the Ripper was actually a tandem of
radical Jewish terrorists who committed the Whitechapel
Murders as a form of protest. According to this theory,
turns were taken, and one kept watch while the other
‘ripped’. This novel theory does have its strong points, but
an obdurate view of this tandem’s use of chloroform on
the victims and the insistence that the victims were all
murdered and mutilated elsewhere and then carried to
the locations where they were found, among other fatal
shortcomings, have caused it to be taken seriously by very
few Ripperologists.
Commissioner Sir Charles Warren
The fact that numerous contemporary authorities
such as Charles Warren were high-ranking Masons has
only lent credence to these types of conspiracy theories
extolled on the Jack the Ripper message boards:
It is my belief that part of the reason for the crimes
was to humiliate Charles Warren, and that any clues
left were more of a taunt for his benefit than anything
else. Another interesting ‘coincidence’ is that the Kelly

Anarchists have been around as long as there has
been government, and Victorian England was no
exception. In the 1880s, an Irish terrorist group known
as the ‘Dynamiters’ had a predilection toward blowing
up London’s Underground as a means of protest against
British government oppression and the Crown. One aspect
of groups such as this separates them from common
criminals who have accomplices – they band together
firmly and won’t betray one another afterwards. Common
ideology can be a bond as strong as that between blood
relatives. If there were such a conspiracy as the basis for
the Whitechapel Murders, the chances are that the details
would indeed have remained a secret. These murders
very nearly toppled the government anyway, intended
or not, and the possibility of such a conspiracy cannot be
discounted.
murder took place on the feast day of Warren’s Quator
Coronati Lodge. I suspect that of all the police, only
Warren would have had any idea what was going on,
and he is on record as having thought that the crimes
were committed by some secret society.
Anonymous poster10
My favourite ‘motive’ at the moment is that the killings
were performed by a handful of Jacobite extremists.
At the time of the Whitechapel murders there was
something of a romantic Jacobite revival going on,
with secret societies whose members consisted
9. www.ihr.org/books/ztn/ztn.html
10. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org

19
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

largely of Scottish Rites Masons, Templars, Occultists
and Magicians. As I understand it, they believed that
the Stuarts were part of the same bloodline as David
and Jesus, and had a divine right to the throne. In
1888 (bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution) they
were supposed to be having a grand Stuart exhibition
in London, but this was undermined by Queen
Victoria and the English freemasons. I think that one
or two of the more fanatical Jacobites devised a plan
to basically provide a ‘show of strength’ for the benefit
of Victoria and Charles Warren, who years earlier had
led the British Army team in Jerusalem that may have
acquired treasures that the Jacobites thought were
rightly theirs.
I think that they planned the killings to form a large
cross. I believe that they profaned the cross as they
did not accept the orthodox Christian view of Jesus’s
death, believing him to have survived and had
children. This explains the ‘double event’, as after
the third killing, the venue for the fourth might have
become obvious if they had not acted quickly.
again see here, repeated from the premise, ‘Product of the
Environment’:
A prostitute was found murdered. During the
investigation the defendant stated that his mother
had been a prostitute, and during his childhood he
had frequently witnessed her in the company of male
partners. Following this, he had developed a deep
hatred for women and desired only to inflict pain
upon them.13
One of the most famous of misogynistic serial killers,
Ed Gein, was characterized as follows:
Ed Gein was fascinated with women because of the
power and hold they had over men. This love-hate
feeling towards women became exaggerated and
eventually developed into a full-blown psychosis.
After his incarceration in a mental institution, he
would stare fixedly at nurses or any other female staff
members who wandered into his line of vision.

Of course, the Ripper suspect Dr. Francis Tumblety was

David Knott11
Of course, not all ideology is as widespread as that
discussed previously. On a smaller scope, the Masons
have repeatedly been implicated by some as either
being directly responsible for the Whitechapel Murders
or involved in them in some manner, mainly due to the
nature of the mutilations. Masons have long complained
about this, explaining in vain that they ‘are not a Secret
Society, but a society with secrets.’
a reputed misogynist said to have had a vicious hatred of
women, especially fallen women. However, he ended his
days by living with his sister and reportedly left a sizable
bequest to a home for fallen women, so one wonders if his
convictions really ran deep enough to have caused him to
be the Ripper. Proponents of his candidacy state that he
must have been remorseful near the end of his life to do
these things, but it is unclear if true misogyny would have
allowed him that flexibility.

If the Ripper committed the Whitechapel Murders as

some sort of political or ideological statement, he may
have been limited to certain times that may have held
some significance to events taking place in the country or
locally. The subsequent mutilations and abandoning of the
victims where they lay could have been done for public
shock effect to damage the police, and/or government or
certain religious institutions.

MISOGYNIST
A prostitute is a murder victim waiting to happen.
Anonymous
A misogynist is simply a man who does not like women,
which is not necessarily the same thing as saying that he
hates women. Many famous men have been misogynists – Tumblety
Isaac Newton, for example, and there are many otherwise
‘normal’ men who never marry, for whatever reason. The
11. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
world’s most famous fictional misogynist is Sherlock
12. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Holmes, who merely ‘disliked and distrusted the sex.’12 Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
Misogynistic serial killers of women may be motivated 13. Spitz, Werner and Fisher, Russell: Medicolegal Investigation of
by no more than their dislike or hatred of them, as we Death, Second Edition, Charles C Thomas Pub. Ltd., December 2005.

20
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Another contemporary misogynist was William Grant
Grainger, a former medical student and ship’s fireman.
Often drunk, he frequently consorted with prostitutes,
who robbed and cheated him. In 1895 he viciously attacked
a prostitute, Alice Graham, with a knife, although he was
not known to attack women previously. Grainger, who
spent many years in prisons, was apparently identified
by a witness in the Ripper case in 1895, although nothing
evidential ever came about from it. He may not even have
been in London in 1888.14
Other serial killers have had problems with women
‘who reminded them of their mother’s promiscuity.’ So,
could Jack have merely been sensitive to immoral women,
killing them as he found them, where the first ones he
found at such hours were prostitutes on the prowl?
Maybe the differentiation was that the actual prostitutes
solicited him, whereas the others did not, but would have
responded positively to him had he solicited them.
As one can rationalize or justify just about anything,
some serial killers of women may have targeted only
prostitutes, so as not to feel guilty or remorseful about
the killings afterwards. Others have probably looked
upon the murder of a prostitute as ‘merely helping a weak
woman to her seat on the ferry that crosses the River Styx.’
However, such murders are usually simply that – murders
without mutilation or other dramatic features. Perhaps
the Ripper felt much as Ed Gein did about women, only he
greatly resented the power and hold that they possessed
over him and all other men, and he thus attempted to
‘destroy’ their womanhood via mutilation of their bodies
and sexual organs.
If the Ripper was a misogynist, he would not have
hesitated to kill his victims, only being limited by time.
The mutilations would have been the result of his hatred
of woman to the extent that he was compelled to destroy
their femininity.
SEXUAL FRUSTRATION OR DYSFUNCTION
He couldn’t get laid if he walked into a whorehouse waving
a fistful of $100 bills.
Anonymous
If the Ripper were truly a sexual dysfunctional, unable
to perform, then the whores that he encountered would
have literally been ‘digging their graves with their
tongues’ had they had occasion to make comment on what
would have undoubtedly been a sore - and possibly short
- subject. Such a man would undoubtedly have had a low
‘flash point’, and the outcome of such an encounter could
easily have been tragic for any woman.
The Ripper theory espoused by Patricia Cornwell was
of this vein. On worldwide television, she presented her
21
theory that the artist Walter Sickert was the Ripper. His
motive was a sexual dysfunction due to his having a hole
in his penis (one would certainly hope so!). The theory
was poorly developed, as very little tangible - or sensible
- proof was offered, and its presentation was laughable
(oh, that Kukri knife!), for those so unfortunate as to have
missed it. Veteran deer hunters know what a condition
‘buck fever’ is, as it affects neophyte hunters, and Ms.
Cornwell had undoubtedly contracted ‘ripper fever’ to
make such a public spectacle of herself with ‘evidence’
such as she presented to millions of others worldwide.
Suffice to say her case was not convincing - except maybe
to ABC News veteran Diane Sawyer.
Yet it is quite easy to understand how a man could
become dangerously enraged over sexual problems,
especially if it were even implied that he must not be much
of a ‘man’ after all. Our society does equate ‘manhood’
with virility, and, of course, the longer and stronger the
member, the better. Stud bucks attract the best females
and get to pass along their genes, and the weaklings and
undesirables die out as virgins; that is nature’s lesson. It
has often been said that serial killers have low self-esteem,
and there is nothing that would lower the self-esteem of
a man young and active enough to have been the Ripper
more than to be impotent and unable to perform sexually.
JEALOUSY AND/OR UNREQUITED LOVE
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster
which doth mock the meat it feeds on.
Othello, Act III, Scene III
Historically, men have done some pretty stupid things
when it comes to women. Men have killed other men to
gain a woman, and men have killed at a desired woman’s
bidding. Men have destroyed their own marriages and
families in order to be with a woman, and they have
killed their own children as a form of protest against an
unfaithful or ex-wife. Both men and women have found it
difficult to accept that a relationship has truly ended, even
as the divorce rate reaches historically high levels. Men,
however, are usually the ‘controller’ once the courtship
is over and a relationship has been established. It should
certainly be noted that ‘control’ was an all-important issue
for Jeffrey Dahmer as well; he could not tolerate rejection
or abandonment.
The one Ripper suspect whose name consistently arises
when jealousy is mentioned as a possible motive for the
murders is, of course, Joseph Barnett. Although men have
14. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
often gone to great lengths to win back an estranged lover,
how many have ever committed deeds such as those of the
Ripper in order to do so? The concept of committing such
ghastly murders in order to scare his lover off the streets
and back into his life - and bed - seems rather unlikely in
retrospect, as the risk and potential consequences were
tremendous as compared to the ‘reward’. Mary Kelly was
not a prostitute because she enjoyed the work; it was
simply the only way that she and many other women in
reduced circumstances could earn a living. With rent due,
no prospects of regular employment, and her former lover
out of a job, what were her alternatives?
As we all know, male-female interaction can be quite
complicated. Some men spend their entire lives trying
to ‘understand’ women, while others seem to empathize
with and ‘relate’ to women naturally. Conan Doyle, a
physician, had good insight into the complex male –
female relationship, as shown by these examples from the
Sherlock Holmes canon:
The maid had loved the butler, but had afterwards had
cause to hate him.
He exercised an influence over her which may have
been love or may have been fear, or very possibly both,
since they are by no means incompatible emotions.
A furious scene followed in which he showed her
for the first time that she had a rival in his love. Her
fidelity turned in an instant to bitter hatred.15
The last is most telling. In matters of the heart, love can
instantly turn to hatred, given the right circumstances,
and, as we have already seen, hatred and anger are both
considered prime motives for the Whitechapel Murders.
The Ripper’s leaving of the victims in public could
likely be attributed to only one possible incentive – the
initial series of ‘warnings’ directed towards the object
of his affections, intended to alert her to the ‘dangers’ of
remaining on the streets. When that failed, he ‘ripped’
her as no one else had ever been ripped, so as to ensure
that no one else could ever have her, and to obscure his
original motive.
RELIGIOUS FERVOUR
The wages of sin is death.
Romans 6:23
And often an unpleasant death at that. Instead of
merely the spiritual death to which the Holy Scriptures
actually refer, death for ‘sinful’ prostitutes has often been
of the direst and most grisly physical form. The Holy
Scriptures abound with references to whores and harlots,
yet curiously, the term ‘prostitute’ is very seldom used in
the King James Version of the Bible. Whatever the term,
22
prostitutes were and have literally been ‘creatures of sin’
since Biblical times. Even today, in the more fundamental
Muslim countries, sexual promiscuity and prostitution
are crimes punishable by death by stoning, a penalty
right out of the Old Testament. The Holy Scriptures are
generally quite harsh in their mention of prostitutes, as
the following examples illustrate:
Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a
whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land
become full of wickedness.
Leviticus 19:29
And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the
beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her
desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn
her with fire.
Revelation 17:16
On a more merciful note, Jesus forgave the prostitute
in the Holy Scriptures, but He then admonished her to
‘Go, and sin no more.’ There is no record as to the penalty
incurred for not having done so.
While on the subject of religion and its inherent sexual
aspects, we ask: who would have ever thought that the
Catholic Church would reel under a tidal wave of sex
scandals in the 21st century?
Secret settlements left families unaware of predatory
priests in their midst and enabled some notorious
pedophiles to abuse hundreds of children for decades.
USA Today, 4 June 2002
The Roman Catholic Church has removed hundreds of
priests from their positions because of child sexual abuse
allegations in recent years, but some offenders remain
in church jobs. Many more priests have been accused of
sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s.
Many have been forced to resign.
These are serious crimes for which many of the Catholic
priesthood are accused today. How serious? Both God’s
law and man’s law address the matter:
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which
believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone
were hanged about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6
15. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Many states now have criminal statutes making child
abuse a felony offense with penalty comparable to
that of homicide.16
Yes, these are serious crimes indeed and it is not too
much to say that a clergyman capable of committing
them could reasonably be a suspect in other crimes - like
murder - for which the penalty would be comparable. Is it
possible that Jack could have been a priest? Priests may
fall into the most sexually suppressed group of people
but whose abuses may be hidden by the Church. Women
would probably have let a priest get close to them.
If a priest or other religious figure were to have
committed the Whitechapel Murders, what on earth
could have possibly been the justification? The following
passage from the Holy Scriptures may apply in this case:
Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price
of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any
vow: for even both these are abomination unto the
LORD thy God.
Deuteronomy 23:18
As St. Botolph’s Church was also known as ‘The
Prostitutes’ Church’ because it was frequently encircled
by a goodly number of streetwalkers soliciting for custom,
a deeply religious figure might have resented the ‘defiling’
of a House of the Lord by their ‘hire’ on consecrated
23
ground and taken action that he considered appropriate
and justifiable, right out of the Old Testament. In the Book
of Ezekiel, the violent death of a prostitute is described as
follows:
These discovered her nakedness: they took her sons
and her daughters, and slew her with the sword:
and she became famous among women; for they had
executed judgment upon her.
Ezekiel 23:10
Even if a fanatical religious objection to prostitution
itself and/or an overwhelming sexual suppression on
the part of a clergyman were not the outright motive(s)
for the Whitechapel Murders, the Lord knows there are
plenty of other examples of religious violence to consider:
Some of the most horrific crimes ever perpetrated
by one human upon another have been committed In
the Name of God. There seems to be no form of crude
torture that human ingenuity could conceive, which
was not used upon men, women, and children of the
hated faith, in the glorious name of religion.
The Turks, upon entering Austria in the sixteenth
century, committed such cruelty and tyranny, as never
had been heard nor written, for of some they put out
the eyes, of others they cut off the noses and ears, of
others they cut off the private members, of women
they cut off the breasts, and ravished virgins, and of
women great with child, they cut open their bellies
and burned the children.17
And this from the Eastern Morning News, 3 October
1888:
It was proved that among certain fanatical Jews there
existed a superstition that if a Jew became intimate
with a Christian woman he would atone for his offence
by killing and mutilating the object of his passion.
Passages of the Talmud were quoted in support of this
view.
And who can forget the Spanish Inquisition, truly the
darkest hour for the Roman Catholic Church, when no
atrocity was too foul to be used against the hated heretics?
Unspeakable tortures, all committed in the Name of God.
In 1642, tortures inflicted on the Protestants by the Irish
Papists closely resembled the myriad mutilations inflicted
by the Ripper, the difference being that their Protestant
victims were still alive at the time. Nothing in Irish history,
16. Spitz, Werner and Fisher, Russell: Medicolegal Investigation of
Death, Second Edition, Charles C Thomas Pub. Ltd., December 2005.
17. Scott, George: A History of Torture, Merchant Book Company Ltd,
April 1995.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
for sheer bloodiness and savagery, equals this wave of
religious terror, in all of its ghastly horrifying tragedy.18
So we see that both clergy and laymen alike have
in the past been perfectly capable of bloody, religious-
based violence against other human beings. An excellent
and comprehensive reference for this is Holy Homicide:
An Encyclopedia of Those Who Go to Their God and Kill
(Michael Newton, Loompanics Unlimited, 1998). Certainly,
either faction could have had a mania about prostitutes,
whether from purely religious, Scriptural objections or
merely from suppressed sexuality.
Indeed, one is reminded of Gary Ridgway, the modern-
day American ‘Green River Killer,’ who, torn between his
lust for prostitutes and his religious beliefs, strangled
prostitutes and runaways with ligatures to purge himself
of his sexual temptations.
It has been observed that Jews and Masons have
often been thought to have somehow been involved in
the Whitechapel Murders, if for no better reason than
the ‘ritual’ throat-cutting and the appearance of the
mutilations of Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes.
However, no one has ever seemed to similarly implicate
those of the Mormon faith, which had, at the time, rituals
that paralleled those of Freemasonry. This is hardly
surprising, since the founder of the Mormon Church,
Joseph Smith, Jr., had himself been a Mason and had
apparently appropriated a good deal of Freemasonry
rituals and practices into the rites of the newly-organized
faith over fifty years earlier. Examples are as follows:
MASONIC OATH
... binding myself under no less penalty than to have
my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots...
MORMON OATH
We and each of us, covenant and promise that we will
not reveal any secrets of this... Should we do so, we
agree that our throats be cut from ear to ear and our
tongues torn out by their roots.
MASONIC OATH
...binding myself under no less penalty than to have
my left breast torn open and my heart and vitals taken
from thence and thrown over my left shoulder.
MORMON OATH
We and each of us do covenant and promise that we
will not reveal the secrets of this ... Should we do so,
we agree to have our breasts cut open and our hearts
and vitals torn from our bodies.
MASONIC OATH
24
binding myself under no less penalty than to have my
body severed in two in the midst...
MORMON OATH
We and each one of us do covenant and promise that
we will not reveal any of the secrets of this... Should
we do so, we agree that our bodies be cut asunder in
the midst and all our bowels gush out.
There are few religions on earth more devout than the
Mormon faith, and the Mormon Church at that time had
had a significant presence in England for several decades.
Thus, if the Ripper were indeed a ‘religious fanatic’, he
might well have been a Mormon. Mormons are among
the world’s great proselytizers, and, as we know, converts
new to any religion often become zealots that are ‘more
religious than the Pope,’ at least temporarily. There is
also the possibility that the Ripper could have been of an
offshoot of this or another faith, but one that kept some
or most of the traditions of the original. These offshoots
today can be quite radical and many have been outlawed
by the parent church. A religious fanatic with radical
tendencies could have been extremely dangerous, as we
know all too well in today’s world. If such were the case,
then the Ripper would have known that others in the
parent church would in all likelihood be blamed for these
crimes and he would himself be ‘safe’.
There is, however, another candidacy in this category
that was much more likely to have committed the
Whitechapel Murders, this being that of a latent psychopath
suffering from some form of religious mania.
Religious homicidal monomania is always of a most
obstinate description, and no doubt the desire to wipe
out a social blot from the face of the earth, being, so to
speak, his destiny, was the cause of his crimes.
L. Forbes Winslow
Recollections of Forty Years
Some Ripperologists believe this to be the probable
explanation for the crimes. The case of Albert Fish is a
good example:
About the age of fifty-five, Albert Fish started to
experience hallucinations and delusions. He had
visions of Christ and His angels. He began to be
engrossed in religious speculations about purging
himself of iniquities and sins, atonement by physical
suffering and self-torture, human sacrifices. He would
go on endlessly with quotations from the Bible all
mixed up with his own sentences, such as ‘Happy
18. Scott, George: A History of Torture, Merchant Book Company Ltd,
April 1995.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their
heads against the stones’. Fish believed that God had
ordered him to torment and castrate little boys. He
had actually done so a number of times.19
As a little insanity on the side seems not unlikely in this
particular example, such a perpetrator could also have
been inclined to incorporate additional religious phobias
or features such as the ‘sacred geometry’ mentioned in the
premise for Occult, in his execution of the crimes. If the
pattern of the Whitechapel Murders really does create the
‘Vesica Piscis’, as postulated by proponents of the ‘black
magician’ theory, it is equally likely that ‘religious mania’
of this sort could instead have been responsible.
The religious mania of the drug-addicted Victorian
poet Francis Thompson, already mentioned, was possibly
brought on by a combination of drugs, disillusionment
and misogyny. Gary Ridgway has already been mentioned
under the Drug Induced Psychosis category. Having a
dominant mother and a wife who had extramarital affairs,
he became religious. He was torn between his lust for
prostitutes and his religious beliefs. Although Ridgway did
not mutilate his victims, he did have sex with their bodies.
Sexual suppression could in this case have been a
prime motive for mutilation, as the Ripper would have
been making an effort to punish and destroy that which
had tempted him in such an ‘unholy’ manner, or at least
render it unattractive to him and any others in the same
25
vulnerable position.
Maybe the Ripper was an unbalanced Jew for whom
the schochet was a role model. Someone who, from a
relatively young age, had seen schochets at work and
come to meld the two aspects of the schochet (a man
who was at once a holy man and a killer) in a perverse
way. It’s not uncommon for the feeble-minded to act
out on religious themes in horrifyingly literal ways,
after all (a trait common to all religions)
Magpie20
The Ripper’s leaving of the victims in public could
be attributed to his desire for all to see the victims’
‘punishment’ before God and their ‘humbling’ by His
Divine justice. The mutilations and the abandoning of
the victims where they lay may have held some religious
symbology as speculated upon before.
LIBERAL SOCIAL REFORMER
The end justifies the means.
Machiavelli, The Prince
The concept of a social reformer exposing the deplorable
conditions in London’s East End by committing the
Whitechapel Murders, knowing that they would focus the
world’s attention on that area, is an old one and has been
addressed by authors as diverse as Donald Rumbelow,
Donald McCormick and Harlan Ellison. To be able to clean
up the slums of one of Earth’s major cities single-handedly,
by the mere blood sacrifice of a few of society’s castoffs,
would have truly been a liberal’s dream and could have
actually been attempted as an early experiment in ‘social
engineering’.
There are many examples in these crimes supporting
the idea of ‘Jack the Reformer.’ This one is from the book
The Identity of Jack the Ripper by Donald McCormick:
I’ve no time to tell you how
I came to be a killer.
But you should know, as time will show,
That I’m society’s pillar.
Is this concept farfetched? Many have thought not,
including George Bernard Shaw, who looked upon the
Ripper as an ‘independent genius’, able to do what the
Social Democrats in 1888 London could not. Writing to
the London newspaper, the Star, on 24 September, he said:
19. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
21. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Will you allow me to make a comment on the success
of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for
a moment to the social question? Private enterprise
has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we
conventional Social Democrats were wasting our
time on education, agitation and organization, some
independent genius has taken the matter in hand,
and by simply murdering and disemboweling four
women, converted the proprietary press to an inept
sort of communism.
In further support of the position that this sort of
thing could have happened, we examine the content of
an interesting URL on the Internet, termed ‘Clinton Body
Count’.22 Incredibly, this site names dozens of people once
associated with Bill and Hillary Clinton, all of whom have
since met with violent deaths, and often under the most
suspicious of circumstances. Some of these deaths, such
as that of Vincent Foster, were obviously beneficial to the
Clintons, and one is left wondering if there really may
be any substance to the inferences drawn. Certainly, one
cannot deny that neither this ultra-liberal, latter-day Lady
Macbeth nor her libidinous husband has ever let anything
stand in their way for very long.
Naturally, someone of this persuasion would worry
about the ‘negative’ ramifications of the murders about
as much as one of the Tsar’s Cossacks would worry about
which peasant owned the cabbage patch through which
he was galloping. If the government actually fell due to
the Ripper’s actions, and it very nearly did, then so much
the better – ‘it was too conservative anyway’. And if the
murder and gross mutilation of three or four useless old
whores did not produce the desired result, well, then,
maybe the total and outrageous destruction of a young
and pretty one would.
The Ripper would have had just one goal - to make
the crimes as grisly and as horrifying as possible, so as
to draw the maximum attention to them and the area in
which they were committed. On a small scale, the Ripper
may have simply felt himself to be an avenging angel,
murdering people for what he recognized to be minor
violations or infractions, for the good of the many.
Actually, the idea of the ripper being some form of
socialist out to change the world of 1888 London
could have some merit. It’s been brought time and
again that the Ripper could have been somebody
who was trying to use the plight of the poor people
in London, the prostitutes and others, as victims of
politics to further their own social or political agenda.
Can a serious link be established involving elections,
parties or candidates that also correspond to the
deaths of the Ripper’s victims? Did a specific political
candidate or party lose or win an election over the
26
Ripper’s actions? What I would be looking for is the
timing of the deaths, the end of the attacks and so on,
realistically linking back to politics in some way.
Instructor 17323
The conviction that the murderer is a madman, very
probably a religious madman, or perhaps we should
say a madman who conceives himself to have ‘a
mission’ gains ground in the public mind.
Nottingham Evening Post, 22 July 1889
The Ripper’s leaving of the victims in public could
be attributed to only one possibility – to embarrass the
government, draw the maximum world attention to the
area affected and maximize public outrage, thus raising
the cry for sweet liberal reform.
IMP OF THE PERVERSE
We stand upon the brink of a precipice.
We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy.
Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger.
Unaccountably we remain.
Edgar Allan Poe
One major trait behavioral scientists have too often
overlooked is perversity, the conscious desire to suppress
a reaction to some type of stimulus that often has the
paradoxical effect of enhancing it. People often do things
for no better reason than that it will hurt themselves
or others. How many times has a murderer been heard
to say ‘I didn’t mean to kill her; I don’t know why I did
it.’ Many people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens
become criminals when confronted with an unexpected
opportunity. A good example is the stealing of the purse or
wallet of an accident victim by someone who had probably
meant to help them initially, but who was quickly overcome
by the sudden appearance of a vulnerable opportunity and
temptation of ‘easy money’. These would all be impulsive,
spur-of-the-moment crimes that most likely would have
never occurred under ordinary circumstances. Could the
Whitechapel Murders be attributed to impulsive behavior
alone? That of Martha Tabram or Polly Nichols, maybe,
but certainly none of the other Canonical Five could have
been murdered as the result of an impulsive, spur-of-the-
moment urge.
However, an ‘impulsive’ crime could have been
one where the Ripper was unconsciously reacting to
a stimulus, much as he might have swatted an insect
22. www.freepublic.com/focus/news/3024701/posts
23. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

without particularly thinking about it. As we shall later
see, serial killers have killed in this fashion before,
deviating from their usual modus operandi just because
someone was annoying them or in their way. Had the
Ripper always harbored ill-feeling toward streetwalkers,
possibly because they offended or annoyed him as he
went out in public? Had he always really wanted to say
or do something vicious to them, but never had, instead
just telling himself ‘easy-on, old fellow; remember the
Golden Rule’, day after day? Had they affected him to the
point where they were always on his mind, so that it had
become a continuous struggle for him to suppress the vile
thoughts that he ashamedly wanted to think about them?
Was this ‘imp of the perverse’ in his mind a phenomenon
like gravity, never giving up in its persistence? Did the
constant ‘nagging’ of the imp finally wear him through,
just as dripping water can eventually cut through stone?
For the Ripper-to-be, it may have been a situation like
thinking about not scratching an itch – it gets worse and
worse until one finally has to scratch it. Did he finally
encounter a hapless streetwalker while occupied in
these throes of suppression, causing him, in spite of any
conscious intention to the contrary, to involuntarily lash
out, with the imp of the perverse then directing his actions
afterwards? And then, upon assaulting (Ada Wilson) or
killing (Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols) his first prostitute
victim, did he realize just how good it made him feel and
how much relief the ‘scratch’ had brought him, that he
should do it over and over again?
If the Ripper had had his own Imp of the Perverse, he
would possibly have hesitated to kill initially, but would
probably have done so mercilessly afterwards, likely
being limited only by time.
of the Canonical Five had no organs whatsoever abstracted.
In this case, the potential reward hardly warranted the
incredible risks, and very few Ripperologists today lend
any credence to ‘profit’ as a motive. One curious fact of the
Whitechapel Murders that has never been satisfactorily
explained is the absence of any money on any of JTR’s
victims. After all, they were all of a profession that dealt
strictly in cash, and one in which payment is made before
services are rendered, not afterwards. So why was there
never any money found on any of the victims?’ The most
logical answer may be that Jack paid his victims and
then simply took it back after he killed them, along with
anything else of value they may have had.
William Henry Bury was a contemporary Ripper
suspect, arriving in London in 1887 from Wolverhampton.
A sawdust peddler by trade, he was a compulsive liar and a
heavy drinker obsessed with money. He stole money from
his employer and took bank shares owned by his wife, a
former prostitute, whom he frequently beat. Eventually
he killed and dismembered her and their children before
being captured. Did Bury kill them just for her money?
That motive is certainly prevalent with the point that he
was a chronic alcoholic in need of anything that could get
him even one drink, although he was undoubtedly cruel
and a misogynist as well.

PROFIT

This multiple murder for profit is merely one form of

making a living, one in which the murder is incidental
to the goal. Those who practice this ‘profession’ would
undoubtedly follow another if they were offered more
money.24

The most famous example of someone – in this case

a pair – who murdered prostitutes for profit is that of
Burke and Hare in the early 19th century. Indeed, one of
the earliest motives attributed to the Ripper was that of
profit; what else could he be doing with the body parts
that he took? – or so the thinking went. Even today, one
hears tales of the ‘mysterious American doctor’ who was
in the East End at the time of the murders, seeking to buy
‘pathological specimens’. If profit of this nature alone had 24. Leyton, Elliott: Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple
been the Ripper’s motive, then a poor job it was, since two Murderer, Blake Publishing, 2nd ed., March 2001.

27
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
There may have been other, less obvious methods
of profiting from these crimes. Could the Whitechapel
Murders have been the work of a Victorian hit man,
for example, someone who had been hired to do grisly
deeds that another man was afraid, unable, or unwilling
to do? Or were the murders committed merely to drum
up business in some other area such as that of private
detective or security firms like Pinkerton’s? Or were they
calculated to drive down property values in the East End
so that they could be bought for a fraction of their former
value? After all, the Victorian Era was also the age of J.P.
Morgan and other flint-hearted businessmen, many of
whom were enormously wealthy, worth many millions
of dollars at a time when an ordinary working man made
considerably less than £1.00 a day. If such a businessman
or a developer were to have coveted the East End property
due to its proximity, say, to the Bank of England, then such
a plot could have conceivably arisen. Situations have been
reported where properly developed, land would become
immensely valuable, and developers have in the past tried
various and devious means to gain title, the last resort
of which was to have many nearby inhabited buildings
condemned, the working-poor occupants forcibly evicted,
and the buildings quickly razed.
Those who are familiar with the plot of Jack, the Musical
know that an enterprising reporter had become the
Ripper in a concerted effort to bolster his own career and
increase circulation, and thereby profits, both corporate
and personal. With these and numerous other profit
possibilities feasible, one must wonder if this motive
should be seriously reconsidered, this time looking for a
different kind of evidence.
The Ripper’s leaving of the victims in public could be
attributed to numerous possibilities, depending on the
exact mode by which profit would be derived. If sale of
body organs were the mode, then such public display
would be paradoxical and dangerous for the end buyer.
For the other ‘profit’ modes mentioned, the public display
would have been calculated to make these grisly crimes as
notorious as possible, in order to create widespread panic
among the East End citizenry and an attendant drop in the
property values there.
JUST FOR JOLLY
I will cut thy throat, one time or other, in fair terms;
that is the humour of it.
The Life of King Henry the Fifth, Act II, Scene I
The concept of the Ripper as a thrill killer certainly has
merit, if we judge just by the media alone. Besides the
many (bad) Ripper films and works of fiction, we note
classic novels such as The Most Dangerous Game, which
28
is based on the premise that there are humans who hunt
and kill other humans for sport. Certainly, the serial killer
Donald Henry Gaskins, who often committed ‘recreational
murder,’25 would fall into this category. We see films such
as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which opens with the murder
of one young man by two others. Their reason for doing
so was that it was an intellectual exercise to see if they
could commit the perfect crime. This film was based
on the story of the real-life Leopold and Loeb, a pair of
wealthy and brilliant college students who murdered
another student to see what it felt like to kill someone and
to prove that they could get away with it. We also note the
film Trading Places, the central premise of which involved
a malignant ‘experiment’ with human lab rats. Although
this was a ‘comedy’, and no lives were lost, it was intended
that these same lives be ruined as the natural outcome of
the ‘experiment’.
Murder, and sometimes mutilation, of strangers has in
the past been the result of nothing more than a college
prank, gang initiation rites, or simple amusement. In
1993, two 16-year old girls were killed in Houston as
they walked home from a party along a railroad track in
an undeveloped wooded area. They had the misfortune
to stumble upon the initiation rites of one of the local
gangs. With the unexpected appearance of these girls,
the rites were quickly altered to include their rape by
the prospective members, who were then instructed to
strangle and mutilate the girls by carving the gang’s ‘sign’
onto their corpses, which were then left to rot where they
lay. At about the same time, two-year old James Bulger
was beaten to death, apparently just for fun, by two young
boys in England, who then left his body on train tracks to
be severed in two. In both of these aforementioned cases,
the extreme physical suffering and mental anguish of the
victims seems to have contributed to the pleasure of their
killers, so much so that it may have been the actual motive
for the eventual murders.
Yet another modern example of killing for sport follows:
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Blessed with a Friday off
school, 15-year-old Alyssa Bustamante dug two holes
in the ground to be used as a grave, authorities said.
For the next week, she attended classes, all the while
plotting the right time for a murder, they said.
That time arrived the evening of Oct. 21, when
Bustamante strangled 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth
Olten without provocation, cut the girl’s throat and
stabbed her, prosecutors said. Why?
25. thebeautifulnecessity.blogspot.com/2008/03/opium-choral-
landanum-and-prb.html
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
‘Ultimately, she stated she wanted to know what it felt
like,’ Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. David Rice
testified Wednesday during a court hearing over the
slaying.
Witnesses at Bustamante’s adult certification hearing
described a girl who was bright yet depressed and
clever in a sometimes sneaky sort of way. She ranked
in roughly the top third of her class at Jefferson City
High School, the principal said, and had been in no
trouble at school or with the law.
Associated Press, 19 November 2009
But the Ripper must have killed quickly in all cases,
and the suffering of his victims, both physical and mental,
must have been minimal. Perhaps he wasn’t interested
in inflicting pain and suffering; otherwise he would have
taken the women to a cave or basement to torture them.
Barring a ‘humane’ Ripper of the sort later discussed in
the premise, A Cry for Help, how can this best be explained,
since so many serial killers have literally tortured their
victims to death as part of the ‘experience’? Instead, he
may have been into thrill killing.
One aspect of the thrill kill may involve exploratory
mutilations signifying fascination with the sexual parts of
human anatomy:
The investigator may find that the victim has been
bitten on the breasts, buttocks, neck, abdomen,
thighs, or genitals, as these body areas have sexual
associations. Limb or breast amputation, or in some
instances total dissection, may have taken place.... the
asocial individual approaches his victim in much the
same way as an inquisitive child with a new toy. He
involves himself in an exploratory examination of the
sexually significant parts of the body in an attempt to
determine how they function and appear below the
surface.34
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
Johnny Cash
Could the Ripper have had such a motive, to do grisly
murder and mutilations in public, just because he could,
and also because he knew that he could get away with
it? Were the Whitechapel Murders nothing more than
an exercise for some bored and malignant Victorian
intellectual, conducted out of a spirit of perverse scientific
inquiry as an ‘experiment’ in human nature among the
lower classes? Was he a ‘Jack the Curious’, just wanting to
know what people looked like inside? Or did the Ripper rip
open his victims just ‘to see how they run’, as serial killer
Edward Kemper3 put it? The Victorian Era was also once
a time, as reported earlier in this series, when journalists
29
had seen the misfortunes of the poor only as suitable
entertainment for the more privileged readership. Was it
one of this readership that one day decided to create his
own ‘entertainment’?
Unfortunately, some people will do anything for
instant gratification across the spectrum and this
includes devaluing or ignoring human life and the
effect crime has on the victim.
Raven26
If the Ripper committed the crimes just for recreation
or as an ‘experiment’ in human nature, he would not have
hesitated to kill, no more than a scientist would hesitate
to vivisect a live lab rat, and was probably limited only by
time. The mutilations may have been the result of further
experimentation or curiosity.
SCHIZOPHRENIA
One thing that struck me is the writer’s statement
that schizophrenia was first identified about 1806
and that it is unknown whether it has always existed
in mankind or whether it arose as a new entity, like
AIDS, with the advent of the industrial revolution.
I am more inclined to think the former, but it makes
for a rather alarming and novel thought to think that
schizophrenia might actually have been a new disease
at the outset of the nineteenth century and perhaps
be a product of the new forces to which mankind
was subjected in the industrial age. This might be
something to think about as we ponder whether
the man who was Jack the Ripper could have been a
schizophrenic.
Christopher George27
Paranoid schizophrenia is the most common type
of schizophrenia in the world. It is characterized by
relatively stable, often paranoid, delusions, accompanied
by hallucinations, particularly of the auditory variety, and
perceptual disturbances. Symptoms are often:
a) Delusions of being watched, persecuted, followed,
exalted birth, special mission, bodily change, or jealousy;
b) Hallucinatory voices that threaten the patient or
give commands, or auditory hallucinations without verbal
form, such as whistling, humming, or laughing;
26. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
27. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
c) Hallucinations of smell or taste, or of sexual or other
bodily sensations; visual hallucinations may occur but are
rarely predominant.28
If the Ripper were a true schizophrenic, then much
about the Whitechapel Murders could be explained from
this natural ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ condition, where the subject
appears normal one moment, and becomes schizoid
the next. Schizophrenia by itself is not necessarily a
dangerous affliction, but it is often accompanied by other
mental problems, such as paranoia or manic-depression,
the combination of which can be extremely dangerous for
those in the surrounding environment, as we see here:
Dahmer was paired up with two highly dangerous
men on a prison work detail: Jesse Anderson, a white
man who had murdered his wife and blamed it on a
black man, and Christopher Scarver, a black delusional
schizophrenic who thought he was the son of God,
who was in for first-degree murder. It’s not difficult
to imagine how Scarver would have viewed Dahmer,
who had butchered so many black men.29
Jeffrey Dahmer
In this case, the schizophrenic personality combination
proved to be deadly, as Christopher Scarver murdered
Jeffrey Dahmer while they were on this work detail.
Winston Moseley, the infamous killer of Kitty Genovese,
also possessed a violent schizoid personality, the
circumstances of which were as follows:
Winston Moseley lived a ‘Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde’ existence.
By day he held a regular job, was married, had a family
and seemed like any other ordinary citizen. But at
night, he turned into a monster, addicted to murder
and sexual frenzies.30
Apparently ‘ordinary’ by day, yet ‘a monster, addicted
to murder and sexual frenzies’ by night – does this sound
30
like someone that should be of interest to Ripperologists?
Schizophrenia is not at all a ‘simple’ condition, and may
actually be quite complex in its nature, as we see here:
I have witnessed one case myself in which a person I
know had a SEVERE nervous breakdown. He locked
himself in his room, and began talking to himself,
with different personality traits I might add (however
never diagnosed, so it cannot be stated for sure if
these were Multiple-Personalities forming), and
he even set a small fire in his room just because he
enjoyed the look of the flames leaping up as well as
enjoying the way certain things burned (Again since
it was not diagnosed it couldn’t fully be stated as a
form of Pyromania). He was like this for 3 months, and
never saw a therapist, or was inducted into an asylum
(his family were devout Catholics that believed that
‘only God could save him, not science’) Then slowly
over time he began to stop talking to himself, and
venture out of his room more and more, till finally
after another few months, he was back to being fully
normal again. Again his case was an EXTREME one
(Maybe even close to being as extreme as Jack’s.)
However, over a very short period it manifested itself,
then disappeared just as suddenly as it appeared.
Now I’m sure that there probably are VERY few
cases of such a thing happening, but they DO exist.
So maybe Jack could be one of these cases? He could
easily have gotten away with it, if either he lived alone
and was a rather anti-social person to begin with, or
if he did have a Multiple Personality Disorder that
never manifested itself around his friends, family, and
coworkers. (The Boston Strangler had this disorder,
being able to hold down a steady job, and be a loving
father and husband, as well as moonlighting as a serial
killer without anyone suspecting it.)’
Chris Hintzen31
The chief suspect in the Ripper-like Kingsbury Run
murders had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic,
further hobbled by manic-depressive disorder.10 Such
a condition, coupled with the nerve and knowledge
that a doctor would naturally possess, would produce
a disturbed individual that could be – and in this case
possibly was - extremely dangerous to society.
It has been suggested that Ripper suspect Aaron
Kosminski may have been a hebephrenic schizophrenic,
characterized by an early onset of the condition in
puberty.32
28. www.schizophrenic.com/history.htm
29. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
30. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
31. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
32. www.schizophrenic.com/history.htm
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
In The Mask of Sanity (page 252), Cleckley writes:
Some patients of this sort eventually show themselves
to be psychotic, and it then becomes apparent that a
serious inner disorder has, perhaps for many years,
been masked by the minor overt peculiarities that
constitute what is generally regarded as schizoid
personality. Sometimes in patients with masked
schizophrenia the serious inner pathology is so
well concealed that the patient may be almost
indistinguishable from the typical psychopath. It is
important to keep in mind that the excellence of the
superficial aspect of the patient (whether he be called
a masked schizophrenic or a psychopath) gives no
reliable indication of how serious the inner, concealed,
and at the time undemonstrable pathology may prove
to be or how disastrously and unpredictably it may be
expressed when it erupts into disastrous antisocial
behavior.
If the Ripper was a schizophrenic, he may have killed
his victims in a spontaneous fit of rage. The subsequent
mutilations would be more difficult to explain, but may
reflect a severe delusional state of mind (at the time),
suggestive of a disorganized schizophrenic. The victims
would be abandoned where they lay with no forethought.
IDÉE FIXE
The change of name may have been inspired by other more
sinister ambitions having ‘for their primary purpose and
idée fixe the pursuit, capture, and the destruction of women’.
H. L. Adam, The Trial of George Chapman
Anyone who has followed the news for the last
couple of decades need not be told about the many and
various ‘celebrity stalkers’ that have been revealed to
the public. These people, both male and female, have
become obsessed with someone, usually a celebrity of the
opposite sex, whom they cannot possibly have, and these
obsessions have often turned into tragedies. Like a song
that sticks in one’s head and cannot be made to go away,
these obsessions can completely drive one’s behavior and
actions, even though one may otherwise be and appear
‘normal’:
There is the condition which the modern French
psychologists have called the `idée fixe,’ which may
be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete
sanity in every other way.
Dr. John H. Watson33
Such obsession can take many forms, often ‘pure’. Jack
the Ripper and Russian serial killer and cannibal Nikolai
Dzhurmongaliev killed prostitutes exclusively. Ted Bundy
31
killed pretty young women. Jeffrey Dahmer killed young
men. Albert Fish killed children. Those serial killers who
target prostitutes as an ‘idée fixe’ may possibly rationalize
the killings, thinking they are actually doing a ‘public
service’. For example, Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev made it his
‘mission’ (refer to premise #1 - The Missionary) to rid the
world of prostitutes and managed to eliminate 47 women
before he was caught. Such an obsession with prostitutes
may itself be complex, as it may involve numerous other
idée fixe obsessions, such as a Freudian fixation on
women, sex, and the womb.
The Ripper could have hesitated to kill his victims, until
driven to do so by his lurking obsession with the women
he viewed as prostitutes. The mutilations and abandoning
of the victims where they lay being the further goal of his
mission to rid the streets of prostitutes.
WALTER MITTY SYNDROME
The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!
James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Who among us has not imagined himself or herself
(just ask Patricia Cornwell) to be the one to finally and
definitively expose the identity of Jack the Ripper?
Certainly, it is normal to daydream about being rich,
famous, good-looking, brave, strong, a genius, or all of
the above. The poster boy for daydreamers is, of course,
Walter Mitty, and ‘Walter Mitty Syndrome’ is an actual
recognized medical affliction. The Ripper probably was a
source of inspiration for many in reduced circumstances,
due to the notoriety he had achieved. With his name on
everyone’s lips and his exploits of bloody derring-do
front-page news in all of the world’s newspapers, he might
naturally have inspired some of history’s earliest copycat
murderers. If so, then these other persons could certainly
have committed some of the murders for which the Ripper
has since been blamed, such as that of Elizabeth Stride or
Mary Kelly. These victims are named because a good case
may be made that the modus operandi and signature for
these particular murders differed significantly from the
others that have been observed in this series. A poseur
such as Francis Tumblety, with his known delusions of
grandeur, could no doubt have been jealous of the slavish
attention exhibited by the media of the day and he may
well have decided to emulate the perpetrator in a lethal
burst of vainglory.
I don’t think he murdered and mutilated just to get
hold of certain body parts; I think they were taken on
outdoor ripping experience was necessarily fleeting -
33. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
over in a flash and no time to savour his work at the
scene. He marked his territory, grabbed whatever
spoils he could, then had to leg it back to safety, where
he could rewind and play the whole thing over and
over again in his mind. Anything physical he had from
the scene would bring it back for him more vividly. And
if he enjoyed reading about the terror he was causing,
the souvenirs would reassure him that it really was
all his doing. He must have thought he was the bee’s
knees, overpowering weak female specimens and
conquering the district in the process. A warped ego
would have seen it as ‘real man’’s work.
Caroline Morris34
Perhaps Jack wanted to be a doctor, but was unable to
for educational/class reasons. Maybe he frequented
lectures and dissection theatres, or even got a job
as a mortuary attendant. It’s not unusual for people
who are refused the chance to work in certain fields
to form an obsessive love/hate attitude toward that
profession: wannabe police officers become security
guards, wannabe soldiers join militias, etc, all the time
dreaming of the chance to show those who turned
them down that they made a big mistake. Perhaps the
murders were Jack the Wannabe Doctor’s attempts
to show the medical field that he could cut it (no pun
intended) as a doctor.
Magpie35
But somehow it seems incongruous that he would
commit butchery of that magnitude from being frustrated
at wanting to become a doctor. In the old Rex Morgan, M.D.
comic strip a doctor, was featured who had been practicing
for years but was exposed as a fake - he had never
obtained a medical degree despite his skills. It seems that
Jack could have done much the same thing - surely a fake
diploma would not have been difficult to come by, and if
you take Conan Doyle’s writing at face value, there were
doctors scattered all over England in little pockets of the
rural countryside. Of course, these were MRCS’s rather
than real physicians, but Jack probably could have earned
while he learned.
We do feel the concept of Jack as a mortuary attendant
is a solid one, and is very close to what we surmised in
a previous article of this series, where we postulated
that maybe he was a ‘post-mortem’ room attendant at
London Hospital. In either case, there would have been
ample opportunity to practice carving out human kidneys
efficiently. Lists of medical students, such as Francis
Thompson, who had failed to make the grade in 1880’s
London, should be scrutinized.
As we speculate further on, Jack may have been a former
32
soldier affected by combat on the battlefield. But he could
have been a wannabe soldier, or in Special Forces, or a
mercenary who dressed the part and acquired combat
weapons as a way of enhancing his military fantasies. One
is reminded of suspect Francis Tumblety, who dressed in
military garb with medals pinned to his uniform, but who,
in fact, never served in the military.
If the Ripper were merely a Victorian Walter Mitty,
he might have at first hesitated to kill and mutilate, thus
possibly accounting for the relatively ‘intact’ condition of,
for example, Elizabeth Stride. Gross mutilations in this
case might well have begun as an afterthought, a good way
to ‘top’ the original murderer. The bodies would then most
likely have been left where they lay since the perpetrator
would probably not have been versed in the skills of
murder and mayhem.
PUBLIC SERVICE
England expects that every man will do his duty.
Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson
Not quite as sweeping in scope as was the premise of
‘Liberal Social Reformer’, a ‘public servant’ would have
been concerned only with cleaning up and protecting his
own immediate area of the East End, taking a microcosmic
view instead of the macrocosmic view of the former.
Woe thus to the streetwalker who might have happened
upon his turf. There was certainly historical precedent in
England for such a thing:
In the seventeenth century lived Sir George Jeffreys,
holding the position of Chief Justice of the Court of the
King’s Bench. No man ever more unjustly dispensed
what he was pleased to term ‘justice’. His inhuman
sentences, his fiendish cruelty, earned for him the
sobriquet of ‘Bloody Jeffreys’.36
Such a man in 1888 London would likely have been the
‘avenging angel’ of his neighborhood, and also quite likely
may have held some sort of minor official position, say as
a member of the local vigilance committee. In an episode
of the old X-Files television series the residents of a
particular subdivision were being murdered by the head of
the local Homeowners’ Association for committing minor
violations of their neighborhood’s Deed Restrictions. The
perpetrator was obsessed with maintaining property
values, and nothing, not even murder, was going to stand
in his way.
34. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
35. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
36. Scott, George: A History of Torture, Merchant Book Company Ltd,
April 1995.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

There have been many theories about the Whitechapel Were there any ‘considerable’ crimes that were foiled as
murders, but so far no one has propounded as the Sherlock Holmes foiled that of The Red-Headed League,
most probable hypothesis the theory that they are during this same time period, perhaps in November or
the work of a Scientific Humanitarian. We may be December 1888?
in the presence of a Sociologist Pasteur, capable of
taking a scientific survey of the condition of society,
and absolutely indifferent to the sufferings of the
individual so long as he benefited the community
at large. We have yet to witness the evolution of the
scientific Sociological Jesuit. His advent, however,
cannot be long delayed. We have been expecting him
for some time. Who knows but he is already in our
midst in Whitechapel? etc.

Pall Mall Gazette, 19 September 1888

Such a man would probably have always known exactly

what was going on, so far as efforts to apprehend the
Ripper were concerned. This would go far in explaining
why he was never even seen for certain, much less
captured. If he were indeed a member of the local vigilance
committee, then naturally he would be privy to all of its
plans for organized action against the Ripper. And, no
doubt, he would have been on familiar terms with all of
the local constabulary and knowledgeable concerning
their habits, probably even going so far as to ‘cultivate’
the most garrulous among them in an effort to ascertain
and keep abreast of the ‘official’ plans to apprehend
the Ripper. Given the extremely localized nature of the
Whitechapel Murders, which took place in a small area of
London’s sprawling East End, there may be considerable
merit to the premise of a ‘public servant’ Ripper after all,
killing out of a sense of public duty or obligation.
COVER-UP FOR OTHER CRIME(S) OR ACTION(S)
Really great criminals are never found out, for the simple
reason that the greatest crimes – their crimes – are never
discovered.
Jacques Futrelle, The Silver Box36
Certainly, if one had wished to create a diversion in
1888 London, there could have been none better than the
Whitechapel Murders, since practically every spare able-
bodied PC and inspector in the metropolitan London area
was assigned to or drawn into the East End during that
infamous autumn. Could the Ripper have been drawing
police and public attention away from another location
within London, where a subtle yet monumental crime was
in progress over those two months of terror? The wealth
of the Bank of England lay at the western edge of the East
End, in close proximity to these murders. Could a profound
bank robbery such as that contemplated in Conan Doyle’s
The Red-Headed League37 have been planned during this
time, with the Ripper acting strictly as a diversionary?
If there were no ‘considerable’ crimes for strict
monetary gain, such as bank or jewel robbery, committed
during this period, were there other crimes for which the
Ripper might have been covering? One possibility that
comes immediately to mind is that of espionage, which
was certainly of interest to many foreign governments
at the time. Conan Doyle alludes to exactly this sort of
crime in several stories of the Holmes Canon, such as The
Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans and The Naval
Treaty.38 Could agents of a hostile foreign government have
committed or commissioned the Whitechapel Murders as
an integral part of some complex espionage scheme within
England? Certainly, England had outright enemies in late
Victorian times, and there were also numerous ‘friendly’
governments that nonetheless might have felt the need to
spy upon England, as Israel has within the United States
upon numerous occasions.
Of course, not all ‘cover-up’ crimes need have been
as sweeping or complex as those described above. One
of the great EC Comics stories of the 1950s was Harvey
Kurtzman’s The Giggling Killer,39 in which an unhappy
36. Futrelle, Jacques: The Thinking Machine, Modern Library Classics
Paperback, December 30, 2003.
37 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
38. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
39. Crime SuspenStories: The Giggling Killer, EC Publications (Russ
Cochran) series 3, May 1993

33
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
husband imitated the modus operandi and signature
of a serial killer then terrorizing the city to murder his
wife, secure in the knowledge that he would never be
suspected of the crime. Were some of the murders then,
such as Elizabeth Stride’s and Mary Kelly’s, actually
unrelated crimes committed by others that have since
been attributed to the Ripper? Did an enterprising
Michael Kidney or Joseph Barnett conceal his own crime
by emulating the Ripper’s methodology at precisely the
right time?
In a past exchange titled, ‘How Many Victims?’ on
the message boards of the Jack the Ripper Casebook,40
Stewart Evans offered surprisingly strong support for this
particular scenario, as we see here:
Statistically speaking, Kelly is far more likely to have
been killed by Joseph Barnett than anyone else. Their
domestic situation indicated a stormy relationship,
with the resultant separation and the fact that they
often ‘rowed’. Barnett saw her on the eve of her murder
and we have only his word that they were on ‘friendly
terms’. If she had finally rejected him on that occasion,
he may well have returned later and murdered her in
a violent domestic dispute, again statistically the most
likely scenario for her murder.
Barnett would have known that in the eyes of the
police he would be the number one suspect anyway.
In those days that sort of murder had only one
consequence for the killer - he hanged at the end of a
rope. In such a desperate situation he would have only
one real way out - to shift the blame for the murder.
Although there had been no Ripper killing since 30
September, the story was still in the news and the
Ripper was still at large.
This theory does not involve a ‘copycat’ murder; it
involves an unpremeditated domestic murder being
disguised as the work of another killer who was
still at large, in order to avoid blame. It is no use to
argue that Barnett simply could not have inflicted
such horrific mutilations. The history of crime shows
that husbands and lovers have been responsible for
the most extreme mutilation and dismemberment of
their victims in an effort to cover their crime. It has
nothing to do with ‘harbouring a grudge’ or ‘casually
cutting her to pieces.’ It has everything to do with the
result of a violent domestic dispute and desperately
cutting up the victim to shift the blame.
The history of crime is littered with such cases of
first-time murderers carrying out the most horrific
mutilation to cover a crime. Buck Ruxton is a prime
example, he beheaded his common-law wife, and a
maid, peeled off their faces and totally dismembered
them in an effort to get rid of the bodies and prevent
identification. There are many others, Greenacre,
34
Deeming, Mahon, Crippen and so on.
If the Ripper committed the Whitechapel Murders
as a diversion to draw police and public attention away
from another spectacular crime, such as bank robbery,
or an action such as espionage, then he would not have
hesitated to kill, probably being limited only by time. The
same would apply if one or more of the murders were
committed by someone in imitation of the Ripper, for
entirely different purposes.
SOMNAMBULISM
An eye in sleep is an eye in Innocence.
George Herriman
Or is it? On the face of it, somnambulism – sleepwalking
– seems a rather ludicrous reason to explain the
Whitechapel Murders, but even in late Victorian times, it
had already been proposed as a possible explanation for
the crimes:
In Lewis Carroll’s diary for 1891 he mentions that Dr.
Dabbs of the Isle of Wight, Lord Tennyson’s attending
physician, apparently had a theory that the murders
were committed by a somnambulist (sleepwalker).
Christopher T George41
Homicidal somnambulism, literally homicidal
sleepwalking and colloquially known as sleepwalking
murder, is the act of killing someone during an episode
of sleepwalking. Occasionally, sleepwalkers kill people
during their sleepwalking act. There have been several
rare cases in which an alleged act of homicide has
occurred, and the prime suspect may have committed the
act while sleepwalking. About 68 cases to date have been
known. One of them is French:
Ledru Case: Robert Ledru, a French police detective,
was asked to investigate a murder on the beach.
Examining the evidence–the fatal bullet and some
footprints–he decided he had been sleepwalking on
the beach and fired the fatal shot. He turned himself
in.
What Causes It:
Another parasomnia, sleepwalking murder starts
when the brain attempts to wake up, normally going
through a process involving a number of stages, but is
unable to do so and is thus stuck lingering between a
state of being asleep and being awake. However,
40. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
41. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
other factors greatly influence the actions themselves,
such as depression, sleep deprivation, and thoughts of
murder. You may think that last one is a bit silly, but
some lawyers have argued that those who kill while
sleeping planned on killing while they were awake.
The Really Bad Part:
In most cases, the victims are family members. That’s
because in the sleepwalking state the brain may rely
on recent or long term memory. In one case, a man
had planned on visiting his in-laws the next day. Sadly,
he hadn’t planned on meeting them to death. Even
those without murderous intent can meet certain
conditions to kill in their sleep and no one is really
sure exactly what those conditions are.42
I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path
laid out for me by Providence.
Adolf Hitler, 1936
Such a thing has typically been found only in fictional
works, and seems about of the category that the murders
were committed by an innocent man under hypnosis.
However, the following case histories may serve to change
this attitude, as they involve violent crimes or murder
committed, apparently, during sleep.
Sleepwalking as Automatism:43
A recent murder prosecution in Queensland,
Australia has put in relief the issue of sleepwalking
and particularly the question whether it can form the
basis for a defense of automatism.
Violence performed while in a state of somnambulism
has been referred to as a self-evident example of acts
not accompanied by the will of the actor.
Can anyone doubt that a man who, though he might be
perfectly sane, committed what would otherwise be a
crime in a state of somnambulism, would be entitled
to be acquitted? And why is this? Simply because he
would not know what he was doing.
Another case in which the will does not go with
the deed is where a man is unconscious and acts in
that state. There are numerous examples of that;
for instance, unconsciousness in sleepwalking.
An act done during that time carries no criminal
responsibility.
The contrast in the nature and quality of the evidence
between Burgess and Parks [two men accused of
murder while sleepwalking] is interesting. Burgess
was charged with wounding with intent. During the
night, he had hit a woman on the head with a bottle,
then with a video, and grasped her by the throat. She
suffered some wounds. He claimed he was…sleep-
35
walking at the time…..
The Court of Appeal accepted that evidence as
properly leading to a conclusion that Burgess was:
‘..suffering an abnormality or disorder, albeit
transitory, due to an internal factor, whether functional
or organic, which had manifested itself in violence.
It was a disorder or abnormality which might recur,
although the possibility of it recurring in the form of
serious violence was unlikely.’
Parks, on the other hand, had been charged with
the murder of his wife’s parents. He had, apparently,
driven 23 kilometres by car to another town one night
and both beaten and stabbed one of them to death and
badly wounded the other in what he claimed was a
somnambulistic episode. This exchange is taken from
his evidence:
Q. Is there any evidence that a person could formulate
a plan while they were awake and then in some way
ensure that they carry it out in their sleep?
A. No, absolutely not. Probably the most striking
feature of what we know of what goes on in the mind
during sleep is that it is very independent of waking
mentation in terms of its objectives and so forth.
There is a lack of control of directing our minds in
sleep compared to wakefulness. In the waking state,
of course, we often voluntarily plan things, what we
call volition - that is, we decide to do this as opposed
to that - and there is no evidence that this occurs
during the sleepwalking episode. There usually
is - well they are precipitated. They are part of an
arousal, an incomplete arousal process during which
all investigators have concluded that volition is not
present.’
If the Ripper were a somnambulist, then he would
never have realized what it was that he was doing, no
matter how gruesome the action. If so, then he must
not have remembered these ‘dreams’, as has often been
the case, or surely he would have been alerted by news
in the daily press. In this case, the murders themselves,
the mutilations, and the subsequent abandoning of the
victims where they lay would have all been dictated by
the subconscious, and we are left with only a reason, and
not a motive. Since nearly all of the Whitechapel Murders
were committed during times when most folk were still
sound asleep in their beds, there is no real conflict here.
Explanation for the murders, their grisly nature, and their
public display might then be for a reason as simple as
indigestion from what the man had to eat before bed that
particular night, in which case he might become known as
the Rarebit Fiend as well as the Whitechapel Fiend.
42 www.weirdworm.com/5-terrible-...-could-have/2/ October 19,
2010
43. www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v3n1/ridgway.html
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
ATAVISTIC THROWBACK
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou Shalt
Not Kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an
endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose
love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in
ours.
Sigmund Freud
Albert Fish
Recessive genes to the front – many early peoples were
cannibalistic, just as a means of survival during hard
times. Even in ‘civilized’ times, incidents such as those at
Donner Pass prove that ‘civilization’ may be a thin veneer
indeed. Looking back at Albert Fish, Ed Gein, Nikolai
Dzhurmongaliev, Andrei Chikatilo, Issei Sagawa, Jeffrey
Dahmer and so many others, we do sometimes wonder
if somehow the instincts of our primitive ancestors, for
whom ‘murder’ was certainly commonplace, and ritual
mutilation and cannibalism were not unusual, have
managed to remain hidden within our own genetics.
Most of the time, the organ removal is mentioned
in some context regarding ritualism or an insane
medical student. I firmly believe that the act of the
organ removal meant something....but what, is the
question.
Could JTR have been a cannibal?
Gein ate parts off of buried corpses. Heidnik made
soup out of the parts of the women. Dahmer ate the
penis. Chikatilo ate testicles and chewed on uteri and
lips. Fish ate the buttocks.
Howard Brown44
If the Lusk Letter is legit then we really don’t have to
wonder if Jack was a cannibal.
Robert Anderson, poster on JTR Casebook
After his capture, the child-murderer and cannibal
Albert Fish was asked what had caused him to do ‘these
horrible things’:
‘You know,’ Fish answered, ‘I never could account for
it.46
No one had ever suspected Ed Gein of any such criminal
activity – he had often been asked by neighbors to do
odd babysitting jobs. And, as if one bonafide cannibal in
modern-day Wisconsin weren’t unlikely enough, how
about TWO, with the later appearance of Jeffrey Dahmer?
Dahmer tried various seasonings and meat tenderizers
to make the human flesh more tasty.47
Another primitive impulse that may be germane to
these killings is the ancient predatory instinct to attack and
kill weak, helpless, and/or solitary prey. Could a solitary
streetwalker, and an unhealthy female at that, have been
seen thus by a predatory Ripper on the prowl? If a solitary
victim were unavailable, would such a predatory instinct
instead have led him to ‘cut out’ a victim from the ‘herd’
and isolate her to set up the ‘kill’?
If the Ripper were truly an atavistic throwback, a
backslider down the scale of evolution, then he would not
have hesitated to kill his victims instinctively, possibly
as ‘prey’, and was probably limited only by time. The
mutilations may then have been nothing more than the
equivalent actions of a wild predatory beast instinctively
disemboweling its kill to get at the nutritious viscera. The
subsequent abandoning of the victims where they lay
would have then been a natural act for a predator ‘at the
top of the food chain’, as top predators such as lions are
today seen to do the same thing so smaller animals may
feed on leftover remains.
BUSINESS
There was no doubt that the Don had solved the problem.
Mario Puzo, The Godfather
There was no horse’s head left on a bed, but there was
something even scarier in the case of Mary Kelly. Could
the Whitechapel Murders have been part of a larger,
subtle business scheme, a series of warnings intended for
a party or parties unknown? Could these murders have
been directed toward some of the glamorous West End
whores, as a warning to ‘bring them in line’ somehow?
44. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
45. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
46. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
45
47. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
36
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Could these murders have just been the result of a
‘business decision’ by a local pimp to achieve the same
effect elsewhere within the East End? If the murders were
really intended as warnings of some nature, then they
must have been quite effective, owing to their limited
number and the short time span in which they occurred.
Of course, they may have also been warnings of a different
sort, conducted by a bonafide businessman or store owner
to frighten off the whores that might have been harming
his business by their continued and pervasive presence.
As Sam Peckinpah once stated, ‘When blood is on the boil,
man is as unselective as nature’.
It is also conceivable that the Whitechapel Murders
were nothing more than an initiation rite of some kind. Or,
rather than an initiation rite, maybe a series of qualifying
events. Looking at 1920s - 1930s America, when Murder,
Inc. was formed by Lepke Buchalter and his associates,
it seems that not just any criminal could join that elite
group; you first had to prove yourself adept at the
intended business of murder. With the Mafia and other
organized crime societies being in existence in 1888, is it
possible that, like Murder Inc., a prospective member of
one of these organizations was given a unique chance to
prove himself worthy of becoming part of a criminal gang
and was intent on showing everyone concerned that he
was indeed qualified?
We see this today on a smaller scale, as many of the
street gangs in the U.S. require that a prospective member
be ‘blooded’ before he may join, preferably by the killing
of a member of some rival gang. This is not the likeliest
of explanations but it is difficult to eliminate it from
consideration with the evidence we have at hand. Few
have ever pursued this theory, which may be why the
Whitechapel Murders remain unsolved. When told how
ridiculous such a theory is, typically by the ‘black magic
ritual’ crowd, I (Mosley) always reread Conan Doyle’s
The Yellow Face for reinforcement. Who would have ever
thought THAT story would turn out as it did? Old Sherlock
sure didn’t. Thanks again, Conan Doyle.
Anyway, such a scenario would certainly explain a lot
- such as why the murders stopped so suddenly, and why
the mutilations, the latter being to prove a strong stomach
and also to provide unimpeachable proof of the deed’s
executor. Also, the ‘Code of Silence’ would prevent anyone
in the know from ever spilling the truth.
If the Ripper committed the Whitechapel Murders
in the course of ‘business’, then he must have had a
sound reason for everything that he did. The murders,
the mutilations, and the subsequent abandoning of the
victims where they lay would have all been necessary as
per some predetermined plan, one which had an ultimate
goal that may or may not have ever been attained.
37
A CRY FOR HELP
For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot
control myself.
William Heirens(?)
A man who has been behind bars more than 50
years in a sensational Chicago murder case asked
a clemency board to free him Thursday, claiming he
was railroaded. Heirens was a 17-year-old student
at University of Chicago when he was arrested in
the slayings of a 6-year-old girl, whose remains
were found scattered in the Chicago sewers, and
two women. The message ‘For heaven’s sake, catch
me before I kill more. I cannot control myself’ was
found scrawled in lipstick on the mirror in one of the
women’s home.
Associated Press, 5 April 2002
If the Ripper were committing these murders in hope to
be caught by the police, then he certainly had an odd way
of facilitating it, seeing as how absolutely no known clues
or messages of any kind were left at any of the murder
scenes. Surprisingly, there are people who do believe that
the Ripper was doing exactly that – ‘crying for help’ and
have stated so on the Casebook Message Boards:
This could well be a cry for help, as in: ‘I’m widely
acknowledged as a great axe man, I wear a top hat on
occasion, and wherever I go, Jack is always with me.
Can’t you see the clues I’m giving you dudes? I’m Jack!
It’s me!’
Graham Sheehan48
But there are also people who believe that the Ripper
killed his victims in a ‘humane’ manner:
Basically I don’t think he was an evil man, he was a man
tormented and pushed to extreme thoughts and his
mind couldn’t cope with the right and wrongs of it. His
method of killing could show he wanted to be humane
about it. Some may say he cut their throats in a savage
fashion, but it may be he wanted to be sure they died
instantly, [that they didn’t suffer death slowly]. He
was humane, he killed with such violence because
he wanted to be sure their deaths were instant, - he
didn’t want them to linger and suffer unnecessarily,
even if he had no feeling for them. Sometimes, if not
every time, he cut the throat twice to be sure.
Anonymous poster49
48. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
49. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

One wonders about how some people might receive
the premise, ‘Imp of the Perverse’, although their probable
political affiliation should not be a mystery to anyone. Yet,
there may be some merit to the premise that the Ripper
was indeed ‘crying out’ for help via commission of these
murders. It may just be that he really wasn’t very good at
it, or maybe he did leave obscure clues, ones that went
unrecognized and/or unnoticed by the investigating
authorities. Readers of the purported Maybrick diary will
recollect the various ‘clues’ mentioned in that narrative,
such as the cotton in the tin match box. Did subtle clues
of this nature lie among the crime scenes and evidence
that was collected at the time, unrecognized for their
significance, clues that have now been lost to us forever?
Surprisingly, a criminologist no less august than John
Douglas, author of The Cases That Haunt Us, has shown
support for the concept of the Ripper ‘crying for help,’ by
comparing the tagline of the Lusk letter, ‘Catch Me When
You Can,’ to the message allegedly left by William Heirens.
He does qualify his support, however, by stating that it is
equally probable that the Lusk letter tagline was intended
as a taunt toward Lusk and the authorities.
If the Ripper were actively trying to be caught, then he
went about it in a most peculiar fashion. Given the utter
lack of clues at any of the murder scenes, and so few
overall, one must suspect the veracity of an alleged motive
such as this. However, he would not have hesitated to kill,
mutilate, and then abandon his victims in public, just to
prove to the authorities that he was ‘serious’.
PARANORMAL
Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England.
Sherlock Holmes50
Although in the Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,51
Conan Doyle may have been correct about clinical
vampirism, and would undoubtedly have been correct in
doubting that the Ripper was actually a DNA-sampling and
vivisecting alien life form, the classification and premise
of ‘paranormal’ encompasses many other circumstances
that are quite possible. Could the Ripper not have been an
otherwise normal person, but one possessed of strange
and unusual needs that precipitated the murders? This is
indeed X-Files territory, and one excellent example from
that program is the episode of the strange man who awoke
from hibernation every 40 years with a hunger for human
liver, that he needed to survive the ages. It is certainly not
being suggested that the Ripper was of this or similar ilk,
but only that he might have been someone significantly
different from everyone else. Science today does recognize
‘vampire killers’, typically those who are afflicted with
‘Renfield’s Syndrome’, an actual pathological craving for
the ‘life force’ of others. At least one serial killer, Fritz
Haarmann, has in the past exhibited a genuine clinical
vampirism.3 Here one is also reminded of Richard Chase,
mentioned earlier, who dabbled in the paranormal as he
killed his victims, drinking their blood and cannibalizing
their remains.
Denis Rader, the BTK killer (Bind Them, Torture
Them, Kill Them), terrorized Wichita, Kansas from 1974
to 1991. He was a necrophiliac and torturer of animals
who thought he was demonically possessed. Ten victims,
mostly women, were strangled and suffocated. After 30
years, he sent mocking letters to the police and media, but
did not resume killing.
Denis Rader
Then there are the dumpsites used by Gary Ridgway
to leave the bodies of his victims. Where there was no
apparent connection to the various dumpsites during
the investigation, it was later found that these locations
correlated with places he had taken his wife for sex.
Is it possible that the Ripper was simply a freak of
nature, like a man with two hearts, a clinical vampire, with
his own natural hungers and needs that not even other
serial killers could begin to understand? ‘Freaks’ of nature
are not all that uncommon, as we see here:
For a lucky handful of people in this world, there is no
such thing as tooth decay. Their teeth naturally resist
all cavities, and normal wearing away is replaced
by upwellings of dentin, the inner material of the
tooth, rising and replacing the worn enamel like tiny
fountains of youth.52
50. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
51. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
52. Maples, William & Browning, Michael: Dead Men Do Tell Tales:
The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist, Crown
Publishing Group, 1995.

38
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
The feats of one twin at calendar-calculating were
especially remarkable: he was reported to have had a
range of at least 6,000 years – far beyond the range of
any conventional or perpetual calendar.53
Multiple murderer Bobby Joe Long had an extra
X (female) chromosome, otherwise known as
Klinefelter’s syndrome, which meant he had the
female hormone estrogen circulating in higher
amounts in his system, causing his breasts to grow
during puberty. He brutally murdered prostitutes
and other women who reminded him of his mother’s
promiscuity.54
Statistically, 1 in 33,000 people have rod monochromat,
an imbalance of the rods and cones in the eyes. This is
a condition similar to the natural way that the eyes of
predatory cats are constructed, a circumstance which
allows them to hunt nocturnally. While daytime vision of
someone with this condition would be poor and would
likely require the use of tinted spectacles, he could
literally ‘see in the dark’, a quite handy talent for someone
contemplating mutilation of and organ extraction from a
murder victim lying in near-total darkness.
It has been estimated by the FBI’s National Center for
Analysis of Violent Crime that there are as many as fifty
serial killers at work in America today. This means the
serial killer is a rare bird indeed, a statistical anomaly
that shows up only once in every 5 million members
of the overall population.55
If this statement is to be believed, then the Ripper would
most likely have been the only serial killer at work in 1888
London. And if he were really 1 in 5 million, why could he
not, for example, have also been 1 in only 33,000 with rod
monochromat? Or why could he have not been one of the
very few people with a documented special pathology or
peculiar talent such as instant mathematical computation,
any of which might have simultaneously motivated him
and helped him commit these crimes in such a mysterious
and efficient manner? One is reminded of the Ripper
suspect Kosminski, who thought he knew other people’s
thoughts and the movements of all mankind by an instinct
that formed in his mind. Could he have possessed an
undocumented special pathology?
If the Ripper was indeed a ‘freak’, one possessed of
strange and rare abilities, needs, or desires, any attempt
to analyze or rationalize the murders and the mutilations
will likely forever prove futile. It is, of course, possible, and
much more probable, that he might have been driven by
one or more of the other motives and reasons discussed,
and merely used a ‘freak’ ability to aid him in commission
of the crimes. In either case, his subsequent abandoning of
the victims where they lay could most likely be attributed
39
to ego, as surely such a man would never believe that he
could ever be caught by ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ men.
OCCULT
Then he becomes an ageless pathological monster,
crouching to kill, on evenings when the stars blaze down in
the blazing patterns of death.
Robert Bloch56
So reads the truly chilling tale by Robert Bloch, which
has lost little of its power in the decades since it was first
written. The essence of this fictional story is ‘mors tua,
vita mea’ – ‘you die, that I may live’, and has as its basis
the theory that the Ripper had long ago made a covenant
with the Dark Gods and would enjoy eternal life on earth
so long as he made blood sacrifices at the proper times,
when the stars were ‘right’, or being affected by various
phases of the moon. Obviously an occult event.
The topic of ‘occult’ encompasses black magic,
witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, satanism, paganism,
voodoo, mysticism, ritual killings of a satanic nature, and
all other related subjects with ties to the supernatural.
All of these variations have at one time or another been
practiced throughout history, and many are still in effect
today, even among ‘civilized’ peoples:
All the victims were young prostitutes, and two of
the murders involved elements of ritual torture and
Satanism.
Human skulls are excavated from plundered graves
for use by such groups as the Santorini Cult in
the Caribbean. Every state in the Union contains
cemeteries that have been plundered for bones by
looters whose motives range from Satanism to plain
old-fashioned madness.57
Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Dahmer’s need for control led
him to dabble with Satanism.58
A different type of perpetrator is Richard Trenton
Chase, the modern day so-called ‘Vampire of Sacramento.’
In that Northern California city, he killed six people in the
span of one month, drinking their blood and cannibalizing
their remains. Chase, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,
53. www.science-frontiers.com/sf065/index.htm
54. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
55. Ubelaker, Douglas & Scammell, Henry: Bones: A Forensic Detective’s
Casebook, New York Harper Collins, 1993.
56. Bloch, Robert, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper: Subterranean Press,
2011.
57. Ubelaker, Douglas & Scammell, Henry: Bones: A Forensic Detective’s
Casebook, New York Harper Collins, 1993.
58. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
had been abused by his mother. In turn, he tortured and
killed animals, and committed acts of arson. He believed
that drinking his victims’ blood would cure him of an
imaginary disease.
A somewhat similar case was described by author A.P.
Wolf on the Jack the Ripper Forums site:
I must say this is the most convincing motive I have
yet seen in connection with the Whitechapel Murders,
that a very insane man feels that he has animals,
reptiles and ‘evil spirits’ in his bowels, buys a razor...
and then slits a girl’s throat to let those evil spirits out.
Might not make sense to you and me, but it sure made
sense to him.
A P Wolf commenting on the
Old Bailey trial of one THOMAS JOSEPH HABERFIELD,
convicted of Breaking of the Peace and Wounding,
22nd October 188859
Another of the more prominent stories in the collection
by C. Daly King, The Episode of the Headless Horrors,60
involves a series of random beheadings that were
plaguing the Pennsylvania – New Jersey border area. The
perpetrators turned out to be a pair of Haitian immigrants
who, although appearing ‘normal’ in the guises of a used-
car salesman and garage owner, were practicing voodoo
ritual murders of a most ghastly nature. Like the Ripper,
they left the corpses of their victims in plain sight along
heavily-traveled roads, the reason being that they knew
that they would never be caught by the police in the short
time frame in which they had to operate, and so they did
not need to go to any particular trouble to dispose of the
bodies by more conventional means.
And so we see in this fictional story methodology that
may have been identical to that of the Ripper – he may have
done the same as these voodoo practitioners; committing
the murders and the horrific mutilations as we have
observed, simply because he knew that the authorities
would never catch him in the short time frame that ‘black
magic’ rituals demanded. The concept of the Ripper as a
‘black magician’ is a relatively new one, first appearing in
an article in True Detective Magazine in 1973 – Was Jack
the Ripper a Black Magician?61 Since then, several books
on the subject have appeared, two of which name Ripper
suspect Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson as the murderer and
either sexual deviance or black magic rituals as his motive.
Given what historical data and evidence there is, the
concept and theory of the Ripper as ‘Black Magician’ are
most unlikely. The foremost problem with this theory is
the small data population (locations of the victims) from
which conclusions as to certain geometric patterns were
drawn. Statistically, it is impossible to draw such a definite
40
conclusion from such a small data population, generated
in so short a time, with an acceptable degree of confidence.
This is not to say that the premise cannot be true; it is
just that it is impossible to state so categorically and
unreservedly from a mathematical standpoint. By way of
comparison, let us consider the career of the Mad Butcher
of Kingsbury Run, whose acknowledged victims numbered
at least a dozen, in a crime spree that lasted at least three
years. Although there was no such significance claimed
for the patterns of this serial killer’s crimes, any such data
patterns that might have been observed and collected
would have had a much greater statistical significance,
due to the much larger data population and length of time
over which the data would have been generated.
A good analogy of such a postulation involves the data
used by Edmund Halley to conclude that he was dealing
with a periodic comet, later known as Halley’s Comet.
Observations of comets made from earth early in history
were naturally limited in scope, as very few data points
could be observed prior to the invention of the telescope.
Such data as there were fitted the curve of a parabola
quite well and many astronomers were thus convinced
that comets therefore passed by earth only once, as the
orbit would then have been ‘open’. This locus of data
points had also been observed to fit an ellipse perfectly
and other geometric forms and curves quite well, but
a parabola was the favorite among the vast majority of
astronomers at the time, there then being no concept of
why an ellipse should instead be favored. It was not until
the advent of Isaac Newton’s concept of gravitational
physics that the mystery was definitively solved – comet
orbits were elliptical, not parabolic. The original premise
of a parabolic orbit was good, but there was simply not
enough data available to make this accepted conclusion
statistically significant.
If the Ripper were a practitioner of the Black Arts, he
would not have hesitated to kill and mutilate his victims,
probably being limited only by the time, physical location,
deaths, and human organs necessary as per the ‘sacred
geometry’ and other requirements of the prevailing
ritual(s).
The Ripper’s leaving of the victims in public would
actually come as somewhat of a surprise, as, historically,
other similar efforts have since been conducted in private
and complete secrecy. Of course, a genuine ‘black magician’
may also have had a wish – and then an unparalleled
opportunity - to shock, horrify, and show contempt for the
pious Christian community surrounding him.
59. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
60. King, C. Daly: The Curious Mr. Tarrant, Dover Publications, 1986.
61. Rumbelow, Donald: The Complete Jack the Ripper, Penguin, 2004.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

WAR VETERAN Or could Jack have been an active serviceman? Recall

that Whitechapel murder victim Martha Tabram and her
Was the Ripper a discharged veteran of some foreign
companion were seen in the company of two guardsmen
war - the Ripper murders being the result of his mind
hours before Tabram’s repeatedly-stabbed body was
suffering the effects of battlefield atrocities? In the decade
discovered. Although never positively identified, could
or two prior to the murders the United Kingdom was
these soldiers have been stationed in London barracks,
involved in multiple conflicts abroad, any one of which
although police searches turned up no suspicious
could have involved Jack as a solider, a field surgeon or
suspects?
medic, or enlisted in some other military capacity. Great
Britain was engaged in a number of African conflicts
prior to the Whitechapel Murders, including the Zulu War
(1879), the Boer War of Transvaal (1880-81), the Ninth
Kaffir War (Cape Colony, 1877-79), Khartoum, Sudan
(1884-85) as well as conflicts in Afghanistan (1878-80)
and Burma (1885-87). We are also reminded of suspect
Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson’s claims of fighting as a
major in General Garibaldi’s army in Italy during the 1860s
(according to Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Roots).
If Jack have been a veteran of the Zulu War, one of the
deadliest of the times, a witness to the ruthless battlefield
mutilations of fellow soldiers literally being cut to pieces,
would the participation in combat on the battlefield have
cemented these feelings even further?
What if Jack had already harbored inclinations towards
serial killing? Jack would naturally feel sheer rage not only
at the enemy, but towards people in general. As witness
to the raping of civilians and the pillaging of their villages
by his comrades-in-arms, this rage would have intensified
this ‘kill or be killed’ attitude, which would follow him on
In an article entitled Out of Africa, Eduardo Zinna
his return to the streets of London.
writes:62
Did he suffer from immediate combat stress, or delayed
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), known to affect The similarities between Zulu rituals and the
soldiers years after wars had ended? Often, ex-soldiers Ripper murders - the repeated, frenzied stabbing,
have delusions or hallucinations that they are back in the disembowelling and mutilations, the removal
combat. If Jack was engaged in mutilating corpses on the of organs and pieces of clothing - are remarkable.
battlefield, the mutilation of London street prostitutes The standard assegai [iron-tipped spear], with its
seems highly plausible, especially if he suffered with other sharp, broad blade, could well have served to inflict
mental disorders. the wounds from which Martha Turner died. Other
assegais were reportedly much shorter and might
A medic could have learned sufficient skills at
have been used in other Ripper crimes.
operating or assisting battlefield surgery. The extraction
of organs from victim Annie Chapman may reflect skills …one might think of a veteran of the Anglo-Zulu
Wars, haunted by the memories of that long, sleepless
Jack acquired and perfected on the battlefield as a field
night spent next to the dead at Isandlwana. Perhaps
surgeon or medic. As either, he may have been used to
such a man came to Whitechapel. Perhaps he drank
working quickly as many of those maimed in warfare
alone at the pubs in Commercial Street, reliving ever-
would need immediate and rapid surgery (usually present images of death and carnage. And, perhaps,
extraction of one or more limbs) to prevent infection of he sometimes walked out into the night, hiding about
wounds. Army and Marine Corps medics in WWII became his clothes the sharp spear he had brought back from
so proficient at what they did that they could work in total Africa as a grisly souvenir. Perhaps. No one can say.
darkness without particular handicap. As a field surgeon,
if Jack was used to working in a hurry, it would allow him
to rapidly eviscerate his Whitechapel victims. This may
explain why most of the victims were quickly ripped open,
62. Ripperologist no. No. 21, February 1999.
but the organs may have been carefully extracted.

41
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
If the Ripper were a veteran of a bloody war, the
murders, mutilations and abandoning of the victims
where they lay would have been the equivalent actions
of a deranged soldier or a battlefield medic affected by a
traumatic brain disorder.
ROYAL COVER-UP
They are entitled to two measures of dead wood;
one branch more and they’re hanged.
Thomas Becket
So said Thomas Becket to King Henry II on the subject
of English common peasantry. Although the treatment of
English commoners by English royalty has improved a good
deal since the 12th century, one cannot doubt that Queen
Victoria or any others of the ‘noble’ class would have done
whatever was necessary to protect the Crown – and their
own privileged and pampered lifestyles. If, indeed, a mere
commoner, and a Catholic female at that, were to threaten
the class structure that they held so dear by a secret Royal
marriage and an inconvenient pregnancy, they would
not have hesitated to have her ‘removed’, possibly in a
manner that would serve as a warning and object lesson
to others of her kind. In medieval times, this could have
meant a public execution and display of a severed head
on a stake, although one might think that these particular
offenders would have simply disappeared; after all, who
would know or care in a slum district largely populated
by indigent transients? In 1888, would this skullduggery
have instead taken the form of gruesome murders and
ghastly mutilations?
A tiny but vocal minority say an emphatic yes to this
question, and so the Royal Theory, and the parallel Royal
Theory involving only Prince Albert Victor, refuse to die.
Since so few dedicated Ripperologists take either theory
seriously, just what is the attraction of these theories
and what makes them so popular among filmmakers and
novelists? Much of their appeal can readily be explained
by the intrigue of royalty worship, and conversely, the fact
that royalty is something that many people love to hate. To
either party, and the media, nothing has so great an appeal
as a scandal involving royalty, as witnessed by the events
surrounding the death of Princess Diana, the sexual
peccadilloes of ‘Randy Andy’, the not-so-private affairs
of the philandering Crown Prince, and the exorbitant
lifestyle of the free-spending late ‘Queen Mum’. Naturally,
the premier royal scandal of them all would be a palace
conspiracy or cover-up underlying the Whitechapel
Murders.
Still, are either of these a likely scenario of events in
Victorian London? Others have pointed out that even
if Prince Albert Victor had sired a Catholic heir, Queen
Victoria would simply have had the marriage annulled,
42
as it would have taken place without Her Gracious
Permission. And of course, under prevalent English
law, a then-illegitimate heir would have had no claim to
the throne under any circumstances. Therefore there
would have been no need for anyone to have taken any
surreptitious and unlawful action to ‘protect the Crown’.
So far as the parallel Royal Theory is concerned, one
soon realizes that its adherents are truly a special breed
apart and they definitely march to a different drummer, as
we see from an anonymous poster on the Jack the Ripper
message boards here:
NOTHING can sway or convince me that the Duke of
Clarence was not Jack the Ripper. All the evidence,
from the Duke of Clarence’s own mental problems
(Prince Albert was seeing a psychiatrist by the name
of Dr. Gull, who diagnosed his mental condition as
insanity), his deer-stalking hat, which many unnamed
witnesses (if the names of the witnesses are not on
record, then that is a part of the coverup) have seen
to be exactly like the Duke’s, the off-duty police officer
who saw everything about the second or third crime,
and the Royal’s Carriage which was also seen by many
witnesses to be at the crime scenes several times just
before they happened, are enough to convince me
that the killer was a Royal, and that was the Duke of
Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria.63
Like so many lesser Ripper authors, this one apparently
does not let the facts get in the way of a good story. The
inspiration for his fervent testimonial seems to have
originated from ‘a television program about Jack the
Ripper’, and astute Ripperologists will quickly spot the
flaws that Hollywood continues to disseminate among the
uneducated and unwary.
What should be the final ‘nail in the coffin’ for these
preposterous theories involving Prince Albert Victor
appeared in the March 1987 issue of Bloodhound (defunct)
in which Simon Wood conclusively showed that the
Prince’s alleged Consort (Annie Elizabeth Crook) had no
connection to the Prince, did not live on Cleveland Street,
nor was she Catholic or confined to various hospitals
until her death, as claimed by Stephen Knight and Joseph
Sickert. Unfortunately, these theories have become
the stuff of legend, and legend is difficult to eradicate,
particularly when it involves royalty and scandal.
COMBINATIONS OR VARIATIONS OF THE ABOVE
Why does a Jeffrey Dahmer happen? How does a man
become a serial killer, necrophiliac, cannibal, and
psychopath?
63. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Why, indeed? Ed Gein was even worse off, being
simultaneously a serial killer, necrophiliac, cannibal,
psychopath, transvestite, misogynist, and ghoul. How can
such things be understood – or explained?
Typologies based on motivation assume that serial
killers always act according to a plan. In real life,
random, unpredictable environmental factors come
into play. For example, David Berkowitz ran away
after his first victim screamed and bled. He had
not anticipated this and so bought a gun for future
attacks. Moreover, serial killers may have different
motives for different victims. Their motives may
change over time, and there may be a progression in
the killings (personality degeneration, less and less
planning, time between episodes decreases, violence
increases). For example, Dennis Nilsen killed a man in
the middle of his killing sequence simply because the
man was annoying and in his way.64
The preceding summary is really profound, for it may
explain much about the Whitechapel Murders that has
baffled Ripperologists for decades. Does this simple
paragraph explain why the Ripper’s methods changed so
drastically after the murder of Polly Nichols and continued
to evolve through the rest of the Canonical Five? What
about the killer’s mindset? Did varying circumstances
leading up to each murder influence his subsequent
actions during the acts of executing the murders and
mutilations? Did the Ripper gain more confidence from
eluding capture as his crimes progressed? Does it help
explain the peculiarities of the murder of Elizabeth Stride
and possibly those of Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly?
Otherwise the two most literally disfiguring acts are
the removal of the nose, and the removal of the lips.
These cuts render people unidentifiable. A person
with no nose and no lips could be anyone. I personally
think that there was something about Eddowes that
made the killer uncomfortable, and that’s why he
obliterated her face. Like, if she looked like his kindly
sister or something, he wouldn’t want THAT face to
watch him rip her open.
Errata65
Did killers like Gein do what they do out of boredom,
for excitement, or just to feel powerful over their innocent
victims? Such a motive or combination of motives often
makes no sense to ordinary people.
He could have been a walking red flag...but because
of the times and because of the volume of people ‘just
like him’....he could have been hiding in plain sight and
never was afraid of being caught or much less, even
43
concerned of being apprehended. That is, unless, he
and another associate were on a mission or a lone
killer with an agenda.
Howard Brown66
While it is generally agreed that the Ripper had to
start somewhere, and one’s methods would certainly
evolve during that kind of work, as an artist’s might with
continued ‘practice’, there remains general disagreement
on the characterizations of the murders themselves. Most
believe them to be all the work of one man, regardless of
the differences observed in methodology. Some believe,
because of these same differences, that there were
multiple killers working in parallel. Likewise, conspiracy
theorists believe that there were multiple killers working
in series. This confusion is easily understood, but it should
be evident that a single killer with multiple motives or
reasons for committing these murders could do so in
an evolutionary style, whereby the last could scarcely
resemble the first of the series. That may be exactly the
case here.
Our main interest in the case at the moment is to identify
motive or reason that could provide, with the known facts,
a sort of Unified Field Theory for Ripperology. None of the
many books written on the Whitechapel Murders does
this successfully, regardless of who the suspect at hand is.
We believe that this is due to the fact that so few authors
credit the Ripper with possibly having multiple motives
or reasons for committing the crimes; it always seems to
be the same old same old – psychopathy, misogyny, sexual
perversion, and so forth, but never a combination of them.
If the Ripper’s motivations or reasons were a
combination of several of the above, or a variation of
any of those listed, he would likely not have hesitated to
kill and mutilate his victims, depending on the precise
‘combination’. It is certainly plausible that a psychopath
could have a strong religious streak, that a misogynist
could be drawn to exact revenge, and that a sexual deviant
could perform a copycat murder, just to name a few of the
more likely permutations. It would not be too much to
state that the Ripper probably was driven by more than
one compulsion, as many of these motives and reasons
complement each other quite well.
In this vein Crime Library’s discussion offers the
following:
64. www.sociology.org/vol003.002/hinch.article.1998.html
65. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
66. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Renowned FBI investigator Jon Douglas: ‘If you want
to understand the artist, look at his work.’ [Herbert]
Mullin took the notion a step further — if you want
to understand the artist, recreate his work. After
reading Irving Stone’s biography on Michelangelo,
Mullin decided that, as a serious artist, he should do
what the famous Renaissance sculptor did — dissect
a body. ‘Michelangelo spent hours and hours secretly
dissecting bodies so he could find out about the form
of the human body for his painting and sculpture and
stuff. That’s why his works are so much better than
anyone else’s. It gave him insight others didn’t have.’
His mom had given him the Michelangelo book, hoping
that Herb would be inspired to use art as an emotional
outlet. What it inspired was another murder, and the
most grisly one in Mullin’s career. (In a rare twist
of maternal wrath, Herb blamed his mother for this
killing, believing that she gave him the book as a ‘hint’
to dissect someone. ‘I think she was trying to tell me
what to do, so I could have this insight too.’)67
Like the prime suspect in the Kingsbury Run Murders,
the Ripper could well have been a paranoid schizophrenic,
manic-depressive, alcoholic child of a violent alcoholic
schizoid. Or perhaps he could merely have been possessed
of the sort of ‘demented sexual rage’ espoused by Martin
Fido2, which could have been incredibly dangerous if
present in conjunction with an obsession with the ‘occult’.
His other motives for mutilation and leaving of the victims
in public could then have been practically any of those
described previously for ‘mutilation’ and ‘public display’.
OTHER/UNKNOWN
‘By the way’, he asked, ‘what was the motive of the murder?’
‘Don’t you know?’ asked Chase quickly.
‘No.’
‘Then you never will.’, declared Chase, grimly.
Jacques Futrelle, His Perfect Alibi68
Regardless of the preceding discussion, it is quite
possible that we have missed the mark somehow and
that the Ripper’s true motive for his actions continues
to evade identification. As the above excerpt from the
Thinking Machine story suggests, the explanation for the
Whitechapel Murders may likewise remain elusive and a
mystery forever. If Anne Rice were to conduct an Interview
With The Ripper, it might be that he himself could not
articulate exactly why he did all what he did, just as Albert
Fish was at a loss for words by way of explanation in the
premise, ‘Atavistic Throwback’. If such were the case, how
could we ever hope to understand his motives or reasons?
Did Jack later recall what he did, and not knowing why,
resignedly bemoan, ‘the devil made me do it’?
I think there is a case for the Ripper being not only
44
ordinary and ‘sane’ - but quite consciously committing
super-horrific crimes for effect only. I find it interesting
to consider the final pose of the victims as being the
ultimate goal of the crime. The mutilations would be
a means to that end, but the important thing to the
killer may be the last image that he sees of the victim
- displayed and ‘ripped up like a pig in the market’ -
in the knowledge that that would be the image the
innocent finder of the body is going to experience, and
due to the usual customary crowd gathering etc, many
members of the public would have been witness to
the sight on the street. He may or may not have been
consciously attempting to create and propagate the
idea of a coherent monster in the mind of the populace
Nemo69
Yet if there were a realistic and identifiable Ripperian
motive or reason that is not among the preceding categories,
could it be so obscure that there are no historical parallels?
The truth may simply be that the Ripper was perhaps
unique among serial killers, much as the Cleveland Torso
Killer is thought to have been, and direct comparison with
the motives and compulsions of other, modern serial killers
may therefore ultimately be futile. Like the sinking of the
Titanic, Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders
may have just been due to a unique combination of
circumstances, the like of which had never occurred before
and which can surely never occur again. If such were the
case, then the Ripper may just have been an extraordinary
man with abilities far ahead of his time, to make calculated
decisions under pressure. He would have been a genius
like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, or John Browning, gone
to the bad for whatever reason, like Professor Moriarty.70
If the sanity of Jack is to be assessed solely from mutilating
street women, does that mean that he had no other mental
issues? We do not necessarily have a loony in mind, but
possibly a real criminal genius who just happened to be a
little insane, such as the fictional Hannibal Lector. Like you,
we really would not necessarily expect to find Jack hearing
voices in his head.
Dr. S. Shuster in the International Journal of Psychiatry
Medicine (1975) comments on the so-called ‘Doctor
Theory’:
It is possible that Jack the Ripper can be understood
in terms of doctor-identification borne of one or more
67. trutv.com/library/crime/index.html
68. Futrelle, Jacques: The Thinking Machine, Modern Library Classics
Paperback, December 30, 2003.
69. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
70. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Mass
Market Paperback, 2 vols, October 1986.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
more terrifying experiences he may have had with
doctors during his childhood. The fantasies acted out
by this primitive murderer are similar to the fantasies
experienced by people who have been surgically
traumatized as children. The evidence suggests that
the activities of Jack the Ripper resemble the acting-
out of a horror story in which he, as the main character,
played to the population of London as an actor plays
to his audience, through the need to discharge anxiety
and regain some kind of emotional balance. When his
depredation failed to achieve the desired results for
him, the Ripper probably committed suicide.71
If the Ripper’s motives or reasons for committing
the Whitechapel Murders were none of the above, then
meaningful analysis of the crimes will be difficult, if not
impossible. Explanation for the murders, the mutilations,
and the subsequent abandoning of the victims where they
lay will not be easily or readily forthcoming – or understood.
But as Richard Whittington-Egan told Paul Feldman,
albeit for a far different reason, ‘There comes a time when
circumstantial evidence is no longer circumstantial’.72
Concerning the man who was arrested for being Leather
Apron and subsequently exonerated, John Pizer, the
circumstances Anderson/Swanson describe for the
family not giving up the suspect would fit Pizer, so you
have to wonder if Pizer’s story is somehow mixed up
with that of one or more Jewish suspects. In any case,
I do believe that Leather Apron/Kosminski just makes
for a representational answer to the case just as the
drowned man scenario does. It’s a ‘strawman,’ a bit of
salve or band aid put on a vexing wound in Scotland
Yard’s damaged reputation but not the true answer to
what the murders were all about.
Christopher George73
Far from clarifying the nature of the Whitechapel
Murders, or narrowing down the list of known suspects, we
instead seem to have possibly compounded the problem.
Now we see that there may be many more viable motives
and reasons for the murders than has ever been popularly
thought, with a commensurate increase in the number
of viable suspects. How many ‘occultists’ and ‘religious
fanatics’ were in London in 1888? How many alcoholic
junkies? How many ‘Walter Mittys’? How many suspects
encompassing all of the other premises? Indeed, we may
find that the majority of adult males alive in England
at the time could, for one reason or another, have been
the Ripper, and this has actually been argued by some
serious Ripperologists. Yet, few have searched for the
kind of evidence that might ultimately expose a Ripper
operating under such premises as Drugs, Religious fervor,
Profit, Walter Mitty Syndrome, Cover-up, Somnambulism,
Atavistic Throwback, Business, or Paranormal. Could
45
evidence of this nature still be available after 128 years?
We won’t know until someone looks for it.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze
long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into
you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
And so the Ripper, for whatever his motives or reasons,
committed in only ten short weeks his dramatic little series
of crimes, completely under his own terms, and has at last
exited the stage that he alone had commanded. The police
were beaten, and they knew they were beaten, as lamented
in the fictional excerpt below:
The bastard’s beaten us all ends up! That’s right!
He’s thumbed his bloody nose at Scotland Yard tonight!
You can feel the fear in the streets of the city this night!
Jack the Ripper rules the city of London tonight!
Christopher George,
Jack - the Musical
So much later in time, it still cannot be denied that Jack
the Ripper, whatever his motives or reasons ultimately may
have been, did rule the city of London when he was in his
prime. The police were confounded, the citizenry terrified,
and his victims helpless against his onslaught of Victorian
society. But at the top of his form, with literally the whole
world watching, trembling, and waiting breathlessly
for his next crime, why on earth did the killings stop?
Possible answers to perhaps the most baffling aspect of the
Whitechapel Murders will be examined in the next article
of this series, Disappearing Into History.
71. www/ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/124780
72. Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org
73. Brown, Howard: www.jtrforums.com
GENERAL SOURCES
Begg, Paul: Jack the Ripper, The Facts, Barnes & Noble Books, N.Y. 2005;
Evans, Stewart and Skinner, Keith: The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Companion,
Carroll & Graf, N.Y. 2000; Evans, Stewart and Rumbelow, Donald: Jack the
Ripper, Scotland Yard Investigates, Sutton Publishing 2006; Dimolianis,
Spiro: Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories,
Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders,
McFarland & Company, 2011; Wood, Simon: Deconstructing Jack: The
Secret History of the Whitechapel Murders, Marywood Publishing 2015.

Tim Mosley is a lifelong Ripperologist, having been introduced to
Jack the Ripper in 1961 via Boris Karloff’s Thriller. He founded the
original jtrforums.com in 2003 and is an administrator of the current
site. Scott Nelson is an environmental engineer living in northern
California. He has been studying the case for 40 years. With thanks to
Eduardo Zinna for his assistance with this article.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
THE RIPPER OF WATERLOO ROAD
The Murder of
Eliza Grimwood in 1838
By JAN BONDESON
When that intrepid ghost-hunter, Mr Elliott O’Donnell,
was making some inquiries about London’s haunted
murder houses in the 1890s, he found an old street hawker
named Jonathan who had been a boy at the time of one of
London’s most notorious unsolved murders: the brutal
‘ripping’ of the beautiful young prostitute Eliza Grimwood
at No. 12 Wellington Terrace, Waterloo Road, back in 1838
when Queen Victoria was young. Jonathan’s mother, who
had known both Eliza and her boyfriend William Hubbard,
used to say that the former was “as tidy a looking girl as
was to be found in the ‘ole neighbourhood.” A Mrs Glover,
who used to visit somebody lodging in Hubbard’s house,
had twice seen Eliza Grimwood’s ghost, dressed just as
she had been in her lifetime, making the bed in the murder
room. People in Wellington Terrace saw the ghost looking
out through the ground floor window so often that they
got used to it, and were not alarmed by its presence, or so
at least Elliott O’Donnell assures us.
In contemporary articles on ‘Murder Houses’, the
sinister dwelling in what had used to be Wellington
Terrace was compared with the Curse on Mitre Square,
the site of one of the ‘Ripper’ crimes, and with No. 22
Wyndham Road, Camberwell, where an entire family had
been exterminated. Similar in notoriety was the strange
Bloomsbury ‘Murder Neighbourhood’ that had been
the site of the unsolved Euston Square, Burton Crescent
and Great Coram Street mysteries. In the early 1900s,
the Wellington Terrace murder house was still standing.
The area remained a seedy and rundown part of London,
although traffic across Waterloo Bridge gathered apace.
In 1905, the journalist Guy Logan wrote, in the ‘murder
46
houses’ column of the old magazine Famous Crimes Past
& Present, that:
No. 12, Wellington Terrace, is daily passed by
thousands who have no idea that it was once the
scene of a most mysterious murder. There Eliza
Grimwood, fair and frail, was cruelly done to death by
a male ‘fiend’ whom she had permitted to accompany
her home from the Strand Theatre …

On May 26 1838, Eliza Grimwood went to the Strand
Theatre, a well-known place of assignation among the
better class of London prostitutes. After attending the
play and enjoying a glass of wine or two, she was met
by a young, well-dressed foreigner, who spoke excellent
English with the French accent still apparent; he looked
like a respectable gentleman’s servant. Eliza and the
Foreigner may well have been previously acquainted; at
any rate, they seemed to be the very best of friends as
they travelled across Waterloo Bridge in a cab, laughing
and joking together. A witness saw them arrived at No.
12 Wellington Terrace at just after midnight, still in a jolly
and exhilarated mood. When Eliza’s servant Mary Fisher
let them into the house, the Foreigner hid his face from
her, and hastily walked into the parlour. The other four
people in the house: Eliza’s boyfriend William Hubbard,
the commercial traveller William Best, the prostitute
Mary Glover and the servant Mary Fisher, all spent a
comfortable night, although Eliza’s little spaniel dog was
heard to bark once or twice.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Eliza Grimwood entering the cab with ‘the Foreigner’,
a fanciful drawing from Famous Crimes Past and Present
The following morning, William Hubbard was going to
work as a bricklayer. He walked up to the half open door
to the back parlour, which was used as a bedroom by Eliza.
Since he was well aware that that she was a prostitute,
and unlikely to approve of him barging in when she was
entertaining some customer, he called out ‘Eliza!’ but
there was no response. After waiting for a while, Hubbard
walked into the room. Since it was still quite dark, it took
some time for him to get his bearings. At first, he could
only see what he thought was a bundle of clothes on the
floor, inside which there was a small pinkish object like
a crayfish. But as he bended down to touch it, he became
aware that it was in fact part of Eliza’s knee that was
only just showing between two folds of her voluminous
skirts. Eliza was lying still on the floor, and her face was
covered with a counterpane. Hubbard had barely realized
that there was clearly something very wrong, when he
perceived something sticky under his feet and looked
down, to find that he was standing in a huge pool of blood.
Slipping and sliding in the blood, the distraught Hubbard
made his way out of the room, staggered up to the front
door and cried out ‘Murder!’ But since there were very few
people about this early on a Saturday morning, no person
took any notice. Hubbard instead dashed upstairs and tore
open the door of his lodger, the prostitute Mary Glover. She
was in bed with her boyfriend, the commercial traveller
William Best. As Hubbard came bursting into the room,
Best hastily leapt out of bed, fearful that it was another
boyfriend of Miss Glover’s, who had come to beat him up.
But as Best was searching for his trousers in the darkened
room, he could see that it was Hubbard, from whom Mary
Glover rented her room. The agitated bricklayer blurted
out
“For God’s sake come downstairs!”
47
“What’s the matter?” asked the bewildered Mr Best.
“Poor Eliza has been murdered!”
Having recovered from this shock to the senses, Mr
Best got dressed, grasped a candlestick and resolutely
went downstairs. He entered Eliza’s bedroom and could
confirm that she was indeed dead, lying in an immense
pool of blood. The room was very much bloodstained,
even the ceiling. As Best was examining the lifeless body,
Hubbard, who was fearful of burglars, distractedly ran
about the house to see if anything had been stolen. As he
came lurching into the candle-lit murder room and saw
the state of it, he nearly had a fit, and Best “was fearful that
he intended to lay violent hands on himself”. Hubbard’s
hysterics were accompanied by those of the young servant
Mary Fisher, who had waited on Hubbard and Eliza for the
last two years, and the piteous crying of poor Mary Glover,
who had known Eliza well. How could some person have
murdered her friend in the room just underneath her own,
without the slightest noise being heard by any person in
the house?
Eliza Grimwood’s bedroom with the body;
from the Weekly Chronicle of June 3, 1838
The post-mortem examination showed that Eliza’s
throat had been dreadfully cut and her abdomen violently
‘ripped’. There was uproar in London, and the newspapers
were full of the ‘Waterloo Road Horror’. The officer
in charge of the murder investigation was Inspector
Charles Frederick Field, an experienced policeman with a
distinguished record. In the five years Inspector Field had
served in the Lambeth area, he had made the acquaintance
of many of its inhabitants. He had of course known Eliza
Grimwood, who had commonly been called the Countess,
because of her handsome appearance, elegant clothes
and proud way of carrying herself. As he later told his
friend Charles Dickens, “when I saw the poor Countess (I
had known her well enough to speak to), lying dead with
her throat cut, on the floor of her bedroom, a variety of
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
reflections calculated to make a man rather low in his
spirits, came into my head.”

Inspector Field saw two possibilities: either ‘the
Foreigner’ had murdered Eliza, seemingly just for the
fun of it, or Hubbard was the guilty man. A purse full of
gold guineas had been stolen from the murder room,
but Eliza’s valuable jewellery had been left behind in her
cabinet. Eight florins, apparently the wages of sin she had
been given by her visitor, had also been left in the room.
It turned out that the Foreigner had been seen by several
witnesses at the Strand Theatre, who provided good and
consistent descriptions of him. Joseph Spicknell, driver of
cab No. 949, said that a lady and a gentleman had hailed
him near the Strand Theatre the evening of the murder.
They seemed to know each other and the gentleman
addressed his companion as ‘Lizzy’, the name under
which Eliza Grimwood was known to her friends. The lady
was very good-looking, wearing a dark dress and a fawn-
coloured bonnet. The man was five feet seven or eight
inches tall, young and foreign-looking, with dark hair and
whiskers but no mustachios. He looked like a gentleman in
an elegant waistcoat, a dark dress-coat and a dark wide-
brimmed hat. Although the weather was fine, he carried
a mackintosh on his arm. Spicknell drove them to the
Hero of Waterloo public house near Wellington Terrace.
After the woman had paid him his fare, she smiled at him,
stroked the nose of his horse and said “You have a nice
horse”, before walking toward Wellington Terrace with
her friend.
Hubbard was a rough diamond, and a prostitute’s bully
who was partially supported by Eliza’s not inconsiderable
earnings. He resented Eliza’s regular customers, many of
whom were respectable gentlemen, particularly a certain
William Osborne, a Birmingham sword-cutler who was
going to take her to the Epsom races. But there was no
blood on Hubbard’s clothes, except what had splashed
onto his trousers in his mad dash to get out of the murder
room, nor was there any trace of the murder weapon. All
Hubbard’s shirts were identified, and they were all free
of blood. And could Hubbard, who was clearly a creature
of modest intellect and dissipated habits, really have
committed the murder without alerting any other person
in the house, or leaving any worthwhile clue? After the
murder, Hubbard had been in a state of prostration,
drinking and smoking immoderately, and ranting and
raving about his dear Eliza. When the Inspector went
to see Hubbard, the bricklayer looked much the worse
for wear after these excesses. When he asked why he
was kept under guard at the house, the Inspector gruffly
replied that it was for his own good, since throughout the
day, large and rowdy crowds had gathered outside the
48
murder house, baying for his blood.
Eliza Grimwood is murdered; from the New Newgate Chronicle
The murder of Eliza Grimwood was headline news
in every newspaper. The savage mutilation of the body,
and the sheer mystery of the crime, put it in a class of
its own among London murders. According to Bell’s New
Weekly Messenger, “The horrible transaction has caused
a frightful sensation in the neighbourhood, and during
the whole of Sunday crowds were collected in front of
the house.” The Globe wrote that “No occurrence of the
kind that have taken place in the metropolis for years
(not even the horrible atrocity perpetrated by Greenacre)
has excited so much interest as this mysterious affair.
During the whole of yesterday crowds collected in front
of the house where the murder was committed; and at
seven o’clock in the evening not fewer than a hundred
and fifty persons had thus assembled, who were eagerly
engaging in discussing the circumstances connected with
the shocking occurrence. An individual who seemed to be
a street-preacher attempted to ‘improve’ the event, but as
no one appeared disposed to listen to him, he soon shifted
his quarters. The toll-takers at Waterloo-bridge state that
the receipts from foot passengers during the week have
trebled the usual average, so great has been the crowd of
curious gazers from all parts of the town.” For those who
could not afford to buy newspapers, there were handbills
pasted up all over London to proclaim that a horrible
murder had been committed. In Whitechapel Road, a man
was parading with ‘a show’ representing, as his placard
announced, ‘the brutal murder of Eliza Grimwood’. The
Morning Herald deplored that “the recent horrible murder
of Eliza Grimwood in the Waterloo-road has furnished
subject for the pictorial talents of the penny showmen.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
This was too rich, too sanguinary, too disgusting, to be
neglected by the itinerant caterers for the enjoyment of the
rising generation …”
Inspector Charles Frederick Field,
from the Illustrated London News of 1855. In 1838
he of course looked a good deal fitter and more youthful than this
Inspector Field hoped that the Foreigner would make
himself known to the police to clear his name, so that
Hubbard could be put under pressure, but this never
happened. A man named John Owen claimed to have seen
the murderer standing outside No. 12 Wellington Terrace,
but at the coroner’s inquest, he proved to be a liar and time-
waster. After an anonymous letter had been received from a
‘John Walter Cavendish’ claiming to be Eliza’s client for the
night of the murder, and saying that Hubbard had ‘bullied’
him and thrown him out of the house, the bricklayer was
arrested. While Hubbard was in police custody, Eliza’s three
brothers had posters pasted up all over London saying
that the murdered Eliza Grimwood’s belongings would
be sold by auction. An auction catalogue headed ‘By the
Administrators of the late Eliza Grimwood’ was printed
and sold for three pence; no person would be admitted
to the murder house unless they could produce one of
these vouchers. When the doors were opened, there was
a tremendous rush for admission, including a number of
well-dressed gentlemen and ladies. Although the sale was
held in one of the first floor rooms, many people halted to
admire the bloodstained floorboards in the murder room.
The bidding was brisk for Eliza’s chairs and sofa, and
particularly for her fine mahogany chest of drawers. The
deceased’s bed attracted even fiercer bidding, since it was
liberally marked with blood-spatter. In total, the furniture
49
sold for £64, a little more than the valuation, Eliza’s watch
and jewellery having already been sold for above £80.
After the auction, it was impossible for the buyers to leave
the house by way of Wellington Terrace, due to the dense
crowd outside. At the advice of the auctioneer, they had to
be let out through the back, before the angry mob outside,
waving their auction catalogues and demanding entry,
could be let in to see the murder room. Disappointed that
no mementoes of the murdered woman remained, one of
these rowdy fellows made a bid for the bloodstained carpet,
which he swiftly rolled up and took outside, proposing to
cut it up into smaller fragments to sell it to the mob outside.
The covetous Grimwood brothers must have been grinding
their teeth that they had not thought of this stratagem
himself.
The cellar of No. 12 Wellington Terrace,
from the Weekly Chronicle of June 10, 1838
When Hubbard was told the shameful news of the
brothers Grimwood selling the entire contents of his house
at auction, he became almost apoplectic with rage. His bed,
his chest of drawers, and even his clothes had been disposed
of. His solicitor applied to the Union Hall magistrates, but
although he managed to recover Hubbard’s writing-desk,
which had been confiscated by the police along with its
contents, there was no way of dealing with the covetous
builder Thomas Grimwood, brother of Eliza, who was
openly crowing at his cleverness in outfoxing the dismal
Hubbard. But Grimwood would not have long to exult at his
success. Just a few days later, he was run over by a carriage
in the street and carried to the London Hospital with several
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

broken ribs. One day, Hubbard and his two brothers came the case, realized that the 30-year-old Hill, who was already
bursting into the ward. They cursed and abused the injured a wreck of a man due to chronic alcoholism, had made his
builder in a shameful manner and swore that they would be confession to get away from military life. Mr Thomas, the
damned if they did not recover the property he had stolen superintendent of the London & Westminster Steam Packet
from Hubbard. The ailing Thomas Grimwood applied to the Company, testified that in May 1838, Hill had been in his
Lambeth Street magistrates to protect his client against the employ as a ticket collector. He produced an account-book
violent and threatening Hubbards, and this was granted showing that Hill had not absented himself from work at
him. the time. Nor had he “exhibited any conduct to induce a
In spite of the rebuff at Lambeth Street, Hubbard belief that he had committed a murder”. A friend of Hill’s
continued his struggle against the Grimwood brothers, who testified that they had often met in May 1838 and that Hill
had deprived him of all the furniture in his house, even his had behaved perfectly rationally and “manifested the same
own bed. He had found out, through large advertisements degree of sympathy” when reading the newspaper reports
pasted up throughout London, that Eliza Grimwood’s dog of the murder of Eliza Grimwood. The cabman Spicknell,
was to be seen at the Gun public house in Shoreditch. This who had seen the face of ‘the Foreigner’ was certain that
was a cunning ploy by the landlord Mr Chamberlayne, since Hill looked nothing like him. Inspector Field concluded that
the beer-barrels were speedily emptied by the crowd of in his mind, Hill was certainly innocent. The magistrate
curious Londoners who came to admire the pretty little discharged him, but he was advised to report to the Horse
spaniel dog, the purported murder witness, whose lack Guards barracks at once, or he would be charged with
of barking the night of the murder remained a mystery. desertion.
When Hubbard summoned him before the Worship Street
magistrates, Mr Chamberlayne said that although he
had exhibited the dog in his public house with a mind to
improving the trade, he was not the owner of the animal.
It had been lent to him by the shoemaker Mr Sparrow, who
was also present in court. The shoemaker said that he was
a friend of the brothers Grimwood, and that he had greatly
desired to buy some of Eliza’s jewellery as a curiosity, but he
had been outbid at the auction. Instead, Thomas Grimwood
had given him the dog. When the parties again met before
the Worship Street magistrates on July 11, quite a crowd
of onlookers had assembled to see Hubbard. Thomas
Grimwood was also present, along with his solicitor. The
latter individual effectively demolished Hubbard’s claims,
stating that Thomas Grimwood had acquired his right to
the dog by virtue of letters of administration. Just like the
remainder of his late sister’s effects, the animal was his to
dispose of. Mr Pelham produced a witness who had heard
Hubbard admit that he had purchased the dog, as a puppy,
and given it to Eliza as a present. This settled the case in the
minds of the magistrates, who took no further action except
to censure the publican Chamberlayne for pandering to
the depraved curiosity of the public by making a show
of Eliza’s little dog. The magistrates had to dispatch an
officer to prevent a fight breaking out, as the Hubbards and
Grimwoods went wrangling out of the office.
A handbill announcing Private Hill’s confession.

The main image, wrongly showing Hill shooting Eliza Grimwood,
The murder of Eliza Grimwood was never solved, in spite had probably been ‘lifted’ from some other broadsheet
of some late drama in 1845 when a private soldier named
Throughout the Victorian era, the murder of Eliza
George Hill confessed to the murder. There was a good deal
Grimwood was vividly remembered in London folklore.
of newspaper optimism that one of London’s unsolved
Indeed, it became a byword for any unsolved murder
murder mysteries would be solved after seven years had
mystery, as well as for the wild accusations that had
gone by, but Inspector Field, who returned to take charge of

50
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
been going round at the time. In 1848, a ludicrous list of
accusations against Lord Palmerston in the satirical monthly
The Man in the Moon included that of murdering Eliza
Grimwood. The next year, the same periodical lampooned
Charles Dickens for his short story ‘The Haunted Man’, the
reviewer saying that he had not the slightest idea “what the
crime committed by the Chemist might have been. For all
that appears it may have been murdering Eliza Grimwood.
Should not wonder if it was.” George Augustus Sala wrote
in a similar vein about people “who accuse you of having
set the Thames on fire, and murdered Eliza Grimwood, if
you do not accept their interminable romances …” and the
Radicals being accused of having “invented the Income Tax,
caused the Irish potato famine, set the Thames on fire, and
murdered Eliza Grimwood.” When the actor William Charles
Macready played a character named Gabriel Grimwood in
a boring religious melodrama, a voice from the audience
interrupted his harangues with the question “Look here,
old bloke, who cut Eliza’s throat?”
The church of St John, Waterloo Road, where Eliza Grimwood was
buried, an engraving from a drawing by Thomas Shepherd
For many years to come, the ghost of Eliza Grimwood
would be conjured up when London was shaken by some
51
gruesome unsolved murder. It was something like the
epitome of a murder mystery: the beautiful but flawed
victim, the base and unworthy Hubbard, and the multitude
of other suspects. In late 1857, when a large knapsack
containing human remains were found in a knapsack on the
abutment to Waterloo Bridge, there was debate whether
this was a hoax by some medical students, or a murder
with dismemberment by some student of James Greenacre,
the Edgware Road murderer of 1836. For topographical
reasons, a journalist thought the hideous relics on Waterloo
Bridge more reminiscent of the great murder sensation back
in 1838: “In some respects, it seems more to resemble the
case of Eliza Grimwood, that castaway whose murder has
probably haunted the memory of some brutal ‘gentleman’
…” Another writer on the Waterloo Bridge Mystery of 1857,
which would never be satisfactorily solved, commented on
this most recent addition to London’s unsolved murders:
“will the assassins ever be discovered, or will this horrid
tragedy remain for ever, like the murder of Eliza Grimwood,
years ago, a mystery, utterly beyond solution …”
When, in January 1860, a young prostitute named Marie
Tourtoulou was found murdered at No. 39 Rue Sainte Anne,
a newspaper headline exclaimed “An ‘Eliza Grimwood’ case
in Paris!” In 1863, the young prostitute Emma Jackson was
found murdered with her throat cut from ear to ear, inside
a seedy brothel at No. 4 George Street, St Giles’s. Although
25 years had passed since the Waterloo Road Horror,
there was immediate comparison with the case of Eliza
Grimwood, and prediction that the murder would remain
unsolved. “While England has a memory, it will ponder
upon the ghastly mystery of Eliza Grimwood’s fate. … When
will the murders of Eliza Grimwood, the child at Road Hill
House, and the girl in George Street, St Giles’s, be ‘out’?”
exclaimed the London Reader. Later in 1863, the bricklayer
Samuel Wright murdered his girlfriend Maria Green at
No. 11 Waterloo Road, “adjacent to the spot where the
unfortunate Eliza Grimwood was murdered upwards of 20
years ago.” An eloquent Morning Post journalist wrote that
It would almost seem that some localities in London
are doomed to bear a fatal reputation, either from
having been the scenes of crimes or accidents, or
from possessing evil reputations gained in other
ways. Waterloo-road is, unfortunately, particularly
distinguished on account of the doubtful reputation
attached to it in times not far gone by … The tragedy
of which Eliza Grimwood was the victim, from the
mystery attending the circumstances, and from the fact
that the perpetrator has never been brought to justice,
was enough to impress the name of the locality on
the public mind for a long time, even had the road not
borne a name which history will not let die.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
The ghost of Eliza Grimwood was again called to rise up
after the mysterious murder of the young prostitute Harriet
Buswell on Christmas Eve 1872, and after a woman’s
dismembered remains had been found in the Thames near
Battersea: “It is greatly feared that we are now in possession
of all we shall ever know concerning the unfortunate
woman, murdered and mutilated, whose remains have been
found in the Thames. The reward of £200 has failed to bring
to light any fresh particulars of the affair, which bids fair to
be consigned to Lethe along with that of Eliza Grimwood
and Harriet, of Coram-street …” An indignant writer on
the Buswell case was scathing about the skill possessed by
the Scotland Yard detectives: “They possess none, and it is
notorious that they make a mull of nearly every intricate
case taken in hand. What about the Eltham murder, the
Hoxton murder, or the murder of Eliza Grimwood (which
in its features was counterpart with the present Coram-
street Tragedy). Moreover, the circumstances connected
with the George-street murder are somewhat identical
with those of the present, and the criminal is at liberty.”
Due to the passage of time, the accounts of the Grimwood
case became increasingly confounded. One journalist wrote
that “in the famous case of Eliza Grimwood at least a dozen
persons claimed the credit of being her assassin. They were
all, of course, lunatics, or in delirium.” A writer on Waterloo
Bridge, which had become toll free after being purchased
by the Crown, said that in Waterloo Road, “Eliza Grimwood
was murdered by some miscreant, of whom the only trace
was a glove, bearing a ducal coronet”!
The final appearance of the ghost of Eliza Grimwood
was in 1888, when it was conjured up by Jack the Ripper’s
sanguineous handiwork in Whitechapel. A writer in the
Daily Telegraph commented that “those with retentive
memories may be comparing notes regarding the strange
similarity existing between the Whitechapel case and that
of Eliza Grimwood, who about half a century ago was found
in a house in the Waterloo-road under circumstances of
closely analogous horror, her murderer never having been
discovered.” The journalist speculated that “foul deed has
been wrought by a lunatic suffering from a recognised and
hideous form of homicidal monomania - possible in the case
of Eliza Grimwood, and incontrovertibly established in that
of the ‘Monster’ Renwick Williams, whose intended victims,
however, escaped with life - or whether the poor waif and
stray of a woman in Whitechapel was done to death by a
gang of fiendishly ferocious roughs.” A letter-writer to the
Irish Times wished to point out that: “Undetected crime in
London has assumed a very formidable and disappointing
shape. Note the Great Coram street murder, the Waterloo
Road murder, the Euston Square murder, the Burton
Crescent murder, the Stoke Newington murder, and various
minor atrocities. …Again is London startled with most
52
appalling murders, committed with impunity in its most
crowded thoroughfares.”

My conclusion would be the same as that of Inspector
Field, namely that the Foreigner committed the murder
of Eliza Grimwood. There is strong technical evidence in
favour of Hubbard’s innocence. Firstly, it is obvious from
the nature of the wounds, and the extent of bloodspatter in
the murder room, that the garments worn by the murderer
would be very extensively stained with blood. Hubbard
was the owner of seven shirts, all of which were found to be
free of blood, including the collar and cuffs. Nor were there
any bloodstains on his other clothes, except what could be
expected from a person stepping into a large pool of blood.
According to the washerwoman and other people who knew
about Hubbard’s rather limited wardrobe, all his garments
were present and correct. One could of course suggest that
he committed the murder naked or dressed only in his
underpants, but there was no way for him to have a bath
afterwards unless he dived into Thames from Waterloo
Bridge. It would of course also have been possible for him
to have clandestinely purchased another complete suit of
clothes in which to commit the murder, but this would have
demanded a degree of cunning that is not consistent with
the other observations of Hubbard. And then there is the
point of how to dispose of these extra clothes, and for that
matter also the murder weapon. No person saw Hubbard
sneak out of the house, through the front or rear entrances,
and making such an attempt would have been hazardous
indeed, since there were still people in the streets this warm
and balmy late May evening, and since he was quite well
known locally. The environs of the house were thoroughly
searched by the police, but neither bloodstained clothes
nor murder weapon were found. Hubbard’s own account of
how he found Eliza’s body makes good sense and contains
no contradictions or inconsistencies. The conclusion must
be that not only were the magistrates quite right when they
acquitted Hubbard, he was almost certainly innocent of
committing the murder.
It can of course not be ruled out that the police were
right and that the murder of Eliza Grimwood was just a
random act of violence, committed by some nondescript
ruffian who had the luck to be able to leave London on
one of the ships lying on the Thames the very next day.
But still, the ‘foreign sailor’ hypothesis has several serious
drawbacks. Firstly, we know from the testimony of Mary
Glover and some of the Strand Theatre witnesses that Eliza
was quite cautious when selecting her customers. Most
of her clients were ‘regulars’ with whom she had been
acquainted for months, or even years. When some fun-
loving gentleman wanted to make her acquaintance, he was
introduced to her by some friend who could vouch that he
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
was a respectable man and that he could pay for himself.
It seems unlikely that a foreign sailor would have access
to such a resource. Secondly, we know that Eliza charged
at least half a sovereign for any customer who wanted to
accompany her home to Wellington Terrace. This would be
an excessive amount for a sailor to pay for one single night
of pleasure, since such a considerable sum could have kept
him going at the cheap brothels for the entire period of his
leave. Thirdly, ‘the Foreigner’ is multiply recorded to have
had elegant dress and suave manners. All the witnesses
who saw him thought he looked rather like a gentleman,
and not a single one of them even entertained the notion
that he might have been some rough seafaring man.
Although he spoke French (and possibly also Italian), he
could also speak good English. Several witnesses observed
that he addressed Eliza Grimwood as ‘Lizzy’ and that they
seemed to be on familiar terms, like if they had met under
similar circumstances in the past. Bearing in mind what we
know about Eliza’s habits, it is likely that they had made an
appointment to meet at the theatre.
There are also some important observations indicating
that far from being the random act of a violent sailor,
the murder had been carefully planned. Firstly, several
witnesses agree that ‘the Foreigner’ wore a broad-brimmed
hat. Did he use this as a disguise, since he was worried
about possible witnesses? Importantly, the servant Mary
Fisher added that when entering the murder house, he
hid his face from her by pulling his hat down and walked
quickly into Eliza’s room. This would indicate that already
when entering No. 12 Wellington Terrace, he had some fell
purpose in mind. And why did he carry a long mackintosh
across his arm? After all, it was late May and the weather
was warm and fine. This garment would become very
useful to protect his other clothing from the bloodspatter
when he committed the murder. If he was also carrying a
cloth bag, into which to put his bloodstained mackintosh,
gloves, hat and gaiters, he would present a perfectly normal
appearance when leaving the house.
A novel suggestion was made by a correspondent to
the Observer newspaper. Pooh-poohing the idea that the
miserable Hubbard had killed the Goose that laid the Golden
Eggs, and blasting the Cavendish letter as an elaborate
hoax, he brought forward a novel theory of his own. Clearly,
‘the Foreigner’ must be the guilty man, but what about the
extreme brutality of the murder and mutilation of the body,
and the absence of a credible motive. The writer knew about
the London Monster of 1790, who took such an insane
delight in stabbing ladies bottoms, and also various other
‘monsters’ of similar proclivities that London and Paris
had produced. Might not the murder of Eliza Grimwood be
the work of such a perverted creature, a serial killer who
delighted in murdering women of the street. From the
53
Causes Célèbres, he quoted the case of a debauched French
Baron, a “demon of the grossest and most unaccountable
sensuality”, who had murdered several young women and
drunk their blood, before being apprehended and executed.
There was no reaction to this challenge, either from the
police or from the newspaper journalists, perhaps because
the exposure of the Cavendish letter as a falsification
rendered part of its reasoning obsolete. This is a pity
because the theory proposed has many things speaking
in its favour. The cunning with which the murder was
committed, the calm demeanour of the killer, the absence of
a sound when the murder was committed, and his stealthy
escape from the house puzzled Inspector Field very much.
It was like if it had all been premeditated and carefully
planned, and if ‘the Foreigner’ had killed before. Was the
Waterloo Road Horror the work of a serial killer, and was
Eliza Grimwood not his first victim?

A sketch of Eliza Davies, done after death by some enterprising
journalist, from the Weekly Chronicle of May 21, 1837
In 1837, the barmaid Eliza Davies was murdered at the
King’s Arms public house at No. 19 Frederick Street. The
murder happened very early in the morning, and there
were no useful witnesses. The police were led on a wild
goose chase, with divergent descriptions of the murderer,
and the murder was never solved. The main suspect was
a dapperly dressed young Frenchman who had been
seen with Eliza Davies the days before the murder, but
this elusive ‘boyfriend’ was never tracked down, and the
murder remained unsolved. In 1839, the Princes Street
watchmaker Robert Westwood was murdered in his
house by two foreign-looking men, who made off with a
number of watches, never to be apprehended. There were
suspicions against the Swiss paper-hanger Nicholas Carron,
who lived not far from Mr Westwood, and who absconded
to America after the murder, but there was not sufficient
evidence to charge him with the crime. The younger of
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
the two miscreants was never identified at all. There were
persistent murmurations at the time that the Grimwood
and Westwood murders were linked in some way, but this
was never followed up by the police.
At this stage, I would suspect that most readers agree
with me (and with Inspector Field) that ‘the Foreigner’
was the guilty man. In an attempt to learn more about his
identity, it is worthwhile to use a strategy well known to the
‘Ripperologists’ and have a look at some of the convicted
killers of women of the time, to see if any promising leads
might be forthcoming. As we have seen, we also have three
unsolved London murders in the years 1837, 1838 and
1839, those of Eliza Davies, Eliza Grimwood and Robert
Westwood, with vague contemporary rumours linking
these three crimes. Was a serial killer at large in London in
the late 1830s, and did he claim more victims than three?
Of the murderers active at the time, the majority could be
ruled out straight away, due to the obvious discrepancies
with the description of the Foreigner: the Cadogan Square
murderer William Henry Marchant was too young, the
Putney murderer Daniel Good too Irish, and the Battersea
Bridge murderer Auguste Dalmas too old.
The discovery of the murder of Lord William Russell,
from Cleave’s Penny Gazette of May 16, 1840
In May 1840, the 24-year-old Swiss valet François
Benjamin Courvoisier murdered his elderly master Lord
William Russell at No. 14 Norfolk [today Dunraven] Street
near Park Lane. The murder was committed in a cunning
and stealthy manner, and the police initially thought
Lord William had been murdered by burglars intent on
plundering the house. Courvoisier showed impressive
coolness and confidence, and his clothes were not at all
stained with blood. He had come to London in 1836, and
worked as a footman in various wealthy households, earning
a good salary. He had ideas above his station in life, and was
very partial to the ladies, taking every opportunity to enjoy
himself in the London nightlife. What led to his conviction
was excessive greed, asking the proprietress of a hotel near
54
Leicester Square, where he had worked just after coming to
London, to take care of a parcel full of Lord William’s silver
forks and spoon, and the deaf old nobleman’s gold ear-
trumpet. At the Old Bailey, the evidence against him was
rock solid, although the murder weapon was never found,
and although it remained a mystery why this well-paid
young domestic would murder his harmless and elderly
master.
Courvoisier in the condemned cell,
from the Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette of July 5, 1840
When Courvoisier was awaiting execution in Newgate,
he wanted to confess to the murder of Eliza Grimwood,
although his uncle persuaded him to keep quiet. According
to a note from the crime historian Guy Logan, the author
and amateur criminologist George R. Sims had heard that
while in the Newgate death cell, Courvoisier had wanted
to confess to two recent unsolved murders of young
London ‘unfortunates’, most likely those of Eliza Grimwood
in 1838 and Eliza Davies in 1837. There are also some
circumstances linking Courvoisier to the murder of Robert
Westwood, and his former employer testified that one
evening, the Swiss valet had arrived home very late, panting
and bedraggled, and there had been speculation that he
had committed a murder. He perfectly fits the description
of the Foreigner, with regard to height, build, features and
clothing, and he also fits the rather vague description of
the young French ‘boyfriend’ of Eliza Davies. Just like ‘the
Foreigner’, Courvoisier could speak both French and Italian,
but he also spoke good English, although with the French
accent remaining. One witness thought his name similar to
that of the French assassin Fieschi, and Eliza may well have
spoken the name of her murderer when he came to fetch
her at the Strand Theatre, although a witness misheard it
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

as ‘He is here’. Then we have the matter of the mackintosh into the 1860s. Adolphus Feistel lived on in the murder
brought by ‘the Foreigner’ to the murder house at house until 1851, along with his wife who was a foreign
Wellington Terrace, in order to avoid getting his clothes toy dealer; the next tenant was the violin maker William
blood-stained; I rather suspect that this was the modus Ebsworth Hill, who would remain in the house until 1868.
operandi also in the murder of Lord William Russell, and In 1864, a journalist wrote, in an article on cheap dinners
perhaps in the murder of Eliza Davies as well. In all four and where to find them, “If the gastronomic student will
murders, the modus operandi was the same: the cutting cross Waterloo-bridge, will walk down that combination
of the throat with great force, making use of a formidable of dubious tenancy and faded respectability known as the
knife that was never recovered. Courvoisier would not Waterloo-road, will pass the half-forgotten site of Eliza
be the only example of an opportunistic serial killer, the Grimwood’s murder, will proceed under the railway bridge,
Ripper of Waterloo Road, who murdered men for the sake and continue his pilgrimage almost due south …” In 1865,
of profit and women for motives of sexual sadism.
the houses in Waterloo Road were again renumbered,
 from the centre of London towards the periphery, those
on the eastern side of the road receiving uneven numbers:
After Eliza Grimwood’s effects had been sold at auction,
it must have been very difficult for Hubbard to find a the Feathers tavern close to Waterloo Bridge on the Surrey
tenant for the house in Wellington Terrace, since every side of the river became No. 1 Waterloo Road, and the
Londoner knew that a particularly gruesome murder had murder house No. 27 Waterloo Road.
been committed there. Rumours soon spread that the
empty house was haunted by Eliza Grimwood’s restless
spirit. Hubbard stayed at his mother’s house, and did not
dare to move back to Wellington Terrace, although he still
had the let for the house. In September 1838, a newspaper
wrote that “Notwithstanding the length of time which has
elapsed since the murder of Eliza Grimwood, the house
which she occupied in the Waterloo-road has remained
untenanted ever since Hubbard quitted it. In order to
facilitate the letting of it, the landlord has reduced the
rent considerably, but all to no purpose. Numerous have
been the applications from individuals of both sexes
to look over the house, upon the pretence of taking it,
should it suit their convenience, but it has afterwards
been apparent, with no other object than that of gratifying
an idle curiosity, From present appearances no one is
likely very soon to become the inmate of this dwelling, so
notorious is it in the annals of crime, while the landlord
has the mortification of knowing that he is not only
pestered by inquisitive observers, but is sure to be a very
great pecuniary sufferer by its inoccupancy.”
And the gloomy prediction of this newspaper journalist
would prove to be nothing but the truth. The haunted
murder house at No. 12 Wellington Terrace stood empty
throughout 1839, 1840, 1841 and 1842, but the Post
Office directory for 1843 shows that it had finally got
The Feathers public house and Wellington Terrace,
a tenant, the German wine merchant Adolphus Feistel,
from Vol. 6 of Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford’s
who may well have been a foreign immigrant who Old and New London
could not understand what all the fuss was about this
notorious murder house. In 1844, the various ‘Terraces’ In the years to come, a number of respectable
in Waterloo Road were incorporated in the main road, tradesmen would live in the rehabilitated murder house at
and the houses renumbered: the murder house at No. 12 what had become No. 27 Waterloo Road: the portmanteau
Wellington Terrace became No. 192 Waterloo Road. The maker Wollrath Zwanziger, the cork manufacturer Henry
old numbering also remained, however, and the phrase Clemence, and the watchmaker Abraham Kaufmann.
‘Wellington Terrace, Waterloo Road’ was in use well Old Waterloo Bridge was closed to traffic in 1924 after

55
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
The site of Wellington Terrace today. The grey building is the Waterloo Campus, King’s College London;
becoming increasingly unstable. After a heated debate
whether it should be repaired or destroyed, it was
demolished in 1936, and a new bridge constructed next to
it. The murder house at what had become No. 27 Waterloo
Road still stood in 1937, but its days were counted: in
1938, it is recorded to have been empty, and in 1939, it
is no longer listed in the Post Office directory. In 1940,
only the Feathers tavern at No. 1 Waterloo Road, and a
shortened terrace consisting of the remaining Wellington
Terrace houses at No. 3- No. 11 Waterloo Road, remained
standing. The Cornwall House Annexe of the H.M. Customs
and Excise had been constructed where the remainder
of the terrace had once been, with the Royal Waterloo
Hospital for Women and Children occupying the corner
with Stamford Street. In 1951, only No. 11 Waterloo Road
still stood, but this ultimus of old Wellington Terrace was
pulled down the following year. Although some older
houses in Waterloo Road remain at the corner with
Exton Street, nothing whatsoever remains of Wellington
Terrace; the Cornwall House Annexe is today the Waterloo
Campus of Kings College London, and the Royal Waterloo
56
the red building the Conway Hall, University of Notre Dame
Hospital has become the Conway Hall of the University of
Notre Dame. If the ghost of Eliza Grimwood has not been
exorcized by constant noise from the motor vehicles in
busy Waterloo Road, the clatter from the trains on their
way to Waterloo Station, and the revel of the jolly young
students, then it would gaze in horror at the Southbank
Centre and the National Film Theatre, and that curious
contraption, the London Eye.

This is an edited extract from Jan Bondeson’s book The
Ripper of Waterloo Road (History Press 2017).
JAN BONDESON is a senior lecturer and
consultant rheumatologist at Cardiff University.
He is the author of Rivals of the Ripper, Murder
Houses of London, The London Monster, The Great
Pretenders, Blood on the Snow and other true
crime books, as well as the bestselling Buried
Alive.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Handling Information
Overload In Ripperology
By NINA and HOWARD BROWN
Ripper-related research has come a long way just
within the last 30 years. Up until the Centennial of
the Whitechapel Murders in 1988, the ways in which
researchers communicated with each other was little
different than those means utilized by people in 1907
or 1967. Excluding the medium of television, people
in 1907 relied on the telephone, personally meeting
other devotees of the case, or sending a written letter
or a telegram were the only means of communicating
with one another just as they would be the only means
in 1977.
Enter Casebook. In 1996, Stephen Ryder established the
first Internet meeting place of like-minded students of the
case in the world. In time, other sites would surface which
hosted interested parties as would sites which would be a
single individual’s perception of the murders. The sharing
of information accelerated to a level researchers from just
a few years before couldn’t have imagined.
One wonders what the researchers of old would think
now in this age of virtually instantaneous communication
via Social Ripperology media, particularly Facebook. The
ability to communicate with a researcher in London or
California or Australia instantly is a terrific tool which
we all hope will be used as much as possible in the years
ahead.
On the other hand, there are quite a few researchers who
either have abandoned the message boards (Casebook or
JTRForums) to pursue their research by other means, or
were researchers who never participated on either in the
first place. We see academic papers being produced on a
regular basis, most of which provide a general overview
of the murders.
Conventions, tours, and mediums such as YouTube
also have emerged as fonts of information for interested
parties. The first Convention, organized by Stewart
P Evans and his good lady Rosie, was established 21
years ago. This year, 2017, will feature two events. Tour
companies, such as that of Richard Jones, operate on a
57
daily basis. Blogs, another creation originating around
the advent of the 21st century, are also updated on a
regular basis, many specialize on certain aspects of the
case (police, maps, specific suspects, etc). There are also
those researchers who still utilize British archives or
other repositories around the world (getting up off one’s
backside) in their work.
Social Ripperology pages on Facebook are also diverse.
There are almost 20 that we know of... some focus on
books, some on the page holder’s personal interest, and
others on a variety of aspects within the case. JTRForums
also has a page which focuses primarily on newspaper
articles of interest. One drawback of the Social Rip scene
is the formatting. Unless one copies and pastes what
one sees, discussions get scrolled out of view and there
isn’t really any way, at the present time, of storing these
discussions in a place for easy access... unless you save
the entire page and extract whatever it was you wanted
to save.
All of this has created an information overload....
and we didn’t even get to the magazines (Ripperologist,
Ripperana, Whitechapel Society Journal, or The Dagger).
Not to forget podcasts, Skype (which will be utilized this
year in the London Convention in August - see back cover)
or documentaries. Unless you spend a great deal of time
online there’s a very good chance that you’ve missed
something which might have been of some interest to you
or even of importance on a project you’re engaged in.
In 2009, we established a thread for JTRForums
members and visitors, entitled: Notable New Threads &
Posts. Its our means of keeping current discussions from
fading into oblivion.... and to illuminate finds shared by
members for other researchers and curious onlookers,
alike.
For the researcher interested in detailed work
(genealogical reports, censuses, obscure or never seen
newspaper reports), these times are the Age of the Loose
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

End. Tying up loose ends by putting names to previously Mr. Damgaard has contributed numerous contemporary
unnamed people found in contemporary newspaper Danish newspaper articles which have been interesting.
articles; by supplying photographs to accompany events One such find was a letter from a Danish Mayor to a
or any reportage which fills in spaces previously left newspaper regarding his belief that Szemeredy was Jack
blank; the odd newspaper article which contains a name the Ripper with the result being that Carl Muusmann wrote
overlooked all these years that might spark new discussion Hvem Var Jack The Ripper in 1908. Another of his finds was
and lead to other avenues of research. a communique from Sir Robert Anderson to the Danish
And in quite a few instances these loose ends have led legation in London concerning thieves and forgerers loose
to further discussion and improvement upon the existing on the Continent never seen before.
case history by some of the tenacious researchers who Some researchers,
grace JTRForums. like Far West (USA)
At this point we’d like to mention a half dozen of those native ANNA MORRIS,
data diggers who have enhanced the site over the last few have been instrumental
years with their research and who have been generous in asking insightful
with their time and eagerness to share with one and all. questions which have
led to the perpetuation
But before we do, we want to mention that there
of several ongoing
are many people on the Forums who make positive
discussions. Anna has
contributions and that this exercise wasn’t undertaken to
also recently rekindled
overlook their efforts. Likewise, we mention the following
interest in Lizzie
researchers in no particular order. Links to all of the
Allbrook, a particular hobby of hers, material on brothels
following finds are available to one and all on the front
in Cardiff, and interesting information regarding Breezer
page of JTRForums under ‘Notable Finds’.
Hill unfortunates. She has also been investigating the
PETER DAMGAARD
Catholic census reports recently made available to the
is an archivist working
public. Ms. Morris has been a member of the Forums since
at Tarnby Municipality
January 2014.
in his native Denmark.
SEAN CRUNDALL,
Peter is known by the
a Londoner, has an
screen handle, Kattrup.
expansive knowledge of
Since he joined the
older crime-related and
Forums in April 2016,
Ripper-oriented works
Peter has provided data
in print. Some of the
about or inquired in
notable efforts Sean has
regard to the police use of bicycles in 1888; a mysterious
undertaken have been
suspect mentioned only in non-English papers (Oscar
taking and sharing the
Marlington 1899); Charles Le Grand’s Danish registry
photograph of Edward
card; photos and background material about the theater
Knight Larkins’ home in
which presented the first film about Jack the Ripper
South London (Larkins’ digs in 1888); locating positive
(Denmark, 1907); short stories written by Charles Le
recollections of Fred Wensley by a former Scotland Yard
Grand; material on Le Grand’s whereabouts between 1924
head; his experiences and thoughts on contacting relatives
and 1930; letters written by Le Grand in 1895 and he had
of people linked to the murders and its pitfalls, as well
been a solid contributor on Le Grand-related threads.
as enhancing many ongoing discussions with further
information from his experience as a researcher... plus
material pertinent to the Morley Seaside Convalescent
Home... all the while with a great deal of enviable civility.
Sean has been a member of the Forums since November
2015.
GARY BARNETT, Stepney born, has worked in several
areas of research ever since he joined the boards in January
2014. Currently, as with Ms. Morris, Mr. Barnett has been
going great guns in the Catholic census reports recently
made available; the Harrison Barber slaughtermen;
Still from the first Ripper film, 1907 a collection of old articles on Duval Street; Ratcliffe

58
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

Highway articles; Tiger has been responsible for contributing to or finding the
Bay articles; locating a following:
blind beggar, Thomas • Finding the d.o.d. of Pearly Poll (Mary Ann Connolly) in
Fogerty, living with a October 1895 based on recent Catholic census research.
Mary A. Connolly (Pearly
• 29 Aldgate Street
Poll); Sgt. Thick and East
• Updated list of Scots Guard Kellys
End boxing matches;
Eddowes family articles; • More research into Ted (the Pensioner) Stanley
material on Polly • Elizabeth Jackson research
Nichols’ employers, the • Ada Wilson research
Cowdrys; locating an
• Alice Carroll information
article mentioning the utilization of a swordstick in the
• Charles Le Grand material
murder of Emma Smith; plus other notable efforts within
existing threads. • ..and a list of girls born in Limerick named Maria, Marie,
or Mary Kelly ( 1857-1864)...
Las Vegas’s finest,
JERRY DUNLOP, has
started a long list of
threads ever since he
joined the Forums. Jerry
focuses primarily on
newspaper articles and
from those sources he
has provided the field
with interesting finds
such as an attack on
Mrs. Lipski (1887), Dennis Lynch (1889), Ward’s Timber
Yard and Elizabeth Jackson (1888), an article in The Echo
suggesting the police felt two men were involved with
the Pinchin Street Torso and Whitehall Mystery, material
on PC Andrews and the Mackenzie murder, background
on “Guzzling Jim”, and discovering William Brodie (self-
confessed Ripper in 1889) using an alias (Broder) which A photograph of Ada Tradigan discovered by Debra Arif,
led to the discovery of Brodie’s photo by Debra Arif. Jerry strongly suspected of being Ada Wilson
has assisted in numerous research endeavors since he
Debra is shown here with daughter (and secret to Debs’
joined JTRForums in June of 2014.
success) Maisie.
DEBRA ARIF needs
There are links to all of these fine efforts on the front
no introduction to
page of the Forums for your perusal.
researchers or the
readers of Ripperologist
magazine. Her enviable 

resumé stretches back

NINA and HOWARD BROWN
over a decade on the are the proprietors of
Forums and on Casebook. JTRforums.com.
The Yorkshire-based
researcher... in just
the past 12 months...

59
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Dear Rip
YOUR LETTERS AND COMMENTS
DEAR RIP
Allow me to congratulate you on yet another wonderful
issue with #153. The cover was perhaps my favorite of the
year, although choosing a favorite Rip cover is often like
being asked to point out your favorite rose while standing
in a rose garden.
What prompted me to pick up the proverbial pen and
write was the pilot article of the issue – The Tell-Tale
Blade by Daniel Cazard. My normal habit when a new
Rip rolls through the inbox is to enjoy the cover for a
moment, peruse the contents, contemplate the wisdom
of the Editorial, and then scroll at hyper speed down to
the reviews. However, the subject matter of Mr. Cazard’s
dissertation as well as his evocative title begged that I
stop and read. And this I did. Twice. It was all for the good
as I was to later find out that living-legend-at-large had
been compelled to take the month off (get well!) and so
there were no new non-fiction reviews (David Green is a
fine reviewer but I’m not present in the market for Ripper
fiction).
Mr. Cazard’s enthusiasm was so raw and refreshing
that I thought he might be interested in some items I
found when I was asking the same questions as he and
embarked on a very similar quest along the dark shadows
of George Yard. He was good enough to reference a short
article I’d written some time back and published in
the Whitechapel Society Journal. I should note that my
suggestion that Francis Hewitt heard Tabram struggling
with her killer and lied about it is just an idea and not a
belief I subscribe to. In any event, I noticed Mr. Cazard did
not reference my book, The Bank Holiday Murders: The
True Story of the First Whitechapel Murders, which deals
in depth with all things Tabram, so it’s likely he has not yet
read it or might not be aware of it.
I believe there can be little doubt that murder was in
the mind of the killer that Bank Holiday evening when he
set out from his lodgings. So, in that respect, the murder
60
of Tabram was premeditated. However, there’s nothing in
the evidence to compel us to believe that she had been
singled out specifically. She may have been so, but it’s just
as likely that she was a victim of chance. Likewise, while
two killers is always possible, there’s no evidence in any
of the murders to force us to that conclusion.
As laid out in full in my book, Mary Ann Connelly aka
Pearly Poll was not a reliable witness and, so it would
appear, did not spend the evening in the company of
Tabram and two soldiers. The soldiers described by
Connelly were never proved to have existed. A more
reliable witness is Ann Morriss, who knew Tabram well
and who saw her standing quite alone outside the White
Swan public house in the Whitechapel Road at 11pm. Mr.
Cazard asks how the killer and Tabram might have met
each other and I’d offer the most likely explanation is that
they met somewhere in or near a pub on the Whitechapel
Road and retired from there to George Yard. However,
seeing as how Tabram was murdered just outside the
communal bathrooms on the first floor of the building in
George Yard, it’s not impossible the killer was lying in wait
in a stall for any hapless woman who should come along.
Mr. Cazard moves on to the question of the blades, and
laments ‘what I wonder about more often than why the
large one had been brought in the first place is which of
the two had been used first. Had the wound to the heart
been the final blow after a 38 stabs-long frenzy, or had
it been delivered first?’ Mr. Cazard observes that the
majority of opinion offered on Tabram seems to accept
the notion that the wound to the heart inflicted by the
larger blade was the ‘final blow’ and he questions why
this is and if it is so. Identifying accepted wisdoms in
the case, understanding their genesis, and coming to an
understanding as to the accuracy of these wisdoms, is
one of the most appealing (and frustrating) aspects of
Ripperology to me. So I applaud and sympathize with Mr.
Cazard’s skepticism. I certainly cannot speak as to how
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
other writers concluded the stab to the heart had been
inflicted after the penknife injuries, but as for myself, I
collected every scrap of information I could find on the
Tabram murder when researching my book, and an eye
witness description from a Star reporter, appearing in
their August 8th edition, was quite telling: ‘The wounds
on the body are frightful. There are about 8 on the chest,
inflicted in almost circular form, while the probably fatal
one – certainly much the largest and deepest of any – is
under the heart.’
This information does not exclude the possibility that
the killer utilized his larger blade first, sheathed it, and
then set about the less effective and more energetic attack
with the penknife. But if we rely on our own logic and
common sense, it’s more likely that the killer attempted to
pierce the breast plate with his penknife and, failing to do
so, brought out his larger blade. I also detail in my book the
likelihood that the killer utilized this larger blade again by
inserting it into Tabram via her vagina, thus creating the
otherwise mysterious pool of blood under her legs. This
would have been in the same manner Emma Smith was
assaulted with a ‘blunt instrument’. In fact, the dagger-like
blade used on Tabram and the blunt instrument wielded
on Smith may have been the same weapon.
I published in my book a notation by Home Office
official William Patrick Byrne, penciled onto a brief
report of Tabram’s murder, which included a crucial piece
of information regarding this larger blade. He writes
‘Some of the wounds so narrow that a bayonet was first
suggested as the weapon but bayonet wounds are quite
unmistakable – WPB.’ If we trust that Mr. Byrne was privy
to information that we are not, we can exclude a bayonet
from the inquiry. Such a thin blade would also make the
average dagger less likely. We’re then looking at a sword
with a stiletto blade – that is to say a blade sharp on both
sides. Dr. Killeen was easily able to deduce this from the
wounds themselves. And it’s worth noting that Byrne tells
us there had indeed been more than one wound inflicted
with this larger blade.
A sword, in the classical sense, is unlikely as such a
weapon would stand out and be remembered. However,
a method of self-protection that I was to find out was
rather common in Victorian times was a sword stick – a
sword concealed inside a walking stick. Sheathed, this
could have served as the blunt instrument used on Smith,
and unsheathed the weapon used both in Tabram’s chest
and private regions. Indeed, George R. Sims, an early
Ripperologist and a friend of many a police official, began
writing a story only days after the Tabram murder in which
the victim was murdered with a stiletto-bladed sword
stick. And following the Tabram murder, newspapers
began back-speculating that Emma Smith had likewise
61
been murdered with a sword stick. There was a feeling
or even a knowledge of this circulating at the time that
had become lost over the generations and not recognized
again until I began research for my own book.
My thinking on the Tabram murder is ever evolving,
but what I currently believe to be the most likely series
of events is that Tabram led her killer to the washrooms
on the first floor of George Yard building and it was here
that he struck by wrapping his forearm around her throat
in a chokehold and squeezing for only the few seconds it
would take for her to pass out. She was heavy, and as he
lowered her body to the ground she fell backward, striking
her head on the stone step that led up into the loo. At least
one contemporary illustration shows her with the back
of her head resting against this step. This impact would
explain the ‘effusion of blood’ or head injury noted by
Dr. Killeen at the inquest. In this position Tabram would
be on her back, arms to her side. The Killer then opened
Tabram’s petticoat and found she was not wearing a shirt
underneath (or else he cut it away and took it with him). He
then opened his pen knife and began inflicting the injuries
to the neck, chest and torso. Not satisfied, he would have
knelt between her legs, pushed them up and spread them
apart (this is how she was found), and unsheathed his
sword stick. At this point he would have inserted the blade
into Tabram, creating the ‘deal of blood’ between her legs
mentioned by Killeen with the greatest discretion. He then
would have stood and, before sheathing the blade, struck
one more blow, this time to Tabram’s chest. He would have
had no blood on him whatsoever.
I can only speculate as to why he attacked Tabram so
fiercely, but my guess is that it was because his previous
victim, Emma Smith, had been left for dead but survived
long enough to talk. He didn’t want to risk that happening
again, so he evolved on the next Bank Holiday with Tabram.
Finding his work here too clumsy and time consuming,
he again evolved in his thinking of blades and how to
most efficiently kill his victim. However, his method of
approaching the victim and rendering them unconscious
did not change, as we see with Nichols. In my upcoming
book, Whitechapel Confidential, I look very closely at the
murder of Polly Nichols and offer some new perspectives.
In closing, let me say that I enjoyed reading Mr. Cazard’s
article and also enjoyed writing this reply. I commend Mr.
Cazard on his critical thinking and Ripperologist magazine
for continuing to introduce new voices to the field.
YOURS TRULY,
TOM WESCOTT

 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
DEAR RIP
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to offer my
response to the letter sent in by Tom Wescott.
He can’t possibly have enjoyed reading my article
more than I have enjoyed his thoughtful argumentation,
it was very rewarding. Always a pleasure. And I believe
we disagree only about one point, while I have to concede,
gladly, in regards of another.
First I do have to clarify my tackling the various
scenarios of encounter, as it appears that I might have
been misunderstood here. I am and was from the outset
of the same opinion as to how the perpetrator met his
victim as he is. I deemed it necessary to go through the
possibilities (as they are indeed circulating) and explain
one by one why they don’t seem plausible to me. Overall
I like to re-encounter the possible sequence as naïvely
as possible, and also with as little reference as possible,
unless when an example urges itself. So the path-finding
was in this sense rhetorical. I needed to get it out of the
way, while in context the means of encounter have to be
mentioned.
Now, the idea of a walking stick concealing a blade is a
very attractive one, and I hadn’t thought of this possibility
at all. If I recall correctly such weapons came in different
length, full-length swords (or rapiers), their blades
reaching far into the stick, all the way down to knife-length
blades. The murderer could have carried a medium-length
blade, which would have been easier to yield.
This would also fit in organically with a later evolution
as far as the blades are concerned: the blade in the stick
his obvious first choice, but unsuitable for what he would
later come to desire.
It does takes a bit the wind out of the presence of the
large blade itself as an indicator for premeditation as
presented by me, albeit not for reason to assume that he
did come with the intention, as I agree. That he carried the
weapon that night with the intention to use it does give a
little wind back, meanwhile.
Our ideas about when this larger blade came first into
use still differ, though.
If I understand correctly, it is those ‘about 8 on the chest,
inflicted in almost circular form’ from which Mr. Wescott
follows that the perpetrator had first attempted to break
through the sternum and, upon failing, then unsheathed
the large blade. I do not quite follow, to begin with, why he
would have first tried to get through the chest with a pen-
knife, then take out the large blade, but then not continue
trying right then, but preoccupying himself with the
abdomen first. The only possible answer I could accept so
62
far would be blind rage. Furthermore, I don’t at all read
with necessity from these wounds to the chest that they
were testimony of such an attempt, vaguely circular or
not– there were quite a lot all together. Unless I was to
see this semi-circle be rather small; the sternum isn’t all
that wide.
But let’s say he first tried with the pen-knife. Doing
something he could have done much easier with the larger
blade he had on him as well. Trying it within the first
‘period’ of stabbing, then delaying it, even when the larger
blade was already drawn. The question still reminds why.
Why not straight with the large blade. Why with the pen-
knife at all?
Again, I can only think of blind rage for such an odd
approach. And not even then. I’d think that even in a frenzy
a man, who carries such a weapon, would have known it
on him. Instinctively it would have been the first weapon
to reach for. Not to mention with more sober calculation.
Plus, there was also still the possibility of response.
Even strangling might not be perfect, incapacitating
by chokehold even less – if the victim isn’t dead with
certainty, there’s a remaining risk: the shock of being
killed can wake people up.
Which is why it rather appears to me: incapacitate,
then make sure she won’t stir, then do what you came here
to do.
Mind you, I’m not a full 100% (never), especially not
since my change of heart in regards of the Nichols murder,
but the amount of wounds and the implication of a
murderer not fully having taken leave of his senses leads
me to lean strongly towards this scenario.
The chokehold is, by the way, a very appealing solution,
not least because the direct knife attack would be almost a
little too literally cloak and dagger (the head wound didn’t
make it into the article; I haven’t reached a conclusion, I
agree with Mr. Wescott that it was most likely an impact
wound and cannot be positively asserted as an assault
wound). Such a chokehold wouldn’t leave marks such as
caused by strangulation, which weren’t found. I hesitate
to include it definitely into my sequence, as, barring any
physical indication, we just don’t know.
I fully agree with Mr. Wescott about approach and first
incapacitating being something that would have made its
appearance already here, to be kept in the future.
My many thanks to Mr. Wescott for his response, it’s
been genuinely inspiring. I’m looking forward to the
upcoming book.
ALL THE BEST,
DANIEL CAZARD
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

Victorian Fiction

Finis Coronat Opus

By FRANCIS THOMPSON

Edited with an introduction and notes by Eduardo Zinna

INTRODUCTION son of a Catholic physician, and was educated at Ushaw

College, where he received a strong classical training. He
The entries on the poet Francis Thompson in the learned
books are short and to the point. The Oxford Companion was destined for the priesthood, but was discouraged
to English Literature states that Thompson’s ‘finest work from pursuing his studies because of a perceived lack of
conveys intense religious experience in imagery of great vocation. Instead he studied medicine, but never qualified
power, but some of his poetry sounds ornate, over-heated as a doctor. In 1885 he left for London carrying books
and derivative’. At a time of wide and radical change, by Aeschylus and William Blake in his pockets with the
Thompson was a staunch Roman Catholic of conservative intention of becoming a writer. He did not succeed and
ideas who held the conventional view of the Victorian was reduced, first, to work half-heartedly in menial jobs,
era, embracing the Empire, Cecil Rhodes, strict morality
and the Boer war. In his poetry he adopted the old forms
and preferred archaisms to living speech. His major
influences were Coventry Patmore, Shelley, De Quincey
and the Catholic poet Richard Crashaw – the Crashaw
of the Maybrick Diary fame. Perhaps the slight quantity
and range of his work militated against his earning wider
recognition: during his lifetime he published only three
volumes of verse. The first, Poems, appeared in 1893.
The second, Sister Songs, followed two years later. It took
another two years for his final work, New Poems, to appear.
During the last ten years of his life he did not publish any
major works. Soon after his death he was called the last
of the great Victorians, yet branded as one of the least
important. The Oxford Companion somewhat cavalierly
dismisses him as someone whose ‘poetry has been more
popular with the general public (especially with Catholic
readers) than with the critics.’ Still, G. K. Chesterton said
of him that ‘with Francis Thompson we lost the greatest and, later, to living in the streets. For the next three years
poetic energy since Browning.’ he slept rough and developed an addiction to opium,
There remains the story of his short, intense, tragic life. which he had first taken as medicine. He derived a meagre
Thompson was born in 1859 in Preston, Lancashire, the income from selling matches, calling cabs or, when

63
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
everything else failed, begging for alms. Yet, despite his
precarious existence, he continued to write in whatever
scraps of paper he could find. In 1888, Wilfred and Alice
Meynell, the editors of a magazine to which Thompson had
sent samples of his work, rescued him from the streets,
secured for him accommodation in London lodgings and
monasteries in Sussex and Wales and arranged for the
publication of his poetry. Thompson’s health, however,
was seriously impaired by his years of extreme poverty
and opium addiction. He died from tuberculosis at the
age of 47 in the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, and
is buried in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal
Green.
In 1988, Dr Joseph C Rupp, the Medical Examiner for
Nueces County, Texas, published in The Criminologist an
article called Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper? In
subsequent years, the Australian author and researcher
Richard Patterson has explored further the tantalizing
possibility that the destitute poet may have been the
Whitechapel murderer. Patterson’s most recent work
on the subject is Jack The Ripper. The Works of Francis
Thompson, which is being released by Austin Macauley
Publishers on 28 February 2017.
Finis Coronat Opus
By FRANCIS THOMPSON
In a city of the future, among a people bearing a name I
know not, lived Florentian the poet, whose place was high
in the retinue of Fortune. Young, noble, popular, influential,
he had succeeded to a rich inheritance, and possessed
the natural gifts which gain the love of women. But the
seductions which Florentian followed were darker and
more baleful than the seductions of women; for they were
the seductions of knowledge and intellectual pride. In very
early years he had passed from the pursuit of natural to
the pursuit of unlawful science; he had conquered power
where conquest is disaster, and power servitude.
But the ambition thus gratified had elsewhere suffered
check. It was the custom of this people that among
their poets he who by universal acclaim outsoared all
competitors should be crowned with laurel in public
ceremony. Now between Florentian and this distinction
there stood a rival. Seraphin was a spirit of higher reach
than Florentian, and the time was nearing fast when
64
Our Victorian Fiction selection for the present issue
of Ripperologist is a short story by Francis Thompson
entitled Finis Coronat Opus (The Ending Crowns the
Work). In The Hound of Death: Francis Thompson and the
Whitechapel Murders, an article published in Ripperologist
146, October 2016, Patterson wrote about Finis Coronat
Opus as follows:
…a short story written in the autumn of 1889, a year
after the Whitechapel murders, in which Thompson
records to a fine degree the perceived thoughts of
a knife-armed man in a killing frenzy. The story…
concerns Florentian, a young poet who, pursuant
to a pact with an evil power, sacrifices a woman in a
pagan temple to become a great poet - like Thompson
himself.
I have taken the text of Finis Coronat Opus from a
compilation of the works of Francis Thompson available
from the Digital Library of India. I have made no changes
to the text except for updating the spelling of a few words.
In the compilation of the notes to the story I have relied
on Richard Patterson’s notes in addition to other sources.
even the slow eyes of the people must be opened to a
supremacy which Florentian himself acknowledged in
his own heart. Hence arose in his lawless soul an insane
passion; so that all which he had seemed to him as nothing
beside that which he had not, and the compassing of
this barred achievement became to him the one worthy
object of existence. Repeated essay only proved to him
the inadequacy of his native genius, and he turned for aid
to the power which he served. Nor was the power of evil
slow to respond. It promised him assistance that should
procure him his heart’s desire, but demanded in return
a crime before which even the unscrupulous selfishness
of Florentian paled. For he had sought and won the hand
of Aster, daughter to the Lady Urania, and the sacrifice
demanded from him was no other than the sacrifice of his
betrothed, the playmate of his childhood. The horror of
such a suggestion prevailed for a time over his unslacked
ambition. But he, who believed himself a strong worker
of ill, was in reality a weak follower of it; he believed
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
himself a Vathek,1 he was but a Faust2: continuous
pressure and gradual familiarization could warp him to
any sin. Moreover his love for Aster had been gradually
and unconsciously sapped by the habitual practise of evil.
So God smote Florentian, that his antidote became to him
his poison, and love the regenerator love the destroyer.
A strong man, he might have been saved by love: a weak
man, he was damned by it.
The palace of Florentian was isolated in the environs
of the city; and on the night before his marriage he stood
in the room known to his domestics as the Chamber of
Statues. Both its appearance, and the sounds which (his
servants averred) sometimes issued from it, contributed
to secure for him the seclusion that he desired whenever
he sought this room. it was a chamber in many ways
strongly characteristic of its owner, a chamber ‘like his
desires lift upwards and exalt,’ but neither wide nor far
penetrating; while its furnishing revealed his fantastic
and somewhat childish fancy. At the extremity which
faced the door there stood, beneath a crucifix, a small
marble altar, on which burned a fire of that strange
greenish tinge communicated by certain salts. Except at
this extremity, the wails were draped with deep violet
curtains bordered by tawny gold, only half displayed
by the partial illumination of the place. The light was
furnished from lamps of coloured glass, sparsely hung
along the length of the room, but numerously clustered
about the altar: lamps of diverse tints, amber, peacock-
blue, and changefully mingled harmonies of green like the
scales on a beetle’s back. Above them were coiled thinnest
serpentinings of suspended crystal, hued like the tongues
in a wintry hearth, flame-colour, violet, and green; so that,
as in the heated current from the lamps the snakes twirled
and flickered, and their bright shadows twirled upon the
wall, they seemed at length to undulate their twines, and
the whole altar became surrounded with a fiery fantasy of
sinuous stains.
On the right hand side of the chamber there rose -
appearing almost animated in the half lustre - three
statues of colossal height, painted to resemble life;
for in this matter Florentian followed the taste of the
ancient Greeks. They were statues of three poets, and,
not insignificantly, of three pagan poets. The first two,
Homer3 and Aeschylus,4 presented no singularity beyond
their Titanic proportions; but it was altogether otherwise
with the third statue, which was unusual in conception. It
was the figure of Virgil; not the Virgil whom we know, but
the Virgil of medieval legend, Virgil, magician and poet.5
It bent forwards and downwards towards the spectator;
its head was uncircled by any laurel, but on the flowing
locks was an impression as of where the wreath had
rested; its lowered left hand proffered the magician’s rod,
its outstretched right poised between light fingertips the
65
wreath of gilded metal whose impress seemed to linger
on its hair: the action was as though it were about to place
the laurel on the head of someone beneath. This was the
carved embodiment of Florentian’s fanatical ambition, a
perpetual memento of the double end at which his life was
aimed. On the necromancer’s rod he could lay his hand, but
the laurel of poetic supremacy hung yet beyond his reach.
The opposite side of the chamber had but one object to
arrest attention: a curious head upon a pedestal, a head of
copper with a silver beard, the features not unlike those of
a Pan6, and the tongue protruded as in derision. This, with
a large antique clock, completed the noticeable garniture
of the room.
Up and down this apartment Florentian paced for long,
his countenance expressive of inward struggle, till his
gaze fell upon the figure of Virgil. His face grew hard; with
an air of sudden decision he began to act. Taking from
its place the crucifix he threw it on the ground; taking
from its pedestal the head he set it on the altar; and it
seemed to Florentian as if he reared therewith a demon
on the altar of his heart, round which also coiled burning
serpents. He sprinkled, in the flame which burned before
the head, some drops from a vial; he wounded his arm,
and moistened from the wound the idol’s tongue, and,
stepping back, he set his foot upon the prostrate cross.
A darkness rose like a fountain from the altar, and curled
downward through the room as wine through water, until
every light was obliterated. Then from out the darkness
grew gradually the visage of the idol, soaked with fire; its
face was as the planet Mars, its beard as white-hot wire
that seethed and crept with heat; and there issued from
the lips a voice that threw Florentian on the ground:
‘Whom seekest thou?’ Twice was the question repeated;
and then, as if the display of power were sufficient, the
gloom gathered up its edges like a mantle and swept
inwards towards the altar; where it settled in a cloud so
dense as to eclipse even the visage of fire. A voice came
forth again; but a voice that sounded not the same; a voice
that seemed to have withered in crossing the confines
of existence, and to traverse illimitable remotenesses
1 The protagonist of Vathek: An Arabian Tale a novel by William
Beckford originally written in French and published in English in 1786.
2 German astrologer and necromancer active circa 1488–1541 who
was said to have sold his soul to the Devil. He was the protagonist of
dramas by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe.
3 Greek epic poet credited with the authorship of the Iliad and the
Odyssey.
4 Greek poet and playwright (525–456 BC)
5 Publius Vergilius Mero, Roman poet (70–19 BC), author of the
Aeneid, the greatest epic poem of Rome.
6 Greek God of shepherds and flocks, represented with the horns,
ears and legs of a goat.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

beyond the imagining of man; a voice melancholy with a her under the influence of the merciful potion which
boundless calm, the calm not of a crystalline peace but of a should save her from the agony of knowledge and me
marmoreal despair, ‘Knowest thou me; what I am?’ from the agony of knowing that she knew, I sought, in the
Vanity of man! He who had fallen prostrate before this air of night and in hurrying swiftness, the resolution of
power now rose to his feet with the haughty answer, ‘My which she had deprived me. The glow-worm lamps went
deity and my slave!’ out as I sped by, the stars in rainy pools leaped up and
The unmoved voice held on its way: went out, too, as if both worm and star were quenched
by the shadow of my passing, until I stopped exhausted
‘Scarce high enough for thy deity, too high for thy slave,
on the bridge, and looked down into the river. How dark
I am pain exceeding great; and the desolation that is at the
it ran, how deep, how pauseless; how unruffled by a
heart of things, in the barren heath and the barren soul. I
memory of its ancestral hills! Wisely unruffled, perchance.
am terror without beauty, and force without strength, and
When it first danced down from its native source, did it,
sin without delight. I beat my wings against the cope of
not predestine all the issues of its current, every darkness
Eternity, as thou thine against the window of Time. Thou
through which it should flow, every bough which it should
knowest me not, but I know thee, Florentian, what thou art
break, every leaf which it should whirl down in its way?
and what thou wouldst. Thou wouldst have and wouldst
Could it, if it would, revoke its waters, and run upward to
not give, thou wouldst not render, yet wouldst receive.
the holy hills? No; the first step includes all sequent steps;
This cannot be with me. Thou art but half baptized with
my baptism, yet wouldst have thy supreme desire. In thine when I did my first evil, I did also this evil; years ago had
own blood thou wast baptized, and I gave my power to this shaft been launched, though it was but now curving
serve thee; thou wouldst have my spirit to inspire thee - to its mark; years ago had I smitten her, though she was
thou must be baptized in blood not thine own!’ but now staggering to her fall. Yet I hesitated to act who
had already acted, I ruffled my current which I could not
‘Any way but one way!’ said Florentian, shuddering.
draw in. When at length, after long wandering, I retraced
‘One way: no other way. Knowest thou not that in my steps, I had not resolved, had recognized that I could
wedding thee to her thou givest me a rival? Thinkest thou
resolve no longer.
my spirit can dwell beside her spirit? Thou must renounce
She only cried three times. Three times, O my God! no,
her or me: aye, thou wilt lose not only all thou dreadest to
not my God.
sin for, but all thou hast already sinned for. Render me her
body for my temple, and I render thee my spirit to inhabit
it. This supreme price thou must pay for thy supreme wish.
I ask not her soul. Give that to the God Whom she serves,
give her body to me whom thou servest. Why hesitate? It
is too late to hesitate, for the time is at hand to act. Choose,
before this cloud dissolve which is now dissolving. But
remember: thine ambition thou mightest have had; love
thou art too deep damned to have.’
The cloud turned from black to grey. ‘I consent!’ cried
Florentian, impetuously.

Three years - what years! since I planted in the grave

the laurel which will soon now reach its height; and the
fatal memory is heavy upon me, the shadow of my laurel
is as the shadow of funeral yew. If confession indeed give
ease, I, who am deprived of all other confession, may
yet find some appeasement in confessing to this paper. I
am not penitent; yet I will do fiercest penance. With the
scourge of inexorable recollection I will tear open my
scars. With the cuts of a pitiless analysis I make the post-
mortem examen of my crime.
Even now can I feel the passions of that moment when
(since the forefated hour was not till midnight), leaving
It was close on midnight, and I felt her only, (she was
not visible,) as she lay at the feet of Virgil, magician and
poet. The lamp had fallen from my hand, and I dared not
relume it. I even placed myself between her and the light
of the altar though the salt-green fire was but the spectre
of a flame. I reared my arm; I shook; I faltered. At that
moment, with a deadly voice, the accomplice-hour gave
forth its sinister command.

66
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
I swear I struck not the first blow. Some violence seized
my hand, and drove the poniard down. Whereat she cried;
and I, frenzied, dreading detection, dreading, above all,
her wakening, struck again, and again she cried; and yet
again, and yet again she cried. Then her eyes opened. I saw
them open, through the gloom I saw them; through the
gloom they were revealed to me, that I might see them to
my hour of death. An awful recognition, an unspeakable
consciousness grew slowly into them. Motionless with
horror they were fixed on mine, motionless with horror
mine were fixed on them, as she wakened into death.
How long had I seen them? I saw them still. There was a
buzzing in my brain as if a bell had ceased to toll. How long
had it ceased to toll? I know not. Has any bell been tolling?
I know not. All my senses are resolved into one sense, and
that is frozen to those eyes. Silence now, at least; abysmal
silence; except the sound (or is the sound in me?), the
sound of dripping blood; except that the flame upon the
altar sputters, and hisses, and bickers, as if it licked its
jaws. Yes, there is another sound - hush, hark! It is the
throbbing of my heart. Not- no, nevermore the throbbing
of her heart! The loud pulse dies slowly away, as I hope my
life is dying; and again I hear the licking of the flame.
A mirror hung opposite to me, and for a second, in
some mysterious manner, without ever ceasing to behold
the eyes, I beheld also the mirrored flame. The hideous,
green, writhing tongue was streaked and flaked with red! I
swooned, if swoon it can be called; swooned to the mirror,
swooned to all about me, swooned to myself, but swooned
not to those eyes.
Strange, that no one has taken me, me for such long
hours shackled in a gaze! It is night again, is it not? Nay,
I remember, I have swooned; what now stirs me from my
stupor? Light; the guilty gloom is shuddering at the first
sick rays of day. Light? Not that, not that; anything but
that. Ah! the horrible traitorous light, that will denounce
me to myself, that will unshroud to me my dead, that will
show me all the monstrous fact. I swooned indeed.
When I recovered consciousness, It was risen from the
ground, and kissed me with the kisses of Its mouth.
They told me during the day that the great bell of the
cathedral, though no man rang it, had sounded thrice at
midnight. It was not a fancy, therefore, that I heard a bell
toll there, where - when she cried three times. And they
asked me jestingly if marriage was ageing me already. I
took a mirror to find what they meant. On my forehead
were graven three deep wrinkles; and in the locks which
fell over my right shoulder I beheld, long and prominent,
three white hairs. I carry those marks to this hour. They
and a dark stain on the floor at the feet of Virgil are the
sole witnesses to that night.
It is three years, I have said, since then; and how have I
67
prospered? Has Tartarus7 fulfilled its terms of contract, as
I faithfully and frightfully fulfilled mine? Yes. In the course
which I have driven through every obstacle and every
scruple, I have followed at least no phantom-lure. I have
risen to the heights of my aspiration, I have overtopped
my sole rival. True, it is a tinsel renown; true, Seraphin is
still the light-bearer, I but a dragon vomiting infernal fire
and smoke which sets the crowd a-gaping. But it is your
nature to gape, my good friend of the crowd, and I would
have you gape at me, if you prefer to Jove.8 Jove’s imitator,
what use to be Jove? ‘Gods,’ you cry; ‘what a clatter of
swift-footed steeds, and clangour of rapid rolling brazen
wheels, and vibrating glare of lamps! Surely, the thunder-
maned horses of heaven, the chariot of Olympus; and you
must be the mighty Thunderer himself, with the flashing
of his awful bolts! ‘Not so, my short-sighted friend: very
laughably otherwise. It is but vain old Salmoneus, gone
mad in Elis.9 I know you, and I know myself. I have what
I would have. I work for the present: let Seraphin have
the moonshine future, if he lust after it. Present renown
means present power; it suffices me that I am supreme
in the eyes of my fellow-men. A year since was the laurel
decreed to me, and a day ordained for the ceremony: it
was only postponed to the present year because of what
they thought my calamity. They accounted it calamity,
and knew not that it was deliverance. For, my ambition
achieved, the compact by which I had achieved it ended,
and the demon who had inspired forsook me. Discovery
was impossible. A death sudden but natural: how could
men know that it was death of the Two-years-dead? I
drew breath at length in freedom. For two years It had
spoken to me with her lips, used her gestures, smiled
her smile: ingenuity of hell! for two years the breathing
Murder wrought before me, and tortured me in a hundred
ways with the living desecration of her form.
Now, relief unspeakable! that vindictive sleuth-hound
of my sin has at last lagged from the trail; I have had a year
of respite, of release  from all torments but those native
to my breast; in four days I shall receive the solemn gift
of what I already virtually hold; and now, surely, I exult
in fruition. If the approach of possession brought not also
the approach of recollection, if - Rest, O rest, sad ghost! Is
thy grave not deep enough, or the world wide enough, that
thou must needs walk the haunted precincts of my heart?
Are not spectres there too many, without thee?
7 In Greek mythology, the lowest regions of Hell; a place of
punishment.
8 Another name for Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Zeus, the king
and father of gods and men.
9 In Greek mythology, Salmoneus was the king of Elis and
founded the city of Salmone in Pisatis.[3] He ordered his subjects to
worship him under the name of Zeus. For this sin of insolence, Zeus
struck him down with his thunderbolt and destroyed the town. In
Virgil’s Aeneid Salmoneus suffers eternal torment in Tartarus.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Later in the same day. A strange thing has happened to
me - if I ought not rather to write a strange nothing. After
laying down my pen, I rose and went to the window. I felt
the need of some distraction, of escaping from myself.
The day, a day in the late autumn, a day of keen winds but
bright sunshine, tempted me out so, putting on cap and
mantle, I sallied into the country, where winter pitched
his tent on fields yet reddened with the rout of summer. I
chose a sheltered lane, whose hedge-rows, little visited by
the gust, still retained much verdure; and I walked along,
gazing with a sense of physical refreshment at the now
rare green. As my eyes so wandered, while the mind for
a time let slip its care, they were casually caught by the
somewhat peculiar trace which a leaf-eating caterpillar
had left on one of the leaves. I carelessly outstretched my
hand, plucked from the hedge the leaf, and examined it as
I strolled. The marking - a large marking which traversed
the greater part of the surface - took the shape of a rude
but distinct figure, the figure 3. Such a circumstance,
thought I, might by a superstitious man be given a personal
application; and I fell idly to speculating how it might be
applied to myself.
Curious! I stirred uneasily; I felt my cheek pale, and a
chill which was not from the weather creep through me.
Three years since that; three strokes - three cries - three
tolls of the bell - three lines on my brow - three white hairs
in my head! I laughed: but the laugh rang false. Then I said,
‘Childishness,’ threw the leaf away, walked on, hesitated,
walked back, picked it up, walked on again, looked at it
again. Then, finding I could not laugh myself out of the
fancy, I began to reason myself out of it. Even were a
supernatural warning probable, a warning refers not to
the past but to the future. This referred only to the past,
it told me only what I knew already. Could it refer to the
future? To the bestowal of the laurel? No; that was four
days hence, and on the same day was the anniversary of
what I feared to name, even in thought. Suddenly I stood
still, stabbed to the heart by an idea. I was wrong. The
enlaurelling had been postponed to a year from the day on
which my supposed affliction was discovered. Now this,
although it took place on the day of terrible anniversary,
was not known till the day ensuing. Consequently, though
68
it wanted four days to the bestowal of the laurel, it lacked
but three days to the date of my crime. The chain of
coincidence was complete. I dropped the leaf as if it had
death in it, and strove to evade, by rapid motion and
thinking of other things, the idea which appalled me.
But, as a man walking in a mist circles continually to the
point from which he started, so, in whatever direction I
turned the footsteps of my mind, they wandered back to
that unabandonable thought. I returned trembling to the
house.
Of course it is nothing; a mere coincidence, that is
all. Yes; a mere coincidence, perhaps, if it had been one
coincidence. But when it is seven coincidences! Three
stabs, three cries, three tolls, three lines, three hairs,
three years, three days; and on the very date when these
coincidences meet, the key to them is put into my hands
by the casual work of an insect on a casual leaf, casually
plucked This day alone of all days in my life the scattered
rays converge; they are instantly focussed and flashed
on my mind by a leaf! It may be a coincidence, only a
coincidence; but it is a coincidence at which my marrow
sets. I will write no further till the day comes. If by that
time anything has happened to confirm my dread, I will
record what has chanced.
One thing broods over me with the oppression of
certainty. If this incident be indeed a warning that but
three days stand as barriers between me and nearing
justice, then doom will come upon me at the unforgettable
minute when it came on her.
The third day. It is an hour before midnight, and I sit in
my room of statues. I dare not sleep if I could sleep; and I
write, because the rushing thoughts move slower through
the turnstile of expression. I have chosen this place to
make what may be my last vigil and last notes, partly
from obedience to an inexplicable yet comprehensible
fascination, partly from a deliberate resolve. I would face
the lightning of vengeance on the very spot where I most
tempt its stroke, that if it strike not I may cease to fear
its striking. Here then I sit to tease with final questioning
the Sibyl10 of my destiny. With final questioning; for never
since the first shock have I ceased to question her, nor she
to return me riddling answers. She unrolls her volume till
my sight and heart ache at it together. I have been struck by
innumerable deaths; I have perished under a fresh doom
every, day, every hour - in these last hours, every minute. I
write in black thought; and tear, as soon as written, guess
after guess at fate till the floor of my brain is littered with
them.
That the deed has been discovered, that seems to me
most probable, that is the conjecture which oftenest
10 Prophetess, fortune-teller, witch.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
recurs. Appallingly probable! Yet how improbable, could
I only reason it. Aye, but I cannot reason it. What reason
will be left me, if I survive this hour! What, indeed, have I
to do with reason, or has reason to do with this, where all
is beyond reason, where the very foundation of my dread
is unassailable simply because it is unreasonable? What
crime can be interred so cunningly, but it will toss in its
grave, and tumble the sleeked earth above it? Or some
hidden witness may have beheld me, or the prudently-
kept imprudence of this writing may have encountered
some unsuspected eye. In any case the issue is the same;
the hour which struck down her will also strike down me:
I shall perish on the scaffold or at the stake, unaided by
my occult powers; for I serve a master who is the prince
of cowards, and can fight only from ambush. Be it by these
ways, or by any of the countless intricacies that my restless
mind has unravelled, the vengeance will come: its occasion
may be an accident of the instant, a wandering mote of
chance; but the vengeance is pre-ordained and inevitable.
When the Alpine avalanche is poised for descent, the
most trivial cause - a casual shout - will suffice to start the
loosened ruin on its way; and so the mere echoes of the
clock that beats out midnight will disintegrate upon me
the precipitant wrath.
Repent? Nay, nay, it could not have been otherwise
than it was; the defile was close behind me, I could but go
forward, forward. If I was merciless to her, was I not more
merciless to myself; could I hesitate to sacrifice her life,
who did not hesitate to sacrifice my soul? I do not repent, I
cannot repent; it is a thing for inconsequent weaklings. To
repent your purposes is comprehensible, to repent your
deeds most futile. To shake the tree, and then not gather
the fruit - a fool’s act! Aye, but if the fruit be not worth the
gathering? If this fame was not worth the sinning for - this
fame, with the multitude’s clapping hands half-drowned
by the growl of winds that comes in gusts through the
unbarred gate of hell? If I am miserable with it, and might
69
have been happy without it? With her, without ambition -
yes, it might have been. Wife and child! I have more in my
heart than I have hitherto written. I have an intermittent
pang of loss. Yes I, murderer, worse than murderer, have
still passions that are not deadly, but tender.
I met a child today; a child with great candour of eyes.
They who talk of children’s instincts are at fault: she
knew not that hell was in my soul, she knew only that
softness was in my gaze. She had been gathering wild
flowers, and offered them to me. To me, to me! I was
inexpressibly touched and pleased, curiously touched and
pleased. I spoke to her gently, and with open confidence
she began to talk. Heaven knows it was little enough she
talked of! Commonest common things, pettiest childish
things, fondest foolish things. Of her school, her toys,
the strawberries in her garden, her little brothers and
sisters, nothing, surely, to interest any man. Yet I listened
enchanted. How simple it all was; how strange, how
wonderful, how sweet! And she knew not that my eyes
were anhungered11 of her, she knew not that my ears were
gluttonous of her speech, she could not have understood it
had I told her; none could, none. For all this exquisiteness
is among the commonplaces of life to other men, like the
raiment they indue at rising, like the bread they weary
of eating, like the daisies they trample under blind feet;
knowing not what raiment is to him who has felt the
ravening wind, knowing not what bread is to him who
has lacked all bread, knowing not what daisies are to him
whose feet have wandered in grime. How can these elves
be to such men what they are to me, who am damned to the
eternal loss of them? Why was I never told that the laurel
could soothe no hunger, that the laurel could staunch no
pang, that the laurel could return no kiss? But needed I
to be told it, did I not know it? Yes, my brain knew it, my
heart knew it not. And now -
At half-past eleven.
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!12
Just! they are the words of that other trafficker in his
own soul. Me, like him, the time tracks swiftly down; I
can fly no farther, I fall exhausted, the fanged hour fastens
on my throat: they will break into the room, my guilt will
burst its grave and point at me; I shall be seized, I shall be
condemned, I shall be executed; I shall be no longer I, but a
nameless lump on which they pasture worms. Or perhaps
the hour will herald some yet worser thing, some sudden
death, some undreamable, ghastly surprise - ah! what is
that at the door there, that, that with her eyes? Nothing:
11 adj. archaic: overcome or oppressed with hunger.
12 O, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night! Originally from Ovid’s
Amore (Liber I, XIII, Line 40. Later spoken by Faust in the last act of
Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
the door is shut. Surely, surely, I am not to die now? Destiny
steals upon a man asleep or off his guard, not when he is
awake, as I am awake, at watch, as I am at watch, wide-
eyed, vigilant, alert. Oh, miserable hope! Watch the eaves
of your house, to bar the melting of the snow; or guard
the gateways of the clouds, to bar the forthgoing of the
lightning; or guard the four quarters of the heavens, to bar
the way of the winds: but what prescient hand can close
the Hecatompyloi of fate,13 what might arrest the hurrying
retributions whose multitudinous tramplings converge
upon me in a hundred presages, in a hundred shrivelling
menaces, down all the echoing avenues of doom? It is but
a question of which shall arrive the fleetest and the first. I
cease to think. I am all a waiting and a fear. Twelve!
At half-past two. Midnight is stricken, and I am
unstricken. Guilt, indeed, makes babies of the wisest.
Nothing happened; absolutely nothing. For two hours
I watched with lessening expectance: still nothing. I
laughed aloud between sudden light-heartedness and
scorn. Ineffable fool that I was, I had conjured up death,
judgement, doom - heaven knows what, all because a
caterpillar had crawled along a leaf! And then, as I might
have done before had not terror vitiated my reason, I
made essay whether I still retained my power. I retain it.
Let me set down for my own enhardiment what the oracle
replied to my questioning.
Have I not promised and kept my promise, shall I not
promise and keep? You would be crowned and you
shall be crowned. Does your way to achievement lie
through misery? Is not that the way to all worth the
achieving? Are not half the mill-wheels of the world
turned by waters of pain? Mountain summit that
would rise into the clouds, can you not suffer the
eternal snows? If your heart fail you, turn; I chain you
not. I will restore you your oath. I will cancel your
bond. Go to the God Who has tenderness for such
weaklings: my service requires the strong.
What a slave of my fancy was I! Excellent fool, what!
pay the forfeit of my sin and forgo the recompense, recoil
from the very gates of conquest? I fear no longer: the crisis
is past, the day of promise has begun, I go forward to my
destiny; I triumph.

Florentian laid down his pen, and passed into dreams.
He saw the crowd, the throne, the waiting laurel, the
sunshine, the flashing of rich robes; he heard the universal
shout of acclaim, he felt the flush of intoxicating pride.
He rose, his form dilating with exultation, and passed,
lamp in hand, to the foot of the third statue. The colossal
figure leaned above him with its outstretched laurel, its
proffered wand, its melancholy face and flowing hair; so
lifelike was it that in the wavering flame of the lamp the
laurel seemed to move. ‘At length, Virgil,’ said Florentian,
70
‘at length I am equal with you; Virgil, magician and poet,
your crown shall descend on me!’
One… Two… Three! The strokes of the great clock shook
the chamber, shook the statues; and after the strokes had
ceased, the echoes were still prolonged. Was it only an
echo?
Boom!
Or was it the cathedral bell?
Boom!
It was the cathedral bell. Yet a third time, sombre, surly,
ominous as the bay of a nearing bloodhound, the sound
came down the wind.
Boom!
Horror clutched his heart. He looked up at the statue.
He turned to fly. But a few hairs, tangled round the
lowered wand, for a single instant held him like a cord.
He knew, without seeing, that they were the three white
hairs. When, later in the day, a deputation of officials came
to escort Florentian to the place fixed for his coronation,
they were informed that he had been all night in his
Chamber of Statues, nor had he yet made his appearance.
They waited while the servant left to fetch him. The man
was away some time, and they talked gaily as they waited:
a bird beat its wings at the window; through the open
door came in a stream of sunlight, and the fragmentary
song of a young girl passing:
Oh, syne she tripped, and syne she ran
(The water-lily’s a lightsome flower),
All for joy and sunshine weather
The lily and Marjorie danced together,
As he came down from Langley Tower.
There’s a blackbird sits on Langley Tower,
And a throstle on Glenlindy’s tree;
The throstle sings ‘Robin, my heart’s love!’
And the blackbird, ‘Bonnie, sweet Marjorie!’
 The man came running back at last, with a blanched
face and a hushed voice. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘and see!’
They went and saw.
At the feet of Virgil’s statue Florentian lay dead. A dark
pool almost hid that dark stain on the ground, the three
lines on his forehead were etched in blood, and across the
shattered brow lay a ponderous gilded wreath; while over
the extinguished altar-fire the idol seemed to quiver its
derisive tongue.
‘He is already laurelled,’ said one, breaking at length the
silence; ‘we come too late.’
Too late. The crown of Virgil, magician and poet, had
descended on him.
13 Also known as Hecatompylos: An ancient city in west Khurasan,
Iran, the capital of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty by 200 BCE. Its
name means ‘one hundred gates’. Hecatompyloi was mentioned In
Thompson’s poem An Anthem of Earth.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Fiction Reviews
By DAVID GREEN
Included in this issue:
No Absolution, The Ripper’s Time, The Demon Hunters: Jack and Ripper
NO ABSOLUTION
NM Bell
Books We Love Ltd (2016)
ISBN 10-1772993883
Paperback 227pp
£8.86
Canadian author Nancy
Bell is best known for her
Romance and Young Adult
fiction. Her new novel
ventures into slightly darker
terrain. No Absolution is a grim
and unremittingly brutal take
on the Jack the Ripper story. While the ceaseless violence,
the squalor, and the depravity will sicken many readers,
there’s no doubt she has produced a serious work that
deserves your attention.
Jake Winncott is a slaughterhouse man and a cattle boat
worker. By day he toils in Fleischer’s abattoir butchering
steers; at night he prowls Whitechapel and Spitalfields in
his India rubber soled boots butchering prostitutes. The
reader gets no respite from the gore and the stink ‒ the
novel is awash in cow dung, spillages of offal, buckets
of blood and dank faecal odours. Jake wears an apron
stiffened with dried blood, and after work he slinks back
to his room in Miller’s Court to roast sexual organs in the
hearth. Even when Jake turns his mind to romance, the girl
he courts works behind the counter at a butcher’s shop
handling mince and sausage and warm blood puddings.
The pages are so saturated in blood and guts that after
a few minutes’ reading you feel the need to wash your
hands in heavy duty liquid soap. If the author’s purpose
is to depict the unpleasantness of the Ripper’s lifestyle,
then she has achieved her aim admirably. Less successful,
though, is her attempt to delineate the psychological and
emotional factors that may have given rise to the Ripper’s
71
derangement. We are shown glimpses from an abusive
childhood steeped in madness and crime, and there’s
a despotic surgeon-father spouting extreme religious
hatred of prostitutes. But these influences seem dully
schematic and they only partially account for the actions
of her unusual protagonist.
No Absolution explores the effects of a monstrous father
on the development of a small boy. It isn’t for the faint-
hearted, but it will be enjoyed by readers who like their
Ripper fiction savage, bitter, and full of human suffering.
THE RIPPER’S TIME
Mark R. Vogel
CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2017
ISBN 10-1540791904
Paperback, 344pp
£12.22
Time travel frequently
crops up in Jack the Ripper
fiction. Often it is Jack himself
who travels back and forth
in time, killing in different
decades or centuries;
sometimes it is a homicide detective or a descendant of
one of the victims who jaunts back to 1888 to pursue
the Ripper and put a stop to his deadly activities. There’s
always room, I feel, for one more Jack the Ripper time
travel yarn, especially if it combines an instinct for
character and story with authentic period scenery and a
relish for the intimate details of real history.
Author Mark R. Vogel uses time travel to great effect in
his novel The Ripper’s Time. He has produced an exciting
page-turner that is also a meditation on love and death,
and a powerful imagining of a life lost and reclaimed.
It tells the story of Henry Willows, a history professor
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

and Ripper scholar from 21st century New Jersey, who The Ripper’s Time is a gripping thriller that is bound to
travels back in time to try and prevent Catherine Eddowes appeal to Ripperologists and all lovers of good historical
from being murdered. It’s not really a science fantasy crime fiction.
novel, although it makes use of some of the tropes and
conventions of time travel fiction. It’s more of a love THE DEMON HUNTERS:
story and a historical murder mystery. Yet it’s a mark of JACK
the author’s skill as a writer that to begin with I wasn’t Simon Hartwell
entirely sure if I was reading a love story or a case study 2017
Kindle Edition, 125pp
in obsession and abnormal sexual desire. The professor’s
£2.39
infatuation with Catherine Eddowes and his adamant
There are time travellers
pursuit of her through time and space comes across a lot
in Simon Hartwell’s new
like stalking.
novel, too.
While the science underpinning time travel isn’t
Father Shaun and Sister
explored in any detail, the novel is nevertheless attuned to
Adriana are demon hunters.
the paradoxes thrown up by the idea of meddling with the
They’ve teamed up once
past. If Catherine is saved, might other women die in her
before to investigate the
place? Mark Vogel has great fun with the concept of the
goings-on at Borley Rectory; now they’ve boarded a Time
Ripper scholar abroad in 1880s London. Willows savours
Gate and are journeying back to the London of 1888 to put
the city and its suburbs with the elation and curiosity of
a stop to the Jack the Ripper murders.
a tourist: he visits Tower Bridge (under construction in
Ripper historians need to know that this novel offers
1888) and he passes New Scotland Yard where he knows
the first fictional treatment of the Cross/Lechmere
a torso will be found several months hence. He takes
suspect theory in English literature. It’s either Cross/
Catherine on a shopping extravaganza, and they go to the
Lechmere or one of the other contenders given an airing
Prince of Wales Theatre to see the comic opera Dorothy.
‒ the unnamed leader of the High Rip Gang, a cabal of
The book brims with these kinds of loving inconsequential
lesbian devil worshippers congregating in the blood-
details. And the novel captures superbly the sense of joy
soaked subterranean passageways beneath a vicarage,
and giddy estrangement at being alive in the historical past.
or Demons. You might think that the evil permeating
The time travel elements are actually quite unobtrusive
Whitechapel is most likely of Demonic origin given that
and (paradoxically) they work to enhance the believability
Father Shaun and Sister Adriana were called in to deal
of the tale rather than distracting from it.
with it. And you’d be right.
The book is at its most affecting in its quiet, rueful
This short novel trawls fairly mechanically through the
moments, when the author dwells on the wonder of small
Ripper story: there are some mild Dennis Wheatley-style
shared things that bring Henry and Catherine together.
supernatural effects, and a lovely cruel villainess called
There are many intimate and unsettling moments:
Mrs Canonical whose victims may (or may not) be the
He found Catherine sprawled on the bed in her
canonical victims.
undergarments, surrounded by his Jack the Ripper
books. Two of them were opened to the chapter on RIPPER
her. One displayed her mortuary photographs. Nikolai Watson
2017
“Darling, are you all right?” Kindle Edition, 150pp
£3.99
“I don’t know what I am. I’ve never read about me
death before. And these horrible pictures.” August 1888. Jack Slawter
works as an undertaker at
The Ripper’s Time is a fast-moving, tightly-plotted story London’s East End Mortuary. He
set against a well-researched and convincing historical deals with at least 20 corpses
background. It alternates elegantly between moments of a day. It’s a grim place, full of
fear and terror and melancholy observations on life and the shadows and vile odours, with
passage of time. But it’s also great fun to read: the book’s a solarium on the top floor.
rife with escapist pleasures ‒ tense situations, action- Penelope is the cosmetician and the hair stylist; Jack does
packed drama, moments of farce and black comedy, lots the body prep work. The cadavers aren’t always handled
of unexpected twists and turns, as well as grim excursions in the most respectful and hygienic manner. Several
into the dark recesses of the human mind. of the bodies are actually Jack’s own murder victims.

72
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
One day a faceless corpse almost completely drained
of blood is brought into the parlour. Then a second body
turns up in the same condition. Intrigued, Jack sets out
to investigate this macabre series of killings… Everyone
he meets is malnourished or malodorous; he experiences
spectacularly grisly drug-induced nightmare visions of an
abandoned lunatic asylum called the Mallehuis Institute,
where a monster insect crawls across the walls and
vaulted ceilings...
This is a feverish decadent text with all the subtlety
and restraint of Peter Sutcliffe with a hammer. It seeks to
offend and disgust, and does a bit of both. Nikolai Watson
writes lyrically and sensually about death and murder
and the destruction of the body, and there is a kind of dark
poetry amid all the coffin timber and the corrupt flesh of
the East End.

PROPER RED STUFF:
RIPPER FICTION BEFORE 1900
In this series we take a look at forgotten writers from
the 1880s and 1890s who tackled the Jack the Ripper
theme in their novels and short fiction.
No. 4: Iva Peacocke: Cásga (1889)
The Irish writer Iva
Peacocke (1847–1902) is
completely forgotten today.
Even during her lifetime
her work was neglected
and received little critical
acclaim. The best of her
ghost and mystery stories are
collected in the small volume
Brought To Light (Hodges
& Co, 1885), and a shilling
novel, Cásga, appeared in
1889. For our purposes,
though, Iva Peacocke is
mainly of interest because she was one of the earliest
writers to allude to the Jack the Ripper murders in a work
of fiction, and almost certainly the first female writer ever
to do so.
Iva Peacocke (née Tufnell) was born in Dublin, the elder
daughter of Thomas Jolliffe Tufnell, a military surgeon, and
Henrietta Fannin. In 1865 she married army officer Peter
Leslie Peacocke, with whom she had four children; her
first son, Leslie, became a screenwriter and film director
in America. The early years of their marriage were spent
in India, but the family eventually returned to Dalkey, a
prosperous seaside resort just south of Dublin. Iva seems
73
to have enjoyed a fairly affluent, leisured existence, her
days taken up with philanthropic work and parish duties.
In the mid 1880s she began submitting stories to
the Irish Weekly Times. She used the noms de plume
‘Iva’ and ‘Ivaniona’, the latter being her grandmother’s
forename. Her style of writing and her choice of literary
themes are typical of female ‘sensation’ fiction in the late
nineteenth century: in Muriel’s Vision (1884), for example,
apparitions of dripping blood foretell the dreadful murder
of a young wife, while Diamonds from the Dead (1886) is
a chilling ghost story based on actual events at a haunted
house in Gardiner Street in Dublin. Her strongest work is
unquestionably the short romantic novel Cásga, published
by Simpkin, Marshall & Co in 1889. It was chiefly written
during the second half of 1888, and in places the dark
influence of the Ripper murders has stained its literary
canvas.
The story is essentially a morality tale in which the
long-suffering virtuous heroine overcomes treachery,
wickedness, and various unnatural cruelties to find true
love. It abounds with thrilling, melodramatic incidents
and colourful descriptions of the wild mountain scenery
around Achill Island on the west coast of Ireland, a part
of the world the author knew well. The novel culminates
in the heroine’s incarceration in a provincial English
madhouse. Here she meets the monstrous Dr Bustock
who uses an electric shock machine to torment his
patients: uncorked speaking tubes connecting the torture
chamber to adjoining wards allow the muffled screams of
his victims to drift out across the asylum.
There is a side plot featuring a villainous assassin-
type character called Michael Peyton. He thinks nothing
throwing a child under the wheels of a passing hansom.
Peyton’s second murder recalls the atrocities of Jack the
Ripper:
Marie Peyton, Michael Peyton’s wretched wife,
had sunk into a desperate state of depravity and
destitution… One night, when she was in abject
poverty, but half-drunk and knew not where to turn
for assistance, she met a man in a purlieu of the east
side of London… He brought her to a deserted square;
a lamp shed a feeble ray upon the gloomy scene… a
frenzied rage seized him, and placing his hand on
her mouth, thus stifling her blasphemous language
of hate and rage, he drew a well-sharpened knife
and quickly cut her throat. Not satisfied with this,
and losing all sense of humanity, he slashed at and
stabbed the wretched remains until they were nearly
unrecognisable. Ere daylight dawned he slunk like a
beast of prey to his lair. The corpse of the murdered
woman was discovered soon after, but no clue could
be obtained as to her identity, and her murder
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

remained one of London’s unravelled mysteries. 

(Cásga, pp.153–155)

The novel was dedicated, by permission, to the Duke of

Cambridge. One wonders what the royal household made
of this shocking gothic confection.
The critical reaction to Cásga was mixed. The Belfast
Evening Telegraph described it as a work “full of absorbing
interest, characterised by life and vigour”, while the
Aberdeen Press & Journal felt it would “help to pass away
an idle hour very pleasantly indeed”. The Northern Whig
praised the author’s “considerable literary power”. But
many critics were left unmoved; the Dundee Advertiser
mocked the book’s implausible escapades and dismissed
it as a “ponderous literary joke”.
Iva Peacocke appears to have stopped writing shortly
after the publication of Cásga, or perhaps she continued
producing novels and short stories under a different
pen-name. (She is still listed as an ‘author’ in the 1901
census.) As a writer she lacked the modernist sensibilities
of many of her contemporaries, and much of her output
is undoubtedly hackwork aimed at the expanding public
readership for cheap fiction. Yet her work shows a daring
streak and an exquisite eye for the macabre detail.
An astute reviewer for the Glasgow Herald responded
warmly to her novel and noted how she had adapted the
Whitechapel murders to her storyline. But can we go
further than this? Has she created in Michael Peyton an
early portrait of the killer of Mary Jane Kelly? What we
have are a young victim called Marie with Irish ancestry,
A CONVERSATION WITH MARK R VOGEL
a decline into drink and destitution, a gruesome slaying
in the courtyards of east London, and a corpse rendered January saw the release of Mark R Vogel’s second novel,
almost unrecognisable through hideous mutilations of The Ripper’s Time (reviewed above). We caught up with
body and face. Many of the elements of the Mary Kelly the author and asked him a few questions about his book
legend are already starting to coalesce. And like all good and Ripper studies in general. Interview conducted by
Ripper suspects, Michael Peyton eventually commits email on February 24.
suicide by drowning in the Thames: his dead body washes
ashore on a deserted wharf below Blackfriar’s Bridge. Q1. Can you tell us something about yourself and your
For details of Thomas Jolliffe Tufnell see D’A. Power, ‘Tufnell, Thomas
background? How long have you been writing and
Jolliffe (1819–1885)’, rev. James Mills, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Information on Dalkey from how did you get started?
F.M. O’Flanagan, ‘Glimpses of Old Dalkey’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 4, I’ve been a clinical psychologist for 30 years. At one
No. 2 (Dec., 1941 – Feb., 1942), pp. 41–57.
point in my career I worked for the state prison system
Reviews of Cásga taken from Aberdeen Press & Journal, May 20,
1889; Belfast Evening Telegraph, May 28, 1889; Dundee Advertiser, May where I did parole evaluations, interviewing hundreds of
27, 1889; Glasgow Herald, May 14, 1889. There are copies of Cásga and murderers, sexual deviates, and other assorted criminals.
Brought To Light in the British Library; they are also available as print- This sparked my interest in forensic psychology and my
on-demand paperbacks from British Library Historical Print Editions. eventual study of the Ripper case.
I also love food and wine and decided to pursue that

professionally as well. I graduated from cooking school
IN THE NEXT ISSUE we review MJ Taylor’s Killing Time in 2003. For years I taught cooking classes and edited
and Stacy Green’s Killing Jane, unavoidably held over from cookbooks. Currently I give classes on wine.
this issue. Since 2002 I’ve been writing a food & wine column

74
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
called Food for Thought. In 2013 I wanted to try
something different so I started writing fiction. My first
novel Crestwood Lake, a horror mystery, was published in
2015. Then came The Ripper’s Time in 2017.
Q2. What’s Crestwood Lake about?
Crestwood Lake is a small town in northern Vermont
where there has been a series of strange deaths and
rumours of witchcraft. The protagonist, the chief of police,
must uncover the truth of what is happening to his town
and how to combat it.
Q3. Can you remember what first stirred your interest
in Jack the Ripper?
Philip Sugden’s book The Complete History of Jack the
Ripper. I think I’ve read it four or five times by now.
Q4. I believe you lecture on the Ripper case and give
slide shows presentations. Can you tell us a little
about that?
I give a lecture accompanied by a PowerPoint
presentation about the case at numerous libraries in my
home state of New Jersey. During my trips to London I
have photographed all of the murder sites and associated
locations, allowing me to give the audience “then and
now” photos of the crimes scenes and other locales.
Q5. Let’s turn now to your Jack the Ripper novel,
which came out at the start of this year. How’s it been
received so far?
It’s only been two months but I have had two
professional reviewers praise it. A handful of readers have
also contacted me and their impressions were even more
favourable.
Q6. Briefly, The Ripper’s Time is a story about a
present-day history professor who travels back in
time to try and prevent Catherine Eddowes from being
murdered. Even though you use a time machine to get
your protagonist back to 1888, I’m sensing you might
not regard the novel as a work of science fiction.
You are absolutely correct. The time machine is merely,
pardon the pun, a vehicle for getting the story to where I
want it to be. The time travel occurs at the beginning and
the end. Everything in-between is the heart of the story
which has nothing to do with science fiction. I consider my
book historical fiction.
Q7. How did the idea come to you to use Catherine
Eddowes as the female lead? What is it about her that
75
would have besotted Professor Willows and made him
want to risk so much to save her?
This is not going to sound very insightful coming from a
psychologist, but there’s something - I’m not exactly sure
what - that has intrigued me about Eddowes, more than
the other victims. Maybe it’s Eddowes’s mortuary photos,
especially the one where you can see her entire body. It
makes her seem more real to me. The victims’ photos
before her are just fuzzy head shots. And Mary Jane Kelly’s
image is so mauled and faceless, that it’s harder to relate
to her.
Q8. Professor Henry Willows is not your typical
adventure story hero - he’s middle-aged, on
medication, bookish and unworldly, a little accident-
prone, and full of vulnerabilities. He spends a lot of
time behaving like a tourist - and of course, in many
respects he is a tourist! But he makes an excellent
everyman hero. Did the character evolve as you wrote
the book, or did you have a fairly clear picture of him
before you started?
I had a clear picture beforehand. I didn’t want a
stereotypical, he-man, John Wayne type. First, because my
protagonist in Crestwood Lake, Captain Butch Morgan, is
a traditional tough-guy. I wanted something different for
The Ripper’s Time. Secondly, it made more sense to me
that a history professor would be less macho.
Q9. You went for Inspector Helson as the main
Metropolitan police presence in the novel. Again, an
unusual choice. I don’t think much is known about
Helson. Is that possibly why he appealed to you?
Helson made the most sense because he investigated
the Nichols murder. Henry begins his quest to stop the
Ripper with the Nichols killing, and (not wanting to give
too much away), you know what happens next. Naturally
Helson would be involved.
Q10. There are a couple of chapters where you delve
into the traumatised childhood of Jack the Ripper.
And in the course of the novel, Professor Willows
expounds a detailed psychological and geographical
profile of the Ripper. Does this sketch of the Ripper
largely mirror your own assessment as to the type of
person the perpetrator may have been?
Willows’s psychological assessment of the Ripper is for
the most part, what modern day profilers assume to be his
distinguishing features. As to my chapters on the Ripper’s
childhood, naturally I had to take some artistic license.
But I would not be surprised if at least some of what I
described actually took place. After all, a killer as twisted
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
as the Ripper doesn’t hail from an idyllic childhood.
Q11. Your novel is obviously the result of many months
of intense and dedicated research. Writers often say
that research is a lot more fun than writing, and that
writing is the hardest work of all. What’s been your
experience?
Normally I prefer the writing to the research, but not
for this book. I enjoy studying the Ripper case so I would
say I liked both equally.
Q12. You’ve been to the East End several times and
visited the crime scenes, or what’s left of them. Did
you draw anything meaningful from the experience?
Absolutely. It brought the case to life, as opposed to just
being this story in a book. For example, I walked directly
from the Berner Street, (now Henriques Street), crime
scene to Mitre Square, quite possibly retracing the same
steps as the Ripper, timing my journey. It gave me much
more of a sense of the original happenings. Visiting the
sites where Eddowes walked, lived, and died, and then
visiting her grave, was a powerful experience. It was quite
moving, to say the least.
76
Q13. I suspect you’re not thinking right now of writing
a sequel to The Ripper’s Time. But can you see yourself
returning to Jack the Ripper in the future, perhaps to
write a nonfiction work about the case?
Perhaps. I’ve toyed with the idea, but I don’t think I have
much to offer, in terms of non-fiction, that hasn’t already
been covered by others.
Q14. What do you read for pleasure? And what’s next
for you as a fiction writer?
I actually don’t read much fiction. I prefer to read books
about history. I recently purchased a new book about the
Salem witch trials. As for my next venture, I’m working on
the sequel to Crestwood Lake. Readers can peruse my food
and wine articles, recipes, and my lecture schedule at my
website: markvogel.info

DAVID GREEN lives in Hampshire, England, where he works as a
freelance book indexer. He is currently writing (very slowly) a book
about the murder of schoolboy Percy Searle in Hampshire in 1888.
History professor Henry Willows is in
love—in love with Catherine Eddowes,
the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper.
Although over a century distant,
Henry’s obsession knows no bounds.
With the aid of an ingenious physicist,
Henry achieves his raison d’être: a
means to travel back in time, stop the
world’s most infamous serial killer,
and save the woman he loves. But the
fabric of time isn’t easy to change . . .
and the Ripper has plans of his own.
Available at amazon.co.uk
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

Reviews
Included in this issue:
Jack the Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert,
21 Years of Jack the Ripper and The Whitechapel Society
and One Autumn In Whitechapel

RIPPER: THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER SICKERT choice of a rather handsome hardback or an enhanced
Patricia Cornwell ebook (which requires compatible hardware).
Seattle: Thomas & Mercer, 2017 I am not a suspect-driven Ripperologist. I’m interested
www.apub.com
in the history of and surrounding the crimes, and to some
First Published:
hardcover and enhanced ebook
extent to how and why some people came to be associated
553pp; illus; appendices; biblio; index with the murders and suspected of committing them. In
ISBN:1503936872 the last fifty years the person most responsible for putting
£25 hardback and £3.98 ebook Walter Sickert’s name in the frame was Joseph Gorman/
For many people Ripperology Sickert through what is probably the most influential
is all about suspects - advancing book about the murders, Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper:
them, assessing them, arguing The Final Solution, which to the best of my knowledge
and fighting about them, and has never been out of print. It spawned the so-called
dismissing them. In this issue Royal Conspiracy theory, several movies, a mention in
of Ripperologist the authors almost every Ripper documentary, and was responsible
of Ripper books under review for millions of people around the world thinking Jack the
variously advance Albert Ripper was a member of the Royal family. Joseph Sickert
Bachert, George Hutchinson, began that story and he claimed he was told it by Walter
Robert Donston Stephenson, Sickert.
Francis Thompson, and Walter The trouble is that basically there’s hasn’t been any
Sickert as Jack the Ripper. The evidence against all of evidence that Joseph ever met or talked to or came within
these people is inconclusive (to say the least), just as it sniffing distance of Walter Sickert, therefore he couldn’t
is against every other person on whom theorists have have been told anything by him, and the reasonable
settled their suspicions, but suspect Ripperology isn’t conclusion reached by many people is that Joseph was
about presenting proof, it’s about making a good case or a fabricator who invented the story about Walter out of
sometimes just a case, and it’s often said that a case can whole cloth. It seems to be generally accepted that the tale
be made against anybody. What distinguishes the authors begins and ends with Joseph.
of these books, however, is that they presumably believe
But Patricia Cornwell’s researches uncovered among
sincerely that their suspect was or may have been Jack or
Joseph Sickert’s papers a statement from a literary agency
that a case can be made that they could have been. I know
dated 19 September 1989 which had accompanied a
that Patricia Cornwell is totally and sincerely convinced
cheque paying Joseph 50% of the advance and permission
that the artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but has
fee pertaining to the paperback publication of A Free
she made a case that he could have been? The question is
House, a collection of Walter Sickert’s writings edited
whether or not people will give this book a chance, or will
by Osbert Sitwell that was originally published in 1947.
allow whatever prejudices they already have to colour
This obviously raised the question of why Joseph received
their opinions.
royalties payable to Walter Sickert’s heirs? The literary
I am unable to review this book because I fact-checked agency explained in a letter dated 10 March 2015 that it
it and assisted with the research, so this is by way of a had been instructed in 1989 that future income was to
heads up that the book has been published. You have the be paid to Joseph Sickert, but there was now no record of

77
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
who had given that instruction. As Patricia acknowledges,
the instruction could have been given by anyone,
even Joseph, but would a respectable literary agency
have accepted instruction from anyone other than an
established immediate descendant? If not, it would seem
that a member of Walter’s family accepted that Joseph was
Walter’s heir.
I am also intrigued by a letter dated 20 October 1975
sent to Stephen Knight by Andrina Schweder, the sister
of Christine Drummond, Walter Sickert’s second wife.
In this letter Schweder wrote of Walter that “I saw him
frequently & with great intimacy”. Having thus made it
clear that she knew Walter very well indeed, she turned
her attention to Joseph, “As far as Jo Sickert is concerned,
Walter was in his dotage by the time he [Joseph] was old
enough to listen to his wanderings, and I think it is rather
mean to have cashed in on the old man’s garbled stories
of the past.” What is significant is that Mrs Schweder did
not dismiss Joseph as a liar or fabricator, she did not deny
that there was a blood relationship between Joseph and
Walter, or deny that Joseph had ever met. spent time with
or spoken to Walter. What she complained of and thought
reprehensible was that Joseph had exploited the geriatric
ramblings of Walter Sickert for a book! It is always
dangerous to read too much between the lines and I can
think of a couple of reasonably plausible explanations for
why Mrs Schweder did not dismiss Joseph as an out-and-
out liar, but the strong implication is that Mrs Schweder
not only accepted that Walter and Joseph met and talked,
but also that Joseph’s story was obtained from Walter.
So, did Joseph receive his story in whole or in part from
Walter Sickert? If he did, was Walter telling him a true
story or was it all geriatric fantasies, or a combination of
the two? And in trying to answer this question, does the
story Jean Overton Fuller told in Sickert and the Ripper
Crimes fit in anywhere? Richard Whittington-Egan wrote
in Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Casebook that Fuller was
“a tenaciously straight dealing” person. In other words, in
his opinion she was honest and unlikely to have invented
her story about Sickert. He did allow that he thought she
wouldn’t be difficult to hoodwink, but who would have
hoodwinked her over her story and why? According to
that story, you will recall, Fuller’s mother had received
some information from a sometime model, fellow artist
and friend of Walter Sickert named Florence Pash, which
suggested that Pash believed Walter to have committed
the Jack the Ripper murders.
We’ll probably never know the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth. The documentary evidence
probably doesn’t exist, and the principle players - not
just Walter Sickert, but Joseph and Jean and Andrina - are
dead, but what looked like a story invented from a to z by
78
Joseph Sickert begins to look just a little less certain.
There’s lots of other interesting stuff in this book, not
the least being the discovery by Peter Bower that letters
purporting to have come from Jack the Ripper came from
a small batch of paper on which Walter Sickert wrote
letters under his own name. This doesn’t make him Jack
the Ripper, of course, but if he did write those letters, why
would he have injected himself into the Ripper case in
such a way?
Just like everyone who has written or is writing a
suspect-based Ripper book, Patricia Cornwell can’t prove
that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. It’s doubtful that
anyone will ever prove who Jack the Ripper was. But has
she made a case that he could have been?
EDWIN BROUGH, SCALBY MANOR AND
THE HUNT FOR JACK THE RIPPER
Mike Covell
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016
Edwin Brough, Scalby Manor And The Hunt For Jack The Ripper
softcover and ebook
166pp;
ISBN:1541009010
£10 softcover and £5.99 ebook
Edwin Brough (1844-1929)
was a breeder of champion
bloodhounds and at the time
of the murders he supplied the
Metropolitan Police with two
of these fabulous animals to
hunt the murder through the
stinking streets of the East End.
However, the police concluded
that the dogs were not incapable
of doing this and Brough had
in any case demanded the dogs return, having become
fearful that criminals might try to injure them. Brough
nevertheless thought the presence of his bloodhounds
in London during October had kept the Ripper from the
streets and in a pamphlet called The Bloodhound and its
Use in Tracking Criminals (1904) he wrote “It is a very
significant fact that at the time at the time of the “Jack the
Ripper” outrages in the East End there were no murders
committed for the two months during which Sir Charles
Warren had arranged for a couple of Bloodhounds to be
kept in London…”
Edwin Brough was a celebrated bloodhound breeder
in his day and remains an interesting and important man
in the history of bloodhound breeding, but he was a very
peripheral player in the drama played out in the East End
in the autumn of 1888 and it is questionable whether he
is of more than passing interest. Whilst Covell has done
his usual excellent job of trawling digitised newspapers
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
and transcribing stories about Brough his Scalby Manor,
formerly his home and now a pub, his book tells you far,
far more than you ever wanted to know. It’s always good
to get some new and detailed information about the most
peripheral players in the Ripper story and this book about
Brough is therefore welcome, but I fear the general Ripper
reader with find it overkill.
21 YEARS OF JACK THE RIPPER AND
THE WHITECHAPEL SOCIETY
Edited by Mark Galloway
London: Mango Books, 2016
www.mangobooks.co.uk
hardcover and ebook
217pp; illus; notes and sources (when given in original articles)
ISBN:1911273078
£15 hardcover £5.79 ebook
Ripperologist began life over
two decades ago as the journal
of the Cloak and Dagger Club.
It was nurtured under the deft
editorial hand of Paul Daniel
and during a brief hiatus it
separated to make its own way
in the world. The Cloak and
Dagger Club also emerged as the
Whitechapel Society, replacing
the Rip with The Whitechapel
Journal. It’s been an eventful twenty-one years and a lot
has changed in the world of Ripper studies during that
time, some good, some bad, and Twenty One Years of Jack
the Ripper and the Whitechapel Society is a collection of
articles written for both Ripperologist, when it was the
journal of the Cloak and Dagger, and for The Whitechapel
Journal, one article being chosen from each year. The
choice was made by Mark Galloway, who founded the
Cloak and Dagger Club all those years ago. From 1995
until 2005 the articles selected come from Ripperologist
and thereafter from The Whitechapel Journal.
Choosing one article from every year since 1995
can have been no easy task and I can’t say it’s one I’d
have willingly accepted, so kudos to Mark Galloway
for undertaking it and making such a good job out of it.
The choice of articles is solid and some were written by
people who are much missed from the Society: Claudia
Oliver, Andy Aliffe (whose article about writer, artist and
early Ripperologist William Stewart is included), and
Christopher-Michael DiGrazia, whose always enjoyable
‘Last Word’ column was a favourite of everyone. Paul
Daniel has a good article on the streets of Whitechapel.
Adam Wood re-evaluates Ripper literature as it was, the
late Colin Wilson rehashed his “My Search For Jack the
Ripper”, and Robert Smith brings back memories of the
79
so-called Maybrick diary, a controversy that tore Ripper
studies apart back in the 90s (you had to be there!) Stephen
Butt looks at Robert James Lees, John Malcolm and Bill
Beadle each took a take on Mary Kelly, current editor of
The Whitechapel Journal, Frogg Moody, looked at William
Thicke, the late Des Mckenna recalled Frederick Deeming,
Mark Ripper investigated Annie Millwood, and Ian Porter
considered that strange witness George Hutchinson.
As said, Mark Galloway did a brilliant job of choosing
one article from each year, but I was disappointed by his all
too brief introduction which gave very little of the history
of Cloak and Dagger Club/Whitechapel Society and didn’t
take the opportunity of the book to thank everyone past
and present who have contributed to the survival of the
Society and its publication. People like the people who
have worked for the Society over the years: Paul Daniel,
who pretty much single-handedly took a four page stapled
newsletter and turned it into proper print magazine,
and Coral Kelly, who for years mailed out the journal to
members, are two examples. On the other hand, I suppose
that so many people have contributed to the Society over
twenty-one years that it may have been more prudent not
to mention anyone rather than to leave someone out.
Twenty One Years of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel
Society is a wonderful stroll down memory lane for those
of who began their interest in the Ripper when they were
slim and had a full head of hair, but the book is definitely a
niche publication for more recent comers to the field, but
the articles published here make interesting reading and
perhaps demonstrate how approaches to the subject have
changed over time.
You have the choice of a hardback - the “jacket” is one of
the best I’ve seen on a Ripper book - or an ebook.
THE TRUE FACE OF JACK THE RIPPER
Melvin Harris
Reigate, Surrey: G2 Rights Limited, 2016
www.g2books.co.uk
First Published: London: Michael O’Mara, 1994
ebook
132pp approx.
99p
Melvin Harris, who died in
2004, was an intelligent and able
debunker of the unexplained,
although personally I think hew
as more interested in collecting
the myths and mistakes rather
than in clearing them away so
that the truth could be seen
better. This was even clear in
his Ripper writing. He wrote
three books about the Ripper,
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
the best being his first, Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth,
which is a collection of Ripper tall stories, but it was in
The True Face of Jack the Ripper, the last of the trilogy and
now published for the first time as an ebook, that Harris
laid out the most detailed case against his suspect, Robert
Donston Stephenson.
Harris’s reputation has suffered in recent years, largely
because of his almost obsessive efforts to prove the so-
called Maybrick diary a fake, but also because research
into his theories have been shown to be less solid than
Harris apparently believed. Stephenson was an alcoholic,
would-be occultist, charlatan, and liar. Investigation of the
Ripper occasionally throws up strange characters who
inhabited the shadows of Victorian society and Stephenson
is unquestionably one of those. His story involves a once-
famous writer named Mabel Collins, a decidedly strange
baroness named Vittoria Cremers, and leading figures in
occultism and theosophy like Alastair Crowley and Helena
Blavatsky. As for being Jack the Ripper, researchers like
Howard Brown of JTR Forums scratched the surface of that
story a little and revealed Stephenson as likely a Ripper as
the man in the moon. Nevertheless, although the theory
against Stephenson may have been demolished, if you
haven’t read Harris’s case against him then The True Face
of Jack the Ripper, published in 1994, presents his theory
with all the details he thought so convincing.
JACK THE RIPPER,
THE WORKS OF FRANCIS THOMPSON
Richard A. Patterson
London: Austin Macauley Publishers, 2017
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published: Francis Thompson - A Ripper Suspect, 2016
softcover
399pp; biblio
ISBN:1786934493
£9.99
I reviewed this book in
Ripperologist no.148 (February
2016) and this edition, which
arrived very soon before “going
to press”, doesn’t appear to have
changed significantly, if at all.
Lancashire-born Francis
Joseph Thompson (1859-1907)
was a Roman Catholic poet
of some distinction. He left
home, went to London, failed
to find employment and was reduced to living on the
streets, where his precarious position was not helped
by an addiction to opium. By the autumn of 1887 he was
contemplating suicide, but met a young prostitute who
took him back to her lodgings and looked after him. In the
80
spring of 1888 Thompson’s fortunes changed when one
of his poems was published and thereafter his literary
career enjoyed a measure of success. Thompson died on
13 November 1907 in London.
Richard Patterson believes Thompson could have
been Jack the Ripper and he works hard to make his case:
Thompson was in London, he consorted with a prostitute,
he had an intense dislike of prostitutes even though he’d
been saved by one, he was staying at the Providence Row
Night Refuge at the top end of Dorset Street in November
1888. Ultimately, though, Patterson fails to convince. What
he does do, however, is make Thompson look a far more
credible suspect than he’s hitherto been seen as being.
ONE AUTUMN IN WHITECHAPEL
M.P. Priestley
London: self-published as Flower and Dean Street Limited, 2016
www.ripperworld.net
softcover
473pp; illus; sources
No ISBN
£11.99
Priestley has written a
detailed account of the White-
chapel murders apparently
in the belief that nobody had
written one before. In his
introduction Priestley says he
thought it was important “that a
book should be written to truly
document the story [of Jack
the Ripper], exactly as it took
place.” Now, Leonard Matters
probably thought the same thing back in the 1920s, Tom
Cullen probably thought it in the 1960s, I thought it in
the 1980s when I wrote Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored
Facts, Philip Sugden had it in mind when he wrote The
Complete History of Jack the Ripper in the early 1990s, and
I had the same thought all over again when I wrote Jack
the Ripper: The Facts. I don’t blame Mick Priestley in the
least for having this thought all over again in 2016, I don’t
even mind him thinking it was original, but I did passing
wonder whether it meant his reading on the subject was
limited and whether this meant his knowledge of the case
was equally shallow.
It didn’t. Priestley provides a straightforward account of
the Ripper murders including the so-called non-canonical
victims as well as the torso murders, which perhaps
makes this account more comprehensive than we’ve
seen hitherto. Priestley has also had the opportunity to
take full advantage of the wealth of digitised newspapers
that were unavailable to many earlier writers, so this is a
doubly welcome volume.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017

Returning to his introduction for a moment, he observes year. The annoying thing is that there is an abundance of
rather curiously: “I don’t feel that I’ve ever read an account clues to stop one from making this mistake, but I missed
of the Whitechapel murders that read like other accounts them too. I am extremely grateful to the indefatigable
of similar true crime cases, or genuinely did justice to the Debra Arif for setting me straight.
crimes that were committed, or the innocent people that Priestley could have done with an editor, the writing
they were committed against.” I’m not sure why anyone being a bit clumsy in places. The non-standard layout of
would expect accounts of the complex and controversial the notes and sources was a pain in the neck and nowhere
Ripper murders to bear the slightest resemblance to near as comprehensive as they needed to be, and the lack
accounts of similar true crime cases, and some readers of an index in a book of this length was a major omission
might cast their eyes along the Ripper books on their that rendered it useless as a go-to reference book. That’s
bookshelves, as I did, and note a significant number of the downside. On the upside, a quick read suggests that
titles that do justice to both the the victims and the case. Mick Priestley has done a pretty good job of setting out
Anyway, this book gives a good and comprehensive the facts in as much detail as possible. As said, this has all
account of the murders. I didn’t notice anything new in been done before and I wondered if we needed Priestley
the book, but much may be new to readers who do not doing it all over again, but his inclusion of the noncanonical
find new info when it first appears on the message boards and the torso victims not only sets his book apart but
or in journals like Ripperologist or all the new books. makes it a necessary addition to anyone’s Ripper library.
Also, this is a very long book and I had a comparatively Recommended.
short time in which to read and digest it, so I confess that
I may have missed something new. My feeling, though, JEWBAITER JACK THE RIPPER:
is that Priestley was not concerned with providing new NEW EVIDENCE AND THEORY
information but with putting what we already know into a Stephen Senise
coherent, flowing narrative. Not so long ago Stephen
What follows is a spoiler, thought probably not a great
Anyone new to the subject of Jack The Ripper might
spend countless hours going over a near endless list
Senise contributed an article
to Ripperologist in which he
of theories on this perplexing case. Most describe

one, but if you don’t want to know who Priestley advances

a killer’s blind rampage – like any of a spate of serial
murders he, the modern prototype, was to usher in.

This study is different. It proposes that conditions on the ground

as a potential Jack the Ripper, don’t read further.

in Victorian East London were unique. Jack The Ripper was not presented his case for believing
simply a maniac, or even just a maniac on a mission. He was the
twisted expression of a moment in time and place. Delving into
that an Australian jailbird
Priestley’s candidate for the bloody mantle of Jack
the socio-political landscape that helped distinguish the East End
in the late 1880s, journalist Stephen Senise looks at the murderous
campaign left by one angry madman bent on broadcasting an
named George Hutchinson was
the Ripper is Albert Bachert, the young Newnham Street
ugly message.

the same George Hutchinson

That his crimes came to a halt as they did, also provides a window
into Jack The Ripper’s intrinsic connection to the setting of the

engraver and self-publicist who injected himself into the

tale, with new archival information presented showing how he

who was a minor but important

got away. Based on Victorian era records and media reports, this
work offers fresh insights, a deeper understanding of events and

Ripper case at each and every opportunity. He’s a good

a novel explanation for the world’s most infamous murder spree.

witness in the Mary Kelly

candidate, so good that one can only assume he was
murder investigation, and also
suspected by the police in 1888 and by every student of
that this George Hutchinson was
the case since then. If so, why hasn’t he been advanced
Jack the Ripper.
before?
On 12 November 1888 George Hutchinson went to
Well, all I can say is that my feeling is that they probably
the Commercial Street Police Station and told the police
did. It’s always possible that the suspicions of the police
that he had met and briefly talked to Kelly, who had met
weren’t piqued in 1888 by the fact that Bachert never
a well-dressed man and returned with him to her room
missed a chance to involve himself with almost every
in Miller’s Court. Hutchinson had followed and loitered
development in the Ripper case, and the American press
outside a common lodging house, apparently in case the
certainly thought the Metropolitan Police were dim
man emerged. Hutchinson was apparently seen in his
witted buffoons who couldn’t find their way through an
lonely vigil by a woman named Sarah Lewis. Hutchinson
open door, but Bachert’s behaviour - cropping up with
was able to give a very detailed description of the man he’d
information, sightings, letters, as so forth - must have
seen with Kelly - so detailed that many researchers have
struck someone as strange. So the question is whether
doubted Hutchinson’s veracity - but the police apparently
Bachert’s behaviour was such that he would have aroused
accepted his story and placed faith in it. Perhaps this isn’t
suspicions at the time, was investigated and dismissed, or
too surprising; unless they had good reasons to doubt
whether he never came on their radar.
Hutchinson, they were obliged to treat his story seriously.
A quick point perhaps worth men mentioning, Priestley After all, he was claiming to be the very last person to have
begins his account of Albert Bachert by saying that his seen her alive! Hutchinson also claimed that he’d seen the
birth name was Wilhelm and that he was born in 1860. man on 11 November in Petticoat Lane, which suggested
This is a mistake, Wilhelm was Albert’s elder brother who that he was local to the area, which was a conclusion the
died in infancy in 1861, Albert being born the following police may also have come to. For some time therefore he

81
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
and a policeman tramped the streets in the hope of seeing
the man again.
All in all, the police had hardly any leads to follow up, so
even if they hadn’t have altogether believed Hutchinson’s
story, at least it offered hope of a breakthrough in the case.
That hope may have been considerably less substantial
than it appears: an American newspaper reported that
Hutchinson was paid five times his usual salary for the
days he was out looking for the man and that his detailed
description was “invented”. Whoever supplied this
information to the newspaper didn’t believe Hutchinson’s
story and thought he was motivated by money.
None of this means that Hutchinson wasn’t Jack the
Ripper, but it weakens any argument that he might have
been. Nevertheless, there remains the question of who
Hutchinson was and whether he emigrated to Australia.
Like the majority of people involved in the Ripper case,
he is little more than a name whose pre- and post-Ripper
life is a mystery and about whom far too little is known
to enable any identification with certainty. Stephen
Senise thinks he’s changed that. He’s found a man named
George Hutchinson in the Australian criminal records -
he was 29-years-old, was born in England, and in 1889
had arrived in Australia, where a few years later he was
sentenced to two years with hard labour for sexually
assaulting two young boys - but it has to be said that the
case isn’t a strong one. “George Hutchinson” is a common
enough name and whilst Senise makes a determined and
not altogether unsuccessful attempt to fit the Australian
man’s physical description to that of the London George
Hutchinson, it’s isn’t particularly strong. There is also a
photograph of the Australian George Hutchinson which
shows a general similarity to a very poor line-drawing
of the London George Hutchinson, but (as Senise is well-
aware) there is no guarantee that the line-drawing is of
the actual George Hutchinson and not a product of the
illustrator’s imagination.
I don’t much like the way Senise writes as if the case
against George Hutchinson is made, rather than just being
a theory, but I must say that I found his arguments about
the London dock strike of 1889 very appealing. This was
a highly-charged time, the ship-owners desperate for
blackleg labour to crew their ships and asking very few
questions. This was a very good time for someone to
easily get work aboard ship and flee the country. Senise
speculates that Hutchinson murdered Alice McKenzie,
but afterwards found the pressure too great to bear
and fled to Australia aboard ship. That’s probably what
the Australian George Hutchinson actually did, but that
doesn’t make him the London George Hutchinson, and, of
course, there is no evidence that the murderer did this or
that George Hutchinson was the murder, or for that matter
82
that McKenzie was murdered by Jack the Ripper.
The book has four appendices and is well served with
notes citing sources, but the PDF I saw did not have an
index, an omission which, as ever, merits a big black
mark. However, the book was well-written - for once!
- and an easy, flowing read, but I don’t think the case is
made for Australian immigrant and child molester George
Hutchinson being the George Hutchinson who claimed
to know Mary Kelly and to have been the last person to
see her alive. And the case definitely isn’t made for either
George Hutchinson being Jack the Ripper. Nevertheless,
in the process of telling his story, Senise gives some
interesting insights into the milieu of the East End, the
dock strike being particularly interesting (there is a book
on the subject if you are interested - Great Dock Strike of
1889 by Terry McCarthy published back in 1888. You can
pick up a copy on Amazon for a mere 1p).
Further research will hopefully reveal more.
THE RIPPER OF WATERLOO ROAD:
THE MURDER OF ELIZA GRIMWOOD IN 1838
Jan Bondeson
Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2017
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
hardcover and ebook
288pp; illus; notes; index
ISBN:075096779X
£20 hardback and £13 ebook
Some while ago a journalist
and author named Rebecca
Gowers wrote a novel, The
Twisted Heart, in which she laid
out an argument that Charles
Dickens had based the horrific
bludgeoning to death of Nancy
in Oliver Twist on the real-life
murder in 1838 of a beautiful
young prostitute named Eliza
Grimwood.
The murder of Grimwood in her squalid lodgings in
Waterloo Road, London, on 26 May 1838, horrified the
nation and put the abilities of the fledgling Metropolitan
police to the test - one they failed - and it has remained
a classic unsolved Victorian murder. However, the
connection with Charles Dickens elevated the murder
and gave it a literary and historical significance, a further
fillip of importance being the suggestion that Dickens’
histrionic stage re-enactments of Nancy’s murder may
have affected his health so badly that it led to his early
death!
Eliza Grimwood was a prostitute, her throat had been
cut and her abdomen ripped open, and the police failed to
bring her killer to justice. In 1888 a journalist for the Daily
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Telegraph noted “the strange similarity existing between
the Whitechapel case and that of Eliza Grimwood”, but
there is no other connection between the Grimwood and
Jack the Ripper. Nevertheless, although the murder of Eliza
isn’t as well-known these days as it once was, it remains a
classic and a definitive account has long been overdue. Jan
Bondeson provides it with The Ripper of Waterloo Road.
On the night she died Eliza Grimwood had gone to
the theatre and at around midnight had returned home
in the company of a tall, well-dressed, and gentlemanly-
looking man. Nobody heard anything further from either
person, and Eliza’s companion made no noise when he
left, whenever that was. The following morning Eliza was
found murdered in her room. Suspicion settled on her
cousin, William Hubbard, with whom Grimwood shared
the rooms in Waterloo Road and who had discovered
her body. He was a man with a violent temper who had
allegedly recently struck Eliza and was thought by some
who knew him as capable of committing such a violent
murder. Evidence was lacking, however, and it is now
commonly thought that the killer was the gentleman
with whom she had returned home and who was never
identified.
It isn’t committing a spoiler to say that Jan Bondeson
believes the mysterious gentleman to have been the Swiss
valet François Courvoisier, hanged in London on 6 July
1840 for the murder of his employer Lord William Russell.
Approximately 40,000 people turned out to watch him
die, including William Makepeace Thackery and Charles
Dickens. The day after he had been sentenced to hang
Courvoisier made a confession, stating that Lord William
had intended to fire him, a disgrace which would have
ruined his reputation. Bondeson bought a book by Guy H
Logan, a journalist and true crime writer, in which there
was a typed note - Bondeson calls it a memorandum -
referring to a belief by George R Sims that Courvoisier had
also wanted to confess to the murder of two unfortunate
young women.
Bondeson outlines his case against Courvoisier and
concludes with a lengthy account of his execution. He also
provides a detailed history of some of the fiction about
or based on the murder of Eliza Grimwood, including the
idea that she provided the real-life inspiration from the
murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes. Bondeson notes several
differences between the two crimes and apparently
remains unconvinced.
The Ripper of Waterloo Road is well-written and
meticulously researched, as you’d expect from Jan
Bondeson, and is without doubt the definitive account
of this early Victorian murder and testing police
investigation. It is a must-have for any true crime
aficionado and cannot be recommended too highly.
83
JOSEPH: THE LIFE, TIMES AND PLACES
OF THE ELEPHANT MAN
Joanne Vigor-Mungovin
London: Mango Books, 2016
mangobooks.co.uk
hardcover and ebook
234pp; illus; appendices; biblio; index
ISBN:1911273051
£20 hardback and £7.51 ebook
In late January we heard the
sad news that the actor John
Hurt had died. I suspect that had
it not been for the movie The
Elephant Man, in which Hurt
gave one of his most memorable
performances, Joseph Merrick
would have remained a novelty
known to few people. I watched
the movie again quite recently to
refresh my memory and as soon
as the black and white opening credits rolled and John
Morris’s haunting theme played, I was completely drawn
into David Lynch’s 1980 classic. It was based in part on
Sir Frederick Treves’ book The Elephant Man and Other
Reminiscences and Ashley Montague’s The Elephant Man:
A Study in Human Dignity, but there have been surprisingly
few books on the subject since then, just The True History
of the Elephant Man (1980) by Michael Howard and
Measured By The Soul (2015) by Jeanette Sitton and Mae
Siuwai Stroshane. Interestingly, though, I have read that
Ash Shah, who produced one of the best Jean-Claude Van
Damme movies, Sudden Death, is apparently planning a
new film about Joseph Merrick. It’s slated for 2017, but
I can’t find much about it, so maybe it’s failed to find the
necessary financing.
Joseph Carey Merrick was born in Leicester on 5
August 1862, the son of Joseph Rockley Merrick and Mary
Jane (nee Potterton). He was a normal baby and even as
a young child he showed no signs of the awful physical
deformities which would blight his life but give him a
sort of immortality as the ‘Elephant Man’. Apparently
this sobriquet was bestowed upon Joseph because his
deformities, which began to reveal themselves from
about the age of five years, were explained by his family
as being a consequence of his mother being frightened
by a fairground elephant when she was carrying Joseph.
Merrick accepted this explanation and believed it until he
died.
In 1884 Joseph contacted the music hall proprietor
and comedian Sam Torr and offered himself for exhibition
as a ‘freak’. He toured widely and in November he
appeared in a penny gaff in Whitechapel run by Tom
Norman in Whitechapel, which was where he was seen
by Dr. Frederick Treves. Norman’s gaff was closed down
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
by the police in 1885 and Merrick joined a travelling
fair and in due course travelled to Europe. His manager
stole Joseph’s life savings and deserted him. Remarkably
Joseph was able to get back to England, where he arrived
at Liverpool Street Station. A policeman did his best for
Joseph and found upon his person a visiting card he’d
been given by Dr Treves. Treves took Joseph to the London
Hospital, where he would spend the rest of his life. On
11 April 1890, Joseph was found dead. Wynne Edwin
Baxter conducted the inquest, where Joseph’s death was
attributed to asphyxia and ruled accidental.
Joanne Vigor-Mungovin’s book begins with a
bewilderingly detailed chapter of Potterton-family
genealogy. I must have missed where the author explained
how the Potterton family was relevant to Merrick. Had
I not already known, I would have been wondering
what the chapter was all about until the final words of
the chapter explained that a Mary Jane Potterton was
Merrick’s mother.
Chapter two begins generations before Joseph’s birth,
with Joseph’s great-great-great-grandfather, Barnabus
Merrick, who was born in the last decade of the 1600s.
As interesting as this depth of genealogical background
might be to the Joseph Merrick enthusiast, I can’t say that
I think the same could be said for the general reader. It
certainly bored me, although might have been of interest
as an appendix and available after I had read about Joseph,
who is, after all, the primary object of interest.
This criticism is of the structure of the book, which I
think could have been better. What the complaint reveals,
however, is the depth of research Joanne Vigor Mungovin
has undertaken. One might find it irksome to be told about
five generations of Joseph’s ancestors before one gets to
the nitty-gritty of the story, but it’s difficult to imagine
how anyone could write a more detailed book about
Merrick. If you want to know everything there is to know
about the tragic but hugely inspiring Joseph Merrick man
then Mungovin’s book is probably your only choice.
Mungovin gets to the subject of the book and takes
off, her interest (maybe obsession) becoming infectious,
making the book a real page turner. As one might expect
from a writer with such a close eye for detail as Joanne
Mungovin, there are notes and sources throughout, a
select bibliography, and thankfully there’s an excellent
and comprehensive index. The book has a very brief
introduction by Michelle Merrick and four appendices, one
of which is The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick.
Overall, after a couple of difficult opening chapters
Joanne Mungovin provides a solid read about Joseph
Merrick and his world. It’s Merrick’s world and his part
in it that also makes excellent reading, highlighting the
84
difficult transitionary phase of late Victorian Britain as
it shed its Dickensian trappings and moved towards the
20th century. It also has an interest for Ripperologists,
of course, partly because Merrick was advanced as Jack
the Ripper, and there have been few more ludicrous
suggestions than that, but also because the core of his
story was based in the heart of Whitechapel. A must have
for everyone’s bookshelf.
CHESNEY: THE MIDDLE CLASS MURDERER
Jonathan Oates
London: Mango Books, 2016
www.mangobooks.co.uk
hardcover
235pp; illus; select biblio; index
ISBN:1911273094
One particularly gruesome
exhibit in Scotland Yard’s Crime
Museum, formerly known as
the Black Museum, has always
drawn me, not because it is
gruesome but because a pair of
forearms preserved in a jar of
formaldehyde isn’t something
you come across everyday
(thankfully). The story behind
the arms is that a suspected
murderer shot himself in Germany and the British police
asked the German authorities to forward his fingerprints.
The forwarded the fingerprints, hands and arms and all.
Sadly, that story isn’t true.
The arms belonged to Ronald Chesney, the subject of
this latest biography from Jonathan Oates. Chesney’s real
name was Donald Merrett and he was born in New Zealand
in 1908, but came to Britain with his mother in 1926,
settling in Edinburgh. He was a repellent individual who
began his criminal career when at university by forging
his mother’s signature on so many cheques that she
accrued such a sizeable overdraft that she was contacted
on the matter by her bank. Merrett then decided that
he’d be better off if his mother was dead and so he shot
her. She was rushed to hospital and before she died she
was able to tell a doctor what had happened, 18-year-old
Merrett being duly charged with murder. His trial involved
some names famous in the annals of true crime: Bernard
Spilsbury and the firearms expert Robert Churchill
appeared for the defence, and Sydney Smith appeared for
the prosecution, and the case itself came down to whether
or not Merrett’s mother could have shot herself, Smith
contending that she could have held the gun far enough
away from herself to avoid getting black powder marks
on her skin, Spilsbury and Churchill arguing that she
could not have done. The jury agreed with the latter and
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
Merrett walked away a free man. Sort of. He was convicted
of forging his mother’s signature on the cheques and was
sent to prison, which free from the shadow of the noose
must have seemed like freedom indeed, and as a bonus he
inherited his mother’s estate of £50,000 and went to live
in Hastings, where he married a lady named Vera Bonnar.
Spool forward to 1954. Merrett had quickly spent the
£50,000, deserted his wife, and become a career criminal,
and eventually settled in post-war Germany, but money
was in short supply and Merritt came to Britain to bum
what he could off his wife. When she refused to give him
any money, Merrett killed her. Then he killed his mother-
in-law, who was asking too many awkward questions,
battering in her head with a pewter coffee pot, which,
badly dented, is another exhibit in the Crime Museum. He
then fled back to Germany, but realised that his “game”
had run its course and killed himself on 16 February
1954. No loss to anyone.
These are the basic facts about Donald Merrett,
aka Ronald Chesney, but there’s lots more to his story.
Curiously, few books tell it and all of them were written by
journalists in the mid-1950s, so a retelling of the tale has
been long overdue. Not only that, whilst the journalists did
what journalists do, and that’s interview people, they did
not document their sources and often wrote in the rather
florid style of a novelist, so it’s very difficult (actually,
it’s generally impossible) to know what’s fact, what’s
hearsay, and what’s fiction. Jonathan Oates has gone back
to documented sources for this biography, which makes
it a must-have volume for every true crime aficionados
bookshelf.
A DANGEROUS PLACE:
THE STORY OF THE RAILWAY MURDERS
Simon Farquhar
Stroud, Gloucesershire: The History
Press, 2016
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
softcover and ebook
256pp; illus (some colour); references;
index
ISBN:0750965894
£9.99 softcover and £3.79 ebook
In 1982, near Hampstead
Railway Station in London, a
women was raped by two men.
It was the first in a series of
eighteen rapes that culminated
in the murder of 19-year-old Alison Day on 29 December
1985.
The mysterious perpetrator, “The Railway Rapist” by
the newspapers, now became “The Railway Killer”.
Detective Superintendent Charles Farquhar took
85
charge of the investigation of the murder of Alison Day
and he was the policeman who made the connection
between the rapes and the murder. He was an East End
copper, the father of the author of A Dangerous Place, and
this book is as much his story as it is that of the terrible
crimes committed by “The Railway Killer”.
Another murder occurred on 17 April 1986. The victim
was a 15-year-old girl named Maartje Tamboezer, and
Farquhar connected it with that of Alison. A month later,
on 18 May 1986, Anne Lock, was abducted as she left a
train at Brookmans Park and murdered.
Among the thousands of suspects was a man named
John Duffy and Detective Superintendent John Hurst
identified him as a known sex offender convicted of the
rape of his wife, and investigations quickly found evidence
tying him to the murder of Maartje Tamboezer, and
mounting circumstantial evidence made identification as
the rapist and murderer increasingly probable. The police
also questioned his close friend, David Mulcahy.
Famously, Dr David Canter, known to Ripperologists
for his connection with the so-called Maybrick diary, was
brought in because of his work on offender profiling,
particularly geographic profiling, which had never been
used in Britain. Canter did what profilers do and built
a psychological profile of the killer. He predicted a total
of 17 items about the rapist/killer’s habits, lifestyle,
and so on. Then the police arrested John Duffy, who was
observed following a woman in a secluded park, and in
February 1988 he was convicted of two murders and
four rapes and was sentenced to thirty years in prison,
which to my mind has never seemed much of a penalty
for what he did. He fitted 13 of Canter’s 17 predictions.
In 1997 Duffy implicated his close friend David Mulcahy
and in 2000 he gave evidence in court against him, being
convicted of three murders and seven rapes, for which he
received a sensible three life sentences, Duffy got another
12-years added to his sentence following conviction of 17
more rapes. Hopefully, neither man will ever see release
from prison.
Amazingly, there has never been a full-length account
of the crimes of Duffy and Mulcahy and I can’t say their
story makes pleasant reading, but Simon Farquhar has
done a sterling job balancing the story of this pair of
wasted space with the far more important stories of the
poor women who died at their hands, the women who
suffered the horror of being raped, the story of those
women who were brave enough to testify, and the story
of Chief Superintendent Charles Farquhar, the author’s
father and investigator of the crimes. This is also valuable
as an accompaniment to Criminal Shadows and Mapping
Murder, books by David Canter.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
HISTORY’S MYSTERIES
Two classic cases of disappearance for the historical
mystery buff this issue - what happened to the princes in
the Tower and to where did a whole colony of would-be
settlers in North America vanish?
RICHARD GRENVILLE AND
THE LOST COLONY OF ROANOKE
Andy Gabriel-Powell
Jefferson,North Carolina: McFarland, 2016
www.mcfarlandpub.com
A revised edition of Grenville and the Lost Colony of Roanoke, 2011
softcover and ebook
180pp; illus; notes; biblio; index
ISBN:1476665710
softcover £28.95 and ebook £11.75
When Queen Elizabeth I
wanted to establish an English-
speaking colony in North
America, Sir Walter Raleigh
accepted the challenge. He
made three attempts and they
all failed, but it is the last of
these that has claimed the
limelight. In 1587 115 would-be
settlers under the leadership of
John White set foot on Roanoke
Island, North Carolina, and quickly realised that they were
inadequately provisioned. White was elected to return to
England and arrange for fresh supplies He left behind 114
of the original colonists - one man having been killed by
the natives - and his newly born granddaughter, Virginia,
the first English child to be born in America. When he
returned to Roanoke Island he found that the colonists
had vanished without trace, the only clue being a single
word carved on a stockade post: “CROATOAN”.
White’s return to America had suffered serious delays.
First of all he couldn’t find anyone prepared to make a
trans-Atlantic crossing in winter, then the captains of
the ships he’d hired were defeated by some Spanish
ships with which they had stupidly engaged, and finally
he was unable to hire a ship because they had all been
readied to oppose the Spanish Armada. It wasn’t until
18 August 1590, coincidentally the third birthday of his
granddaughter Virgina Dare, that he reached Roanoke.
The colonists had not left their settlement under duress.
They had calmly and efficiently dismantled all the building
that housed them and nowhere could White find the sign
that they’d promised to leave if their evacuation had been
against their will. White further learned that CROATOAN
was Croatoan Island - today known as Hatteras Island -
but a severe storm was threatening and his ships sailed
before he could go there to investigate.
86
Investigations by Captain John Smith of the later
Jamestown settlement apparently established that the
colonists had survived for some two decades, but were
eventually slaughtered on the orders of Chief Powhatan
because they had settled with an enemy tribe. The
trouble is that the slaughter may have been of fifteen
members of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first attempt to establish
a colony in America. Also, for what it’s worth, no bodies
or archaeological evidence has been found to support the
story.
Over the years information emerged of white people
being seen in several native camps, either as prisoners
or having integrated. There were stories told of literate
“tribesmen” and of two story houses. Who these people
were, if they really existed, is unknown. They could have
been members of White’s Lost Colony or equally of earlier
would-be colonists. Or maybe not even English at all.
Back in 2011 Andrew Thomas Powell wrote Grenville
and the Lost Colony of Roanoke, an excellent account of
the attempts to establish an English speaking colony in
North America. The title under review is an update of
that earlier book, although it differs sufficiently to merit
being considered an entirely new book. The author also
discusses discoveries since 2011 that might shed a light
on the true fate of the colonists, such as a map drawn by
John White which appears to show a fort on what some
authorities believe to be a place called Salmon Creek and
speculate that the settlers relocated there. Also, one of the
most contentious items connected with the lost colonists
are the so-called Dare Stones which apparently bare the
writings of Eleanor Dare, White’s daughter and mother
of Virginia, describing the fate of the colonists. Lost
dismissed by historians as a fraud, Gabriel-Powell reports
on some new thinking.
This is the first of two books about the Lost Colony
published by McFarland, the other will hopefully be
reviewed in the next Ripperologist, and both will probably
demand to be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in
this mystery. My only regret is that McFarland’s books
are horrendously expensive and for a paperback of 180
pages (inclusive of notes, bibliography, and index) this
one carries an eye-watering cover price of nearly £30!
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems hard to justify spending
that kind of money on a slender softcover book, even if
it is as readable as this one. On the other hand, it’s easy
enough to rack up that sort of bill just grabbing dinner in
a restaurant or being caught for a couple of rounds in the
pub. Unless you find yourself devouring this book in one
or two sittings, which is entirely possible, it will probably
entertain and inform you for a good many hours, and leave
you free of the calories and hangover.
Warmly recommended.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
RICHARD III AND THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER:
THE POSSIBLE FATES OF EDWARD V AND RICHARD
OF YORK
Gerald Prenderghast
Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2016
www.mcfarlandpub.com
softcover and ebook
242pp; illus; notes; biblio; index
ISBN:1476666652
£28 sofcover and £11.75 ebook
King Edward IV had two
sons, twelve-year-old Edward
and nine-year-old Richard, and
when their father died in 1483
they were placed in the care of
their uncle, Richard, Duke of
Gloucester, who lodged them in
private apartments in the Tower
of London. They were seen
several times, but less and less
and eventually no more. Their
fate remains unknown, though it is widely assumed that
they were murdered on the orders of their uncle, who
duly claimed the throne for himself as Richard III.
The trouble is that apart from their disappearance
there is no evidence that the brothers were murdered. In
fact, one source, Dominic Mancini, an Italian friar who was
in London at the time and who seems reasonably well-
informed, says that Edward was regularly visited by a
doctor and believed that he was going to die, so it is entirely
possible that the brothers contracted a fatal illness. But
if so, why didn’t Richard III say so? No matter from what
angle one approaches the mystery of the princes in the
Tower, Richard III seems guilty, if not of directly ordering
the boys’ murder, then of being negligent in his care
of them, allowing others to kill them or perhaps of not
taking adequate precautions against illness and disease.
A third possibility is that they were not killed at all, but
taken elsewhere to live, somehow agreeing not to make
their true identities known. It was something along these
lines that Perkin Warbeck claimed when pretending to be
Richard - he claimed that his brother Edward had been
murdered, but that he had been allowed to live because of
his age, and had been sworn not to reveal his true identity.
Do we really need another book about the Princes in
the Tower? I guess that depends. I always seem to enjoy
a rehashing of the evidence, especially as the books aren’t
all that frequent. On the other hand, will the arguments
ever lead anywhere different to the places they’ve already
taken us, and if they won’t, what’s the point of traipsing
over old ground?
Gerald Prenderghast has written a book that’s a little
different. Right from the get-go he makes it clear that even
87
the most basic questions about the princes are lacking
definitive answers, and he bullet points what they are.
And, as he says, there is nothing to be gained from trying
to construct another unprovable hypothesis to answer
them. What Mr Prenderghast sets out to do is sift through
the extant sources and examine the facts, constructing an
easy-to-read, highly enjoyable, and refreshingly unbiased
assessment of what he know and what we can safely
deduce about the fate of young Edward and Richard.
HISTORY
History knows him as Æthelred the Unready and he’s
usually portrayed as a terrible king, but a brilliant new
biography gives a somewhat different picture. I don’t
normally mention books published some time ago, but I
missed a little gem from Nathen Amin about Tudor Wales.
ÆTHELRED THE UNREADY
(THE ENGLISH MONARCHS SERIES)
Levi Roach
London: Yale University Press, 2016
www.yalebooks.co.uk
hardcover & ebook
369pp; illus; notes; biblio; index
ISBN:0300196296
hardcover £30 & ebook £23.40
When I was a child my parents
took me on holiday to Dorset
and I pestered them to take me
to Corfe Castle, a village with a
medieval castle perched above
it, the latter almost certainly
having been built on the site of
a Saxon fortification or manor
house where a murder was
committed on 18 March 978.
King Edgar, who reigned from
959 to 975, had two sons, Edward, who was illegitimate
but the first born, and Æthelred, who was legitimate
and declared by Edgar as his heir, but was a young boy.
Typically, when Edgar died in July 975 the reigns of power
were seized by the elder and illegitimate brother, Edward,
a strange young man who was probably off his trolly. He
was reportedly given to extremely abusive and violent
outbursts that made him enemies, and on 18 March 978,
having arrived at Corfe to visit his half-brother and step-
mother Ælfthryth, he was dragged from his horse and
killed, his body being buried without honour or ceremony.
12-year-old Æthelred succeeded and doesn’t appear to
have been suspected of a part in the murder, but whispers
did circulate about the formidable Ælfthryth, and
troublingly Edward’s grave quickly became associated
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
with many miracles and Edward himself became known
as “the Martyr”.
Æthelred is probably known to most people for his
nickname “the Unready” and nothing else. If they do know
him for something else it is some vague idea that he was a
poor or even a bad king and possibly that this was because
he kowtowed to the Danes and paid them a tribute called
Danegeld. In reality Æthelred faced a succession of
difficult problems which he could probably have handled
better, but he began his reign as a boy, was in the grip of
Ælfthryth, and was not given good advice - which is the
origin of his nickname. Levi Roach describes as best the
sources will allow the intricacies of his kingship and
Æthelred emerges as a far more understandable character.
This is the latest volume in Yale’s scholarly “The English
Monarchs Series” and it’s a crackerjack, Roach drawing
upon all the known sources so that when you regretfully
turn the last page you will know pretty much all there is to
know about Æthelred.
Oh, and why was he called “the Unready”? “Unready”
is a mistranslation or misunderstanding of the Anglo-
Saxon word ræd, meaning ill-advised or ill-counseled. It
was a nickname that may not have had the Anglo-Saxons
rolling in the aisles, but it was a witticism or a play on the
name “Æthelred”, which meant something like “noble-
counseled”. Names meant a lot to the Anglo-Saxons, who
bestowed upon their children names which they were
supposed to live up to.
This is a fabulous book, superbly and exhaustively
researched and very well-written. Thoroughly
recommended.
TUDOR WALES
Nathen Amin
Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014
www.amberley-books.com
softcover & ebook
The dynasty known as the
Tudors ran from 1485, when
Henry VII dumped the body of
Richard III in a Leicester car
park ( well, sort of) and seized
the throne for himself, to the
death of Elizabeth I in 1603.
The dynastic founder, Henry,
had been born at Pembroke
Castle in Wales but otherwise
had little connection with the
place, although he used his Welsh ancestry to successfully
garner support in Wales when he made his bid for the
throne. In reality, Henry VII’s Welsh lineage was about
as tenuous as the legitimacy of his claim to the throne.
88
However, as Nathen Amin states, “118 years of Tudor rule
steered England from the dreary medieval period into a
new era of celebrated discovery and advancement.”
Nathen’s book is essentially a guidebook to important
Tudor sites in West Wales, South Wales, and North Wales,
respectively. Naturally I turned to South Wales. Nathen
lists ten sites, which is fewer than he gives to West or
North Wales (boo, hiss), but they are some real goodies
like Cardiff Castle and St Fagans, which I regularly visited
when I was a child. St Fagans was a particular favourite,
so its saying a lot when I tell you that I learned something
from the brief, page-long entry Nathen Amin gives it - a
museum these days preserving a range of fascinating
buildings from the past; a definite place to visit again.
Each location is given as full and detailed description
as possible in the limited space allowed, which was often
not enough. I got the feeling from time to time that Amin
could have written lots and lots more, his knowledge of
and enthusiasm for the period not being given chance to
take off. In addition to the description, each location is
accompanied by several full-colour photographs.
If you are planning a trip to Wales - and if not, why not?
- then this book is a good guide to just some of the remains
of the Tudors. And if you’re not going there, you can read
about them. Recommended.
THE CHICAGO GUIDE TO FACT-CHECKING (CHICAGO
GUIDES TO WRITING, EDITING AND PUBLISHING)
Brooke Borel
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016
www.press.uchicago.edu
First Published:
softcover & ebook
180pp; appendices; references; index
ISBN:022629093X
£12 softcover, £11.40 ebook
I read in Joseph (reviewed
elsewhere) that numerous
sources, including a memorial,
say that Joseph Merrick had a
brother named John Thomas,
but that these sources are
wrong, John Thomas in fact
being the son of another
woman named Merrick who by
a remarkable coincidence lived
in the same street as Joseph’s
family. It would seem that nobody had bothered to check
John Thomas Merrick’s birth certificate until Joseph’s
author came along. This story illustrates how false facts
can be repeated so often that they become accepted as
the truth. This may not worry you, but if you care about
historical accuracy it should.
 Ripperologist 154 February 2017
In recent months “fake news” has become a big
story, mainly thanks to the antics of Donald Trump and
uncertainty about what it actually is. To me “fake news”
meant a wholly invented news story or at a push a story
that had a biased or an invented twist or slant, such as
one might get from a spin-doctor. Of course, the latter
definition means that “fake news” could be attached to
stories you don’t like or with which you disagree, so “fake
news” is probably better defined as factually inaccurate
reporting. Anyway, whatever it is, it’s the sort of story that
no self-respecting journalist would have wanted to attach
his or her name.
Good journalists check and double check and even triple
check their sources and makes sure that whenever possible
all quotes are properly attributed. Some publishers even
employed people to identify details in a story that needed
confirmation. These days fact checking is too expensive.
It’s very time-consuming and in the high-pressure world
of “instant” journalism it’s a luxury few can afford. The
onus is therefore pretty much on the author and that’s the
person at whom this book is principally aimed, and not
just journalists but all writers and researchers.
OVER 200 JACK THE RIPPER AND ASSOCIATED TITLES ON LAYBOOKS.COM INCLUDING:
LAY (LORETTA) & WOOD (ADAM) - The Whitechapel Album h/b Numbered Limited Edn.
New £25
ANDERSON (SIR ROBERT) - The Lighter Side of My Official Life h/b Insc. and Signed +
handwritten letter to sister £425
DEW (EX-CHIEF INSP. WALTER) - I Caught Crippen h/b £375
GRIFFITHS (MAJOR ARTHUR) - Mysteries of Police and Crime (1902 edn. in 3 volumes)
h/b £150
JEYES (S.H.) & HOW (F.D.) - The Life of Sir Howard Vincent h/b Signed by Ethel Vincent
£400
LEESON (EX-DET. SGT. B.) - Lost London h/b (fair only copy) £120
LITTLECHILD (CHIEF-INSP. JOHN GEORGE) - The Reminiscences of Chief-Inspector Littlechild
h/b (Good only) £100
LOGAN (GUY B.H.) - Masters of Crime h/b £180
MCLAUGHLIN (ROBERT) - The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs Ltd. Edn.
Numbered (73) Signed Robert + Whittington-Egan label As New s/c £225
89
Once you have managed to look beyond its bias towards
journalists, The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking by Brooke
Borel is really good reading. Fact checking is commonly
done after an article or book has been written, but there’s
no reason why a writer shouldn’t undertake some fact
checking during the writing process. Fact checking is all
about accuracy and sources. It’s about double and triple
checking the things you write about, learning to recognise
sources that could be inaccurate or biased, and knowing
the difference between primary and secondary sources.
It’s about taking a story back to the original source, as was
done when John Thomas Merrick’s birth certificate was
checked, and it’s about understanding one’s sources and
how to confirm what they say.
This book is written for journalists and some of the
information given here won’t apply to the authors and
would-be authors of Jack the Ripper books, or, indeed, any
historical subject, but there’s a lot here that could be of
value, and in any case it is an enjoyable read. A cheaper
ebook price would have been very welcome.
All reviews by Paul Begg
MACNAGHTEN (SIR MELVILLE L.) - Days of My Years h/b £425
MATTERS (LEONARD) - The Mystery of Jack the Ripper h/b £150
MAYBRICK (FLORENCE ELIZABETH) - Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story h/b £90
ROBINSON (BRUCE) - They All Love Jack : Busting the Ripper hb/dw Signed New £35
SIMS (GEORGE R.) - The Mysteries of Modern London h/b £175
SIMS (GEORGE R.) - My Life Sixty Years’Recollections of Bohemian London h/b Signed
(Fair only) £150
SWEENEY (LATE DET.-INSP. JOHN) & RICHARDS (FRANCIS) - At Scotland Yard h/b £225
WHITTINGTON-EGAN (RICHARD) - A Casebook on Jack the Ripper h/b signed £250
SMITH (LIEUT.-COL. SIR HENRY) - From Constable to Commissioner h/b £600
STEWART (WILLIAM) - Jack the Ripper: A New Theory h/b £900
WILLIAMS (WATKIN W.) - The Life of General Sir Charles Warren h/b (ex-Boots) £275