PLANET NERD

On 25 September, 1888, a letter was delivered to the Central News Agency in London’s Fleet Street. It read: Dear Boss, I keep on hearing that the police have caught me. But they won’t fix me yet… I am down on certain types of women and won’t stop ripping them until I do get buckled.

Grand job, that last job was.  I gave the lady no time to squeal. I love my work and want to start again.

You will hear from me, with my funny little game.

I saved some of the proper red stuff in ginger beer bottle after my last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope. Ha, ha!

Next time I shall clip the ears off send them to the police just for jolly.’

The letter was sign ‘Jack the Ripper’. It was the first time the name had ever been used. And it immortalized this twisted and mysterious killer who lurked in London’s backstreets.

Jack the ripper’s reign of terror was short one. He first struck on a warm night in August 1888. On a chill, foggy night three months later he claimed his last victim. He is known to have slaughtered at least five women –and some criminologists have credited him with 11 murders.

All that is known to for certain about Jack the Ripper is that he had some medical knowledge and that he was left handed –a fact obvious to police surgeons who examined the grisly remains of his victims. He was probably a tall, slim, pale man with a black moustache. This was the description given by witnesses, including one policeman who saw someone hurrying away from the vicinity of one of the crimes. Each time, he a wore a cap and a long coat, and he walked with the vigorous stride of a young man.

But it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to identify him. Even in 1992, when the secret Scotland Yard files on the case are finally made public, they are expected to cast little new light on the case.

The story of London’s most mysterious and ferocious mass-murderer began shortly after 05:00 on the morning of 7August, 1888. A man hurried down the stairs of the White chapel hovel in which he had a room –to be confronted by a bundle lying on the first floor landing. He tried to push the bundle out of his way, and then recoiled with horror when he realized that what lay at his feet were the bloody remains of a woman. She was identified as Martha Turner, a prostitute. Her throat had been slit, she had been stabbed several times, and bestial mutilations had been carried out on her body.

As the murder of prostitutes was no rare things in those days, the case was soon shelved. But when a second, similar murder was committed 24 days later, fear and panic began to sweep the mean streets of East End. The mutilated body of 42-year old Mary Ann Nicholls –or pretty Polly as she was known was found in the early hours of 31 August.

Mary had probably taken no heed of the grisly fate of Martha Turner. She was desperate for money. She needed four pence  for a doss-house bed, and when a tall, pale man approached her she looked forward to the chance of making a few coppers, with perhaps something left over for a couple of tots of gin.

The man drew her into the shadows. If she looked finally realized there was anything wrong, it was too late. The Ripper put a hand over her mouth and dexterously slit her throat. Then the crazed killer set about his savage butchery.  A detective who examined the body said: ‘Only a madman could have done this.’ And a police surgeon said: ‘I have seen so horrible a case. She was ripped about in a manner that only person skilled in the used of knife could have achieved.’

It was just one week before the Ripper struck again. His prey was ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman, 47 years old and dying of tuberculosis when she was hacked down. When found in Handbury Street by a porter from nearby Spitalfields Market, her few pitiful possessions had been neatly laid out beside her disemboweled corpse.

The next victim was Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride. On the evening of Sunday, 30 September, a police constable had not been mutilated –which led police to surmise that the Ripper had been disturbed in his grisly task. But to satisfy his bloodlust, he soon found another victim. And it was during this killing that he left the only clue to his identity.

Just 15 minutes walk from the spot where Long Liz’s body had been found was discovered the bloody remains of 40-year-old Catherine Eddowes. Her body was the most terribly mutilated so far –the Ripper had even cut off her ears. And from the corpse a trail of blood led to a message scrawled in chalk on a wall: the Jews are not men to be blamed for nothing.’ But this vital piece of Metropolitan police was never studied properly. Sir Charles Warren, head of the Metropolitan Police, perhaps fearing a violent backlash of hatred aimed at the Jews, ordered the slogan to be rubbed out and kept a secret.

Rumors now began to sweep like wildfire through the sleazy streets of London’s East End…..The Ripper carried his instrument of death in a little black bag – and terror crazed crowds chased any innocent passer-by carrying such a bag. He was a foreign seaman –and anyone with a foreign accent went into fear by opening his mouth for being set upon. He was a Jewish butcher and talent anti Semitism already simmering because of the influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing the Russian and polish pogroms began bubbling to the surface.

An even wilder theory, popular in the most squalid areas where there was no love lost between the inhabitants and the police, was that the killer was a policeman. How else would he be able to prowl the streets at night creating a suspicion?

The killer was in turn thought to be a mad doctor, a homicidal Russian by the Czar’s secret police trying to cause unrest in London, a puritan obsessed with cleansing the East End of vice, and a crazed midwife with a hatred of prostitutes.

On 9 November, the Ripper struck again. Mary Kelly was unlike any of the other victims. She was younger –only 25 blonde and she was attractive. The last person to see her alive was George Hutchinson whom she had asked for money to pay her rent. When he said he could not help he approached a slim, well dressed man with a trim moustache and a deerstalker hat. She was never seen alive again.

Early next morning, Henry Bowers knocked impatiently at her door for his unpaid rent. Finally he went to the window of Mary’s room and pushed the sacking curtains. The sickening sight within made him forget all about the rent and sent him running for the police. Later, he was to say: ‘I shall be hunted for the rest of my life.’

With Mary Kelly’s death the Ripper’s reign ended as suddenly and mysteriously as it began.

Two convicted murderers claimed to be the Ripper. One, who poisoned his mistress, said when arrested: ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last.’ But there is a little evidence to suggest that he was telling the truth. The second cried out as the trapdoor on the gallows opened ‘I am Jack the. . . ‘But it was later proved that he was in America when the Ripper’s crime was committed.

Some members of the police force were sure they knew who the Ripper was in 1908, the assistant commissioners of police said flatly: ‘in stating that he was a Polish Jew, I am merely stating a definitely established fact.’

But Inspector Robert Sagar, who played a leading part in the Ripper investigations and who died in 1924, said in his memoirs:

‘We had good reason to suspect a man who lived in Butcher’s Row, Aldgate. We watched him carefully. There was no doubt that this man was insane, and, after a time, his friends thought it advisable to have him removed to private asylum. After he was removed, there were no Ripper atrocities.’

Even Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson has been named as a suspect. He was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, who if he had lived, would have become king when his father Edward VII, died. 

But perhaps the most likely solution is the one arrived at by author and broadcaster Daniel Farson. He pointed the finger barrister who had both medical connections and history of mental instability in his family.

Farson based his accusation on the notes of Sir Melville Macnaghten, who joined Scotland Yard in 1889 and became head of Criminal Investigation Department in 1903. Macnaghten named three’ Ripper suspects –a Polish tradesman, who hated women and was probably Jewish, a homicidal Russian doctor, and Druitt. 

The soundest basis for blaming Druitt for the murders is that a few weeks after the death of Mary Kelly, Druitt’s body was found floating in the River Thames. After that there were no further attacks by Jack the Ripper.