Preface

Jack the Ripper was a leading and international conspiracy theory of the late Victorian and premodern period. The unsolved case continues to charm, acquiring its own mythology and fancied suspects. Fiction is transmuted into fact and history into firm beliefs. True crime events that produce tangled theories and attract modern forensic interest to a serial killer whose identity is still unknown. Any approach seems to mask rather than resolve the murders that happened in 1888 in Whitechapel, London’s East End, the impoverished heart of Victorian London.

Though the overall case history of the Whitechapel murders has been examined and documented, less attention was brought to vague anomalies noted in official files, Home Office reports and in subsequent police press statements and memoirs. Stories of supernatural events and shady politics born of opaque senior police conclusions has further entrenched the mystery. Without the full details, conspiracies flourish and detract from the truth, however incredible. It is then useful to compare Jack the Ripper legends in their historic context with a fair variety of sources and established investigative reports to discern fact from fiction.

The Victorian era was also an age of the secret societies. A review of these period subcultures is important in considering the Whitechapel murders because of repeated police references. These clubs were political, mystical, economic, esoteric, fraternal, subversive, and friendly. Some were law enforcement agencies. If the Ripper was a local nobody as supposed, and Scotland Yard simply failed to capture the culprit, why make subsequent politicized statements in defense of evolving Victorian police methods? Why record responses to tabloid press theories well into the next century with official phantoms and cautionary high level police fictions? Constantly, the known facts are overwhelmed and at odds with fantastic historical surmise.

Jack the Ripper lore has become linked with the study of Queen Victoria’s British Empire. The subject is studied by those who are drawn to the era’s cultural and social elements and hooked by the mystery of the Whitechapel murders. Release of the official police and government files on the case during the late 1970s brought further insights and scholarly attention. “Ripperologists” have made significant contributions to the subject much as amateur astronomers searching for supernovas in an endless sky have contributed to the efforts of NASA.

The advent of digital archives and search engines has added vast amounts of raw Victorian data to the mix. With ongoing online release of primary sources, such as the Old Bailey criminal trials and scanned newspaper collections, particularly of obscure American

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sources, new theories are born of curiosity. The ease of Internet searching has tended to dispense with the exacting research methods of past crime historians and created new approaches. However, research is thus narrowed to digitized sources and omits documents that have not yet been digitized from fragile archives.

The official case files transcribed and published at the turn of the millennium were helpful to Victorian scholars, criminologists, feminist academics, crime historians and in school curricula. The fascination with a serial killer of prostitutes and the death of female victims representative of poverty and social neglect in Victorian East End London has achieved mythical status but little historic closure. As mounting primary, secondary and unrelated sources are sifted and analyzed, more questions are generated than resolved. The mystery of conflicting Scotland Yard reports, medical autopsies and Victorian politics invites conspiracy theories that lead only to the next exciting discovery.

Obviously the real Jack the Ripper can now never be captured. This has encouraged application of modern forensics and criminal profiling to a cold case, a historic murder inquiry with no surviving material evidence. The responsibility to catch the elusive murderer was the ultimate job of the Home Office, but blame for the failure was laid at the door of the police, strongly vilified in parliament, local and international press. Press coverage of the Whitechapel murders created a false impression that Scotland Yard and the City of London Police were weak and incompetent bodies that failed to capture an ordinary serial killer. This is important because those contemporary press reports are now relied upon as primary sources.

This incorrect historic premise leads to attempts to identify Jack the Ripper through use of modern forensics and DNA testing of irrelevant, missing or contaminated evidence. Psychological, geographical and behavioral profiling of a long- dead serial killer derived from fragmentary investigative files is also ineffective. Rather than view Victorian police methods as archaic and dysfunctional, it is useful to regard the crimes as did the era’s highly experienced detectives. The Victorian foundations of English law enforcement provided a system that in a sense “made up for” the absence of advanced forensic technology.

The mythical character of Jack the Ripper is known, for instance, only through period press portrayals or letters conjectured to be from the killer. The events of the Whitechapel murders are known as far as what happened, how and to whom in some detail. However, the subjective why for an apparently motiveless series of murders and mutilations proves elusive yet crucial to its resolution. A comparison with modern serial killers is fraught with the pitfalls attending a Victorian cold case. Lines of period police inquiries and the nature of wounds on the Whitechapel victims are all that remains in determining a credible motive with some confidence.

This book traces relevant, obscure and discounted or unknown accounts to their official sources or compares them with surviving Scotland Yard and Home Office reports for clarity and leads. Where possible, rare internal official reports were consulted. Anomalies of the period expressed in official files legitimized wildly speculative ideas. Hence, this book is also intended as a definitive reference on alleged Whitechapel murder conspiracies and theories on ritual homicide, occult crime, political slayings and the supernatural mystique of Jack the Ripper.

For the Victorians, the Whitechapel murders were significant as indicators of imperial, legal, political and social change. These implications have become shrouded with time. Yet

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the thematic persistence of class and cultural Jack the Ripper legends that supported suspects detached from Scotland Yard inquiries embody social commentary. Consequently, the narrative journeys through a remote time, place and cultural perspective in search of some tangible ground. As we know through experience gained with modern police methods on cold murder cases, a reevaluation can only commence from reconsidering existing files and evidence collated by the original police investigation.

Victorian beliefs about Jack the Ripper embraced fortune- telling, gypsies, the demonic, political and occult secret societies, ritualized or religious murder and the supernatural. As these expressions are also found in official files on the Whitechapel murders, then it is probably a good idea to examine them as objectively as possible. This is rarely done effectively, even by those with a professed interest in the study of all aspects of the period. As the medical conflicts are pervasive in the unsolved Whitechapel murders, this is precisely the area most vulnerable to speculation and inviting of commentary shaded with dogmas. Historic mythologies that have grown with the identity of Jack the Ripper are also social and cultural expressions worthy of study because they can illuminate other unsolved serial murder cases and the critical beliefs that infuse them. When it is shown that beliefs held by senior police officials may influence serial murder investigations, the topic assumes some importance.

These cultural conditions are vital in reviewing Victorian documents where the crimes of an unknown serial killer are recorded and noted according to attitudes, beliefs and detection methods of the time. When they are further glossed with modern criminology and scientific methods, surviving primary sources on the Whitechapel murders are inclined to support views and case studies far removed from their social and historical contexts. It is fortunate that the subject of Jack the Ripper has attracted the attention of cultural historians Judith R. Walkowitz and Sir Christopher Frayling. Their piercing social commentary remains pertinent and crucial to exploration of the murders in the period. Though human nature may not change significantly over time, social perceptions and systems of criminal justice vary.

Walkowitz observed that the historical narratives, reactions and speculative theories recorded on Jack the Ripper tend to fall into two broad gendered categories; expressions of female political melodrama or male gothic fantasy. Material in this book likewise reflects on obscure accounts of mystical, occult and supernatural subcultures that in Victorian times were aligned with development of the early English socialist and feminist movements. The gothic literature of the period on Jack the Ripper was fused closely with the facts of the case. These theories were forms of Victorian social and utopian expressions on the nature of crime and evil. They intersected with the police investigation, government policies and reached the ear of Queen Victoria.

Sir Christopher Frayling regards Victorian perceptions as idealist melodrama steeped in literary traditions legitimized by press proprietors, Fleet Street editors, and West End clubs. He extended the observation to the police investigation on Jack the Ripper. According to Frayling, Melville Macnaghten’s central police briefing document naming three likely suspects, known as the Macnaghten Memorandum, is more a cultural expression of the prevailing moods than the considered police conclusions of an extensive manhunt.

The Jack the Ripper murders occurred at a crucial and changing time for Queen Victoria’s British Empire. Fascinating and informative as the Ripper stories are, they continue

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to mask historical events. Pre-modern politics of crime with their legal precedents in developing democratic systems of law enforcement and civil liberties were a fixture of the Whitechapel murders. The killer’s identity was unknown, but he was regarded as a psychotic maniac or insane immigrant whose crimes deserved limited police resources. That is generally the official view. However, the East End was also a hotbed and asylum for revolutionaries. European anarchists, Irish Republicans, retired soldiers, passing sailors and a transientlocal population all came under strained police concern during the murder investigation.

The Littlechild Letter, the informed views of ex–Chief Inspector John George Littlechild, head of Metropolitan Police Special Branch from 1883 to 1893, was sent to crime journalist George Sims in 1913. It is probably the most decisive document on Jack the Ripper since discovery of the Macnaghten Memorandum, though it is not an official police report. Littlechild’s suspect, Dr. Francis Tumblety, suggested Special Branch inquiries regarding the Whitechapel murders. Littlechild’s suspicions supported traditional historic surmise of political intrigues for Jack the Ripper with release of Victorian secret service index ledgers in 2002 to academics confirming it.

James Monro, Metropolitan Police commissioner and successor to Sir Charles Warren from late 1888, was also privately reported in retirement as having special knowledge of Jack the Ripper. However, Robert Anderson, Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner and head of CID, took the limelight with widely publicized theories that were at odds with internal police reports on the Ripper case. The Jack the Ripper case had many shades not only within a social, cultural and press context, but also with senior police officials navigating the investigation.

This book grew from an observation that despite works published during more than a century on the Whitechapel murders that cite fantastic theories of occult agencies, covert conspiracies and psychic detections, the topic had not been approached definitively or in context. Suspects conjured without reference to primary sources and with little regard for historic traditions of non-mainstream subcultures and personalities were the norm. When these theories approach flagrant fabrication and hoax, they become untenable, and fragile mainstream and official theories are afforded tenuous support as the best or only solutions. Yet behind almost every political conspiracy or fantastic occult crime theory lies some element of truth. When reputable contemporary sources considered them, then we must address them with fairness and objectivity and view them in a Victorian social and cultural context. Sensitive political and historic events often generate conspiracy theories with a tendency to record partial views as facts. This trend of historical bias must be taken into account in reviewing the Whitechapel murders with their reliance on conflicted primary sources and official period assurances.

Research for this book involved sourcing obscure periodicals, press reports, and antiquated works and official records omitted or excluded by other authors because their subject matter was dated or had fallen out of mainstream political, social and religious history. In any era, subcultures that are orphic, secret, mystical and politically subversive are the least documented or accessible. When they are noted, advocates of conservative principles, popular political scapegoats or the detractors of heretics usually record them for curious future historians.

Jack the Ripper was considered a renegade of a Victorian London’s subculture due to the macabre and extensive mutilations of the victims. In the Victorian period, this naturally

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led to suspicions of secret societies. Probably the most obscure official files on the White chapel murders are the police and government inquiries into political secret societies steeped in esoteric designs. Covert and subversive groups are more impenetrable to historic research than a study of Victorian Freemasonry, the occult or supernatural. They are underground streams that all had cause to blend with period Ripper legends and the investigations of Metropolitan Police Special Branch detectives.

I reasonably assume that readers will have some knowledge of the Whitechapel murders. For that reason, a list of recommended texts is included for reference and further reading. Otherwise, the narrative seeks to be as accessible as possible in examining Victorian ideals and motives found in official documents, press reports and unpublished sources as a stand alone study of the Whitechapel murders. Though several suspects, including some who are unknown or obscure, are covered in this work, I emphasize crimes committed by and efforts of the police to apprehend the killer known as Jack the Ripper. Credible suspects who came to the attention of Scotland Yard are considered, though it is misleading to chase imaginary and romantic Victorian Jack the Ripper figures around an East End landscape. Only related personalities who form part of a lost Ripper apocryphal tradition have been examined in some further detail.

A search for the historic reality of Jack the Ripper cannot be a partial attempt to extract reprisal for Victorian class inequities, gender conflict or the religious struggle between good and evil. It is rather a sustained vindication of the adapting justice system and its appended law enforcement agencies. Nor can it absolve charges of official corruption, suppression and political mongering at the expense of the murdered citizens of East End London. Historic consideration of Victorian subcultures, which are known to have harbored accounts of suspects during the murders, discounts imaginative theories on firmer ground. Cultural sensitivity for conflicted and opposing social and political forces active in the Victorian period and influential to its modern estimation, affords the killer, victims and motives sharper relief.

In knowing the broad context of a historic event, whether social or criminal, it is vital that period worldviews and legitimate expression of subcultures are allowed without antiquated bias and with informed fairness. Similarly important is a sound grasp of past places, dates and events noted with actions, reports and beliefs of individuals during the White chapel murders of 1888. Historical sources, for these reasons, are as reliant on a balanced assessment in hindsight and, as projections of future conclusions on Jack the Ripper, as they are on their documentary survival and archival preservation.