Read Complete History of Jack the Ripper Online
Authors: Philip Sudgen
Complete History of Jack the Ripper (2 page)
I am delighted to say I was wrong. After the
Complete History
was published I learned that notes made from the Metropolitan Police file, before it was lost, still exist in papers owned by the noted true crime author Richard Whittington-Egan. These notes, taken by Ian Sharp, a research assistant who worked on the 1973 BBC television series about the Ripper, do not add a great deal to what we already know about Emma Smith, but the little they do tell us is immensely interesting.
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In his 1938 reminiscences Ex-Chief Inspector Walter Dew wrote that Emma was found unconscious in the street by a man who immediately summoned the police. Detectives waited by her bedside, he related, but she died ‘without regaining consciousness’.
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The true story, as I reconstructed it from press notices of the inquest, was very different, and Sharp’s notes confirm that Dew’s account was indeed largely fictitious.
Emma was attacked on the pathway opposite 10 Brick Lane but she was not left unconscious. Far from it, she walked about three hundred yards from there to her lodgings and then, in company with Mary Russell, the deputy at the lodging house, and Annie Lee, another lodger, something like another half mile to the London Hospital. And she spoke of the attack, both to Mary Russell and to George Haslip, the surgeon who attended her. For their part the police knew nothing whatever about the incident until two days after Emma’s death, when
the coroner’s officer notified them that there was to be an inquest. Not one of the constables on duty at the time of the attack had seen or heard anything of it.
Sharp’s notes also tell us a little more about Emma herself. About forty-five, with a son and daughter living in the Finsbury Park area, she was five feet two inches in height, had a fair complexion and light brown hair, and bore a scar on her right temple.
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Although the slaying of Emma Smith was the first of the Whitechapel murders we cannot be certain how many of these crimes were committed by the man we call Jack the Ripper. My study of the evidence in Emma’s case quickly persuaded me that she had not, in fact, been a Ripper victim. Emma was attacked by three men, and although she subsequently died of her injuries murder does not seem to have been intended. Emma herself was evidently of this opinion. Chief Inspector West’s report, as rendered for us by Ian Sharp, carries the information: ‘According to deceased’s statements the motive was robbery’. Which leaves Martha Tabram or Polly Nichols as the Ripper’s first probable murder victim.
Modern research has concerned itself primarily with the problem of the Ripper’s identity. This book explored contemporary police suspects, especially those accused by senior officers – Montague Druitt (accused by Macnaghten), Aaron Kosminski (Anderson), Michael Ostrog (Macnaghten again) and George Chapman (Abberline). To these names we would now have to add Francis Tumblety (Littlechild), about whom more presently. My conclusions were that there was no consensus of view within the police about the identity of the killer, that different officers held to different theories, and that a serious case did not exist against any of their candidates. The evidence that has come to light since the book was written has strengthened rather than weakened these convictions.
As the only major suspect against whom any direct evidence was alleged Kosminski is of considerable interest. Fundamentally the case against him stands on two legs, one an identification by a witness, the other the reminiscences of Sir Robert Anderson, neither sufficient to support so weighty an accusation.
In the light of the evidence we have the witness can only have been Joseph Lawende, the commercial traveller who saw a man thought to have been the Ripper on the night of the Mitre Square murder. Sir Robert clearly came to believe that his identification of Kosminski as
the same man was conclusive. But we know a great deal more about this kind of evidence now than he did then.
After the Devlin Report of 1976 the Home Office commissioned psychologists John Shepherd, Hadyn Ellis and Graham Davies at Aberdeen University to study the impact of long delays on the accuracy of identification evidence. The results were revealing. For the purposes of one experiment, for example, people drawn from the local non-university population were invited to the psychology department to carry out a series of paper and pencil tests. In the midst of these proceedings a young man barged his way into the room. He read out a car registration number and hotly demanded to know whether the owner was present. The car, he claimed, had scratched his own vehicle and was now blocking his exit from the car park. Walking up and down the centre aisle, the man repeated the number and looked threateningly at each row of people in turn. Then, after about forty-five seconds, he was hustled from the room by the lecturer. The incident had been staged. And different groups of witnesses were recalled at intervals of between one week and eleven months to see if they could pick the irate motorist out from an identification parade. Even under conditions of minimum delay they performed relatively poorly and there was a significant decline in performance over time. Misidentifications remained constant at about 15–20% but recognition rates fell from 65% at one week to only 10% or chance at eleven months. In short, after eleven months more witnesses were picking out the wrong man than recognizing the right one! The witnesses were all advised to select a man only if they were quite certain that he was the motorist, and the most noticeable feature of the results at eleven months was the large number of them (75%) who declined to make any identification at all. When those who had so declined were then asked to pick out the man ‘most resembling’ the motorist, 87% of them opted for the wrong man, a finding which suggests that the principal result of pressure would have been to greatly increase the number of misidentifications.
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In the light of this and similar experiments it should be clear why we have to discount Lawende. He saw the Ripper fleetingly and in a dark street, and he had no reason at the time to take particular note of his appearance. Indeed, he reposed so little confidence in his sighting that within a fortnight of it he had told the Eddowes inquest that he did not think he would be able to recognize the man again. But at that time, still more than a decade before the Adolf Beck case focused attention
on problems of mistaken identity, the police were very inexperienced in the use of identification evidence, and they sought to exploit Lawende’s sighting long after it had ceased to be of practical significance. Lawende seems to have been asked to identify Kosminski about two years after his original sighting. And the police had still not finished with him. They asked him to turn out again in 1891, more than two years after the event, and again, apparently, in 1895, more than six, to see if he could identify other suspects. Given the drastic decline in the accuracy of identifications within just eleven months of the sighting demonstrated in modern experiments all of these exercises appear to have been quite futile.
The credibility of the case against Kosminski rests also upon that of Anderson. Although we now know that Anderson believed in Kosminski’s guilt, at least as a ‘perfectly plausible theory’, as early as 1895
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, it was in 1910, when he published his memoirs, that he first entered into detail. Unfortunately his account contains errors both of fact and interpretation. This should not surprise anyone for the same is true of virtually all reminiscent accounts. In Sir Robert’s case we have no reason to suppose that he was being intentionally dishonest. But he does not seem to have been very interested in the Ripper case and I took the view in my book that his memories became vague and muddled over the years and that, moreover, he began to interpret them in ways that pandered to his own not inconsiderable sense of self-importance.
Additional material bearing on this matter has since come to light. H. L. Adam, writing in 1931 of Anderson’s later years, explicitly referred to Sir Robert’s declining powers of recall:
‘His memory also apparently began to fail him, and he fell into the error of mixing cases. For instance, in reference to the Penge murder which I was discussing with him, he said, or rather wrote, “I am too tired to-night to recall it. But I think it was a nightdress that the officer was put to watch – its hiding-place having been discovered, and when he awoke it was gone, carried off, they supposed, by Alice Rhodes.” He was clearly mixing up the Penge case with that of the Road murder, in which a woman’s nightdress figured prominently.’
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Anderson was confusing the Constance Kent case of 1865 with that of the Stauntons in 1877. Adam knew Anderson pretty well, and there
are grounds for believing that this particular memory of him dates from the period 1910–1913, but it would be unfair to infer a great deal from it because it concerns early cases in which Sir Robert had no personal involvement. More telling is an interview Anderson gave to
The Daily Chronicle
in 1908:
‘In two cases of that terrible series [the Ripper crimes] there were distinct clues destroyed – wiped out absolutely – clues that might very easily have secured for us proof of the identity of the assassin. In one case it was a clay pipe. Before we could get to the scene of the murder the doctor had taken it up, thrown it into the fireplace, and smashed it beyond recognition. In another case there was writing in chalk on the wall – a most valuable clue; handwriting that might have been at once recognised as belonging to a certain individual. But before we could secure a copy, or get it protected, it had been entirely obliterated . . . I told Sir William Harcourt, who was then Home Secretary, that I could not accept responsibility for non-detection of the author of the Ripper crimes, for the reasons, among others, that I have given you.’
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Even in this brief allusion to the Ripper case there are two glaring errors. Sir William Harcourt ceased to be Home Secretary in 1885, three years before the murders began. The man with whom Anderson dealt in 1888 was Henry Matthews. The reference to the pipe is also incorrect. Anderson’s mention of a fireplace clearly indicates that he had the murder of Mary Kelly in mind for this was the only one in the series committed indoors. Dr Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, was called out to the scene of this crime. And a pipe belonging to Joe Barnett, Kelly’s lover, was indeed found in Mary’s room. But this was not the pipe that was smashed. Anderson was confusing the Kelly murder with that of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley about nine months later. A clay pipe found with Alice’s body was thrown to the floor and broken. However, this incident occurred at the mortuary, during the post-mortem examination, not at the crime scene, and the culprit was one of the attendants, not Dr Phillips.
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So here, two years before his memoirs appeared, and speaking of investigations for which he bore overall responsibility, Anderson was confounding officials and running quite separate incidents together in his mind.
The committed Anderson partisan may not be willing to internalize the implications of this or indeed any evidence that runs counter to his
prejudices but it is important, nevertheless, to set it down and source it here so that rational and fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions.
The most dramatic revelations pertaining to a major suspect have come in the case of Michael Ostrog, one of the three men named by Melville Macnaghten in his now famous report of 1894.
When I wrote the
Complete History
I knew nothing of Ostrog’s career after 1888. But in 1995, after Mr D. S. Goffee had published some details of his later convictions gleaned from newspapers
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, I took time out from other research projects to explore his last years in more depth. The research, conducted in French as well as British archives, turned up some fascinating information and categorically exonerated Ostrog of any complicity in the Ripper crimes, the first time this had been done for any of Macnaghten’s names.
When Ostrog was discharged from Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in March 1888 he was required, under the provisions of the Prevention of Crime Acts of 1871 and 1879, to report monthly to the police and notify them of any change of address. He didn’t, and for several years the police lost sight of him. Nothing seems to have been done about it until the following 26 October, at the height of the Ripper scare, when the police tried to trace him through the columns of the
Police Gazette.
It is more than probable that Ostrog became a suspect in the Ripper case simply because he was thought to possess medical knowledge and had recently been discharged from an asylum. Whatever, the police could not find him and that is why, in his 1894 report, Macnaghten stated that ‘his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.’ On 9 August 1889, three weeks after the McKenzie murder had given rise to fears that the Ripper had returned to killing, the Metropolitan Police once more tried to find Ostrog by means of the
Gazette.
Although, again, he was supposedly only wanted for failure to report, they called ‘special attention to this dangerous man’ and requested inquiry ‘at hospitals, infirmaries, workhouses, etc.’.
They eventually caught up with him two years after that. Apprehended on 17 April 1891, he was hauled before Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, remanded twice, and then, on 1 May, committed to the St Giles Workhouse, Endell Street.
Dr William C. Sheard examined him there on 4 May and certified him insane. ‘He has delusions of exaggeration,’ Sheard noted, ‘he says he has twenty thousand houses and five hundred thousand francs in
Paris – he says he intends to commit suicide thoroughly by cutting his left femoral artery. Other means such as hanging he says are no good.’ On the strength of this certificate Ostrog was committed to Banstead Asylum in Surrey as a lunatic found ‘wandering at large’. Subjoined to the order was a statement about him by Frederick Wright, the Relieving Officer of the Strand Poor Law Union, intended for the information of the doctors at Banstead. It asserted that Ostrog was suicidal but
not
considered dangerous to other people.