Ghosts & Gallows (9 page)

Melvin Harris later went on to publish an expanded study of Robert Lees’ involvement with the Ripper in his
Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth
(1987). This also contains demolitions of other Ripper anecdotes and theories, in particular the Freemasonry conspiracy of Stephen Knight. Recently (in 2001) Ripper authors Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner also drove another literary nail in the Lees-Ripper coffin by offering an alternative translation to a phrase contained in a ‘Dear Boss’ letter received by the police at the time of the murders, which had been used (particularly by Knight) to support the medium’s connection with the case, when they suggested that ‘You have not caught me yet you see, with all your cunning, with all your
Lees
, with all your blue bottles’ should in fact read ‘with all your
tecs
’, a slang term for detectives
4
. Almost overnight any paranormal connection with the ‘autumn of terror’ seemed finally to fade away.

Robert Lees was a respected figure both within and outside of the Spiritualist movement (his diaries are preserved at the Spiritualists’ National Union headquarters at Stanstead Hall in Essex), a gentle man known for his humanity and social work – in 1893 he established a community project for the poor and homeless, the People’s League, which operated out of purpose-built premises in Peckham High Street in South London – and to be willingly a part of what to him and his family would have struck as being a distasteful fraud seems out of character. In reality Lees neither confirmed or denied, publically or in print, any involvement in the Ripper case (even the interview mentioning his involvement that appeared in the
Illustrated Leicester Chronicle
was written by a supporter) and much of his posthumous reputation as one of the greatest of twentieth-century Spiritualists and a worker of paranormal miracles lies in the untiring support of his devoted daughter Eva Lees, who nursed the medium in his final years (his wife died in 1912) and spent the rest of her days, until her own death in 1968, as a propagandist for his life and published works, a total of six books said to have been dictated by spirit communicators with Lees acting as an amanuensis.

When Donald West interviewed Eva Lees in November 1948, he found her ‘an elderly but well-preserved lady’ who was ‘voluble in the extreme’. ‘She talked incessantly for over two hours,’ he later commented, ‘relating the most fantastic stories concerning her father’s mediumship’. These included accounts of objects materialising in his presence and spirits appearing in Lees’ study who spoke naturally to him like real people, in much the same way that full-form materialisations were often seen and photographed in the presence of Brazilian medium Carmine Mirabelli
5
. Miss Eva claimed to have seen the materialisations herself and in the 1960s told Leicester Spiritualist Barry Jeffrey a similar story, of hearing several spirit voices in her father’s room when she knew for a fact that no one had been previously admitted to the house. West was, however, unimpressed and felt that these accounts were nothing more than hysterical fantasies, although there was no doubting her devotion to Lees’ memory, who she described as being ‘an intensely spiritual man’. That his name was continually associated with what she described as ‘garbled newspaper versions of the Ripper story’ was something that caused her great personal annoyance.

Interestingly, the Leicester house that Eva Lees lived in for many years following Robert Lees’ death, a three-storey villa known as ‘Rodona’ in Fosse Road South, itself gained something of a haunted reputation in the early 1980s, when several student lodgers (the house by this time had been split into bedsits) claimed to repeatedly hear strange sounds and footsteps coming from the old ground-floor kitchen.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Lees-Ripper story lies in the one piece of documentary evidence connecting the medium with the murders but which has been used by a number of commentators to effectively dismiss his association with the case. In Lees’ diary for the week following the ‘double event’ of 30 September 1888, he notes three separate visits to the police with offers of help in tracking down the killer; on each occasion he was turned away as ‘a fool and lunatic’ although on the third visit (to Scotland Yard), probably to humour his persistence, he was promised that the police authority would write to him, but there are no further entries to confirm this happening. The entry for 2 October is the most interesting as it shows that Lees visited at least one of the murder sites for himself. This was Dutfield’s Yard, where the medium makes the comment: ‘Got trace of man from the spot in Berner Street’.

There is no doubting Robert Lees’ sincerity but it was to be many years before a sensitive such as Gerard Croiset (who we will meet in a later chapter) would make psychic detection a seemingly viable option for the police dealing with difficult and unsolvable murders. We can now only speculate on the thought that, for one brief moment in October 1888, Robert James Lees was in fact the one person in the whole of England who may have been able to lead officers to the most notorious murderer in history …

NOTES

1
. Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918) was a powerful physical medium from Naples who was subjected to numerous scientific investigations over many years. Despite being detected in fraud on a number of occasions, Eusapia produced undoubtedly genuine phenomena when strictly controlled and in the presence of experienced and critical researchers, particularly a committee from the London Society for Psychical Research (SPR) comprising Hereward Carrington, Everard Fielding and William W. Baggelly, who held a series of sittings in Naples in 1908. Mina Stinson (1888-1941), wife of the former Harvard Medical School instructor Le Roy Goddard Crandon, who, as noted in the Introduction, went under the pseudonym of ‘Margery’ for much of her career – the most controversial physical mediums of the twentieth century whose phenomena include direct voice communication, phantom lights and materialised spirit hands which exuded from her vagina. Many aspects of her mediumship, which itself caused a sixteen-year rift between factions of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), and despite being championed by modern day Spiritualists, has been in all probability truthfully described as ‘a most ingenious, persistent and fantastic fraud’.

2
. The Mitre Square murder is one of three Ripper killings which have now entered contemporary London ghostlore. The ‘Ripper Corner’, the spot where Catherine Eddowes’ body was found and is still discernable as such despite much alteration to the surrounding area over the years, is said to be haunted by the apparition of a huddled form glimpsed on occasion, most often on or around the anniversary of the ‘double event’ of 30 September. According to Jack Hallam, a ‘huddled figure, like that of a woman, emitting from all over it a ghostly light’, said to be the ghost of ‘Polly’ Nicholls, has allegedly been seen over the years near the murder site in Durward Street; while groans and screams heard in nearby Hanbury Street have been unsurprisingly attributed to the second Ripper victim, Annie Chapman.

3.
There has been much debate over the years as to the exact ages of the Fox sisters at the time of the disturbances in 1848. For a comprehensive study, see ‘The Fox Sisters: Riddle of the Records’ by Lis J. Warwood,
Psypioneer
, Vol. 4, No. 9, September 2008. Retrieved from
www.woodlandway.org
on 10 September 2011.

4
.
Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell
(Sutton Publishing, Gloucestershire, 2001).

5
. Carmine Mirabelli (1889-1951) was a powerful physical medium and one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of Spiritualism. His phenomena included the movement and teleportation of objects, materialised figures in full daylight and automatic writing in several languages, all unknown to the medium. One famous photograph of Mirabelli levitating during a séance in São Paulo has been shown to be faked, but there are many testimonies to the genuineness of his remarkable mediumship.

Around lunchtime on 16 November 1922, the duty manager of the Old Bar Hotel at Scarborough, a popular seaside holiday town on the north Yorkshire coast, thirty-five miles north-east of York, was called through into the hotel lobby by the receptionist. Waiting for him was a man who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Abbott of the Scarborough CID and he was keen to speak with one of the guests, a Mr James Fitzsimmons, who at that moment was eating a meal in the dining room. In recent days a number of incidents had come to the attention of the local police: these included the passing of forged or ‘dud’ cheques and a series of newspaper advertisements that struck heavily of a confidence trick, offering business opportunities for suitable applicants in return for large downpayments in cash; all of which appeared to be connected with Mr Fitzsimmons, who was asked to come through to the front of the hotel. As Abbott waited in the lobby he had no idea that his routine visit would have such a dramatic and deadly outcome. The Yorkshire policeman was also unaware that it was just one piece of a mysterious puzzle that was to take many months and, more remarkably, a series of eerie paranormal visions that would ultimately bring about a solution.

Breaking off from his meal, Fitzsimmons seemed surprised to see the CID man but appeared cooperative and agreed to accompany Abbott to his hotel room to discuss the matter. As they reached the first floor, the policeman became instantly on his guard as Fitzsimmons reached for something in an inside pocket and, afraid he was attempting to destroy incriminating evidence, Abbott made a grab for his arms. Fitzsimmons had in fact made an effort to draw a loaded revolver; as the two men struggled together there was a shot, deafening in the confined corridor, and the hotel guest crumpled to the floor, fatally wounded.

In the immediate aftermath Abbott entered the locked hotel room and quickly came across several items which clearly showed that James Fitzsimmons, now on his way to the mortuary, had been working as a fraudster under a false identity. That name was Eric Tombe. There was a passport containing a photograph of the dead man in that name as well as several chequebooks and a leather suitcase bearing the initials ‘E.T.’ As Abbott examined the cheques he noticed that each bore Tombe’s signature in pencil, ready to be overwritten in ink, which gave the policeman the distinct impression that Fitzsimmons had been masquerading as a real person. His few other meagre possessions showed that he had been moving from hotel to hotel, surviving on the proceeds of a well orchestrated deception.

The reality was that James Fitzsimmons was a wanted man and a warrant had been issued for his arrest; but his real name wasn’t Fitzsimmons or even Eric Tombe, it was Ernest Dyer, a former employee of the Air Ministry, often known to his associates as ‘Bill’ Dyer. One of these was a young man by the name of Dennis Yeats Wheatley, at that time a newly married London wine merchant who had yet to embark on the future and successful literary career that was to span four decades and in a few years would transform him into the ‘Prince of Thriller Writers’ for several generations of the British reading public. The only son of a Mayfair wine seller, Wheatley entered the family firm when he was sixteen but turned to writing when the business stalled during the Depression. His first published novel
The Forbidden Territory
(1933) was an instant success, going through seven reprints in as many weeks, and quickly established a winning formula that would produce a total of fifty-four books, of which only eight (beginning with
The Devil Rides Out
in 1934) were the Black Magic stories for which he is now famous. Despite his imagination, talent for writing and knowledge of occultism and the supernatural, it is doubtful whether even Wheatley would have conceived a plot line such as that of the real life events into which he would eventually be drawn during the early years of the roaring twenties.

In September 1914, aged seventeen, Wheatley had received a commission into the 2
nd
/1
st
City of London Royal Field Artillery, but suffered from several periods of ill heath and caught severe pneumonia while digging gun pits at a training camp on Salisbury Plain. Following a period of convalesce at the Great Central Hotel in Marylebone, he was posted to the 6
th
Reserve Brigade camp at Biscot in Bedfordshire, a small village which is now a suburb of Luton. Here he met Gordon Eric Gordon Tombe, known as Eric Tombe, and they shared a billet together for eighteen months before Wheatley was finally sent to France in August 1917. Despite their friendship lasting just five brief years, Tombe would be one of the most lasting influences on the thriller writer’s life: Wheatley’s bookplate, self-designed and one he used throughout his life, featured Tombe as a satyr with the young author sitting enthralled at his feet, and sixty years after they first met he dedicated a three-volume set of memoirs to his memory. ‘He weaned me from reading trash to books by the finest authors of all nations,’ Wheatley later recalled, ‘and to books about ancient civilizations and the occult’. Gordon Eric, as Wheatley called him, ‘was completely immoral and immensely knowledgeable’ and was twenty-four when they first met; he was also ‘a crook of the first order’ and that was to prove his downfall.

Eric Tombe was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of a clergyman, the Revd George Gordon Tombe. Later, the family moved to Ireland, where Tombe received his schooling, but by the time war broke out in the summer of 1914 they had returned to England and Eric, now married and with a young family of his own, was living in Stoke Newington in London and working as a motor mechanic. Tombe quickly became a private in the Public School Corps. As a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery he saw action in France, but was wounded when an exploding shell buried his position; he was convalescing at the Biscot Camp at the time he met Wheatley and around the time the younger man was finally posted abroad to Vlamertinghe he had taken up a desk job at the Air Ministry in Kingsway in London, monitoring the progress of factories involved in war work. In May 1918, Wheatley was gassed; his fighting days were over and, invalided out of the Army, he spent several months convalescing before finally taking up his position in the family wine business. With the war over Wheatley was also quick to renew his friendship with Eric Tombe, who, by this time, had quit his job as a civil servant and had gone into business with a former colleague from the Air Ministry; that person was ‘Bill’ Dyer.