Jack the Ripper: The Secret Police Files (19 page)

Signed: M. Barrett (practically illegible)

The major stumbling blocks with regards to Barrett’s account as given in his initial affidavit are firstly, with regards to Barrett as a person. He has been described by many who knew him as being somewhat illiterate and not deemed capable of carrying out such a detailed and complicated exercise, as the forgery of the diary would have required. Clearly as can be seen he did state he did not carry out this task alone.

Furthermore, it was discovered that in 1992 a newspaper advert appeared in H.P. Bookfinders purportedly placed by Barrett seeking a Victorian Diary, the advertisement read: “
Unused or partly used diary dating from 1880-1890, must have at least 20 blank pages.”
. I don’t think for one minute Barrett himself placed this ad, I think it was place by A.N. Other, and another example of perhaps Barrett being manipulated by another person or persons. This action of placing such an advertisement clearly shows intent by someone, having regard to what followed in 1993 when the diary was first released into the public domain and what was contained in the first affidavit.

Further enquiries reveal that in fact Barrett went to the solicitors with a pre-prepared statement, which was simply transcribed into an affidavit by the solicitor. That being said it can clearly be seen that whoever drafted that statement for him was a person who was well educated and clearly by the content had to have had direct involvement in the forging of the diary. So of course I have to ask who prepared it for him?

On another note, not wanting to cast any aspersions. D.P. Hardy the Liverpool solicitor who acted for Barrett was struck off the solicitors register from practicing in 2003 for a number of offences of improper practice.

I have no doubt that there was perhaps some form of conspiracy involving some of the persons whose names appear throughout the investigation. I suspect there may have been others who have as yet not been named. However, the passage of time has not been kind to the question of ascertaining conclusively who the persons responsible for forging the diary were. Three of the main persons, Tony Deveraux, Melvyn Harris and Paul Feldman all of whom had direct involvement with Barrett are now deceased.

The police did become involved in a criminal investigation but I am led to believe that this wasn’t helped by a number of complainants subsequently withdrawing their complaints. The failure of the police to be allowed to carry out a full criminal investigation has not helped in trying to fully establish whether or not the diary is genuine or a fake and if the latter then who was responsible?

James Maybrick died on May 11th 1889 from arsenic poisoning. His wife was subsequently accused of murdering him. As has been documented following his death there were the two further prostitute murders in Whitechapel, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles both of which were thought by the police to have been the work of Jack the Ripper.

So was James Maybrick Jack the Ripper or responsible for any of the murders? The answer is no. Did James Maybrick write the diary? In my opinion no he didn’t. However, there are those who still seek to suggest the diary is authentic, despite it being proved that the handwriting in the diary has been compared to the handwriting of Maybrick’s will and they are different. Those believers in the authenticity of the diary will argue the fact that the reason for this is that Maybrick did not write his own will out.

WALTER RICHARD SICKERT

Walter Sickert the famous British painter only emerged as a suspect in recent years when in 1993 US crime novelist, Patricia Cornwell, took it upon herself to investigate Sickert as a Ripper suspect. Sickert was first mentioned with regards to the Royal Conspiracy theory. At the time of the murders Sickert would have been 28.

Cornwell suggests that in his early painting days Sickert frequented the slums of London's East End and is alleged to have had a number of secret rented studios in that area. This was never proved, but it was a fact that he did have rented studios in the Camden area of North London. Sickert’s models for his paintings were said to be poor, unattractive female prostitutes. One such painting, which added to Patricia Cornwell’s suspicions was the “
Camden Town Murder”
. This was painted by Sickert in 1908. This painting she suggests bears some similarity to the original murder scene of Mary Kelly. However, this painting was not painted until many years after the murders and the Mary Kelly original murder scene picture would have been readily available then as it is today. If one looks at the general painting style of Sickert it can be seen that he has painted a number of pictures whereby males are seen in company with semi-clad females in room and bedrooms, so the picture Cornwell refers to is not unique.

Patricia Cornwell believed that Sickert was also responsible for the writing of a number of Ripper letters sent to the police during the time of the murders. She thought that if she could obtain DNA from letters believed to have been sent by the Ripper, she could compare them with letters known to have been written by Sickert, as well as trying to extract a DNA profile from any of the letters.

She came to London with her own team of forensic experts. She was given permission to examine the Ripper letters now contained in The National Archives at Kew. However, she discovered that the letters had been heat sealed under plastic to preserve them, a process that degrades primary DNA. None of the letters had any trace of any DNA, primary or secondary. She then came into possession of a letter that, strangely enough, had not been handed over to the archives and had not been heat sealed so was suitable for DNA examination. When tested there was no trace of any primary DNA.

In an attempt to acquire a DNA sample of Sickert, Cornwell purchased some of Sickert’s paintings and purportedly tore them apart, examining the frames and canvas for fingerprints or traces of blood, but found nothing. It was the same story with his painting table. Cornwell will argue that the paintings were damaged when she acquired them.

So do her suspicions surrounding Sickert stand up to close scrutiny? Well there are unconfirmed reports that suggest Sickert was not even in the country at the time of some of the murders. It is believed that he was in France painting between August and October 1888. Although Cornwell states that Sickert was a man of mystery and not even his close friends knew where he was at any one time, but she has failed to produce evidence to support this. She even suggests that he could have left France unnoticed and come to England, committed the murders and then travelled back unnoticed. Despite all the hard work and expense she went to, her experts were unable to prove that Walter Sickert was the author of any Ripper letters.

So what can be deduced from her research and findings? She did in the first instance set out to prove or disprove some interesting theories and she was the first person to actually use modern-day forensic science in an attempt to solve the crimes. For this I have to commend her.

Many researchers into these crimes like me have wondered whether it was possible to extract useable DNA from any of the documents left behind in the archives. Well we now know it is possible, equally we know that without any comparison samples any results would be worthless, which turned out to be the case with Cornwell’s examinations.

Since the publication of her book, “
Jack the Ripper - Portrait of a Killer”
I am led to believe that she has been continuing her quest to prove some involvement of Sickert in the letters and the murders. As far as my investigation is concerned I can find no evidence to connect Walter Sickert to any of the murders or the letters.

ROBERT MANN

In October 2009 the Jack the Ripper bandwagon rolled into town yet again with the publication of a new book titled, “
Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer”
and an accompanying television documentary based on the book titled, “
Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed”
.

The book was written by author Meirion Trow, who had published one previous Ripper book in 1997, “
The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper”
. In that original book he stated he believed the Ripper would never be identified. However, in his new book he puts forward a new name as being the prime suspect. In what in my opinion is clearly another case of a wild speculative uncorroborated theory, where he suggests a male by the name of Robert Mann was Jack the Ripper.

Mann was 52 years of age at the time of the murders. He was a pauper and a resident in the Whitechapel workhouse. Mann worked as the mortuary keeper at the Whitechapel workhouse mortuary where the bodies of Chapman and Nichols were taken and the post-mortems carried out.

Trow’s suspicion is based on a number of facts. The first being, that at the inquest of Annie Chapman it was suggested that someone with anatomical knowledge had committed the murder and removed the uterus. The second being that the knife used could have been similar to that used in a post-mortem room. The third being that Mann fits the psychological profile provided by the FBI in the 1980s. But then again so did half the population of Whitechapel at the time.

Trow is not able put forward any motives for Mann to be the perpetrator of these crimes, but allows a professor to suggest the murders were sexually motivated, and that continued when Mann was able to gain more sexual satisfaction by undressing his victims at the mortuary. I know of many cases of serial killers revisiting the bodies of their victims after the murders, but have never heard of the victims revisiting their killer!

Furthermore, Trow is not able to show any history of violence by Mann or any incidents involving violence against women. As to the type of person Mann was, at the Nichols inquest, coroner Wynne Baxter noted that Robert Mann was subject to fits and that his statements were “hardly reliable”. The coroner went onto say: “
The time has surely come when the police stations of the metropolis shall have proper mortuaries attached to them so that the help of epileptic paupers
(referring to Robert Mann)
warranted to forget what they have done shall not be brought into requisition.”

Other very important issues he fails to cover are in relation to the removal of the organs of the victims. Did Mann remove them at the mortuary? And if so for what purpose, or did he remove them on the street after killing the victims and if so what happened to them? Other unanswered questions are, how was Mann able to come and go all hours of the day and night from the workhouse? In Victorian times workhouses were run almost like prisons with the doors being locked at night and staff being on duty to ensure no one left and no unauthorised persons gained entry. As previously stated Mann was a pauper. It is a known fact that the victims would not have gone with the killer unless they had seen the colour of his money in advance. Mann would not have being in that financial position being a pauper.

Trow also suggests that the murder of Alice McKenzie in 1889 was his last murder and this was due to him suffering from tuberculosis from which he died in 1896. McKenzie was not murdered in the same fashion as some of the other victims and experts are divided as to whether she was a Ripper victim. Her body was not subjected to the same mutilations as previous victims. Trow suggest that his debilitating illness prevented him carrying out the mutilations. I would suggest that had Mann been suffering from tuberculosis in 1889 he would most certainly have died from that illness long before 1896.

In summing-up the case against Robert Mann from an evidential point of view there is not one scrap of what can be described as “evidence” to confirm Trow’s suspicion. In my opinion Mann should not even be looked upon as a viable suspect.

CHARLES LE GRAND

In June 2010 an American Ripperologist Tom Westcott published an article in one of several Ripper monthly online magazines titled, “
Casebook Examiner”
. The article was titled, “
Le Grand the New Prime Suspect”
. In the article after lengthy research Westcott suggests that Charles Le Grand was in fact Jack the Ripper.

I decided to peruse the article and to assess and evaluate the content. After all the title suggested the author had obtained sufficient and overwhelmingly irrefutable evidence to point to a new prime Ripper suspect.

So what is known of Charles Le Grand? It is believed he was apparently born in Denmark in 1849, making him aged thirty-nine at the time of the Whitechapel murders. He was known to use many different names among these were Charles Grand, Charles Grant, Christian Nielson, Christian Nelson, Captain Anderson, and Christian Briscony. I will refer to him throughout as Le Grand. He spoke several different languages and was apparently well educated.

Le Grand had a long criminal history with offences recorded as far back as 1877 when he was convicted for a series of thefts and sentenced to eight years penal servitude, followed by seven years police probation. He was convicted in the name of Christian Nelson and released in May 1884. He then apparently was responsible for a series of criminal deceptions by obtaining monies from women on the promise of marriage only to disappear with their money.

He surfaced again in London in 1886 when he formed a relationship with a female who was to be his constant companion, living together as man and wife. Her name was Amelia Marie Demay aka Amelia Pourquoi she also used many different aliases and was of dubious character and known to the police. She was approximately 28 years of age and a known prostitute.

Demay and Le Grand set up house together, which they later turned into a brothel. It is then suggested that Le Grand threatened violence towards any other prostitutes working within their area who were not under his or Amelia’s control, and on many occasions purportedly inflicted violence upon them, forcing them to either join their operation or move away leaving the path clear for clients to use their prostitutes. As time progressed Le Grand would later employ others to do this work for him.

Between 1888 and 1889, Le Grand was involved in the running of a private detective agency, working from his home address, before taking an office in the Strand in the heart of central London. The name of the agency was “
Le Grand and Co”
.