Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (15 page)

We now know that Jack the Ripper had ended his bloody work with the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, but the hysteria at the time meant any act of violence against women was, for a
couple of years at least, ascribed to the Ripper. Two murders in particular were thought to be his handiwork, those of Alice Mackenzie, which did bear some similarities, and Frances Coles, which
clearly was completely different. Both happened some time after the Ripper stopped his spree. Alice Mackenzie died the following summer, July 1889, with two stab wounds to her throat. Like the
Ripper’s victims, she was a prostitute living hand-to-mouth in the dosshouses of the East End, and her body was found in a squalid alleyway off Whitechapel High Street. The murderer had tried
to rip her clothing off, but had only pulled it away enough to inflict superficial cuts on her stomach and genital area. Opinion at the time was divided about whether she was a Ripper victim, with
Sir Robert Anderson, Inspector Abberline and one of the police surgeons, Dr George Bagster Phillips, all saying that this was the handiwork of a different killer, and Dr Thomas Bond and Police
Commissioner James Monro asserting that Alice was another Ripper victim. Opinion has remained divided ever since.

Frances Coles was murdered in January 1891, more than two years after the last Ripper murder. Like the other victims, she was a prostitute. Her body was found under a railway arch between
Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street in
Whitechapel, and her throat had been slashed. But unlike the others, the wound had been inflicted with a blunt knife, and there were
no other mutilations. There was a suspect, a ship’s fireman called James Sadler, who had spent much of the evening and night with her, and both of them were, apparently, very drunk. They had
parted company after an argument, and Sadler tried to rejoin his ship at London docks but was turned away because he was so drunk. Sadler was arrested, and briefly came under suspicion as the
Ripper. But he was at sea when the other killings were committed, and there was not enough evidence to try him for the murder of Frances Coles.

Why did the Ripper stop? I have my own theory, which I will expound later in this book. But it is also worth noting that the streets were genuinely safer for the unfortunates, because of the
heightened public awareness, and the existence of the Vigilance Committees.

Then, as now, different experts and authorities had their own, differing ideas as to who Jack the Ripper really killed – and who he was. In February 1894, the
Sun
newspaper
claimed it knew who Jack the Ripper was, but stopped short of giving his name. In response Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was appointed Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan police in 1889,
swiftly wrote a memorandum, for whom specifically is uncertain, exonerating the man in question, who he named as Thomas Cutbush. In this lengthy report, he went over the crimes and made a definite
statement, that ‘the Whitechapel Murderer had 5 victims and 5 victims only . . .’ These were Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly and although others were mentioned, they were
dismissed out of hand. It was the discovery and publication of these notes in the early 1960s which set out what is now called the ‘canonical
five’ victims.
Martha Tabram
may
be the Ripper’s first foray into the world of brutal murder, and in my opinion she was, but I cannot assert it with complete certainty: however I feel more than
certain that Macnaghten’s five are true victims of Jack the Ripper.

But there is a more important significance to Macnaghten’s memorandum. He named three suspects who he felt were more likely to be the murderer than Cutbush: they were Montague Druitt,
Michael Ostrog and ‘Kosminski’. Was one of
them
Jack the Ripper?

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE HISTORY OF THE SHAWL

K
nowing the stories of the victims and looking at the line-up of suspects only increased my fascination with the case. Why had it never been
solved? How had this man Jack the Ripper perpetrated the crimes which made him the most famous murderer in the world, with so much attention focussed on him, and still been able to defy detection,
not just at the time but ever since? The questions went round in my head. I had a busy life, with a difficult business to run and now a toddler son who kept Sally and me at full stretch, as
children do. But there was always some free time, after Alexander was asleep, to dig into the books and trawl around on the internet, looking for something that had been missed. I had this
niggling, persistent feeling that there was a loose thread somewhere, and if I found it and pulled it the whole mystery would unravel.

Whenever I was in London on business I went to the East End to eat, walking the same streets I’d walked as a student, but now with a different perspective. Yes, I still loved the buzz of
the area for its own sake, but now it was overlaid with pictures
in my head of how these streets had looked in Victorian times, how the cars I dodged as I crossed Commercial
Road had once been horses and carts, how the prostitutes I saw now, with their miniskirts and cigarettes, had once been unfortunates who, like Catherine Eddowes, wore all the clothes they possessed
as they looked for a man to pay them the money for a night’s sleep.

At weekends, when we went as a family to Cambridge, I’d tour the bookshops, looking for accounts I hadn’t read before, getting exasperated with some of the wilder theories, noting
anomalies in evidence and always being fascinated by attempts to get inside the head of the killer. This was where I felt the clue would lie: if I could begin to understand him I’d find my
way to him. It was a lonely quest: I was never drawn to joining the Ripper community, the experts and enthusiasts who trade their opinions and theories on the internet, who attend conferences and
swap snippets of information, although I would read their dissertations and theses if they published them.

At the time there was one suspect who interested me more than the others, for no other reason than that he had a connection with Birkenhead, my home town, and had lived two roads away from where
my grandmother lived. Frederick Deeming was hanged in Australia in 1892 for the murder of his second wife. The bodies of his first wife and four children were then found under the floor of a house
he had rented on Merseyside, all of them with their throats slashed. Although Deeming had lived in South Africa and Australia, there was a possibility that he had been in England in 1888. Enjoying
the notoriety, he told other prisoners as he waited for the death sentence to be carried out that he was Jack the Ripper.

I believe in the power of coincidences and chance, and the
fact that I knew the area where he killed his family made him interesting. The savage murders, with throats
slashed, had echoes of the Ripper’s modus operandi, even though the bodies were not mutilated. He was an evil man, with no redeeming features: he was a conman, a thief, a braggard, a
bigamist. It all sounded to me, at the time, as if he could be a suitable candidate.

But after six years of trawling through books and records, I was unable to find anything to take the Ripper story forward, and I was determined not to be just another Ripper geek, following all
the twists and turns but never adding anything. I had just about reached the conclusion that the case was unsolvable.

‘Nobody is ever going to know the identity of this man,’ I told myself. I decided to put the matter to rest, to move on. I’d had a good stab at it, but in the end, perhaps
there genuinely was nothing new to find.

It was at this stage in 2007 that a friend who knew of my interest sent me a text, telling me that in that day’s
Daily Mirror
there was a small item about a piece of memorabilia
coming up for auction: a shawl that was believed to have been the property of Catherine Eddowes.

It was 9 p.m., too late to dash out and get a copy of the paper, so I looked the news report up, and the next day bought the local papers which also mentioned the auction. I realized that the
auction was only a few days away. Initially I wasn’t interested: a quick trawl through the usual sources revealed very little about the shawl, and I wasn’t convinced that it was
genuine. Occasional mentions of it on internet message boards glossed over it rather quickly, as if there was very little available information to discuss. Some commentators denounced it as
a fake without saying much else. Yet something made me want to find out more. As I have said, despite the fact that I’m hard-headed in business, I believe in hunches
and following my feelings: my instincts are not always right, but they are far more often right than wrong, and I’ve had occasion to be grateful to them many times, never more so than in the
quest for Jack the Ripper.

In the next few days, I logged on to the internet to go over all the information on the Catherine Eddowes murder, for anything that would make me believe that the shawl had something going for
it and would be a worthwhile investment. Then I noticed the pattern on the shawl, a deep border of Michaelmas daisies.

I looked again at the police inventory of Catherine Eddowes’ clothing and possessions, which included the skirts she was wearing:

But the press reports in many newspapers reporting the Eddowes inquest consistently mentioned that ‘her dress was made of green chintz, the pattern consisting of
Michaelmas daisies’. Did this mean something? I’m a keen gardener, but surprisingly I had no idea what a Michaelmas daisy was until I looked them up on the internet and saw a picture,
when I recognized them immediately. I simply hadn’t known the name. They are a favourite with gardeners wanting a splash of colour in their borders when other plants are fading, because
they come into bloom in late summer and early autumn, and that’s how they get their name, because they are in bloom at Michaelmas.

I didn’t even know when Michaelmas was, or what it was. I looked it up in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and found that it is the Christian feast of St Michael the Archangel,
celebrated in Western and Eastern (Orthodox) Churches. In the Roman Catholic faith it is known as the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, the archangels, and in the Anglican Church it is
the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. In Western churches, Michaelmas is celebrated on 29 September, whereas in the Eastern (Orthodox) churches it is celebrated on 8 November.

In years gone by, a businessman like me would have been well aware of Michaelmas: it was one of the four quarter days of the year, when legally all rents and debts had to be paid, lawsuits had
to be settled, servants could be hired on contracts. This practice dates back to the Middle Ages but fell out of use in the last hundred years or so, although there are still some very traditional
leases that refer to it, and the name is enshrined in traditional university terms, and the terms of the Inns of Court. Significantly, it would have been a well-known and important date back at the
end of the nineteenth century.

It was while I was reading up about it that something hit me, hard. It was like being knocked over. It was one of my massive moments on this journey, something that made me reel back in
surprise. I checked it, checked it again, and then checked it once more. How could I have seen this, when nobody else had?

It was the two dates of Michaelmas that hit me. They were the nights of the last three murders, first the double event on the traditional Michaelmas celebrated in this country, second the
final murder of Mary Jane Kelly on the night of the Orthodox Church Michaelmas. The double event deaths happened after midnight, so they were technically on 30 September,
but what if Jack the Ripper set out on his mission on the evening of Michaelmas Day? We know that Elizabeth Stride was killed around 12.45 a.m., not long after the date change, and he presumably
allowed himself time to find a suitable victim.

I have a natural ability to remember dates: my friends and family tease me that I have the memory of an elephant when it comes to them. As I talk, I pepper my conversation with references to
dates: for some reason they have always been important to me. I think this perhaps explains why I, and not any of the researchers who went before me, spotted this connection.

It was the Michaelmas daisies on the shawl that had set me off researching Michaelmas, and now the shawl assumed a much bigger significance than before. Could there be a connection?

It seemed as if I knew something that nobody else did. I was very excited, but as usual there was nobody close to share the information with. Sally would listen, but she didn’t share my
interest and she made it clear it was my hobby, not hers. She wasn’t convinced by my Michaelmas theory.

But now I really wanted the shawl. It was important to me. I was still operating on my hunch alone, and that was enough to make me want to own the shawl, but I wanted to find out if there was
any corroborating evidence. I knew, from the auction catalogue, that the shawl had at one stage been housed at Scotland Yard’s ‘Black Museum’, the popular name for the
Metropolitan Police Crime Museum, where a fascinating collection of exhibits and
items of evidence from notorious criminal cases stretching back into the nineteenth century
are kept.

The title Black Museum, apparently coined in 1877, is appropriate, as the collection includes weapons used in actual murders, pieces of crucial evidence from hijackings, sieges, robberies and,
most creepily, the death masks of various prisoners hanged at Newgate prison, as well as a plethora of other true-crime ephemera. Some of the more well-known criminal cases represented by the
collection include those of John Christie, Ruth Ellis, the Great Train Robbery, Dr Crippen, Dennis Nilsen, the Kray Twins and – not surprisingly – Jack the Ripper.

With the date of the auction fast approaching, I decided to contact the Black Museum to see if I could find out any more about the history of the shawl, and the likelihood of it being genuine
(although I was increasingly sure that it was). I rang Scotland Yard and was put through to Alan McCormack, the curator of the Crime Museum. I realized immediately that he was friendly and
down-to-earth, so I explained that I was thinking of buying the shawl, and asked if he could tell me anything about it.