Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (3 page)

I can remember one particular evening when I went with my best mates Andy and Paul to celebrate Andy’s birthday with a curry in Brick Lane, our idea of the best possible night out.
We’d had a tankful, we somehow got separated, and in my inebriated state I had no idea how to find my way back to Liverpool Street station. For some reason which now seems surreal, I found
myself talking to a Spanish prostitute in Spanish (thanks to my Spanish girlfriend I knew a smattering of words) and she took me back to the station, where I dodged the barrier and ended up back at
the flat where I was living. Her friendliness and willingness to help somehow typified the area for me.

I knew nothing about Jack the Ripper at this stage. Yes, like everyone else in Britain I’d heard the name. But I had no idea that I was walking the streets where his crimes took place.
That would all come later. There was, though, a very
strange moment in 1991, nine years before I first heard the Ripper story. I was walking down Commercial Road and at the
junction with White Church Lane I had a very strong feeling that something had happened there. It was powerful enough to make me stop for a few seconds, and just absorb the feeling: I had no notion
what it meant until years later.

My life was going well. While I was at college I met a lovely girl, Lyndsay, and we became engaged, and even got to the stage of sending out the wedding invitations, and paying for the dress.
But I realized that we had drifted apart, with her concentrating on her teaching career and me, after leaving college with my master’s degree, flat out pursuing a lucrative career with a
software company which I helped to establish. I was greatly relieved when, after plucking up the courage to tell Lyndsay I didn’t think I could go through with the wedding, she sighed with
relief and told me she felt exactly the same . . . I will always be grateful to her and her family, because they showed me, for the first time, what a normal happy family life can be like. They
welcomed me into their home, and it was very different from my own childhood, with everyone getting on well and caring about each other.

Soon afterwards, with business going great guns, I met and married my first wife, Feiruz, who was Ethiopian. It didn’t last: we were only married for three-and-a-half years.

During this time I was still frequenting the East End, making it my regular stop to entertain the corporate clients of our business who flew in from Holland, Denmark, Africa and other countries,
as well as from other parts of the UK. A curry in Brick Lane was a popular choice, as they always enjoyed seeing the East End of London, and I was happy for any excuse to go there.

The business became the third largest supplier of software in the country, and I will give you a couple of examples of the way my brain works – not because I am
bragging, but to illustrate how I think in a lateral way, seeing opportunities that others have failed to spot. This quirk, which has helped me so much in business, eventually helped me when I
first encountered the shawl and started thinking deeply about the Ripper mystery.

One Sunday afternoon I went to the Tate Gallery, purely as a visitor. I noticed that while they sold prints and souvenirs in the shop, they had no software. The following day I spoke to the
buyer and did a deal to supply CD-ROMs of art and artists. In the same way, I read a news item about government plans to put computers into all schools, started work on it the following day and we
became a major supplier of educational software to schools. Another time one of our customers told me he had acquired a large collection of titillating, but perfectly legal, photographs of
semi-naked girls. I encouraged him to put them on disks, and I sold them into the Virgin and HMV stores on Oxford Street – but only after sitting up late into the night obscuring the nipples
on the covers with a marker pen.

When I decided to leave the company, I set up a software brokerage company. For three-and-a-half years we were very successful, but 9/11 put paid to it overnight, as some of our customers were
badly hit. By then my marriage was foundering, I was in the process of buying a beautiful seventeenth-century malting house in the country, and I was considering setting up my next venture, a
company running care homes for the elderly. I was on the brink of big changes in my life, but even bigger ones were in store . . .

The first and most important (she’d kill me if I didn’t say that, and it’s true) was meeting my second wife, Sally. I went
for a day out with a mate of
mine, Mark, and he promised to take me somewhere interesting. Unlike half the population of London, I’d never heard of the restaurant School Dinners. How I’d avoided all the publicity
about this place, where the waitresses dressed as if they were off the set of a St Trinian’s film and the food was all traditional British grub, I don’t know.

But what first struck me about the place was not the ambience, but the woman who was at the reception desk who, when I remarked it felt a bit chilly in there, looked up and with a straight face
said: ‘That’s because you’ve got no hair.’

I laughed at the insult, and we spent the rest of the evening laughing and talking together. Sally McMullen owned the restaurant with her ex-husband, and they had seen every star you can name
pass through, it was such a unique and popular venue.

As we chatted I discovered that she came from a part of North Wales I knew well, and she had even been in the same school as my sister, at the same time. There was an immediate feeling that we
were right together. Later that night, Sally suggested we go to a club in the Kings Road and as she and I danced together, another club-goer tried to make a play for her. She said: ‘Excuse
me, I’m dancing with my future husband.’

It was a prescient remark. In 1999, in the space of three weeks there had been big events in my life: I bought our golden retriever Goldie on a Friday, the following Friday I met Sally, and
exactly a week later I moved to the malting house. Sally and I were so sure we belonged together that she moved in with me straight away. Shortly afterwards I was in the middle of buying my first
care home, a stressful business.

Then the next, vitally important, event happened. It was, on the face of it, nothing more than a pleasant night out, a
trip to the cinema with Sally. We went to the Vue
Cinema in Cambridge to see
From Hell
, a Johnny Depp movie in which he plays a police inspector who investigates the Jack the Ripper killings in Victorian London. The film shows some of the
key locations in the Ripper story, notably Christ Church in Spitalfields and the Ten Bells pub. I had never realized until I saw it that my favourite area, the East End, was the location of these
grisly murders about which I had only the vaguest idea.

‘How come I didn’t know about this?’ I asked myself.

The strange feeling that I had been walking the same streets as this mysterious killer without knowing it, coupled with my inherent interest in crime, made me want to know a lot more. That
night, watching the film, my continuing fascination – obsession, even – with the Ripper case was born. There have been four or five massive moments for me in the quest for the Ripper
and this was the first.

I started to read books about the case, and soon after seeing the film Sally and I went on a two-hour-long ‘Jack the Ripper’ walk around Whitechapel, one Saturday afternoon. We were
conducted around the area and heard the story of the crimes, told by a Ripper expert who made a very good job of stoking my enthusiasm for the mystery, even if Sally made no attempt to hide her
boredom: she was rolling her eyes, folding her arms, looking up at the sky. But for me, it was all fascinating. Yes, here was the Ten Bells pub I had seen in the film, here was the church, here the
places where each of the victims’ bodies were found: real streets, real places.

We were in a group of assorted people, including American tourists, but despite the varied company I could feel the deep affinity I had always felt for the East End, but now coupled with
something darker, more intriguing. This was the biggest
unsolved murder case ever: surely there had to be a key to it somewhere, some door that nobody yet had opened? I had a
feeling, born I suppose of ignorance and arrogance, that I was going to find that door, that it was simply a matter of thinking about it all in a fresh way.

Looking back, I’m astonished at my presumption. I now know that much better qualified people than me, professional historians, genealogists, forensic psychiatrists, senior policemen, have
all tried and failed to give definitive answers to the big question: whodunit? But I have always enjoyed and risen to challenges, and this was a huge one.

By the time I had bought and was running three care homes I was under a lot of stress: it was a fraught business, dealing with staff and, more importantly, making sure the needs of the residents
were met. I was working long hours, and there were other worries in my personal life. I’d never wanted children before in any of my other relationships, but when Sally fell pregnant I was
overjoyed. We were putting roller blinds up when she told me: ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ I felt such a surge of joy. Tragically, within a week of the great news, she had a
miscarriage and we lost the twins she was carrying. We then embarked on a frustrating round of IVF. To our lasting delight, she became pregnant with our son Alexander naturally, between IVF cycles,
and we were thrilled when he made his appearance on my birthday in 2005.

For me, Jack the Ripper was an escape route. I could shut off from the problems of the business and the worries about our battle for a baby by immersing myself in books and research. I
didn’t take much notice of the books which expounded wild theories, but stuck to the ones that laid out the facts. I even rang Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, thinking they would
have all the official paperwork on the case, but they told me the material was at the National Archives in Kew. I went there and viewed everything they had on microfiche. I
even once handled some original documents, including a photograph of one of the victims, Elizabeth Stride. Seeing the grainy black and white image of her brought the case to life more than anything
had before: this was a real person. But it’s true to say that I was much more fascinated by the detective work than I was about the social history of the area, and the plight of the women
victims, at this stage. What drove me on was a deep-seated conviction that something, somewhere along the line, had been missed.

But to understand my quest, it is vital to know the whole story of Jack the Ripper’s crimes.

CHAPTER TWO

A MURDERER STRIKES IN WHITECHAPEL

A
s I’ve said, the East End became a special place for me as soon as I got to know it. It is a fascinating area, a distillation of its own
rich, evolving history. It feels like it’s constantly in flux, bending and changing with the waves of different people who have lived there, the new and the old rubbing along together, old
tenements and warehouses holding their own against the new glass and steel skyscrapers I have watched going up over the last twenty-five years I have been going there.

If you look hard, you’ll see old alleyways and cobbled streets, narrow, dimly lit, just as they were in Victorian times. I have seen rats scuttling along Gunthorpe Street, off Whitechapel
High Street, and felt transported back to the nineteenth century. And like them, I feel at home in these dingy streets.

Nowadays the area is enjoying a renaissance as a trendy hangout, but when I first went there it was more squalid, the streets often strewn with rubbish, much quieter than it is today, with
transactions between pimps and prostitutes openly conducted on street corners. The lights were dimmer, the
sound of music more muted, and the others who hung around the area
were locals or, like me and my friends, poor students who liked the lack of pretension and the cheap food.

Today there are two contrasting East Ends. There is the area around Brick Lane where the most recent immigrants are Asian, and where the shops and restaurants cater for them and the outsiders
who come in search of a good curry, where the old synagogues are now mosques. Then there is the area around the four streets that have survived and been preserved: Princelet Street, Hanbury Street,
Wilkes Street and Fournier Street, where the beautiful four- or five-storey houses built for the Huguenots (themselves religious refugees, escaping persecution in France) and dating back to the
seventeenth century now sell for millions of pounds each. In Victorian times these were crumbling, rat-infested tenements with whole families in one room, sometimes with a couple of pigs for
company. When I first visited, a quarter of a century ago, those now-restored houses were still slums, many of them in a terrible state of disrepair, the rooms sub-let to a polyglot mix of tenants,
only slightly more salubrious than in Victorian times.

Now they attract artists like Tracey Emin and Gilbert & George, the actress Keira Knightley, there are bustling cafes with well-heeled clienteles, pubs that attract a young, right-on crowd,
fashion mavens tottering along cobbles in their preposterous shoes. The gentrification is creeping, with lofts on sale for seven figures in Commercial Street and Brick Lane.

Over the years that I have been going to the East End, I have seen the architectural landscape change drastically. I’ve watched warehouses become galleries and restaurants and the old
buildings being dwarfed by new and modern office
blocks and apartments. Hoardings and cranes are a familiar sight, as every small space between the old and new buildings is
developed as prime real estate. I have also seen the Ripper ‘industry’, which has existed since a few years after the murders, grow into a big business, with upwards of ten different
walking tours a day being escorted around the area, some in daylight and others at dusk, to add to the atmosphere. Some tours have as many as forty people, others as few as ten; some are in
Spanish, German, French. Small coaches struggle round the tight corners, as guides tell the stories of the crimes on their intercoms. Early in the twentieth century the tours were fewer and
sparser, but still attracted the curious, reputedly including Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens’s son, also called Charles. Nowadays, with tourism and more leisure time, the tours have
become so popular that the East End streets swarm with them, guides swerving down side streets to avoid mingling with other tours.