GEORGE HUTCHINSON

No. 146 October 2015
GEORGE
HUTCHINSON
STEPHEN SENISE wonders whatever happened
to the Miller’s Court witness
SARAH BETH HOPTON on Mary Pearcey and the Hampstead Murders
SCOTT NELSON AND TIM MOSLEY and the Pick-Up Shtick
RICHARD PATTERSON on Francis Thompson
PAUL WILLIAMS on Mary Kelly and a Welsh colliery explosion
JAN BONDESON’S MURDER HOUSE CASEBOOK
NINA AND HOWARD BROWN | VICTORIAN FICTION
Ripperologist 118 January 2011 1

Quote for the month
“I’ll put my cards on the table and say we definitely did make contact with
Jack the Ripper. I felt there was a tall gentleman looking very dark and
mysterious, very much like him. [The London Dingeon has] an area dedicated to
Jack the Ripper and I feel that could attract him as a spirit.”
TV psychic Ian Lawman wins this year’s Halloween quote with his description of Jack the Tourist. The Daily Star, 28 October 2015
Ripperologist 146
October 2015
EDITORIAL: ‘UNFORTUNATES’ AND BÊTES NOIRS
by Christopher T George
TERROR AUSTRALIS: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
GEORGE HUTCHINSON?
by Stephen Senise
AN UNGOVERNED PASSION:
JOURNALISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF MARY PEARCEY
AND THE HAMPSTEAD TRAGEDY
by Sarah Beth Hopton
THE PICK-UP SHTICK
by Scott Nelson and Walter Mosley
THE HOUND OF DEATH: FRANCIS THOMPSON
AND THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
by Richard Patterson
DEATH IN THE COLLIERY
by Paul Williams
FROM THE CASEBOOKS OF A MURDER HOUSE DETECTIVE
by Jan Bondeson
A FATAL AFFINITY: CHAPTER FOUR
Nina and Howard Brown
DEAR RIP
Your letters and comments
VICTORIAN FICTION:
THE THRONE OF THE THOUSAND TERRORS
by William Le Queux
REVIEWS They All Love Jack and more!
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Adam Wood
EDITORS
Gareth Williams
Eduardo Zinna
REVIEWS EDITOR
Paul Begg
EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Christopher T George
COLUMNISTS
Nina and Howard Brown
David Green
The Gentle Author
ARTWORK
Adam Wood
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COVER IMAGE: We would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance given by the following people in the production of this issue of Ripperologist: Rob Gallop, Loretta
Lay and Mark Ripper. Thank you!
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‘Unfortunates’
and Bêtes Noirs
EDITORIAL by CHRISTOPHER T GEORGE
Although the broad and well-known stories of the ‘Unfortunates’ who were Jack the Ripper’s
victims have remained much the same for the past 127 years, the face of ‘Jack’ himself continues
to change, with an endless parade of newly promoted or revived suspects. No doubt to the utter
confusion or else fascination of the public - or is it more boredom with the topic by this point?
Well, frankly, the way the media jumps on each new sensational theory, with little discernment as
to the particular theory’s possible flaws or shortfalls, it seems newspaper writers and editors and
TV producers have the sense that members of the public retain their hunger for news of ‘Jack’
and the latest narrative that will forever settle the never-ending question of who he (or she) was.
Somehow it’s still the bloody autumn of 1888 and everyone is panting waiting to know the identity
of the unknown killer.
When my wife Donna and I attended the Salisbury Conference in September
2014, the ‘big thing’ was Russell Edwards’ recently published book, Naming
Jack the Ripper, and he and his Liverpool John Moores University DNA expert,
Dr Jari Louhelainen, were in attendance to tell the delegates that indeed
the shawl allegedly found in Mitre Square on the night of 30 September
1888 contained DNA from the blood of victim Catherine Eddowes and the
semen of suspect Aaron Kosminski - or at least that the DNA would match
that of modern-day relatives of both parties. Doubts about these revelations
have since arisen, to the extent that the DNA matches are believed by
many observers to be not as rare or as strong as Mr Edwards continues to
aver. Meanwhile, out in the lobby of the Mercure White Hart Hotel, was the
manuscript of the alleged confession of one James Carnac who claimed to
have been the Ripper, also published in the months before the convention. A
piece of fiction no doubt but also with its own claims to a corner in the rich
and somewhat confusing story of the Whitechapel murders from 1888 to the
modern day. A long and winding road with no end.
Russell Edwards and the alleged Eddowes shawl
Mr Edwards and the shawl also figured prominently in a segment of ‘CBS
Sunday Morning’ that aired here in the United States this past Sunday, 25
October. I had fully expected to be treated to the spectacle of learning
that the Ripper is revealed to be celebrity musician and baritone Stephen
Adams, aka Liverpool-born Michael Maybrick, but it seems that the CBS
story was prepared for Halloween before Bruce Robinson’s They All Love
Jack: Busting the Ripper, implicating Maybrick, hit the bookshops, and the
producers received insufficient ‘heads up’ to enable them to jump on to the
‘next big thing’ - the absolutely latest revelation about the Ripper. Friends,
is this story starting to become a bit tawdry - can we somehow get off this
neverending ghoulish cavalcade? Would the media perhaps help us to look at
the situation a bit more rationally? Or might that be making too frank a call
to the honest, news-reporter souls in the media?
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 1

And what of Bruce Robinson and his theory? A Hollywood scriptwriter,
acclaimed for the movies The Killing Fields and Withnail and I, has suddenly
become an ‘expert’ on the Whitechapel murders with a book fifteen years in the
making. But unfortunately, as with American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell,
author of Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed nearly 15 years ago,
who sought to skewer as the Ripper British expressionist artist Walter Sickert,
a celebrity that she clearly detests, Mr Robinson similarly seeks to pillory a
man he hates, Michael Maybrick, as the guy who slaughtered prostitutes in
Whitechapel. But on what evidence? The scriptwriter’s statements about his
chosen suspect even before the October publication of his book did not bode
well. As reported in an article by Richard Inman in The Independent on 31 May
2015, Robinson declared, ‘He was a prick - a psychopathic prick. Somehow
he’s managed to accrue this almost heroic aura, but I have no time for that. I
go after the bastard.’ 1 In an interview on Soundcloud, the scriptwriter doubles
down on this characterization and admits he is a cynic in approaching the
case, as he is about most things. That seems about true in that throughout his
long, long book, he lambastes in turn earlier writers on the case along with
Scotland Yard officials, and of course his chosen suspect, the composer of the
popular period song, ‘They All Love Jack,’ as well as of well-known hymns
such as ‘The Holy City’ 2 written with the composer’s longtime collaborator,
lyricist Frederic Weatherly. Indeed, Robinson proudly asserts in the Soundcloud
interview, ‘This book is a repudiation of virtually everything that Ripperology
has ever written!’ 3
For all the voluminous pages of his book, stuffed with ‘new’ research and
analysis, Mr Robinson gets a lot wrong. For example, he characterizes suspect
Aaron Kosminski as a weakling who couldn’t possibly have committed the
murders. But he appears to have based his ideas on Kosminski’s weakened
physical shape on the medical data collected about the man while he was
in Colney Hatch Asylum. Information in other words describing the Polish
Jew’s physique in his last months before he died in 1919 rather than the
man’s physical shape in his prime in 1888 - indeed Robinson characterizes
Kosminski as if the information about the weak nature of the man was known
by Scotland Yard in 1888, which makes little sense given Sir Robert Anderson’s
later adamant claim that the Jew was the Ripper. Would Anderson have named
a man who would have been physically incapable of committing the crimes?
Similarly, for some reason Robinson claims that after the Maybrick trial - the
murder trial in Liverpool in which Michael Maybrick’s American-born sister-inlaw
Florence Maybrick, was convicted for the poisoning death by arsenic of his
brother, cotton merchant James Maybrick, for which Florence served 15 years
in gaol, Michael Maybrick became a recluse on Isle of Wight. Totally untrue!
Maybrick was elected five times as Mayor of Ryde, served as a justice of the peace, became president of the Isle of Wight
Conservative Association and chairman of the county hospital. He even represented Ryde at the coronations of Edward
VII (9 August 1902) and George V (22 June 1911), before finally dying in Buxton, Derbyshire, on 25 August 1913. 4 The man
could not have led a more public life.
Top: Bruce Robinson, author of
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
Bottom: ‘They All Love Jack’ by F E Weatherly
and Stephen Adams (aka Michael Maybrick)
Period songsheet
1 Richard Inman, ‘Bruce Robinson: Creator of Withnail and I on his new book about Jack the Ripper,’ The Independent, 31 May 2015.
2 Frank Patterson sings ‘The Holy City.’ Released on the 1996 album, ‘Amazing Grace’. Written by Stephen Adams (Michael Maybrick)
and Frederic Weatherly in 1892.
3 4th Estate Books: 4 Books, Interview with Bruce Robinson at soundcloud.com/4thestate-1/4-books-bruce-robinson
4 ‘Death of Mr Michael Maybrick, JP. The Great Vocalist and Composer Dies in His Sleep. Ryde and the Island’s Loss.’ Isle of Wight
County Press, Saturday, 30 August 1913.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 2

Robinson also insinuates darkly that, before
the East End crimes of the Ripper, while on a
singing tour of the United States, Maybrick,
a heart-throbbingly mellifluous baritone and
apparently, according to this writer, also a
globe-trotting serial killer, committed the
famous Ripper-like series of ‘servant girl
murders’ in Austin, Texas - the bloody murders
of eight African-American servant girls. Once
again this is erroneous and loose thinking. It is
well recorded that Maybrick toured the United
States and Canada in 1884, but the servant girl
murders occurred mostly in 1885, seven in all
in that year, with only one of the crimes, the
first, occurring in 1884 the year of the tour -
the murder of Mollie Smith, on 30 December
1884. 5 During the Texan crime spree, therefore,
Michael Maybrick was back in Britain and can
safely be exonerated of those crimes!
Getting back to my original mention of
‘Unfortunates’ - yes the downtrodden women
of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and St Georgein-the-East
who were the victims of Jack the
Ripper, are rightly called ‘unfortunates.’ But
perhaps, might I say, perversely, a large number
of men who have been named as suspects by
now, wrongly, are also unfortunates in a real
sense as well!
Michael Maybrick aka composer Stephen Adams, 1907. Courtesy of Rob Gallop.
5 Michael Corcoran, ‘Rediscovering Austin’s Jack the Ripper’ available at www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-austin.html.
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Ripperologist 146 October 2015 3

Terror Australis:
Whatever Happened to
George Hutchinson?
By STEPHEN SENISE
Having wandered into Commercial Street police station voluntarily at the height of London’s
Ripper scare in November 1888, George Hutchinson, possibly the case’s most enigmatic witness,
seems to have vanished from the face of the earth not long thereafter.
Ripperologists have spent many decades diving into mouldy archives, scouring yellowing newspaper articles,
and been left scratching their heads. Post-contemporary reports pick up a possible trail many years after events,
usually involving a photo, purportedly the first ever located of this elusive witness, and to this day the only one
ever presented. The picture came to attention in tandem with statements by son, Reginald, attributed to father
George, implying a royal-masonic conspiracy at the root of the Ripper saga.
Most were unconvinced by such testimony, framed as it was by in-vogue theories assuaging the collective
imagination during those years courtesy of Stephen Knight’s Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution and later Melvyn
Fairclough’s The Ripper and The Royals, in which Reginald quotes George saying: “It was more to do with the Royal
Family than ordinary people.”
Reginald’s father, full name, George William Topping Hutchinson, was born in 1866. Accomplished violinist in
his spare time, rarely out of work plumber by trade, he was possibly too young at 22 to be the underemployed 1
witness who in 1888 was sleeping in a doss house and who only ever appeared in contemporary police and media
reports as plain old George Hutchinson. Where modern literature 2 ventures an opinion, it puts the police witness
at about 28 years of age at the time, though the question remains open.
In 1993, document examiner Sue Iremonger opined that the signature of George William Topping Hutchinson was
not the same as George Hutchinson’s when compared to the latter’s, as appears on his police witness statement
of 1888. But she allowed for the possibility that the ten year gap between the production of the two might have
accounted for such a marked difference.
Irrespective, the witness who in 1888 claimed to have got such a good look at the Ripper that he knew the
colour of his eyelashes was about to get a promotion. Thanks to a quick succession of works by Bob Hinton, From
Hell: The Jack the Ripper Mystery (1998), Stephen Wright, Jack the Ripper: An American View (1999), John
Eddleston, Jack The Ripper: An Encyclopedia (2001), Garry Wroe, Jack the Ripper: Person or Persons Unknown
(2002), and Chris Miles, On the Trail of a Dead Man: The Identity of Jack the Ripper (2004), George Hutchinson
went from witness to suspect, all within the span of the same decade in which his purported photo had appeared.
Without landing the knockout blow, the authors presented a robust case, for all the limitations posed chasing
the suspect in a murder spree of whom all trace had long vanished.
During the long span of time that George Hutchinson’s Ripper candidacy had gone unnoticed the art of criminal
profiling had evolved and become a sophisticated tool the likes of which the cases’s lead detective Frederick
Abberline and nineteenth century colleagues could only have dreamed of.
1 The term unemployed was used in an earlier version of this article – see other examples for its usage re Hutchinson: The Whitechapel
Society, Jack the Ripper: The Suspects (2013); Maxim Jakubowski, The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (2008); John Douglas &
Mark Olshaker, The Cases That Haunt Us (2000); Christopher J Morley, Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide (2005).
2 For example, Bob Hinton, From Hell: The Jack the Ripper Mystery (1998); Garry Wroe, Jack the Ripper: Person or Persons Unknown
(2002); John J Eddleston, Jack The Ripper: An Encyclopedia (2001); Chris Miles, On the Trail of a Dead Man: The Identity of Jack
the Ripper (2004).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 4

Indeed, courtesy of modern profiling and associated databases, serial killers who wade-in to “assist” police
investigations into their own crimes are not an unkown species. It is the very essence of the accusation levelled
at Hutchinson.
Author Garry Wroe uses the example of StephenYoung who came forward to help police looking into the murder
of Harry and Nicola Fuller only after his cover had been blown. A not dissimilar scenario to George Hutchinson who
came forward belatedly after inquest testimony by Sarah Lewis compromised his presence outside Miller’s Court
in the early morning hours before canonical fifth victim Mary Kelly was murdered there.
It is not the aim of this article to go over all the arguments against George Hutchinson, though a few highlights
and the odd personal elaboration may help provide a quick recap:
● By his own admission Hutchinson had known Kelly for three years, and had given her money in the past.
● He resided at the Victoria Home for Working Men on the corner of Wentworth and Commercial Streets, in
the very heart of what has been dubbed “Ripper Central”.
● He waited outside Miller’s Court for about three-quarters of an hour in late autumn on a rainy night when
temperatures got down to less than 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit), after having walked back to
London from Romford, roughly 12 miles (20 kilometres).
● In a report in The Times, Hutchinson says that he eventually tired of his vigil, and places himself inside
Miller’s Court, directly outside Kelly’s room.
The description of the suspect in his witness statement, who he momentarily observed in poor light accompanying
Kelly, is not only overly detailed but downright fanciful, laden with all the stereotypical projections about Jack the
Ripper then current. While every other credible sighting ranged between fleeting and to the point, Hutchinson’s
reads like a screenplay. Here he is quoted in a report from the Pall Mall Gazette of 14 November 1888. Part of it
reads:
He was wearing a long, dark coat, trimmed with
astrachan, a white collar, with black necktie, in which
was affixed a horseshoe pin. He wore a park of dark
“spats” with light buttons, over button boots, and
displayed from his waistcoat a massive gold chain.
His watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone
hanging from it. He had a heavy moustache, curled
up, dark eyes, and bushy eyebrows... He looked like a
foreigner... The man carried a small parcel in his hand
about eight inches long, and it had a strap around it.
He had it tightly grasped in his left hand. It looked
as though it was covered with dark American cloth.
He carried in his right hand, which he left upon the
woman’s shoulder, a pair of brown kid gloves. One
thing I noticed, and that was that he walked very
softly.
George Hutchinson watches Mary Kelly walk off with “the perfect villain”
From Famous Crimes, 1903
Author Bob Hinton called it, “totally theatrical... the perfect villain”.
Hutchinson’s statement to police describes the “Jewish appearance” of the suspect in a case heavy in anti-
Jewish overtone.
This was loudly on display on the night of “the double-event” when canonical victims Elizabeth Stride and
Catherine Eddowes were killed, and which preceded Kelly’s murder by some forty days. There was the anti-
Semitic shout of “Lipski” directed at witness Israel Schwartz during the attack on Stride outside a Jewish club,
the proximity of Eddowes’ murder site to the Great Synagogue, and the wording of the Goulston Street graffito
attributed to the Ripper, “the Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing”.
The Wentworth Model Dwellings where the graffito was found with a portion of apron belonging to Eddowes,
was on a direct path from the scene of her murder to Hutchinson’s lodgings. It lay also on the most logical side of
the street for such an escape route, with the Victoria Home for Working Men practically around the corner, only
than a few minutes walk.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 5

His detractors have also pointed to the internal inconsistencies and niggling contradictions in Hutchinson’s
evidence which are many, and gnaw at some modern-day researchers.
One discrepancy that was pursued by police in 1888 was his claim that he had volounteered his important
information to an officer on the street in the days before Kelly’s inquest had wrapped up, and prior to officially
making contact with police. Despite an extensive search, the policeman was never located. This has left Hutchinson
open to the accusation that he waited three days to come forward only because evidence provided at the inquest
made it clear to him he had been observed at the scene.
As an exercise, if we were to take away that part of Hutchinson’s statement which could be seen as exculpatory,
what remains? A lurking vigil at Miller’s Court not long before Kelly was murdered, which is backed up by Sarah
Lewis’ inquest testimony.
Many Ripperologists counter by proposing that he was one of a multitude of East End poor, and may have just
been trying to cash-in on his five minutes of fame rather than being Jack the Ripper. Others still, if not most,
absolve him altogether on the basis that Abberline passed him fit as a legitimate witness.
But there may be more to know, which does not bode well for such exonerating interpretations. New research
has come to light...
Forbes, New South Wales, 1896. Not quite the end of the earth, but at the time, some might have thought it
viewable from there - especially an Englishman 3 looking to disappear. But staying ahead of British justice required
laying low, even in the colonies.
No such luck. On Tuesday, 1 December, his Honor Judge Docker
presided over a trial in a case of “indecent exposure”. In earlier phases
of the legal process the charge had been described in media reports as
“indecently assaulting two boys”, confirmed as such in the New South
Wales Police Gazette of 11 November 1896. The victims were aged 11
and 8.
Over the course of three editions spanning late October to early
December, the Forbes and Parkes Gazette had provided details of
proceedings, culminating in the following account:
His Honor summed up very strongly against prisoner who had no
defence whatever to offer, and the jury after a retirement of only
five minutes, returned into Court with a verdict of guilty.
Judge Docker then delivered sentence:
I am sorry that owing to the charge which is laid against you and of
which you have been found guilty, I am unable to order that you be
whipped, were I able I certainly should give it you. The sentence
of the Court is that you be imprisoned for two years with hard
labor in Bathurst gaol.
As late as the committal hearing, the charge still seemed to be that
of indecent assault according to media coverage at that moment and
Judge Ernest Brougham Docker
previously. Indeed, the facts of the case were considered too shocking
for proceedings to go on as normal. The court reporter described them
“of a most revolting nature and totally unfit for publication”.
After hearing evidence - which was of such a nature that the Bench decided to hear it with closed doors
- the prisoner was committed to stand his trial at the next Court of Quarter Sessions to be holden at
Forbes on 1st December next.
The man in the dock was George Hutchinson a “stranger” or foreigner, no initials. He would plead “not guilty”,
be placed on remand, and court room events play out in the manner described.
3 An early version of this article used the term ‘Cockney’.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 6

Crew and Passenger list of the Ormuz, with Geo. Hutchinson listed fourth from the top
Corresponding documentation from Bathurst gaol refer to him as prisoner 1166, born in England, who arrived
on board the Ormuz in 1889.
Built in Glasgow and launched in 1886, the RMS Ormuz serviced the London to Melbourne and Sydney run.
Boasting a top speed of 18 knots, it had arrived from the port of London and deposited Hutchinson in the colony of
New South Wales on 29 October, aged 29. This would tally with the George Hutchinson of the previous November.
The relevant Sydney port authority document lists his surname as “Hutchinson”. The given name is abbreviated
to “Geo” - a common truncation for George at the time, and coincidentally the same used by Abberline’s witness
of that name in 1888 to sign the second page of his statement. It also has him down as “British” and one of the
“crew”.
There is no other listining of this “crew” member easily at hand in the nautical record. This is consistent with
information from the prison file which refers to his arrival in the colony with a single entry, 1889. He does not
appear in Australian documents for any of the Ormuz’s readily verifiable arrival dates into Sydney despite trawling
over records covering 5 years between July 1887 and July 1892, or 11 other voyages 4 . There may be other of the
Ormuz’s voyages to identify within this or broader timeframe, which is why research is ongoing.
To be sure, the net will also require to be cast beyond the silhouette of the Ormuz. There may be scope here
according to online forums for early leads to develop - but only if they can conform more readily with information
proferred by the Ormuz’s records, mindful too of those contained in the prison document. The best of these
presently, seems problematic on numerous fronts. There is a G. Heukhison as transcribed (in error for Hutchinson
or variation of) who appears once in the New South Wales record. On that occasion he was 28 in October 1886, a
ship’s trimmer. His vessel was the Elamang of Sydney with a tonnage of less than a third the Ormuz’s, and seems to
have limited its runs up the coast between the colonial capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. But for a few northern
Europeans, the crew were all “British” as colonial subjects then were. There were no “Australians” until 1901
when the six colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia.
So as it stands, the evidence suggests George Hutchinson’s trip from London on the Ormuz with an arrival date
of October 1889 may well have been a one-off. There are other reasons for suspecting as much. The following
discussion might serve to broaden the horizon.
Nowhere in the extant record was witness Hutchinson known to be a sailor, although in Tom Cullen’s Autumn of
Terror (1965) he is referred to as a night watchman.
Hutchinson’s station is listed as “A.B.” or able seaman, meaning an unlicensed member of the deck department,
often working in relatively menial roles like watchstander, simple workman or other general maintenance duties.
There were three ordinary seamen (“O.S.”) on board, all younger than Hutchinson.
A nautical career seems somewhat incongruous with the Bathurst gaol record of 1897 which lists his occupation
previous to conviction as “tinsmith”, and information recorded by the court reporter in Forbes in 1896 which
describes him as “labourer”. 5 How to make sense of this?
4 July 1887; March 1888; November 1888; March 1889; March 1890; July 1890; November 1890; March 1891; July 1891; November,
1891; July 1892.
5 See Addendum III for corroboration.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 7

RMS Ormuz
Abberline described his witness
in an official document as being “at
present in no regular employment”,
while media reports in 1888 refer
to him as a “labourer”. What seems
consistent is both encompass the
lesser skilled end of the professional
spectrum. Normally, London’s
unskilled and semi-skilled urban poor
had few means to travel the world. A
working passage would have offered
one way, particularly so during late-
August, early-September 1889 when
the Great London Dock Strike was
at its height, encouraging unskilled
“blackleg” labour onto ships to
replace unionised elements. 6,7
By 22 August the whole of the dock system had been closed down. Just six days later it was estimated 130,000
men were on strike from stevedores to seamen, firemen, lightermen, watermen, dockmen, bargemen, plus other
tradesmen and women in solidarity. 8 Might this provide context?
It is known from contemporary Australian and British media reports covering the strike that the Ormuz was the
subject of international controversy at that moment, “having shipped blackleg crews of seamen and firemen”. 9
Another headline referencing the “Orient liner Ormuz” reads, “Boycotting Vessels Manned By Blacklegs”. 10
Specifically, these reports referred to the journey the vessel was in the process of undertaking with George
Hutchinson on board.
In the very days the ship was making ready to leave for the Australian colonies, a manifesto had been cabled
from the Seamen and Fireman’s Union in Britain to their brethren at the Wharf Labourers’ Union (an Australian
organisation which had played a crucial role in support of the industrial action in London). The cry across the
ocean was clear: brothers, do not load or unload the Ormuz! 11 Or to put it in the Australian vernacular, the crew
are bodgie. 12
This might explain why the passenger list describes Hutchinson’s station as able seaman. There would have
been no means or desire to write the alternative, as might otherwise have jumped out of the technical manual of
organised labour: scab. Consistent with this, the official Australian record only ever lists him henceforth as either
“labourer” or “tinsmith”. Nowhere has the able seaman, so-called, resurfaced to date.
The industrial action wasn’t just news of international importance, its immediacy reached right into the heart
of the East End in practical ways. The area’s workforce had an integral relationship with the London port system.
Its newest and easternmost expression, Tilbury dock, a further twenty miles downstream, handled roughly half
the Thames’ tonnage 13 and is where the Ormuz was moored when in port.
In City of Cities, author Stephen Inwood describes the strikers’ “daily midday procession in August and
September” which made its way west through the heart of Whitechapel along Commercial Road to Leadenhall
Street and Tower Hill.
6 Stephen Inwood, City Of Cities, Pan Macmillan 2005, pp101-103.
7 Tilbury was one of the docks of the London port system involved in the strike: Stephen Inwood, City Of Cities, p101.
8 www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/ConNarrative.77/chapterId/1855/The-Great-Dock-Strike-of-1889.html.
9 12 September, 1889, Dundee Courier, p.3.
10 13 September, 1889, The Advertiser (Adelaide), p.4.
11 13 September 1889, The Argus (Melbourne), p.5.
12 Bodgie also bodgy: in the Australian slang means, inferior, false, counterfeit.
13 Stephen Inwood, City Of Cities, Pan Macmillan 2005, p. 22; see also: Chris Jenks, Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and
Cultural Studies, Volume 4, Routledge 2004, pp.156-7.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 8

He provides a colourful contemporary eyewitness account:
There were burly stevedors, lightermen, ship painters, sailors and firemen, riggers, scrapers, engineers,
shipwrights, permanent men got up respectably, preferables cleaned up to look like permanents, and
unmistakable casuals with vari-coloured patches on their faded greenish garments; Foresters and Sons
of the Phoenix in gaudy scarves; Doggett’s prize winners, a stalwart battalion of watermen marching
proudly in long scarlet coats, pink stockings, and velevet caps, with huge pewter badges on their breast,
like decorated amphibious huntsmen; coalies in wagons fishing aggressively for coppers with bags tied
to the end of poles... Skiffs mounted on wheels manned by stolid watermen; ballast heavers laboriously
winding and tipping an empty basket.
The industrial action was noted for its high level of organisation and discipline. It was not just effective, it was
conducted with dignity, and violence was avoided. 14
The Ormuz had been due to leave 15 on the evening of Friday the 13th but the strike had held things up. In
desperation, sixteen clerks from the Orient Line’s Fenchurch Avenue city office plus a bit of hired muscle from
Liverpool had to be brought in to act as stevedores under the taunts of picketers. With only the odd accident and
a negligible delay to its schedule “the pseudo dockmen” 16 as they were described in the media, managed to get
the Ormuz loaded and she steamed out of port in the early hours of the next day, Saturday the 14th.
At the very moment the Ormuz was making final preparations to cast-off 17 an agreement was being signed to
bring the Great London Dock Strike of 1889 to a close after five weeks. In the end it had taken the intercession
of none other than the city’s lord mayor, Cardinal Manning, 18 hailed a hero by dockers and seamen forever more.
Their demands met, the strikers began to return to work on Monday, 16 September. 19
Union-busting exploits aside, there is another possibility which could have accounted for Hutchinson’s presence
on the ship:
The cheapest way of travelling on the Ormuz was as a stowaway, who once discovered were usually put
to work as a member of the crew”. 20
Press-ganged stowaways as some of the crew may have been, the Ormuz’s greater claim to fame was its touted
status as “the fastest ship in world”, as described in 1887 in the Melbourne Daily Telegraph. It had managed to
place the great “metropolis of the world”, London, “within twenty-seven days six hours of its antipodes”. The
Ormuz could steam from London to Sydney in 30 days; 42 days with passengers on board.
Which begs the question, what might have prompted George Hutchinson to gain passage on the “fastest ship in
the world” and flee to the ends of the earth? Did the Great London Dock Strike offer the perfect means during a
period of renewed searching for the Ripper and a heightened police presence on the streets?
In the early hours of 17 July, 1889, Alice McKenzie was found murdered with her throat cut, her clothes pulled
up, exposing her abdomen which had been slashed. Her body was found in Castle Alley, just around the corner
from George Hutchinson’s last known address at the Victoria Home, or two minutes’ walk.
The wound to the left side of her neck was sufficiently severe that H Division police surgeon Dr George Bagster
Phillips believed death was probably “instantaneous”. 21 The Times of 19 July reported:
The wound in the neck was 4 inches long, reaching from the back part of the muscles, which were
almost entirely divided. It reached to the fore part of the neck to a point 4 inches below the chin. There
was a second incision, which must have commenced from behind and immediately below the first. The
cause of death was syncope, arising from the loss of blood through the divided carotid vessels.
14 Stephen Inwood, City Of Cities, Pan Macmillan 2005, p.103.
15 Reading Mercury, 7 September 1889, p.7.
16 The Herald, 23 September, p.3.
17 The Essex Newsman (The Herald), 21 September 1889, p3.
18 Old Thunder: A Life Of Hilaire Belloc by Joseph Pearce, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2002.
19 www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/ConNarrative.77/chapterId/1865/The-Great-Dock-Strike-of-1889.html.
20 historyhackblog.wordpress.com/tag/ship.
21 The Times, 19 July 1889.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 9

The conclusions of his colleague Dr Thomas Bond are worth quoting (see below). He had conducted the postmortem
on Mary Kelly. At the request of Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson in October 1888 he had prepared
a report pooling all the medical and inquest testimony on the canonical victims prior to Kelly, confirming they
were victims of the same perpetrator. In the intervening period Dr Bond’s discerning judgement was brought to
bear when he examined the body of Rose Mylett and dismissed the hypothesis she had been murdered by the
Ripper.
Upon conducting a medical investigation of the injuries suffered by Alice McKenzie he reported:
I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel Murders, viz: sudden
onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skillfully & resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation,
each mutilation indicating sexual thoughts & a desire to mutilate the abdomen and sexual organs. I
am of opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of
Whitechapel Murders.
On arriving at the scene of the crime, Chief Commissioner James Monro had formed a similar view which he
reported to the Home Office: 22
...the murderer...I am inclined to believe is identical with the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’ of last year.
Alice McKenzie walked along grey streets in the East End and inhabits
a parallel grey area after death. She is not counted as a canonical victim
of Jack The Ripper, though some Ripperologists dissent. This mirrors
differing official opinions in 1889. Dr Bond and Chief Commissioner
Monro’s assessment was not shared by the police hierarchy. That it
was not, is in considerable part due to the opinion of Dr Phillips who
concluded that:
I cannot satisfy myself, on purely anatomical & professional
grounds that the perpetrator of all the ‘Wh Ch. murders’ is our
man. I am on the contrary impelled to a contrary conclusion...
There are good reasons why Dr Phillips’ view won out. By July
1889 he was a veteran well versed in the case, having participated in
postmortems on four of the five canonical victims. Understandably, his
opinion carried weight. But it is also true that the higher echelons of
the Criminal Investigation Department carried bitter memories of their
perceived failure the previous year. The often vitriolic press campaign
directed against them had not only fanned the flames of public panic
but directed much odium at police.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren had resigned
nine months earlier, on the same day Mary Kelly’s body was found.
Long assumed to have been a political victim of the Ripper, in reality
he seems to have resigned on a technicality: penning an unauthorised
article responding to broader media criticisms of the police.
Alice McKenzie
This was the charged political environment still fresh in everyone’s mind. Under such circumstances, Dr Phillips’
postmortem report must have fallen into the police’s lap with a good measure of relief, though the ever hounding
media appear to have sensed it. One accusing headline read, “Jack the Ripper’s Latest Murder Accepted as a
Matter of Course”. 23
Having formed his own opinion within hours of McKenzie’s murder, Monro pressed an extra 42 plain-clothes
policemen onto the streets of Whitechapel for the duration of the next two months. Understandably. Things were
getting heated again. The media and people of the East End were demanding answers with an urgency unseen
since the febrile days after the murder of Mary Kelly.
22 Controversially, Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Robert Anderson claimed in his memoirs in 1910 that Monro had investigated Alice
McKenzie’s murder “on the spot” and concluded she was not a victim of Jack the Ripper – this is in contrast to Monro’s opinion as
stated in his own words in the official record.
23 Jack the Ripper: The Forgotten Victims, Paul Begg and John Bennett, Yale Univ Press 2013, p.176.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 10

Had things become too much for George Hutchinson as well? Had he struck too close to home this time and
slipped-up? Is it possible that some enterprising detective decided to walk the five or so minute journey from
where Alice McKenzie was last seen alive at the eastern end of Flower and Dean Street, to where she was killed
in Castle Alley and noticed the easiest route led past Hutchinson’s lodgings on the corner of Commercial and
Wentworth Streets? Had Hutchinson, belatedly, made the same realisation himself?
A proactive response may have been his solution, as it had after Kelly’s murder when he came forward as a well
meaning witness. The scenario dovetails with a flight to New South Wales aboard the Ormuz in September 1889,
and the facts fit when considering what is known about the George Hutchinson who arrived in New South Wales
and later served time in Bathurst gaol.
The prison record describes a man whose level of education
consisted of being able to read and write, consistent with
witness Hutchinson who signed all three pages of his police
statement in 1888, suggesting he was able to verify its contents
to his satisfaction by reading it.
Hair colour is recorded as brown, eyes blue, the accompanying
photo shows a moustache. His height is recorded as 5’5 & ½’’
and weighing 154 lbs, which would put him in the stocky range
and consistent not only with Sarah Lewis’ inquest testimony
but that of witnesses claiming to have seen the Ripper.
The images of prisoner 1166 recall Israel Schwartz’s
description of the “rather stoutly built” 24 moustachioed
man seen attacking Elizabeth Stride in the minutes before
her murder, particularly the reference to his “full face” and
“broad shoulders” (age about 30, height 5’5”, complexion fair,
hair dark). 25
Indeed, based on historic witness accounts, modern
investigators from Scotland Yard compiled a physical
description of Jack the Ripper in 2006: he was a man of
medium height, between 5’5’’ and 5’7’’, stout build, between
25 and 35 years of age.
Which brings us to the issue of Hutchinson’s year of birth. In
From Hell:The Jack the Ripper Mystery pioneering Hutchinsonaccuser
Bob Hinton described him being 28 in 1888, basing
himself on newspaper reports. 26 More recent forum postings
attributed to Hinton seem to imply this is less certain, 27
while definitive source material from the period paints but a
thumbnail sketch - allbeit one consistent with his proposition.
George Hutchinson as he appears on his prison record, 1897
Realistically, the question is “fraught” to quote from an earlier published version of this article, 28 and the
reason why it introduced the broader discussion of age with a cautionary advisory that 1860 was not a concrete
foundation, but the best presently available. 29
The George Hutchinson who arrived in Sydney on 29 October 1889 was 29 according to the shipping master’s
records, in other words, born 1859 or 1860. This sits well but less than perfectly with the date of birth cited in
the prison document (1861) which points ultimately to said shipping records.
24 The Star, 1 October 1888.
25 HO 144/221/A49301C, ff 148-59.
26 Bob Hinton, From Hell: The Jack the Ripper Mystery (1998), Old Bakehouse Publications 1998; p.217.
27 ‘George Hutchinson George Hutchinson from Romford?’, www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=13917.
28 Ripperologist 146 “sneak preview”.
29 See also: Garry Wroe, Jack the Ripper: Person or Persons Unknown (2002); John J Eddleston, Jack The Ripper: An Encyclopedia
(2001); Chris Miles, On the Trail of a Dead Man: The Identity of Jack the Ripper (2004).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 11

I had wondered whether the discrepancy might be explained by clerical error. However, what I referred to as
a speculative birthday line some time between early December and early March is very unlikely to have been in
play for the purposes of this article. I am pleased to remove it from present calculations together with the George
Hutchinson it attached to and who was born in Shadwell on 10 December 1859. 30
We are left frustratingly, with a year of birth and chronological age as stated in the Australian documents
which contradict and support one another simultaneously. Be that as it may, the gaol record refers to, and crossreferences,
information verifiable in the shipping files and together they cast a consistent net around Hutchinson’s
date of birth. Except for this dilemma, in all other details, it would seem clear they refer to the same man.
A 29-year-old Englishman is recorded arriving in Australia on a ship from London within a year of Mary Kelly’s
murder, a few months after Alice McKenzie’s. A spree of violent mayhem came to an end in the East End.
The only Ripper-like murder after McKenzie’s was that of Francis Coles in 1891, but police were sure they
had their man when they charged her partner James Sadler, even after the case fell apart. Whatever Sadler’s
involvement if any, there were some decidedly non-Ripper facets to Coles’ injuries, particularly the lack of
mutilations. Students of the case are broadly in agreement that Jack the Ripper was probably not involved. To all
intent, his crimes came to a halt no later than July 1889, on the eve of George Hutchinson’s departure for New
South Wales.
It was ultimately in this colony, seven years after disembarking, where he found himself charged before a court
with indecently assaulting two children. Though convicted of indecent exposure, the offences were particularly
shocking according to media coverage.
Physically, he fits Sarah Lewis’ description of witness George Hutchinson from 1888. It is not just Lewis’
testimony that tallies. Various descriptions of Jack the Ripper match the newly gleaned information presented
here, as the work done by the Scotland Yard team in 2006 attests.
It is worth adding that the information from Bathurst gaol states he was carrying a few scars and injuries,
recorded as identifying marks or special features: a broken nose, a broken little finger on his right hand, a broken
right knee, and a scar on his left breast. His religion is given as Church Of England.
There is more work to be done, for facts to be flushed out and nailed down, in turn building a platform for
research to proceed. Until then, an otherwise interesting report like the following is limited in its value to
spurring on further enquiry.
It comes from the Sydney Morning Herald which carried in-depth coverage of an inquest into a corpse fished
out of the Lachlan River near the now abandoned hamlet of Grudgery about 16 miles downstream from Forbes. In
other contemporary Australian reports it was referred to as “The New South Wales Mystery”. 31 The news report is
dated 29 October 1895.
MYSTERIOUS MURDER NEAR GRUDGERY
BY TELEGRAPH
(FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT)
FORBES, Monday.
The Coroner, Mr Sowter, continued the inquest on the body of the man found in the Lachlan River at
Grudgery on the 20th instant at the courthouse to-day. The evidence of Dr McDonnell, Government
medical officer was all that was forthcoming. He had searched and examined the body thoroughly,
besides taking a number of photos, which were produced and put in as evidence. The back of the skull
was knocked in, as though by a hammer or tomahawk. Around the waist was a trouser strap, also a rope
tightly knotted at the rear, and attached to which was 16 yards of No. 8 eight wire; also a bag with the
bottom rotted out. The bag had evidently been fastened to the body, and is supposed to have contained
weights for keeping the body underwater, but as soon as the bag rotted the weights were lost and the body
rose to the surface. The body was in a frightfully decomposed state, the flesh having been stripped off
the hands, shins, thighs, &c. The clothes were also perfectly rotten. Nothing was found on the deceased
except a knife, tobacco, and matches in one of the waistcoat pockets. He appeared to have been a stout
30 www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?p=278839#post278839.
31 The West Australian, Friday 1 November, 1895.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 12

greyish man about 50 years of age, with good teeth, a short stubbly grey beard, and short grey hair. After
hearing the evidence and an address by the Coroner, the jury return the following verdict:– “We find
that the said man, name unknown, was found in the River Lachlan, near Grudgery, in the colony of New
South Wales, on or about 20th October instant: we also find that the deceased died from injuries to the
brain caused by a fracture of the skull: and we further find that the said man, name unknown, was some
months ago wilfully and feloniously killed and murdered by some person or persons to us jurors unknown.”
It cannot be ascertained how long the body been the water, but it had evidently been there for some
months. The man is unknown to the police, but there is no doubt whatever that he has been the victim
of a cruel and brutal murder. At the conclusion of the inquest the foreman of the jury returned special
thanks to Dr McDonnell for the information he had given them, thus considerably lightening their
duties.
A cautionary emphasis attaches in presenting this report because there is nothing to suggest Hutchinson was
involved, or anything remotely on the Ripper radar involving the murder of a male, let alone with a fatal, bluntinstrument
attack to the skull. However, the geography and general chronology triggers curiosity.
Ultimately, the inquest reporting of the ‘New South Wales Mystery’ of 1895 is presented with a desire to share
information come upon during research. Any attempt to give it context is beyond the scope of this article.
Besides, there is much to digest considering what has come to light with the documents proferred here,
tangible as they are, and consistent with the tale of southern flight they would recount.
More research beckons, but even at this stage the fresh evidence adds a new dimension to suspicions long held
by many Ripperologists. The facts match-up remarkably well. If this is the George Hutchinson, then the case for
him being Jack the Ripper has just been strengthened considerably.
After all this time, dare we believe it is him?
Addendum I 32
It should be noted that there is another George Hutchinson, an Englishman, that appears in the record at about
this time, but it seems unlikely he is the same George Hutchinson who arrived in Sydney on the Ormuz or the
witness from 1888 (if indeed these two are different men):
a. The shipping document from the British end of his journey describes him as 28 in 1894 - arriving in Sydney
on the RMS Ophir on 3 November 1894 - no age is given for him in the corresponding Australian record.
b. The British record describes him as a “farmer”. There is no reference to occupation in the Australian
version.
c. The shipping document available in New South Wales government archives confirm the English record of
him travelling as a normal passenger, which suggests this George Hutchinson could afford the price of
passage.
Addendum II 33
• There is a third-class passenger, a T. Hutchinson, no age or nationality given, listed on the Ormuz’s arrival
into Sydney in early March 1890. The initial “T” could not be mistaken for a “G” when compared to examples of
that initial or the letter “g” appearing on the document. This is consistent with its transcription, which also
gives the passenger’s initial as “T”.
• The corresponding British record lists a passenger by the name of Tom Hutchinson departing London for
Sydney in January 1890 on board the Ormuz. He is recorded as single, an English male of 25 years of age.
More than likely, he is the T. Hutchinson appearing in the Australian maritime record.
32 State Records Authority of New South Wales: Shipping Master’s Office; Passengers Arriving 1855 - 1922; NRS13278, [X201] reel 524;
also, Ancestry.com UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960 [database online].
33 New South Wales, Unassisted Passenger Lists, 1826-1922; UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 13

Addendum III 34
The New South Wales Police Gazette of 17 August 1898 details Hutchinson’s release from Darlinghurst gaol in
Sydney at the end of his two year sentence. The date might suggest he had been in police custody since August
1896.
It states his “trade” as “labourer” consistent with the court reporter’s description in 1896.
The matter of his exact year of birth is further muddied because it is listed as 1862.
His eyes are described as “brown” and hair “dark brown”, though the information accompanying his photographic
record from Bathurst gaol, says the eyes were “blue” and hair simply “brown”.
In the column under “Remarks, and if previously convicted” it states “previously convicted”. It is unclear to this
writer whether this is a reference to the recorded offence of 1896 or another prior conviction.
Sources
www.poheritage.com/Content/Mimsy/Media/factsheet/94092ORMUZ-1886pdf.pdf; Melbourne Daily Telegraph, 1887 as quoted at
historyhackblog.wordpress.com/tag/ship; Forbes and Parkes Gazette (State Library of NSW: microfilm collection, RAVFM4/248, roll
n# 5: Friday 30 October 1896, p.2 - article dated 29 October 1896: Tuesday 3 November 1896, p.2 - article dated 30 October 1896:
Friday 4 December 1896, p.2 - article dated 1 December 1896; State Records Authority of New South Wales: Shipping Master’s Office,
Passengers Arriving 1855-1922; NRS13278, [X201] reel 493, reel 524; State Records Authority of New South Wales: NRS1998, [3/5960],
Bathurst Gaol photographic description book, 1874-1930, No. 1166, p.19, reel 5085; ancestry.co.uk, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-
1960 [database on-line]. Original data: Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and successors: Outwards Passenger
Lists. BT27. Records of the Commercial, Companies, Labour, Railways and Statistics Departments. Records of the Board of Trade and of
successor and related bodies; The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, England.
34 Posted online by jtrforums.com.
A student of the Ripper case since way-back, STEPHEN SENISE is a freelance journalist. His political analysis has featured in national and
capital city dailies across Australia. Most of his time these days is spent as a stay-at-home Ripperologist dad and occasional 146 October racing 2015 correspondent. 14 He
has a BA (Hons Lit) and previously worked as a ‘secretary & research-assistant’ in the New South Wales Legislative Council.

An Ungoverned Passion
Journalistic Constructions of Mary Pearcey
and the Hampstead Tragedy
By DR SARAH BETH HOPTON
I see when men love women they give them but a little of their lives.
But women when they love give everything.
Oscar Wilde
* * * * *
The Crime
Friday, 24 October 1890. A few minutes past 7.00pm, a clerk named Somerled McDonald was walking home toward
Belsize Park Road when he stumbled upon a woman lying in the road, a jacket thrown across her torso. At first he thought
she was drunk, homeless, or sick - the jacket obscuring his view - and moved to the far edge of the pavement to avoid
her. Something tickled his curiosity though, and he turned back. He bent down and shook her, but her body replied stiffly,
and he was unnerved and ran toward the Swiss Cottage Railway Station to fetch a constable. 1
McDonald led PC Arthur Gardiner back to
the spot where he’d left the woman. When
Gardiner arrived, he removed the jacket.
Underneath was a barely recognisable
woman’s face bespattered with blood and
dirt; her neck cut so severely her vertebral
column and ligaments were exposed.
The post where the body was found. From Famous Crimes
Sgt Brown and Inspector Wright of S
Division (Hampstead) were soon on the
scene, as was Dr Arthur Wells, fetched to
assess time of death. Wells determined
that the woman had not been dead long,
since her legs were still warm and her arms
not quite cold. Brown and Wright collected
evidence including a brass nut dappled with
blood. 2
An ambulance conveyed the body to the Hampstead Mortuary, while Inspector Wright canvassed the neighborhood.
Early information suggested the woman was in the “habit of walking up and down Eton-avenue,” which is to say they
suggested she was a prostitute, but the constables who walked that beat were later paraded before the body to confirm
this theory, and none recognised her. 3 Though it had been two years since the last Ripper victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was
found butchered at 13 Millers Court, the nature of this murder stirred immediate public angst and speculation. 4
1 “Shocking Tragedy at Hampstead.” Herts Advertiser, 1 November 1890. p7.
2 “Trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online. December 1890, www.oldbaileyonline.org.
3 “Woman Brutally Murdered at Hampstead.” Pall Mall Gazette, 25 October 1890. pp4-5.
4 “Terrible Murder at Hampstead.” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 26 October 1890. p1.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 15

The Ripper Connection
The theory that this woman was another Ripper victim was strengthened when a cab driver told police that a “well
dressed man” hailed him, 5 promising double fare if he would drive full speed to Chalk Farm Station. The presence of
Chief Inspector Donald Swanson (the lead investigator into the Whitechapel murders) at the site where the body was
found was enough for reporters to print what bystanders were already thinking: the devil had again fled Hell for London.
The Pall Mall Gazette led with this the following morning. “The unfortunate victim was seized from behind and
was at once rendered speechless by one large, clean cut of a knife, as in the case of the
women murdered in Whitechapel.” 6 The hasty conclusion is forgivable considering some
similarities appeared to exist in the modi operandi of both killers. Mary Kelly’s throat
was severed to the spine like the woman lying dead in the Hampstead Mortuary, and the
crimes were apparently perpetrated under cover of night and without a single witness.
The description given by the cab driver reified speculations about the Ripper’s physical
comportment. According to the Gazette, police were looking for a man “aged about forty,
nearly six feet high, with a dark moustache, and wearing a light suit and peak cap.” 7 This
description is strikingly similar to that given by Thomas Ede of a suspicious looking man
he thought might have been the Ripper. The man was described as 5ft 8in in height, about
35 years of age with a dark moustache and whiskers. He wore a double peaked cap, dark
brown jacket and a pair of overalls and dark trousers. 8 Regrettably, both descriptions are
generic enough to have fingered virtually every other white, male Londoner living nearby,
and thus proved unhelpful in either case.
Though Swanson left the scene certain he saw none of his nemesis’ handiwork in the
mutilated woman’s corpse, Scotland Yard took no chances. A constable woke Chief Constable
Melville Macnaghten to tell him about the murder at Crossfield Road. Macnaghten relayed
back a message to Inspector Bannister: he would meet him at the mortuary at first light.
Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten
The Pram
Meanwhile, two and one half miles away, Police Constable John Roser was walking his beat in Hamilton Terrace, when
he stumbled upon something curious. Leaning against the garden wall of No. 35 was a baby’s perambulator, a brown rug
draped over it. The handle was broken and the pram seemed wet, though it had not rained. Roser saw blood. He pushed
the pram back to the Portland Town Police Station.
Roser and Inspector Holland, who was on night duty, studied the contents of the pram, finding “partially congealed
blood” in the seat and human hairs sticking to its side, a waterproof apron, 9 and a butterscotch candy 10 wrapped in
robin’s egg blue paper, bespecked with blood. 11
5 “The Hampstead Murders.” Pall Mall Gazette, 25 October 1890. p7.
6 “A Woman Brutally Murdered at Hampstead.” Pall Mall Gazette, 25 October 1890. It seems the PMG also published the theory of
Jill the Ripper, connecting and exploring the possibility it was even Pearcey, in an article titled “The Whitechapel Horror” published
on Valentine’s Day, 1891.
7 Ibid.
8 “The Man Not Found.” The Echo, 17 September 1888.
9 The presence of the waterproof apron particularly would later support theories first proposed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and later
expanded by William Stewart (1939) that Jack the Ripper was a woman; more specifically a midwife. The theory was not without
logic. Those who wore such aprons commonly practiced the bloody arts of midwifery, surgery, or butchery and could roam the busy
streets of London wearing a besmeared apron without exciting much notice. Though criminal historians like F. Tennyson Jesse, as
well as a preponderance of evidence to the contrary have since debunked the theory that Jack was a Jill, the idea of the Ripper as
a woman proved to be pernicious. In 2006, Ian Findlay, professor of Molecular and Forensic Diagnostics (Marks, 2006) claimed he
could extract DNA from a single cell taken from a strand of hair up to 160 years old. At the time, conventional DNA sampling
methods required at least 200 cells. With samples taken from evidence housed at the National Archives, he extracted DNA from the
gum used to seal the so-called “Openshaw letter” from which he created a profile. Ultimately, Findlay’s results were inconclusive,
but the global press reignited the Jill-the-Ripper theory because Findlay deduced from his partial profile that it was “possible” the
Ripper could be female.
10 “The Victim on Her Way to her Fate.” St Pancras Gazette, 5 November 1890.
11 “Trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online. December 1890, www.oldbaileyonline.org.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 16

Oliver Smith finds the body of a baby
A Hawker Finds The Baby
Sunday, 26 October 1890. A hawker named Oliver Smith
was walking inside a hedgerow across a vacant lot early in
the morning when he spotted something out of place in the
landscape. As he drew closer, he realised he was peering down
at a dead baby girl and noticed she was missing a tiny shoe
and sock. Smith tracked down a doctor, Dr John Maundy Biggs,
and a constable, PC Dickerson, who removed the baby to the
Hampstead Mortuary where an autopsy was performed to
determine cause of death.
Though Dr Joseph Augustus Pepper had performed countless
autopsies as Master of Surgery at the University of London 12 he
could not say definitively what killed the child. She appeared to
be roughly two years old and was well fed and clean except for
a small smudge of dirt on her cheek. Other than this smudge,
he described in his notes that her lips were pale blue - a sign of cyanosis - due to a lack of oxygen in the blood, which
he believed was caused by asphyxiation. 13 Pepper couldn’t rule out death due to exposure either, though The Times
reported the weather for 25 October as singularly mild.
The Puzzle Pieced Together
The body of the dead child was eventually linked to the bloody perambulator, and finally, to the nearly decapitated
woman decomposing in the Hampstead mortuary. As the details of the case unfolded, Scotland Yard was as surprised as
the public - and perhaps also as relieved - to learn that the murderer was not Jack the Ripper, but a 24-year-old woman
named Mary Eleanor Pearcey (née Wheeler).
Pearcey purportedly murdered Frank Hogg’s wife, Phoebe, and infant child, Tiggie. Hogg being Pearcey’s lover of
several years, the crime was always attributed to jealousy, but the evidence at the scene suggested that Pearcey killed
Phoebe in a fit of rage and murdered the child to either silence her cries, or out of desperation having realised what
she’d done. The murder clearly took place in Pearcey’s kitchen at No. 2 Priory Street. Several witnesses saw Phoebe
pushing the pram along Haverstock Hill, the street on which she stopped at a confectioner’s shop to buy Tiggie a
butterscotch candy, or, more exactly, a toffee candy, and then along Priory Street. Later, she was seen struggling to get
the pram into the hallway at No. 2 at approximately 3.30pm, which aligns with a probable time of death based on body
temperature and weather conditions.
* * * * *
The Nature of Murderous Women
What is the character of tragedy? Aristotle tells us that an act is truly tragic only when it arouses pity and fear. 14
Separated, pity and fear provoke independent responses, but combined, they aggravate inquiry into the depths of
human nature. And so the journalists and writers who broke the story that late autumn morning in 1890 rightly named
the murders of Phoebe and Tiggie Hogg “The Hampstead Tragedy”.
Until the nineteenth century, murder was considered an act of will. Socrates argued that the unrestrained person
acted as such because he lacked self-understanding. Through reason one might willfully restrain the passions that - left
unchecked - so often caused human hurt and fatal harm. Aristotle later finessed this theory, suggesting that human
tragedy was not tied to self-knowledge, but was due to an excess of certain emotions. Such emotion was felt so intensely
among some people they could be driven to act against their better selves.
12 Augustus Joseph Pepper. Biographical entry 1849-1935. www.livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/biogs/E004458b.html
13 “Trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online. December 1890, www.oldbaileyonline.org.
14 George Whalley, et al. Aristotle’s Poetics. (Montreal, Que: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 17

From the mid-nineteenth century, the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, an annual publication, suggested
that crime in general was falling. There are problems with crime statistics, especially from this period. For example,
Clive Emsley tells us that the Metropolitan Police often reported thefts as lost property, and the disenfranchised were
often suspicious of police and rarely reported crimes. That said, secondary data supports the claim that theft and
violence were in decline by mid-century, and that violent crime in the form of murder - whether committed by men or
women - never figured meaningfully in the statistics. 15
On the whole, men murdered more than women, and when women murdered, they disproportionately murdered
their children or husbands. In fact, by the ‘hungry forties’ more than 90 percent of murders committed by women were
against their children, 16 making women who killed someone other than a child exceedingly rare. Most crimes committed
by women tended to be “victimless,” vagrancy, disordered conduct, or solicitation, for example.
Judith Knelman’s book Twisting in the Wind attempts to classify the other kind of female criminal, the kind who
murdered, and murdered someone other than a child. Knelman catalogues the motives of 50 murderesses she identifies
as “notorious” who killed between 1830-1901. By her estimation, only 22 percent of these 50 women were driven to
murder by passion, 17 making passionate murder of someone other than a child or husband rarer still. Women who killed
their children and husbands were thought of as those who had “sunk to the very depths of humanity,” 18 while women
like Pearcey were thought to suffer a depravity that was almost inhuman. 19
The Mad Murderess
The “murderess,” as reported and constructed in the London press, was
often little more than a binary construction in equal turns described as either
too delicate or too fierce; too calculating or too simple; raving mad or just
plain bad. By the time of the Pearcey trial, educated Victorians believed in a
hardened criminal class composed of hereditary offenders. 20 Several papers
incorrectly published that Pearcey’s father was also a murderer, 21 though
he was not. 22 Pearcey’s father, James Wheeler, was actually a partially deaf
dockworker, who was not hanged for the murder of farmer Edward Anstee,
but died at home in August, 1882, 23 after a work accident resulted in a
ruptured spleen. 24
The criminologist Cesare Lombroso first proposed belief in atavism. His
theories, as well as wide interest in the pseudoscience of physiognomy and
phrenology, which linked mind, body and character, 25 resulted in cultural
practices that attempted to see sexual deviance and criminal behavior within
certain physical characteristics. Lombroso’s theory of criminal behavior was
an earlier example of what Lacan would later term as the “gaze.” Michele
Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish later applied the gaze to criminology.
Cesare Lombroso
15 “Crime and the Victorians.” BBC News, 17 February 2011. Accessed October 12, 2015.
16 Robyn Anderson. Criminal Violence in London, 1856–1875. (PhD Thesis, Toronto, Ont: University of Toronto, 1990).
17 Knelman. Twisting in the Wind. p9.
18 Rachel Short, “Female Criminality 1780-1830.” (Oxford, 1990), p156.
19 Knelman. Twisting in the Wind. p14.
20 L Perry Curtis. Jack the Ripper and the London Press. (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2001), p85.
21 Herts Advertiser, 13 December 1890.
22 Simon Walker. Crime in Hertfordshire: Murder and Misdemeanors. (Hertfordshire, Eng: The Book Castle, 2003), p179.
23 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 12 December 1890.
24 See www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/data/answers/answers-2007/ans7-063-wheeler.htm to unravel the confusion about
Thomas Wheeler’s connection to Mary Pearcey.
25 Ibid.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 18

According to film critic Laura Mulvey, women are always the objects of the “gaze” - they are always the “bearer of
meaning,” not the maker of meaning. 26 These meanings were developed, vetted, and reworked through journalistic,
legal, and political discourse. “When the unhappy woman stepped up into the dock and found herself suddenly in the
midst of a prying crowd, every eye turned upon her, and confronted by the imposing array of the judgment-seat, she
visibly quailed. Nevertheless she stepped composedly forward, looking very much improved since her last appearance at
Marylebone. Her black crape-trimmed cape had given place to a brown cloak and the hat had been discarded. She wore
her brown hair rolled tastefully about her shapely head.” 27
Certainly, some of this detail was included to set the scene for the paper’s readers, but the writer is not merely
describing; he (presumably) is also editorialising, both in the selection of what to write about and feature, and in the
words chosen to describe. This discourse reinscribed dominant cultural ideologies about women, femininity and crime,
and how Pearcey affirmed or deviated from those norms, which were, according to currently believed theories, largely
written on the body. 28
Over time, philanthropists and social researchers like Charles Booth, and writers like
Arthur Morrison and R L Stevenson popularised alternative social theories of crime, such as
those proposed by psychiatrist Henry Maudsley and physician Havelock Ellis. These newer
theories suggested that deviant behavior was not written on the body, but was the product
of genetic factors exacerbated or perhaps triggered by cultural conditions. Abuse, neglect,
poverty, and alcoholism, as well as biological predispositions made criminals, not a glut of
emotion as Aristotle nominated, nor physical markers, as Lombroso guessed. Criminals, Ellis
and Maudsley imagined, could be “manufactured articles,” just like the steam engine or
printing press. 29
These were progressive views that have since informed modern views of criminality, but
the prevailing sociological belief about murderesses was more Aristotelian than Maudslean
in Pearcey’s time. “Women have as a rule less power of self-control than men, and often
act hastily under the influence of feelings and emotions to which men are comparatively or
altogether strangers,” wrote then Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt in 1882, eight years
before the murders. 30
Henry Maudsley
The male gaze, systems of power, developments in forensic psychiatry and asylum management practices all combined
to helped legitimize the idea that women were prone to hysterics. Together, they revived, theorised, and applied the
clinical diagnoses of “hysteria” to virtually any emotional excess a woman displayed, covering everything from murder
to the inability to orgasm. 31 That women were genetically predisposed to uncontrollable emotions which might lead
to murder, and that these tell tale signs were visible if one looked closely enough, was both absurdly gendered and
biologically false, but it would take another century of feminist activism and advances in criminal psychology to rewrite
this trope.
Speculative science aside, the mood toward women who committed capital crimes had significantly shifted between
the middle and end of Victoria’s reign. If women were less capable of controlling their emotions, then they were less
liable for the consequences of their emotional explosions. Interested in whether this social turn had actually impacted
juridical practice, the Home Secretary asked his staff to compile a list of women who were hanged for the capital crimes
they’d committed. Specifically, Harcourt wanted to better understand what role premeditation played in the crimes
perpetrated by women, presumably because he wanted to consider this new science as he recommended commutations
to the Queen. 32
26 L. Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 1975, pp6-18.
27 “Mrs. Pearcey’s Trial.” Lloyds of London, 7 December 1890. p4.
28 The term “the gaze” derives from Jacque Lacan. It is a psychological effect that results when a subject loses a degree of
autonomy upon realising that he or she is a visible object. The “male gaze” was a term coined by feminist writer and film scholar
Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). The “gaze” is a central thesis in Michele Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish and is applied to systems of power.
29 Martin Wiener. Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914. (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp224-244.
30 Public Record Office, HO 144/108/A23081, 19 December 1882.
31 The original Greek word hystera simply meant uterus. Women who couldn’t or didn’t orgasm and suffered emotionally because of
it were said to suffer “uterine melancholy”.
32 Knelman. Twisting in the Wind. p16.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 19

Pearcey’s solicitor and barrister, Frederick Freke Palmer and
Arthur Hutton, were also likely savvy to the changing scientific,
cultural and political attitudes toward capital punishment
generally, and the treatment of murderesses particularly. Perhaps
that is why they were hopeful that evidence of Pearcey’s chronic
epilepsy, suicidal ideation, and chronic depression 33 would rouse
mercy on appeal, if not overturn the mandatory sentence of
death by reason of insanity at trial. But, Pearcey refused to plead
insanity, saying, “All would come right in the end.” 34
Frederick Freke Palmer interviews Mary Pearcey
chain, one penalty as insufferable as the next.
Palmer, who was only four years older than Pearcey when he
took her case, was exasperated by his client’s response, though
no one could blame her for recognising that trading Newgate
Prison for Broadmoor Asylum was merely to trade the rope for the
The stigma attached to mental illness is not unique to any one culture, but the terror of finding oneself locked up in
an asylum unjustly was a uniquely Victorian terror. 35 This fear was perhaps more keenly felt among women because of
their lack of legal and financial standing, which made fighting trumped up charges exceedingly difficult. Many women
languished in asylums where they endured torturous practices like lobotomies and sexual abuse, to cite but two. It
would not be a stretch to suggest that Pearcey may have been especially resistant to the idea of pleading insanity given
her personal and familial experience in workhouses. 36
Still, Palmer tried to persuade her that pleading insanity - even if temporary - was her best defence. On several
occasions in private sessions Palmer made it clear that if Pearcey didn’t confide in him the whole truth, her fate was
all but assured. Not only did Pearcey refuse the insanity defence, she also refused to admit guilt, name an accomplice,
or offer any plausible explanation for the preponderance of circumstantial evidence that suggested that she, alone,
murdered Phoebe and Tiggie Hogg. This made Palmer’s defence of Pearcey a Sisyphean task.
Madness as Theatre
Palmer had been in practice for but six years when he took Pearcey’s case, and though he was on his way to
establishing himself as a “brilliant advocate,” he was, as yet, largely without experience in capital crimes. 37 Even so,
he was smart enough to know that, as W T Stead once said, the press was the “great inspector, with a myriad eyes, who
never sleeps.” 38 He knew his client would stand trial at the Old Bailey, and concomitantly stand trial in the court of
popular opinion. To spare her life, Palmer needed someone who could convincingly sell her madness, however temporary,
and stir public sympathy. He also needed someone who knew the Lunacy Laws exhaustively, and so he enlisted the help
of the controversial alienist, Dr Forbes Winslow.
It may have been that Forbes Winslow was not so much invited into the Pearcey case, as he inserted himself into
it. Winslow interleaved himself into the Ripper investigation in a rather insalubrious way two years before the Hogg
murders. Chief Inspector Swanson quickly rebuked him on discovering Winslow had altered letters purportedly received
from Jack the Ripper foretelling Mary Kelly’s murder on 9 November 1888, 39 and for this infraction, he lost significant
professional credibility.
33 There is a long and well-documented historical connection between epilepsy and madness. For a quick introduction into this
connection, see Robert Porter’s excellent and short book Madness: A Brief History (2002).
34 Lloyd’s, 4 January1891.
35 There are countless literary, journalistic, and biographical representations of life in Victorian and Edwardian asylums. Women
were sent to asylum for any number of transgressions, real or imagined, including epilepsy, infidelity, post-natal depression,
and menopause. See: The Yellow Wallpaper for a fictional representation of the fear women held of being sent away, and Life in
the Victorian Asylum: The World of 19th Century Mental Health Care for an academic/historical treatment of the mental health
system in Victorian England.
36 Charles Booth. Notebook. B162. Case No. 26: Charlotte Wheeler.
37 “Death Notice of Freke Palmer.” The Times, 21 January 1932.
38 Stead. “Government by Journalism.” Quoted in Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski (McMillian, 1984), p127.
39 Molly Whittington-Egan. Doctor Forbes Winslow: Defender of the Insane (Capella Archive, 2000) p192.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 20

Winslow was blustery, self-important, and self-promotional, 40 but he knew how to work the press, and the public
seemed genuinely curious about Pearcey’s descent into madness. “So great was the interest manifested in the case that
hundreds of people blocked the footways in the street outside the court, and the precincts of the court were thronged
by persons anxious to see the accused”. 41
The challenge for Winslow was that his client didn’t act mad. In fact, reporters consistently described her demeanor
in court and prison as cool and calm, even stoic. “When the prisoner was placed in the dock, she was dressed in a black
gauze dress with several flounces, and a black cape. She looked pale but was apparently composed”. 42 And yet, as
evidence of the crime unfolded, many would report that while Pearcey’s madness may have only been temporary, “it
was a mad business from start to end.” 43
Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow was a psychiatrist, and the son of the psychiatrist
that had contributed to the development of the lunacy laws of 1843, most famously
the M’Naghten rule, 44 which defined the threshold for criminal responsibility. Winslow
posited that a woman like Pearcey, who had demonstrated strict composure during her
trial and incarceration, simply didn’t have it in her to bludgeon a woman to death, cut
through her windpipe, fold and pack her virtually headless body in a pram, and then
wheel that pram through London. “It was difficult to imagine,” Winslow wrote in his
autobiography, “that anyone who behaved herself so quietly and with so much propriety
could have been guilty of such a heinous offense.” 45 If she did do it, he proposed, then
she had to have committed the crime while in an “acute, violent, epileptic trance,”
better known as a “fugue” state. 46 “With a distinct history of four attempts to commit
suicide, with a strong hereditary predisposition to mental disorder, with strong evidence
of attacks of severe epilepsy, passing on some occasions into the trance state, there is
most presumptive evidence of either the act being committed whilst in this state, or to
a disordered brain rendering her irresponsible for her actions.” 47
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder, not a mental disorder, but this distinction was
not well established in the late Victorian era. In fact, epilepsy continued to suffer an
L Forbes Winslow
unfortunate association with madness and murder well into the 20th century, conceived
in literature well before it was theorised in science. Othello’s murder of his beloved Desdemona is presaged during a
fugue state associated with epilepsy, for example.
Perhaps oblivious to or unconcerned with his own public perception, Winslow first advanced the temporary-madnessby-way-of-epilepsy
defence in a column published in Standard. After he established Pearcey’s “disordered mind,” the
result of chronic epilepsy, he cited previous cases of epileptics committing murder in a fugue state. The details of
Pearcey’s case certainly stirred public sympathy. Winslow recounted in his memoirs that Pearcey’s solicitor, Freke
Palmer, received nearly 2,000 letters a week after the Standard piece ran. Regrettably, these letters have likely been
lost to history, but they expressed sentiment similar to this: “I will be glad to do six month hard labor in any prison in
England for the respite of Mary Eleanor Pearcey, now under sentence of death. I do not know the prisoner, but this comes
from a heart of pity.” 48
40 Robin Odell. Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction (Mandrake, 2008), p18.
41 The Star, 4 November 1890.
42 Ibid.
43 “The Kentish Town Murders.” Auckland Paper, 5 December 1890.
44 In 1843, Daniel M’Naghten shot and killed the secretary of Prime Minister Robert Peel, believing it was Peel himself whom he’d
shot. Winslow, Sr had taken great interest in the case. Prior to it, he had written and published several articles on the legality of
executing the insane, one of which the judge in the M’Naghten case, Nicholas Tindal, had read. Realising Winslow was in the
audience, Tindal asked the physician to come to the witness box and give his professional opinion of the case. M’Naghten was
acquitted largely on Winslow, Sr.’s testimony, and the psychiatrist became an instant authority on criminal lunacy.
45 Forbes Winslow. Recollections of Forty Years (John Ouseley, 1910), p166.
46 Ibid. Victorian psychiatry theorised epileptics could enter a “fugue” state, murder, and then exit the state with no memory of the
act. Modern psychiatry calls this state dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue and it is listed in the DSM-5. Though exceedingly
rare, it is characterised as a short-term, reversible amnesia that can last hours to days. There are several case studies of dissociative
fugue states, most interestingly experienced by the Grand Dame of murder writing, Agatha Christie. See: Cecil Adams, “Why Did
Mystery Writer Agatha Christie Mysteriously Disappear?” (The Chicago Reader, 2 April 1982).
47 Forbes Winslow. Recollections of Forty Years, p163.
48 Ibid, p166.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 21

Not everyone sympathised with Pearcey, of course, and some perceived Winslow’s argument as absurd. “So far as I
can perceive, this singular theory [Pearcey’s insanity] is based upon the fact that Mrs Pearcey did commit the murder,
and says she did not. I need hardly point out that, if this were deemed proof of mental aberration, every murderer would
only have to deny the murder not to be punished for it. The murder was an atrocious one. The murderess killed a mother
and a child. She had an intrigue with the husband of the elder victim, and wished to marry him. The motive is as clear
as is the guilt.” 49 While this quote no doubt represented the views of one faction, it should be noted it came from Truth,
a conservative Christian publication with well-known biases.
Home Secretary Henry Matthews agreed. It’s probable that Winslow’s agitations generated
some public sympathy and greater discussion about the culpability of the mentally ill, though
to what degree is unknowable, but neither he nor Palmer convinced Home Secretary Matthews
that Pearcey was ill enough. To be fair, it seems Matthews tried.
Dr P F Gilbert, a general doctor and the medical officer at Holloway Prison visited Pearcey
regularly, almost daily. On 16 December, Gilbert visited Pearcey again to examine her
“carefully”. Though what this actually entailed was never directly reported, Gilbert diagnosed
Pearcey as having a somewhat “nervous disposition,” but she was not insane in his opinion. 50
Gilbert’s notes say that she “eats and sleeps well.” Still, Palmer was unconvinced. He wanted
a specialist, not a generalist to examine Pearcey.
Charles Murdoch, acting on behalf of the Home Office, spoke to Dr Southey, the Medical
Commissioner in Lunacy. Southey recommended that a team of doctors with representation
in lunacy, general medicine, and epilepsy, should take on the inquiry. Murdoch proposed Dr
Savage, late head of Bethlem, who had the largest lunacy practice in London, and failing
Henry Matthews
him, Maudsley. For general medical knowledge, Murdoch advocated on behalf of Dr Buzzard
of the Epileptic Hospital who could speak to epilepsy and the state of mind accompanying the disease. If Buzzard was
unavailable, then Sir J Risdon Bennett should conduct the exam.
As it happened, Drs. Savage and Bennett were selected for the task of examining Mary Pearcey and on 19 December
1890 they visited Pearcey in the condemned cell. Palmer knew Dr Savage, as he had testified for the defence in another
case Palmer tried. Their findings were even more disappointing than Gilbert’s. The doctors found nothing wrong with
Pearcey’s mind.
It is worth noting however, that Pearcey’s responses to the various officials whom she encountered during her arrest,
arraignment and trial were strikingly bizarre, and the doctors’ diagnostic interview, patently short. Even so, Pearcey was
deemed competent, and the verdict passed down on 3 December 1890 stood. 51
Without Madness, There Must Be Motive
Judgment of competency forced the conversation of motive to center stage, speculative though it would turn out
to be. Many, including (years later) the female crime reporter F Tennyson Jesse, believed Pearcey’s motive was simple
jealousy. Jesse posited that Pearcey’s intention was to eliminate her romantic rival, so she and Frank could marry and
she could adopt and raise Tiggie as her own. Those closest to Pearcey however, didn’t find this motive plausible. Palmer,
for example, believed Phoebe to be no match for Pearcey. “A word from her [Pearcey] would have taken him [Hogg]
from her rival and secured him as her own husband,” had she wished it, he wrote in his appeal to the Home Secretary.
Instead, “she sent him back to a woman who had a better claim on him and saved this other woman from disgrace and
the child that was not yet born from bastardy.” 52 Hogg confirmed this when he told a reporter, “I never wanted to marry
pore Phoebe, I’d rather o’ bolted.” 53
49 Truth, 11 December 1890.
50 Correspondence from Dr Gilbert dated 16 December 1890. H/O files A52045:31.
51 “Kentish Town Murder - Date of the Execution.” Daily News, 5 December 1890.
52 “Petition of Frederick Freke Palmer to the Right Honorable Henry Matthews” A52045:27. 5 December 1890.
53 “The Kentish Town Murders.” Auckland Paper, 5 October 1890.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 22

Letters read during trial reveal that it was, indeed, Pearcey who convinced Frank
to marry Phoebe when she turned up accidentally pregnant, despite his melodramatic
threats to kill himself or flee the country. 54 Pearcey may have been in love with Frank
- she may have left other men for him, and maybe even killed for him - but there is
scant evidence to suggest she wanted to be his wife. She knew quite well that Frank
was incapable of providing for her financially. In fact, when Phoebe was sick, and
Pearcey nursed her, she reportedly spared no expense for Phoebe, bringing her fresh
eggs and chocolate. Pearcey was not a woman of means, but she was likely better off
than Frank. Marriage - to Frank Hogg anyway - would not have improved her financial
position or social status.
The truth is that not even Frank and Clara, his sister, - who, by highlighting Pearcey’s
guilt could have diverted suspicion away from themselves - managed even a guess as
to why Pearcey would murder Phoebe. A Press Association reporter asked Clara if she
could suggest any reason Pearcey would have killed Phoebe, and she replied, “None at
all.” 55
That’s not to suggest Pearcey and Phoebe Hogg were on
good terms. In contemplating the evidence, it is most likely 56 this was a crime of passion,
committed after years of built up anguish and frustration, and precipitated in a flash of
rage sparked by something Phoebe said, though it wouldn’t have mattered had Palmer
and Hutton successfully proved that. Unlike French law, British law did not recognise a
difference between murder committed in a moment of passion, or diminished capacity, and
those committed under other circumstances. Murder was murder, and it carried a mandatory
sentence of death.
Even if it had, the popular press had already constructed Pearcey-the-murderess as a
beautiful, cunning young woman who - though perhaps mentally ill - was not insane, and
chose to live a sordid, “immoral life,” undeserving of public sympathy or legal reprieve. 57
She typified Lombroso’s criminal woman who stood, “midway between the lunatic and the
savage.” 58
The Mistress Pearcey
On Booth’s poverty maps of London and the London poor, No. 2 Priory Street in Kentish
Town is decidedly purple, neither solidly middle or upper class, but not entirely poor or
lower class either. This block of Georgian style row houses 59 was a mixed neighborhood of working class Londoners, some
in poverty, and others at varying levels of comfort, though not luxury. Kentish Town was only six miles away from the
“plague spot” that was the East End, 60 but it did not suffer a similar reputation as a neighborhood blighted by violence
and extreme poverty.
Somewhat educated and literate enough that she could recite the poetry of Longfellow, 61 Pearcey relied on an older
businessman named Charles Crichton, who lived in Gravesend, to keep her in modest comforts. 62 When questioned by
nosy neighbors about her relationship to Crichton, Pearcey described him as a “brother” or “friend,” 63 though he was
54 Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 17 March 2015), December 1890, trial of Mary Eleanor
Wheeler Pearcey (t18901124-43).
55 Bristol Mercury Daily Post, 1 Novemver 1890.
56 Phoebe Hogg’s sister and niece claimed to have seen a letter Pearcey sent inviting Phoebe to go to look at vacant houses in a new
neighborhood with her. According to her relatives, as she lit the note on fire, she said, “no one would think to look for me there,”
implying Pearcey intended to kill her and leave her body in one of the empty houses for let.
57 The Times, 4 December 1890.
58 Lombroso, Cesare and Guglielmo Ferrero. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (1893). Trans. Nicole Hahn
Rafter and Mary Gibson. (Durham: Duke U. P., 2004). pxvi.
59 The street has since been renamed Ivor Street.
60 Curtis. Jack the Ripper and the London Press, p46.
61 “The Kentish Town Murders.” Daily News, 2 December 1890.
62 Bristol Mercury. 1 November 1890.
63 “The Hampstead Tragedy.” The Morning Post, 8 October 1890. p5.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 23

decidedly not. Pearcey never worked the streets (that we know of) as an
occasional prostitute, as did the Ripper victims, but was instead, a “kept”
woman. Crichton visited Pearcey for sex a few times a week, and in return,
he paid for her rooms at No. 2 Priory Street. He also likely bought her, or
gave her money with which she purchased, a second-hand piano. She was
quite gifted at playing popular tunes, according to one exposé. Her favourite
among them an ironically titled piece: When There’s Love at Home. 64
How Pearcey and Crichton met or started their affair is unknown, but
according to testimony delivered at the magistrate’s hearing and covered in
the Bristol Mercury, 65 Pearcey was still technically living with and “married
to” John Charles Pearcey, when she started having sex with Crichton. Crichton
helped her move out of the dingy let rooms she shared with John Charles, but
she was already in love with Frank Hogg. In fact, she likely chose Priory Street
because it was only 10 minutes’ walk to 141 Prince of Wales Road, where
Frank Hogg lived. She’d hired the Hogg moving company - owned by Frank’s
older brother - to remove her things to her new flat.
Her rooms at Priory Street were decorated in typical Victoriana: flowerpatterned
wallpaper hung on the walls; a crystal candy bowl sat on the
mantel, and newly bought lace curtains draped the street-side window. She
also owned a sewing machine. The basic layout and catalogue of Pearcey’s
household items comes from the collection of Madame Tussaud, whose estate
bought up and displayed the contents of Pearcey’s house only a few days after
the papers broke the story of her involvement. Tussaud’s even purchased
Frank Hogg’s beard, 66 an ancient symbol of virility, and a macabre visual
metaphor for the consequences of what Chief Justice George Denman would
later call “prurient and indecent lust.” 67
Voyeurs of Violence
Palmer’s affidavits suggest that Pearcey may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy - the kind that some
researchers propose caused Van Gogh to cut off his ear and gift it to his prostitute/girlfriend. 68 However, what was said
of Pearcey’s medical problems and psychological character - that she was a great favorite of the neighborhood but had
also suffered epileptic fits and incapacitating headaches since childhood - was rarely printed in the press. Conversely,
how she dressed for court, the color of her hair and eyes, 69 her comportment, and how gallantly she died was mentioned
in virtually every article in every paper.
Pearcey was written in equal turns as beautiful and sympathetic, as well as ghastly and unknowable. A female
reporter for the Pioneer wrote, “the alleged murderess is a quiet-looking little woman by no means handsome - a large
chin bold in its curves but not heavy, a very large weak mobile mouth, and large eyes which she continually directs from
side to side scarcely moving her head…” 70 By contrast, another writer for the Evening News described Pearcey as young,
good looking and “well-made.”
64 “Hampstead Tragedy.” Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 23 November 1890. It’s also possible the piano was a “house” piano, shared
among the tenants of the flat, but so far as records at Tussaud’s speak to this, it was Pearcey’s piano and was likely bought second
hand in Kentish Town, since Kentish Town was known as a hub of piano manufacture.
65 Bristol Mercury. 1 November 1890.
66 Nearly 30,000 Londoners clogged the streets of London, nearly breaking down the door to pay the extra sixpence for admission to
the Pearcey exhibit the day it opened. Tussauds became as big an attraction as Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London (Curtis
p79 n62), and Pearcey would stand in waxen relief among the body snatchers Burke and Hare and the notorious Dr Crippen until
the late 1970s.
67 “The Hampstead Murders.” The Standard, 4 December 1890. p9.
68 Diedrich Blumer. “The Illness of Vincent van Gogh.” American Journal of Psychiatry 159, no. 4 (April 2002). pp519-526.
69 Eye color was often associated with witchcraft, which was for centuries associated with epilepsy (See: A Brief History of Madness,
2011)
70 Pauline Chapman. Madame Tussaud’s Chamber Of Horrors: Two Hundred Years Of Crime (Constable, 1984), p102.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 24

James Berry, the man sent to execute Pearcey two days before Christmas wrote
of her “big blue eyes with a languishing look in them” and “masses of wavy hair and
lips like Cupid’s bow.” 71 Berry, like Frank Hogg, was prone to melodrama, but his
uncomfortably erotic description of the woman he would later hang is interesting in
that it represents the male gaze, and how that gaze composed Pearcey, and others
like her. “Her neck was long and shapely, and though there was never anything of
the artist or poet in James Berry, I tell you I was spellbound when I saw her in the
condemned cell.” 72
The Jekyll and Hyde characterisations of Pearcey are undeniable. According to
scholar Bridget Walsh, the Victorian public was already nervous about what went
on behind closed doors. Pearcey was a particularly unsettling figure because like
Dr Jekyll, she hid her secret impulses behind a certain kind of femininity, which
was respectable (composing elaborate lies about the nature and relationship of her
gentleman callers, for example). Dr Jekyll was also highly respected, whereas Mr
Hyde was a pariah, outcast by his appearance as much by his actions. That they were
one in the same implied that the criminal could lurk behind Victorian respectability;
appearances providing no real indication at all of the violence beneath.
The Pearcey case symbolised the instability of the changing female figure, as well
as the overall uncertainty and anxiety characteristic of fin-de-siècle British culture.
As Walsh suggests, “with the self located within an interior space, and mental state
James Berry
increasingly difficult to ‘read’ from external signs (despite the claims of Lombroso
and his followers), the difficulty of detecting whether one had ‘crossed the border’ meant that the boundaries between
the law-abiding and those capable of committing transgressive acts were increasingly blurred.” 73
Though advances in criminology, psychology, and biology afforded more complex understandings of identity and the
psyche, this complexity also facilitated increased unease. Literary and journalistic treatments of stories and cases
where characters possessed an ‘evil other half’ demonstrated how contrived the line between “good” and “bad” was,
and how narrow the chasm between “us” and “them.” 74 Pearcey’s crimes disturbed and fascinated those who feared
that little separated those who acted on murderous rage from those who didn’t.
Pearcey’s story as told in the popular press generally lacked nuance, was often factually inaccurate, and tended to
highlight the sensational, and the social outrage of other women clamoring to see this fallen but powerful sister’s deeds.
A short article in the Standard recounts how when the door to the mortuary was opened, “a knot of women clamored for
permission to see the bodies [of Phoebe and Tiggie Hogg].” 75 But Pearcey wasn’t just interesting to women, or the lower
classes eager for entertainment; she also captivated the interest of literary writers and social commentators too, who
explored with greater sensitivity the depths of her psychology and the larger social implications of her crime.
Thomas Hardy was sixteen the first time he watched a woman hang. Her name was Elizabeth Martha Brown, and she’d
murdered her husband, John. Thousands of spectators gathered to watch William Calcraft hang her on 9 August 1856,
Hardy among them. He later recalled Elizabeth’s “fine figure” silhouetted against the grey mist of a rainy morning. Still
impressed by the event years later, he wrote, “the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round
and back.” 76 Hardy arrived in London the day Pearcey’s case opened at the Old Bailey, and he was so taken with the
complexity of Pearcey’s character, mind, and motive, he wrote aspects of the case into Jude the Obscure, according to
his biographer Martin Seymour-Smith. 77
71 Stewart Evans. Executioner: The Chronicles of James Berry, Victorian Hangman. (Sutton Publishing, 2004), p267.
72 Ibid.
73 Bridget Walsh. Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-Century England (Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), p140.
74 Steve Chibnall. Law and Order News: Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (Tavistock Publications, 1977).
75 “The Hampstead Murders.” The Standard, 30 October 1890.
76 Lady Hester Pinney. Thomas Hardy and the Birdsmoorgate Murder 1856 (Toucan, 1966), p2.
77 Martin Seymour-Smith. Hardy. (Bloomsbury, 1994).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 25

For hundreds of years the viewing public took great pleasure in state-sponsored killings, which were attended by
crowds in the tens of thousands, with politicians and the nobility paying top dollar for spots closest to the noose.
Executions were theatre, and the moments leading up to the climactic act were exhaustively described in broadsheets,
penny dreadfuls, and newspapers. Most often, reportage of the crime and criminal featured “confessions” by murderers
accompanied by detailed accounts (if not always first hand) of their execution. When public executions were banned in
1868, the press’s role incorporated a new function: it would continue to entertain the masses with its lurid descriptions
of crime and criminal proceedings, but it would also serve as a proxy witness, offering public guarantee of fair practice
and attenuating the very concern Justice Denman, the judge that tried Pearcey, voiced in his vote on the Criminal Act
two decades prior.
Pearcey’s execution, however, was different. In an unusual and perhaps singular move, the High Sheriff of the County
of London, Sir James Whitehead, denied all press access to her hanging. Why Whitehead wished to spare Pearcey the
indignity of press objectification is unknown. When pressed, he cited her “delicate nature” as the reason. Milman
also ensured Pearcey was moved to the condemned cell in the male ward of Newgate Prison for her last days. Also
uncustomary, this move afforded Pearcey a walk of less than twenty yards to the execution shed through a private door
in the cell wall.
In so doing, Milman ensured Pearcey would not suffer “birdcage” walk, the long hallway of narrow arches that led to
the scaffold, designed to force a prisoner to contemplate his impending death as he marched toward it. An unusually
cruel - though perhaps unintentional - consequence of “birdcage walk” 78 was that the condemned had to walk atop the
ground into which their bodies would soon be buried as the minister delivered last rites. 79
Reporting Bodies, Sex and Death
“Horror is the true sublime,” wrote Peter Ackroyd. 80 What made journalistic coverage of crime “sensation-horror”
- and thus sublime - was the body subjected to trauma. Unlike war or shipwrecks, more papers were sold if murder
news included the lurid details of autopsy reports and eyewitness accounts of finding the dead. 81 Though some of these
details were undoubtedly perceived as garish and unnecessary, they drew many more readers, and by the 1860s even
the elite press were covering scandalous crimes. 82 In an article published in the Standard, the reporter who stopped by
the undertaker to see the bodies of Phoebe and Tiggie Hogg wrote, “Although distressed, he [Frank Hogg] appeared to
bear the presence well, and kissed the faces of his wife and child, and then left. The deceased woman’s features wear
a peaceful appearance, but her face, forehead, and hands, and arms bear shocking evidence of the dreadful struggle
which preceded death.” 83
The ways bodies were written about depended on the paper in which such descriptions were printed; the more
sensational the paper, the more lurid the description. Yet, even the Times wrote that Phoebe’s head was nearly severed
from her body. A widely syndicated account of Phoebe’s murder added that the head was “attached to the body by
only a piece of skin.” 84 Yet, balancing their audience’s thirst for - as Stead called it, “blood, blood, blood!” 85 - while
concurrently maintaining Victorian codes of respectability, was difficult.
To read the coverage of the Pearcey trial then is to take a lesson in deconstructing euphemism, circuitousness and
elision. Euphemism softens the harder aspects of Pearcey’s sexual affair with Frank Hogg, as in this Standard article
from 25 November 1890. “It appears that the Prisoner had been on terms of intimacy with the husband of the murdered
woman for some years, and a long correspondence shows that she was devotedly attached to him, and had been living
with him immorally for five years.” 86
78 Anna Edwards. “Behind Locked Doors at the Old Bailey: Exclusive Pictures Reveal 363-year-old ‘dead Man’s Walk’ Where Britain’s
Most Evil Killers Were Led to the Gallows.” Mail Online. 14 June 2013. Accessed 30 September 2015. ‘Birdcage Walk’ was nicknamed
as such because it was the last time prisoners would see natural light. Also called ‘Dead Man’s Walk’.
79 Kelly Grovier. The Gaol: The Story of Newgate - London’s Most Notorious Prison. (John Murray, 2008).
80 Quoted by David Sexton in his review of Peter Ackroyd’s horror-detective novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, in Spectator
(10 September 1994), p33.
81 Curtis. Jack the Ripper and the London Press, p75.
82 Ibid
83 “The Hampstead Murders.” The Standard, 30 October 1890.
84 Bristol Mercury, 1 November 1890.
85 Stead is actually paraphrasing Othello’s famous line “O blood, blood, blood”, from Shakespeare’s Othello (Act III, Scene 3).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 26

86 “Central Criminal Court (Before the
Recorder).” The Standard, 25 November 1890.
Because of the nature of this crime,
none was spared the scrutiny of the press.
Tiggie Hogg, the 18-month old child of Frank
and Phoebe, whom Pearcey had minded on
several occasions, was another object of
public fascination, though there is far less
coverage of the child’s autopsy than her
mother’s, for it may have marked the edge
between sensational and sordid.
Press Influence in Court
Though there are various views of the
social function of journalism, critical
journalistic theory proposes that papers
are “commercialised promoters of law
and order and normative behavior” and
that most media play some role in setting
political agendas. 87 Other theories suggest
that news about brutality has more
entertainment value because the horrible
fosters “generalised anxieties” and fears
of an impending breakdown of order. 88 Jack
the Ripper’s crimes inspired fear not only
because the murders were grisly but also
because these crimes contained elements
that threatened the civilizing nature of
British culture. 89 Similarly, Pearcey’s crimes
were unsettling because not only had she
“flouted the human taboo against killing
another”, 90 but also because she spurned
the feminine stereotype. Her punishment
was as much a response to her alleged crimes as they were a means through which to conclude the theatre of guilt; her
sentence the denouement in a play that highlighted the justness of the legal system. But, was it just?
One of the most remarkable features of Pearcey’s trial was that of the 37 witnesses called in her case, not a single
witness was called in her defence. In Justice George Denman’s summation, he said that letters Pearcey wrote to Hogg
were evidence she had succumbed to “an ungoverned passion,” so the intensity of Phoebe Hogg’s death, while tragic,
was not surprising. To him, the letters represented her state of mind, a mind so obsessed with Frank Hogg that it would
make her “go to the length of making her wish to get rid of the woman.” 91 The content of Pearcey’s letters indeed
demonstrate a heart obsessed and a woman willing to make any concession to keep her lover close, even accepting his
pregnant fiancé into the folds of friendship. In one letter she writes, “I will love her [Phoebe] because she will belong
to you.”
87 Curtis. Jack the Ripper and the London Press, p49.
88 Ibid, p51.
89 Ibid.
90 Knelman. Twisting in the Wind. p20.
91 The Times, 4 December 1890.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 27

That’s not to suggest that Pearcey didn’t have
a hand - perhaps the only hand - in the double
murder, or to suggest that the sentence of death
was unjust. It is to say however, that several key
mysteries remain unsolved, and thus the story
unfinished. One spectator of the Pearcey case,
who wrote to Forbes Winslow, said it was difficult
for anyone of good sense, “to sit there without
being stirred by a profound pity for the wretched
young woman, around whom the meshes of the
law were being drawn so relentlessly without the
faintest hope of mercy.” 92
On 3 December 1890, the jury returned a
verdict of guilty. Donning his black cap, Denman
said, “I don’t wish to add to the pangs, which
you must feel, by saying much to you. I do say,
however, that I think it is one of many instances
which have come before me, even at this very
sessions, of the terrible results of persons giving
way to prurient and indecent lust. You have
become a person of so little moral sense that
eventually you have been an instrument, and
a willing instrument, of taking away the life of
a woman whose only offence was that she was
married to a man upon whom you had set your
unholy passion.” 93
Twenty days later, James Berry, who had prepared a length of rope appropriate for Pearcey’s height and weight,
appeared at the condemned cell to fetch her, along with Governor Milman and other prison officials. Just before she
stepped into the open yard between the prison and the execution shed, Berry slipped a white hood over her head, so
she would be spared the terror of seeing the drop.
On the platform, Berry said, “When you are ready, madam, I will get these straps around you.”
“I am quite ready, Mr. Berry.” 94
Pearcey raised her arms above her head and Berry fastened a leather belt around her waist. At eight o’clock in the
morning, two days before Christmas, he removed the cotter pin that held the trap doors secure, then pushed the lever.
The doors snapped open with a bang! and Mary Pearcey disappeared into the darkness below, the rope vibrating before
coming to rest. A jailer hoisted the black flag, which flapped furiously in the winter wind above Newgate prison and a
crowd below cheered and booed in equal turns.
The Press Still Scintillated
Mary Pearcey never confessed to the crimes, and she never named an accomplice. She begged Frank Hogg to visit her
before she was put to death and was despondent when her invitation was returned and Hogg did not show. In a letter
to his sister, Clara Hogg, Pearcey absolved Frank of all culpability, though many doubted his innocence. Frank Hogg
attempted to erase his connection to the scandal by changing his name and leaving Camden Town, though his brothers
stayed behind and resumed life as normal. Hogg appeared at the Old Bailey for the opening day of the trial, gave his
testimony, and later, on December 16th, appeared before Edmund Baker, a commissioner of oaths, to make a declaration
on Pearcey’s behalf. Within the week after however, he disappears from London, and the historical record.
92 Winslow. Recollections of Forty Years, p164.
93 “Trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online. December 1890, www.oldbaileyonline.org. Testimony of
Justice George Denman.
94 Stewart Evans. Executioner. p267.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 28

* * * * *
In an uncustomary interview granted after Pearcey’s execution, Freke Palmer told the reporter it seemed that
Pearcey’s lot in life “had been a very hard one, that she had been badly treated by many people. In fact, the whole world
appeared to be against her and none for her. She was a woman of some character and of great intelligence. She was
not a common low character, as people make out.” Then he added, “[but] her character will not bear investigation”. 95
In a final mystery that solidifies Pearcey’s connection with the press and her construction as one of the most baffling
murderesses of her day, Pearcey further titillated the public when she asked Palmer to place an advert in the Madrid
newspapers following her execution:
M.E.C.P. - Last wish of M.E.W.; Have not betrayed.
CODA
Gothic until the last moments of its mysterious end, Pearcey herself played a significant role in ensuring that her story
remained unfinished. She withheld key details and names, and told stories so fantastic they suggested a mind incapable
of separating fact from fiction. One hundred and twenty five years later we still, to paraphrase one Australian reporter
covering her case, “don’t know all yet.” 96
That is not to suggest Pearcey didn’t do it, or that the sentence was unjust. It is quite possible - probable even - that
Pearcey withheld the name of her secret accomplice because there was none; denied Palmer the satisfaction of pleading
insanity because she was quite sane; and absolved Frank Hogg of guilt because he was innocent.
It is easy to reread history and her antagonists more sympathetically than a contemporary could have, yet Pearcey’s
story contained all the elements of the tragic, marked as it was by pity and fear. The political, legal, and scientific
affordances that developed over time provoke our pity. Undoubtedly Pearcey would have benefited from medication to
control her seizures and any one of several mental illnesses from which she likely suffered. Modern forensics would have
exonerated or definitively settled Pearcey’s involvement in the butchering of Phoebe Hogg’s body. And, Pearcey would
not have taken so many secrets to the grave - at least not an early grave - since capital punishment was abolished in
the United Kingdom in 1965.
But what is it about Pearcey’s case that still provokes our fear? Why do we turn our attention to her again and again
over a century later? Perhaps it is the uncomfortable recognition that love can serve as the wellspring of both charity
and inhumanity. Who among us has not loved something or someone so completely, that it stripped us bare of reason,
even if only for a moment? As we turn our gaze to Pearcey again, perhaps we fear looking too closely at her, and those
like her in our own time, for fear we might catch a glimpse of ourselves in the reflection.
Acknowledgements
Deep appreciation to Mark Ripper and Justin Weltz for their help in vetting facts, formatting, and editing this article.
95 Lloyds of London, 28 December 1890.
96 “The Kentish Town Murders.” Auckland Paper, 5 December 1890.

DR. SARAH BETH HOPTON is an Assistant Professor of Professional and Technical Communication at Appalachian
State University. A former reporter, Dr. Hopton covered crime and politics for a Florida newspaper, and later
worked as a Legislative Aide and Communication Director for multiple elected officials. She holds an M.A.
with distinction in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, and a Ph.D. from the
University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Dr. Hopton lives in Boone, North Carolina.
Her book Woman at the Devil’s Door: The Extraordinary True Story of Mary Pearcey and the Hampstead
Murders, the first full-length examination of the case, is due to be published by Mango Books later this year.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 29

The Pick-Up Shtick
By TIM MOSLEY AND SCOTT NELSON
In a previous article in this series, we hypothesized as to the possible type and location of
the Ripper’s presumed regular employment and as to how he might have outfitted himself in
preparation for the Whitechapel Murders. We now turn an eye toward how the Ripper might have
selected his victims, as well as the specific locales where he committed his murders.
Two of the foremost reasons that the Whitechapel Murders were as sensational and horrifying as they were
to the general public in 1888 are, first, the peculiar attitude of the Victorians toward sex and prostitutes, and,
secondly, the burgeoning press that had begun to generate explicit scandal stories for popular consumption
on a scale that had not been possible before. 1 These crimes occurred during a puritanical age in Britain when
many a woman was shocked upon initially discovering the facts of life from her husband on her wedding night. 2
Sex was simply not something to be discussed publicly, under any conditions; parodies of this quaintly prudish
Victorian attitude may be found even today in plays such as No Sex, Please, We’re British. Although Victorians
were forbidden by the customs of their era to discuss sex, the scandal story, which openly broadcasts information
ordinarily kept secret, was an altogether different matter. Formerly, journalists had seen the misfortunes of the
poor only as suitable entertainment for the more privileged readership. Then, partly as a result of the repeal of
the stamp tax in 1855 and the paper duty in 1860, the number of newspapers in Britain multiplied tremendously.
As newspapers became cheaper, more widely available, and more national in scope, they naturally became
more competitive and hence encouraged the activities of scandal-mongering journalists. 3 The stage was set for
the unparalleled media coverage of a sensational sex scandal the likes of which had never been seen before – a
merciless killer who preyed upon the prostitutes that sold sex to anyone on the streets, murdering them in public
locations, mutilating or removing their sexual and other bodily organs, and leaving the remains in plain sight in an
unprecedented, in-your-face style which was a horrific affront to Victorian society itself.
At the same time, exclusive brothels thrived in the affluent West End, where prostitutes of a much higher
class than those being murdered and mutilated in the East End catered to an enthusiastic and discriminating
clientele. Those patrons from the middle and upper classes largely thought of these prostitutes as ‘daughters of
joy’, women who were so overwhelmed by the pleasure of sexual feelings that their pursuit became an avocation.
Being relatively well-to-do themselves, many in such a position found it difficult or impossible to understand or
accept the fact that women could become so desperate that they would sell their own bodies several times daily,
just to survive. To quote Donald Rumbelow, 2 ‘The crude economic necessity that drove women to “sail along
on their bottoms” was generally glossed over with a wishy-washy sentiment that they had fallen because they
had been betrayed by a wealthy seducer.’ For others, it was a hoped-for Cinderella story of unjust oppression
and eventual triumphant reward, where unfortunate women were suddenly transformed by remarkable fortune.
These so-called rags-to-riches stories were vivid dreams imagined by many unfortunate East End women suffering
in endless obscurity and neglect.
1 Cohen, William A.: Sex, Scandal and the Novel, From Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, Duke University Press,
1996.
2 Rumbelow, Donald: The Complete Jack the Ripper, London, Penguin (revised 2004).
3 Cohen, William A.: Sex, Scandal and the Novel, From Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, Duke University Press,
1996.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 30

The following poem, The Ruined Maid by Thomas Hardy, 4 serves as a satirical and sly tongue-in-cheek commentary
on these comically misguided standards, idealistic attitudes, and denial-philosophy of upper Victorian British
society. O tempora, o mores!
‘O ‘Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?’
‘O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?’ said she.
‘You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!’
‘Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,’ said she.
‘At home in the barton you said ‘thee’ and ‘thou’,
And ‘thik oon’ and ‘theäs oon’ and ‘t’other’; but now
Your talking quite fits ‘ee for high compan-ny!’
‘Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,’ said she.
‘Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!’
‘We never do work when we’re ruined,’ said she.
‘You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you’d sigh, and you’d sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!’
‘True. One’s pretty lively when ruined,’ said she.
‘I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town.’
‘My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,’ said she.
Whereas the upper classes, blinkered as they were in these sexual matters, were generally sympathetic toward
the plight of those trapped within the Ripper’s killing ground, the working classes of the East End showed sympathy
and empathy for the victims far beyond anything that had ever been observed previously. Turning out en masse
for the pauper’s funerals of the Ripper’s victims, thousands of East Enders paid their last respects to one of their
own, shedding tears and doffing caps in genuine displays of grief and emotion. 4 These feelings ran high, and they
indubitably complicated the Ripper’s actions in his subsequent crimes. With public sensibilities aflame, dozens
of ‘penny-dreadful’ newspapers fanning those fires on a daily basis, police everywhere, and the blood-lust of the
multitudes aroused, the Ripper no doubt realized that his would be no easy task if he were to continue his bloody
work. Against such forces arrayed in opposition, not even a series of disguises would prevail. What the Ripper
needed was a game plan.
One might wonder if the Ripper did formulate any detailed plans for securing a victim or murder site other than
the general preparations necessary. Were some of the murders, such as that of Annie Chapman, merely crimes
of opportunity, quite likely if the Ripper was always ‘on’? If so, were his victims merely streetwalkers who were
in the wrong place at the wrong time? After all, as Philip Sugden 5 suggests, there were only four-eight probable
Ripper victims, and consecutive sevens have been rolled against the odds numerous times at gambling tables in
many casinos. It might conceivably have been nothing more than dumb luck, carried through with extraordinary
audacity; however, the much greater probability is that the crimes were very well planned in their entirety.
Several serial killers have murdered for years without detection, much less capture, and only a little over two
months had elapsed since the murders of the Canonical Five. Disregarding the presumably inactive month of
October 1888, we find that the Ripper killed over a period of only six weeks! With so few murders to analyze
statistically over such a relatively short period of time, it may be impossible to interpret with a significant level
of confidence any discernible planning patterns from what little we know. The murders themselves might have
4 Blake, Wilfong: www. wondersmith.com.
5 Sugden, Philip: The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, London, Robinson (revised 2002).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 31

actually been planned down to the smallest possible detail, or the Ripper might have employed, at least some
of the time, a combination of general planning and opportunistic endeavor in a ‘fuzzy logic’ mode of operation
wherein critical decisions were made as the situation evolved.
Debate has ensued for decades as to exactly how the Ripper and his victims met and which of his thought
processes determined the location of the murder sites. When it comes to these subjects, virtually anything is
possible. There are almost no impossibilities, only varying degrees of probability. Exactly what was said or done
by whom to whom beforehand must forever remain a mystery. Still, here we will address reasonable scenarios of
encounter in an effort to explain what we know did happen.
The selection of a victim probably posed more of a problem for the
Ripper than one might first assume from reading the many Ripper reference
books. Even though, as Rumbelow 6 states, there were so many prostitutes
in London’s East End that a man could hardly walk the streets without being
propositioned, molested, or harassed by one or more of them, not just
any streetwalker would do. The Ripper had to find the ‘perfect’ victim,
one who possessed the requisite qualifications to be the object of his
attentions and who would either accompany him to his choice of location
or lead him to a location that was known to him and acceptable for his
purposes. If the Ripper truly had a fixation on prostitutes only, and not
on women in general, then surely he must have taken some precautions
against accidentally engaging a bona fide working woman who might have
been identical in appearance to those he sought as victims, but who had
just ‘been looking for love in all the wrong places’ and at the worst possible
time. Such an attitude might indicate that the Ripper would prefer to allow
the woman to be the aggressor, in order to be sure of her intentions, but if
She saw her speaking to a man
not, he could easily have ‘tested the waters’ to ensure himself of a potential victim’s status before proceeding
too far or committing himself.
In most of the Canonical murders, the Ripper’s engagement of prostitutes that were definitely on the downhill
side of their careers and lives might be explained by the concept of the modern-day ‘honey trap’, still used today
with good results by Israeli Intelligence. The Ripper might have considered an attractive woman too dangerous
to engage openly, for not only would she naturally draw more attention than a drab woman in her middle forties,
but she might also be leading her client to an ambush where, in the seclusion of an alleged trysting place, her
confederates might beat and rob – or worse – anyone who appeared the least bit prosperous. If there was no
actual danger of being accosted while in the intended victim’s company, there would still be the danger of being
observed in the act by voyeurs willing to pay prostitutes for the privilege; there is certainly historical precedent
for such a thing. The Ripper probably selected those women whom he felt presented minimal risks. Certainly,
most of the women whom he did engage would scarcely have received a second look as they departed the pick-up
location, and this was just what the Ripper wanted from a victim.
Misogynist or not, psychopath/sociopath or not, the Ripper must have known how to manipulate the female
psyche and must have been an expert at doing so. He would likely have engaged his victims in ordinary conversation,
eg, ‘Evening, miss; care for a pint?’ He would certainly have been well versed in the local vernacular and pick-up
lines. He would probably have utilized banter such as the phrase well known to Ripperologists, ‘you would say
anything but your prayers’, as well as palaver, to put his selected victim further at ease. Some excellent examples
of this sort of palaver have been posted on the Message Boards of Stephen Ryder’s Casebook Jack the Ripper,
and are reproduced below. If indeed the Ripper had been acquainted with his victims beforehand, the actual
conversations he might have had with them just prior to their murder could well have been of this sort:
‘What-O there Poll! My, but you’re a way from your bed and at this hour too. Had a drop as well, ain’t ya gel?
Here, let me give you a hand back to your doss - Flowery Dean innit? We’ll go Bucks Row way; it’ll be quicker than
going down the High Street.’
6 Rumbelow, Donald: The Complete Jack the Ripper, London, Penguin (revised 2004).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 32

He accosted one woman after another
‘Mornin’, Annie; how are you, Duchess? What, been out
all night! Hadn’t got the shekels for your bed, eh? Well,
look, come with me down Hanbury Street; I have to pick up
some vegetable trays from Richardson’s. Give me a hand to
the market with ‘em, and I’ll give you a tanner. That’s right
Annie, down the entry, you won’t have to walk the streets
tonight!’
‘Katy, my gel, wot you doin’ out this way, at this time? If
you ain’t careful Jack’ll get you. Wot, you just got aht the
slammer for drunk and disorderly? Well Katy, if you play the
game, you must take the blame! Got a touch of the dog have
yer? Never mind, come with me, I’m just going round to the
old Orange Market for a bit of work, I’ll get yer a couple
of oranges - better than nothing. Come on, we’ll go down
through the Square.’
The Ripper would almost surely have made use of kind
words and flattery during his negotiations with the intended
victim – all women love them and are susceptible to them.
Besides, of course, from the victim’s point of view there
was always the theoretical possibility of a romance and a
way out of the endless drudgery and hopelessness of an East
End indigent. Such an event may have been highly unlikely,
but was certainly possible – after all, many a modern-day
high-price call girl has left the business engaged to a former
client. 7 Most important, though, the Ripper would not look
or act in public like the monster that everyone felt was
committing these murders. The general public, as well as
many a police official, expected to find and was searching
for an obvious fiend, not a next-door neighbor.
Outwardly, many women of the East End either had
a surprisingly morbid attitude toward the Whitechapel
Murderer, ‘I’d be a victim of his just to be talked about so
nice afterwards’, 8 or a fatalistic one, which was more to be expected of those who lived such dreary and hopeless
lives. We should note in particular the emphatically defeatist attitude of some of these women, who would
remark ‘I’m the next for Jack’ or ‘It’s either the Ripper or the bridge for me’. 8 Is it possible that at least a few of
the victims might just not have cared about the risk, or the inevitable outcome of engaging the Ripper as a client,
and gone with a suspicious pick-up anyway as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? Were their lives so riddled with
despair that they should be virtually willing to cast them away to the Ripper? When you have nothing, you have
nothing to lose. Such philosophy might perfectly represent that possessed by the helpless street women being
preyed upon in the East End.
Each of the Ripper’s later victims must have known about the unfortunates preceding her, and each of them
must have known that she was in identical circumstances. Yet they went willingly with him anyway. Barring a
passive sense of inescapable doom or a death wish, could it have been because the victims were at ease and never
suspected a thing until it was too late? Surely the modern-day victims of the Boston Strangler and Ted Bundy knew
that other women were being murdered, women who most probably were in exactly the same circumstances as
they now found themselves. Yet, these modern-day victims, like the Ripper’s victims, must have felt safe with
their killers, just as all the others had before them.
7 Puzo, Mario: Inside Las Vegas, Penguin Books, New York, 1977.
8 Sugden, Philip: The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, London, Robinson (revised 2002).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 33

To understand exactly how the Ripper may have been so successful with the prostitutes, nervous and paranoid
as they must have become as the autumn of 1888 evolved, we must look at the methods used by Ted Bundy, the
infamous American serial killer of the late 20th century. Bundy utilized numerous methods to acquire a victim, the
most successful among them being to feign injury or helplessness to gain a potential victim’s pity and trust. Bundy,
who also had the advantage of being reasonably handsome, was often seen by his victims as an object of pity, and
evidently few of them had been the least suspicious of him or his alleged plights. Considering this, imagine how
the Ripper might have appeared to his victims - a man of some attractions who could obviously do better, but who
seemed awkward and handicapped enough with women that he was reduced to seeking out the intimate company
of well-worn women long past their prime. Had he cultivated a false stutter or other handicap and feigned shyness
for the occasion, any remaining suspicions or fears on the victims’ part would have been quickly allayed. As was
probably also the case with the victims of the Boston Strangler and Ted Bundy, the last thought of the unsuspecting
prey of the Ripper may have been something in the order of ‘how can this nice man be doing this to me?’
Did the Ripper aggressively seek to engage his victims, intending to take them to predetermined locations, or
did he allow them to solicit him and guide him to one of their regular and preferred locations for concluding sexual
transactions? The World’s Oldest Profession has changed little over the centuries in these respects, so we can look
to the present to help us understand the past.
In a number of the world’s fleshpots, interesting variations of these
ersatz mating rituals persist. For example, in the American state of
Nevada, prostitution is legal in most counties. However, it is illegal in
the more heavily populated ones and, therefore, in many municipalities
such as Las Vegas, as many conventioneers discover each year from the
price they must reluctantly pay. 9 Illegality does not hinder prostitution
– it only raises its price. In Las Vegas, the prostitutes either wait
passively on street corners or public sites such as parks, waiting to be
picked up, or aggressively seek clients, sometimes venturing into the
casinos themselves.
designated destination begins.
In a passive state, the prostitute will stand discreetly in some
accessible public location while a potential client makes a pass around
or by her. If he comes back for a second look, she will typically give
some sign that, yes, she is available. This is done subtly and usually
with great discretion because of the danger of undercover police
and ongoing sting operations. They may then engage in conversation,
during which the woman or the man inevitably hints that she/he has a
room and wouldn’t mind his/her company. Terms and conditions may
then be negotiated, or they may be deferred until the journey to the
In an aggressive state, the prostitute will travel a regular route, actively seeking out a client. Men alone are of
course a favorite target. Yet, during a memorable trip to Las Vegas, one of the co-authors of this article witnessed
a prostitute openly pick up a client in a downtown casino. This incident was noteworthy because the prostitute
had evidently been waiting patiently, milling around the casino with the crowd, for the chance to solicit her mark,
a middle-aged man who was in the company of his rather portly wife. When the wife (finally) left the gaming
area, probably to use the restroom, the prostitute made her move. Whatever she said to him - perhaps an enticing
description of what she would do with him when they were alone - must have been quick and to the point, for the
man left immediately with her. One can only imagine his wife’s perplexity when she returned and her husband’s
eventual explanation of his sudden disappearance.
In major cities where prostitution is illegal, it is still conducted openly by streetwalkers. Invariably, these
women, usually provocatively dressed, either stand in a fixed spot, undoubtedly a location on a regular route, or
circulate through the same route while waiting to be picked up. Numerous times in Houston, Texas, one of the coauthors
of this article has seen these women quickly strike an agreement with a client and leave with him in his
vehicle, if there is no suitable venue within walking distance. The parallels between these modern-day activities
and those known to be centered on St. Botolph’s Church in 1888’s Whitechapel should be obvious.
9 Puzo, Mario: Inside Las Vegas, Penguin Books, New York, 1977.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 34

Could the Ripper have offered his victims liquor as well as money? Many a casual pick-up begins over a drink
even today. All the Canonical Five were known to imbibe, some heavily, and one suspect described by eyewitnesses
was holding a quart can of beer as he talked to Mary Kelly. 10 Although the Ripper’s use of an anesthetic such as
chloroform on his victims may probably be safely discounted, recourse to another drug such as chloral was quite
possible. Once ingested, chloral in the form of the common hydrate takes effect in a relatively short time, about
30 minutes, and will induce a deep sleep within an hour.
Spiked into liquor proffered to the victim, which would almost surely have been accepted by women of those
intemperate habits and station in life, chloral hydrate would instantly form a potent mixture with alcohol to
produce nearly immediate – and soundless – unconsciousness, a state which would go far in explaining exactly how
the Ripper murders did proceed so quietly and without any apparent struggle. Naturally, the detection of such
a substance in the victim’s blood or digestive tract would have been beyond the capabilities of the physicians in
attendance at the post-mortems, at a time before forensic pathology and biochemical analysis were developed
as sciences.
In the Victorian Era, chloral hydrate was most often used by alcoholics whose sleep patterns had become
chronically disturbed by excessive drinking. The danger of such a potent mixture and the highly addictive
properties of chloral resulted in ‘two cravings for a single craving,’ as was detailed in 1880 in the Quarterly
Journal of Inebriety. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that the medical community became aware
of the problems associated with the indiscriminate use of hypnotic drugs such as chloral, especially when taken in
combination with alcohol to bolster their effects. A further detail that should pique the interest of Ripperologists
is that it has also been observed that a mixture of alcohol and drugs such as morphine, which, like cocaine, opium,
and heroin, was readily available to the general public in Victorian Britain, is likely to bring about an episode of
temporary psychosis in its user. 11
Much has been made of the fact that little, if any, money was found on the Ripper’s victims. He could certainly
have paid them, as a client normally would, prior to accompanying them to the chosen site. However, that
leaves unsolved the problem of why little or no money was afterwards found on any of the victims. Surely, in the
haste that must have necessarily followed his murderous frenzies, the Ripper would not have risked detection or
capture by wasting precious time fumbling on the victim’s person in an effort to recover the trivial amount that
would have been paid to her – if indeed any money had changed hands. It was certainly possible for the Ripper to
have offered to pay the victim half some time beforehand
and half afterwards, knowing that the intended victim,
destitute as she was, would surely not decline to meet
a paying and presumably well-mannered client who had
promised additional money. If such were the case, then
there would naturally be no money to be found on the
victim at the murder site, as she would undoubtedly have
already spent it all, expecting to receive an additional sum
afterwards for services rendered.
As an example in support of this postulation, a welldressed
Elizabeth Stride is known to have apparently
refused a potential client, saying to him ‘not to-night, but
some other night,’ 12 shortly before her murder. She was
seen waiting alone at Dutfield’s Yard on Berner Street, only
a few yards from where she was later found murdered.
Did this uncharacteristic development occur because she
was waiting for the Ripper, who had already put her on
retainer for a ‘date’ that night? Prior to Stride’s murder, the police had been given orders to stop and question
any man seen in the company of a woman after the hour of midnight. If the Ripper had arranged to meet Stride
at the chosen murder site, this subterfuge would have been an effective countermeasure against the precautions
10 Sugden, Philip: The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, London, Robinson (revised 2002).
11 www.thebeautifulnecessity.blogspot.com/2008/03/opium-choral-laudanum-and-prb.htm.
12 Evans, Stewart P and Keith Skinner: The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Companion, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., New York, 2000.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 35

Victorian prostitution, 1870s
being taken by the police. In this manner, the Ripper would
never be seen walking in the company of his victim, and could
not legally be stopped by a constable and questioned as a
suspicious character.
It has been pointed out by numerous Ripperologists that
Catherine Eddowes might have arranged to meet the Ripper
at Mitre Square. It certainly would have been a clever move
on his part to arrange to meet his victims on site instead of
accompanying them there, given the precautions being taken
by the police. The Ripper would have been far more likely
to succeed, particularly once the murders had become well
publicized, if he selected a victim with whom he had already
become familiar. Could he have arranged a rendezvous
with one or more of these women on the nights they were
murdered to ensure that his careful planning around location
and the police constable’s beat times would not depend on
encountering a suitable victim by chance at exactly the right
time and place? In all likelihood, a cautious Ripper had made it his business to become familiar with the police
constable beat times at all of his selected murder sites and attempted to commit the crimes midway between these
established beat times. If not, then the victims themselves were likely to have had a good working knowledge of
the police beat times at their favoured locations and been able to inform the Ripper of approximately how much
time he had to consummate the transaction.
If the Ripper had been a reputable client before, his victims would have felt safe in his company and would
have gone to any reasonable location to do practically anything with him for payment. In the absence of a death
wish, they would not have otherwise accompanied him anywhere alone under those conditions at that time.
One ingenious manner in which the Ripper could have instilled a sense of security in his intended victims could
be by feigning nervousness or impotence during the first encounter, and then arranging to rendezvous later
for another attempt. Such a charade would
certainly accomplish this objective, especially
if he had initially paid them well for their time
and trouble in addition to his initial conduct
being above reproach.
The eyewitness George Hutchinson reported
seeing a man come up to Mary Kelly on the
street and tap her on the shoulder, 13 probably
to ascertain her availability. Such an act
of familiarity, followed by Kelly’s friendly
laughter, was undoubtedly conducted by a
regular customer, someone she knew well, and
not a hitherto unknown client. The man who
butchered Kelly must have known Miller’s Court
well, and he must have been aware that no one
would disturb him there for hours. Could this
be an indication that the Ripper had visited
Haymarket - midnight. From Henry Mayhews "London Labour and London Poor"
Kelly’s room as an acquaintance or client some time prior to her murder, and that he may have known her well?
With a congenial face concealing a heart of marble, the Ripper undoubtedly relished engaging his victims in this
manner, deriving no small measure of satisfaction out of leading an unsuspecting woman to a grisly fate amidst
all those surrounding and in pursuit. Since anticipation is often more pleasurable than the actual experience, the
Ripper may have had a personal incentive to give his victims every consideration possible to reassure them of
their safety and to prolong the charade.
13 Sugden, Philip: The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, London, Robinson (revised 2002).
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 36

Having secured a victim, how did the Ripper decide upon a murder site? He might or might not have had
an intimate knowledge of the maze of side streets and labyrinthine alleys of the East End. Yet, for reasons of
security, he could not allow the woman herself to select the precise location at which they were to conduct
their business. A much better solution would be for him to suggest a location which he had previously scouted
and selected as ‘safe’ and with which the victim herself was familiar. Certainly, knowledge of the site proposed
would have served to quell any fears the woman might have had during that terrible autumn and to preclude any
suspicions that might have otherwise arisen.
The Great Social Evil by John Leech, 1857
among whom to choose.
Some Ripperologists believe that the Ripper must have
investigated potential murder sites beforehand for suitability,
possibly via practice runs during the intervening weeks between
murders. With such a transient population in the East End, the Ripper
could not afford to check the sites out too early in advance, for the
attendant risks would be too great. If the Ripper surveyed a site
that was not suitable for his needs, he would discard it, at least for
the while. It is possible, though unlikely, that the Ripper had taken
a prostitute to each of the sites for a practice run, but there may
have also been numerous ‘dry runs’, during which he was unable to
secure a suitable victim on his terms and conditions. It is, of course,
possible that the Ripper selected a murder site and waited nearby
for a suitable victim, knowing that time and probability would be
on his side in that area of the East End. Or the Ripper might have
gone to view the prostitutes’ ‘parade’ around St. Botolph’s Church
and engaged a possible victim from among the available candidates,
knowing that his favoured site or sites would be but a short walk
away in any direction from the main thoroughfares surrounding that
location. If so, then the Ripper probably picked up his victims as
close to the murder sites as possible, as a long walk would pose all
manner of risks at that time of night and undoubtedly cause the
victim to become uneasy and suspicious, not to mention increase
the likelihood of running into a patrolling constable. In case there
were no suitable candidates to be found at or near the location he
desired, he might simply have ‘trolled’ for a victim in the area,
knowing that he would surely encounter a goodly number from
Of course, it is difficult to imagine a location less desirable for public killing and mutilation than the backyard
of the rooming house on Hanbury Street where the Annie Chapman murder was committed. Who would have
selected that particular location, especially during the early daylight hours, when some residents of the house
were already awake and preparing for work? Did a desperate Ripper choose it after a fruitless search the preceding
night for the ‘perfect’ victim to take to his original intended murder site, thus throwing caution to the wind? Was
this location one of Annie Chapman’s regular ‘business stops’? Most likely, the rooming and doss houses in that
area of the East End were very much alike in appearance, construction, and arrangement, so that both the Ripper
and Chapman would have known in general what to expect even without having been there before.
A novel theory presented recently on the Casebook Message Boards 14 is that the Ripper took Chapman to the
backyard at Hanbury Street not for purchase of sex, but ostensibly to retrieve some goods from the outhouse
there. As was stated earlier, virtually anything is possible, and this postulation cannot be discounted. After all,
some of the victims were known to have engaged in some minor craft or trade to earn money however and
whenever they could, and an unsuspecting Chapman was likely to have followed the Ripper willingly at that
early morning hour if there was an apparent chance to earn money by some handicraft work or other honest
labour such as that described in the earlier example of ‘palaver’. Such a pretext could go far in explaining the
selection of that particular location at that time of day, a combination which must have been highly unusual for
a commonplace ‘immoral act’.
14 Ryder, Stephen: www.casebook.org.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 37

Debate continues as to the exact manner in which the Ripper assaulted his victims once they did reach their
destination. There are fervent partisans of several opposing theories. The most common of them speculate on
whether the Ripper approached his victims from the front or the back, on whether he stunned them with a punch
to the face or strangled them into unconsciousness, and on whether he cut their throats while they were still
conscious in a vertical position or while stunned or unconscious in a horizontal position. Each of these theories has
its pros and cons, but there is simply not enough data or forensic evidence to make more than an educated guess as
to what might have actually transpired. Recent discussion on the Casebook message boards has turned to whether
the Ripper may have bargained for oral sex in lieu of the rear penetration typical of those circumstances. Any
proposition for oral sex was probably well received by these women, as it might then, as today, have commanded
a premium price over the usual ‘knee-trembler’. If so, the vulnerability of the victim as she prepared to perform
fellatio would be such that she could be quickly overwhelmed by the Ripper’s frontal attack. Already kneeling or
squatting in the position customary for this act, an unsuspecting prostitute would also be accustomed to having
a client’s hands on her person, either the shoulders or the head itself. In such an arrangement, the Ripper would
have had a tremendous advantage, being able to use his weight, strength, and leverage to the fullest extent
necessary to throttle and subdue his victim quickly and quietly.
Of course, conventional theories on the Ripper’s selection of victims and murder sites are predicated on the
habits and motives of conventional psychopaths and sociopaths. If instead the Ripper were, as one current theory
postulates, a ‘black magician’, an entirely different thought process would be dictating his actions. Under these
circumstances, the issue of ‘sacred geometry’ might well prevail above all other considerations and the questions
of who the victim was and why she was selected would become secondary to the time when she was selected and
where the murder site was located.
The much discussed lack of activity in October 1888 may be attributed to the repercussions of the Double
Event, after which paranoia, vigilance, and police presence in the East End would have been at an all-time high.
As successive Whitechapel Murders occurred, longer periods of time elapsed between events. While the Ripper
might have laid low awhile after each successive killing for a variety of reasons, he might very well have spent
this ‘down time’ profitably by planning the next murder, locating and cultivating the next victim and scouting for
murder sites. If he indeed did such things, this could certainly explain why and how the murders themselves were
executed so flawlessly despite the oft-adverse conditions. Naturally, as the murders took place, the time required
for the Ripper to do his preparatory work would increase in direct proportion to the police and vigilante activity
in the area.
Why did the Ripper want these murder sites to be in such public locales, where he would have little choice
other than leaving the corpses of his victims fully exposed, instead of disposing of them in some manner in order
to conceal the crimes, as modern serial killers do? There are really only two likely reasons. The first is that there
were no rural or secluded locations in that heavily populated urban area. The second, and most probable reason
as to the Ripper’s motives in committing these atrocities in such a public manner, will be examined in the next
article of this series, Murder Most Foul.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Eduardo Zinna for his help with this article.
WALTER MOSLEY is a lifelong Ripperologist, having been introduced to Jack the Ripper in 1961 via Boris Karloff’s Thriller.
He founded the original jtrforums.com in 2003 and is the administrator of the current site.
SCOTT NELSON is an environmental engineer living in northern California. He has been studying the case for 40 years.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 38

The Hound of Death:
Francis Thompson and
the Whitechapel Murders
By RICHARD PATTERSON
The poet Francis Joseph Thompson was
born in Preston, Lancashire, on 16 December
1859. His parents were Charles, a medical
doctor, and his wife, Mary Turner Morton, both
of them Roman Catholic converts. Francis was
educated at Ushaw College, near Durham, in
the north of England. He was destined for the
priesthood, but it was felt by his superiors
that he lacked the necessary qualities. At
his father’s request, he applied to Owens
College, now the University of Manchester,
as a student of medicine, and passed the
entrance examination with distinction. For
the following six years he trained as a surgeon.
Apart from a period during the summer session Ushaw College
of 1882 when he had a mental breakdown, he
attended every lecture. In her 1988 biography of Thompson, Between Heaven & Charing Cross,
Brigid Boardman described the curriculum and working conditions at Owens during Thompson’s
time as follows:
…Anatomy had always occupied a central place in training and the dissecting of cadavers was
accompanied by far more practical experience in assisting at operations…[Thompson’s] time was almost
equally divided between the College and the Hospital…Outside there was a constant flow of traffic with
patients arriving on stretchers or in carriage-like ambulances drawn by police horses…In the main hall
a huge bell was continually clanging, twice for medical aid and three times when surgery was needed.
In the Accident Room staff and students waiting to be called for their services gathered round the fire…
There were two operating theaters with wooden tables, to which were attached leather straps for
controlling those whose fear led to violent protest…
Some observers have stated that Thompson neglected his medical studies. Such claims, however, are inaccurate
and originated only after his death. His enthusiasm for spending long hours with a scalpel at the college’s mortuary
led his sister Mary to observe ‘Many a time he asked my father for 3 pounds or 4 pounds for dissecting fees so
often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.’ What did not interest Thompson was
passing examinations and bringing his studies to an end. On the three occasions he was required to sit the final
examinations he simply did not show up and as a consequence failed in his studies.
In 1879, Thompson fell ill and spent a long time recovering. It was probably then that opium – in the form
of laudanum – was first prescribed for him as medicine. It was also at that time, during his early courses at
Owens, that his mother gave him a copy of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a work
which made a profound impression on him and, according to some, may have been at the root of his own opium
addiction. It was his mother’s last gift, for she died soon afterwards.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 39

When Thompson failed to qualify as a doctor for the third time, his father showed great disappointment and
impatience towards him. He compelled his son to enter the establishment of a maker of surgical instruments and
to work as an encyclopædia salesman, but Thompson did not last long in either job. Nor did his attempt to enlist
as a private in the army succeed; he failed the medical examination.
In November 1885, after an unpleasant discussion with his father, Thompson left for London. His only wealth
consisted of two books, the plays of Aeschylus and the poems of William Blake, which he carried in his pockets.
But he did not find employment commensurate with his ability and was soon reduced to menial occupations. He
obtained a job with a bookseller, but did not do too well at it, and then worked for a while at the store of John
McMaster, a shoemaker. Eventually he sank into destitution. For the next three years he lived in the streets and
slept in common lodging-houses, in archways or by the Thames, depending on the state of his finances. He earned
the few pence necessary for his subsistence by selling matches, calling cabs and begging for alms. He found some
comfort in the public libraries until he was banned from them on account of his unkempt appearance. During a
grim moment of despair he decided to end his life, but was dissuaded from following this extreme course of action
by a vision of the 17-year-old poet Thomas Chatterton, who had committed suicide in 1770. A prostitute, whose
identity Thompson never disclosed, befriended him, gave him a home and shared her income with him. Yet she
left him one day, never to return. Thompson remembered her longingly in his poetry:
Then there came past
A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering.
She passed - brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing!
And of her own scant pittance did she give,
That I might eat and live:
Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
Despite his drab existence, Thompson continued to write both verse and prose.
On 23 February 1887 he dropped in the letter-box of Merry England, a Catholic
literary magazine, three poems and an essay written in scraps of paper. The poems
were The Passion of Mary, Dream Tryst and The Nightmare of the Witch-Babies.
The essay was Paganism: Old and New. In a covering letter addressed to Wilfrid
Francis Meynell, the magazine’s editor, Thompson wrote:
Dear Sir... I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It
is due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances
under which it has been written... I can hardly expect that where my
prose fails my verse will succeed. Nevertheless, on the principle of
“Yet will I try the last,” I have added a few specimens of it, with the
off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
Meynell wrote to Thompson at the address given by him, the Charing Cross postoffice,
but his letter was returned. In April 1888, he published in Merry England
one of the poems, The Passion of Mary, and soon received a letter from Thompson.
At Meynell’s invitation, the poet came to the magazine’s offices. In the words of
Thompson’s first biographer, Meynell’s son Everard:
Wilfrid Meynell
No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the
average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes…
Meynell rescued Thompson from his life of abject poverty and arranged for him to receive medical care and
spend several months as a boarder at the Premonstratensian monastery in Storrington, Sussex. Eventually he
brought Thompson to London and looked after him for the rest of his life.
Yet Thompson never quite recovered from his years in the streets. In later years he wrote:
The very streets weigh upon me. Those horrible streets, with their gangrenous multitude blackening
ever into lower mortifications of humanity... These lads who have almost lost the faculty of human
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 40

speech: these girls whose very utterance is a hideous blasphemy against the sacrosanctity of lover’s
language... We lament the smoke of London: it were nothing without the fumes of congregated evil.
Nor did Thompson ever give up entirely his addiction to opium, though he was able to master it sufficiently to
continue writing acclaimed poetry. Meynell arranged for the publication of his first book, Poems, in 1893. The
Hound of Heaven, which appeared in this book, describes the pursuit of the human soul by God, and is considered
as the best example of Thompson’s baroque, metaphysical style.
Poems attracted the favourable attention of critics in the St James’s Gazette, the Fortnightly Review and other
publications. Sister Songs followed in 1895 and New Poems in 1897. Thompson’s prose writings include Health and
Holiness, released in 1905, and the posthumously published The life and labours of Saint John Baptist de la Salle,
The Life of St Ignatius, and the celebrated Essay on Shelley. He also wrote, between 1901 and 1904, more than
250 reviews and articles on a wide range of subjects for such publications as the Academy and the Athenæum.
In early November 1907, Thompson was admitted to the Hospital of
St John and St Elizabeth, St John’s Wood, where Meynell’s daughter
happened to be lying ill at the time. He was very thin and too weak to
be allowed much less than his usual doses of opium. Meynell wrote to
Thompson’s landlady that the poet was fine and that she should look
after his papers, books and other possessions. Thompson was placed in
an isolation ward. Five days later, his medication was withdrawn and
he was given only opium. Meynell said that his condition, which was
largely the result of his drug addiction, was aggravated by tuberculosis
but, even though this disease is typified by the coughing up of mucus
mixed with blood, Thompson did not even have a cough before entering
hospital.
The years of extreme poverty, bad health and opium addiction had
taken a heavy toll on Thompson. Ten days after entering hospital, he
was dying. A will was hastily drawn up by Meynell’s son-in-law and signed
by Thompson, only hours before he died. The will granted to Meynell
all rights to Thompson’s works. A patient who knew none of the men
witnessed the will. Thompson died at dawn on 13 November. He was 47
years old and weighed less than 32 kilograms. No autopsy was performed
on his body.
Thompson’s death was as lonely as his life had been. Only a dozen
mourners, mostly Meynell and members of his family, attended his
funeral at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, London.
His gravestone bears the last line from a poem he wrote for his godson:
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
In 1988, the centenary of the Ripper murders, a new and far darker
facet of Thompson’s life was first explored. In Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?, an article published in The
Criminologist, Dr Joseph C Rupp, MD, PhD, the Medical Examiner for Nueces County, Texas, wrote:
Francis Thompson spent six years in medical school, in effect, he went through medical school three
times. It is unlikely, no matter how disinterested he was or how few lectures he attended, that he did
not absorb a significant amount of medical knowledge… The Ripper was able to elude the police so many
times in spite of the complete mobilization of many volunteer groups and the law enforcement agencies
in London. If we look at Thompson’s background, having lived on the streets for three years prior to
this series of crimes, there is no doubt that he knew the back streets of London intimately and that his
attire and condition as a derelict and drug addict would not arouse suspicion as he moved by day and
night through the East End of London.
Thompson is indeed the most likely of all Jack the Ripper suspects. He is the only one of them who possessed
the four main traits of the Ripper: ability, opportunity, motive, and a weapon.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 41

Ability: Thompson knew how to cut up people. He was trained as a surgeon
at Owens College, where he dissected hundreds of cadavers. In his testimony
at the inquest of Ripper victim Mary Ann Nichols, the police surgeon Dr Rees
Ralph Llewellyn stated that the killer was left-handed. So was Thompson.
When asked, at the inquest of Catherine Eddowes, whether the killer possessed
anatomical skill, Dr Frederick Gordon Brown replied that he had ‘A good deal
of knowledge as to the positions of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the
way of removing them.’ At Owens College Thompson was taught, in particular,
the then very new and very rare technique of heart removal known as the
Virchow method, after its first practitioner, the German pathologist Rudolf
Virchow (1821–1902). This method entails the removal of the heart via the
pericardium. In his report on his post-mortem examination of the last Ripper
victim, Mary Kelly, Dr Thomas Bond noted ‘The Pericardium was open below &
the heart absent,’ evidently describing a procedure bearing close similarity to
the Virchow method.
Opportunity: Thompson was able to walk the East End streets at all hours
without arousing suspicion. Having been homeless in the area for three years,
he was a familiar sight and was consequently ignored, as though he were just
part of the landscape. He could come and go freely. Although he was still
homeless by the start of the Ripper murders, he was paid some money upon the
first publication of his poetry which he used to clean himself up and buy new
clothes, including a coat.
Dr Rudolf Virchow
Indeed, if you think that someone who lived right close to the murders, carried a knife and hated prostitutes
could have been the Ripper, you think that Francis Thompson could have been the Ripper. At one time Thompson
was living less than 100 metres away from Mary Kelly, carried in his person a dissecting knife or scalpel, which
he claimed he used to shave, and nursed the deep bitterness resulting from his failed affair with a prostitute. He
was staying at the Providence Row night refuge at No. 50 Crispin Street, Spitalfields, opposite the end of Dorset
Street, where Kelly’s room at Millers Court was located. The historian John Evangelist Walsh and the custodians of
the Francis Thompson archives at Boston College confirm that he lived there during the first weeks of November
1888, when Kelly was murdered.
Motive: Thompson hated prostitutes. At the start of June 1888, his relationship of more than a year with an
unnamed Chelsea prostitute ended suddenly and, for him, bitterly. When he told her that his first poems were to
be published, she said that she did not want the attention and announced she would leave him. Eventually she
disappeared without a trace, probably fleeing to the East End. Soon afterwards, the murders of prostitutes began
in Whitechapel.
Weapon: Thompson owned the ideal weapon for the Ripper crimes, a razor-sharp surgical knife.
Out of the thousands of existing suspects none apart from Thompson possesses all these characteristics. Logic
dictates that he should be at the top of any list of suspects. Nobody else can hold a match to him. The popular
Ripper suspect James Maybrick, for example, did not have the anatomical ability required to commit these
crimes, while Thompson, a former medical student, did. Furthermore, Maybrick lived in Liverpool, on the other
side of the country, while Thompson lived in the East End itself. Moreover, Maybrick had no clear motive, while
Thompson was out in the streets searching for his prostitute friend. There is no evidence that Maybrick carried a
knife, while it is known that Thompson carried a scalpel throughout 1888.
Another popular Ripper suspect, Francis Tumblety, had a medical background of sorts, but he dispensed pills,
while Thompson had trained as a surgeon. Unlike Maybrick, Tumblety lived in London at the time of the murders;
but so did Thompson. Tumblety disliked all women, once being heard to say of women, ‘I don’t know any such
cattle, and if I did I would, as your friend, sooner give you a dose of quick poison than take you into such danger.’
Thompson, who was dumped by a streetwalker, had a particular hatred for her profession. He once described
prostitutes as ‘These girls whose Practice is a putrid ulceration of love, venting foul and purulent discharge - for
their very utterance is a hideous blasphemy against the sacrosanctity of lover’s language!’ Thompson also wrote
‘the girls harlots in the mother’s womb…the Assassin left us a weapon which but needs a little practice to adapt
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 42

it to the necessity of the day… For better your children were cast from the bridges of London than they should
become as one of those little ones.’
Another suspect, the butcher Jacob Levy, knew how to cut up carcasses, but Thompson knew how to cut
up people. Levy had butcher’s knives, Thompson had a dissecting scalpel. Levy was an East Ender, but so was
Thompson. He stayed, for much of 1888, at the newly opened Salvation Army refuge. Although he was born a
Roman Catholic, served as an altar boy and studied for the priesthood, he had already accepted offers of help from
other faiths. This first happened when the shoemaker John McMaster came to his succour. Thompson had just
lived through a straight fortnight in the streets, when McMaster, who was also the Protestant Churchwarden and
choirmaster of St Martins, sighted him. Thompson was wandering the Strand trying to sell a box of matches when,
from the crowded street’s din, McMaster called out to him.
‘Is your soul saved?’ he asked.
‘What right have you to ask me that question?’ replied Thompson.
‘If you won’t let me save your soul, let me save your body.’
McMaster took Thompson home and hired him to work in his shop. He later recalled that Thompson would raise
his voice, would shout, in medical and other arguments:
‘There was something between him and the priests...A damp rag of humanity...He was the very personification
of ruin, a tumbledown, dilapidated opium-haunted wreck.’
After being dismissed by McMaster for accidentally injuring a customer’s foot, Thompson again sought help
outside his faith at the Salvation Army’s Limehouse male night refuge. At this shelter the men slept in narrow
wooden boxes under a leather apron or coverlet to protect them from the rats. By August 1888, he had received
some income from the publication of his works and by the following month of September, when the words ‘The
joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits’ appeared in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, Thompson had no more need of
his shelter’s leather apron.
By November, when the Catholic-run Providence Row
night refuge opened for the winter, Thompson was able
to meet an entry requirement of working at a trade. He
could now joke about the leather apron and the dark
days of his homelessness, when his cohorts were wanted
murderers, like the Ripper. Everard Meynell explained
this in his 1913 biography, The Life of Francis Thompson:
In a common lodging-house he met and had talk
with the man who was supposed by the group
about the fire to be a murderer uncaught. And
when it was not in a common lodging-house, it
was at a Shelter or Refuge that he would lie in
one of the oblong boxes without lids, containing
a mattress and a leathern apron or coverlet, that
are the fashion, he says, in all Refuges.
Unlike Thompson, Jacob Levy had no motive to
commit murder, leading people to speculate that sexual
disease may have been a reason for him to hate prostitutes, even though there is no evidence that he ever visited
one. Thompson, on the other hand, had a clear motive. He was devastated when his prostitute friend broke off
their relationship.
Another top suspect is Severin Klosowski, also known as George Chapman, who had qualified as a surgeon in
Poland. But while Chapman had taken only a four-month surgery course, Thompson had trained for six years.
Like Tumblety, Chapman disliked women generally, while Thompson specifically hated prostitutes. Chapman, a
publican, could not walk through the East End unnoticed, while Thompson, who had lived there several years
as a homeless person, could be out at all hours without arousing suspicion. That Chapman owned a knife was
mentioned by his wife only once, in passing. Thompson, on the other hand, was known to carry a scalpel in his
person at all times.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 43

Meynell, Thompson’s protector and editor, had a keen interest in the Ripper murders. His friend, the Irish writer
Katharine Tynan, wrote about it in her autobiography, Twenty-five Years: Reminiscences, which came out in 1913.
This was the same year when Thompson’s Complete Works were published, and the first successful novelization of
the Ripper murders, The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, was released by Methuen, the firm for which Meynell
worked. Methuen’s offices were at 36 Essex Street, London. Four doors down Essex Street was Number 44, where
Merry England, the magazine edited by Meynell, was located.
In 1888, during the Ripper murders, Katharine was staying with the Meynells. In her autobiography she said
that Meynell made it his practice to discuss the murders with the Catholic Cardinal and would taunt Tynan by
stating that the murderer must be some Irish radical. While Thompson hardly knew anyone, Meynell, his editor,
had friends in high places. He knew everybody, even prime ministers and church dignitaries. Of one particular
meeting with the highest Catholic Church official in the land, Tynan wrote:
I paid my last visit to the Cardinal just before I left for home at the end of September. The visit was
made in the early forenoon, and as we walked along from Victoria Station, the newsboys were shouting
the latest Jack-the-Ripper murder. We were the first to carry the intelligence to the Cardinal... When
Wilfred Meynell told him of the murder, he closed his eyes and the strangest look came into his face,
careful for a whole world of sin and pain.
After Thompson’s death, Meynell sold his surviving manuscripts, which included a short story written in the
autumn of 1889, a year after the Whitechapel murders, in which Thompson records to a fine degree the perceived
thoughts of a knife-armed man in a killing frenzy. The story, entitled Finis Coronat Opus (The end crowns the
work), concerns Florentian, a young poet who, pursuant to a pact with an evil power, sacrifices a woman in a
pagan temple to become a great poet - like Thompson himself. An omniscient narrator begins the story, but at
one point Florentian himself takes over for what he tells us is a confession. ‘If confession indeed give ease,’ he
writes, ‘I, who am deprived of all other confession, may yet find some appeasement in confessing to this paper.’
As mentioned earlier, before training as a surgeon Thompson spent several years at a Roman Catholic seminary.
He had excellent marks and was an altar boy, but then something came between him and the priests and just
before he was to take the cloth he was dismissed. For him, a Roman Catholic and former seminarist, the use of a
‘confessional’ would have held special importance.
Thompson’s story is not, as some have speculated, a take on the Ripper murders or the hallucinations of an
opium addict. Long before the murders, Thompson wrote at least a dozen half completed, never published poems
of the same gory nature. In his 1988 book, Francis Thompson, Strange Harp, Strange Symphony, John Evangelist
Walsh wrote:
The most painful of these poems was The Nightmare of the Witch Babies, never revived in a fair copy.
But in the last of the notebook drafts, he added a reminder, rare for him, of the date of its completion:
“Finished before October 1886” – that is within a year of his departure from home.
The Nightmare of the Witch-Babies was one of the poems submitted to Meynell’s Merry England magazine on 23
February 1887. In his diary entries for 1888, when he was eight years old, Everard Meynell recorded the reaction
of his mother, the poet Alice Meynell, when she read Nightmare on the torn ledger page it was written on:
Told by A.M at 21 Philimore Place, Mother read in bed the dirty ms of Paganism and along with it some
witch-opium poems which she detested.
The protagonist of Nightmare is a ‘lusty knight.’
A lusty knight
Ha! Ha!
On a swart steed
Ho! Ho!
Rode upon the land
Where the silence feels alone
As he rides through a desolate landscape, the knight catches sight of a beautiful woman.
What is it sees he?
Ha! Ha!
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 44

There in the frightfulness?
Ho! Ho!
There he saw a maiden
Fairest fair:
Sad were her dusk eyes,
Long was her hair;
Sad were her dreaming eyes,
Misty her hair, And strange was her garments’ flow
Soon he begins to stalk her.
Swiftly he followed her
Ha! Ha!
Eagerly he followed her.
Ho! Ho!
But then he discovers she is unclean.
Lo, she corrupted!
Ho! Ho!
The knight decides to kill her by slicing her stomach open in order to find and kill any unborn offspring she may
have. The poem ends with his rapture at finding not just a single foetus but two.
And its paunch was rent
Like a brasten [bursting] drum;
And the blubbered fat
From its belly doth come
It was a stream ran bloodily under the wall.
O Stream, you cannot run too red!
Under the wall.
With a sickening ooze - Hell made it so!
Two witch-babies, ho! ho! ho!
This poem, which contains phrases like ‘the bloody-rusted stone’, ‘blood, blood, blood’, ‘No one life there,
Ha! Ha!’ and ‘Red bubbles oozed and stood, wet like blood’ and a plot which reads like the description of a
slaughterhouse, was not published. Instead, in November 1888, the month of Kelly’s murder, when Thompson was
living a two-minute walk from her room, one of his essays was published in Merry England. In this essay, Bunyan
in the Light of Modern Criticism, Thompson compared a good writer to someone skilled in the use of a knife on
a corpse:
He had better seek some critic who will lay his subject on the table, nick out every nerve of thought,
every vessel of emotion, every muscle of expression with light, cool, fastidious scalpel and then call on
him to admire the “neat dissection”.
This is a boast from Thompson, the failed doctor, who now was a writer - unlike what he was just weeks
previously, when the author of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, incensed by newspaper reports about the thinking of the
police, had stated, ‘I have laughed when they look so clever… They say I’m a doctor now. Ha ha.’
Even without hard proof that Francis Thompson was Jack the Ripper, the insurmountable wealth of circumstantial
evidence makes him not just another suspect.
RICHARD PATTERSON was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1970. He first speculated that
Francis Thompson could be the Whitechapel murderer in 1997. He spoke about his findings at
the 2005 Jack the Ripper Conference in Brighton, UK. In 2000, he released a short non-fiction
book, Paradox 2000, examining this premise. In 2014, he wrote and published an experimental
horror novel called Francis Thompson and the Ripper Paradox which has received five-star
reviews in Amazon and in magazines. The world’s most visited website on the Whitechapel
murders, Casebook Jack the Ripper, uses his article on Thompson to introduce him. Out of
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 45
the hundreds of popular suspects listed on their site, Thompson is the 12th favourite.

Death in the Colliery
By PAUL WILLIAMS
In 1887 a woman calling herself Marie Kelly told her boyfriend that she grew up in Wales and
married a collier at the age of 16, then became a widow two or three years later when her husband
died in an explosion. She was believed to be 25 years-old in 1888, dating the explosion to c.1882.
In that year a woman called Maria Kelly became a widow when her husband died in an explosion
at a Welsh colliery. This essay explores the possibility of a connection between these two events.
Marie Kelly, better known as Mary Jane and a victim of Jack
the Ripper, has never been identified. Our knowledge of her
background comes almost entirely from her ex-partner Joseph
Barnett, who provided a witness statement and testified at the
inquest. 1 Allowing for minor differences between the two pieces
of evidence, the gist of the story is as follows. He knew the
victim as Marie Kelly and had lived with her for about eighteen
months. She told him she was 25-years-old and born in Limerick.
She moved to Wales when very young and her father, John Kelly,
worked as a foreman or gauger at an ironworks in Carmarthenshire
or Caernarvonshire. Marie left home about four years earlier.
Joe Barnett at Mary Kelly's inquest
She married a collier, whom Barnett thought was called Davies
or Davis, at the age of sixteen. He died in an explosion two or
three years later. Marie went to a cousin in Cardiff and followed
a bad life, spending eight to nine months in an infirmary. Next
she moved to a West End brothel where a gentleman took her to
France but she did not stay more than two weeks. Then she went
to Ratcliffe Highway and to Stepney where she lived near the
gasworks with a man named Morganstone. This was in Pennington
Street where she met a mason’s plasterer called Joseph Fleming,
whom she was very fond of.
Her family included six brothers at home and one in the army, plus a sister who travelled between marketplaces,
selling materials. Barnett never met any of the brothers. One, Henry, was serving in the 2nd Battalion, Scots
Guards and was known to his colleagues as Johnto. His regiment was in Ireland.
Parts of this tale are supported by other sources. Kelly was known to others in the neighbourhood by that
surname, but first name 'Mary'. The day after the murder Mrs Elizabeth Phoenix went to the police and said that
a woman matching Kelly’s description used to live in her brother-in-law’s house at Breezer’s Hill, off Pennington
Street. Mrs Phoenix said that Kelly claimed to be Welsh and that her parents who lived in Cardiff had discarded
her, but sometimes she claimed to be Irish. 2 The press investigated further and reported that Kelly made the
1 Witness statement of Joseph Barnett, S P Evans and K Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook, Constable and Robinson,
2001, p.404. Inquest Papers, Ibid., p.409-10.
2 Morning Advertiser, 12 November 1888, Casebook, accessed 8 August 2015.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 46

acquaintance of a French woman in Knightsbridge who encouraged her in a depraved life. She went from this West
End home to a Mrs Buki, residing in St George’s Street, who accompanied her to collect some expensive dresses
from her previous home. 3 After leaving Mrs Buki she lodged with Mrs Carthy at Breezer’s Hill, leaving her eighteen
months before the murder.
Mrs Carthy told the press that Kelly went to live with a man in the building trade. A neighbour of Kelly’s Julia
Venturey said that Kelly was fond of another man called Joe, who used to visit her. 4 This is assumed to be Joseph
Fleming. The other ex-lover, referred to by Barnett, has been identified as Adrianus Morganstein or possibly
his brother Maran. Adrianus worked as a gas stoker in Stepney and in 1891 was living with Elizabeth Felix. 5
Adrianus’s brother, Johannes, also had a common-law wife called Elizabeth. Her maiden name was Boeku. 6 This
identification of Morganstein, Elizabeth Phoenix (Felix) and Mrs Buki indicates that the later part of Barnett’s story
is substantially correct.
There is little, if any, supporting evidence for the earlier part.
Elizabeth Foster said that Kelly came from Limerick and a missionary
said that her mother still resided there. 7 Both received this information
from Kelly, which only proves that Barnett did not invent the story.
Extensive searches have failed to find a record of a marriage between
Mary Kelly and a collier named Davies c.1879, or evidence of a soldier
in the Scots Guards called Henry Kelly. No relative is known to have
attended the funeral or come forward since, despite global publicity.
Over a thirteen year period I compiled a list of women called Mary
Kelly or close derivatives who were born between 1858 and 1868
and either born in Limerick county or resident in Wales before 1888.
Attempts to trace them all, after 1888, are ongoing. At the time of
writing 132 individuals are untraced, 62 from Limerick births and 70
from Welsh records. Of these, thirteen had a father called John, nine
from Limerick and four in Wales. None match.
Just one untraced record relates to a Mary Kelly who lived in
Carmarthenshire and one to Caernarvonshire. Only one had a father
who worked in an ironworks, and three married between 1878 and
1880, but none to a collier named Davies or Davis. Three of the four
Welsh records with a father named John did not marry before 1881
and nor did the one who lived in Caernarvonshire. I have a provisional
shortlist of nine women who meet part of Barnett’s story, but there
is not a single individual who comes close to meeting all the details,
even allowing for errors in Barnett’s recollection.
It is possible that a birth in Limerick was not recorded and that the family were not in the 1871 Welsh census
because of a temporary absence, a misreporting of their data or a migration after that year. The marriage may
have been common-law rather than legal and Barnett wasn’t sure about the groom’s name. However, if the story
is true, there must be a record of the explosion.
Between 1878 and 1882, twelve mining accidents in Wales with five or more deaths accounted for a total 601
fatalities. 8 It is estimated that 83% of total mining deaths in Wales were in lesser accidents. 9 Most of these are
unlikely to be recorded anywhere other than inquest papers, if they survive, death certificates and newspaper
reports. This may explain why, to date, no specific accident has been definitely linked to Mary Jane Kelly’s collier
husband whom Barnett only thought was called Davies or Davis. The commonness of the name does not help
researchers.
3 The Star, 12 November 1888, Casebook, accessed 8 August 2015.
4 Ibid.
5 Shelden, N, Mary Jane Kelly and the Victims of Jack the Ripper, Kindle, 2013 loc. 556-563.
6 Ibid, 576-583.
7 Evening News, 12 November 1888.
8 Data from www.welshcoalmines.co.uk, accessed 13 September 2015.
9 Ibid.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 47

In 1880 a collier owner named Samuel Kelly was present at the inquest into the deaths of 120 men and boys at
Risca on 15 July 1880, one of the worst mining disasters. 10 It has been speculated that Mary Jane’s husband was
amongst those who perished. 11 At some point in that year or the following year, Samuel purchased the purchased
the Crown Level Colliery, also known as Ynsywen, in Treorchy, from David Weakes. 12 In February 1882 he again
attended an inquest at Risca, this time into the deaths of four workers. 13 Three months later he would be the
subject of his own inquest.
On 9 May 1882 Samuel William Kelly arrived at Ynyswen on the 11:20 train from Pontypridd. He was there to
inspect the level in preparation for future expansion. Up to five colliers worked there, selling the coal in the yard
for domestic use. Kelly intended employing up to 80 men to send the coal to Cardiff, and a branch siding was
being constructed for that purpose. He entered the mine with his overman, James Harris. For some reason Harris
removed the lid of his safety lamp and an explosion occurred, at about 14:30. Both men were carried to local
pubs and attended to by doctors, including Dr Henry N Davies. Kelly’s injuries were so severe that his wife was
sent for. 14 She was joined by a daughter and a brother, who came from Blaenavon. 15 Kelly died at 21:50 on 11 May.
According to a newspaper report, Mrs Kelly, Mrs Jones (Dowlais) and Mr Fred Kelly, his brother, were present. Fred
was also referred to as Frank. 16
The inquest began the following morning at the Boar’s Head, where Kelly had been taken after the incident.
The coroner Thomas Williams began by remarking that Kelly was known to most people. He resided at Llandaff
and was about 58 years of age. The first witness was Frederick Kelly, who identified the deceased as his brother.
Samuel left a widow and five children. After evidence from a doctor, the inquest was adorned to allow time for Mr
Harris to recover and testify. 17 It resumed on 6 July 1882. Amongst those present was Thomas Jones, a cashier from
Dowlais who was Samuel’s brother-in-law, and a Mr D H Kelly of Ebbw Vale. Harris testified that he had removed
the top off his light to enable them to travel faster. He was criticised by the coroner and the jury returned the
following verdict that: “Mr Kelly died from burns and shock consequent upon an explosion of gas in the Ynyswen
Colliery and the jury cannot avoid directing attention to the great indiscretion shown by James Harris and the
deceased in examining old and unventilated workings with naked lights.” 18
The colliery was sold in December 1882 and Mr Harris offered to remain as foreman. 19 It is not known if this
offer was accepted. The accident was gradually forgotten, but perhaps not by the woman who met Joseph Barnett
in 1887. The possibility that she was related to Samuel Kelly has to be considered.
Samuel was born around 1822, son of Samuel and Elizabeth. He married Maria Roberts in 1853. In the 1861
census, the couple lived in Merthyr Tydfil, with sons, Sydney, Arthur and a servant. By the time of the 1871 census
they had moved to the Canton area of Llandaff. Arthur still lived at home and he was joined by Edith Maud, Albert,
Florence and Stanley, and the presence of four servants indicates a growing prosperity. It was the first time that
Samuel was described as a colliery owner. Edith Maud’s age indicates she was born in the third quarter of 1862. In
the 1881 census Arthur, Edith and Stanley are listed along with five servants.
Edith Maud moved to London sometime after this, and probably after Samuel’s death. She married 25-yearold
Frank Arnold on 18 June 1887 at St-Martin-in-the-Field, Westminster. So the daughter of a man who died in
a colliery explosion was living in London, the year before Mary Jane Kelly died. They cannot be the same person
because Mary Jane was living with Barnett at the time of Edith’s marriage. Furthermore, Edith and Frank were
alive and well, staying in Cambridgeshire at the time of the 1891 census. Did Edith talk to others about her
father’s death? Did someone, perhaps a cousin or a servant, accompany her from Cardiff to London?
10 Weekly Mail, 24 July 1880, p.5.
11 Reported on various internet discussion forums, see Casebook: Jack the Ripper, ed. S P Ryder, www.casebook.org/forum/
messages/4921/6745.html, accessed 18 September 2015, as an example.
12 Slaters Commercial Directory, 1880, trans. P. Mustoe, lists Weakes at the manager/owner in 1880, www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/
GLA/Ystradyfodwg/slaters.1880.html, accessed 12 September 2015.
13 Monmouthshire Merlin, 10 February 1882, p.5.
14 Western Daily Mail, 10 May 1882, p.3.
15 Western Daily Mail, 13 May 1882, p.2.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 South Wales Daily News, 7 July 1882, p.4.
19 South Wales Daily News, 9 December 1882, p.4
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 48

Samuel Kelly and family in the 1861 census
The servants at the time of the 1881 census, included a Mary J Phillips and her husband, David. She was aged
35 and David was 48. He was employed as a coachman. It is possible that his services were not required after
Samuel’s death but Mary was too old to be the woman who died in Millers Court.
Samuel’s father, also called Samuel, was possibly born in Llangynderyn, Carmarthenshire around 1789. This is
not certain because the place name written on the census returns for 1851 and 1861 (he was not at home in 1841)
is hard to read. The second part appears to be Carmarthenshire, but the transcriber on the Ancestry website
renders it as Cambridgeshire for 1851. Possibly Edith’s residence forty years later was with relatives.
Samuel senior settled in Trevethin, a suburb of Pontypool. In the early 1800s this was an agricultural town with
a population of about 1,200. By 1840 it had increased to over 17,000, due mainly to the ironworks in the adjoining
district of Blaenavon. 20 The population was then split between English and Welsh, with about 820 Irish. A nearby
village is called Cwmavon, which sounds very much like Carnarvon. It has previously been suggested as the home
of Mary Jane Kelly’s family, on that basis. 21
Samuel Kelly senior married Elizabeth Jones on 11 October 1822 and died on 29 April 1867. 22 The couple had ten
known children, with Samuel being the eldest. His siblings were:
Elizabeth, c.1826-?
She married Thomas Jones, the inquest witness. One of their children, Elizabeth, was born in 1859. There was
also a brother called William Henry.
Marianne born c.1827-?
I have not been able to trace her, even under the variants Mary and Mary Anne.
Thomas, c.1829-1897
He married Mary Ann Rushton on 27 December 1858 and moved to Staffordshire.
20 Kenrick, G S, “Statistics of the Population in the Parish of Treventhin (Pontypoll) and at the neighbouring works of Blaenavon in
Monmouthshire, Chiefly Employed in the Iron Trade and Inhabiting Part of the District Recently Distributed”, Journal of the
Statistical Society of London, Vol 3., 4, January 1841, p.367.
21 See blog.casebook.org/chrisgeorge/2011/08/08/a-%E2%80%9Cnew-face%E2%80%9D-for-mary-jane-kelly, accessed 18 September
2015.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 49

David, c.1831-1899
Presumably the D H Kelly in attendance at the inquest. He married Annie and they had a daughter, Edith, born
c.1875.
Caroline, c.1833-?
She married a farmer called James Williams and had at least four children. Sometime between 1861 and 1868
she married for a second time, to a Francis Kelly from Mansfield, but continued to live in Wales. They had a
daughter, Ellen, born c.1868. At the time of the 1871 census two daughters from her first marriage, Annie Williams
age 12 and Minnie Williams age 10, lived with them. Neither were there ten years later. Ellen was still alive and
at home in 1891.
Dorcas c.1835-1910
She married a David Hughes and moved to Ohio, Cleveland.
Jabez, c.1837-1839
Jabez, c.1840-1890
He married Rachel Jones on 27 April 1862, and then Eliza Glazebrook on 18 May 1874. This second marriage
produced five children between 1875 and 1885.
Barnabas, c.1844-?
He married Emmie Gorrell and moved to Bilston, having at least three children. He was widowed prior to 1881
when his occupation was given as iron and steel inspector.
There is the possibility that Frederick Kelly, born c.1841 in Trevethin, was also a sibling. He appears in the 1881
census at the Royal Albert Hospital, Southampton, described as a soldier. This identification is uncertain because
he does not appear in the census records with the family. There were other families called Kelly, apparently
unrelated to Samuel. Another possibility is that Barnabas, whose middle name was Frederick, was the witness.
This perhaps makes more sense as Frederick was able to attend the inquest within three days of the accident,
suggesting he was local.
The 1881 census contains a John Kelly, age 50, a widower working as a labourer in an iron works. Along with
James Kelly age 15, and Juhannah Kelly age 13, he was lodging at a house in Trevethin. James Kelly was also a
labourer in an ironworks. Both children were stated to have been born in Trevethin. The landlady of the house
was Mary Madden, born Ireland, and she had two sons, Michael aged 13 and Timothy, aged 10. Both were both
born in Trevethin. In the same census was another John Kelly, age 18, born Ireland and living in Trevethin with his
father James, a widower, brother Daniel and a man named John James. John and James Kelly both worked in the
ironworks and John James was a coal miner.
I also found this family in the 1871 census, in Trevethin, when the mother was still alive. Not one of these
people could be connected to either Samuel Kelly or Mary Jane. The other tenative connection between a woman
on my untraced list of Mary Kellys and Samuel was one who lived in Canton, where Samuel’s family moved to.
Many Irish immigrants to Cardiff settled there but this Mary’s father was from Gloucestershire and her mother
from Usk. I found no definite relationship to Samuel’s family.
We are left then with a man named Kelly who died in a colliery explosion in 1882, whose father possibly
came from Carmarthenshire and settled in a place with a large ironworks and many Irish migrants. The research
continues but possibly, just possibly, we have found the key to unlocking the truth behind Joseph Barnett’s story
of Mary Jane Kelly’s origins.
22 Ancestry.com. England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1966 [database on-line].
Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2010, accessed 12 September 2015.
PAUL WILLIAMS is the author of Howls of Imagination (Heart of Albion, 2005), The Mystery Animals of the British
Isles: Gloucestershire and Worcestershire (CFZ Press, 2009), and short fiction in magazines and anthologies. He
is currently seeking a publisher for an extensive study of all Jack the Ripper suspects.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 50

From the Casebooks of
a Murder House Detective
The Acton Atrocity, 1880
and
Charles Dickens and The Murder House in Chatham
By JAN BONDESON
The Acton Atrocity, 1880
Mr John Shepherd was a successful builder and house decorator, who employed several workmen. He lived at No. 3
Herbert Villas, Cowper Road, Acton, with his second wife, his young son, and his four daughters. The oldest daughter,
ten-year-old Ada, was reliable enough to take care of her younger sisters when this was required. On Friday, 22 October
1880, Mr Shepherd and his wife went to visit Mrs Shepherd’s mother, who lived at Norwood Junction. He brought with
him a large cheque for a house he had just sold, which he cashed in a bank on the way. Mrs Shepherd took the baby with
her, but Ada was instructed to take the other three children to Mrs Perry’s private school at No. 2 Churchfield Villas,
where they were pupils, and to give them their luncheon. George Pavey, a workman who had been in Mr Shepherd’s
employ for six months, was left in charge of the house, which doubled as Mr Shepherd’s office. Pavey was a ‘cripple’
affected with partial spastic paralysis in one arm and leg, and he was supposed to be very grateful to Mr Shepherd, who
had shown him much kindness in the past.
Just before two o’clock, the three
children came home to No. 3 Herbert
Villas, where Ada made sure they were
fed, before she escorted them back to
school. But when some customers of
Mr Shepherd came knocking at around
three and four, nobody answered the
door. When the little children arrived
home from school a little later, they
were equally surprised that Ada was
not there to let them in, and they went
off for a stroll. Mr and Mrs Shepherd
returned to the deserted house at half
past six in the evening, wondering
where Pavey and the children had
gone. In the back kitchen, Mr Shepherd
stumbled over a large object lying on
the floor. He gave a cry of horror when
he realized that it was the dead body of his daughter Ada, lying in a large pool of blood. Her face was covered with a
handkerchief.
The discovery of the murder of Ada Shepherd, with a view of the murder house,
from the Illustrated Police News, 6 November 1880
At first, the distraught Shepherds thought that their entire brood of children had been murdered, but the other three
eventually turned up, none the worse for their late-afternoon stroll. Police Constable Walter Millar, who had been on
patrol nearby when he heard an excited local shouting ‘All of Mr Shepherd’s children have been murdered!’ as he ran
along the pavement, went to Herbert Villas to investigate. He expressed relief when he saw the remaining children alive
and well, and then horror as he was confronted with Ada’s mangled corpse. The surgeon Mr Clement Murrell also arrived
and examined the blood-soaked corpse, declaring that Ada had been brutally ‘outraged’ [raped] and then deliberately
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 51

murdered with a deep stab wound to the throat. A blood-stained kitchen knife was found nearby. Ada’s face was bruised
and livid, like if her attacker had struck her, and held her in a stranglehold. She had been dead about three hours and
a half.
The question on everybody’s lips was of course what had happened to the man George Pavey, who was supposed
to have been looking after the house. When Inspector Frederick Savage, an experienced officer from the Metropolitan
Police, arrived at Herbert Villas to take charge of the murder investigation, it was clear to him that Pavey was the main
suspect. After dispatching some constables to guard the murder house, and to search for Pavey and other suspicious
persons locally, Inspector Savage went to the wanted man’s last known lodgings, No. 31 Manchester Street, Notting
Hill. Neither Pavey nor his wife were at home, however, and although the canny Inspector kept watch until 1 am in the
morning, the suspect did not make an appearance.
Ada Shepherd, and the apprehension of George Pavey,
from the Illustrated Police News, 6 November 1880
The following morning, Inspector
Savage ordered a general search
for George Pavey, instructing that
all hospitals and workhouses should
report any suspicious new inmates,
and that all low-class boardinghouses
should be searched. It
turned out that a young man
had seen Pavey absconding from
the murder house at 3.20 in the
afternoon, heading towards the
Uxbridge Road. Ada Shepherd had
last been seen alive at 2 pm, by
a confectioner from whom she had purchased a sugar-stick for her little sister, and at 2.10 by a greengrocer, from
whom she had purchased halfpennyworth of nuts, obviously as a treat for herself once she had dispatched the younger
children at their school. And indeed, some nuts had been found underneath one of Ada’s lifeless hands. Inspector Savage
suspected that Pavey had raped and murdered Ada soon after she had arrived home around 2.20 in the afternoon. He had
then broken open the door to Mr Shepherd’s office, and searched it for the money his employer had spoken of receiving
for the sale of a house. Finding none, since Mr Shepherd had not cashed the cheque but brought it with him to Norwood,
he had stolen a pair of boots and various other articles, before skulking away towards the Uxbridge Road.
The days after the murder, there was much uproar in Acton and its surroundings. Crowds of people stood gawping at
the murder house. Rumours were abounding that all Mr Shepherd’s children had been murdered, or that the entire family
had been exterminated in a bloodbath. Still, the true facts of the case were horrific enough: nothing even remotely like
the Acton Atrocity, as the rape and murder was called, had ever occurred in this quiet suburban neighbourhood. Rumours
were flying about Pavey being arrested in Croydon, or with his parents in Brighton, possibly disguised as a woman.
Unamused by such idle speculation, the police retorted that although several people had been taken into custody in
different parts of London, they had all been able to explain themselves. Watch was kept at the railway stations, and
at the main roads out of London, and all cheap hotels and lodging-houses were being searched by the police. The
description of George Pavey, five feet five inches in height, of sallow complexion, clean shaven face, and walking stiffly
due to being partially paralysed in the left side, was widely circulated. Local feeling against the suspect as greatly
inflamed, and Inspector Savage was fearful that Pavey would be lynched if he was captured by the Acton vigilantes. The
funeral of Ada Shepherd, at Hanwell Cemetery, was very well attended in spite of rainy weather conditions.
On the evening of Sunday, 24 October, two days after the murder of Ada Shepherd, a sore-footed vagabond came
tramping into Hendon Workhouse. He was given some bread and butter, which he devoured with the rapidity of extreme
hunger. The workhouse superintendent, who of course knew about the Acton Atrocity, came to see him. Since the
tramp was lame in one arm and leg, and very much resembled the description of George Pavey that had been issued by
the police, he gruffly called out ‘Your name is Pavey!’ The vagabond, who was chewing hard at the bread, swallowed
convulsively, before meekly admitting ‘Yes, it is.’ He was promptly taken to the Paddington police station, where he was
confronted by Inspector Savage. The detective showed him a large handkerchief, the one found covering the face of the
murdered child, and Pavey said ‘Yes, it is mine, I put it there!’ He kept eating ravenously, consuming an entire loaf of
bread, and drinking enormous quantities of tea, but he did not sleep all night.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 52

George Pavey, and other images from the Acton Atrocity, from the Illustrated Police News, 13 November 1880
On 25 October, Pavey was charged with the wilful murder of Ada Shepherd at the Hammersmith Police Court. A
short, clean shaven man, he looked younger than his 29 years. His story was that around 2 pm the day of the murder,
an unknown man had come to No. 3 Herbert Villas, to say that Mr Shepherd wanted Pavey to go to the Uxbridge Road
railway station at once. Without asking why, Pavey set off, but since he could not find his master, he returned to find
that Ada had been murdered. Since Pavey has a criminal record for child molestation, he realized that he himself would
become the main suspect, and absconded from the murder house. He had tramped round London for two days without
anything to eat, and was in a state of near collapse, due to hunger and mental anxiety, when he decided to take refuge
in Hendon Workhouse.
The police could soon verify that George Pavey had indeed “been repeatedly convicted and imprisoned for horrible
offences” as a newspaper expressed it. He came from a respectable Brighton family, and there was much sympathy for
his poor parents. The police were working overtime to find additional evidence against him, and they soon had success:
a pawnbroker’s assistant named Henry Cross picked him out as the man who had pawned Mr Shepherd’s boots, stolen
from the murder house, for seven shillings. Pavey’s shirt and trousers had been found to be stained with blood, and
the forensic specialist Dr Thomas Bond declared that these stains came from mammalian blood. The coroner’s inquest
on Ada Shepherd, held at the Station Hotel, Churchfield Road [it still stands, but is today the Rocket public house],
returned a verdict of wilful murder against George Pavey. According to a local newspaper, Pavey was quite optimistic
about his chances at the Old Bailey, even making plans for his wife to sell his clothes to Madame Tussaud’s when he had
been acquitted.
On trial for murder at the Old Bailey on November 23, things did not
look good for George Pavey. His previous career of child molestation, the
forensic evidence, and the clear and damning witness testimony all helped
to bring the noose round his neck. He was prosecuted by the eloquent
Harry Poland and Montague Williams, and his own barrister Mr Frith could
do little to combat the relentless witness testimony against him. The jury
found Pavey guilty, and the far from bonhomous Sir Henry Hawkins put on
the black cap, and delivered the following address:
George Pavey, it is impossible to conceive a more atrocious or a more
cruel crime than that of which you have been convicted by the jury,
who have listened patiently and very attentively to all that has been
said on your behalf. God knows what can have possessed you to have
committed that atrocious cruelty in violating the person of this poor
little helpless unprotected child, and afterwards murdering her, as
unquestionably you did, in the most cruel and brutal manner. It is
difficult to find language to express one’s sorrow at the barbarity of
the act which you committed. For the crime of murder of which you
have been convicted the law knows no sentence but that of death,
and you must, young as you are, prepare to die, for your crime is of so
barbarous a nature that I dare not hold out to you any hope that any
mitigation of your sentence can be expected.
George Pavey is sentenced to death,
from the Illustrated Police News, 4 December 1880
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 53

Sir Henry then pronounced sentence
of death, and the prisoner, who
remained perfectly calm during its
delivery, was removed to the cells.
While awaiting execution in Newgate,
Pavey was twice visited by his wife,
who brought their young child along. He
is recorded to have made statements
to the warders that after he had been
left alone in the murder house together
with Ada Shepherd, he felt strong urges
to molest her sexually. Angered by her
stubborn resistance, he then raped and
murdered her. A garbled account of his
dying speech and confession was widely
hawked around the Acton streets.
George Pavey was hanged at Newgate on
13 December 1880, and a dark chapter
in London’s criminal history was at an end.
A postcard showing the western part of Cowper Road, stamped and posted in 1910.
The murder house is the third house on the right hand side.
Both Harry Poland and Montague Williams, who prosecuted George Pavey at the Old Bailey, wrote memoirs, but
neither made any mention of their part in the conviction of the Acton child murderer. Instead, the famous Detective
Superintendent Percy Savage, the son of Frederick Savage, pointed out the arrest and conviction of George Pavey as one
of his father’s greatest cases, instrumental in securing him the post as detective inspector in personal attendance on
Queen Victoria. Just as the murderer himself had once planned, his effigy made an appearance at Madame Tussaud’s,
dressed in a suit of his own clothes, sold to Tussaud’s establishment by Pavey’s wife.
The key question for the murder house detective, namely
whether the house at No. 3 Herbert Villas, Cowper Road, is still
standing today, was not immediately easy to answer. The reason
for this is that all trace of the various ‘Villas’ and ‘Terraces’
in Cowper Road has disappeared, and the houses have been
renumbered in a more conventional manner. Situated not far from
Acton Central station, the houses in Cowper Road are numbered
from the Churchfield Road end to the Shakespeare Road end,
with even numbers on the eastern side, and odds on the western
one. The houses closest to Churchfield Road on the eastern side
are older in character, indicating that this part of the road was
first developed. There is a terrace of four houses, and then a pair
of semi-detached houses in a similar style. The third house in
the terrace, formerly No. 3 Herbert Villas and now No. 6 Cowper
Road, is the only house in Cowper Road to exactly fit the drawing
of the murder house in the Illustrated Police News; not even the
windows appear to have been changed.
* * * * *
This is an extract from Jan Bondeson’s book Murder Houses of
Greater London (Troubador Publishing, Leicester 2015).
The murder house at No. 3 Herbert Villas (now No. 6 Cowper Road),
as it stands today.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 54

Charles Dickens and The Murder House In Chatham
From 1817 until 1821, the youthful Charles Dickens spent some of his formative years with his family at No. 11
Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. In 1855, there was a gruesome murder in Chatham: the 78-year-old Mrs Catherine Bacon
was brutally done to death in her home. Her maidservant, the 17-year-old Elizabeth Laws, stood trial for murdering her,
and the evidence against her seemed solid enough, but the squeamish jurymen were unwilling to send a young woman
to the scaffold, and she was acquitted. The unsolved murder of Mrs Bacon took place at – No. 11 Ordnance Terrace,
Chatham! Clearly it was time to do some murder house detection work, to find out if the Dickens house in Chatham had
really become a murder house.
* * * * *
Mrs Catherine Bacon was the widow of Matthew Bacon, civil engineer at H.M. Dockyards, who had predeceased her
in 1849. They had four adult sons alive. Mrs Bacon was very short and thin, and suffered badly from chronic bronchitis,
but she remained alert of mind and capable of locomotion. She was rather pernickety, and apt to find faults with her
servants. In late November 1854, she had employed the local girl Elizabeth Avis Laws as her live-in maid-of-all-works.
Elizabeth was just 17 years old, and looked even younger, but she was a precocious teenager who liked drinking and
revelling. More than once, Mrs Bacon upbraided her for sneaking out late in the evening, and going to a public house of
low repute for some ‘fun’.
On the morning of 29 January 1855, the girl
Hannah Bagot came to No. 11 Ordnance Terrace
with some milk. Elizabeth Laws opened the door to
her and asked what time it was. It was ten minutes
past eight. Hannah Bagot noticed that the lower
ground floor shutters were up. The two schoolboys
Henry Farmer and Charles Manning then came up
to the premises, hoping to earn some money by
sweeping away the snow from the stairs and the
front of the house. But although the boys stood
knocking and ringing at the door for more than
five minutes, no person answered it. But at length
they heard the bolt being drawn, the door opened
and Elizabeth Laws emerged. The boys saw that
she was bleeding and that her throat seemed to
have been cut! They ran off in a panic, and told the
railway porter Samuel Smith, who was just coming
up Ordnance Terrace to deliver some parcels, what
The body of Mrs Bacon is found, from Famous Crimes Past & Present
they had just seen. Smith helped Elizabeth into the
house, and made sure that a doctor was called. He went upstairs to have a look inside the main bedroom, and shouted
‘There is a dead person up stairs!’ when he saw the mangled body of Mrs Bacon lying on the floor.
Dr Gammie, who lived nearby, made sure that Elizabeth’s throat was bandaged. Her wound was not a deep one, and
the doctor was confident that she would live. When her dress was undone, a small parcel wrapped in blood-stained
newspaper fell from her bosom. It contained a ring and a brooch, both belonging to Mrs Bacon. Elizabeth was removed
to the Fort Pitts military hospital, where she made a statement to the magistrate Major Boys. She had been chopping
wood in the cellar, she said, when there was suddenly a knock on the door. Two men were standing outside, asking if
they could take the dust away. Mrs Bacon had heard them, and come down stairs. All of a sudden, one of the men seized
hold of Elizabeth and forced her into the back kitchen, and the other pursued Mrs Bacon down into the cellar. Mrs Bacon
screamed, and Elizabeth herself also screamed very loud. As one of the dustmen murdered Mrs Bacon, and searched the
house for valuables, the other did his best to keep Elizabeth quiet. When she bit his hand hard, he cut her throat, and
then the two miscreants left the murder house, in a hurry.
Superintendent Thomas Everist took charge of the murder investigation. He found it peculiar that the servants in the
two neighbouring houses had not heard any screaming or uproar the morning of the murder. No person had seen the
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 55

two murderous dustman enter or exit the premises, and they did not seem
to have left any tracks in the snow. Had they existed at all? An axe with
blood and grey hairs on it was found in the kitchen, and this was obviously
the murder weapon. When the room of Elizabeth Laws was searched, a
quantity of pawn tickets were found, and when the police tracked down
the pawnshops, they discovered that Elizabeth had for some time been
stealing Mrs Bacon’s clothes and other belongings. She had been in the habit
of letting herself out of the house after her mistress had retired to bed,
to revel in various low public houses. She used to tell people that she was
companion to a wealthy aunt, and once gave her drinking companions odd
volumes of Barclay’s Dictionary, stolen at No. 11 Ordnance Terrace. Then
there was the matter of the ring and brooch stolen from the deceased after
the murder, which Elizabeth had tried to secrete. A blood-stained purse
containing more than £2 in silver was found buried in a pot of sand in the
cellar. A locked strong-box in the house was found to contain £100. When
the murder house was searched by the police, one of Elizabeth’s dresses
was found, severely stained with blood. Superintendent Everist suspected
that this had been the dress she had worn when she beat Mrs Bacon to death
with the axe in the cellar, before dragging the body up to the bedroom,
changing her blood-stained dress, and inflicting a shallow wound to her
throat in order to evade suspicion. A kettle and some bloody water found in
the cellar indicated that prior to dragging the body up to the bedroom, she
had made an attempt to clean off some of the blood.
Elizabeth Laws is found sitting by the stairs,
from Famous Crimes Past & Present.
The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder against Elizabeth Laws, and she was committed to stand
trial at the Maidstone Spring Assizes on March 16. The evidence against her was entirely circumstantial, but it appeared
to be very strong indeed. Her defending barrister Mr Ribton speculated that two experienced London thieves might have
entered No. 11 Ordnance Terrace, knowing that the feeble old Mrs Bacon had hoarded money in the house. Perhaps
doubting whether the jury would believe this yarn, he then went on to emphasize the youth and small stature of the
prisoner: was it really credible that such an innocent-looking creature could have committed a brutal axe murder? And
why, if she was the guilty party, had she not stolen the £100 in the strong-box? He also asked the jury to consider the
possibility that Mrs Bacon had complained of or chastised Elizabeth Laws, who had been holding the axe at the time,
provoking the fatal blows, struck under the influence of sudden excitement. In that case, the prisoner should surely
be found guilty of manslaughter only, and her life would be spared, so that the town of Maidstone would be spared the
disgrace of a public execution, which was an outrage upon every feeling of humanity and civilisation.
The Unitarian Church in Chatham, and right, the grave monument to the Bacon family in its cemetery
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 56

In his summing-up, Mr Baron Platt reminded the jury that it was their duty, before God and their country, to return
a verdict according to the evidence. The jury could not return a verdict of manslaughter: either the prisoner was guilty
of murder, or she was innocent. He gave little credence to the story of the two London thieves: would such hardened
ruffians bother to clean the blood off the dead body; furthermore, would they have concealed the purse inside the
house, and not stolen £100 inside the strong-box? Instead, he pointed out the solid circumstantial evidence in favour of
the guilt of the prisoner. After the jury had withdrawn for an hour, everybody in court were amazed when they returned
a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’. It was rumoured that one of the jurymen was a member of the local Anti-Death-Punishment
Association, and that his resolve not to put the innocent-looking young Elizabeth Laws to the scaffold had won some of
the others over. There is a story that after her narrow escape, this juvenile miscreant commented, with a merry smile,
that ‘The law has been very kind to the Laws!’ The following day, a different jury was empanelled to try Elizabeth Laws
on the charge of robbing Mrs Bacon of various articles, which she had pawned using a false name and address. This time,
the evidence against her was rock solid, and she was found guilty and sentenced to be imprisoned for six months, with
hard labour.
According to Guy Logan, who wrote about the
Chatham murder in his 1935 book Verdict and
Sentence, a Rochester clergyman marvelled at
Elizabeth Laws’ considerable power of dissimulation:
she appeared to be the perfect liar, and managed
to convince many respectable people that her story
of the two murderous dustmen was nothing but the
truth. Morally, she was the most abandoned creature
the clergyman had ever come across. There was a
rumour that after learning that she could not be
tried again, the smiling murderess calmly confessed
to the crime, describing its horrid details with gusto.
Guy Logan speculated that after being released from
prison, Elizabeth Laws may well have emigrated
to Australia. Mrs Bacon had four sons, all of whom
married. In 2011, a woman who identified herself
only as ‘Jane’ was interviewed on an Internet blog,
A view of the twelve houses in Ordnance Terrace, from the west
claiming to be a direct descendant of Mrs Bacon.
Since at least one of Mrs Bacon’s sons is known to
have had issue, she may well have been telling the truth. Interestingly, she said that a descendant of Elizabeth Laws had
once been in touch with her, to find out more about the murder back in 1855
* * * * *
In spite of wartime damage, and threats of demolition in the 1970s, Ordnance
Terrace still stands today, not far from the Chatham railway station. The terrace
proper consists of twelve houses, of which the present-day No. 1 is larger than
the others. They all have a rather deep lower ground floor, and three upper
floors. The present-day No. 2, No. 8 and No. 12 have been equipped with bay
windows to the two lower floors; the other houses retain their austere Georgian
architecture. Although some of the houses have been subdivided into flats, many
of them retain their original windows, front doors and fanlights, and cast-iron
railings to the front. The house at No. 11 bears a plaque indicating the residence
of the youthful Charles Dickens, between 1817 and 1821.
When I went to the Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre to make
inquiries into the mystery of No. 11 Ordnance Terrace, I was cheered to find
out that the local archivists had already made good progress in investigating the
numbering of the Dickens house. Studies of the relevant rate books disclosed
The murder house at No. 11 [today No. 2] Ordnance Terrace.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 57

that the Dickens house had originally been No. 2 Ordnance
Terrace, indicating that at some stage, the twelve houses had
been renumbered from west to east instead of from east to west,
the Dickens house at No. 2 becoming No. 11. If this renumbering
had happened between 1821 and 1855, the Dickens house is the
murder house; if it had happened after the murder in 1855, the
murder house is the present-day No. 2.
A look through the available Chatham directories was to prove
profitable. An 1838 directory lists Mrs E. Newnsham, recorded to
have been a neighbour of the Dickenses, as still occupying No. 4
Ordnance Terrace, where she had been living back in 1819. An 1849
directory lists Mrs Bacon as living at No. 11. A certain Ambrose
Etherington was at No. 4 from 1865 until 1878, and S. Claringbull at
No. 3 from 1871 until 1878. But in the 1882 directory, Etherington’s
house has become No. 9, and Claringbull’s house No. 10! Since the
Rochester & Chatham Industrial Home for Friendless Girls at No. 1
Ordnance Terrace is recorded to have been at that address since
its foundation, it would appear likely that the renumbering of the
houses happened in 1880 or 1881, at the same time the houses
in the Chatham High Street were renumbered. The reason for
the renumbering was clearly to incorporate the houses in nearby
Watt’s Terrace into the rear [as it would become] of Ordnance
Terrace. The York Hotel at No. 13 Ordnance Terrace remained a pub until quite recently, although it is today a grocer’s
shop.
Thus it can be established that the Dickens house at what is today No. 11 Ordnance Terrace is not identical to the
murder house that was No. 11 Ordnance Terrace back in 1855. The houses were renumbered around 1881, the Dickens
house at No. 2 becoming No. 11, and the murder house at No. 11 becoming No. 2. In spite of the vandalistic ambitions of
the local council in the 1970s, Ordnance Terrace still stands today, although its two houses of fame and notoriety have
swapped numbers with each other.
The Dickens house at what was originally No. 2
[today No. 11] Ordnance Terrace.
Left: The birthplace of Charles Dickens in Portsmouth, a postcard stamped and posted in 1902.
The house still stands.
Above: The Broadstairs house of Charles Dickens, a postcard stamped and posted in 1938.
The house is today a Dickens museum.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 58

Another Broadstairs house where Dickens was once busy scribbling away.
The London house of Charles Dickens, in Devonshire Terrace, a
postcard stamped and posted in 1904.
The house no longer stands.
A souvenir to Charles Dickens: a postcard stamped and posted in 1912
The Dickens house at No. 48 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury.
The house is today the main Charles Dickens museum.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 59

The Dickens country house at Gads Hill Place, Higham, Kent, a postcard stamped and posted in 1904. The house is today a private school.
JAN BONDESON is a senior lecturer and consultant rheumatologist at Cardiff University. He is the author
of Murder Houses of London, The London Monster, The Great Pretenders, Blood on the Snow and other
true crime books, as well as the bestselling Buried Alive.
WRITE FOR RIPPEROLOGIST!
We welcome contributions on Jack the Ripper, the East End and the Victorian era.
Send your articles, letters and comments to contact@ripperologist.biz
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 60

A Fatal Affinity:
Marked for a Victim
Chapter Four:
A Birthday Gift
By NINA and HOWARD BROWN
126 years ago this month, the noted ‘thought reader’ Stuart Cumberland’s Whitechapel
murders-influenced fiction novel, A Fatal Affinity, was serialized in issues of the South Australian
Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide). Cumberland’s book was just one of several Ripper-related works
which appeared contemporaneously to the East End murders. In the last issue of Ripperologist we
published Chapter Three; here, we give Chapter Four: A Birthday Gift.
* * * * *
Chapter IV
A Birthday Gift
Evelyn Hardcastle, Fred Harvey’s fiancee, was a beautiful girl. She was very fair, with a wealth of golden hair; her
eyes were a deep blue and of the kind a poet calls soulful and she was exquisitively formed. But her charms did not lie
so much in regularity of facial outline and perfection of form as in the sweetness of her disposition and graceful bearing
Her murdered friend had, as been stated, closely resembled her especially in the expression of the eyes. No one who
knew them failed to noticed the extraordinary resemblance. Their dispositions too were to all outward appearances
precisely alike, the wish of one invariably being the wish of the other. From early childhood they had been friends and
it was their boast that in all the years they had known each other they had not once quarrelled.
A learned Theosophist stated on one occasion that there was undoubtedly an affinity- whatever that might mean-
between them and that their souls as well as their lives were bound together in indestructible bonds. They were as the
love-birds, he said, made for each other whilst in life and as the love-bird if ribbed of its mate pines and die, so would it
be impossible for one to survive the other. But Geraldine Ulverstone had been slain and Evelyn Hardcastle, in spite of the
alleged affinity, did not die. She was as a matter of course terribly upset and the shock to her system cause considerable
anxiety, but her love for Fred Harvey sustained her. Had she had no lover to lavish her affections upon, her sympathetic
heart might have broken at the loss of her friend.
For more than a fortnight after the inquest she was confined to her room, but at length she was well enough to come
downstairs and receive a few of her personal friends.
face.
It was the eve of her birthday.
Several friends had called during the afternoon, but they had all gone and she and her fiancee were alone together.
“Now Fred, we are all alone, tell me what ails you? Are you ill, dearest?” she said, with a shade of anxiety upon her
“No, darling,” he answered somewhat wearily, “I am quite well.”
“Why then are you so sad and heavy, for you, dear fellow, are as dull as- well, I don’t know what. A nice cheerful
companion for an invalid,” she added banteringly. “Come, smile; no, smile - that’s it.”
Harvey tried to force a smile, but it was like a November sun endeavoring to shine through a London fog.
“You call that a smile, do you?” and held up her finger reprovingly, “There must be something,” she continued; what
is it now? You musn’t have secrets from me- indeed you musn’t.”
“I have no secrets, my darling.” he said this with an attempt at a laugh, but it was a nervous, meaningless laugh, and
the sternness of his face did not relax.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 61

“Then why are you so glum, Fred; it isn’t at all like you. Aren’t you pleased with me? I feel almost inclined to cry and
I was so happy to think that you were coming to-day.” She lowered her eyes which became dim with tears.
“This will not do, dearest. Look up, Evie mine,” and he pressed her hands passionately in his. “See darling, I am
smiling,” and the poor fellow looked into the eyes that were turned to him. But they were tears that softened his eyes,
not smiles.
“You don’t call that smiling! Why Fred, you’re crying,” she replied, stroking his head.
“Yes, dear, out of sympathy for you.” He bit his tongue after he had said the words; but they were spoken and could
not be recalled. Luckily, she did not understand his meaning.
“Out of sympathy for me, dear, how so?” Am I not quite well now? You said yourself that I should soon be all right -
and you are a doctor.”
“Yes dear, “ he replied, “I know that. I dare say I am very foolish; but I do love you so.”
He was thinking of the fate that might be awaiting her. Tomorrow was her birthday and tomorrow she might be lying
dead. He tried to dismiss the thought from his mind. “Why should she be murdered, she who has not a single enemy
in the world?” argued Hope. “But, then” replied Fear, “what had Geraldine Ulverstone done? Why was she chosen as a
victim? If she was murdered, why should your darling escape?”
It was an anxious time for him and the anxiety laid its impress upon his spirits.
Evelyn accepted Fred’s explanation although she was more convinced there was something more to be explained ;
but she kept her doubts to herself and said nothing more.
The entrance of her father - a somewhat careworn-looking man of sixty (Evelyn had no mother) - followed by Colonel
Mansfield moreover cut short all further conversation.
Evelyn sprang up with a cry of delight as she saw her godfather.
“Well, my little one; but this I must call you no longer, for you have become a woman since I last saw you.” said
Mansfield, taking both her hands in his and kissing her on the forehead.
“You may call me what you like, Uncle Lal” (with her, he was always Uncle Lal, although they were in no way
related). “But what a long time its been since we last saw you; where have you been all these years?”
“That, my dear, would take years to tell, but I hope before I leave again to have time to tell you all that has
happened since we last met.”
“Before you leave again? You mustn’t be talking about leaving; why you have only just come and this is the first time
I’ve seen you for five years.”
“I hope to be able to stay until the end of the year. In such case- with your permission- I shall see you often ; but to
be frank with you I may have to leave at any moment- perhaps even tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” said Fred and Evelyn in one breath; and the expression on the young man’s face was one of the greatest
alarm. He had convinced himself that the only chance of his darling’s safety lay in the protection of Colonel Mansfeild;
and no he, who might be able to save her, was going away.
“Yes, it may be tomorrow that I shall have to depart.”
“And where to?” asked Evelyn.
“To India.”
A suppressed groan escaped from Harvey’s tightly compressed lips. There was, then, no hope of his assistance.
“You spend all your time out there now, Mansfield,” said Mr. Hardcastle, “I hope you find it pays.”
“All my interests are central in the East,” was the equivocal reply.
“When is your book coming out, Uncle Lal?” asked Evelyn; one hears so much about it and I am terribly anxious to
see it.”
“Not just yet, dear; not till I am dead maybe.”
“Don’t talk of dying, Uncle Lal; you must never die,” replied Evelyn, with a reproachful glance.
“Well, don’t let us talk about the book then, but about yourself, dear. Tomorrow is your birthday, is it not?”
“Yes, tomorrow I am twenty-one; only fancy tomorrow I am of age and then I shall commence the down grade
according to a woman’s idea about age. But I don’t feel all at all old. Do I look old, Uncle Lal? You at least will tell me
the truth. Fred and father are such dreadful flatterers.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 62

She turned her sweet face to his with a bewitching roguery in her expressive eyes.
“Old, dear! If all women looked as fresh and young at one and twenty! So your father and this thrice happy young
man flatter you, do they? They probably only speak the half-truth.” replied her godfather gallantly. “Why, Harvey,
what makes you so glum?” he said, turning to the young doctor, who at the reference to his fiances’s birthday had
visibly shuddered; for was it not on her twenty-first birthday, exactly a month ago, that Geraldine Ulverstone had been
murderer and what might not be the fate on the morrow of the girl he loved best on earth?
Harvey made some haphazard answer and Mansfield, seeing how the hand lay, did not again refer to the matter.
“Now, my little goddaughter, I must say good-day.” said Mansfield after a while, “and I hope it will not be goodbye.
But I cannot at this moment tell you where tomorrow will find me. I have therefore brought with me a little birthday gift
which I might not be able to bring tomorrow and I prefer your receiving it from my own hands.”
He took from his pocket a packet and opened it. It contained a gold chain curiously fashioned, to which was attached
a locket. This locket was heart shaped and in the centre was a diamond, shaped like the sun, its scintillations in the
light looking like sunrays.
“What a beautiful present and what a lovely diamond,” said Evelyn enthusiastically, as she took the gift from
Mansfield’s hand. “It contains a lock of hair; how white it is and strangely woven; and what do these curious signs
mean?”, she added pointing to the polished surface of the heart. “It must be very old.”
“It is very old, dear, older than any living man; older in fact than many nations,” replied Mansfield gravely.
“How good of you to give me so curious and beautiful a present: but Uncle Lal, you haven’t told me what these
hieroglyphs mean.”
“They mean, dear,” he replied, spelling out the signs, “I am the shield of the heart that I cover.”
“What a beautiful sentiment; I really ought to wear it over my heart after that,” she added gaily.
“Yes, dear; that is just what I was going to ask you to do - to wear it always, sleeoping or waking. You promise to do
this?” He asked the question with great earnestness.
“Of course, Uncle Lal, I will do so, if you wish it.”
“I do wish it,” he replied simply.
Then, taking his present from her, he put the chain round her neck, with the locket covering her beating heart,
muttering something to himself as he did so.
“What were you saying to yourself, Uncle Lal? It sounded like some mystic rite,” said Evelyn, looking at him with
curious eyes.
“I was simply saying I hoped it would bring you good luck,” he replied somewhat evasively; “presents given beforehand
are said to be unlucky, you know, and I want this to be a talisman of good fortune. And now dear I must be going. You
won’t begrudge me a farewell kiss I hope?”
He took her fair face in his hands and pressed a burning kiss upon her forehead.
“How much you look like your mother - there, goodbye.” he said ; and as he turned away tears were in his eyes.
Evelyn never forgot his farewell look or his farewell words. In another moment he was gone.
“Are you really going away tomorrow?” said Harvey nervously as he saw his friend to the door.
“I cannot at this moment sat; it is possible- nay it is probable ; but tonight will decide everything.”
“I had hoped,” replied the young man mournfully, “that you would have stayed over tomorrow, for I have - I can’t tell
you why - so much faith in your power to avert any danger that may threaten her. But tell me, standing there with your
hand in mine, if you think she is in any danger?”
“At this moment I cannot tell you what may happen. Tonight I shall know all. Call on me in the morning.”
“But before the sun rises she may - if the assassin has selected her as his next victim - be dead.” replied Harvey, in
an anguish of despair.
“Nay my friend, no harm can come to her.”
“Are you certain of this?”
“As certain as there is life beyond the grave - that is, if she fails not to wear the locket next to her heart.”
To be continued in the next issue of Ripperologist
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 63

Dear Rip
Your Letters and Comments
Dear Rip,
Severin Klosowski
In our article ‘The Jack the Ripper Museum - A Special Report’ (Rip 145),
when discussing the plaque outside said museum which is dedicated to ‘George
Chapman’, we made reference to Chapman’s birth name being ‘Severyn
Klosowski’, and also to his being responsible for the deaths by poisoning of three
women in the Southwark area subsequently to 1888.
As Helena Wojtczak has pointed out to us since, in her book Jack the Ripper
at Last? The Mysterious Murders of George Chapman she demonstrates that the
first of these murders occurred in Finsbury and not Southwark; she also discusses
her belief that his name would be more accurately transliterated as ‘Severin’.
Although this was the only reference to Klosowski in the article, we are grateful
to Helena for pointing out these matters to us, and clearly we should have
consulted her work in order to ensure total accuracy.
We would therefore like to take this opportunity to apologise for these
unfortunate errors.
Trevor Bond and Jon Rees
Simon Wood: An Apology
In the last issue of Ripperologist (145, August 2015) we published a report on the recent Jack the Ripper
Conference at Nottingham. It was then brought to our attention that we neglected to mention the presentation
of a ‘Book of the Year’ award to Simon D Wood for his Deconstructing Jack: The Secret History of the Whitechapel
Murders.
Our reporter at the Conference, Steve Rattey, told us that as the presentation was not listed on the programme
of events he was unaware it was about to take place and left the lecture room to make an important telephone
call. He therefore missed the presentation of the award, made by Amanda Lloyd and David Hall.
We were also smacked on the wrist regarding a well-known photograph of a meeting of Ripperologists in
the Golden Heart in 1988, in that when we recently referred to the photo and mentioned the attendees we
neglected to include Simon alongside Don Rumbelow, Tom Cullen, Martin Fido, Paul Begg, Keith Skinner and
David Andersen.
Before we are accused of building a Bruce Robinsonesque conspiracy we would like to extend our apologies
to Simon for our double oversight. We have published several of his articles in the past, and hope this will
continue.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 64

Victorian Fiction
The Throne of
the Thousand Terrors
By William Le Queux
Edited with an Introduction by Eduardo Zinna
Introduction
In a lecture in 1948, Vladimir Nabokov, the putative father of Lolita and Humbert Humbert, famously said:
‘Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with
a big grey wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was
no wolf behind him.’ Nabokov thought it quite incidental that the shepherd’s boy who lied too often was finally
eaten up by a real wolf; what counted in his view was that ‘the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that
he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf.’ ‘Literature is invention,’ said Nabokov, ‘Fiction is fiction.’ ‘To
call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.’
Fortunately, in old Aesop’s version of the story the shepherd’s boy who had cried wolf too often was not
eaten by the beast. He lived, but the wolf ate his sheep, and when he complained that no-one had come to his
assistance, the wise men of the village said: ‘A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.’ Aesop
does not tell us whether the boy learned his lesson.
By and large we can believe, with Nabokov, that every great writer is a great
deceiver. We are safe in the knowledge that the characters in a book or a film
are creatures of invention and that, regardless of how real they may look to us,
they are but fictions, even less substantial than so many wisps of smoke. Still,
Odysseus and Sindbad of the Sea, Othello and Raskolnikov, Jim Hawkins and Anna
Karenina, Sherlock Holmes and the Count of Monte Cristo often occupy a far
more important place in our lives than the people we cross daily in the street.
Yet there are story-tellers, some of whom are writers, and some of whom are
not, who claim to tell the truth when they are actually dreaming up their tales.
There are those who embellish upon what is known and call it ‘faction’; there
are those who make up their stories out of whole cloth and still call them true.
Sacha Guitry, a French film-maker known for his fanciful historical adaptations,
said of one of his films that it was ‘truthful - and sometimes plausible – since I
believe it is not lying to assert brazenly irrefutable improbabilities. Yes, I claim
the absolute right to imagine incidents that have remained secret and to narrate
adventures of whose unlikelihood I have found no evidence.’
Some of the authors who have turned an inquisitive eye to the Whitechapel
murders may legitimately be suspected of having embroidered their narratives
a little too eagerly. William Le Queux occupies a special place among them.
He was born in London in 1864 to a French father and an English mother, was
William Le Queux
educated in France and Italy and began his career as a journalist writing for French newspapers. In the late 1880s
he returned to Britain where he edited the magazines Gossip and Piccadilly and joined the staff of the Globe.
After a couple of years he abandoned journalism and became a full-time writer, both of fiction and non-fiction,
although often the distinction between the two was tenuous at best.
In 1893 Le Queux scored his first success in a field he would make his own: the speculative politico-military
thriller. Brimming with patriotic ardour, he wrote a magazine serial about a future treacherous invasion of Britain
by France and Russia, which was eventually repelled with the assistance of Germany. For a while French and
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 65

Russian spies continued to perform dastardly deeds in the many best-selling narratives that followed. Yet, as the
political climate changed and the European system of alliances shifted, Le Queux was in need of a fresh enemy for
Britain to contend with. Soon he found it in newly bellicose Germany, which seemed determined to carve a niche
for herself in world politics at the expense of Britain. In 1906 Le Queux wrote a series for the Daily Mail entitled
The Invasion of 1910, which reanimated his previous military fancies in a larger and more ambitious scale. During
several weeks the Mail’s readership followed the ruthless advance of the Teutonic hordes through their towns and
villages. London fell, but soon its population rose as one and utterly defeated the enemy. The Invasion of 1910 was
translated into 27 languages and, in book form, sold over one million copies. It was even published in Germany,
where deft editorial manipulation allowed the Kaiser’s army to remain in control of London.
The success of The Invasion of 1910 turned Le Queux into a celebrity and ensured a profitable future for him as
an author. Inventive, resourceful and prolific, he would publish during his literary life nearly 200 books, including a
fair share of mysteries, thrillers and espionage novels. At the same time, he became a self-appointed spy-catcher,
allegedly carrying out sensitive missions all over Europe and writing titillating but discreet exposés about them.
When the war he had so assiduously predicted came to pass, Le Queux not only continued to write about German
spies in Britain but added dire accounts of German atrocities and scandalous revelations about the private lives
of the Kaiser’s family. The war ended, he extended his coverage to the fallen Russian royal family and their
circle; their confidant, the Siberian monk Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, became a favourite target in such books as
Rasputin the Rascal Monk, The Minister of Evil and Rasputinism in London.
Towards the end of his life, in 1923, Le Queux published a volume of memoirs entitled
Things I Know about Kings, Celebrities and Crooks. Most of the book was devoted to his
acquaintance with the rich and famous: the Sultan of Turkey, King Nicholas of Montenegro, the
Queen of Romania aka ‘Carmen Sylva’, Princess Luisa of Saxony, Vat Marashi, the bajraktar of
Shkreli, and Dimitar Petkov, the Prime Minister of Bulgaria. But not content with dropping all
these names, and a few more, Le Queux obliged the world by disclosing, in a couple of pages,
the true identity of Jack the Ripper. To do that he had recourse to his pet peeve, Rasputin.
By his own account, Le Queux received in 1917 from the Kerensky government a number
of secret documents, including a manuscript dictated in French by Rasputin: Great Russian
Criminals. The manuscript purportedly drew upon
a report by a Russian agent, Johann Nideroest, who
belonged to the Jubilee Street Club, an anarchist
association in the East End of London. The Russian
anarchist Nicholas Zverieff had told Nideroest that
the Ripper was Dr Alexander Pedachenko, a homicidal maniac who
had been sent to Britain by the Ochrana, the Russian secret police, to
commit the Whitechapel murders in order to discredit the Metropolitan
Police. Pedachenko had two accomplices: a tailoress called Winberg,
who engaged the prospective victims in conversation, and a Londonborn
man called Levitski who kept an eye out for the police while
Pedachenko struck. Their mission accomplished, Levitski and Winberg
returned to Russia, but instead of reaping a proper reward they were
exiled to Siberia. The Ochrana smuggled Pedachenko back to Russia,
where he soon attempted to murder a woman. He was promptly
committed to an asylum where he died in 1908.
Was there any truth to Le Queux’s disclosures? Few people gave
them credence at the time they were made and fewer still take
them seriously today. The Star pointed out that Nideroest was not a
cunning Russian agent, Rasputin’s daughter remarked that her father
knew no French and had no interest whatsoever in Russian criminals,
and Stepan Poberovski observed that all the names mentioned by Le
Queux could be found in a few pages of the Address-Calendar of the
Russian Empire for 1888. The friend of Kings, celebrities and crooks
Rasputin
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 66

has earned a place in Ripperology, not as a respected theorist but as one of the many unreliable raconteurs whose
theses survive only as historical curiosities.
On the other hand, Le Queux could certainly spin a yarn. Apart from his political, military and espionage thrillers,
his oeuvre includes tales of the occult such as Stolen Souls (1895), society intrigues such as Secrets of Monte Carlo
(1899) and The Heart of a Princess: A Romance of To-Day (1920), cockney chronicles such as A Secret Sin, or A
Madonna of the Music Halls (1897), motoring narratives such as The Mystery of a Motor-Car (1906) and Cinders
of Harley Street (1916), aviation stories such as Beryl of the Biplane (1917) and The Terror of the Air (1920),
radio romances such as Tracked by Wireless and The Voice from the Void: The Great Wireless Mystery (1922) and
even true-crime accounts such as Landru: His Secret Love Affairs (1922). The locales of his novels range from
the bitter cold of the northernmost regions of the world in On the “Polar Star” in the Arctic Sea (1903) to the
mild winters of the Riviera in Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo: A Mystery of To-day (1921) and the fierce heat of the
North-African deserts in Zoraida (1894), The Eye of Istar: a Romance of the Land of No Return (1897), The Veiled
Man (1899), The Hand of Allah (1914) and Where the Desert Ends (1923). At their best, Le Queux’s stories move
fast, offer exciting descriptions of exotic customs and faraway lands and feature unfaltering heroes, gorgeous
heroines and despicable villains.
Our Victorian Fiction offering for this month is The Throne of the Thousand Terrors, one of William Le Queux’s
Arab romances located in the arid expanses of the Great Sahara, where the boundaries of Algeria, Lybia, Niger and
Chad meet. It first appeared in issue 67 of The Strand Magazine, published in July 1896. Its narrator is a European
man who ostensibly possesses a thorough knowledge of the desert and its ascetic, blood-thirsty denizens, in many
ways the ancestors of the supporters of Al-Qaida and the Islamic State. One would be tempted to consider the
unnamed narrator as a portrait of Le Queux himself in one of his many incarnations, were it not for the fact that
the tale was told again with slight amendments in 1899 under the title The Throne of the Great Torture, the
last chapter of a novel The Veiled Man. This time the narrator is not a Christian, but the notorious robber-sheikh
Ahamadou, ‘the Abandoned of Allah,’ once the terror of the Areg Desert, but now friendly to the French. Le Queux
only claims for himself the role of translator, editor, and presenter of the sheik’s reminiscences. Be it as it may,
The Throne of the Thousand Terrors is surely a ripping yarn. Judge by yourselves.
The text is as it was published over a century ago. I have only updated the spelling of some words to reflect
modern usage.
The Throne of the Thousand Terrors
By William Le Queux
Far south, beyond the Atlas mountains, beyond that great, limitless plain where nothing meets the
aching eye but a dreary waste of red-brown, drifting sand, one experiences some curious phases of a life
comparatively unknown, and little understood in European civilization. In the great Sahara, life today is
the same as it was ten centuries ago – the same as it will ever be: free and charming in its simplicity, yet
with many terrors ever present, and sun-bleached bones ever reminding the lonely traveller that a pricked
water-skin or a lame camel means the end of all things.
In a recent journey from Biskra to Murzuq, in Fezzan, 1 I foolishly disregarded the injunctions of my old
friend Emile Chandioux, the commandant of the outpost of Spahis station in the Arab town of In Salah, 2 in
the Touat Oasis, and was rendered extremely uncomfortable by the astounding discovery that the camel
1 Fezzan: The ancient Phazania, it is the southwestern region of modern Libya, in the Sahara. It consists mostly of desert,
but in the north it has mountains and wadis - the beds or valleys of a stream which are usually dry except during the rainy
season - and in the south it has many oases.
2 In Salah or Ain Salah is an oasis town in the Sahara desert, in central Algeria, which was once an important post in the
trans-Saharan caravan route. Its name comes from the term ‘good well’, although in fact its water has an unpleasant, salty
taste.
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 67

caravan I had joined in Zawiyah 3 Timassanin, and with which I had been travelling for twenty days, belonged
to the Kel-Izhabân, 4 a tribe of marauders and outlaws whose depredations and relentless butchery of their
weaker neighbours caused them to be held in awe from Morocco across to Tripoli, and from Biskra to Lake
Chad. In addition, I ascertained that our Sheikh, known to me as Sidi El-Adil, or ‘The Just’, was really none
other than the dreaded Abdul-Melik, the pirate of the desert, against whom the French Government had
sent three expeditions, and upon whose head a price had been set.
With bronzed, aquiline features, a long grey beard and keen, deep-set eyes; tall, erect, agile, and of
commanding presence, he was a splendid specimen of the Arab of the plains. Though he expressed intense
hatred for the Infidel, and invoked curses most terrible upon the horsemen of the Roumis 5 in general,
and my friend Captain Chandioux
in particular, he, nevertheless,
treated me with haughty courtesy,
and extended to me the hand of
friendship. As, at the head of our
cavalcade of two hundred armed
men and a long string of camels,
he rode day after day across the
parched wilderness, interspersed
by small sand hills and naked
ledges of rock, speckled with
ethel-bushes half overwhelmed
by sand, he was truly an imposing
figure. His burnouse was of finest
white wool, embroidered heavily
with silk; the haick 6 surrounding
his face was of spotless china-silk, and around his head was wound many yarns of brown camel’s hair. The
saddle upon which he sat was of crimson velvet, embroidered with gold and set with precious stones, and
stirrups and spurs of massive silver completed the trappings of his splendid coal-black horse, which he
managed with rare perfection and skill. On my white Kuhailan stallion, 7 I usually rode at his side, chatting
to him in his own tongue, while two hundred of his people, erect in their saddles, and their long-barrelled
rifles slung behind, were ready to instantly execute his slightest wish.
The days were breathless and blazing. Scorched by the sun, and half suffocated by the sand-laden wind,
our way lay through a wilderness that Nature had forsaken. At night, however, when the outcasts of the
desert had cast sand upon their feet and prayed their maghrib, 8 and we had encamped under the palms of
the oasis, eaten our dates and couscous, and slaked our thirst from our water-skins, then commenced the
real luxury of the day – the luxury of idleness – as, reclining on a mat in front of the Sheikh’s tent, with
coffee and a cigarette, the great Abdul-Melik would relate with slow distinctness stories of past encounters
between his people and the hated Christians. While sentries with loaded rifles kept a vigilant look-out lest
we should be surprised by the ever-watchful Spahis or Chasseurs, half-a-dozen Arabs would squat in a semicircle
before the great Sheikh, and, twanging upon their guenibris, those queer little banjos fashioned from
turtle-shells over which skin is stretched, would chant weirdly, in a strange staccato, Arab songs of love and
3 A zawiyah or zaouia is an Islamic religious school or monastery. The term is Maghrebi, roughly corresponding to the Eastern
term Madrasa. In his notes to his translation of the Arabian Nights, Richard Burton defined zawiyah as an oratory and
added that a zawiyah is to a mosque what a chapel is to a church.
4 Kel-Izhabân: One of the noble tribes of the touaregs. Other tribes were in servitude.
5 Roumi (usually disparaging): A non-Muslim.
6 Haick: An outer garment consisting of a large piece of white cloth worn by both men and women in northern Africa.
7 Kuhailan: Desert Arabian horse breed.
8 Maghrib: Prayed just after sunset, it is the fourth of five formal daily prayers performed by practicing Muslims.
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 68

war. At that hour a coolness falls over everything, intense silence reigns, the sky above grows a deeper and
deeper blue, and the palms and a type of acacia trees look mysterious in the half-light. Soon the stars shine
out like diamond points, and it grows darker and darker, until the chill night breeze of the desert stirs the
feathery heads of the date-palms. Then the lawless nomads, my companions, would wrap their burnouses
closely about them, scoop out a hole in the warm sand, and there repose until the first flush of dawn.
About five weeks after I had inadvertently thrown in my lot with the Kel-Izhaban, and after penetrating
a region that, as far as I am aware, has never been explored by Europeans – for it remains a blank upon the
most recent map issued by the Depôt de la Guerre - we were one evening, at a spot evidently prearranged,
joined by a body of three hundred horsemen, who armed themselves with the rifles they obtained from
our camels’ packs, and then, leaving the camels in charge of half-a-dozen men in a rocky valley called
the Anzoua, we all continued our way in high spirits, jesting, laughing and singing snatches of songs.
Throughout that night and during the following day we rode at the same steady pace, with only brief halts
that were absolutely necessary. On the second night darkness fell swiftly, but the moon rose, and under its
bright mystic light we sped forward until suddenly the gaunt man, in a dirty, ragged burnouse, who acted
as our guide, shouted, and we pulled up quickly. Then, in the moonlight, I could just distinguish among the
trees of the little oasis a few low, white houses, of what I subsequently learned was the little desert village
of Tilouat, inhabited by the Kel-Emoghri, and distant ten leagues from the town of Idlès. 9
Abdul-Melik shouted an order clear and distinct. Whereupon the horsemen spread themselves out in two
long lines, and with their guns carried across their saddles, the first line crept slowly and silently forward.
By this movement I knew that we were about to attack the village, and held my own rifle ready for purposes
of self-defence. Sitting in the second line, I advanced with the others, and the breathless moments that
followed were full of excitement. I had become a pirate of the desert, one of a band of fierce outlaws,
the report of whose terrible atrocities had sent a thrill of horror across Europe on more than one occasion.
Suddenly a shot startled us, and at the same moment
a muttered curse fell from the Sheikh’s lips as he saw
that our presence had been detected, for the shot had
been fired in the village as a sound of warning. Almost
instantly it was apparent that we had been betrayed, for
a great body of horsemen galloped out to meet us, and
in a few moments I found myself lying behind my horse
pouring forth volley after volley from my repeating rifle.
The fusillade was deafening, and for fully half an
hour it was kept up. About twenty of our men had been
killed or wounded, when suddenly the first line rose with
loud shouts as if they were one man, and, mounting,
rode straight at their opponents, while we followed at
headlong speed upon our enemies almost ere they had
time to realize our intention. The melee was awful.
Swords, rifles and keen, crooked jambiyahs 10 were
used with terrible effect, but very soon all resistance
was at an end, and the work of looting the village had
commenced.
Half demented by excitement and success, my
companions entered the houses, shot down the women
with relentless cruelty, tore from them what little jewellery they possessed, and plundered, wrecked and
burned their homes out of sheer delight in destruction. I stood watching the terrible scene, shuddering
9 Idlès: A municipality in the Tazrouk District, Tamanrasset Province, Algeria.
10 Jambīyah: The Arabic term for dagger, generally used to describe a specific type of dagger with a short curved blade and
a medial ridge.
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 69

at the inhuman brutality of my companions, but unable to avert the terrible calamity that had fallen so
swiftly upon the peaceful little place. The fiendishness of the outlaws had, alas! not been exaggerated.
Abdul-Melik laughed gleefully, uttering some words as he rode past me swift as the wind. But I heeded him
not; I loathed, despised, and hated him.
When dawn spread in saffron streaks, the work of plunder still proceeded, but when the sun shone forth,
only the smoke-blackened walls of Tilouat remained standing. The plunder was quickly packed upon our
horses, and soon afterwards we rode off, carrying with us some twenty men and women who had been
captured, all of whom, I was informed, would eventually find their way into the great slave-market, far
away at Murzuq.
At sundown, five days afterwards, we descended into a rocky valley, and suddenly came upon a wonderful
mass of scattered ruins, of amazing magnitude and extent, which Abdul-Melik told me were the remains
of a forgotten city called Tihodayen, and as we approached I saw by the massive walls of hewn stone, the
fallen columns half imbedded in the sand, and by an inscription over an arched door, that they were relics
of the Roman occupation. When we dismounted, I found that the ruined city gave shelter to the outlaws,
and was their habitual hiding-place.
An hour later, reclining in mats under the wall of what had once been a great palace, the outlaw Sheikh
and myself ate our evening meal of saubusaj, beryseh, and luzinyeh, and drank copiously of dushab,
that luscious date syrup that is so acceptable after the heat and burden of the Saharan day, while my
companions feasted and made merry, for it appeared that they kept stores of food concealed there.
On commencing to smoke, Abdul-Melik ordered that the captives should be brought before him and
when, a few minutes later, they were ushered into his presence, they, with one exception, fell upon their
knees, grovelling, and cried aloud for mercy. The single captive who begged no favour was a young, darkhaired
girl of exquisite beauty, with black, piercing eyes, pretty, dimpled cheeks, and with a complexion
almost as fair as an Englishwoman’s. She wore a zouave of crimson velvet heavily embroidered with gold, a
heavy golden girdle confined her waist, and her wide trousers were of palest rose-pink silk, while her tiny
feet were thrust into velvet slippers of green embroidered with gold thread. But her dress had been torn
in the fierce struggle with her pitiless captors, and as she stood, erect and defiant, with her hands secured
behind her with a leathern thong, she cast at us a glance full of withering scorn.
The Sheikh raised his hand to command silence, but as her fellow-captives continued wailing, he ordered
the removal of all but this girl, who apparently set him at defiance. Turning his keen eyes upon her, he
noted how extremely handsome she was, and while she returned his gaze unflinchingly, her beauty held me
in fascination. In all my journeys in the Land of the Sun I had never before seen such an absolutely perfect
face.
‘Who art thou?’ demanded the dreaded chief, roughly. ‘What is thy name?’
‘I am called Khadidja Fathma, daughter of Ali Ben Ushshami, Cadi 11 of Idlès,’ she answered, in a firm,
defiant tone.
‘Ali Ben Ushshami!’ echoed Abdul-Melik, knitting his brows fiercely. ‘Thou art his daughter; the daughter
of the accursed son of offal who endeavoured to betray me into the hands of the Roumis,’ he cried,
exultantly. ‘I have kindled the lights of knowledge at the flambeau of prophecy, and I vowed that I would
ere many moons seek vengeance.’
‘I have anticipated this thy wrath ever since thine horde of cowardly ruffians lay hands upon me,’ she
answered with a contemptuous toss of her pretty head. ‘But the daughter of the Cadi of Idlès craveth no
mercy from a servant of Iblis.’ 12
11 Cadi: civil judge, usually of towns, in Moslem country (OED)
12 Iblis or Eblis: In Islam, the Evil One, the Devil, a jinn punished for refusing to bow before Adam.
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 70

‘Darest thou insult me, wench?’ he cried, pale with passion, and starting up as if to strike her. ‘Thou art
the child of the man who would have given me into the hands of the Spahis for the sake of the two bags of
gold offered by my head. I will return his good offices by sending him tomorrow a present he will perhaps
appreciate, the present of thine own hands. He will then be convinced that Abdul-Melik knoweth how to
repay those who seek to injure him.’
‘Dost thou intend to strike off my hands?’ she
gasped, pale as death, nevertheless making a
strenuous effort to remain calm.
‘At sunrise the vultures will feast upon thee,
and thine hands will be on their way to Idlès,’
he answered, with a sinister smile playing about
his hard mouth.
‘Malec hath already set his course upon
thee,’ she said, ‘and for each murder thou
committest so thou createst for thyself a fresh
torture in Al-Hâwiyat, 13 where thy food will be
offal and thou wilt slake thy thirst with boiling
pitch. True, I have fallen captive into thine
hands, having journeyed to Tilouat to see my
father’s mother who was dying; but thinkest
thou that I fear thee? No,’ she added, with
flashing eyes. ‘Though the people dread you
as the great and powerful Chief, I despise thee
and all thy miserable parasites. If thou smitest
off mine hands, it is but the same punishment as thou hast meted out to others of mine sex. Thou are, after
all, a mere coward who maketh war upon women.’
‘Silence, jade!’ he cried, in a tumult of passion, and, turning to the men beside him, commanded: ‘Take
her away, secure her alone till dawn, and then let her hands be struck off and brought to me.’
Roughly the men dragged her away, but ere she went she cast at us a look of haughty scornfulness, and,
shrugging her shoulders, treated this terrible mandate with ineffable disdain.
‘The jade’s hands shall be sent to her father, the Cadi, as a souvenir of the interest he taketh in my
welfare,’ the Sheikh muttered aloud. ‘Her tongue will never utter again rebuke or insult. Verily, Allah hath
delivered into my hands a weapon to use against mine enemies.’
I uttered eager words of intercession, pointing out the cruelty of taking her young life, but he only
laughed derisively, and I was compelled to sit beside him while the other captives were questioned and
inspected.
That night I sought repose in a shed that had been erected in a portion of the ruins, but found sleep
impossible. The defiantly beautiful face of the young girl who was to die at dawn kept recurring to me with
tantalizing vividness, and at length I rose, determined if possible to save her. Noiselessly I crept out, my
footsteps muffled by the sand, saddled one of Abdul-Melik’s own horses, and without attracting the notice
of either sentry on duty at each end of the encampment, I entered the ruin where, confined to an iron ring
in the masonry by a leathern band, she crouched silent and thoughtful.
‘Fi Amani-illah!’ 14 I whispered, as I approached. ‘I come to have speech with thee, and assist thee to
escape.’
13 Al Hâwiyat: the name of an apartment in hell.
14 Fi Amanillah: In the safety of Allah.
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 71

‘Who art thou?’ she inquired, struggling to her feet and peering at me in the gloom.
‘A Roumi, who art determined that the outlaw’s command shall never be executed,’ and taking the
jambiyah from my girdle, I severed the thongs that confined her hands and ankles, and next second she
was free.
Briefly I explained how I had saddled a fleet horse and placed a saddlebag with food upon it.
‘If I get safely away I shall owe my life to you,’ she said, with intense gratitude, pressing my hand for
an instant to her quivering lips. ‘I know this place, and ere two moons can have risen I can travel through
the rocky defile and be at my father’s house at Idlès. Tell me thy name, so that my father may know who
was his daughter’s liberator.’
I told her, and in the same hasty breath asked for some souvenir.
‘Alas! I have nothing,’ she answered; ‘Nothing, but a strange ornament which my father’s mother gave
me immediately before she died, an hour previous to the attack made upon the village,’ and placing her
hand deep into the breast of her dress she drew forth a rough disc of copper about the size of a crown piece
with a hole on it, as if it had been strung upon a thread.
‘When she gave it to me she told me it had been in her possession for years, that it was a talisman against
terror, and that some curious legend was attached to it, the nature of which I do not now recollect. There
is strange writing upon it in some foreign tongue of the Roumis that no one has been able to decipher.’
I looked, but unable to detect anything in
the darkness, I assured her that its possession
would always remind me of her, and slipped
it into the pocket of my gandura. 15 Then
together we crept along under the shadow of
the wall, and, gaining the spot where the horse
stood in readiness, I held her for a second in
my embrace while she kissed me, uttering a
fervent word of thanks, and afterwards assisted
her into the saddle. Then a moment later, with
a whispered ‘Allah isemeleck!’ she sped away,
with her unbound hair flying behind her, and
was instantly lost in the darkness.
On realising that she had gone I was seized
with regret, but feeling that at least I had
saved her from a horrible doom, I returned
to my little shed and, wrapping myself in my
burnouse, slept soundly until the sun had risen
high in the heavens.
Opening my eyes, I at once remembered Khadidja’s quaint souvenir, and on examining it was astonished
to find both obverse and reverse of the roughly fashioned disc covered with an inscription in English crudely
engraved, or rather scratched, apparently with the point of a knife. Investigating it closely I was enabled,
after some difficulty, to read the following surprising words:
‘This record I leave for the person into whose hands it may fall, for I am starving. Whosoever reads this
let him hasten to Zemnou, in the Zelaf Desert, two days from the well of El Ameïma, and from the Bab el
Oued pace twenty steps westward outside the city wall, and under the second bastion let him dig. There
will he be rewarded. John Edward Chatteris, held captive in the Casbah of Borku by order of the Sultan
Othmân. Sunday, June 13, 1843.’
15 Gandoura: A long loose gown with or without sleeves worn chiefly in northern Africa.
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 72

Chatteris! Immediately it occurred to me that a celebrated English explorer, archaeologist, and member
of the Royal Geographic Society of that name, had years ago been lost, and his fate remained a complete
mystery. This, then, was a message inscribed with apparent difficulty within the impregnable citadel of the
warrior, Sultan of Borku, whose little mountain kingdom was situated five hundred miles south of Murzuq,
between the Tibesti Mountains; 16 a secret that for half a century had been in the keeping of Arabs who
could not decipher it.
What might not be buried at the spot indicated by this curious relic of the great traveller? My curiosity
was excited to the utmost. Impatient to investigate the truth, but compelled, nevertheless, to remain
patient until such time as I could escape from my undesirable companions, I concealed the disc in my
gandura and rose to join Abdul-Melik at his morning meal.
Khadidja’s escape caused the old outlaw intense chagrin, and his anger knew no bounds, but luckily no
suspicion fell upon me, and having remained with them during two whole moons I succeeded one day, when
we were near the town of Rhat, in evading them and getting away. As quickly as possible I returned to In
Salah, where I exhibited the metal disc with its strange inscription to Captain Chandioux, who became at
once interested in it, announcing his intention to accompany me next day to investigate the truth of the
engraved record.
With an escort of twenty Spahis, all well mounted and armed, we rode out of In Salah at dawn, and for
nine days continued our journey across the desert due eastwards, first taking the caravan route to Tarz
Oulli, beyond the French boundary, and continuing through the rocky region of the Ihéhaouen and across
the Djedid Oasis, until one evening, at the mahgrib hour, the high white walls and three tall minarets
of the desert city of Zemnou came within view. It was unsafe to take the Spahis nearer, therefore we
returned and bivouacked until darkness set in. Then, dressed in the haick and burnous 17 of the Arab of the
plain, Chandioux with myself and three Spahis, carrying spades concealed beneath our flowing drapery,
approached the town and crept under the shadow of the walls until we reached the Bab-el-Oued, or
principal gate. Guarded by strong watch-towers on either side, the gate was closed, and silently we crept,
anxious and breathless, on over the sand westward until we had counted twenty paces and reached the
second bastion.
Then, after glancing eagerly around to reassure ourselves that we were not observed, we all five
commenced to dig beneath the wall. Discovery, we knew, would mean death. The sand was loose, but full
of stones, and for some time we worked without result. Indeed, I began to fear that someone had already
been able to decipher the record and obeyed its injunctions, when suddenly the spade of one of the Spahis
struck something hard, and he uttered an ejaculation. With one accord we worked with a will, and within
ten minutes we were unearthing an object of extraordinary shape. At first it puzzled us considerably, but at
length, when we had cleared the earth sufficiently to remove it, we made a cursory examination by the aid
of wax tapers, and discovered that it was a kind of stool with a semi-circular seat, supported by six short
columns of twisted gold in imitation of serpents, the seat itself being of gold inlaid with many precious
stones, while the feet consisted of six great yellow topazes, beautifully cut and highly polished, held in
the serpents’ mouths. The gold had become dimmed by long contact with the earth, but the gems, as we
rubbed off the dirt that clung to them, gleamed and sparkled in the tapers’ fitful rays.
The stool, or throne, was so heavy that it was with difficulty two men dragged it from the trench, and
breathless with anxiety we all lent a willing hand to carry it over the five miles of open desert to where
the men were awaiting us. Our arrival was greeted with cheers, but quickly the strange relic was wrapped
in saddle bags and secured upon the back of a spare horse, and we set out on the first stage of our return
journey, reaching In Salah in safety ten days later, and learning with satisfaction on our arrival that Abdul-
16 Tibesti Mountains: A mountain range in the central Sahara, primarily located in the extreme north of Chad, with a small
extension into southern Libya and Lake Chad.
17 Burnous: Arab or Moorish hooded cloak (OED).
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 73

Melik had, during our absence, been killed in skirmish with the Spahis in the Ahaggar. 18 Not until I had
brought the jewelled seat to England and exhibited it before a meeting of the Royal Geographic Society
was I aware of its real antiquarian value. From the letters sent home by the intrepid Dr. Chatteris, and still
preserved in the archives of the Society, it appeared that during 1839 Salman, the great Sheikh of Augila, 19
assembled a formidable following, and proclaiming himself Sultan of Tunis, led an expedition through the
country, extorting money from the people by reason of horrible tortures and fearful barbarities. While
sentencing his unfortunate victims, he always used a curiously-shaped judgment seat, which, for ages, had
been the property of the Sultans of Sokoto, 20 and it thus became known and dreaded as the Throne of the
Thousand Terrors, it only being used on occasions when he sentenced the unfortunate wretches to torture
for the purpose of extracting from them where their wealth was concealed.
Against this fierce rebel the Bey of Tunis was compelled to send a great expedition, and after several
sanguinary encounters at Sinaun, and in the Um-el-Cheil, he was utterly routed and killed in his own
stronghold at Augila. Dr Chatteris, in the last letter received from him, mentioned that he had secured the
jewelled throne, but that on account of the superstitions of the Arabs it was an extremely difficult matter
to convey it to the coast.
Fearing lest he should lose it, he had apparently buried it, and soon afterwards unfortunately fell into
the hands of the Sultan of Borku, who held him captive until his death. Khadidja is still living in Idlès, where
she is happily married to the younger son of the Governor, but in the seclusion of her harem she is still in
ignorance that, by the curious little souvenir with which she rewarded her Infidel friend, she added to our
national collection of antiquities a valuable and highly interesting relic. Visitors to the British Museum will
experience but little difficulty in finding it, for in the Oriental section at the present moment one of the
most frequently inspected and greatly admired treasures is the quaint, historic, and bejewelled Throne of
the Thousand Terrors.
18 Ahaggar: Plateau region in southern Algeria in the west central Sahara.
19 Augila: An oasis town in the Al Wahat District in the Cyrenaica region of northeastern Libya.
20 Sokoto: The Sokoto Caliphate was an independent Islamic Caliphate in West Africa founded in 1809 and abolished in 1903,
when the area came under the British Northern Nigeria Protectorate.
SIR HOWARD VINCENT’S
POLICE CODE
1889
NEIL R A BELL and ADAM WOOD
FOREWORD BY
DEPUTY ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER NEIL BASU
Chairman of the Metropolitan and City Police Orphans Fund
A republishing of the famous guide for Metropolitan Police of the Victorian era, with an extensive introduction by Neil Bell and Adam Wood.
First published in 1881, the Police Code was written by Howard Vincent, Director of the CID and was an invaluable resource to Metropolitan
Police officers. The version reprinted is for 1889, in use by officers at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
Originally, a share of proceeds from sales were donated to the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage, and we are proud to continue this
tradition by donating an equal share of profits from every book sold to the Metropolitan and City Police Orphans Fund.
AVAILABLE NOW FROM MANGO BOOKS
www.mangobooks.co.uk
Ripperologist 146 October 2014 74
* 262 pages - Hardback, cloth covers - 8 colour plates - £15.00 + P&P

Reviews
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF JACK THE RIPPER STORIES
Thanks to the kind folks at Robinson we have three copies of this
collection of 40 Ripper-related fiction stories, compiled and edited by
Maxim Jakubowski.
We recently ran a competition where our readers could win one of these
copies.
The question was: “With whom, in 1999 and 2008, did Maxim Jakubowski
co-edit an anthology of non fiction essays on the identity of Jack the
Ripper, also published by Robinson?”
The correct answer was NATHAN BRAUND.
We had a tremendous response, with over 90 correct answers! Thank you
to everyone who entered.
The winners, whose names have been chosen at random, are as follows:
Lindsay Goode
David Hall
Steve Weaver
Congratulations! Your book will be sent to you very soon!
WANT US TO REVIEW YOUR BOOK?
Ripperologist magazine has a circulation list of over 900 readers,
each with an interest in Jack the Ripper, Victorian crime and London’s East End.
If you are an author or publisher of a forthcoming book and would like to reach our readers,
please get in touch at contact@ripperologist.biz
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 75

J A C K T H E R I P P E R
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
Bruce Robinson
London: 4th Estate, 2015
www.4thestate.co.uk
ISBN: 978007548873
hardcover/ebook; 850pp; illus; notes & sources; index
£25.00 hardcover / £14.99 Kindle
2015 opened with a conspiracy book and the publishing year almost comes to a close with a
conspiracy book. They All Love Jack has apparently taken fifteen years to write and cost an estimated
£500,000 to research, and it claims that Jack the Ripper was a Victorian superstar and Freemason
named Michael Maybrick, that he left signs of Masonic ritual at the murder scenes, and that the
Victorian establishment in the shape of Sir Charles Warren and almost any other Freemason who
swam within reach worked themselves into a frenzy to hide the fact.
The Freemasons are at the heart of several hundred conspiracy theories. The Freemasons were supposedly responsible
for organising the eighteenth-century ancien régime (the old regime in France). Freemasons and the Jews were
responsible for World War I, according to Friedrich Wichtl’s book The World War, World Freemasonry, World Revolution.
Freemasonry features in the Holy Blood, Holy Grail nonsense about the bloodline of Christ. The Freemasons faked the
Apollo moon landings, and according to David Icke, leaders of Illuminati-Masons are reptilian humanoids from another
dimension.
I, for one, would need a very compelling reason to buy into any Freemason theory.
The idea that the Freemason-dominated Victorian Establishment worked itself into a froth to hide the evidence that
Jack the Ripper was himself a Freemason probably wouldn’t persuade even a retarded gnat if the tale had been told
by a less accomplished storyteller than Bruce Robinson, but Robinson lays out his his case in overwhelming detail and
the force of his own conviction carries the incautious reader on a roller-coaster ride to what they might conclude is the
truth. But this story isn’t the truth.
I usually avoid reading reviews of the books I am reviewing, but in this case I knew that mainstream reviewers would
lack the specialist knowledge to properly assess Robinson’s claims, but I wanted to know their reaction to the overall
argument. Reading the reviews revealed rather bewildered reviewers who were in the main underwhelmed by the book.
In the Daily Telegraph Mick Brown stated the obvious, ‘Robinson is not a historian; he is a dramatist…’
Robinson is indeed a storyteller and he doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He’s certainly doesn’t pretend to be an
historian, and that’s just as well because he doesn’t come close to being one. Writing of the argument exhaustively laid
out in this book, Rosita Boland asked in the Irish Times,‘Would it all stand up before a panel of history-PhD assessors?’
She gives an unadorned answer, ‘No.’
The important distinction between historians and dramatists is that the former deal with facts and evidence, whilst
the latter deal with entertaining things like storylines. As P D Smith observed in the Guardian, whether or not you are
persuaded by Robinson’s theory, his book is ‘still a bloody good read’. It may well be, but the historian has higher goals
and would find little satisfaction in providing ‘a bloody good read’ when the theory they want to persuade their peers
is dumped in the rubbish bin. Mr Robinson isn’t dispassionate. He is unashamedly biased. He wears his subjectivity like
a badge of honour. Robinson’s argument is personal. He is clearly very passionate. Sometimes he’s overwhelmed by his
passions. Occasionally I worried about his blood pressure. ‘Rarely has a book on Jack the Ripper been written with such
visceral anger,’ wrote P D Smith in The Guardian. Robinson’s authorial voice is ‘scabrous’, wrote Mick Brown in The Daily
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 76

Telegraph. Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday wrote that Robinson’s attempts to set out his argument in sober, rational
terms were ‘continually undermined by sugar-rushes of sudden mad invective.’
Richard Davenport-Hines in The Times took the view that the Whitechapel murders were just a pretext for Mr
Robinson ‘to write a huge diatribe about class conspiracies’. A friend of Mr Robinson, Andrew Birkin, was quoted by Mick
Brown in The Daily Telegraph, as saying, ‘The Ripper book isn’t really about who Jack the Ripper was. It’s really about
Bruce’s own obsessive loathing of the establishment – and he’d be the first to admit that.’
Objectivity is not what this book is about, it’s an exercise in spleen venting.
Robinson’s book, for some reason longlisted for the £20,000 Samuel Johnson literary prize but unsurprisingly failing to
make the shortlist - books about Jack the Ripper don’t win literary prizes - is an 800-page mammoth. It can be broadly
divided into three objectives:
(1) Robinson argues that Freemasonic ritual symbolism was left at all the Jack the Ripper murder scenes and were
recognised as such by Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a high-ranking and extremely
well-informed Freemason, who went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the Masonic links. ‘What we have here is
an Establishment conspiracy… to conceal a Freemason,’ he claims.
(2) Robinson argues that the murders were committed by the celebrated musician and song-writer Michael Maybrick, a
superstar of his day but now chiefly remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the brother of poison victim
James Maybrick. Michael’s motive is a bit hazy, but is basically that he was working off his hatred of Florence, the
wife of James, who was convicted of his murder. And was also kicking Freemasonry in the teeth in the process.
(3) Robinson challenges accepted Ripperological thinking on assorted aspects of the Ripper case, from the writing on
the wall in Goulston Street through the coins left at Chapman’s feet, the grape-stalks found in Dutfield’s Yard, to
the genuineness of the ‘Ripper’ correspondence. In the process Robinson makes clear his contempt for Ripperology
and seizes lots of opportunities to criticise Ripperologists, myself included.
As said, objectivity is as alien to Mr Robinson as the reptilian humanoid leaders of the Illuminati/ Freemasons are to
David Icke. If Robinson wants you to think Donald Swanson was a rotten and corrupt policemen, he doesn’t bother with
niceties such as supportive evidence, he just calls him one. And just in case you forget, he reminds you by calling him
one over and over. And he does the same about assorted policemen, coroners, solicitors, politicians, and pretty much
anyone who’s rolled a trouser leg up to the knee. Robinson possesses an inexhaustible supply of denigratory words and
phrases with which he labels anyone he wants his readers to know is a villain.
Sir Charles Warren was ‘a lousy cop’, was ‘an aggressive authoritarian who imagined all social ills could be solved
with a truncheon’ who ‘went berserk on the back of a horse in London’s West End and shafted the riffraff as if he was
up a delta in Matabeleland.’ Robinson adds for good measure that he was a ’selfserving idiot’, a ‘Masonic zombie’, and
a ‘buffoon’. Warren and Anderson were ‘God-sodden zealots’.
Donald Swanson is a ‘rotten little copper’ who ‘cobbled up…bullshit’. He’s the man with a bucket of whitewash, he’s
a creator of smokescreens. Robinson nicknames him ‘Shifty Nib’ and says he ‘couldn’t look at a bottle of ink without
fishing it for lies.’ He was a ‘shifty little ink-monger’.
Sir Robert Anderson, the helpless target for everyone’s brickbats, receives a royal treatment from Robinson: ‘If
you could get a cigarette paper between Anderson’s teeth he was probably lying.’ He was ‘bewitched by his own selfrighteousness.’
He was a ‘notable reptile’, ‘unquestionably an Irish idiot’, ‘an evangelical twerp’, ‘a veteran liar’, ‘a
religious fanatic and a liar of incontestable talent’, ‘a professional liar and a moral degenerate’. He ‘could lie like a
back-alley slut’. According to Robinson, Anderson was also a ‘notable anti-Semite’ - I’m not sure there is any evidence
that Anderson was anti-Semitic or any more anti-Semitic than the average Victorian, or was so distinguished an anti-
Semite as to deserve the epithet ‘notable’.
Macnaghten is ‘a liar’ whose opinions ‘are not to be taken too seriously’. He was (sarcastically) ‘that fount of
dispassionate accuracy’, a man ‘not best known for his original thinking’. His ‘silly memoir’ is ‘monkeybrained’ (which
is damned insulting to Macnaghten’s book and monkeys), his memoranda is ‘transparently bogus’. ‘Macnaghten and
Anderson are doormen at the house of mirrors…’
Arnold is ‘Warren’s laundryman’. Nott-Bower, the police chief of Liverpool is ‘a goon’ who shouldn’t ‘be in charge of
anything beyond a municipal urinal’. Chief Constable Withers of Bradford is a ‘f****** idiot’.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 77

Coroner Wynne Baxter was a ‘Masonic dupe’. ‘He should have been summarily fired, and prosecuted for misfeasance
of office.’
Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, is ‘the boss c*** of his class’. A ‘corpulent reprobate’, he is ‘a master of chicanery’
and a barefaced liar’. Home Secretary Henry Matthews is ‘a rotten little whore’. The Earl of Euston is ‘a classic pile of
shit’, Lord Arthur Somerset is a ‘noble faggot’, and Prince Albert Victor, is ‘a halfwitted homosexual’, an ‘effete little
half-wit’, and an ‘effete little useless pederast’.
Oh, and Scotland Yard under Warren ‘was corrupt from its back door to its front’, Parliament ‘was rotten to its
sanctimonious marrow’, ‘the British state was rotten to the core,’ and ‘the Victorian ruling elite’ was a ‘venal dinosaur.’
Mr Robinson doesn’t like Ripperology very much either, and he’s contemptuous of Ripperologists. They are the
‘guardians of flat-earth thinking’, he writes. ‘I do not care for corporate thinking, and therefore I do not like Ripperology.’
‘Until confronted with Ripperology I had never laboured through such an expulsion of syncopated crap masquerading
as history in all my life.’ ‘I tire of its blindness, constipated thinking and phoney academia. I tire of its ‘shameless
manipulation’. ‘Ripperology is like a gang of shagged-out seagulls in the wake of a phantom steamer.’
Well, that’s a point of view, I suppose.
Ripperology is not a Borg-like collective. Since maybe as early as the 1970s it was customary for Ripper authors to rip
the guts out of other authors’ theories. Today, one of the most disagreeable things about Ripperology is the venomous
fallings out between Ripperologists on the internet message boards. Ripperology is anything but ‘corporate thinking’.
But my favourite line of Mr Robinson’s on the topic is: ‘Ripperology is dedicated to the non-detection of J.T.R.’
I read that several times. I looked for a meaning I wasn’t seeing. I looked again. Nothing. I read it again: ‘Ripperology
is dedicated to the non-detection of J.T.R.’ Bollocks, I thought, by now infected by Mr Robinson’s wide vocabulary
of expletives - used to the detriment of his book, I may add. Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday observed that the
‘frequent bouts of Tourette’s… undermine Robinson’s credibility as a disinterested historian, and his ability to build up
a convincing case…’ Too true.
Anyway, from the endless stream of suspect-orientated Ripper books it must be patently obvious that Ripperology is
not dedicated to the non-detection of Jack the Ripper.
According to Mr Robinson, another fault of Ripperology is that ‘If a policeman wrote it, it’s enshrined, axiomatic
amongst Ripperologists as a sacrosanct truth. There’s Swanson and his ‘marginalia’, Macnaghten and his ‘memoranda’,
Littlechild and his ‘letter’. Ripperology is constipated with this junk.’
One can only wonder if Mr Robinson actually knows anything about Ripperology, or whether he’s simply beguiled by
an idea that’s crept into his head and set up home. Ripperologists do not unquestioningly accept anything written by
a copper. There are some Ripperologists who place great store by the official police reports, always preferring a MEPO
report to a newspaper account, but personal comments and reminiscences such as the marginalia and the memoranda
are questioned and doubted until they scream with the agony of it all.
Individual Ripperologists also come in for a lot of stick.
Philip Sugden, who Robinson refers to as ‘Boss Ripperologist’ and is a special target, is ‘all paper and no walls’
(whatever that means). ‘Every time there is a little light cast upon the mystery, Sugden and others turn up to stamp
on it, navigate, dismiss or feebly argue it away.’ This he describes as Sugden dispensing ‘fairy dust’. Sugden can also
be found ‘flogging a substantial untruth’ and indulging in ‘shameless distortion’. And he is guilty of having ‘laughably
misrepresented Vincent’s Code’.
Melvin Harris is ‘all hat and no drawers’, ‘disseminating characteristic misconceptions with his usual small calibre
pop-gun.’
Stewart Evans and Donald Rumbelow are responsible for ‘an excrescence that disgraces the page.’
I am also frequently shaken out of my quiet repose by some criticism or other, and I should say that not all are
undeserved. I have made mistakes. Who hasn’t? Most of Mr Robinson’s targets are dead and obviously unable to speak in
their own defence. I can’t speak for them either. But I can speak for myself with authority, so if I expose my failings we
may also get some idea about the reliability of what Robinson says about the others.
One prettily phrased accusation is that, ‘Mr Begg is so agog to prove Packer a liar that he buggers himself with his
own contradictions.’
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 78

I’m not sure that one can be ‘agog’ to prove something, but we’ll let that pass. What this is all about is the claim by
Matthew Packer, a Berner Street greengrocer to have sold grapes to Elizabeth Stride an hour or so before she was found
dead. At about 11:00pm a man and a woman, whom he subsequently identified as Elizabeth Stride, bought some grapes
from his shop. He recalled that it was raining heavily at the time and that he watched the couple getting soaked as they
ate the grapes. When Elizabeth Stride’s body was found a short time later, it was examined by Dr Blackwell, who stated
that her clothes were dry (or, as he peculiarly expressed it, ‘not wet with rain’.) I concluded that if Stride’s clothes
were dry, she could not have been the woman who bought the grapes from Packer. However, a few pages earlier I had
said that it was raining hard when two men saw a man and a woman they afterwards identified as Stride leaving a pub
in nearby Settles Street. Mr Robinson writes: ‘So, at 11:00pm it was pissing down in Settles Street, while 100 yards away
in Berner Street it was as dry as a bone?’
Well, no. I’m not quite that thick. There is no doubt that Dr Blackwell examined Elizabeth Stride, but it is not certain
that Stride was the woman seen leaving the pub in Settles Street, so I concluded that if Stride’s clothes were dry, she
couldn’t have been the woman seen leaving the pub in the rain and who ate Mr Packer’s grapes in Berner Street. All well
and good. However, Mr Robinson has produced another examining doctor who said Stride’s clothing was sodden, and Mr
Robinson has made better use of the weather information than I did (or obtained more detailed weather information
than I did) and he rightly challenges my conclusion, forcing a re-examination of the evidence. Fantastic. I’m all for reexamining
the evidence. But what I am not too happy about is Mr Robinson’s suggestion that I wanted - if that is the
inference to be drawn from ‘agog’ - to prove Packer a liar. I might be an oaf, but I am an honest one. I interpret the
source material as best I can. I do not have a hidden agenda.
Staying with the grape-selling Mr Packer: there was a sketch, apparently of a boy, which Mr Packer contemptuously
dismissed as not having the remotest resemblance to a man he’d seen with the women he believed to have been
Elizabeth Stride. Mr Robinson says that the creation of this sketch was ‘duplicitous garbage’ instigated only by those
seeking to deceive. He continues, ‘and only those seeking to deceive could invest it with credibility. Ripperologist Mr
Paul Begg seizes upon it without inhibition…he creates an outrageous sentence which suggests Packer is rejecting the
sketches he approved in the Telegraph.’ Now, what Mr Robinson is contentedly prattling on about is that the Daily
Telegraph published two sketches side by side. One was of a fresh-faced young man, the other of an older man with
a pencil moustache. Either I never knew about the sketch of the boy, or, if I knew about it, I stupidly dismissed it
from my mind as unimportant. Anyway, I thought the Telegraph’s sketch of the young man was the picture Packer was
contemptuously dismissing.
It was a mistake. I don’t mind my mistakes being exposed. We all make them and I am considerably less interested
in the making of mistakes than I am in the correction of them. I am concerned with establishing the facts and if I know
one thing without a shadow of doubt it’s that my mistakes are made honestly. I do not, never have, and never will do
something with the deliberate intention of deceiving someone.
Turning to the writing on the wall at Wentworth Model Dwellings, in the 1970s the late Stephen Knight argued in his
best-selling Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that ‘Juwes’, hitherto dismissed as a mis-spelling of ‘Jews’, was in fact
a Masonic word. In Masonic tradition the architect of King Solomon’s temple, Hiram Abiff, was murdered by three men
named Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum. When they were caught, King Solomon decreed that they should be executed in
specific ways, these ways being symbolically enacted in Masonic ritual. The men were known collectively as the Assassins
or the Ruffians, and Stephen Knight claimed that they were also known as the Juwes. In the late 1980s, when I was
researching my book Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts, I was told by the librarian at Freemason’s Hall that ‘Juwes’
was not a Masonic word. Almost as an afterthought he added that Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum had not featured in
Masonic ritual since the beginning of the 19th century.
Mr Robinson has found a Masonic encyclopaedia which shows that in fact Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum were alive and
kicking like Tiller Girls in late 19th century British Masonic tradition. I have no idea why I was told differently, but Mr
Robinson takes pages to excitedly drive home this mistake, if mistake it be, and in the process obscures the fact that
‘Juwes’ was not a Masonic word and was not the collective name for Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum.
In fairness to Mr Robinson, he does clearly admit that ‘Juwes’ was not a Masonic word. What he says, though, is that
at the murder scenes the Ripper left evidence suggesting a symbolic re-enactment of the ritual executions of Jubelo,
Jubela, and Jubelum. He also argues that ‘Juwes’ was a word clue, similar to some Masonic puzzles, and that Sir Charles
Warren, an expert at Masonic word games, would have immediately recognised as referring to Jubelo, Jubala, and
Jubelum - their names all begin ‘JU’, which could be verbalised as Ju’s, pronounced ‘Juws’ and spelt ‘Juwes’.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 79

This is pure supposition, but it is a neat argument, albeit one that depends entirely on whether it can be shown that
anything at the murder scenes really reflects Masonic ritual. That’s something to look at carefully.
Mr Robinson claims that Philip Sugden fiddled about with a direct quotation so that he could play down the urgency
in Sir Charles Warren’s dash to Goulston Street. In a report to the Home Office on 6 November 1888, Warren explained
‘The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall in Goulston Street evidently written with
the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews…’ Later in the same report Warren wrote, ‘I accordingly
went down to Goulston Street at once before going on to the scene of the murder…’ When Philip Sugden came to quote
this report he wrote, ‘I…went down to Goulston Street…before going on to the scene of the murder.’ Sugden omitted
the preamble in which Warren wrote that the writing on the wall was ‘The most pressing question at that moment’,
and he edited out ‘at once’ from Warren’s later statement. In Mr Robinson’s opinion, Sugden, ‘by fiddling about with
this sentence, he defuses the urgency associated with the writing on the wall…’ It is difficult not to agree. Struggle as
I might, I can’t see any justification for editing out ‘at once’. I can’t blame Robinson for suggesting that Sugden was
intentionally trying to play down the supposed urgency of Warren’s trip to Goulston Street. The question, though, is why
was the writing on the wall important?
The sequence of events is actually quite clear, Warren was told about the writing by Superintendent Arnold, the head
of H Division, who expressed his fear that it could incite anti-Jewish violence. Arnold’s anxiety was so great that he
had an inspector in Goulston Street waiting for the order to erase the writing. Warren, knowing that the destruction of
evidence was extremely serious, did the ‘good boss’ thing, taking the responsibility for such an important order on his
own shoulders and went to Goulston Street to personally give instructions for the writing to be erased. The matter was
by now one of some urgency as it was getting light and people would soon be on the streets.
Now, one might ask whether there was in fact the remotest chance of the chalked message inciting violence, whether
the whole thing could not have been resolved by the simple expedient of erasing ‘Juwes’, and whether it was completely
beyond the wit of the police to hide the message until it was light enough for a photograph to be taken? But which is the
most probable, that Sir Charles Warren went to Goulston Street to obliterate the writing because it alluded to Masonic
ritual (presumably recognised as such by Arnold), or that Warren went to Goulston Street to erase the writing because
his man with a finger on the pulse of the East End feared the writing could incite violence?
Mr Robinson’s argument is a house of cards; one assumption carefully built on another, and another built on top of
that, with the whole structure liable to collapse with the faintest puff of wind.
Before leaving the writing on the wall, Mr Robinson is somewhat critical of the A to Z, which apparently never plainly
says something. According to Mr Robinson, it ‘dribbles’ it, it ‘chimes’ it, and even ‘minces’ it.
Ooooo, fantabulosa. Bona.
Anyway, at the inquest PC Long, who discovered the apron and the writing on the wall in Goulston Street, was asked
why he searched only the landing and stairs of the dwellings and not the rooms. The A to Z says that PC Long ‘reasonably
replied’ that he didn’t know at that time that a murder had been committed. Mr Robinson doesn’t like this, and in a
jaw-dropping example of pot calling, he detects an ‘editorial slant’ in the words ‘reasonably replied’. He also thinks that
‘this entry is so inaccurate that it qualifies as fiction.’
What PC Long actually said was, ‘When I found the piece of apron I at once searched the staircases leading to the
buildings. Having searched I at once proceeded to the station. Before proceeding there I had heard of a murder having
been committed, I had heard of the murder in Mitre Square.’ What this means is that when PC Long discovered the
apron he did not know about the murder in Mitre Square, and he did not know about it when he searched the stairs and
landings. He heard of the murder after he had completed his search, but before he headed to the police station. PC
Long’s reply to the juror was therefore utterly reasonable.
We’re all big boys and can accept criticism, but looking at these few examples suggests that for all his dislike of
Ripperology and contempt for Ripperologists, and for all the £500,000 he spent researching the subject, Mr Robinson
leaves a lot to be desired.
The ‘Dear Boss’ letter passes beneath Mr Robinson’s magnifying glass, in particular the threat therein to ‘clip the
lady’s ears off…’ The murderer didn’t manage to do this, only severing a lobe, and a lobe does not make an ear, quotes
one Ripperological voice, fairy dust falling like a winter’s snow. Mr Robinson delivers his size tens to the pants, citing Dr
Gordon Brown’s report which states that ‘the lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through’ (the auricle
being that part of the ear that sticks from the head) and he reproduces a mortuary sketch that seems to show the entire
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 80

ear missing. However, ‘obliquely’ means diagonally, which presumably means that the ear was sliced off at an angle
from where the lobe attached to the head. Does a diagonal piece of ear constitute an attempt to slice off the whole ear?
As might be expected, Mr Robinson writes at length about the claim that ‘Dear Boss’ was penned by an ‘irresponsible
journalist’, who Mr Robinson confidently asserts did not exist. With this observation one begins to think that not only
didn’t Mr Robinson spend his £500,000 wisely, but that he sees only what he wants to see. For example, he writes: ‘It
was Sims, incidentally, who received one of those beguiling bum steers so beloved of Ripperology. Like ‘the Swanson
Marginalia’ and ‘the Macnaghten Memorandum’, it is reverentially referred to as ‘the Littlechild Letter’. The copper
who never caught the Whitechapel Fiend, and squandered no time trying to, is now thrashing away on his Underwood
with a solution. While his letter has charm as memorabilia, it’s worthless as anything else.’
Well, where to begin; we’re talking about a letter that was written by Littlechild and is unimaginatively and far from
reverentially called ‘the Littlechild letter’. I wonder what screenwriter Robinson would call it? Anyway, Littlechild didn’t
venture a solution, as even the most casual reading of the letter demonstrates. Needless to point out, Sims initiated the
exchange of letters by asking about a ‘Dr. D.’ Littlechild simply replied, saying he hadn’t heard about a ‘Dr. D.’ but had
heard of a Dr. T., who he goes on to suggest wasn’t the Ripper. How was Littlechild ‘thrashing’ out a solution?
As for Littlechild’s suggestion that ‘Tom Bullen’ penned ‘Dear Boss’, Mr Robinson gives us the benefit of his not so
well-informed opinion, ‘…to credit him with ‘Dear Boss’ is expecting a little too much servitude from ink,’ except that
in 1895 the American journalist Arthur Brisbane said pretty much the same thing. Was he wrong too? I wonder, was Mr
Robinson, coffers depleted by half a mill, unaware of Arthur Brisbane, or is he guilty of selective use of sources?
Turning to the theory that Jack the Ripper was Michael Maybrick, the idea is flatter than a cheap pizza. At the
beginning of The Diary of Jack the Ripper Shirley Harrison quotes part of a letter she received from Bruce Robinson: ‘If
this Diary is a modern forgery - which I am sure it is not - and if I were the forger, I would consider it to have been the
summit of my literary achievement.’
They All Love Jack doesn’t mention Shirley Harrison very much. Of the diary he writes, ‘I don’t want to get into this
document at all’.
Time passes. Minds change. On reflection Mr Robinson is perhaps inclined to place a higher price on his literary
achievements. That’s fine and almost certainly correct, but I am bemused by his reasons for dismissing James as Jack
the Ripper. It was because (a) he was an arsenic user and would have known if Florence was poisoning him with arsenic,
and (b) because ‘Jack the Ripper was in the business of murdering women, not being murdered by them’. I’m afraid I’m
not seeing something in this argument. Like rationality. But I don’t see why either of Robinson’s suggestions disqualify
James Maybrick from being the Ripper. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t for a moment think that James was the Whitechapel
murderer, but I can’t see why his ability to recognise arsenic if given it (assuming that argument is valid) precluded him
from killing East End women several months earlier. Anyway, by these means Mr Robinson removes James from the frame
and cuts and pastes Michael in his place. Michael is the author of the diary, Michael is Jack the Ripper, and it is Michael
who murdered surrogates for Florence.
Some Jack the Ripper correspondence is written with the distinctive and old fashioned ‘f’ for ’s’ - as in that delight of
young boys, ‘where the bee sucks there suck I’ - and this was an affectation also beloved of Michael. At first blush this
seems remarkably persuasive, albeit only showing that perhaps Michael, like, allegedly, Walter Sickert, wrote letters
to the police and press. However, it strikes me that Michael would have been plum stupid to have written with such a
distinctive hand. Otherwise, the idea that anyone could have committed such horrendous crimes as those committed by
Jack the Ripper, then retired to live in semi-seclusion on the Isle of Wight, offends my sense of plausibility.
This is not sufficient reason to dismiss Michael Maybrick. We must look at and consider him carefully, and we must
do the same about the Masonic symbolism at the crime scenes and the possibility that efforts were made to hide it,
albeit on a scale considerably smaller than Mr Robinson suggests. The possibility that Matthew Packer did sell grapes to
Elizabeth Stride; that ‘two farthings polished brightly’, as reported the Daily Telegraph, really were arranged with other
objects at the feet of Annie Chapman’; the ^^ under the eyes of Eddowes looking like Masonic compasses… we need to
consider these things, partly because I’d hate to see a display of Ripperological corporate thinking come into play, but
also because I think it is valuable to take a second look at the accepted facts. It doesn’t matter if the theory doesn’t
pan out, it’s the fresh look at what’s been accepted that could lead somewhere.
I could go on. And on. It’s a big book.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 81

Overall, this hernia-giving doorstop of a book is a disgrace. It isn’t history. It is a lavatory-mouthed personal rant
vomiting up accusations against all and sundry with little or no supportive evidence to back them up. It’s offensive,
but far more importantly it obscures Robinson’s arguments. Robinson overwrites. If something can be explained in two
pages, Mr Robinson takes ten. And repeats it. Probably twice. I’m jesting, but not a lot. Richard Davenport-Hines in
The Times referred to this as the reader being ‘bludgeoned with unreliable facts and judgements’. If ever there was an
author who needed a fearless editor to get the writing focused, the repetition junked, and the rant stripped out, it’s
Bruce Robinson, but I suspect that a wound up Bruce Robinson going off on one is what the publisher wanted and what
this book is all about.
A decade or so ago conspiracism was popular. The shelves of bookshops groaned under the weight of titles describing
so many conspiracies that it seemed as if nothing was real. We were living in the Twilight Zone. But conspiracism has
had its day. The world is precisely what it seems to be: normal, boring, and full of screw-ups. My point is that Sir Charles
Warren went to Goulston Street because he had been told the writing could incite an anti-Jewish riot. Whether or not
it could or would have done is utterly irrelevant. It was a real world judgement call, perhaps based on a complete
misreading of the signs by Superintendent Arnold, back at work fresh from his holidays. It was a dull, boring, screw-up.
Real world.
Robinson’s arguments follow a well-worn and predictable pattern. One claim is piled on another, then another, and
another, until the sheer weight seems overwhelmingly persuasive, but each of the claims has to be rock solid. All it takes
is one weak link for the whole edifice comes crashing down like a a tottering Jenga tower. I genuinely hate to say it, but
I have a horrible feeling that in a few months we’ll see piles of this book on tables in the remainder shops.
However, there is definitely gold in them there pages. I have no doubt at all that it will repay careful reading. If
researchers cut through the crap and focus on the questions Robinson asks, such as the whole issue of Matthew Packer,
we might either get a completely new perspective on some things or tighten up what is already known. Either way, we’ll
find nuggets. I hope they’ll be worth the effort.
Jack the Ripper: Case Solved?
G. Alexander
Morrisville, N.C.: Lulu Enterprises, 2015
www.lulu.com
ISBN: 9781326389680
softcover; 176pp;
£8.49
The theory advanced by G. Alexander is that friends of Toulouse-Lautrec took revenge upon Mary
Kelly, from whom it is argued he contracted syphilis. Alexander does not state with certainty who this
assassin was, but suggests Dr Henri Bourges, a medical man who for a time shared an apartment with
Toulouse-Lautrec and was perhaps installed there to keep an eye on the painter’s activities. Henri
Bourges (1860-1942) was one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s best friends and a confidant of his family. Whilst
studying medicine in Paris he shared an apartment at 19 rue Fontaine with the artist for seven years
from 1887 and 1893, leaving to marry and take up what proved to be a very successful practice and medical career. It was
Bourges who, in 1899, persuaded Toulouse-Lautrec’s mother to admit him to a sanitarium to be treated for alcoholism.
Briefly the theory is that in the 1880s Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite model was red-headed Carmen Gaudin, a
young women who worked in a laundry near Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio in the Rue Ganneron. In a letter to his mother,
when mentioning an unnamed model believed, apparently with some certainty, to be Carmen Gaudin, Toulouse-Lautrec
wrote the name Jeanette Hathaway. G Alexander argues that this was Carmen Gaudin’s real name and from it that she
was English, from where it is but a short step to arguing that back in England Jeanette Hathaway became Marie Jeanette
Kelly.
It is supposed that Toulouse-Lautrec caught syphilis from Carmen Gaudin and that in reprisal and perhaps at the
behest of Toulouse-Lautrec’s mildly eccentric father, Dr Bourges sought her out and after several cases of mistaken
identity murdered her. The immediate obstacle to this theory is that it isn’t certainly known that Toulouse-Lautrec had
caught syphilis, be it from Carmen Gaudin or anyone else, but given his lifestyle it is quite possible that he did, so this
isn’t a hurdle too awkward not to be able to clear. Bet even if one accepts for argument’s sake that Toulouse-Lautrec
caught syphilis from Carmen Gaudin and that she was in reality an English woman named Jeanette Hathaway, that she
was Mary Kelly is a connection which is actually very hard to make.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 82

Joseph Barnett stated that Mary Kelly had gone to France but had not liked it there and had returned after a couple
of weeks. We don’t know whether this story is true or not, but even if it is true there is no reason to suppose that Kelly
stayed longer than two weeks or that she subsequently returned there, or that she worked there as a laundress or in
any other capacity. G. Alexander works hard to sweep this aside and argue otherwise, but ultimately his argument lacks
conviction.
As for Carmen Gaudin, with a few notable exceptions it seems that artists’ models fade into the obscurity from which
they often came, leaving their image but otherwise little more than a name, which in many cases might not be real.
Toulouse-Lautrec first saw Carmen Gaudin at the exit of a Paris restaurant in 1884 and was immediately attracted by her
beautiful copper-coloured hair - Lautrec having a strong liking for redheads. He painted her a lot for several years and
one painting, ‘The Laundress’, was auctioned by Christie’s in New York in 2005 for $22.4 million, the highest price so far
paid for a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec. It seems that the date most commonly assigned to this painting in 1889, which
would seem to dash Alexander’s theory upon the rocks. Alexander argues, perhaps persuasively, at least to a reader not
versed in the dating of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, that the dates assigned to them are in some cases off by a couple
of years, and ‘The Laundress’ is one of them. However, I have also read that Carmen Gaudin lived until 1901, when she
possibly fell victim to the Spanish Flu epidemic. I have no idea how true this is, or how reliable the evidence on which
it is based may be, but, if true, it delivers a fatal blow to Alexander’s theory.
Alexander’s theory is a variation on a theme we’ve seen repeated time and again, namely that Jack the Ripper was
exacting revenge on or on behalf of someone who had wronged them or wronged someone close to them. It is almost
a parallel of Leonard Matters’ ‘Dr Stanley’, for example, and it is unlikely that the Jack the Ripper murders were
committed for a motive so prosaic, if, indeed, there was a motive at all. It should also be said that Alexander’s theory
is constructed on plentiful ‘ifs’ and we’ve seen quite a few in this short review: if Toulouse-Lautrec caught syphilis; if
he caught it from Carmen Gaudin; if Carmen Gaudin was really named Jeanette Hathaway, if Jeanette Hathaway was
English; if ‘The Laundress’ is incorrectly dated 1889 and was painted before that date, if Carmen Gaudin was Mary
Kelly… There are no notes, no sources, and no index, and the book would have benefited from passing through the hands
of a good editor, but it’s an entertaining read, even if the theory seems improbable.
If you want a taster of what to expect, Greg Alexander wrote an article, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’ for Ripperologist,
134, October 2013.
Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Casebook
Richard Whittington-Egan
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2015
www.amberley-books.com
ISBN:9781445649610
ISBN: 9781445617862 ebook
hardcover/ebook
510pp; illus; notes; biblio; index.
£14.99 softcover/£6.99 Kindle
Ripperology has been around so long that it has its own history, the development and growth of which
has been charted in a couple of outstanding books, Robin Odell’s Ripperology (2006) and John Bennett’s
shamefully-neglected Jack the Ripper: The Making of the Myth (2011). To these must be added Jack the
Ripper: The Definitive Casebook by Richard Whittington-Egan, originally published in hardcover in 2013, and essentially
a review of ‘Ripperature’ from 1888 until 2000, with a few honourable mentions to have appeared in the fifteen years
since then.
I wasn’t keen on the book when I got it for review in 2013. I found and still find the structure difficult to get to grips
with, but I must say that since then I have grown accustomed to the book and now like it very much. Mr Whittington-
Egan is a great writer, generous to fellow researchers, and able to review with objectivity, which, in such a narrow field
where authors and reviewers tend to know one another, is very difficult. Whittington-Egan manages to say it as it is,
but do it with charm. Of one writer’s argument he very kindly says it ‘depends upon several acts of faith and hope on
his [the author’s] part, and a considerable donation of charity on the part of his reader.’ Gently done. In context, the
author probably never even noticed the knee going in. But when Whittington-Egan turns nasty, when the gloves come
off, he can be brutal. He lambasts one book as ‘appallingly careless’, as full of ‘crass inaccuracies’, and as littered with
‘frightful howlers’. But he prefaces this bloodletting with an almost avuncular, ‘What is one, hand on heart and anxious
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 83

not to wound, to say about…’ I bet the author of the book in question, bloodied, needing stitches, couldn’t be cross with
a reviewer facing a difficult task but genuinely anxious ‘not to wound’.
The book is divided into six parts. Part One is called ‘The Seeding of the Killing Field’ and consists of six essays
discussing what might be described as the Jack the Ripper phenomenon from the commission of the crimes through to
the first hardback books about them. One passing observation in the first essay slightly raised my eyebrows, ‘…it had
always struck one as somewhat surprising that the populace at large should have worked themselves into such a truly
heroic state of terror following the discovery of the corpse of Annie Chapman, which was, after all, preceded by only a
single previous Ripper murder; that of Mary Ann Nichols.’
This is true, but Martha Tabram was ferociously stabbed to death on 7 August 1888, only a short while before Nichols
was killed. That makes Annie Chapman the third woman to have died in a relatively small geographical area, the second
to have been horribly mutilated, all within a month between 7 August and 8 September. That would have been pretty
scary, whether or not they were all killed by the same hand. Whittington-Egan uses another author - a sociologist named
Joseph C Fisher and his book Killer Among Us: Public Reactions To Serial Murder (1997) - to establish that the Ripper
murders ended with that of Mary Kelly.
Anyway, essay two looks at early suspects like ‘Leather Apron’ and at some contemporary theorising; essay three
takes a canter through contemporary police thinking; essay four, does the same but it’s medical opinion; essay five
considers the the early scribes, concluding with the journalist William Le Queux; and essay six is a look at writers from
Le Queux to Donald McCormick’s 1959 offering, The Identity of Jack the Ripper.
In Part Two Whittington-Egan gets to the guts of his book, critiquing books from Cullen (1965) to Jane Caputi’s The
Age of the Sex Crime (1982). This is where the arrangement of the book can catch the incautious reader off-guard. The
essay headings mention the suspect, such as ‘Jack the Wig: Montague John Druitt’, but one will later encounter ‘Jack the
Cricketer: Montague John Druitt’ and ‘The Legal Ripper: Montague John Druitt’. None of these essays give a full account
of Druitt. They are reviews of books advocating Druitt, namely Cullen, Farson, and Howells and Skinner.
Part Three is a series of six essays looking at how the times and crimes have been interpreted by people taking
different perspectives, such as ‘The Pathologist’s View’, ‘The Historian’s View’ (primarily Sugden), ‘The Policeman’s
View’ (Rumbelow) and ‘The Fictive Detectives’ View’ (a long essay about the six-part Barlow and Watt television series
in the 1970s).
Part Four begins with an essay ‘The Bloody Centenary’ which concludes by recalling a grand evening in the Golden
Heart, a celebrated watering hole in Commercial Street, at which were present some illustrious Ripperologists such as
Tom Cullen, Donald Rumbelow and Robin Odell, and some bumptious newcomers, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, and
some embarrassing nobodies who Mr Whittington-Egan doesn’t bother to mention, but who I know to have been Simon
Wood and David Andersen (who organised the event). I know they were there because I was also an embarrassing nobody
who doesn’t merit a mention. Mr Whittington-Egan also says those present were given a commemorative tie, which
is incorrect. The tie of which he speaks was given those those who spoke at an event that year at Wood Green Police
Station.
Whittington-Egan looks at the centenary of the murders in Part Four, one excessively long essay looking at Peter
Underwood’s One Hundred Years of Mystery, a book by a distinguished author but otherwise of such little merit that
one wonders what justified the number of words spent on it. The following essay looks at other centennial offerings by
Terence Sharkey, Colin WIlson and Robin Odell, Donald Rumbelow, and myself. All these books are distinguished by not
proffering a suspect, and I am relieved to say that Mr Whittington-Egan is gentle and generous about my offering. Phew.
Mind you, everything else I have ever written on the subject, apart from the A to Z, don’t get a mention, much like my
presence at the Golden Heart.
Part Five rather dates this book - a whole section devoted to the so called Maybrick Diary! It reviews Shirley Harrison’s
The Diary of Jack the Ripper (1993) and Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter (1997) by Paul Feldman. This might have
been a good place to have mentioned Ripper Diary: The Inside Story (2003) by Linder, Morris and Skinner, but for some
reason it is consigned to the bibliography. Guess whose books are missing from there?
Part Six: ‘Dreads and Drolls: A Meaningful Miscellany’ is, as the section heading suggests, a miscellany of bits and
bobs. The first essay, ‘The Knight’s Tale’, looks at the genesis of Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution and
it’s interesting to compare Whittington-Egan’s account of the story’s lineage with that of the acerbic Bruce Robinson.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 84

First, Whittington-Egan: ‘He [Stephen Knight], let us be clear, imported neither the royal coat of arms nor the Masonic
emblem to the Ripper saga; begat out of Stowell and Sickert, they were first introduced into the bloodied arena of the
Whitechapel killings by the BBC.’ Robinson seems to think that Dr Thomas Stowell made successive attempts to get
his Clarence theory ‘out there’, first attempting to inveigle Colin Wilson into being his patsy, then Phillipe Julian, and
finally, in desperation, doing the job himself in the Criminologist. To Robinson, Stowell is a ‘deceitful old man’ who
‘opened his idiot mouth’ with the result that Knight wrote his ‘idiot book’. Robinson doesn’t mention the BBC.
Similarly, Whittington-Egan says in one of his final essays, ‘Epicedium’ - the word means funeral ode; Whittington-
Egan’s writing is liberally peppered with obscure words; this is where the Kindle edition with its built-in dictionary really
comes into its own. Anyway, in ‘Epicedium’, he writes,
‘I am inclined to think that, in a sense, much that is labelled history is no more than a fable for posterity that
has been universally and solemnly agreed upon. By this definition, the chronicle of Jack the Ripper does not
qualify as history, for search as I might — and did — I failed to find any unified view, any consensus.’
Under no circumstance that I can immediately think of is history ever a ‘fable’. But history is an agreed interpretation
of available evidence. History also changes as new evidence is uncovered and old evidence is reinterpreted. That’s why
history is a living, ever changing subject. However, what’s interesting about Whittington-Egan’s observation is that he
looked for and failed to find any unified view or consensus. Bruce Robinson, however, damns Ripperology for what he
calls its ‘corporate thinking’. One finds no ‘unified view’, the other sees ‘corporate thinking’.
If the history of Ripper writing is of interest to you, The Definitive Casebook is an absolute must have. No question.
Mr Whittington-Egan’s critiques are generally spot on. He has the authority and the knowledge and he is a pleasure to
read. However, maybe it’s me, but I sense that Mr Whittington-Egan’s interest begins to wane for the mid-1990s. Up
until then Ripper books used to follow a set pattern, there would be a chapter or two about the time and place of the
murders, and this would be followed by an account of the murders and the police investigation. Then there would be
the guts of the book, namely an assessment of previous theories, and finally the author would present his or her own
suspect. But from the middle of the 1990s this was changing. Books like my own and Philip Sugden’s eschewed the
suspects pretty much altogether and concentrated instead on the crimes and investigation, books like the A to Z and
the Ultimate Sourcebook were standard reference books, and we began to see books looking at specific aspects of the
case. Ripperology was changing and the most dramatic change was brought about by the internet and with it a growing
demand for factual accuracy and full and proper sourcing. Ripperology ceased to be a relatively safe and comfortable
hobby of pin the tail on the Ripper.
Ripperology was on its way to being a bear pit. All of which is ‘here be dragons’ territory to Mr Whittington-Egan. He
makes a none too graceful nod at the first fifteen years of the 21st century, but he seems oblivious to the momentous
changes which have taken place in the field. In his world Ripperana is still a major player in the Ripper journal stakes,
Ripperologist is still a print magazine and an adjunct to the Cloak and Dagger Club, and members of the Cloak and
Dagger are still gathering in the cigarette smoke-filled Alma pub. Of course nobody denies the huge importance of
Ripperana, but today it only seems to be mentioned when somebody asks if it still exists. Ripperologist became an
electronic publication a good many years ago, the Cloak and Dagger has transformed into the Whitechapel Society with
its own journal and a string of books written by its members, and the Alma was long ago delicensed and turned into an
office. You wouldn’t know anything of this from Mr Whittington-Egan’s book. Nor, I guess, are you really supposed to.
But history isn’t a static beast. What happened back in the day ripples out to touch us today, and what we do today can
affect the past.
Anyway, this criticism aside, if you are interested in the history is Ripperology, specifically the history of Ripperature,
then this book is a must have. General readers might wonder what they’ve walked into, but I can’t think of a better
introduction to this subject.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 85

LO N D O N
Lord Mayor’s Show 800 Years 1215-2015
General Editor Dominic Reid
Foreword by HRH The Princess Royal
Introduction by Melvyn Bragg
London: Third Millennium Publishing, 2015
www.tmiltd.com
ISBN: 9781908990556
hardcover; 144pp; illus; biblio; index.
£29.95
One of the best known works of William Logsdail (1859-1944), a popular and highly respected
artist in his day, is The Ninth of November 1888. It depicts the splendour of the Lord Mayor’s Show
passing the Royal Exchange. You can even buy a 1,000 piece jigsaw of it on eBay. I read somewhere,
but I can’t now recall where, that it was Mary Kelly’s intention to see the Show, but that morning her body was found
in her room in Miller’s Court.
The fascination of this painting is the crowd, most of whom were real people, some professional models hired for
the purpose, particularly a little crowd scene behind a policeman, which features a little urchin stealing fruit from the
basket of an Irish woman selling oranges. This book contains extracts from Logsdail’s own account of how he created this
huge canvas, a masterpiece that today hangs in the Guildhall Art Gallery.
2015 is the 800th anniversary of the Lord Mayor’s Show and this beautiful book commemorates the event. It is a
prestigious title, as a foreword by Princess Anne indicates, and the front cover is a specially commissioned work by Sir
Peter Blake, who most famously designed the album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. General Editor
Dominic Reid succeeded his father as Pageantmaster of the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1990 and has held the post ever since.
London has two mayors: the Mayor of London, an elected politician responsible for the strategic government of
Greater London, the position currently held by Boris Johnson, and the Lord Mayor, who has precedence in the City of
London over everyone except the monarch. A new Lord Mayor is elected every year, the Lord Mayor’s Show being held
the day after. The first Lord Mayor was Henry Fitz-Ailwin de Londonestone. The man taking office in on 9 November 1888
was James Whitehead, who succeeded Polydore de Keyser.
The book is divided into four sections, each containing ten to twelve short essays that rarely exceed two pages
apiece. Section One, Heritage and Traditions, begins with a look at the Henry Fitz Ailwin, who held the office from 1189
until his death on 19 September 1212; Dan Cruickshank, whose book Spitalfields, due out next year, is on my list of must
haves, has a long essay about the architectural setting of the show; and I was pleased to read a contribution from The
Gentle Author, whose Spitalfield’s Life blog is regular reading.
Section Two, Treasures and Paraphernalia, looks at the seals, heraldry, coach, barge, robes, and much else. Section
Three, Shows and Lord Mayors, has eleven essays looking at assorted Mayors, including Richard Whittington, who to my
everlasting disappointment did not have a cat; at several commentators, such as Pepys, who was underwhelmed by the
first show after the Restoration; and two interesting essays on the Show during the Great War and WWII. Finally, Part
Four, Art and Literature, offers ten short essays looking at the Lord Mayor’s Show in art, beginning with Canaletto in
1746 and, of course, featuring the aforementioned William Logsdail’s 1888 masterpiece. Other interesting short essays
look at the reporting of the event in The Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated newspaper; the Show as
depicted in the movie Sabotage (1936), Alfred Hitchcock’s telling of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent; and the Show
and James Bond.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 86

Add to this a short history of the Show by Melvyn Bragg and a short history of the City of London by Jeremy Black,
plus loads of colour illustrations, and you have a slender but excellent book about one of the most historic of Britain’s
pageants.
Bloody British History: East End
Samantha Bird
Stroud: Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2015
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
ISBN9780750952330
softcover; 94pp; biblio.
£9.99 softcover/£9.49 Kindle
Dr Samantha Bird, who has a PhD based on her East End research, suggests that the name London
is derived from the Celtic Llyn-dim, meaning lake-fort, but many etymologists dispute this origin. In
fact, where the name came from seems to be unknown. The Romans called London Londinium and it
is supposed that they based this on a pre-existing Celtic name, but nobody really knows what it might
have been. In fact, Roman and the earlier Celtic names for places in and around London are few and
far between, which is odd because one would have expected the invading Anglo-Saxons to have assimilated Celtic and
Roman place-names along with the Romano-British population. What this could mean is that the Romano-Britons were
exterminated or forcibly evicted so that there was nobody left to recall the ancient place-names. Either way, it could
be that London was a dangerous and scary place to be in the post-Roman decades.
The East End was certainly a scary place, though for other reasons. In the beginning it was a land of bogs and dense
forests where mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses roamed. It was the Anglo-Saxons who called the area Stebunhithe and
by the time of the Domesday survey, completed in 1086, it was owned by the Bishops of London, who traditionally date
back to within two centuries of the birth of Christ, but don’t really emerge into an historical light until St Augustine’s
mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. As part of the mission St Mellitus (d.642) came to Britain in
601 and became Bishop of London, but was kicked out of London by the pagan King Sexred (d.626).
East End has over twenty shortish chapters going back to the hairy rhinoceros and mammoths and telling some of the
bloody and occasionally gruesome history of the area from then until the Bethnal Green Tube Shelter Disaster in 1943.
There’s quite a bit of more recent East End criminal history missing from the book - no Arthur Harding, no Darkie the
Coon striding up Brick Lane dressed as a cowboy, and Jack the Ripper is relegated to two pages. I think it is questionable
whether the Jack the Ripper murders did help to ameliorate conditions in the East End, which Dr Bird says was ‘the only
positive outcome of these appalling events...’ Nor would I agree that this was the only positive outcome.
However there’s a lot here of interest, including chapters on Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, Bligh of the Bounty, the
Ratcliffe Highway murders, the bodysnatchers Bishop, Head and May, the murder of Harriet Lane by Henry Wainwright
gets six pages, the enduring mystery of whether Israel Lipski committed murder or not, the extraordinary Siege of Sidney
Street.
At 95 pages and costing £9.99 it’s on the expensive side, but it packs in a lot of information and makes good and
informative reading from those contemplative moments.
WANT US TO REVIEW YOUR BOOK?
Ripperologist magazine has a circulation list of over 900 readers,
each with an interest in Jack the Ripper, Victorian crime and London’s East End.
If you are an author or publisher of a forthcoming book and would like to reach our readers,
please get in touch at contact@ripperologist.biz
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 87

C R
I M E
The Crime Museum
Some years ago I stood with Gordon Honeycombe, who died in October of this year, eating canapés and drinking a
glass of wine amid the relics of heinous crime in Scotland Yard’s internationally famous Black Museum, as the Crime
Museum was still popularly known. Honeycombe had written The Murders of the Black Museum (1982), and we were
both at the Black to extend our good wishes on the retirement of curator, Bill Waddell (who in 1993 would write his own
book about the place, The Black Museum). I don’t think I have been to a party in a stranger venue. Happy days.
The Crime Museum Uncovered:
Inside Scotland Yard’s Special Collection
Jackie KeIly and Julia Hoffbrand
London: I.B. Taurus, 2015
www.ibtauris.com
ISBN: 9781781300411
softcover; 192pp; illus;
£12.99
‘Money cannot purchase access to it, and curious visitors are only admitted on orders signed by
senior executive officials who know them personally. For the museum contains too many of the
secrets of crime to be a wholesome place for the general public…’
So wrote George Dilnot in a chapter devoted to the Black Museum in his book Scotland Yard: The Methods and
Organisation of the Metropolitan Police. Dilnot was writing 100 years ago, but you still can’t buy a ticket to the Black
Museum. But you can buy the next best thing - from 9 October 2015 until 10 April 2016 the Museum of London is hosting
an exhibition of objects from the Crime Museum. I’d love to visit the exhibition, but unfortunately I won’t be able to,
but the accompanying book, The Crime Museum Uncovered, is an absolute cracker.
It’s written by Jackie Keily and Julia Hoffbrand, who curated the exhibition in partnership with the Metropolitan
Police Service and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. Hoffbrand had previously curated the excellent Jack the
Ripper exhibition at the Docklands Museum. The book discusses over four hundred carefully selected objects recalling
some of Britain’s most notorious crimes, including the Great Train Robbery, the Kray twins, and the Millennium Dome
diamond heist. There are nearly five hundred illustrations.
The book is divided into three sections, The Early Crime Museum, Individual Cases, and Themes.
The Early Crime Museum opens with an illustration of the visitors’ book, two interesting visitors being John Moore and
Tom Bullen of the Central News Agency. They visited on 26 July 1892 and may well have seen the ‘Dear Boss’ letter which
gave the world the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ and which may have been conceived and written by one or both these men.
The facsimile of the ‘Dear Boss’ is pictured, as is a copy of ‘Illustrated Circular, No. 76’ dating from 1905 and showing
a picture of ‘John Evest’, otherwise Michael Ostrog. This is a fascinating discovery of Ostrog in later life.
There are pictures of several death masks and the ropes used to hang various murderers, including the rope used to
hang Mary Pearcey. Pictures of weapons include the knife use by Richard Prince who murdered William Terriss and the
gun used by Edward Oxford in his ridiculous and half-hearted attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria.
Individual cases include the Stratton Brothers, Dr Crippen, the Siege of Sidney Street, Gordon Cummins (the so-called
Blackout Ripper), Neville Heath, John Haigh, Charlie and Eddie Richardson, and, inevitably, Ronald and Reginald Kray.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 88

The third and final section, Themes, kicks off with some disturbing photographs of offensive weapons, disguised
weapons, assorted firearms, infernal devices (bombs), the tools of espionage, of burglars and robbers, and assorted
items found at Leatherslade Farm (hideout of the Great Train Robbers).
I really liked this book. It is well produced, the choice and wealth of illustrations is smashing, and the price is sensible
and good value. It’s a fine memento of the exhibition.
Scotland Yard’s History of Crime in 100 Objects
Alan Moss and Keith Skinner
Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press,2015
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
ISBN: 9780750962872
hardcover/ebook; 400pp; illus; biblio; index.
£25.00 hardcover / £6.02 Kindle
It’s 1953. You turn on your radio and see the dial glow into life as the valves warm up. Then you
carefully tune it to the medium wave, frequency 208 metres (1439 kHz). Radio Luxembourg. If you were
lucky you might get good, clear reception and be able to enjoy an hour or two’s entertainment of a sort
unavailable on the staid BBC. You might tune in to hear the Ovaltineys, or Pete Murray’s Top Twenty,
or The Adventures of Dan Dare. Or you could hear the deep and distinctive voice of Orson Welles saying: “…here in the
grim stone structure on the Thames which houses Scotland Yard is a warehouse of homicide, where everyday objects, a
paperweight, a rag doll, a pair of stockings, are all touched by - murder.”
The series was called The Black Museum. It’s still hugely enjoyable and if you fancy a listen you can find all fifty-three
episodes here: archive.org/details OTRR_Black_Museum_Singles. As a matter of interest, the case of Adelaide Bartlett
(see In The Interests of Science below) features in the episode ‘Four Small Bottles’. Ripperish episodes are George
Chapman in ‘The Straight Razor’, Florence Maybrick in ‘Meat Juice’, and the Camden Town Murder in ‘The Postcard’.
This book reminded me of that radio series. One hundred objects - a handkerchief, a box of Dr Patterson’s Female
Pills, a bottle of meat juice, a policewoman’s hat - all innocent in themselves, but all touched by crime. Not necessarily
murder or violence. In their introduction the authors express their desire ‘to avoid putting into the public mind any
previously unknown details that might give improper inspiration.’ Somehow, what with gore-fests seen in movies and on
television, I don’t think some picture in a history of Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum presents anything to worry about,
but the authorial concerns are nonetheless appreciated. And not all crime involves violence and murder, so I am all for
looking at the other crimes people can sink to committing.
Jack the Ripper gets several mentions, but you have to search hard. Object 23 is the Appeal Poster issued in an
attempt to identify the author of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and Saucy Jacky postcard, Object 24 is the Swanson marginalia,
brief and to the point, and Object 25, ‘Witness Album Photographs’, includes a completely new photograph of Michael
Ostrog in later life. Two new photographs in the new Crime Museum books! One can only wonder what other gems lurk
in files and cupboards and propping up desks at Scotland Yard!
There’s a ton of solid information in this book about all sorts of aspects of the Metropolitan Police history. Although
this book is very well - and carefully - illustrated, it isn’t a coffee table type picture book. It is a history of the Met told
through one hundred objects retained, thankfully, by the Crime Museum. The book is highly recommended.
it had been done.
In The Interests of Science:
Adelaide Bartlett and the Pimlico Poisoning
Kate Clarke
Foreword by Linda Stratmann
London: Mango Books, 2015
www.mangobooks.co.uk
First Published London: Souvenir Press, 1990
2nd edition Carrington Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9931806-7-5 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-9931806-8-2 ebook
239pp; illus; biblio; index;
£15.00 hardcover/£6.52 ebook
They knew who’d done it, they knew what it had been done with, they just couldn’t figure out how
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 89

Edwin Bartlett was found dead. There was a fatal quantity of chloroform in his stomach. It was believed that it had
been administered by his French wife, Adelaide, and in due course she stood trial for his murder. Most of the criteria
for guilt applied, except one important detail. Chloroform should have burned Edwin’s mouth, throat and windpipe, but
it hadn’t. It was possible that this could have happened if it was self administered and drunk very quickly. If, in other
words, Bartlett had committed suicide. How the chloroform entered the stomach if administered by someone else, such
as Adelaide, was utterly baffling. It resulted in the acquittal of Adelaide. Sir James Paget, a respected surgeon, famously
quipped,”Now that she has been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of
science how she did it!”
The case of Adelaide Bartlett, known as the Pimlico Mystery, is one of the great murder mysteries of the 19th century,
ranking up there with Constance Kent, Charles Bravo, Florence Maybrick, and Madeleine Smith. Most of the great crime
writers have had a crack at it, but for my money Kate Clarke is among the best. I have always held Ms Clarke in high
regard. My purely personal list of favourite crime books features Murder at the Priory, about the Bravo case, which she
wrote with Bernard Taylor (see There Must Be Evil below). I read it years ago and have been promising myself a re-read
if I ever got the chance! Another favourite is this book, first published as The Pimlico Murder by Souvenir Press in their
distinctive Classic Crime Series, also on my list for a re-read, which thankfully Mango Books has given me.
Mango Books’ revised edition has a too-short introduction by Linda Stratmann, author of Chloroform (2013), and has
uncompromising production values. It is beautifully bound, there’s a good picture section on quality art paper, and a
nice looking jacket. But above all it is a great story, an impenetrable mystery, and exceedingly well told by Ms Clarke.
So come and meet Ms Adelaide Bartlett.
Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille was born in 1855, the identity of her father, who was rumoured to be wealthy and
maybe even titled, being one of the minor mysteries attached to the case. She married an oddball but well-off grocer
named Edwin Bartlett, but also had a relationship with a Wesleyan minister, Reverend George Dyson, apparently with
Edwin’s encouragement. It was Dyson who purchased chloroform. In the early hours of 1 January 1886 Adelaide sought
help, fearing that Edwin was dead, which he was, his stomach full of chloroform.
At her trial for murder Adelaide was defended by Sir Edward Clarke, his fee being met by her mysterious father, and
the prosecution was utterly unable to explain how the liquid chloroform could have been administered without burning
the mouth and throat. The defence suggested suicide, it being argued that had Thomas drunk the chloroform quickly
it may not have burned. When the jury returned, the foreman said, “although we think grave suspicion is attached to
the prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered.”
Kate Clarke tells the story of Adelaide Bartlett with skill and clarity and concludes by taking a good shot at identifying
Adelaide’s mysterious father, which isn’t just something for idle speculation. Adelaide was the wife of a grocer. He had
money, but no social position, and neither did Adelaide. Yet in prison she enjoyed certain comforts not normally given to
a grocer’s wife and her defence in the shape of Edward Clarke was expensive. Daddy was clearly somebody of standing
in society, and thirty years later Edward Clarke would admit so. But who was he?
And the big, frustrating mystery is this: what happened to Adelaide Bartlett? She vanished from the historical record
as utterly and completely as if she had never existed.
There Must Be Evil:
The Life and Murderous Career of Elizabeth Berry
Bernard Taylor
London: Duckworth Overlook, 2015
www.ducknet.co.uk
ISBN: 9780715650516
softcover/ebook; 242pp; biblio; index.
£11.99 softcover/£7.59 ebook
One evening in August 1885, at a police ball in Manchester, an attractive young woman in her late
20s introduced herself to a man named Berry and they tripped the light fantastic together. Later they
discovered that they were heading home in the same direction and they accompanied one another for
part of the journey. Coincidentally the woman was also named Berry, which may have been the reason
why they remembered each other when they met for a second time. On this occasion the attractive young woman was
the client of her former dancing partner. His clients never visited him twice. His name was James Berry. He was the
public hangman.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 90

Elizabeth Berry sported the same short hairstyle with fringe as Adelaide Bartlett. Like her, she was a poisoner, and
she killed with an ice-cold callousness that was almost beyond belief. The last five years of 31-year-old Elizabeth Berry’s
life had been damned by misfortune, although it was later suspected that it was a misfortune of her own making. Her
mother, husband and her son had all died. A life insurance payment had in each case made the tragedy a little easier
to bear, but a widow with a daughter, 11-year old Edith Annie, and half the wages she earned as a nurse at Oldham
Workhouse being paid to her sister-in--law for looking after Edith, life wasn’t easy.
At the end of 1886 Edith and one of her friends went to spend a few days with Elizabeth at the workhouse, where
they arrived on Wednesday, 29 December 1886. By 1 January 1887 Edith, up until then a healthy child and full of
energy, began vomiting severely. She was seen by Dr Thomas Patterson, the workhouse doctor, who accepted Elizabeth’s
suggestion that Edith was ill because of something she had eaten at breakfast that morning. By the following day she
was bringing up blood as well as vomit, and Dr Patterson smelt something acidic coming from a towel containing stains
of both. By Sunday evening red marks had appeared around Edith’s mouth and her condition was clearly worsening. Dr
Patterson and another doctor whose opinion he had sought began to suspect that Edith had ingested a corrosive poison,
but there was little they could do, and Edith began to deteriorate, eventually passing away in the early hours of Tuesday.
Dr Patterson refused to sign a death certificate and requested a post mortem, suspecting that Edith may have been
poisoned with medical liquid creosote which he’d noted had been depleted. The post mortem confirmed his suspicions
and Elizabeth was arrested. She was tried before Mr Justice Hawkins at Liverpool Assizes at the end of February 1887,
where it was learned that an insurance policy would pay out £100. Expert medical evidence also proved that Edith had
been poisoned. Elizabeth was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to be hanged. The possibility of a reprieve lay in
the hands of the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, who was some 18-months away from having Hell break over his head
when Jack the Ripper began stalking the streets of Whitechapel. He saw no reason to alter the decision of the court and
on the morning of Monday, 14 March 1887, she came face to face with executioner James Berry. She was the first woman
to be executed at Walton Prison in Liverpool.
S O F T WA R E
Speech Recognition
Dragon For Mac
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or faster processor - Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 recommended
Free hard disk space: 8GB. Supported Operating Systems: OS X Mavericks (10.9) or OS X Yosemite
(10.10) or OS X El Capitan (10.11)
£139.99
There’s a lot of software available to help researchers and writers collect, store, access, share, and use the fruit of
our labours. Over the coming months we’ll be taking a look at what’s available and how it can help. One of the tasks we
all face is getting our research filed and findable, and for many that means getting the physical data - the information -
transferred to our computer. There are lots of ways to do this. You can scan it and use OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
software to convert it into editable and searchable text. We’ll take a look at OCR software in a later Ripperologist,
but sometimes what we need to OCR is too degraded for the software to work or can’t be photocopied or scanned.
Newspapers are particularly problematical. They are easy enough to scan or to copy from a newspaper database such
as The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), but 19th century newspapers can be tough
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 91

enough to read, let alone OCR, so your alternative is to laboriously type it up. I have the greatest admiration for people
who can do that. A long article can take me forever.
To cut to the chase, sometimes the quickest way to do a job like that is to dictate the article using speech recognition
software. In all my years reviewing computer programs for the-all-but vanished computer magazines, I never bothered
with. I tried it out once or twice, it may even have an early incarnation of Dragon Naturally Speaking that I toyed with,
but I wasn’t at all impressed. It wasn’t very good. I enjoyed talking (very slowly, carefully enunciating every word) and
watching the words magically appear on screen. The trouble was, very few of them were my words and a lot of them
weren’t words at all, just gobbledygook. It took so much time to go over the text and correct all the errors that it was
quicker to type up to begin with.
Anyway, a while back I got to thinking about speech recognition software again. It surprised me to discover that both
Windows and Mac computers come with the pre-installed speech recognition software. To load it on a Mac (1) from the
Apple menu, choose System Preferences, (2) from the View menu, choose Dictation & Speech, (3) click On to enable
Dictation, or Off to disable it. If you are using Windows, go to the Start menu, type “speech recognition” in the search
box, and click the option that pops up. I tried this out and I was impressed. The output wasn’t free of errors, but it was a
million times better than I remembered. So, if something that came free with the computer was that good, what would
dedicated, industry standard speech recognition software be like?
The grand-daddy of speech recognition software is Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s made by a company called Nuance,
located in Burlington, outside Boston, and was launched back in 1997. Nuance also make OmniPage, one of the best OCR
packages and one I have used off and on for years. I hope to review OmniPage in a forthcoming Ripperologist.
Nuance sent me the latest version of Dragon for Mac (renamed from Dragon Dictate) which was released a few months
ago. It’s a major upgrade. Obviously I am reviewing the Mac version, so I can’t tell you if and how it differs from the
Windows version. Sorry about that. Anyway, it’s massively different from how I vaguely remember the speech recognition
software I used in the past, and I gather it looks and feels different from all the versions to date.
Installation was simple enough and the first thing the software does is create a profile. This involves you reading some
prepared text, setting the language and your accent, so that Dragon can do whatever it does to recognise the way you
talk. Dragon for Mac also integrates so smoothly that it feels like it’s part of your Mac, not a separate piece of software.
One of the things that’s really great about Dragon for Mac is that it has several modes. For example, Dictation Mode
lets you use your computer as your own personal secretary. You can dictate your book or your emails, or read text from
a newspaper or another document, or simple read out your handwritten notes made in the library or when travelling.
Command Mode lets you give verbal instructions to your computer or apps, such as telling Safari to close. But one thing
I think is really great is Transcription Mode. If you are out and about and you need to dictate something, you can do so
into a digital recorder or your mobile, transfer your audio file to your computer, and using the Transcription Mode, have
Dragon type it up.
One thing that put me off using voice recognition software was that you needed a fairly good quality microphone,
which had to be plugged into your computer. I briefly flirted with the idea of a wireless microphone, but wireless stuff
like keyboard and mice didn’t work terribly well. Connecting with your Mac via Bluetooth is now standard, but the
Bluetooth mics weren’t much good. Things have changed now and the quality is great, and the big, big advantage is that
wearing a headset mic means you can wander around your room while dictating. But the last time I looked, a Bluetooth
head-mic cost a lot. Anyway, Dragon For Mac has made the need for a mic unnecessary because recognition is now so
good you can use your computer’s internal mic.
There’s a lot to say about this software, and not enough space to say it, and frankly it’s been so long since I used
speech recognition software that using Dragon for Mac v5 is like using it for the first time. What I really wanted to do
was to quickly transcribe whole or parts of a bunch of 19th century newspaper reports. I could OCR some, but with most
the number of errors it made meant it was prohibitive. Dictating seemed the only way. The built-in voice recognition
software worked a treat, but I wasn’t really converted. After using Dragon for Mac I’m not only converted, I’m an
evangelist. It’s become part of my everyday computing habits.
The drawback is price. Industry standard software is often expensive and Dragon for Mac could set you back £140,
which is a substantial investment, so have a play with the built-in software while you save your pennies.
All reviews by Paul Begg
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 92

OVER 200 JACK THE RIPPER AND ASSOCIATED TITLES ON LAYBOOKS.COM INCLUDING:
Introducing Make Me An Offer...
Books included in this section include:
AN EYE TO THE FUTURE.THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS - Cory (Patricia), HVEM VAR JACK THE RIPPER? EN DANSK FORHORSDOMMERS
UNDERSOGELSE. (WHO WAS JACK THE RIPPER? A DANISH JUDGE’S INVESTIGATION) - Muusmann (Carl), IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS: AN EXAMINATION OF THE JACK THE RIPPER MURDERS USING MODERN POLICE TECHNIQUES - Plimmer (John F.)
and JACK THE MYTH: A NEW LOOK AT THE RIPPER - Wolf (A.P.)
Visit the website to see the full list!
I’m taking orders for signed copies of:
PRISONER 4374 by A.J. Griffiths-Jones Signed p/back £9 and JACK THE RIPPER - CASE SOLVED 1891 by J.J. Hainsworth Signed label price tba
BELL (NEIL R.A.) / WOOD (ADAM) - Sir Howard Vincent’s Police Code
1889. Facsimile Edn. New h/b Signed £20
CLACK (ROBERT) / HUTCHINSON (PHILIP) - The London of Jack
the Ripper Then and Now. Revised & Updated hb/dw Signed Clack/
Hutchinson + Stewart Evans £35
CONNELL (NICHOLAS) / EVANS (STEWART) - The Man Who Hunted
Jack the Ripper. hb/dw Signed Connell/Evans + Whittington-Egan As
New £35
CULLEN (TOM) - Autumn of Terror Jack the Ripper: His Times and
Crimes. reprint hb/dw £25
DIMOLIANAS (SPIRO) - Jack the Ripper and Black Magic. New s/c
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DEW (WALTER) - I Caught Crippen. h/b Various copies ranging in
price from £300 - £450 or Offers
McCORMICK (DONALD) - The Identity of Jack the Ripper. hb/dw
Signed £50
McLAUGHLIN (ROBERT) - The First Jack the Ripper Victim
Photographs. Ltd. Edn. Numbered (73) Signed Robert +
Whittington-Egan label As New s/c £225
MATTERS (LEONARD) - The Mystery of Jack the Ripper. 1948 Reprint
h/b £45
MAYBRICK (FLORENCE ELIZABETH) - Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story. h/b
£90
MORLEY (CHRISTOPHER J.) - Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide.
E-Book As New s/c £25
PULLING (CHRISTOPHER) - Mr Punch and the Police. hb/dw Signed
£40
RIPPEROLOGIST/RIPPER NOTES/RIPPERANA - back issues of all
available
ROBINSON (BRUCE) - They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper. New hb/
dw Signed £25
SHELDEN (NEAL) - Annie Chapman Jack the Ripper Victim, A Short
Biography. s/c Rare £40
SHELDEN (NEAL) - Jack the Ripper and His Victims. s/c Rare £40
SIMS (GEORGE R.) - The Mysteries of Modern London. h/b Good only
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STRACHAN (ROSS) - Jack the Ripper : A Collectors Guide To The Many
Books. Published Rare 1st Edn. s/c Signed As New £30
WHITTINGTON-EGAN (RICHARD) - A Casebook on Jack the Ripper. h/b
Signed. Various copies priced from £150 to £250 or offers
WOODHALL (EDWIN T.) - Jack the Ripper Or When London Walked in
Terror. Ltd. Numbered Facsimile Edn. New s/c £20
YOST (DAVE) - Elizabeth Stride and Jack the Ripper. Signed s/c As
New £30
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 93

Ripper Fiction
with DAVID GREEN
There was Mary.
She didn’t look like much of a person at all, the way she was carved up. It was so awful, if I did any
kind of job telling you about it here, you might get so revolted you’d quit reading my book. Besides, I’d
feel guilty for putting such pictures into your head. My aim is to inform you and entertain you with the
tale of my adventures...
Anatomy of Evil
Will Thomas
Minotaur Books (2015)
ISBN: 978-1-250-04105-0
Hardcover 326pp USD $25.99
* * * * *
from Savage by Richard Laymon (1993)
Anatomy of Evil is the seventh outing for Will Thomas’s acclaimed private investigators Barker and
Llewelyn.
Cyrus Barker is a pugnacious, pipe-smoking Scotsman with impressive contacts in high places. His
sidekick, and the novel’s narrator, is Classics scholar Thomas Llewelyn, a slightly naïve but eager
young Welshman who has served time for fraud. Previously the London crime-fighters have tackled
Fenian terrorists, Italian crime bosses, and white slave traffickers; now they’re up against a far more
formidable villain as Jack the Ripper slashes his way across the dark streets of the East End.
Robert Anderson has enlisted Barker and Llewelyn as temporary special agents for Scotland Yard. Within no time they are
rubbing shoulders with Abberline and Swanson, and spending their evenings undercover at the Frying Pan public house. They work
well as a sleuthing double act: the novel sparkles with their drollery and older man/younger man repartee. Interestingly, both
protagonists are maturing as the series develops, becoming battle-scarred and world-weary.
Anatomy of Evil is a capable romp, full of fast-moving action scenes and tense dramatic moments in lamp-lit courtyards.
There are a couple of grisly, strongly-flavoured scenes – the autopsy of Catherine Eddowes and, inevitably, the carnage at Miller’s
Court - but for the most part the author steers clear of blood and guts, preferring to dwell on political intrigue among the senior
ranks of the Met and themes of justice, racial discrimination, and social inequality. Alas, it’s a rather dull, plodding yarn, lacking
in flair and originality. Only in the last quarter of the book, when the detective duo strike out on their own and pursue irregular
lines of enquiry, does the story catch fire.
Nice Man Jack
Dave Franklin
Baby Ice Dog Press (2015)
Kindle 94 pages (estimated)
£1.99
Here’s a stylishly depraved excursion into Ripper territory from expat Welshman Dave Franklin.
Inspired by John Miles’s classic 1978 progressive rock song of the same name, this novella-length
tale sets out to shock and appal. Genitals drip pus, blood pools on theatre floors, and Harley Street
surgeon Frederick Treves ejaculates while performing an emergency appendix operation at the London
Hospital. Meanwhile, Mary Kelly meets the Elephant Man in an exhibition room off the Whitechapel
Road, and Jack the Ripper circles ever closer… The two worlds are about to messily collide.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 94

Just as Nice Man Jack (the song) switches abruptly from catchy melody to heavy metal riff, so Nice Man Jack (the story)
presents horror alongside the everyday. An afternoon stroll around the lake in Kensington Gardens leads to decapitated swans
and fountains of crimson blood; a soak in the bath with scent-of-roses soap degenerates into a black magic ceremony.
I think Dave Franklin pulls it off magnificently, serving up a weird, slightly mad Rock’n’Roll vision of the East End. The
Elephant Man wiggles his warty sausage-like fingers, and in Miller’s Court the smell of cheap lavender perfume can’t quite mask
the stink of fish from Billingsgate market. It’s a frantic, high-energy yarn, written with savage black wit and a genuine love of
the macabre and the perverse. In fewer than a hundred pages there’s love and hatred, kindness and violence, and madness of
a particularly vicious strain. Well worth reading, especially with Nice Man Jack (the song) blasting away through headphones
in the background.
Millers Court
PD Goodall
2015
Kindle 316 pages
£1.99
“Every cockroach is beautiful to its mother,” claims the Neapolitan proverb, and I’m sure Millers
Court will find its fans, too. It’s a gory, revolting, messed up tale that never strays as far as it should
from the well-trodden ground of stalk-and-slash splatter fiction. But if you can put up with the
unrelenting grimness of it all, the endless spill of vomit and the pervasive stench of human misery
and depravity, then you might find that the book grows on you the further you get into it.
In her small room off Dorset Street, Mary Kelly ekes out a drab, often brutal, existence with Joe Barnett. By chance, she
meets a West End toff, an unusual gentleman who (we learn) loves to tuck into a plate of uterus while dining alone in a white
waistcoat at a table set for twelve. This is Montague John Druitt as you’ve never seen him before. The story charts the course
of Mary’s relationship with Druitt, going off in a direction you might not expect…
Millers Court often feels overburdened with its own sick horror agenda. The author spends way too much time dwelling on
open wounds and maggots and the bloody physics of mutilation. Yet there is terror and menace here, too, and while it offers
little in the way of escape or meaningful reflection on suffering and mortality, it occasionally touches on the most sordid
aspects of life with a lyricism that comes close to poetry. If you like your Ripper fiction bleak and ugly, this will suit you fine.
The Lodger
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Edited by Elyssa Warkentin
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2015)
ISBN: 978-1-4438-7818-0
Hardcover 195pp £47.99
Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) was a prolific author who worked primarily in the romance,
mystery and detective genres. Over her lifetime she published more than forty novels in addition to
a large body of journalistic work. Today, though, if she is remembered at all, it is solely for her 1913
novel The Lodger based on the Jack the Ripper case.
The Lodger started out as a short story in the January 1911 issue of the American monthly magazine
McClure’s (later New McClure’s Magazine). One of the many delights of this new edition from Cambridge Scholars is that
it brings together for the first time the original short story (with facsimiles of Henry Raleigh’s illustrations) and the fulllength
novel that grew out of it. This allows the reader to appreciate the evolution of Lowndes’s working methods and the
development of the Ripper motif in her fiction.
The plot centres on the experiences of Mr and Mrs Bunting who live in the West End. To stave off financial ruin, they take
in a lodger, the enigmatic Mr Sleuth. But over time, Mrs Bunting in particular begins to suspect that their lodger may in fact
be The Avenger, the lunatic who is murdering women and terrorizing the capital. She is able to apply her feminine strategies
of ‘wit and cunning’ to solve the mystery of the killer. The novel concludes with a tense scene in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber
of Horrors.
Elyssa Warkentin (University of Alberta) provides a very useful introductory essay placing The Lodger in literary and cultural
context. She highlights the novel’s significance as an early text in the history of women’s crime fiction, and draws out many of
its important themes and ideas. In addition, there is a brief look at Lowndes’s professional rivalry with Agatha Christie, along
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 95

with a valuable bibliography of Lowndes’s published books. All of this stimulates interest in the figure of Lowndes herself and
whets the appetite for the author’s forthcoming (although temporarily on-hold) full-length biography.
Of course, The Lodger is fairly tame by today’s standards - there are no mutilated corpses, no missing internal organs, no
‘unfortunates’ walking the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. In Lowndes’s reconfiguration of the Ripper story, the killer
targets women who drink alcohol in public, and his homicidal mania is driven by the patriarchal authority of Old Testament
teachings which denounce immodesty and intemperance in women. But read late at night, The Lodger still has the power to
chill. It is a novel that deals primarily in suspicion and dread and unease.
Perhaps like me, you‘ll welcome the opportunity to chuck out the old dog-eared paperback and replace it with this deluxe
new volume from Cambridge Scholars. Editor Elyssa Warkentin has done a great job in re-introducing this early twentiethcentury
classic to scholarly and general public attention.
A Conversation with Maxim Jakubowski
Maxim Jakubowski is a writer and editor of crime, mystery, and erotic fiction.
He has been a columnist for Time Out and the Guardian, and for many years
he owned and ran the Murder One Bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. He
has been called by The Times “the King of the erotic thriller.” He maintains a
website at maximjakubowski.co.uk. His latest collection is The Mammoth Book
of Jack the Ripper Stories published by Robinson on 12 November. Interview
conducted by email between 4-5 October, 2015.
Can you tell us what the story is behind The Mammoth Book of Jack the
Ripper Stories? Did you approach the publishers with the idea, or did they
come to you?
As I used to do yearly, I came up with a series of ideas for possible new
Mammoth fiction collections and this was one of them. It made sense in view of
the success of the non fiction volume I’d done with Nathan Braund some years
earlier and also connected with the Moriarty volume we’d already agreed on.
Jack the Ripper has featured in possibly hundreds of novels, and in countless works of shorter fiction. What is it, do you
think, that writers find particularly alluring about the Ripper and his crimes?
The fact that the crimes have become iconic and that the identity of the perpetrator has never truly been established, thus
reinforcing the mystery and the fascination. It’s become a cultural trope and therefore a challenge for writers to come up with
a worthwhile variation on the theme.
Mammoth Stories was an open-submission anthology. Surely you must have been inundated with tales? How do you cope
with an avalanche of submissions, and what techniques have you developed over the years to quickly winnow out the
gems from the dross?
I treated this anthology as I do all projects (I’ve now done well over a hundred collections in my editing career). I reached
out to 20 or so writers who I knew might respond to the theme or who I admired and felt were in tune with it. Half of those
submitted but through an extensive call for submissions to authors in a variety of genres, I also hoped to see material from not
just crime authors but also people in the horror, SF and even erotica genres. Yes, there was an avalanche of material submitted
but that’s normally the case with all my projects. Once the submission deadline passes, I then take a week and exclusively read
submissions over a short period so I get a feel for the balance of moods and themes, and then, painfully, make my selection.
As ever, more than half the stories from unknown quantities didn’t pass the customary opening page test but then it’s a slow
process to winnow things down, bearing in mind not to allow too many repetitions of culprits, angles and such (although I had
asked potential contributors to warn me in advance of their respective approach). I’m an editor; that’s what I do, Ripper or
not related.
If I asked you what makes a good Jack the Ripper story, what would you say?
That it should be well written and surprise me.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 96

And what makes a particularly bad one?
That it just repeats the known facts and is closer to non fiction.
Will you tell us a little about your process when choosing stories for this collection? I’m guessing similar themes and ideas
and images kept cropping up time and again. Was it difficult avoiding a samey feel to the anthology?
Yes, it is difficult and on occasions there were hard choices to be made to avoid the repetition and I hope I managed it.
There’s a whole sub-category of Ripper fiction that pits Jack against his fictional
contemporaries. In Mammoth Stories I see you have one or two examples of these, such as
Sherlock Holmes and Thomas Carnacki. Which other fictional detectives would you love to
see going head-to-head with the Ripper?
Any of them, particularly if they’re not contemporaries, which presents an even greater
challenge.
How will readers get the most out of your anthology? Should they dip into it like a box of
chocolate liqueurs, or read it from cover to cover? How much effort went into planning the
story order?
Dip, devour, I reckon it depends on their mood. But I do hope that whatever the order they
read them all. I do take particular care of the running order to keep the rhythm varied and the
surprises coming though.
Did you have a policy regarding depictions of extreme violence, especially sexual violence?
Not really, although because of the subject matter it was inevitable that many of the stories in the anthology would be
somewhat gruesome in their attention to detail. But as long as the sexual and violence content is not gratuitous or exploitative,
I have no problem with it.
Not all Ripperologists can be bothered reading Ripper fiction. How would you persuade them to give Mammoth Stories a
try?
I’d just ask them to be open-minded. At any rate, the book is addressed to the general reader and not just the specialist.
Do you have much spare time to keep up-to-date with the latest Ripper theories and research? Can you remember what
the last Jack the Ripper non-fiction title was you read?
I don’t keep up to date since my original non fiction compendium, but am intrigued by the new Bruce Robinson book and
might read it soon.
Besides editing, you have also authored many novels and short story collections. Have you ever had a go at writing a Jack
the Ripper yarn yourself?
No.
Do you have any advice for wannabe fiction writers with an unpublished Jack the Ripper manuscript (or ten) in the desk
drawer?
To submit it to existing markets and await its fate.
After editing Mammoth Stories, how would you characterise the overall health of Ripper fiction?
I don’t believe there truly is a field of specific Ripper fiction, just brilliant writers who have the temerity to tackle the
subject and prove innovative, despite all the obstacles placed in front of them.
IN THE NEXT ISSUE we bring you a full review of The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories, plus another
instalment in our Proper Red Stuff series examining the work of forgotten Ripper authors from the 1880s
and 1890s.
DAVID GREEN lives in Hampshire, England, where he works as a freelance book indexer. He is currently
writing (very slowly) a book about the murder of schoolboy Percy Searle in Hampshire in 1888.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 97

The Murders & Mystery of Jack the Ripper
The Crochan, Y Ffwrness. 27 and 28 October 2015
This year has seen two productions grace two very different stages in South Wales, in August we were treated to historical
drama from Talking Scarlet’s Sherlock Holmes and the Jack the Ripper Murders, and this Halloween in Llanelli’s Ffwrness
Theatre we were treated Jon Lee Rees’ insightful and intelligent The Murder and Mystery of Jack the Ripper a project launched
in conjunction with a Llanelli based theater company Boom Productions. Two contrasting productions with the clear winner
being Boom Productions offering, which offered a unique and intriguing experience, experimental and unique in its creation
but nonetheless outstandingly enjoyable, well executed and excellently preformed.
On entering the theater the atmosphere was set by the playing of Music Hall music, combined with the low lighting of the
(LED) candles set on tables that were dressed with black cloth, it created an exciting and wonderful atmosphere. Added to
this was the air of mystery added to the evening, through an intriguing envelope that was lying quite innocently on our tables
marked ‘Do not open.’ It was clear from the outset that we were in for a mysteriously entertaining evening.
The performance itself was held in the intimate setting of the Crochan, a space which suited the production as the second
part of the evening included audience participation and would not have worked so well in a larger setting. Being in part a
lecture on the Whitechapel Murders, with key situations being dramatized by a strong and talented and highly commendable
cast using the text of original police reports as their script it was something fresh and new. Bringing the Whitechapel murders
to a new audience is a tricky task, and Rees managed to hold his audiences attention by breaking up his narration with this
inventive device. I feel that given Rees’ strong skill that he would be able to have carried the evening alone. His speech was
clear; his passion for his subject evident and above all it was delightful to see just how much he enjoyed presenting his work
to the audience added to the enjoyment of the evening. He is highly knowledgeable, friendly and spent a great time during the
interval, and after the performance discussing the crimes. There was a real effort to help the audience see and understand the
surroundings that the murders took place in, this was achieved through high quality animations showing the location slowly turn
from how it looks now to how it would have looked in 1888. These recreations were high quality and their detail was incredible,
and helped the audience get a real feel for what life would have looked like. The whole evening really displayed a high level
of attention for detail and history.
During the interval not only was there an opportunity to talk with our narrator, but to delve into and explore the National
Archive Pack that had been kindly put on display. Which was a great opportunity, and fascinating to see.
A great knowledge was not just shown by our narrator, but by the cast too, it was great to see that they had taken to
learning about the crimes to help the audience decided upon the killer in the second part of the evening. During the interval
it was announced that we would be helping to ‘solve’ the murders and all the information we needed was in the packs in front
of us. The audience pack was well done, there was a brief biography of the suspect and how they factored into the crimes
committed, with the post mortem and crime scene photographs of the victims discretely labeled in a separate envelope.
This was just as enjoyable part of the evening, and gave the audience the chance to talk about what we had just listened
to, and discuss out own theories in regards to the suspects we were given, which were Walter Sickert, William Gull, George
Hutchinson, Aaron Kosminski, James Maybrick, Montague John Druitt and Charles Lechmere. An interesting rouges gallery that
provided a diverse range of theories..
It truly was a strong production from a wonderful company. I hope that they have the opportunity to present this production
to a wider audience.
Review by Lauren Davies
WANT US TO REVIEW YOUR BOOK?
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each with an interest in Jack the Ripper, Victorian crime and London’s East End.
If you are an author or publisher of a forthcoming book and would like to reach our readers,
please get in touch at contact@ripperologist.biz
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 98