GEORGE HUTCHINSON

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