Edmund Reid
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So you never obtained a description of the man from anyone?<br />
‘Never. Indeed that the murderer was a man, is only an inference from the fact that no one but a person<br />
believed by the women themselves to be a man could have been taken by them to the secret haunts in<br />
which the murders were all committed.’<br />
All the murders were committed in secret haunts?<br />
‘Yes, all the murders were upon women of the most degraded class, and in the darkest, most secret<br />
places, inaccessible to the police, where the murderer was taken by the women themselves. This is<br />
an important point, in reviewing the crimes, that it was evident in every case the women themselves<br />
selected the place of their death. The murderer never took them to these places. He was always taken<br />
to them by his victims who knew and selected dark, hidden spots for their own purpose. This, also, is<br />
why I maintained always that respectable women never had anything to fear from the Ripper.’<br />
And the next murder?<br />
‘The next murder was the one which has been recorded as the first Ripper case. This was the notorious<br />
Buck’s-row murder. In this case the woman was believed to have been murdered about one o’clock in<br />
the morning. She was found with her throat cut and on the post-mortem examination taking place it<br />
was found that her body was [sic] been cut about in a brutal, haphazard manner with a knife.’<br />
And what connection had this case with the previous one?<br />
‘The answer to your question is an explanation of the whole theory of the murders. The idea that the<br />
murderer was a mad surgeon, or a man with any knowledge of the anatomy of the human being was a<br />
most ridiculously inaccurate one. The murderer was mad beyond a doubt – a homicidal maniac. He had<br />
no method, nor did he exhibit any acquaintance of the human frame. He was simply seized with a frenzy<br />
the moment he was alone with the women, hacked and tore at them in his frenzy, with no intent but<br />
the satisfaction of a horrible passion for destruction. There were other murders in the district during<br />
the period which were not Ripper murders.’<br />
And herein lay the distinction between the ordinary murders and the others, if I am right in putting<br />
the question so?<br />
‘The cases which I am discussing with you as the Ripper murders all displayed one peculiar form of<br />
violation and an interesting fact was that the hand of the one madman could be traced through a series<br />
of nine murders, each one displaying a gradation of more intensified frenzy. Every fresh time the mania<br />
seized the murderer his passion became more horrible in its satisfaction. The mutilation in the Buck’srow<br />
case was exactly of the same nature as that inflicted upon the woman who died in the hospital;<br />
but in the second and all succeeding cases the throat of the victim had been cut before the mutilation.<br />
Take another case. There was the George-yard murder. A cabman coming down the stairs of some<br />
dwellings at four o’clock in the morning found the body of a woman named Tabrun [sic] lying half in<br />
the doorway of a passage in the building. Her throat was cut and she had been stabbed in 39 places.<br />
She had been dead over two hours. The doctor who examined the body said the stabs appeared to have<br />
been inflicted with a bayonet. A woman known as Pearly Poll said she and Tabrun were in company the<br />
evening before with a private soldier and a corporal, and that the corporal went away with Tabrun. We<br />
had two parades at the Tower of London of the Coldstream Guards, and one at the Wellington Barracks.<br />
At each place Pearly Poll picked out a different man as the one she had seen, but in each case the books<br />
of the barracks proved that the men she picked out were indoors during the whole evening and night.<br />
As a matter of fact Pearly Poll was not a trustworthy witness. We never obtained any clue in this case,<br />
nor anyone in any subsequent case able to afford us the slightest information that was of use.<br />
To enable you to understand the difficulty surrounding the next case I need to explain that in the East<br />
End of London it is a common thing for men of means to farm houses. This is to say they rent houses in<br />
which they do not live themselves, and let out every room of a house to tenants of their own. The front<br />
door of such a house is always unbarred, and no person living on the premises has a right to interfere<br />
with anyone using the front doorway, or the passages or stairs. Yet the police have no power to enter,<br />
as the place is the private property of the absent landlord. Outcasts wander into these houses and<br />
sleep on the stairs and in the passages, and no one is empowered to remove them. A resident in one of<br />
Ripperologist 147 December 2015 3