Edmund Reid

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