Colonel T.H. Shadwell Clerke, Masonic Constitutions (1884)
In chronological terms, Annie Chapman was the third in the series, but it was the most shocking yet in terms of Masonic signature. Mrs Chapman was a forty-seven-year-old nothing with progressive lung disease that would probably have killed her if the Ripper hadn’t. In the early hours of Saturday, 8 September 1888, in want of four pennies for a bed, she went out hawking the only thing she had. Just before six o’clock that same morning, her grotesquely mutilated body was discovered in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Whitechapel.
Her killer had clearly performed some kind of postmortem ritual. Her throat was cut across, her abdomen had been slashed open and her intestines removed, and deposited on her left shoulder. A ring or rings had been wrenched from her fingers, and together with her womb were missing from the crime scene. The assailant had also cut her pockets open, making a neat display of their contents at her feet. Amongst ‘other articles’ these consisted of a piece of muslin and a pair of combs. ‘There was also found,’ reported the Telegraph, ‘two farthings polished brightly’ – coins soon to be named ‘the Mysterious coins’, and to become the subject of trivial controversy.
A little over a week before Annie Chapman, a forty-three-year-old dipso called Mary Anne (‘Polly’) Nichols had suffered a primitive version of the same penalty. She had her throat cut across, her entrails hauled out and a worthless ring purloined from her finger. It is very probable that her murderer took it.
As has been mentioned, the removal of metal is axiomatic in Masonic ritual – ‘What ever he [or she] has about him made of metal is taken off,’ order the statutes of lodge initiation, ‘as buckles, buttons, rings, boxes, and even money in his pocket is taken away.’
No chance of any leap in forensic thinking here, then? It seems worth thinking about to me, particularly in the context of Scotland Yard’s comic mantra, ‘No clue too small.’
Bearing ‘clues’ in mind, and as a consideration, is it not possible that the assassin was indulging in some kind of postmortem compulsion that dictated entrails on a shoulder and the removal of metal? No need to get off one’s perch about it – just consider it along with a cut throat, cut pockets and coins as part of a broadening debate.
The following enquiry, in respect of metal, is one of the first put to an Entered Apprentice on Masonic initiation:
WORSHIPFUL MASTER: Brother, your Conductor thinks you have money about you. Search yourself. (Candidate feels in his pockets and insists he has none.)
SENIOR DEACON: I know the Candidate has money and if he will suffer me to search him, I will convince you of it.
In the above example, the Senior Deacon surreptitiously supplies the coins, and it’s my view that Jack supplied the farthings that were found near Annie Chapman’s body. Although these coins were described in contemporary press reports, a stalwart voice with special historic insight raises conjecture. Boss Ripperologist Mr Philip Sugden denies that they were there, citing Dr Phillips (who conducted the autopsy) as impeccable support for his argument. Because neither Phillips nor Inspector Chandler mentions coins at the inquest, hey presto, they couldn’t have been there. But Bro Dr Phillips is no more reliable than Bro McLeod, and both occasionally suffer the tribulations of amnesia. Memory loss is a shared phenomenon among certain Masons that will grip the corporate brain as we progress with this narrative. In the meantime, if the metaphor can be forgiven, I’d like to argue the toss of these coins in a later chapter, leaving the politics of metal until then.
On Wednesday, 26 September 1888, presiding over Chapman’s inquest, the coroner, Mr Wynne Baxter, said this: ‘But perhaps nothing was more noticeable than the emptying of her pockets and the arrangement of their contents with business-like precision in order near her feet.’
These murders were part of an evolving homicidal signature, the significance of which would have been as clear to Charles Warren as the nose on his face. For the sake of illustration, I’d like to consider Chapman’s demise from a different perspective. Let us create and evaluate an alternative battery of mutilations. Instead of a throat cut across, let us suppose the fatal wound was a deep gash, as might be caused by a spear or something similar thrust into her side. And let us imagine, subsequent to death, that her killer had opened her arms into the position of a crucifixion, and had taken the time (and the risk) to drive rusty nails through the palms of her hands, then positioned these nails at her feet before he fled. Would you not expect that someone of even moderate intelligence might hazard the possibility that the murder was the work of a ‘religious nut’? A one-eyed vicar up for the day could put it together. Yet of inquisitiveness over a similarly glaring distortion of Masonic ritual there was none. Warren and his detectives were positively stumped. There were no clues whatever, they said. No scream, and nothing to go on. ‘So far from giving a clue,’ comes a perceptive echo, ‘they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.’ ‘It exemplifies their worst fault,’ agreed the Daily News: ‘they cannot put two and two together.’
Maths was not a problem for a journalist by the name of George Sims, who wrote a weekly column for the Referee under the title ‘Mustard and Cress’. Sims’ derisive comments don’t do a lot for the idea that nobody said anything about Freemasonry in connection with the murders until the arrival of Mr Stephen Knight.
On 9 September 1888, the day after Chapman’s death, Sims wrote this: ‘The police up to the moment of writing are still at sea as to the series of Whitechapel murders – a series with such a strong family likeness as to point to one assassin or firm of assassins’ (my emphasis).
‘Assassins’ and ‘ruffians’ are interchangeable in the mythos of Freemasonry. Notwithstanding that, what did Sims have in mind when he wrote of a ‘firm of assassins’? Is it the same question posed in a pamphlet dedicated to Bro Sir John Corah, published in Anno Lucis 4954? ‘What is this drama of Assassination?’ he asks. ‘And whence is it derived?’1
Sims needed no explanation. He was a Freemason himself, and on 16 September 1888 he returned to his theme. ‘The police may be playing a game of spoof [swindle, humbug or fraud, according to The Oxford English Dictionary], but the fact remains that in no suggestion made by the authorities up to the present is the slightest technical knowledge of the “speciality” of the Whitechapel atrocities shown.’
Bro Sims doesn’t elucidate what he means by ‘speciality’,2 but that didn’t prevent him adding a bit of cynical doggerel to underline his drift:
The Summer had come in September at last,
And the pantomime season was coming on fast,
When a score of detectives arrived from the Yard
To untangle a skein which was not very hard.
It puzzled the Bar, and puzzled the Bench,
It puzzled policemen, Dutch, German and French,
But ’twas clear as a pikestaff to all London ’tecs,
Who to see through a wall didn’t want to wear specs.
‘Clear as a pikestaff’ it was, to Bro Sims as it is to me. But the Metropolitan Police didn’t want to see anything, through spectacles or anything else. Warren and his ‘’tecs’ would have seen nothing worth investigating if they’d been staring at the Ripper in action through an open window.
During the stalled Chapman inquiry, Inspector Abberline of H Division, Whitechapel, consulted with Detective Inspector Helson of J Division, CID, an officer who was (or should have been) still working on the Nichols horror at Buck’s Row in Whitechapel. There were clear similarities between the two cases, and Abberline was palpably having a problem with his. According to the Daily Telegraph on 15 September, ‘Inspector Abberline himself says that the Police Surgeon [Bro Dr George Bagster Phillips] has not told him what portions of the body are missing.’