At last the jury was party to the classified forensics Bro Phillips had so assiduously tried to hide behind. It must have all sounded so obvious when you knew it. Jack the Ripper was working for a publisher! What Baxter would have had the jury believe was that ‘some abandoned wretch’, converted into an entrepreneur by something that was never said at a non-existent medical school, had then set about terrorising East London, burgling uteri, which he would post to America, where they would be packaged with a book. A sort of ‘buy one get one free’.
‘I need hardly say,’ confided Bro Baxter, ‘that I at once communicated my information to the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. Of course I do not know what use has been made of it.’
I’m happy to supply the answer. None. None, because it was diversionary junk for public consumption; and none, because the Detective Department was busy doing what you were now doing, Coroner Bro Baxter, and that was covering up.
As far as the ‘Fiend’ was concerned, Baxter had learned his lesson the hard way. He would never again make the same mistake. At the Stride inquest he would preside over an ‘in-house’ conspiracy that should have put him in prison. Baxter had joined the automaton, and what a pitiful little maggot Jack had made of him. He all but blew it with ‘the Womb-Collector’, stretching credulity into a backlash of press ridicule.
‘Of all the ludicrous theories,’ mocked Henry Labouchère’s Truth, ‘the theory of the coroner is assuredly the most grotesque. I don’t know if there is any way of getting rid of a Comic Coroner, but if any machinery does exist for the purpose, it ought without a moment’s delay be put into force.’ Truth wanted Baxter ‘retired summarily and quickly’, lest ‘the bibulous gentlemen about Pall Mall might get their livers torn out and offered with some number of a temperance magazine’.9 Baxter’s theory was ‘altogether preposterous’, according to the Observer.
But much more damning for ‘the Comic Coroner’ was the reaction of his peers in the medical profession. ‘My purpose in writing,’ intoned one eminent croaker, Sir James Risden-Bennett, ‘was simply to demonstrate the absurdity of the theory that the crimes were being committed for the purpose of supplying an American physiologist with specimens. It would be extremely easy, here or in America either, for a physiologist to secure this portion of intestines. The notion that they were wanted in order that they might be sent out along with copies of a medical publication is ridiculous; not only ridiculous indeed, but absolutely impossible of realisation.’10 In other words, you don’t have to go through the perversions of obvious Masonic ritual to publish a non-existent book.
No one agreed more than the world’s most respected medical journal. ‘The whole tale is almost beyond belief,’ judged the Lancet, ‘and if, as we think, it can be shown to have grown in transmission, it will not only shatter the theory that cupidity [twenty quid] was the motive of the crime, but will bring into question the discretion of the officer of the law [Bro Baxter] who could accept such a statement and give it such wide publicity.’11
Baxter was no more believed than had he proposed Jack’s disappearance from Hanbury Street up a beanstalk. His artful little fairy tale had backfired. The Lancet hadn’t finished: ‘And what is equally deplorable, the revelation thus made by the Coroner, which so dramatically startled the public last Wednesday evening, may probably lead to a diversion from the real track of the murderer, and thus defeat rather than serve the ends of justice.’12
Or, put succinctly, it was a resounding success. Diversion and defeat of the ends of justice were what it was all about. The felony that terminated inquiries into the death of Annie Chapman shows just how easy it was for bent officials to corrupt justice. It was ‘preposterous’, it was ‘deplorable’, it was ‘comic’, it was a false lead that could only serve to assist the criminal. But it was also an unaccountable system in action. Bro Baxter kept his job. The only individuals with the authority to get rid of him were those who needed him most.
The hostile reaction to his desperate lying, however, panicked the authorities, who realised that some urgent news management was required. Feeble as it was false, the conservative Standard delivered a wriggling little effort, attempting to portray Baxter’s flight of fantasy as the result of a ‘mistake’ by a ‘minor official’. Dismissing the £20 as an unhappy nonsense, the paper went on to dismiss the very notion of the American quack and his fabulously laughable book. ‘The person in question was a physician of the highest respectability,’ assured the Standard, ‘and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities of his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real information for the hypothesis, and the information communicated, which was not at all of the nature which the public had been led to believe, was due to an erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard, and to which a negative reply was given. This theory may at once be dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained even by its author.’13
It wasn’t. But never mind what ‘the public had been led to believe’ – what about the jury? It got the same despicable earful of Establishment camouflage. If ‘the Womb-Collector’ was a ‘theory that may at once be dismissed’, should not the court have immediately reconvened under an honest (non-Masonic) coroner to examine the true nature of Chapman’s mutilations? Was not Bro Dr Bagster Phillips withholding a reality, converted by Bro Coroner Wynne Baxter into a comic fantasy? Such patent rubbish had now been rejected, so what exactly were the pair of them hiding?
Such questions were emotive, and remained bereft of answer. But let no one fret – we’ll soon be back in the gaslight, a sedative is on its way. ‘Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt,’ writes Mr Sugden from his usual altitude, ‘but it would be instructive to learn just how much truth there was in the information he was given.’14
As in, how brown is this shit? The tenor of this sentence is breathtaking. If Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt, might we please know Mr Sugden’s definition of integrity?
Baxter’s ‘integrity’ was shot to bits, and all subsequent evidence reveals him to have been a Masonic dupe. He should have been summarily fired, and prosecuted for misfeasance of office. And he would have been, had he not been protecting the Establishment that owned him.
The answer to the second part of Mr Sugden’s sentence is none. There was no truth in ‘the information he was given’, because he was never given it. It was merely a contribution to what the Telegraph called ‘the scandalous exhibition of stupidity revealed in the East End inquests’. In short, it was a confection of diversionary twaddle, and once it had served its nefarious purpose, Bro Baxter (like Bro Stowell after him) denied it.15 There was no American in London seeking uteri in glycerine. There was no medical school that could confirm such an approach. There was no £20 on offer for the merchandise, and there was no mind-numbingly ridiculous book to go with it. The ‘minor official’ referred to by the Standard, incidentally, was almost certainly Bro Phillips himself. In apparent ignorance of the impending backtrack, he turned up at Baxter’s court with ambitions to confirm the theory. The witness who previously hadn’t wanted to say anything was now canvassing the ear of any reporter who would listen.
Baxter, meanwhile, was in full mendacious flight on the bench. The Masonic doctor had not been called that day, and was present at the court on his own account, claiming that he had ‘attended the inquest for the purpose of answering further questions, with a view to elucidating the mystery; but he arrived while the Coroner was summing-up, and thus had no opportunity’.16
Phillips was there in order to confirm