To ‘follow this information up’ was to pursue an utterly false lead, and Phillips knew it as surely as did the Lancet. This creepy little profferer of deceit had no business to be at this court, talking up such junk. ‘The American Womb-Collector’ had about as much credibility as Robert Anderson’s ‘Ink-Stained Journalist’, who was about to make his entrance, poised with his quill, in anticipation of the Ripper’s correspondence. The American Womb-Collector was never to be heard of again, soon to be replaced for the duration by a character of no less fabulous provenance: to wit, ‘the Insane Medical Student’. Their differences were few, but while ‘the Womb-Collector’ gathered in human organs, ‘the Insane Medical Student’ handed them out.
Nothing happens by accident. Bro Baxter didn’t invent his nonsensical theory by accident, and it was no accident that Bro Phillips reappeared at his court to support it. Both were lying, and the Ripper was on a win–win. They knew he was a Mason (or someone pretending to be one), but they didn’t yet know who he was. Was he someone close to the System, or even a part of it? Until this was found out, he had to be accommodated.
Evidence was therefore manipulated, degraded and distorted, and in the case of the imminent outrage at Goulston Street, literally wiped out. When Sir Charles Warren finally got his silly arse down to Whitechapel, he found the vernacular of the ‘Three Assassins’ flaunted like an advert for Freemasonry. In a crazy onslaught, the crime scenes were saturated with it. But Jack’s extravaganza was also his immunity. ‘The feeling,’ accused the Bradford Observer, ‘is that the helplessness of the police is the most discreditable exhibition of their incapacity that has been witnessed for many years.’
Discreditable it was, but they hadn’t seen nothing yet. Under Warren, detectives regarded the office of a Freemason as superior to that of a serving police officer. Dispensing with any sense of duty to the public who paid them, they got into line like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. ‘He never left a clue, lads! He never left a clue! Keep those truncheons up, lads! Not a one! Not a one! Not a one!’
What they actually meant was that he left far too many of the sort of clues they didn’t want to know about. ‘Sir Charles Wakes Up’ was the headline in the New York Herald.18 Warren had just had the kind of door-knock in the dead of night that presages dismay. When he left his home in Westminster at about 4.15 a.m. the last thing he wanted was any further intimation, be it overt or oblique, of Freemasonry. A carriage was waiting outside in the drizzle. This was the Bro Commissioner’s first ever trip to the East End in respect of these murders. He must have rattled out of the Establishment heart of London expecting the worst. And he got it.
4
Ignorance worships mystery, reason explains it.
Robert G. Ingersoll
In the early hours of Sunday, 30 September 1888, the Ripper made two hits. The first was an aborted liaison at a place called Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street in Whitechapel, where he attacked and murdered a forty-four-year-old part-time whore, Elizabeth Stride. It seems his postmortem activity was interrupted by the arrival of a young coster, Louis Diemschutz, with his pony and cart. Sensing something untoward, the animal shied in the darkness, and it was probably in the few moments of ensuing confusion that the assassin made himself scarce.
Like an Argentine toad – touch the bastard and die – our Purger must have been almost toxic with homicidal adrenaline. For him, murder wasn’t even half the story. What motivated him was ritual. He wanted body parts, trophies, wanted to leave his ‘mark’, a pleasure denied him at Dutfield’s Yard by the arrival of Diemschutz and his nag.
The hunt for more action took him west, into the City – over the state line, so to speak, and therefore into a location that made some sense. Stride had been slaughtered on Charles Warren’s patch in Whitechapel. Jack was now out of there, relatively safe in an entirely different police district, a part of London under the aegis of another ex-military man, Assistant Commissioner Major Sir Henry Smith.
At about 1.30 a.m. the killer ran into his next victim, a forty-six-year-old drunk called Catherine Eddowes. The encounter tells us something about the Ripper’s extraordinary credentials as a psychopath. Not an hour before, he’d cut so deep into a woman’s throat that he was down to the vertebrae, yet here he clearly manifested no sign of physical or mental duress beyond that of a man taking a leisurely stroll. A blood-drenched cliché scuttling for a ‘lair’ he was not. There could have been no blood, no exposed canines – nothing to alert this streetwise woman at all. Jack was clearly a man in complete control, and within minutes he had control of Eddowes. The unfortunate woman had just got out of a police cell, where she’d been banged up for a few hours to sleep off the gin. ‘I shall get a damned good hiding when I get home,’ she told the copper who released her. She never made it, but became world-famous instead.
Mrs Eddowes was murdered in Mitre Square, Aldgate, at about 1.45 a.m., suffering horrendous mutilations which probably included Elizabeth Stride’s share too. For it seems very likely that the disturbance at Dutfield’s Yard put in its invoice here. The killer cut her throat, then flayed her in sexual insult, creating a classic Ripper atrocity.
‘The throat was cut across to the extent of 6 or 7 inches,’ recorded City Police surgeon Dr Gordon Brown. ‘The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. The lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through … Several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed.’
No clues, of course, except for the usual cornucopia. It’s a virtual repeat of Chapman, although in Eddowes’ case the intestines were placed on the right, rather than the left, shoulder. Brown’s autopsy was comprehensive, and I’ll get back to it. Meanwhile, I want to concentrate on the injuries inflicted upon the face. Much hatred was lavished there, with apparently random mutilation. But as with everything else in Jack’s signature, there is always a message for Charlie Warren:
There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose, extending from the left border of the nasal bone down near to the angle of the jaw on the right side of the cheek. This cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth. The tip of the nose was quite detached from the nose by an oblique cut from the bottom of the nasal bone to where the wings of the nose join the face. A cut from this divided the upper lip and extended through the substance of the gum over the right lateral incisor tooth. About half an inch from the top of the nose there was another oblique cut. There was a cut on the right angle of the mouth as if the cut of a point of a knife. The cut extended an inch and a half, parallel with the lower lip.
This is crazy stuff, an uncoordinated frenzy of spite. However, the last cuts Brown describes are very different from the rest, and were almost certainly the last the Ripper made on this occasion. ‘There was a cut on each side of the cheek,’ he notes, ‘a cut which peeled up the skin, forming a triangular flap about an inch and a half.’
Complementary of each other, these are the only duplicated injuries to the face. No slashing here: rage has given way to balance and control. Irrespective of the darkness and the risk of discovery, it was a steady hand and deliberate thinking that cut this precise duo of marks. Like the items ‘placed in order or arranged’ at Chapman’s feet, and the piece of Eddowes’ intestine