Sir, – will you allow me to ask a question of your correspondents who want to disperse the vicious inhabitants of Dorset Street and Flower and Dean Street? There are no lower streets in London, and if they are driven out of these, to what streets are they to go? The horror and excitement caused by the murder of the four Whitechapel outcasts imply a universal belief that they had a right to life. If they had, then they had the further right to hire shelter from the bitterness of the English night. If they had no such right, then it was, on the whole, a good thing that they fell in with the unknown surgical genius. He at all events had made his contribution towards solving the ‘problem of clearing the East End of its vicious inhabitants’. The typical ‘Annie Chapman’ will always find someone in London to let her have a ‘doss’ for a consideration. If she is systematically ‘dispersed’, two results will follow. She will carry her taint to streets hitherto untainted, and she herself will [illegible] in larger sums than before for the accommodation. The price of a doss will rise from 8 pence to 10 pence or a shilling, the extra pennies representing an insurance fund against prosecution and disturbance.58
Annie Chapman’s life is valued at two pennies above the market rate, so all six victims added together to a shilling. By this computation the Ripper would have had to kill 120 women to cost a quid. This correspondent’s address, 64 Eaton Place (just around the corner from Charles Warren), reveals more about him than his text. Here is a voice from one of the most salubrious areas of London; it’s the voice of the class the System served to protect. The calamity of these atrocities is reduced to the impact they might have on Eaton Place and its environs, including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the Athenaeum. In short, these homeless scum have brought the hand of ‘genius’ upon themselves, and are better dead than spoiling the view around here.
Reality is turned on its head, and it is the victims who are the vicious. I think such heartlessness explains the government’s shrewd assumption that, provided information could be carefully managed, the majority would buy into the ‘mystery’, and nobody else who mattered would give tuppence of a damn.
5
Clench the fingers of the right hand, extend the thumb, place it on the abdomen, and move it upwards to the chin, as if ripping open the body with a knife.
Richardson’s Monitor of Freemasonry (1860)
The ‘Double Event’, as the Stride/Eddowes murders were christened by their perpetrator, is not original to the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard he sent, but was a vulgar colloquialism of the age. It meant to simultaneously suffer venereal disease of both the anus and the genitals. Jack’s choice of such a pleasantry may be trivial, but I don’t think it is. Although characteristic of a pun, I think it had a more substantive meaning for the murderer, and I interpret the ‘Double Event’ as both sobriquet and expression of disgust.1
The Ripper’s choice of target was opportunistic, but not accidental. Self-evidently he was looking for a ‘type’, his selection of a victim in life no less specific than the signature he wrote into their deaths. This fabulously cruel man didn’t rip the ‘sex’ out of East End whores because he lacked the wit to kill elsewhere. He killed in Whitechapel as part of his statement. He wanted ‘sex’ as low as it got. The furnace of his rage was in his victim’s womb, the ‘filthiest part’ of her being, and he was disgusted with her for what his hatred would have him do.
Theories seeking to link these women to their killer (as in Clarence) are as risible as the use Freemasonry attempts to make of them. The victims were linked only in circumstance, and insomuch as they were available. As far as this narrative is concerned, Catherine Eddowes’ life lasted about thirty-five minutes: from the time she left the police lock-up to the time the Ripper killed her. Many accounts detail what’s known of her past, her lousy life and those in it, but none of that is of much interest here. Eddowes’ biography matters no more to me than it did to the man who eviscerated her. On her drunken arrest earlier that evening she gave her name as ‘Nothing’, and that’s just about it. She was just another bit of trash in the ugly East End rain.
A psychopath is at his most dangerous when he’s having fun. Jack was having a lot of fun, playing off the angels and the ogres in his own homicidal fairy tale. Authority would feel the weight of his spite, and women the depths of his revenge. Angels don’t fuck, and in the vernacular of his hatred, I believe that’s how Jack saw women, as either mother-angels or whores. It’s my view that he killed these women as surrogates, punishing them for the sexuality of another, and I believe one woman in particular was on his mind. She was a mother-angel who had proved herself lower than the filthiest whore. Until he got to her, and destroyed her, he owned her in Eddowes and the rest, cut out her mother-part for a trophy, like a huntsman with the head of a vanquished animal. He was ‘walking with God’, as the great detective Robert Ressler characterises the mindset of such a psyche, and what fault there was belonged to the victims.
‘It wasn’t fuckin’ wrong,’ claimed American serial killer Kenneth Bianchi. ‘Why’s it wrong to get rid of some cunts?’2
‘Four more cunts to add to my little collection,’ brags a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ (dismissed with infantile pomp by Ripperology as a hoax).
Eddowes was a cunt, and the Ripper put his hands inside her and excoriated what he pulled out, literally hated her guts.
The question, then as now, is: who was he? Dozens of writers – some admirable, many not – have taken their shot. The list of candidates is phenomenal. If all the Rippers had been in the East End on the same night they’d have been elbowing into each other up the alleyways. There would have been about thirty Fiends out there at first fog. It’s worth a glance at a few of the names. They were (and are) Kosminski, Ostrog, Druitt, Klosowski, Clarence, Pizer, Gull, Austin, Cutbush, Cream, Sickert, Isenchmid, and James Maybrick.
None of the above was remotely plausible as far as I was concerned. But when the name Maybrick turned up, I was interested. As I intended to set out in the Author’s Note at the beginning of this book, but didn’t, my curiosity about tackling a murder mystery kicked off with reading Raymond Chandler. In his memoir, published in 1962, the inimitable crime writer nominated the case of Florence Maybrick as one of classic forensic interest. Exploring it over about a dozen pages, he concludes that evidence of her guilt is cancelled out by evidence of her innocence, and that the resulting conundrum remains insoluble. What made the name Maybrick interesting to me was that it was not only already associated with an unresolved murder mystery but, many years after Chandler’s death, with the mother mystery of them all.
This development, reprising the name Maybrick, came via a ‘scrapbook’ that emerged in Liverpool in 1992, provenance unexplained. Ludicrously misnamed as ‘The Diary of Jack the Ripper’,3 it implicated James Maybrick as our famous purger. Beyond Chandler, I knew nothing about James Maybrick, or the mystery surrounding his wife either, but considering both were accused (albeit over a hundred years apart) of being famous murderers, I thought both were worth a closer look.
In 1880 James Maybrick was a forty-one-year-old Liverpool-based cotton broker who had met and wooed Florence Chandler, a seventeen-year-old Alabama beauty, on an Atlantic crossing. Their wedding the following year was the biggest mistake of her life. Eight years later, and now with two kids, Florence was about to take her seat in the front row of a nightmare.
It doesn’t take long to dismiss James (or ‘Jim’, as he was nicknamed)