‘Left her there as a sign for something or other’.
As with much in Caputi’s book, her judgement here is precise. Although her description echoes aspects of the Ripper’s crime scenes, she’s actually writing about a squad of American soldiers who have just beaten and shot a Vietnamese woman to death. The perpetrator here is a representative of USAID. ‘Such crimes are indistinguishable from the crimes of Jack the Ripper,’ writes Caputi; ‘both are meant to signify the same thing – the utter vanquishment and annihilation of the enemy.’15
You don’t have to be ‘insane’ to cut people up, no matter how fiendishly you do it. You just have to hate enough. The Whitechapel Murderer was a beast who hated women (one young American woman in particular), but no way was he insane.
In 1889 an American lawyer wrote about the Ripper scandal in a Boston legal journal called the Green Bag. Considering his piece is contemporary, it is quite remarkable in its perceptions, and is not remotely taken in by the forest of nonsense being put out at the time. It’s far too long to reproduce in its entirety. This edited version therefore is mine, as are the emphases.
It is surprising that, in the present cases, there has been a failure to discover the perpetrator of the deeds; for they have not been ordinary murders. Not only are the details as revolting as any which the records of medical jurisprudence contain; they are also marked by certain characteristics which at first sight would seem to afford a particularly strong likelihood of the crimes being cleared up. The very number of the crimes, the almost exact repetition of the murderer’s procedure in each, the similarity of hour and circumstances, the elaborate mutilation of the bodies … these things might not unnaturally be expected to give some clue.16
My kind of lawyer. I couldn’t agree more, exploration of the words ‘marked by certain characteristics’ being the aspiration of this book.
Yet this abundance of circumstance gives none. So far from giving a clue, they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.
The writer goes on to dismiss the theory of a ‘homicidal maniac’ as an unreliable proposition:
It is the very atrocity of the Whitechapel murders that gave rise to the theory of their being the work of a madman. It is not a novel line of reasoning, this. Only let the deed be surpassingly barbarous, and the ordinary mind will at once leap to the conclusion that it was a maniac who wrought it. Now, the inference is quite fallacious. Some of the most barbarous murders on record have been perpetrated by admittedly sane men – men on whose perfect soundness of mind no doubt has ever been cast. The mutilation of the bodies of these wretched women in East London, taken by itself, is no indication whatever of insanity on the part of the perpetrator of the deeds. The craft and the cunning evinced in the murders seems little to consist with insanity. The rash and uncalculating act of the lunatic is not here. No doubt there are on record a few isolated cases of considerable caution being shown on the part of insane homicides; but we are not acquainted with any which approach to the present display of prudence and circumspection. The craftiness of these deeds is astounding; and the highest tribute to it is the fact that all attempts at detection have been made in vain hitherto. The actual execution of his foul deeds must have been swift and dexterous, and shows coolness of hand and steadiness of purpose. These things are all markedly in the direction of disproving insanity.17
But that wouldn’t do for the hierarchy at Scotland Yard; it was not even up for consideration. For mischievous reasons that will explain themselves, the authorities needed a maniac, preferably a foreigner or a Jew.
Havelock Ellis’s hysterically funny but apparently serious book The Criminal (1890) gives a thumbnail sketch of the kind of thing the Metropolitan Police were trying to sell. The following is a description of one such murderer in the dock:
Imagine a sort of abortion, bent and wrinkled, with earthy complexion, stealthy eyes, a face gnawed by scrofula, a slovenly beard framing a yellow bilious face of cunning, dissipated and cruel aspect. The forehead is low, the hair black and thrown backwards, the muscles of a beast of prey. His repellent head was photographed on my memory, and lighting up the sinister features with a sinister gleam, two small piercing eyes of a ferocity which I could scarcely bear to see.18
This perceived horror and ‘lair-dweller’ – as widely prescribed for our world-famous gent – was an unquestioningly well-enjoyed camouflage, relished and accepted not only by the press and public, but by a majority of experts (the Ripperologists of their day): Jack was a Hebrew frightener with the eyes of a ferret, a sort of Elephant Man with no laughs, and on a moonless night his complexion approached hues of the earth from a freshly violated grave:
The eye of the habitual criminal is glassy, cold, and fixed; his nose is often aquiline, beaked, reminding one of a bird of prey. The jaws are strong, the canine teeth much developed, the lips thin, nystagmus frequent, also spasmodic contractions of one side of the face, by which the canine teeth are exposed.19
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was a hardened, streetwise East End whore, half-sloshed and desperate for fourpence or not, I would definitely avoid going up an alley with this man. Forget the canine teeth, it’s the spasmodic contractions of one side of the face that would do it for me.
No whore in Christendom is going to entertain it. But just in case she does, there’s more. Let’s overlook Talbot and his ‘degenerate ear’ (1886), and move straight to Ottolenghi (1888), who described the ‘extraordinary ape-like agility noted in criminals’, a characteristic sometimes accompanied by ‘unusual length of arm’; he also drew attention to the prevalence of the ‘prehensile foot’. In 1886 Giovenale Salsotto apparently found ‘abundant hair round the anus’. So you knew what to look out for.20
What the Victorians feared in their Ripper was a manifestation of their own prejudices, and it was rubbish like this that got women killed. ‘Your suspect, ladies, is an anthropophagite goon, and local Israelite. Avoid large noses and hair round the anus and you’ll be all right.’
It all kicked off with this, fly-posted and hawked all over the East End immediately after the murder of Annie Chapman, with no complaints from the police.
Another murder of a character even more diabolical than that perpetrated in Buck’s Row, on Friday week, was discovered in the same neighbourhood, on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman [Chapman] was found lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging-house in Old Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields.
The hunt was now on for a man called John Pizer, a.k.a ‘Leather Apron’, who was ‘known to carry knives’. This was not entirely unreasonable, since his trade was as a boot-finisher – which is presumably why he also wore an apron.
Pizer was a Jew, well known to the police in Whitechapel. In the light of what was to evolve, it is noticeable that the authorities showed little care for Hebrew sensibilities. When they weren’t accusing Jews, the police were destroying potential vital evidence in the ridiculous pretence of protecting them from anti-Semitic attack. As will be seen, from various schools of Ripperology there’s been a catalogue of excuses for the police concerning the obliteration of some writing on a wall at Goulston Street, near the scene of one of the murders. (Ripperology calls this writing ‘graffito’. This unhelpful sobriquet has attracted a good deal of explaining away and very little explaining.) But, as is my intention to demonstrate, not a few senior policemen had a vested interest in the maintenance of bafflement and the dissemination of fairy tales.
Let’s just have a brief look at the sad case of another utterly innocent little Jew, called Kosminski. His star rose when certain Ripperologists gave credibility to a bit of worthless moonshine in the margins of a book. This scribble