Latest List: The World's Most Prolific Serial Killers (no, they're not all American!)
Sheer Lunacy: a Brief History of the Naming of Jack the Ripper Suspects
My favoured suspects? It's got to be Eddy, effeminate eldest son of the Prince of Wales, teaming up with supreme late Victorian artist Walter Sickert as the front and back end respectively of a deranged pantomime horse, galloping loose through the mean streets of Whitechapel and bent on terrible harm. Just think how easily it would have been for them to evade detection during their wicked autumn spree?
Ripperologists are of course completely bonkers, pushing their theories built on sand, seen through the dense smoke and fog of one hundred and twenty six years. Several have been as certifiable as their dotty suspects. And I must admit here and now that I am indeed of their kind. Yes, I am also a Ripperologist! I thrill to that particular chase. Indeed I even have my own suspect, although more of him later; who knows, I may even convince you. Oh, I'll never prove anything—that's the point of all of this nonsense; the sum total of zero forensic evidence will ever be brought forward in support of a single theory or suspicion. And what a crestfallen and bedraggled crew the Ripper community would become no sooner had irrefutable proof been wheeled out to the light of day. Book deals: cancelled. Walking Tours: nobody turns up. Mystique: evaporates.
And so while we cast our eyes along the police line-up of the so-far named, let us not forget the FBI's highly respected and generally widely accepted sexual serial killer 'attributes' that would pertain to these particular crimes. As a clearly frenzied or 'disorganised' murderer of strangers in public places Jack was very highly likely to have:
• Lived and worked in that particular part of the East End
• Been working-class and to have held down menial or low-paid work
• Shown outwardly 'normal' or at least unremarkable behaviour but been somewhat socially inadequate
• Have been of fairly limited IQ
• Been between the ages of 25 and 40
• Exhibited regular nocturnal habits
Now then, to some of the 'prime' suspects. I will deal with them as one solid crass block, with nonsense piled on top of risibility:
Montague J. Druitt: educated at Winchester and New College Oxford, teacher, excellent cricketer, almost certainly homosexual and possibly implicated in certain 'shenanigans' at his school, never lived in the East End, found drowned in the Thames Christmas 1888, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. James Maybrick: erroneously suggested as the author of the infamous forged 'Diary Of Jack the Ripper', wealthy Liverpool shipping merchant, never lived remotely near the East End, 50 years-old, murdered by his wife in 1889 in Liverpool, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Michael Ostrog: Oxford educated petty criminal, possibly qualified as a doctor, 55 years-old, never fully resident in the East End, remarkable resemblance to double-taking James Finlayson from the Laurel and Hardy films, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Sir William Gull (and Masonic Friends): Queen Victoria's personal physician, Governor of Guy's Hospital, an ancient 72 years-old, never resident even remotely near to the East End (unless you count Mayfair), NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Aaron Kosminski: Polish Jew occasionally working as a barber in the East End, 23 years-old, perpetually confused with other named suspects like Nathan Kaminsky, some other bloke called Kosminsky, and David Cohen, all of whom were variously insane and institutionalised at one time or another, a much better suspect than the fellows already listed but apparently so gaga and dribbling that women would cross the street and yell on spotting him rather than engage the guy in banter or negotiations of a sexual nature, so NOT JACK THE RIPPER. George Chapman: 22 years-old at the time, Polish by birth and a conman by proclivity, later murdered three women by poisoning, so modus operandi-discrete and therefore NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Francis Tumblety: 55 year-old Irish-born mountebank who earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada, identified living just about everywhere other than London's East End, definitely NOT JACK THE RIPPER. J. K Stephen: Cousin of Virgina Wolf, Old Etonian, poet, tutor to the aforementioned Prince Eddy, the right sort of age at 28...................can we stop now?
Do you see the problem? It goes on and on. And yet rather than simply dismissing all this as either authorial license gone mad or a pressing need to sell books in an era of celebrity, we really should address it for what it is: intelligent (in the main) men (in the main) ignoring all the tested and established tenets of police investigation and scientific criminology in order to add gloss to a series of murders that although horrendous in nature, were limited in number and historically mundane. Stood alongside Sutcliffe's paralysing six-year hold over whole swathes of northern England or the deadly and incomprehensible machinations of Doctor Harold Shipman, the Jack the Ripper murders start to look like rather small beer.
Of far greater significance was the effect of the 1888 Autumn of Terror on urban social policy and the plight of impoverished women; the Salvation Army and common and garden charity itself, philanthropic and state-sponsored housing and slum clearance, enhanced workers' rights, the Suffragette movement, and maybe even eventually the National Health Service and the Welfare State owe at least a small nod of begrudging recognition to the Cockney madman and his knife.
A light got shone at last where Saucy Jack did play.
William Ruby
Appendix
And my man?
Of the local working-class men identified at any stage as suspects only Kosminski and Joe Barnett (final victim Mary Kelly's estranged boyfriend) have been given anywhere near the sort of retrospective scrutiny afforded the motley crew of posh blokes and weirdoes listed above. Barnett's candidacy does not garner too much support: rather he appears to be simply a daft local lad (think Ricky from EastEnders, with Mary as Bianca) caught up in dreadful events. And yet one young local bloke has been seriously overlooked, not least because he was neither glamorous nor particularly notorious during his own lifetime.
Jacob Levy simply hid in plain sight. He is by far the most likely Ripper, but Ripperologists think him simply too boring and obvious to be true. Here goes:
• 32 years-old
• local butcher
• nocturnal (both through work and habit)
• previous low-key criminal activity: some aggression and anti-social behaviour
• lived all his life in the Aldgate area of the East End
• lived/raised on dividing line between Met and City police areas (see Double Event if bothered to investigate the significance of this: I won't bore you)
• anatomical knowledge gained through work consistent with very quick removal of 'trophy' body parts from victims in poor light in early mornings
• able to be bloodied and carrying knives without alerting too much attention
• killings Friday/Saturday morning/Bank Holiday; as a Jew, Levy observed the Sabbath and had more freedom from work at these times
• worked on Butcher's Row on Aldgate High Street as a 'jobbing butcher' (having apparently lost his own family business), directly opposite St Botolph Church where the prostitutes of the area used to parade, in sight of his family house on Middlesex Street, and two minutes walk from Mitre Square where Cath Eddowes was murdered on the night of the Double Event
• Syphilitic. Likely to have contracted the disease from a local working girl. Did this give him his motive?
• Cutting off tips of noses of victims consistent with revenge disfigurement: syphilis often takes the nose first.
• Graffito and piece of Eddowes apron found in building where Levy's brother lived at the time, and consistent with a man wanting to get home to safety but not wanting to go straight home and be observed doing so. Did he beg his brother for help that night?
• Family grew increasingly concerned about his aggression, nocturnal wanderings and unaccountable absences
• Committed to an asylum eighteen months after the final murder (of Kelly)
• Possibly physically incapable of murder in that final eighteen months due to the syphilis, so no more killings
• The Hyam Levy eye-witness account near Mitre Square. Hyam distantly related to Jacob and also worked in the local Jewish butchery trade. Said victim was three inches shorter than the man who almost certainly became her killer. Eddowes was 5 foot, Levy a titchy 5 foot 3 inches. Police sources continued to suggest for some years that the Ripper was positively identified by a 'relative' who would not give evidence against one of his 'own kind'.
• The witness who saw Kelly take her final client into Miller's Court on the night she died described him as a short Jewish-looking individual. The same witness told police he saw the same man a few days later.....on Middlesex Street!
• Widely suggested recently that the killer may have strangled and incapacitated his prostitute victims as they knelt to perform fellatio. As a very short man, was this Levy's essential advantage?
• Mary Kelly was by all accounts a 'big girl'. As the only victim with her own private room and bed, did this give little Jacob all the physical advantage he needed? Many Ripperologists believe Mary was attacked as she dozed after sex.
• Geographic profiling. Levy could appear to be circling his lower Middlesex Street home, choosing women whose locations were convenient but on each occasion some distance from his most recent attack but, as he became more reckless and 'disorganised', closer and closer to that home?
But hey, we will never know, will we? For a start, Levy was married (albeit unhappily), and the FBI chaps say that 'disorganized' killers like Jack the Ripper are usually unmarried loners. No theory ever snuggly fits into the hole you have created for it.
As I used to walk from Aldgate East tube station to Fenchurch Street each dark autumn morning, passing the southern end of Middlesex Street, the old Hoop and Grapes pub, the run of shops that was once Butcher's Row, then St Botolph's mournful tower and the troubling space that is Mitre Square, it was a brisk, small, angry presence that I occasionally felt darting along beside me, and not a languid septuagenarian old Etonian in a top hat. Particularly one loquaciously reciting romantic poetry as he went, and with tickets to a Buckingham Palace garden party nestling in an inside pocket.
Latest List:
The World's Most Prolific Serial Killers (no, they're not all American!)
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Ahmad Suradjl Indonesia
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