Complete History Of Jack The Ripper Part 1

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper.

Philip Sugden.

Acknowledgements.

During the research and writing of this book I have had the help of many people and it is a great pleasure to be able to thank them.

I owe a considerable debt of grat.i.tude to the following persons for according me facilities to study, replying to my inquiries or granting me access to archives: the staff of the Public Record Office, Chancery Lane and Kew; Miss J. Coburn, Head Archivist, and her staff at the Greater London Record Office and Library; Mr James R. Sewell, City Archivist, and his staff at the Corporation of London Records Office; the staffs of the British Library, Bloomsbury, and the British Newspaper Library, Colindale; the staff of the Guildhall Library; Miss K. Shawcross, City of Westminster Archives and Local Studies, Victoria Library; Richard Knight, Local Studies Library, Holborn Library; Paul Burns, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; Myrtle V. Cooper, Metropolitan Police Archives Department; Miss Rhoda Edwards, St Olave's and St Saviour's Grammar School Foundation; Mr P. R. Evans and Mrs J. V. Thorpe, Gloucestershire Record Office; Michael Farrar, County Archivist, Cambridgeshire Record Office; Robin Gillis, Metropolitan Police Musuem; Stephen Humphrey, Southwark Local Studies Library; David A. Leitch, Curatorial Officer, Royal Commission on Historical Ma.n.u.scripts; C. J. Lloyd, Local History Librarian, Globe Town Neighbourhood, Bancroft Road Library; Keith A. Miller, Executive Administrator, World a.s.sociation of Doc.u.ment Examiners, Chicago, USA; Michael Page, Surrey Record Office; Mark Purcell, Senior Library a.s.sistant, Bodleian Library; Miss G. Sheldrick, Hertfordshire County Record Office; Miss J. G. A. Sheppard, Wellcome Inst.i.tute for the History of Medicine; Mr Jonathan Evans, Archivist, Royal London Hospital Archives and Museum; Mr Maurice D. Jeffery, formerly Administrator, Friern Hospital; Mr H. P. Dulley, Trust Project Manager, Horizon NHS Trust; Miss J. M. Smyth, General Services Manager, and Mr Bernard Cousens, Fire Prevention Officer, Springfield Hospital.

Even within a field as notorious for its cranks and charlatans as Ripper research there are knowledgeable and responsible students dedicated to the pursuit of truth. I am particularly indebted to four of the latter: Nick Warren, for guidance on the medical aspects of the case; Jon Ogan, for innumerable suggestions and especially for information on criminal psychological profiling; Stewart Evans, for dispelling my confusion as to the site of George Yard Buildings and for information on the Littlechild letter; and Keith Skinner, for generously agreeing to read my extracts from the Aberconway notes.

Extracts from Crown Copyright records in the Public Record Office and the Corporation of London Records Office appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Material from Gloucestershire Quarter Sessions records in the Gloucestershire Record Office appears by permission of Mr David J. H. Smith, the County and Diocesan Archivist.

I am grateful for this opportunity to express my thanks to Nick Robinson, my publisher, and to Jan Chamier and Eryl Humphrey Jones at Robinson Publishing, for their patience and understanding and for their expertise in steering this project through its various stages of production. To my editor, Tim Haydock, I owe a special debt of grat.i.tude. Tim's impressive knowledge of the Whitechapel murders and boundless enthusiasm for this book were most formidable factors in sustaining me over the last mile. I also wish to thank Richard Corfield, Sue Aldridge and Mick Wolf at Oxford Ill.u.s.trators Ltd, for their preparation of the maps.

Thanks are long overdue to my friend Derek Barlow, formerly of the Public Record Office, for his generosity, encouragement and support over many years. My greatest debt, finally, is to my brother, Dr John Sugden of Coventry, who unstintingly spared time from his own research projects to discuss or a.s.sist this one and who, ten years ago, first insisted that I write this book.

Philip Sugden.

Hull, England, 1994.

Picture credits: 1, 45, 78, 13, 1617, Public Record Office, MEPO 3/140 and MEPO 3/3155; 3, 6, 9, 22, 24, Greater London Photograph Library; 2, 19, British Library; 11, 1415, 18, British Newspaper Library; 10, Royal London Hospital Museum and Archives; 12, Metropolitan Police Museum; 21, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries.

Since the first printing of this book a great many people have a.s.sisted me with information and advice and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their time and generosity. In addition to those acknowledged above I am particularly indebted to Martin Fido, Sue Iremonger of Doc.u.ments in Dispute Ltd, Professor Graham Davies of the University of Leicester, Richard Morgan at the Glamorgan Record Office, and Ron Bernard. Many thanks, too, to Mark Crean, Editorial Director at Robinson Publishing, for his kindness and efficiency in preparing this updated edition for the press.

Philip Sugden, January 1995.

I would like to express my grat.i.tude to the following people for their kindness and a.s.sistance: Neal Shelden; Nick Warren; Nick Connell; Melvin Harris; Paul Gainey; Dr Harold Smyth; Dr Catherine Greensmith, University of Hull; Mrs J. E. Goode; Christine Nougaret, Archives de France; Genevieve Madore, Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris; Jean-Jacques Thiefine, Archives de la Prefecture de Police; Francoise Banat-Berger, Archives du Ministere de la Justice; Loretta Lay; Jan Chamier, Sarah Smith and Krystyna Green, Constable & Robinson Ltd; and the staffs of the Public Record Office, London Metropolitan Archives, the British Newspaper Library, the Archives Departementales de Paris, the Brynmor Jones Library (University of Hull) and the Kingston upon Hull Central Reference Library. I owe a special debt to Stewart Evans, for suggesting some corrections to the text, for his generosity with knowledge and resources, and, most of all, for his unfailing friendship and encouragement.

Philip Sugden, April 2001.

Introduction.

INTEREST IN THE Jack the Ripper murders is probably greater today than at any time since the killer himself actually stalked the streets of London's East End. In recent years we have been all but deluged in a swelling tide of books, articles, films, plays and comics inspired by the case, and aficionados can now debate their theories and exchange views via Internet sites, at annual conferences and in the columns of specialist magazines (the latest of no less than five devoted to the murders was launched in Australia in 2000).

Inevitably, perhaps, this vast outpouring of Ripperana has produced a great deal more heat than light. Partly this is because the archival sources, thoroughly explored in this book eight years ago, have now been picked over many times. Partly, too, it reflects the commercial potential of anything to do with the Ripper, which continually sp.a.w.ns catchpenny solutions to the mystery, badly researched, ill-considered, and, in the worst cases, flagrantly dishonest. The modern Ripperologist has nothing to learn from Munchhausen and de Rougemont.

It is now unlikely that any really significant discoveries await us. Nevertheless, digging in the same field as the cranks and charlatans I have spoken of are growing numbers of genuine and dedicated researchers, and their efforts to unearth fresh gems of knowledge continue to shed new light on aspects of this century-old story.1 Take the case of Emma Smith. Her murder was the first in the series that became known as the Jack the Ripper or Whitechapel murders. First crimes in a series are interesting. They can sometimes reveal more than any of the others because they are likely to be less well-planned. However, when I attempted to research Emma's murder my efforts were quickly frustrated by the loss of records. There were press reports of the inquest, of course, and at the Royal London Hospital, where Emma died, I found the record of her admission. But after that it was one dead end after another. At the Public Record Office I learned that Emma's file had disappeared from the Metropolitan Police case papers at some time before 1983, and at what was then the Greater London Record Office (now London Metropolitan Archives) that no relevant coroner's papers for the old Eastern District of Middles.e.x survived. A ray of hope invigorated my efforts when I discovered that Coroner Wynne Baxter had sent a copy of his inquest papers to the Public Prosecutor, but it was soon extinguished. All that remains today in the records of the Director of Public Prosecutions is a single line entry in a register of cases. In the comments column is the cryptic remark: 'no one in custody'.2 And that, I thought, was that.

I am delighted to say I was wrong. After the Complete History was published I learned that notes made from the Metropolitan Police file, before it was lost, still exist in papers owned by the noted true crime author Richard Whittington-Egan. These notes, taken by Ian Sharp, a research a.s.sistant who worked on the 1973 BBC television series about the Ripper, do not add a great deal to what we already know about Emma Smith, but the little they do tell us is immensely interesting.3 In his 1938 reminiscences Ex-Chief Inspector Walter Dew wrote that Emma was found unconscious in the street by a man who immediately summoned the police. Detectives waited by her bedside, he related, but she died 'without regaining consciousness'.4 The true story, as I reconstructed it from press notices of the inquest, was very different, and Sharp's notes confirm that Dew's account was indeed largely fict.i.tious.

Emma was attacked on the pathway opposite 10 Brick Lane but she was not left unconscious. Far from it, she walked about three hundred yards from there to her lodgings and then, in company with Mary Russell, the deputy at the lodging house, and Annie Lee, another lodger, something like another half mile to the London Hospital. And she spoke of the attack, both to Mary Russell and to George Haslip, the surgeon who attended her. For their part the police knew nothing whatever about the incident until two days after Emma's death, when the coroner's officer notified them that there was to be an inquest. Not one of the constables on duty at the time of the attack had seen or heard anything of it.

Sharp's notes also tell us a little more about Emma herself. About forty-five, with a son and daughter living in the Finsbury Park area, she was five feet two inches in height, had a fair complexion and light brown hair, and bore a scar on her right temple.5 Although the slaying of Emma Smith was the first of the Whitechapel murders we cannot be certain how many of these crimes were committed by the man we call Jack the Ripper. My study of the evidence in Emma's case quickly persuaded me that she had not, in fact, been a Ripper victim. Emma was attacked by three men, and although she subsequently died of her injuries murder does not seem to have been intended. Emma herself was evidently of this opinion. Chief Inspector West's report, as rendered for us by Ian Sharp, carries the information: 'According to deceased's statements the motive was robbery'. Which leaves Martha Tabram or Polly Nichols as the Ripper's first probable murder victim.

Modern research has concerned itself primarily with the problem of the Ripper's ident.i.ty. This book explored contemporary police suspects, especially those accused by senior officers Montague Druitt (accused by Macnaghten), Aaron Kosminski (Anderson), Michael Ostrog (Macnaghten again) and George Chapman (Abberline). To these names we would now have to add Francis Tumblety (Littlechild), about whom more presently. My conclusions were that there was no consensus of view within the police about the ident.i.ty of the killer, that different officers held to different theories, and that a serious case did not exist against any of their candidates. The evidence that has come to light since the book was written has strengthened rather than weakened these convictions.

As the only major suspect against whom any direct evidence was alleged Kosminski is of considerable interest. Fundamentally the case against him stands on two legs, one an identification by a witness, the other the reminiscences of Sir Robert Anderson, neither sufficient to support so weighty an accusation.

In the light of the evidence we have the witness can only have been Joseph Lawende, the commercial traveller who saw a man thought to have been the Ripper on the night of the Mitre Square murder. Sir Robert clearly came to believe that his identification of Kosminski as the same man was conclusive. But we know a great deal more about this kind of evidence now than he did then.

After the Devlin Report of 1976 the Home Office commissioned psychologists John Shepherd, Hadyn Ellis and Graham Davies at Aberdeen University to study the impact of long delays on the accuracy of identification evidence. The results were revealing. For the purposes of one experiment, for example, people drawn from the local non-university population were invited to the psychology department to carry out a series of paper and pencil tests. In the midst of these proceedings a young man barged his way into the room. He read out a car registration number and hotly demanded to know whether the owner was present. The car, he claimed, had scratched his own vehicle and was now blocking his exit from the car park. Walking up and down the centre aisle, the man repeated the number and looked threateningly at each row of people in turn. Then, after about forty-five seconds, he was hustled from the room by the lecturer. The incident had been staged. And different groups of witnesses were recalled at intervals of between one week and eleven months to see if they could pick the irate motorist out from an identification parade. Even under conditions of minimum delay they performed relatively poorly and there was a significant decline in performance over time. Misidentifications remained constant at about 1520% but recognition rates fell from 65% at one week to only 10% or chance at eleven months. In short, after eleven months more witnesses were picking out the wrong man than recognizing the right one! The witnesses were all advised to select a man only if they were quite certain that he was the motorist, and the most noticeable feature of the results at eleven months was the large number of them (75%) who declined to make any identification at all. When those who had so declined were then asked to pick out the man 'most resembling' the motorist, 87% of them opted for the wrong man, a finding which suggests that the princ.i.p.al result of pressure would have been to greatly increase the number of misidentifications.6 In the light of this and similar experiments it should be clear why we have to discount Lawende. He saw the Ripper fleetingly and in a dark street, and he had no reason at the time to take particular note of his appearance. Indeed, he reposed so little confidence in his sighting that within a fortnight of it he had told the Eddowes inquest that he did not think he would be able to recognize the man again. But at that time, still more than a decade before the Adolf Beck case focused attention on problems of mistaken ident.i.ty, the police were very inexperienced in the use of identification evidence, and they sought to exploit Lawende's sighting long after it had ceased to be of practical significance. Lawende seems to have been asked to identify Kosminski about two years after his original sighting. And the police had still not finished with him. They asked him to turn out again in 1891, more than two years after the event, and again, apparently, in 1895, more than six, to see if he could identify other suspects. Given the drastic decline in the accuracy of identifications within just eleven months of the sighting demonstrated in modern experiments all of these exercises appear to have been quite futile.

The credibility of the case against Kosminski rests also upon that of Anderson. Although we now know that Anderson believed in Kosminski's guilt, at least as a 'perfectly plausible theory', as early as 18957, it was in 1910, when he published his memoirs, that he first entered into detail. Unfortunately his account contains errors both of fact and interpretation. This should not surprise anyone for the same is true of virtually all reminiscent accounts. In Sir Robert's case we have no reason to suppose that he was being intentionally dishonest. But he does not seem to have been very interested in the Ripper case and I took the view in my book that his memories became vague and muddled over the years and that, moreover, he began to interpret them in ways that pandered to his own not inconsiderable sense of self-importance.

Additional material bearing on this matter has since come to light. H. L. Adam, writing in 1931 of Anderson's later years, explicitly referred to Sir Robert's declining powers of recall: 'His memory also apparently began to fail him, and he fell into the error of mixing cases. For instance, in reference to the Penge murder which I was discussing with him, he said, or rather wrote, "I am too tired to-night to recall it. But I think it was a nightdress that the officer was put to watch its hiding-place having been discovered, and when he awoke it was gone, carried off, they supposed, by Alice Rhodes." He was clearly mixing up the Penge case with that of the Road murder, in which a woman's nightdress figured prominently.'8 Anderson was confusing the Constance Kent case of 1865 with that of the Stauntons in 1877. Adam knew Anderson pretty well, and there are grounds for believing that this particular memory of him dates from the period 19101913, but it would be unfair to infer a great deal from it because it concerns early cases in which Sir Robert had no personal involvement. More telling is an interview Anderson gave to The Daily Chronicle in 1908: 'In two cases of that terrible series [the Ripper crimes] there were distinct clues destroyed wiped out absolutely clues that might very easily have secured for us proof of the ident.i.ty of the a.s.sa.s.sin. In one case it was a clay pipe. Before we could get to the scene of the murder the doctor had taken it up, thrown it into the fireplace, and smashed it beyond recognition. In another case there was writing in chalk on the wall a most valuable clue; handwriting that might have been at once recognised as belonging to a certain individual. But before we could secure a copy, or get it protected, it had been entirely obliterated . . . I told Sir William Harcourt, who was then Home Secretary, that I could not accept responsibility for non-detection of the author of the Ripper crimes, for the reasons, among others, that I have given you.'9 Even in this brief allusion to the Ripper case there are two glaring errors. Sir William Harcourt ceased to be Home Secretary in 1885, three years before the murders began. The man with whom Anderson dealt in 1888 was Henry Matthews. The reference to the pipe is also incorrect. Anderson's mention of a fireplace clearly indicates that he had the murder of Mary Kelly in mind for this was the only one in the series committed indoors. Dr Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, was called out to the scene of this crime. And a pipe belonging to Joe Barnett, Kelly's lover, was indeed found in Mary's room. But this was not the pipe that was smashed. Anderson was confusing the Kelly murder with that of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley about nine months later. A clay pipe found with Alice's body was thrown to the floor and broken. However, this incident occurred at the mortuary, during the post-mortem examination, not at the crime scene, and the culprit was one of the attendants, not Dr Phillips.10 So here, two years before his memoirs appeared, and speaking of investigations for which he bore overall responsibility, Anderson was confounding officials and running quite separate incidents together in his mind.

The committed Anderson partisan may not be willing to internalize the implications of this or indeed any evidence that runs counter to his prejudices but it is important, nevertheless, to set it down and source it here so that rational and fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions.

The most dramatic revelations pertaining to a major suspect have come in the case of Michael Ostrog, one of the three men named by Melville Macnaghten in his now famous report of 1894.

When I wrote the Complete History I knew nothing of Ostrog's career after 1888. But in 1995, after Mr D. S. Goffee had published some details of his later convictions gleaned from newspapers11, I took time out from other research projects to explore his last years in more depth. The research, conducted in French as well as British archives, turned up some fascinating information and categorically exonerated Ostrog of any complicity in the Ripper crimes, the first time this had been done for any of Macnaghten's names.

When Ostrog was discharged from Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in March 1888 he was required, under the provisions of the Prevention of Crime Acts of 1871 and 1879, to report monthly to the police and notify them of any change of address. He didn't, and for several years the police lost sight of him. Nothing seems to have been done about it until the following 26 October, at the height of the Ripper scare, when the police tried to trace him through the columns of the Police Gazette. It is more than probable that Ostrog became a suspect in the Ripper case simply because he was thought to possess medical knowledge and had recently been discharged from an asylum. Whatever, the police could not find him and that is why, in his 1894 report, Macnaghten stated that 'his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.' On 9 August 1889, three weeks after the McKenzie murder had given rise to fears that the Ripper had returned to killing, the Metropolitan Police once more tried to find Ostrog by means of the Gazette. Although, again, he was supposedly only wanted for failure to report, they called 'special attention to this dangerous man' and requested inquiry 'at hospitals, infirmaries, workhouses, etc.'.

They eventually caught up with him two years after that. Apprehended on 17 April 1891, he was hauled before Bow Street Magistrates' Court, remanded twice, and then, on 1 May, committed to the St Giles Workhouse, Endell Street.

Dr William C. Sheard examined him there on 4 May and certified him insane. 'He has delusions of exaggeration,' Sheard noted, 'he says he has twenty thousand houses and five hundred thousand francs in Paris he says he intends to commit suicide thoroughly by cutting his left femoral artery. Other means such as hanging he says are no good.' On the strength of this certificate Ostrog was committed to Banstead Asylum in Surrey as a lunatic found 'wandering at large'. Subjoined to the order was a statement about him by Frederick Wright, the Relieving Officer of the Strand Poor Law Union, intended for the information of the doctors at Banstead. It a.s.serted that Ostrog was suicidal but not considered dangerous to other people.

Ostrog was admitted to Banstead on 7 May 1891. The admissions register notes that his physical condition was 'much impaired' and that he 'has delusions of various kinds and is paralyzed on one side of face, muscular tremor due to sclerosis'. Two years later, on 29 May 1893, he was discharged 'recovered'.

It was to the Banstead incarceration that Macnaghten undoubtedly referred when, in 1894, he said that Ostrog was 'detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac' subsequent to the Whitechapel murders. He knew about it because on 7 May 1891, the day Ostrog was admitted, it was Macnaghten himself who wrote to the Medical Superintendent at Banstead about him on behalf of the Convict Supervision Office. 'I shall feel obliged if you will cause immediate information to be sent to this office in the event of his discharge,' he said, 'as the Magistrate [at Bow Street] adjourned the case sine die, in order that he (Ostrog) might be again brought up and dealt with for failing to report himself if it is found that he is feigning insanity.'12 Ostrog's movements during the next year are obscure. In June 1893 he was arrested for a robbery at Canterbury. Apparently he 'feigned' insanity and then, while being taken to Dover for deportation to France, escaped. In the following November he was believed to have stolen two books and a silver cup at Eton College. This run of thefts terminated with Ostrog's arrest in June 1894. Clearly his 'delusions of exaggeration' had not deserted him for on this occasion he was claiming to be a 'professor of bacteria' and a French Republican with 'eighty millions in the Bank of England'. The magistrates at Slough Petty Sessions were not impressed. They committed him for trial at Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions.

Curiously enough, when Ostrog was brought to trial at the beginning of July, he was convicted of an offence he did not commit. The charge was one of obtaining three gold watches and chains by false pretences from a jeweller's shop at Eton in 1889. Several witnesses swore that Ostrog was the man who had done it and, although he vehemently challenged their evidence in court, he could not shake them. 'Look at me! Look at me! I'm not the man,' he cried at Frederick Rowell, the shop a.s.sistant. 'Yes, you put it on very well, old chap,' replied Rowell. Ostrog protested that he could not have been the fraudster because at the time of the offence he had been in a criminal lunatic asylum in France. Not surprisingly, in view of his repeated lies, the jury did not believe him. And he cannot have enhanced his credibility with them when he explained that he had returned to England hoping to sell an invention to the Royal Navy a lifebelt that would enable a man to swim around the world! He was sentenced to penal servitude for five years with police supervision for a further seven. However, soon after the trial, the French authorities verified Ostrog's story. After just twelve weeks in prison he was released and awarded 10 compensation.13 We next hear of him in 1898. On 15 September that year Richard Wells, a cadet's servant at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, saw him coming out of the room of one of the cadets. When books were found to be missing from the room Ostrog was given into custody. Under the name of Henry Ray he was convicted the next day at Woolwich Magistrates' Court and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour for six weeks.14 Ostrog's last known offence occurred in 1900. In August a microscope belonging to Colonel James Mulroney of the Indian Medical Service was pilfered from the London Hospital Medical College. Only a short time after the theft Ostrog p.a.w.ned the instrument for 3 at the shop of John Arnold in Lewisham High Road. He was eventually apprehended on 8 December and it was Arnold himself who procured the arrest. Ostrog was foolish enough to try to sell the p.a.w.n ticket to a neighbouring chemist and Arnold, having learned from the police that the microscope had been stolen, gave him into custody when he saw him hanging about the street. The culprit was brought to trial under the name of John Evest at the County of London Sessions, Clerkenwell, in December 1900. By this time he was partially paralyzed and in sentencing him to five years' penal servitude Mr Loveland, the deputy chairman, told him that 'if his health was bad he would be well cared for in prison and he would not be set to any work he could not do.'15 Ostrog's imprisonment began in Wormwood Scrubs but he did not complete the full term. On 17 September 1904 he was released on licence from Parkhurst. He would, he a.s.sured the authorities, earn his living as a doctor and he gave his intended address as 29 Brooke Street, Holborn.16 It is the last glimpse we have of him.

A description of 1904 gives Ostrog's height as only five feet eight and three-quarter inches. By then he was aged and decrepit and his brown hair was turning grey and thinning on top. It is probable that his sad and wasted life came to an end in some workhouse inst.i.tution shortly after his release from prison. But no record of Ostrog's death has yet been discovered. Apparently he died, as he had lived, under an a.s.sumed name.

Ostrog's height, age and infirmities suggested that he could not have been the Ripper but I could not conclusively rule him out using English sources alone. There were, in fact, two serious gaps in the record of his criminal activities in England: the periods 18837 and 188891. It turned out that these two periods were linked.

The clue to his disappearance in 1888 lay, of course, in his own claim to have been serving a prison sentence in France at the time the Eton fraud was perpetrated in 1889. Further research at the Archives Departementales de Paris unearthed the record of his conviction and it was this doc.u.ment that cleared the mystery up.

Ostrog was convicted on 14 November 1888 under the name of Stanislas Lublinski alias 'Grand Guidon'. He told the French police that he was a doctor and that he had been born in Warsaw on 5 March 1835. This biographical data sounds authoritative but since Ostrog was probably no more truthful in France than in England we had best treat it with caution.

The offence for which he had been arrested was the fraudulent removal of a microscope belonging to a certain Monsieur Legry in Paris. Fortunately for us, however, there was more to his case than that. It was also established that he had been in France before, that he had been given an earlier sentence of more than a year's imprisonment, and that he had eventually been expelled from the country by ministerial order dated 9 June 1886. In 1888, then, there were three strikes against Ostrog: returning to France without the government's permission, defrauding Monsieur Legry of his microscope, and being a repeat offender, all punishable with terms of imprisonment under articles 8, 401 and 58 respectively of the penal code. He was sentenced to serve two years in prison and pay costs a.s.sessed at 448 francs and 85 centimes.

It should be noted that the date 14 November 1888, five days after the murder of Mary Kelly, was that of Ostrog's conviction. The conviction record does not tell us when Ostrog re-entered France that year, or even when he stole the microscope. That information might be established by further research. But, crucially, it does tell us the date of his arrest by the French police in Paris 26 July 1888. So there we have it. During the late summer and autumn of 1888, when Jack the Ripper was slaughtering prost.i.tutes in London, Ostrog was in custody in France. He was completely innocent of any involvement in the crimes.

Exonerating Ostrog was a worthy exercise in itself, of course, but the results of the inquiry have much wider implications. They throw considerable doubt upon the value of Macnaghten's report, long used both as a source of general information on the murders and as a platform from which to launch accusations against Druitt and Kosminski as well as Ostrog.

Some of the things Macnaghten wrote about Ostrog have checked out. The Police Gazette notices prove that he was regarded by the police as a serious Ripper suspect and that attempts were made to establish his whereabouts at the time of the murders. It is also important to remember that the British police knew nothing of his sojourn in France until the summer of 1894, several months after Macnaghten had penned his report. Having said all that, we would still have to conclude that Macnaghten comes out of the Ostrog evidence very badly.

His characterization of Ostrog was grossly unfair. Ostrog's later convictions were identical in character to those before 1888. His record was by no means 'of the very worst'. Not a single one of his thefts or deceptions involved violence or the threat of violence and there is nothing whatever to substantiate Macnaghten's claim that Ostrog was habitually cruel to women. Even when writing of events within his recent personal knowledge Macnaghten was extremely misleading. Ostrog was not 'subsequently detained . . . as a homicidal maniac'. He was arrested in 1891 for failing to report while under police supervision and committed to an asylum as a lunatic found wandering at large. The medical evidence submitted at the time of his committal explicitly stated that he was not dangerous to others. Macnaghten was well aware, too, that there were serious doubts about Ostrog's insanity. It was widely believed in police circles that he faked insanity to escape long prison sentences. In 1894 Dr Morris of Reading Gaol, who had observed Ostrog's behaviour for about two weeks, told Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions that in his opinion Ostrog was a 'shammer', not a lunatic.

As the man who led the Scotland Yard team in the East End17, Fred Abberline should have possessed a more intimate knowledge of the Ripper investigation than either Anderson or Macnaghten. Unfortunately, he never published his memoirs and his mature views on the case have largely been lost to us. We do know, however, that he did not endorse any of the suspects named by Anderson and Macnaghten and that, at least in 1903, he was espousing a rival theory of his own. Abberline's suspect was Severin Klosowski, better known as George Chapman, the triple poisoner hanged at Wandsworth on 7 April 1903.

Chapman matches the little we know or can reasonably deduce about the Ripper rather better than the other princ.i.p.al suspects. One always gets the feeling with him, too, that there was much more to him than met the eye. H. L. Adam, who was present at Chapman's arrest in 1902 and who sat on the bench during one of his appearances at Southwark Police Court, caught a glimpse of that secret Chapman: 'I got the impression that he was a particularly callous murderer. When most people in court were horrified he appeared to be amused. On one occasion, while a sarcastic smile was spreading over his face, he caught sight of me watching him. Immediately he straightened his face and a.s.sumed a serious expression.'18 That Chapman committed crimes of which we have no present knowledge I can well believe. That he was Jack the Ripper is another matter.

The main difficulty with the Chapman theory is that because he did not become a suspect until 1903 no accurate information as to his whereabouts at the times of the Ripper murders could ever be procured.

Abberline, hunting for evidence to back up the theory, questioned Lucy Baderski. But Lucy did not meet Chapman until 1889 and could have contributed little of value relating to his movements during the previous autumn. Similar problems beset those seeking to exonerate Chapman. We are indebted to Nick Connell for his recent discovery of Norman Hastings's articles on the Ripper and Chapman cases. Hastings, apparently, also made inquiries in 1903. 'The woman with whom he [Chapman] lodged in the West India Dock Road was positive that he could not have committed the first of the Ripper crimes,' he wrote. 'That took place on the night of the August Bank holiday in 1888, and she fixed the date easily because that night she gave a small party to a number of Poles, whom Chapman, who was new to the country and lonely, was anxious to meet.'19 This witness was clearly Ethel Radin, and what she had to say is interesting in that it appears to give Chapman an alibi for the Tabram murder. Unfortunately even this apparent firm ground may be quicksand. Fifteen-year-old memories are treacherous and Ethel's reference to Chapman's being 'new to the country' raises the possibility that she was remembering the August Bank Holiday of 1887 rather than that of 1888. Post Office directories lend some support to this view. Abraham Radin's premises were at 70 West India Dock Road and we know he was there from 1887 to 1888. In the latter year, however, the Radins moved out and the shop was taken over by Hyman Schein. It is Schein, not Radin, who is listed as the occupant in the Post Office London Directory of 1889, and bearing in mind that the data in these directories was normally at least six months out of date when they were printed, there is every chance that the Radins had already vacated the premises by the time Martha died.

Protagonists of the Chapman theory have always sought to b.u.t.tress it by linking him with alleged murders in New York or the vicinity of Jersey City. Yet Chapman's American activities are even more obscure than his early years in London. The murders themselves are still deeply mysterious. The most celebrated American Ripper-type slaying was that of Carrie Brown, committed in a New York lodging house on the night of 2324 April 1891. This, undoubtedly, was one of the crimes early theorists had in mind. Allusions to atrocities in New Jersey are more difficult to explain. Melvin Harris believes that they were garbled memories of a tale broadcast in the National Police Gazette (New York) on 16 February 1889. This report recounted a knife attack on Annie Eisenhart, the head nurse at the Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, and was headlined: 'ANOTHER VICTIM OF JACK THE RIPPER'. He may be right. But R. Michael Gordon, the author of a recent book on Chapman, also draws attention to the murder of an old woman in Milburn, New Jersey, during the night of 3031 January 1892. Elizabeth Senior, the victim in the case, suffered multiple stab wounds to the breast and had her throat cut. Gain was, perhaps, the motive, for Elizabeth's killer also ransacked her house.20 On present evidence it would be unfair to attribute any of these atrocities to Chapman. The Camden attack, as Melvin points out, occurred before he went to America. And he may also be out of the reckoning for the Carrie Brown murder. It is true that Chapman emigrated to New York in 1891 but as late as 5 April, less than three weeks before the murder, he was still in London and was recorded there in the national census. The few crumbs of information we have about Chapman in America do suggest that he was based in Jersey City at the time of the Elizabeth Senior murder, but there is no evidence to connect him with the crime.

R. Michael Gordon attempts to put Chapman in the frame for a full score of killings. The Thames torso murders appear on the charge sheet as well as those of Chapman himself and Jack the Ripper. This is frankly preposterous. We cannot seriously accuse anyone not even a man as bad and dead as Chapman of crimes like those of the Ripper without clear and positive evidence to back us up. And it is important to understand that direct evidence against Chapman exists only for the three poisonings that took place between 1897 and 1902. Abberline, G.o.dley and Neil all, admittedly, expressed the conviction that he was also Jack the Ripper. But not one of them produced tangible evidence to substantiate their allegations. For this reason, if for no other, the case that Chapman and the Ripper were one is decisively hulled below the waterline.

The lack of credible evidence is the bane of Ripperology. Without it the Ripperologist necessarily resorts to coincidence and conjecture. But coincidence is never enough and all too often a baited trap for the unwary. Mr Gordon, for example, notes the fact that the Ripper's Hanbury Street victim, her daughter and Chapman's 1894 mistress all bore the name Annie Chapman, and he speculates that Dark Annie's daughter and Chapman's mistress were one and the same person. 'If true, Klosowski may have been playing a dangerous egotistical game with this direct link to his Ripper past,' he writes dramatically, '. . . it would be well beyond simple coincidence with the Ripper murders. It is an open risk the Ripper would have delighted in.'21 This all sounds too good to be true and it is. The full name of the woman Chapman lived with at Tottenham was Sarah Ann Chapman. Their child a boy Sarah called William Klosowski Chapman was born in Edmonton Workhouse on 8 August 1895. In 1903 Sarah Ann was still living in Tottenham, at 9 Hartington Road. She had nothing to do with the Annie Chapman slain by the Ripper in 1888. Dark Annie's daughter was Annie Georgina Chapman. She married Edward Pryke, a cowman, in Croydon on 10 February 1895 and died in 1958.

The most important doc.u.ment relating to the ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper discovered in recent years is the Littlechild letter.22 This letter, written by Ex-Chief Inspector John G. Littlechild to the journalist George R. Sims in 1913, came to light in a small collection of Sims correspondence bought by Stewart Evans, a leading authority on the Ripper case, in 1993. Stewart recognized its significance immediately. For Littlechild had been in charge of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard in 1888 and in that capacity would have worked in close and regular personal contact with men like Chief Inspector Swanson, appointed by Sir Charles Warren to oversee the Ripper inquiry.

Littlechild made reference to the notorious 'Dear Boss' letter, signed 'Jack the Ripper' and sent to the Central News in September 1888. Although the writer was never conclusively identified the police came to the conclusion that the letter was a hoax, the time-wasting prank of an irresponsible journalist. Anderson and Macnaghten, in published memoirs, wisely declined to venture names. Littlechild, writing privately to Sims, was a great deal more forthcoming. 'With regard to the term "Jack the Ripper",' he wrote, 'it was generally believed at the Yard that Tom Bullen [Bulling] of the Central News was the originator but it is probable [Charles] Moore, who was his chief, was the inventor. It was a smart piece of journalistic work.' Very probably Anderson and Macnaghten had one or other of these names in mind but we still do not know the basis for their suspicions.

In his comments on the ident.i.ty of the murderer himself Littlechild introduced us to a suspect hitherto unknown to researchers: an IrishAmerican quack doctor named Francis Tumblety. Tumblety was in London during the autumn of 1888. On 16 November he was brought before Marlborough Street Police Court charged with h.o.m.os.e.xual offences and was bailed to appear at the Central Criminal Court, but he violated bail, fled to France and there, under the alias Frank Townsend, boarded a steamer bound for New York. He died in St Louis in 1903.

An interesting circ.u.mstantial case can be alleged against Tumblety. Littlechild undoubtedly regarded him as a 'very likely' suspect. He was reputedly a misogynist. He had pretensions to medical knowledge. And he collected anatomical specimens. Colonel C. A. Dunham, an American lawyer who knew Tumblety, recalled in 1888 having once seen the doctor's anatomical museum. It contained, he said, 'a dozen or more jars containing . . . the matrices [wombs] of every cla.s.s of women.' This was the organ, of course, that was extracted and taken away in two of the Ripper murders. Furthermore, to those who believe that Mary Kelly was the last Ripper victim Tumblety's arrest and flight might provide a neat explanation for the cessation of the crimes.

In other respects, however, Tumblety does not fit the bill. He was fifty-six years old in 1888, far older than any of the men reportedly seen in the company of victims, and he seems to have been a man of much greater physical stature than the Ripper. Mrs Long, who saw Annie Chapman, the Hanbury Street victim, talking with a man shortly before she was killed, said that the man stood only a 'little taller' than Annie, and Joseph Levy, one of the witnesses thought to have seen the Ripper standing with Kate Eddowes, said that he was only 'about three inches taller than the woman'. Annie and Kate were both about five feet in height. Tumblety was a great deal more prepossessing than that. He was five feet ten inches to six feet tall, in those days a very good height indeed. 'A t.i.tanian stature, with a very red face and long flowing mustache, he would have been a notable personage in any place and in any garb,' said one who knew him. 'He looked like a giant,' commented another.

There is, finally, the matter of evidence. Littlechild's suspicions against Tumblety seem to have been partly grounded in the doctor's h.o.m.os.e.xuality and in his own belief that those given to 'contrary s.e.xual instinct' were also p.r.o.ne to cruelty. Certainly there was never any substantive evidence to connect Tumblety with any of the murders. Had that been the case the police would have charged him with it or, after his escape, sought his extradition.

It is by no means impossible that Tumblety had something to do with the origins of the story Coroner Baxter picked up of an American seeking specimens of the uterus. But Littlechild's letter persuades me less that Tumblety was the Ripper than that the police investigation ended in abysmal failure, leaving detectives grasping at straws.

Littlechild had never heard of Druitt, Macnaghten's princ.i.p.al suspect, and he clearly didn't share Anderson's views. 'Anderson,' he told Sims, '. . . only thought he knew' (Littlechild's emphasis). In the end it is this diversity of opinion amongst informed officers that is most telling. In print and in private they contradicted one another repeatedly. In their later years some, like Ex-Detective Inspector Edmund Reid and Sir Henry Smith, acknowledged frankly that the Ripper had beaten them. Others expressed preferences for named suspects, but no theory commanded general acceptance. Abberline and G.o.dley accused Chapman. Anderson and Swanson opted for Kosminski. Macnaghten always held tenaciously to his belief that Druitt had been the killer. And Littlechild ventured a case against Tumblety. Only Anderson insisted categorically that the case had been solved. But neither he nor anyone else ever produced acceptable evidence of guilt.

Unfortunately, given the circ.u.mstances, the police failure was all too predictable. The murderer was a stranger to his victims so inquiries into their social relationships yielded no clue to his ident.i.ty or motive, and in 1888 modern aids to detection like fingerprinting, DNA testing and psychological profiling were unknown or undeveloped. Then, too, the character of the district favoured the hunters much less than the hunted. A bewildering jumble of streets, alleys, courts and yards, the Victorian East End was impossible to patrol effectively, and the victims themselves, prost.i.tutes all, contributed to the difficulties of the police by their eagerness to conduct clients into dark and secluded spots for s.e.x. Abberline and his team were also overwhelmed by the sheer volume and labour of their inquiries. In this context it is worth remembering, as James Monro had complained, that London then ordinarily had 'proportionately fewer men employed in the investigation of crime' than any comparable city in Britain. In the Metropolitan Police the percentage of men engaged in detective work to those in other duties was 2.42. In Manchester it was 2.7, in Liverpool and Glasgow 3.5, in Dublin 3.6 and in Birmingham 4.5.23 Today the Ripper stirs human imagination worldwide. He is the basis for one of the greatest and blackest of popular legends. More than any other factor it was the failure of the police to catch him that led to our present fascination with the case. Myth feeds on the gaps in history. And in the case of the Ripper's ident.i.ty it is less a gap than a yawning pit into which Ripperologists, novelists and film-makers can toss any theory they like as long as they are not required to substantiate it.

It is exceedingly unlikely that the murderer will be unmasked now. But I would not wish to end on so negative a note.

The first book I ever read on the Whitechapel murders was The Ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper by Donald McCormick, bought at a local bookshop in 1962. McCormick's account was semi-fictional journalese rather than history, but it was a cracking good read all the same and it set me on the trail that led to this book. Anyone who cares to compare McCormick's book with the present one, or with The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook recently edited by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner, will readily appreciate the tremendous advances that have been made in our knowledge of this subject. They are a product of the efforts of many different researchers. No, the research has not enabled us to name Jack the Ripper. But its achievements, surely, are much more important than that. It has doc.u.mented the birth of a legend of global impact, it has taught us a great deal about the early history of the CID, and it has illuminated the social conditions in which ordinary people lived, worked and died in outcast London more than a century ago.

I wrote this factual study of the Ripper case, now issued for the third time, as an antidote to the sensational ident.i.ty theories and irresponsible journalism then in print. Its success demonstrates that many readers share my own fascination for the past and believe, with me, that real events that happened to real people can be far more absorbing than anything to be found in fiction.

Philip Sugden, April 2001.

1.

A Century of Final Solutions.

JACK THE RIPPER! Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prost.i.tutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cries of newsboys 'Whitechapel! Another 'orrible murder! Mutilation!' and silent, cruel death, personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag.

The Victorian murderer who slew a handful of women in London's East End has become a worldwide symbol of terror, his fame celebrated in story and song, on the stage and on film, in art and in opera, his tale told in languages as diverse as English and Russian, Spanish and Swedish, German and j.a.panese. Robert Bloch, the American author of Psycho, has said that Jack the Ripper belongs to the world as surely as Shakespeare. It is not an undue exaggeration.

Why our perennial fascination with the Ripper case? After all, tragic and gruesome as his crimes undoubtedly were, they are by no means unique or even spectacular in the lengthening roll of serial murder. The victims were comparatively few. They were drawn from only one small cla.s.s of the population. And they were slain within an area less than a single square mile in extent.

True, they have their niche in history. In 1888 they embarra.s.sed Lord Salisbury's second Conservative administration, contributed to the resignation of Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and, by spotlighting the living conditions of the poor, inaugurated a brief period of redevelopment in Spitalfields, at the heart of the murder district.

More important for our own day, perhaps, the Ripper heralded the rise of the modern s.e.xual serial killer. He was not the earliest such offender. But he was the first of international repute and the one that first burned the problem of the random killer into police and popular consciousness.

The Ripper's contemporaries were baffled by the lack of conventional motive, whether gain, jealousy or revenge, in his crimes. Casting about for an explanation, some turned to the far past. 'It is so impossible to account . . . for these revolting acts of blood,' commented one, 'that the mind turns as it were instinctively to some theory of occult force, and the myths of the Dark Ages rise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables which have been acc.u.mulated throughout the course of centuries take form, and seize hold of the excited fancy.' Others, sensing that the Ripper's origins lay in the social and economic upheavals of the new industrial age, glimpsed the future. 'Suppose we catch the Whitechapel murderer,' queried the Southern Guardian, 'can we not, before handing him over to the executioner or the authorities at Broadmoor, make a really decent effort to discover his antecedents, and his parentage, to trace back every step of his career, every hereditary instinct, every acquired taste, every moral slip, every mental idiosyncrasy? Surely the time has come for such an effort as this. We are face to face with some mysterious and awful product of modern civilization.'1 Those who hunted the Ripper, too, believed they were confronting a new and frightening phenomenon. 'I look upon this series of murders as unique in the history of our country,' Warren told Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, at the height of the scare. George Lusk, President of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, formed to a.s.sist the police, agreed. 'The present series of murders,' he a.s.sured the Home Office, 'is absolutely unique in the annals of crime . . . and all ordinary means of detection have failed.'2 But none of this explains the Ripper's continual hold on popular imagination, his most potent legacy to the world. Some would have it that those who read or write about the murders are misogynists. I am not a misogynist. Nor, for that matter, is any serious student of the case personally known to me. It should be obvious from the most cursory glance at the literature, moreover, that what really fascinates people about the story is the question of the killer's ident.i.ty. After a series of horrific murders Jack the Ripper disappeared, as if 'through a trapdoor in the earth' as a contemporary put it, and left behind a mystery as impenetrable as the fog that forms part of his legend. He left us, in short, with the cla.s.sic 'whodunnit.'

It is this that lies at the root of our enduring fascination with the case. Good mysteries become obsessive. A century ago Percival Lowell spent a fortune in building the Lowell Observatory in Arizona specifically to find the ca.n.a.ls of Mars. In the 1960s Tim Dinsdale, monster hunter extraordinaire, abandoned his career as an aeronautical engineer to search the waters of Loch Ness. And, driven by similar irresistible urges to know the truth, amateur sleuths in at least three continents still seek final proof of the ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper.

Since 1891, when the last victim widely attributed to the Ripper died, we have had an ever-growing mountain of books and a welter of theories. Looking at the size of that mountain and the dramatic finality of many of the t.i.tles that form it The Final Solution, The Mystery Solved, etc. the general reader might well ask: is there anything new to be said about Jack the Ripper? The answer, surprisingly, is an emphatic 'Yes'! For the fact is that the conventional story of the murders, as pa.s.sed down to us in these books, is shot through with errors and misconceptions and that, with very few exceptions, their authors have taken us, not towards, but away from the truth.

The whole subject is now a minefield to the unwary. Even true crime experts venture there at their peril. 'No new books will tell us anything more than we already know'. This was the confident claim of Brian Marriner, reviewing the Ripper case in his valuable book, A Century of s.e.x Killers. Unfortunately, Marriner's account of the murders, brief as it is, proceeds to repeat a number of old canards.3 And where an author as knowledgeable as this stumbles, one is tempted to caution the general reader, approaching the groaning shelf of Ripper books for dependable information, with those famous words from Dante: 'Abandon hope, ye who enter here!'

There are several reasons for the lamentable state of Ripper studies.

One has been the tendency of writers to draw the bulk of their primary source material from newspaper reports and later reminiscences of police officers and others. This practice should not have survived the 1970s, when police and Home Office records on the Ripper case were first opened to the public, but it continues because of the relative accessibility of newspapers and memoirs. Every sizeable library has its microfilm backfile of The Times, and published memoirs are readily available through interlibrary loan services. Unfortunately, as sources of factual information on the crimes and police investigations, they are simply not reliable.

At the time of Jack the Ripper it was not the policy of the CID to disclose to the press details about unsolved crimes or their inquiries respecting them. Reporters were not even permitted to enter premises in which such a crime had been committed. Naturally, they resented it. 'The police authorities observe a reticence which has now apparently become systematic, and any information procured is obtained in spite of them,' carped one. 'However much or little they know, the police devote themselves energetically to the task of preventing other people from knowing anything,' fumed another.4 The purpose of the police precautions will be discussed later. Primarily it was to prevent villains being forewarned as to what the CID knew and might do. But at present the rationale behind the policy concerns us less than the effects of its application upon newsmen. It placed them in an impossible predicament. For they were confronted at the height of the Ripper scare by a ma.s.sive public clamour for information and possessed few legitimate means of satisfying it.

Gathering news at that time was a particularly frustrating business. Sometimes, by following detectives or hanging about police stations, reporters were able to identify and interview important witnesses. We will have cause to thank them when we encounter Israel Schwartz and George Hutchinson. But more often press reports were cobbled together out of hearsay, rumour and gossip, picked up at street corners and in pubs or lodging houses.

There seems to have been no shortage of informants. A Star reporter, investigating the Miller's Court murder in November 1888, found the locals basking in their new-found importance, anxious to please and ready to regale him with 'a hundred highly circ.u.mstantial stories', most of which, upon inquiry, proved 'totally devoid of truth'. Even true anecdotes might be pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth until they became unrecognizable. Sarah Lewis, who stayed in Miller's Court on the fatal night, had heard a cry of 'Murder!' By the time the Star's man got to the scene of the crime her story had got round and 'half a dozen women were retailing it as their own personal experience', a circ.u.mstance which may explain why Sarah's story is sometimes credited, in aberrant forms, to a Mrs Kennedy in the press.5 Inevitably much of the press coverage was fiction. Inevitably, too, the press were happy to blame the police. 'We were compelled in our later editions of yesterday,' observed the Star after the Hanbury Street murder, 'to contradict many of the reports which found admittance to our columns and to those of all our contemporaries earlier in the day. For this the senseless, the endless prevarications of the police were to blame.'6 But journalists themselves, determined to exploit the astonishing runs on the papers after each murder, were more than usually willing to invent copy of their own.

Perhaps the most important myth created by the press was Fairy Fay.

The first trace of her appeared in a verse broadsheet, Lines on the Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel, printed at the beginning of September 1888. This referred vaguely to an early and unnamed victim of the murderer, killed 'twelve months ago', i.e. in 1887. However, it was the Daily Telegraph that really got the ball rolling. In its issues of 10 and 11 September 1888 it stated that the first victim of the Whitechapel murderer had been slain in the vicinity of Osborn and Wentworth Streets at Christmas 1887. A stick or iron instrument had been thrust into her body. She had never been identified. The story was repeated again and again in newspapers and broadsheets, in a parliamentary question of November 1888, and in Dr L. Forbes Winslow's widely read memoir, Recollections of Forty Years, published in 1910. Terence Robertson, writing for Reynold's News in 1950, embroidered the tale still further. He gave the unknown woman a name Fairy Fay and said that she was killed on Boxing Night 1887, when she was taking a short cut home from a pub in Mitre Square.

No such event occurred. There is no reference to it in police records. No mention of it can be found in the local or national press for December 1887 or January 1888. And a search of registered deaths at St Catherine's House reveals no woman named Fay or anything like that murdered in Whitechapel during the relevant period. There is no doubt that the Telegraph story was a confused memory of the known murder of Emma Smith in the spring of 1888. Emma was attacked in Osborn Street and a blunt instrument, perhaps a stick, was savagely thrust into her. She died the next day in the London Hospital. Obviously the Telegraph's writer recalled this incident very hazily. He remembered, for example, that it had occurred on a public holiday and opted for Christmas 1887. The correct date was the night of Easter Monday, 23 April 1888.7 Today writers still regularly list both Fairy Fay and Emma Smith as possible victims of Jack the Ripper. But Fairy Fay is a phantom, born of sloppy journalism back in 1888.

The deficiencies of newspaper files cannot be redressed from reminiscent evidence, whether memoirs of retired policemen or interviews with aged East End residents. These sources, although often readily accessible, have special problems of their own.

Over time our memories deteriorate more profoundly than many people inexperienced in the use of historical evidence realize, and reminiscences recorded long after the event are characteristically confused on chronology and detail. There is a very human tendency, too, for us to 'improve' upon our memories, to make a better story, to explain away past mistakes, or simply to claim for ourselves a more impressive role in past dramas than we have acted in life.

In 1959 a ninety-year-old Mr Wright could still show broadcaster Dan Farson the spot in Buck's Row where one of the murders took place. He had lived in Buck's Row as a boy, he explained, and it was he who had washed the blood from the pavement. Contemporary records reveal that there was, in fact, very little blood and that what there was was washed down by a son of Emma Green, who lived adjacent to the murder site.

At the time of the murders a greengrocer called Matthew Packer told police that on the night Liz Stride was killed in Berner Street he had sold grapes to her killer. More than seventy years later an aged Annie Tapper remembered the story and retold it for Tom Cullen. She insisted, however, that as a girl of nine she had sold the grapes to Jack the Ripper and, of course, she remembered him perfectly. 'I'll tell you what he looked like as sure as this is Friday,' she said. But her murderer was a fantasy, disguised in a black, pointed beard and togged out in a bobtail coat and striped trousers.

At a more exalted level Sir Robert Anderson, head of CID in 1888, made the preposterous suggestion in his memoirs that his policy of withdrawing police protection from prost.i.tutes drove them from the streets and thereby put an end to street murders in the Ripper series. Not true. Contemporary evidence demonstrates that the policy was never implemented and could not have worked.