ARE THEY STILL ALIVE? JACK THE RIPPER - THE QUEENSLANDER 1937.

Published in the Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld)  Thursday 7th January 1937.

ARE THEY STILL ALIVE? — 6

JACK THE RIPPER, 

By J.L. Hodsen

    IT is a strange thought for Londoners, that when they look across the Tube at an old man, not so very old either, for Mr. Baldwin, Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Lloyd George must have heard a lot about him when they were young men—he may be "Jack the Ripper" himself.

    If you ask what he would look like, nobody can tell you. Nobody can be sure he ever saw him. Several have said they did, of course. A former constable who lived not long ago at Woodford Green, Essex, believes he arrested the very man—a man wearing a tall hat and a silk-faced frock coat. He had a fair moustache, light blue eyes, rosy cheeks; about him was the general air of a doctor. The constable's superiors let him go, ridiculed the notion that this was the Ripper. 

    The idea that he was a surgeon it favoured by a number of those criminologists who have studied the mystery—the theory is based on the fact that the mutilations bore signs of anatomical skill— and a doctor is said to have confessed in Buenos Ayres at some unspecified date, when dying of cancer, that he was the man. Nothing is conclusive; so much legend, so much wild theorising, so much panic at the time have done their part in overlaying the truth. 

    It was on August 7, 1888, that the first murder was committed. Nobody paid any undue attention to it. Why should they? The woman was a drab, ill-favoured, a Martha Tabram who occupied a room in a dingy tenement off Commercial Road, in the East End.

It was true that she had 35 knife wounds, but many a diseased mind has inflicted injuries of this nature —the facts were not so rare as in themselves to call for comment. That sort of crime is rarer now, but it is still known. It was peculiar, of course, that no one had heard a sound, not a cry: the policeman on his beat hadn't an atom of help to give. The woman was buried. 

    Life in those ill-lit, dingy streets and courts went on as usual—you can imagine it—hard work, brawling, drinking when money was to be had, vice in dark places. What was a drab more or less? Three weeks after the first murder, a second—a donkey shied at something and a woman, Mrs Nichols, whose trade was the same as the first, was found in the open gutter of a place called Buck's Row, near Spitalfields.

The horror was bad enough in itself, but when the police surgeon discovered, on examination that the throat, as in the first murder, was cut from behind and that, once more, mutilation was added to mutilation; sensation was spread abroad and fear also—fear of the unknown lurking in the dark. 

    That fear developed into a panic a week later when a third victim, Mrs. Chapman, was found dead In a court within a stones-throw, her wounds of the same sort and—a queer thing—the miserable, ragtaggle contents of her pockets laid at her feet in some sort of crazy, geometric design.  

    No one could doubt now—at all events no one did doubt—that a killer was at work who struck secretly, efficiently, and left no trace —no trace beyond a vague story of a suspicious man in a black suit carrying a small bag. The police were roundly abused and doubled and trebled their numbers in the area. 

    A number of revolvers were issued, and rubber soled boots—an innovation then. The public formed a Vigilance Committee—even well-known offenders began to offer help, for this murderer was making their own craft more difficult to pursue. Coffee stall keepers bemoaned the unwillingness of people to stay about in the streets—but every street was looked on as a possible murder ground. Only one individual seems to have thrived on the murders—a man whose lodging-house window overlooked the flags where the last victim's body had lain.

He started a sort of devilish peepshow, and did a roaring trade. Three further weeks passed during which hysteria rose and began to fade and, as it waned, was suddenly raised to greater heights. For now two women were murdered on the same night—the night, of a dance in a social club near the Commercial Road. 

     A Mrs. Stride was killed in a yard behind the dance-hall, and Catherine Eddowes —both of them middle-aged unfortunates— in Mitre Square less than an hour later. The Ripper was possibly disturbed before the customary disfigurements that identified him were left on his first victim and hurried away to complete his night's task elsewhere—as a postcard received by the Central News Agency explained. "Couldn't finish straight off’ the person wrote —"had no time to get ears for police."  

Was this postcard genuine, together with one or two others that reached the same agency—genuine in the sense that the murderer wrote them ? Again, nobody can be sure. Nothing of value came from them except that the writer who called himself Jack the Ripper and "Saucy Jackie," christened himself with as foul a title as exists in on criminal history. 

    The accounts of the crimes rang across Europe. In London's East End every man with a small bag was suspect; a scratch on the hand was enough to lead to your being denounced. In Tunbridge Wells a woman spoken to by a bearded man carrying a black bag dropped dead in fright. In the vicinity of Aldgate Pump and the area of a square mile In which the crimes had been committed, scores of persons were arrested. Hoaxers and lunatics gave themselves up in several parts of the country. It was suggested that the pupils of the dead should be photographed, for on them would be imprinted a picture of the Ripper himself. 

    The police were vigorous, employing great numbers both uniformed or disguised In rags; they were ready to take anybody into custody and did—but they achieved nothing. They were no nearer getting the man than if he were a ghost who materialised out of the atmosphere, did his atrocious work and vanished as a wraith. The reward of £1500 might as well not have existed. For five weeks nothing further happened beyond wild alarms, vain arrests, and fruitless denunciations.

But if it were the Ripper who had promised on his postcard to do his Job better next time he fulfilled his word on November 9. For on that night Miss Mary Jeannette Kelly, an Irish girl from Limerick, who lived in a ground-floor room in Miller's Court —a young woman of 24, whose looks alone among the victims might have been expected to attract him—was found dead, her innumerable wounds—184 of them—executed in some approximation to a geometric design bearing resemblance to that in which the pocket content of Mrs. Chapman had been arranged. 

    This crime is generally accepted as the last that can, with certainty, be attributed to The Ripper. That it was the final one has been adduced in support of a theory that the murderer was the doctor who confessed in Buenos Ayres, for his work was now, it is argued, completed—he had found the woman who was his son's downfall and taken his vengeance.

    It is not an impressive theory. But If you discard it, there is no shortage of others. One is that the Ripper was a religious homicidal maniac, avenging himself on women of an undesirable kind. Yet other investigators have argued that the monster was either George Chapman, the Southwark poisoner (certainly he had surgical knowledge and was working in a Whitechapel barber's at the time) — but it was his custom to marry his victims first; or that Neill Cream, another poisoner and a medical student, was the man. Cream was reported by Billington, the executioner, to have begun to say as he stood on the scaffold: "I am Jack ..." ere the bolt was drawn and the rest of the sentence went with him to eternity. But as Cream was in gaol in the United States during the time The Ripper was committing his crimes, that doesn't bear much investigation either. 

George R Sims in 1884

    George R. Sims asserted the Ripper was a doctor found dead in the Thames, and William le Queux is credited with the fanciful belief that the murderer was sent over by the Imperial Russian Government to expose our faulty police system and that he returned to Russia when his task was done!

    But even that is not the peak of imagination, for a spiritualist claimed that his clairvoyance has yielded HIM the secret. Jack the Ripper, he has declared, was a highly respected West End surgeon, whose wife, found him normally kind and loving but who nevertheless, was aware of his cruelties, for had she not found him torturing cats over a flame. Taxed with his crimes this surgeon (the story goes) confessed to his Jekyll and Hyde existence, was examined and found insane by a medical body, and quietly disposed of in a lunatic asylum. To hide the truth, it was given out that he had died, and an empty coffin bearing his name was duly buried.

Sir Melville Macnaughten

    Of the more authoritative opinions, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was at one time Chief of the Criminal Investigation Dept., held the view that the Ripper came from a noble house and committed suicide the day after the final murder (though it is not plain why he held this theory) and another Superintendent of the Department, a Mr. John McCarthy, also now dead, declared that he was satisfied the murderer was a doctor who killed himself. 

    But all is conjecture. We know nothing that is beyond question other than that the man had some knowledge of anatomy and possessed a sexual impulse which drove him crazy from time to time. He is probably dead but it is not beyond the limits of possibility that Londoners may find themselves in a Tube or omnibus calmly and unwittingly watching this monster. The man would probably be seventy-odd years old now.