cut out. And street-walker Frances Cole, also known as “Carroty Nell” because of her flaming red hair, was found in Whitechapel with her throat cut and slashed around her abdomen. A policeman saw a man stooped over the body, but he ran away before the constable could get a good look at him.
The description of the Ripper that has seized the public imagination comes from a friend of Mary Kelly’s who saw her with a man that night. He was five feet six inches tall, about 35, well-dressed with a gold watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket. Kelly was seen in conversation with him.
“You will be all right for what I have told you,” he said.
“All right my dear,” she replied, taking him by the arm. “Come along, you will be comfortable.”
A few hours later a chestnut vendor saw a man matching that description, wearing a long cloak and silk hat with a thin moustache turned up at the end and carrying a black bag.
“Have you heard there has been another murder?” he said.
“I have,” the chestnut seller replied.
“I know more of it than you do,” said the man as he walked away.
There are a huge number of theories as to the identity of the Ripper. The police had 176 suspects at the time. The most popular is the mad Russian physician Dr Alexander Pedachenko who worked under an assumed name in an east London clinic that treated several of the victims. A document naming him as the Ripper was said to have been found in the basement of Rasputin’s house in St Petersburg after the mad monk’s assassination in 1916. However, some have pointed out that Rasputin’s house did not have a basement.
A Dr Stanley is another popular suspect. He is said to have contracted syphilis from a Whitechapel prostitute and thus took vengeance on them all. He fled to Buenos Aires where he died in 1929, after confessing all to a student.
V. Kosminski, a Polish Jew who lived in Whitechapel, threatened to slice up prostitutes. He went insane and died in an asylum. East European Jewish immigrants, who were unpopular in London at the time, were regularly blamed for the Ripper killings. It was said that the murders were ritual Jewish slaughters performed by a
Another Polish immigrant, Severin Klosowich—alias George Chapman—was also suspected. He was a barber’s surgeon in Whitechapel and kept sharp knives for bloodletting and for the removal of warts and moles. He poisoned three of his mistresses and went to the gallows in 1903.
Thomas Cutbush was arrested after the murder of Frances Cole for stabbing women in the buttocks. He died in an insane asylum.
The insomniac G. Wentworth Bell Smith who lived at 27 Sun Street, off Finsbury Square, was a suspect. He railed against prostitutes, saying, “They should all be drowned.”
Frederick Bailey Deeming confessed to the Ripper’s murders. He had killed his wife and children in England, then fled to Australia where he killed a second wife. He was about to kill a third when he was arrested. It is thought that his confession was an attempt to delay, if not evade, the gallows in Australia.
Dr Thomas Neill Cream poisoned prostitutes in London and went on to murder more in the United States. He is said to have told his hangman “I am Jack…” as the trapdoor was opened.
The police’s prime suspect was Montague John Druitt, an Oxford graduate from a once-wealthy family. After failing as a barrister, Druitt became a school teacher, but he was a homosexual and was dismissed for molesting a boy. He moved to Whitechapel where he was seen wandering the streets. In December 1888, his body was fished out of the Thames. There were stones in his pockets and it is thought he had drowned himself.
Salvation Army founder William Booth’s secretary was also a suspect after saying “Carroty Nell will be the next to go” a few days before the slaying of Frances Cole. Alcoholic railway worker Thomas Salder was arrested after the murder of Alice McKenzie. He also knew Frances Cole, but was released due to lack of evidence.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed that the Ripper was a woman. His theory was that “Jill the Ripper” was a midwife who had gone mad after being sent to prison for performing illegal abortions.
The spiritualist William Lees staged a seance for Queen Victoria to try and discover who the Ripper was. The results frightened him so much he fled to the Continent. The Ripper, he believed, was none other than the Queen’s personal physician Sir William Gull. Gull’s papers were examined by Dr Thomas Stowell. They named the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, commonly known as Prince Eddy, the grandson of Queen Victoria who died of syphilis before he could ascend to the throne, as the Ripper, Stowell says. Another suspect is James Kenneth Stephen, a homosexual lover of Prince Eddy. The two of them were frequent visitors to a homosexual club in Whitechapel.
The painter Frank Miles, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, has also been named as the Ripper.
But Ripperology constantly moves on. In 1976, Stephen Knight published
In 1973, when Knight was working on a documentary about the Ripper murders for the BBC, a contact at Scotland Yard advised him to speak to a man named Sickert who knew about the secret marriage between Eddy and a poor Catholic girl, later divulging Sickert’s address and phone number.
The man was Joseph Sickert, son of the famous painter Walter Sickert. Joseph briefly outlined a tale in which Prince Eddy, while slumming as a commoner under the aegis of the artist, met a girl named Annie Crook in a tobacconist’s shop in Cleveland Street. Annie soon fell pregnant and she, Eddy and their daughter Alice were living quite happily in Cleveland Street until the Queen found out. She was furious. Not only was Annie a commoner, she was also a Catholic. Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, it was illegal for the monarch or the heir to the throne to marry a Catholic. And under the Royal Marriage Act 1772, royal children were prohibited from marriage without the specific consent of the monarch. Royalty was unpopular at the time and any scandal might risk revolution.
Queen Victoria handed the matter over to her prime minister Lord Salisbury, who organized a raid on the couple’s Cleveland Street apartment. With the aide of the Queen’s physician Sir William Gull, Annie was committed to a lunatic asylum where attempts were made to erase her memory, eventually driving her insane.
But Alice had escaped. When the raid had taken place, the child had been in the care of Mary Kelly, an orphan rescued from the poor house by Walter Sickert who was employed as Alice’s nanny. Forced back on her own devices, Mary left the child with nuns and returned the East End, where she fell into a life of drink and prostitution. However, in her cups, she often told her story and some of her fellow women of the night—notably Polly Nichols, Liz Stride and Annie Chapman—encouraged to her to pressure the government for hush money.
Learning of the threat, Salisbury called on Gull once more and coachman John Netley, who had often ferried Eddy on his forays into the East End, to get rid of the troublesome women. They performed the Ripper murders and built up the image of Jack with letters and the symbols of Freemasonry. Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Robert Anderson was employed as look-out, Joseph Sickert said. As Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, he was also in the perfect position to cover up the crime and hamper any investigation.
The women who knew the secret were duly despatched, along with Eddowes, whose murder, Sickert said, had been a mistake. She often went by the name of Mary Kelly and the conspirators thought that she was the woman they were looking for. When they discovered their mistake became known, they found the real Mary Kelly and killed her in a manner so gruesome that it would scare anyone else who had got a whiff of the scandal into silence. They had even organized a scapegoat in the person of poor barrister, Montague Druitt, who was chosen to take the blame and was, Sickert hinted, murdered for it.
The daughter Alice grew up quietly in the convent and, by an odd twist of fate, later married Walter Sickert and gave birth to their son, Joseph. Sir William Gull died shortly after the murders, but there were rumours that he had been committed to an insane asylum. Annie Crook died insane in a workhouse in 1920. Netley was chased by an angry mob after he unsuccessfully tried to run over Alice with his cab shortly after the murders. He was believed to have been drowned in the Thames.
Joseph said that his father Walter Sickert was tormented with guilt over the murders and, as a form of
