The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

expiation, painted clues into several of his most famous paintings. Checking out the story, Knight found that a woman named Annie Crook lived at 22 Cleveland Street at that time and that she did give birth to an illegitimate daughter. This was also handy for the homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, centre of the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, in which the notorious bi-sexual Prince Eddy was thought to be implicated.

However, before Stephen Knight had finished writing Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, he had fallen out with Joseph Sickert. This is partially because he rejected Sickert’s story that Sir Robert Anderson was the third man in the killings. Instead Knight insisted that Joseph Sickert’s own father, Walter Sickert, was the third man. Joseph Sickert was not unnaturally offended by this suggestion, withdrew his co-operation and held back part of the story. From what Joseph Sickert told him, Knight concluded that Sir William Gull was the evil genius behind the Ripper murders. Sickert later claimed he kept back the name of the ringleader because he did not want to bring shame on the culprit’s family. But as Knight’s story came into general currency Sickert found that his omission had rebounded on him. The shame was now being heaped on his family. He was particularly upset when the 1985 TV film Murder by Decree portrayed Prince Eddy as the heartless seducer of the naive Annie Crook, who he intended to dump. Sickert was offended by this, believing that his grandparents had shared a great love. They had suffered enough in their lifetime, he thought. It did not seem fair to him that they should be slandered after their deaths and he resolved to reveal the vital details he had withheld.

In doing so he confirmed everything that he had told Stephen Knight, though he continued to insist that Sir Robert Anderson, not Walter Sickert, had been the third man. But there were more men in the gang—maybe as many as 12. These included Lord Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, two of those who took the fall in the Cleveland Street Scandal.

The reason Stephen Knight concluded that Walter Sickert, not Sir Robert Anderson, was the third man was because Sickert knew too much simply to have been a bystander. When he had told his son what he knew of the Ripper murders, he divulged details that only someone who had been there when the murders happened would have known. But Joseph Sickert had withheld the source of his father’s information. Walter Sickert had been told the inside story of the Ripper murders by Inspector Frederick George Abberline, the policeman in charge of the investigation. Abberline, in turn, had been told the story by one of the men involved—the heir to the throne Prince Eddy’s tutor J. K. Stephen, one of the favoured suspects of the lone-madman theory of the murders. Stephen, Sickert said, was one of the Ripper gang and part of the conspiracy. Abberline had written down what Stephen had told him in three diaries which he had given to Walter Sickert, who passed them on to his son. Both father and son regularly referred to the diaries to keep the details of the Ripper murders fresh in their minds.

One of the reasons that Knight discounted Anderson as a member of the Ripper gang was that he had been out of the country at the time of the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. But Sickert maintained that Anderson’s role, as a detective, was able to collect and collate information on the whereabouts of Mary Kelly and the other blackmailers. The fact that Catherine Eddowes was not one of the blackmailers and was killed by mistake, because she had been unfortunate enough to use the pseudonym Mary Kelly, seems to confirm that whoever was in charge of tracking the women down had slipped up or was not available at the time.

Sickert continued to maintain that Sir William Gull and John Netley were the men who actually performed the murders and mutilations. However, he later revealed that Gull had not begun his murderous campaign on his own initiative. He was acting on the orders of more prominent men. His orders came from his Masonic superiors in the Royal Alpha Lodge No 16. The chief conspirator, Sickert maintained, was none other than Lord Randolph Churchill, father of wartime leader Winston Churchill. Although the Freemasons deny Lord Randolph Churchill was ever a member, Sickert maintained that he was Magister Magistrorum—the master of masters. There are other indications that he was a mason, but had joined under the alias Spencer. Like his son, he often used the double-barrelled surname Spencer Churchill.

Lord Randolph Churchill had a twisted reason to hate women. By 1888 he was already suffering from bouts of madness, caused by the tertiary syphilis that would kill him. He blamed his condition and the loss of his meteoric political career on the woman who had given him the disease. It seems that Sir William Gull, an expert on syphilis, was treating him. By 1886, because of his condition, Lord Randolph Churchill ceased having sex with his wife, the beautiful American Jenny Jerome. She began to take lovers. This left Lord Randolph Churchill alone and bitter. His condition left him reliant on drugs. Like his son, he was a big drinker. He was also audacious and brooked no opposition. He even defied the Prince of Wales, threatening to publish incriminating letters which would lose him the throne if the Prince did not back down in an affair involving Churchill’s brother Lord Blandford. The Prince of Wales did as Churchill demanded but refused to speak to him again for eight years. Lord Randolph Churchill believed that he had been robbed of the chance to be prime minister and did anything he could to exercise power behind the scenes. He saw himself as a second Machiavelli and was known to be unscrupulous. He was certainly a man who could have cooked up the Ripper conspiracy and would have had the expertise to pull it off.

Winston Churchill was a tireless defender of his father, whitewashing him in his biography Lord Randolph Churchill. As Home Secretary in 1910, Winston Churchill was in a perfect position to remove any evidence linking his father to the Ripper murders from the police files. When they were opened in 1988, the Ripper files were found to be far from complete. Soon after, Winston Churchill quit the Freemasons. There were other connections between Churchill and the conspiracy. Walter Sickert gave Winston Churchill painting lessons and Churchill had been induced into the masons by Lord Euston.

Joseph Sickert maintained that J. K. Stephen was related to Annie Crook and may have introduced Eddy to her. Sickert also believed that Lord Randolph Churchill got carried away with the power the Ripper conspiracy gave him. After killing Mary Kelly and the other blackmailers, he intended to finish the job by killing Annie Crook, her daughter Alice and Prince Eddy himself. It was then that Stephen broke with the other conspirators and, breaking his Masonic oath, talked to Inspector Abberline. Like so many others involved in the conspiracy, Stephen died in a lunatic asylum. He starved himself to death after being told of Eddy’s death in 1892. Four days later, Abberline retired from the police force.

As Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution points out, the conspiracy among the highest echelons of the police force and the establishment was so powerful that even though Abberline knew the truth there was nothing he could do about it. The Ripper case had to remain officially unsolved or it would have opened the very can of worms the conspirators had sought to conceal.

Joseph Sickert told the rest of what he knew to Melvyn Fairclough, who recounted it in his book The Ripper and the Royals published in 1991. The book confirms the thesis of Stephen Knight’s book and adds a myriad of detail. However, Fairclough’s book over-eggs the pudding, tying the Ripper conspiracy to an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria and the abdication crisis of 1936. Distraught at being forcibly parted from his wife, Prince Eddy intended to exact his revenge by killing his own grandmother. And, apparently, Prince Eddy did not die in 1892. Being thought unsuitable to ascend to the throne, he was proclaimed dead then hidden away in Glamis Castle—ancestral home of the Bowes-Lyons—until he died in 1933. In recompense, the master of Glamis, the Earl of Strathmore, was to see his daughter, a commoner, sit on the throne of England. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon—who later became Queen Elizabeth, then the longstanding Queen Mother—was romantically attached to the Prince of Wales who became Edward VIII before marrying his brother the Duke of York who became George VI. Apparently Edward—or David as he was known before ascending to the throne—had discovered the secret of Glamis and had decided to abdicate in protest at the treatment of Eddy, who was rightfully king, before he even met Mrs Simpson. Hence Ms Bowes-Lyon’s change of partner. For my money, this is one conspiracy theory too far.

But there are still more theories. In 1987, Martin Fido fingered “David Cohen”—the name given to an unknown Jewish madman incarcerated in Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in December 1888. He died there in October the following year. The last murder known for sure to have been the Ripper’s occurred on 9 November 1888. Fido believes that “Cohen” was identified by Joseph Lawende, a witness who had seen a man talking to the Ripper’s fourth victim Catherine Eddowes shortly before she was murdered. But Lawende refused to testify against a fellow Jew, knowing that he faced the hangman’s rope, so the police detained “Cohen” under the Lunacy Act instead to keep him off the streets. Fido also believes that the police were convinced of his guilt but rivalries between the Metropolitan and City Police have obscured his real identity. It is a nice theory but hardly satisfying as nothing more is known about “Cohen”—other than he was a foreign-born Jew, a tailor living in a homeless shelter in Whitechapel aged 23 in 1888, who was extremely violent and had to be kept in a straitjacket. However, his wild assaults on other patients, his shouting and dancing, his noisy acts of vandalism, his inability to take care of himself and his