borrowed one. I’ve a very good memory. Some I read on the Internet but kept that to an absolute minimum. I knew everything was logged, everything monitored, everything watched.
I watched documentaries. Bought satellite television just for that. Read magazines, paid for in cash, bought in different places.
Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Fred West. Jeffrey Dahmer. Dennis Nilsen. Albert DeSalvo. David Berkowitz. Alexander Pichushkin. Pedro Alonso Lopez. I knew them all.
Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, Charles Ng, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Albert Fish. Leopold and Loeb. Aileen Wuornos. Harold Shipman. Andrei Chikatilo. John George Haigh. John Christie. Peter Sutcliffe. Josef Fritzl.
Then there was Jack.
Some said the Ripper was overrated. I always remembered someone saying that to me: ‘Jack the Ripper is overrated.’ Just like that.
In purely numerical terms he was probably right. But what he forgot, what they all forget, is that Jack got away with it. The single most famous serial killer in history yet still unknown. Outstanding.
Some people think they know who Jack was but they don’t. They can’t know.
They call themselves Ripperologists, those who study Jack. Those that are into him in a big way. Ask ten Ripperologists who killed those women and you will get eleven different answers.
We know the women’s names.
Polly Nichols.
Annie Chapman.
Liz Stride.
Kate Eddowes.
Mary Kelly.
Five prostitutes of Whitechapel. Victims of life. Victims of Jack. Jack killed them, ripped them. But we don’t know why and we don’t know who.
They say he was Queen Victoria’s whoring grandson Eddy, the Duke of Clarence, driven mad by syphilis. They say it was the Queen’s physician William Gull. They say it was her obstetrician John Williams.
He was the painter Walter Sickert. He was Carl Feigenbaum, a German sailor. He was an insane Polish Jew, Aaron Kosminski.
It was the Ripper diary confessor James Maybrick or the bogus doctor Francis Tumblety. It was barrister Montague John Druitt, the abortionist Dr Thomas Neill Cream, the Polish poisoner George Chapman or Mary Kelly’s lover Joseph Barnett.
It was them and it was a hundred others but it was none of them. It was Jack. No one knows who he was.
Jack did what Jack had to do then he stopped. Disappeared. Slipped back into the London fog. Untouched.
Know what though? Jack’s biggest secret is that maybe he didn’t even exist. There is a theory that says there was no psychopath stalking the streets of Whitechapel, no madman hunting down prostitutes to kill and dissect them. Those women died all right but this theory says that there was no Jack.
It goes that three men worked together to do the murders. Their plan, if you believe it, was to cover their true intentions by creating the myth of the Ripper. These men were high establishment, variously connected to the Royal Household and were set on protecting its interests. Whether it was mad Prince Albert Victor that needed protecting or Gull or Williams, you can take your pick.
The bottom line is that one of the five whores, Mary Kelly, knew too much and was prepared to tell. She had to be silenced. But the killing of Mary alone would have left a trail back to the palace. Maybe the police would not have bothered their arses too much about a murdered prostitute but if they had looked into it seriously then motive could eventually have led them to the truth.
So the plan was devised. A story spun. A play performed.
Mary Kelly and her friends were slaughtered and the murders made to look the work of a complete monster. The silencing of Mary Kelly was hidden amidst the other four. She was the needle. They were the haystack.
The beauty of it was that it was made to look like madness but in reality it was clinical, reasoned and sound.
So was it true, this theory among theories? I didn’t know but I understood it. I respected the logic.
Rationale. It was where the others – West, Bundy, Nilsen, Dahmer – messed up. They were wild beyond reason and mostly insane. Jack was sane enough not to get caught. Ever.
Dahmer was a drunken, morbid obsessive. West was a sexual compulsive with a gruesome fascination for mutilation. Brady was power-driven and bitterly resentful. Nilsen was a self-absorbed fantasist, another suffering from an addictive compulsion.
All were off their heads in their own crazy ways even if they had a competent sort of insanity that let them pass for sane. The detective who arrested Nilsen described him as ‘frighteningly normal, an ordinary sort of man’. Shipman was mad enough to kill maybe more than 300 old people yet sane enough that none of them suspected him. Dahmer was able to convince cops that a fleeing victim in the street was a liar, a lover scorned.
But they could only play at being sane. And they could only do that for so long. It kept tugging at them. Their addiction, their obsession, their compulsion, it always made them do it one more time. No rationale.
The urge they couldn’t resist was what undercut any kind of normal thinking and what drove them to do what they did. Not evil or any such pish, just uncontrollable obsessions.
There is a lot of rubbish talked about evil when it comes to serial killers. Numbers mess with people’s moral outrage. The thinking goes that someone who kills twenty people is more evil than someone who kills two. The man who rips his victims apart is more evil than the man who doesn’t. The woman who kills is more evil than the man. The man who mutilates one victim is more evil than a politician who sends millions to their death in the name of patriotism or oil. It’s all bollocks.
I doubted there was any such thing as evil. I used to think there was but then I used to think there was a God. If God represented good and there was no God then why would there be evil?
Even if there is evil then it is in a man’s actions not in his soul. Whatever someone has inside is irrelevant. Only deeds matter.
I knew plenty of absolute bastards who never killed anyone. Harold Shipman, if you believed him, was a nice old man who eased people’s pain.
I didn’t claim to know anything about evil. I just knew my serial killers.
I knew my ain folk too.
Scotland gave the world television and the telephone, penicillin, the pneumatic tyre, the steam engine and the bicycle, radar, insulin, calculus and Dolly the sheep. But we are also right up there with the best of them when it comes to killing people.
America’s first recorded serial killers were ours. Two cousins, pretty much unheard of over here, named Bill and Josh Harpe. Born in Scotland, they changed their names when they moved to America. They became known as Micajah and Wiley, Big and Little Harpe.
In the late 1700s they slaughtered at least forty-one people in a blood spree lasting a year. Their favourite trick was to beat or stab someone to death then gut them, rip out their insides and fill them up with rocks. The body would then be thrown in the river and allowed to sink.
They killed their own children too, poor little bastards born to the three wives they had between the two of them. One eight-month-old wee girl cried once too often and the father grabbed the poor wee thing by its ankle, smashed its head on a tree and threw it dead into the woods.
Then there was old Sawney Bean, the man who washed his hands in the blood of a thousand souls. But just like Jack, all was probably not as it seemed. Alexander Sawney Bean. Said to have been the head of a forty-eight- strong family of cannibals in Ayrshire. An incestuous, murderous bunch who are supposed to have lived in a cave during the day, venturing out at night to slay unwary innocents and drag them into their lair to be dissected and eaten.
Some tales have it that as many as 1,000 were killed and devoured by Bean’s incestuous band but more likely the whole thing is just another load of bollocks. Chances are Sawney and his brood were just an invention. A figment of an English imagination determined to damn the reputation of the Scots in the wake of the Jacobite
