626. Jack The Ripper: The Killer Strikes Again (Part 3)

27:23and number three the Ripper left the message but it's a trick to throw the police off the scent this is what Sir Charles Warren thought Sir Charles Warren told the Home Office he said it was evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews and that's why I had to get rid of it I mean that is clearly the case but it doesn't have to be the Ripper who's written it I mean no one would put that up and not want that I think it's a better story if it's the Ripper though isn't it Yeah, of course it is. But, you know, I'm applying my razor sharp powers of deduction and logic here.

27:57Well, listen, amaze us now with your razor sharp powers of deduction and logic, because is there not an exciting conspiracy theory attached to this that you will very much enjoy? Yes. So there's a very notorious, I think, mad, well, I think basically everyone thinks mad book about Jack the Ripper called Jack the Ripper, The Final Solution. And I honestly think that any book with the word final solution in the title is probably best left alone. And it was written by a guy called Stephen Knight. And we will be talking about this in our final episode. But it's a theory about a member of the royal family being involved and various masons.

28:33And remember that Sir Charles Warren, the head of the Met, is himself a mason. And he says that the misspelling of Jews, so J-U-W-E-S, is a clue. And it refers to three legendary masonic figures, Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubalum. And it has to be said that this is, I mean, can I say bollocks on this podcast? I mean, yeah, I guess you can. So these figures had apparently not been part of Masonic ritual in Britain for almost a century. And British Masons never used the term J-U-W-E-S to describe them. And there is no link with the Masons at all. Well, we should explore this in greater detail, shouldn't we, in our final episode where we solve the crime.

29:19and we should be digging into the Masonic conspiracy theory, which, spoiler alert, I actually do agree with you and I think it is completely bonkers. But do remember Sir Charles Warren had dug, had excavated on the site of the temple and Mason's obsessed with the temple. So who knows, maybe there is something there. That was a tantalising clue there, Tom. So let's take a break and then we'll come back and we will plunge back into the stricken streets of Whitechapel as the story races towards the next terrible crime.

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31:51Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. And we are in Whitechapel in the heart of the East End. And it is the morning of Sunday, the 30th of September, 1888. And news is spreading across the East End and beyond of the double killing overnight of Elizabeth Stride in Whitechapel, Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square in the City of London. And the police have cordoned off the murder sites, but already thousands of people are gathering outside Mitre Square and Duckfield's yard where Elizabeth Stride had been murdered. And there are newspapers are starting to appear, people hawking them. the news is spreading virally.

32:32Yeah, and there's a massive sense of panic actually for the next week or so. So the streets are deserted at night. There are reports that lots of poor homeless women have gone west to the city or to the West End because the streets are better lit there. There are reports of people kind of, those people who don't, the women are huddling together for protection in the East End. There are some women carrying knives. The local shopkeepers complain officially to the government that people are staying away, especially because in mid-October, there's one of Victorian London's perennial fogs. P-super.

33:06A P-super. A regular P-super descends. And they actually petition the Home Secretary, and they say, basically, you've lost control of law and order in East London, clearly. Respectable people are not going shopping, and we're losing our livelihoods. And in the meantime, there are loads of mad theories about the killer. There are sort of letters to the Times from old India hands and things saying, you know, we recognise this. This is a Lascar at work. I mean, that is what it would be in a Sherlock Holmes story. That idea that the kind of opium crazed foreigners who've landed on a ship, that kind of, it's exactly what you get in a Victorian crime thriller.

33:42It's the sort of the empire coming home, right? Or Wilkie Collins or something. There's a diamond involved, almost certainly. Yeah. But a lot of people, I know we've got lots of American listeners and they'll be pleased to hear that a lot of people assume it must be an American because they know that Americans get up to extreme behaviour. But also there's been rumours that a man in a soft felt American hat was talking to Elizabeth Stride. And there's even suspicion that it may have been done by cowboys, isn't there? Well, I mean, this is actually, I think, a kind of very interesting angle on the panic.

34:12Because it's not just cowboys, but also Indians are much on the public mind. Because the previous year was when Buffalo Bill had come with his Wild West show to coincide with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. And it's really notable when you look at the press coverage, how regularly comparisons are made with the mutilations and murders in the East End with the supposed mutilations inflicted by Native Americans. So we actually read one, didn't we? A piece from the Evening Standard that compared the mutilations to those done by a poor knee Indian. and W.T. Stead, so the editor of the Pal-Mal Gazette in the wake of Annie Chapman's murder, he had pointed out that a Londoner is quite as capable of bathing his hands in blood as any Sioux who ever scalped a foe.

35:02And of course, Sitting Bull had been part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. So I just feel it's clearly part of the kind of the climate of the times that journalists are instinctively reaching for those kind of comparisons. Yeah, and I think there's a case that the Ripper story almost immediately becomes absorbed into the kind of popular culture of London in 1888, doesn't it? And it becomes sort of confused with lots of other different things. And actually, people immediately rush to make money from it. I mean, people are selling special editions of the newspapers, and there are some tremendously tasteful ballads, aren't there?

35:36Are you going to sing this ballad, or would you like to read it? I mean, I think it's interesting, because actually, Catherine Eddowes and Thomas Conway had spent much of their time hawking these exactly these kinds of ballads. So they would go to places, say, where people were being hanged and compose these kinds of songs and sell them. And now songs are being composed about the murder of Kate Eddowes and the other victims. So this is an example. In famous London City in 1888, four beastly cruel murders have been done. Some say it was old Nick himself or else a Russian Jew. some say it was a cannibal from the isle of kickaboo some say it must be bashi bazooks or else it's the chinese come over to white chapel to commit such crimes as these something slightly gilbert and sullivan about music horde about that isn't it it's certainly not tennyson um but it's also interesting that the blame is being put on foreigners again there's this idea that no englishman could possibly do this right and there's that i mean you can completely see how that's part of the same world as Sherlock Holmes, because in Sherlock Holmes, it would be bashy bazooks or the Chinese or something, wouldn't it?

36:44So anyway, people are cashing in, they're opening their houses to sightseers. So even that socialist club where Elizabeth Stride's body was found, they're making money out of it by charging tourists. Ah, socialists. Yeah, that's a lesson for you, Theo. Now that makes it sound as though people didn't care, but they absolutely did care. And the whole business was a spur, particularly to political radicals. So loads of letters in the newspapers saying, this is a reminder that it's a disgrace that the East End is like this. We should clean up the streets. We should do something for the poor. We shouldn't have an underclass in the heart of the imperial city.

37:24People feel guilty about it. And again, that's part of the kind of imperial dimension to it, isn't it? That people in London, the capital of the world's greatest empire, justify their empire in terms of a kind of civilizing mission. The idea that other parts of the world are savage compared, say, to Britain. But what these murders show is that savagery lurks in the streets of the imperial capital as well. And I know we'll talk about this in the next episode when you're going to be talking about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and so on. But it's really striking to me reading a lot of the newspaper commentary how often people would say things like, you know, that there are people walking around in the East End whose eyes have been opened to the horror that has been lurking among us all this time, that there is something deeply buried in us that has now come out.

38:14You know, that people didn't just say it's a foreign menace. There's a lot of commentary that says this is something that has almost been bubbling away in the sewers of our souls all this time. I mean, I think it works in two dimensions. There's the imperial dimension, the idea that the savagery that is conventionally identified with primitive peoples in distant climes is a part of the savagery of the imperial capital. But it's also this idea that there is a darkness, a murderousness, a savagery lurking in the soul, perhaps, of even the most outwardly respectable figure walking the streets, say, of the West End.

38:51And yeah, we will be coming to this in our next episode. That's a huge part of the Ripper mystique, isn't it, as it were? So to go back to the investigation, there are lots of calls in the press for a publicly funded bounty or reward. Now, as we described last time, the Home Office hate the thought of rewards because they say a reward is basically an invitation to hoax us. And there's a big disagreement between the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, and the Commissioner of the Met, Sir Charles Warren, about this. Their relations are terrible already, pretty much. and they're bickering furiously, basically by early November, for unrelated reasons, but this is definitely a factor.

39:27It's compounded, isn't it? Yeah, it's compounded. Sir Charles Warren has decided to resign. So the head of the Met is going to step down. Now, meanwhile, the incoming head of, the guy's going to be running CID, Criminal Investigation Department, Dr. Robert Anderson, has been away on holiday. Oh, in Switzerland. And the newspapers notice this, and they start to get very outraged. the Pall Mall Gazette, says that Dr. Anderson, the chief official responsible for the detection of the murderer, is as invisible to Londoners as the murderer himself. Dr. Anderson is taking a pleasant holiday in Switzerland.

40:02I mean, newspapers don't change, right? And Dr. Anderson then returns with an absolutely mad idea. He says, we should arrest every prostitute in London, or tell them that the police will not protect them. And everyone says, this is mad. First of all, the police's own estimates, and don't forget the definition of prostitution is incredibly vague, they reckon at least 1 ,200 women would fall under this category and would end up being arrested. They had got nowhere to put them. And secondly, people point out to Anders and they say, these women are soliciting in order to pay for their lodging. They have literally nowhere to go.

40:42If we stop them plying their trade, they will just be lying in the streets. What are we going to do? so they ditched that idea they do launch a house-to-house search and actually this is interesting because you know you might assume that everybody in the east end hates the police well i think they do don't they in spitalfields there's all this stuff that you can only go in as a policeman in pairs but obviously times change and now yes the police are your allies in hunting out the killer so to do this search right this house-to-house search the police have to ask the permission of every single householder.

41:20And almost everybody grants permission. There's virtually no resistance at all. The press are really surprised by this and struck by it, that the East End welcomes the police, says, come on, yes, do the search. So they do the search. They don't find anything. There's also another Sherlock Holmes parallel, actually, an experiment with bloodhounds. Which does not work out well, does it? No. So in The Sign of the Four, where it's a very good example of the crimes in that Sherlock Holmes story have been committed by, you know, it's the violence of the empire coming back home. There's a bloodhound called Toby, who's the most brilliant bloodhound in London and Holmes and Watson follow him across town in search of whatever the guy is called.

42:01Jonathan Small, is it? Who's the killer or was certainly involved with the killer? I can't remember. Anyway, the press have been pestering the home office, you know, use bloodhounds and eventually they get two dogs called Barnaby and Burgo and they do experiments in Regents Park and Hyde Park. But comically, this doesn't happen in Sherlock Holmes. There's a massive disagreement and falling out about who's going to pay for the dog's insurance. So eventually the dog breeder loses patience with the police and he takes them to a dog show instead. And so the police lose the cooperation of Barnaby and Burgo.

42:36But as Charles Warren said, This is a mad experiment because we don't have the killer's blood or any of his clothes or anything like that. So what are they supposed to be tracing? Yeah. I mean, Warren's got his finger on the pulse there. Well, I've got an even better wheeze for you. So there were no police women in the Met. So they can't entrap the Ripper. They can't send police women out to kind of lure him. Do they, however, have any young lads who could plausibly pass? Well, so the press have been pestering the Met and saying, could you not send out people dressed as women to lure him? And the Met points out, they say, all our recruits by law have to be more than five foot seven.

43:21So at an age when people are slightly shorter than they are today, they will stand out. It'll be very conspicuously, not women. But one bloke did try this. He was Detective Sergeant Robinson of G Division. And he went and sort of, he dressed up and he stood around. He was accosted by some cab washers. So people washing down, you know, hackneyed carriages. Was this because they felt that he wasn't really plausible? I don't know. They basically saw this, Blake. One of them shouted at him. Now, this is some form of slang that I don't really understand. But they shouted at him, you're cats and dogs, aren't you?

43:53And then they stabbed him in the face. Oh my God. So it was quite a big altercation. He had to be rescued by other policemen. So that's a lesson to you, Tom. If you go on one of your walks in the East End, be careful how you dress because I don't want you to be accused of being cats and dogs and stabbed in the face. Anyway, the various police wheezes don't really work. And not surprisingly, you start to get genuine vigilantes. So last time we mentioned the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was dominated by local Jewish tradesmen. And they would meet at the Crown Pub on Mile End Road and they would organise patrol.

44:26They would get unemployed locals to do patrols and they would give them a little bit of money and they'd give them a whistle, a stout stick and some galoshes. I don't know why particularly they'd give them these galoshes. But basically, this doesn't act, you know, there are two different schools of thought on this. Number one is the police didn't really like these vigilante patrols for obvious reasons and it also made their job more difficult because now there are lots of strange men kind of lurking around the streets with galoshes and upsetting the locals and stuff. But there is an argument. There is now a delay of six weeks before the Ripper strikes again.

45:01And this may be because the patrols are a bit of a deterrent. There are a lot more people out on the streets, like with stout sticks and galoshes. And this may explain why the next crime happens indoors rather than outside because of all these patrols. So meanwhile, the press are getting more and more critical of the police. So they call them rotten. They say they're incompetent. Even the conservative papers. So the Daily Telegraph, we mentioned a few times, it slams what it calls the notorious and shameful shortcomings of the detective department, or rather of the botched up makeshift, which does duty for a detective department at Scotland Yard.

45:41They call the Tory Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, they call him a helpless, heedless, useless figure, which I think is actually a little bit harsh. The police are doing all they can. They're trying lots of different things, but this is a really, really hard crime to solve. And now we come back to this issue of the Ripper taunting the police. We already mentioned the Dear Boss letter, the letter in which he had said he would cut a victim's, if this is the Ripper, which we actually don't think it is, that he would cut the victim's ears off, and then, of course, he doesn't do it. But then on Monday, the 1st of October, the Central News Agency got a second message.

46:19And this was a bloodstained postcard with a London East postmark dated the 1st of October. So it could have been posted after the Catherine Eddowes murder made the newspapers. In other words, the person, it could be a hoaxer who's read about the murder. And most handwriting experts think it's written by the same person who had written the previous dear boss letter tom do you want to give us the uh in your excellent australian accent the text of this postcard i wasn't codding dear old boss when i gave you the tip you'll hear about saucy jack's work tomorrow a double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn't finish straight off it's not time to get ears off for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

47:09Jack the Ripper. So copies of this were published on posters outside every police station, and then they were published in the newspapers on the 4th of October, because the police were desperate to basically say, do you know this, ma 'am? The general consensus, I think, is that these are not real. Neither this or the dear boss. To repeat, there are no spelling mistakes at all, although the punctuation is very all over the shop. There are capital letters, as there should be. There are full stops, however, as there should be. and it feels a little bit like somebody is trying to pretend to be less educated than he is.

47:43It's also somebody who can come up with the brilliant name of Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper, exactly. Almost certainly, I think, a young reporter or somebody like that who's covering the case. And the result of the police publicising this is a flood of hoax letters. They are deluged with false leads and it reminds me very much of what happened in the 1970s with the Yorkshire Ripper case when the police publicised the work of another hoaxer who was called Wearside Jack. And then they were absolutely deluged with false information and it made it almost impossible for them to sift through it all.

48:16So that's the postcard. And then just over two weeks later comes the most infamous letter of all. So this was addressed to the new chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, the kind of vigilante group, Mr. George Lusk. And it arrived at his house in Mile End on the evening of Tuesday, the 16th of October. So he gets a small parcel wrapped in brown paper with a letter and he opens the box and it contains what is clearly half a kidney, a human kidney. And the letter, do you want to give us the letter? Yeah, it has the most chilling opening, doesn't it? Which has often been rehearsed from hell.

48:54And it's Mr. Lusser, I send you half the kidney I took from one woman, preserved it for you till the peace. I fried and ate. It was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a while longer. Signed, catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk. The bit at the beginning, From Hell, very famous because that inspires the enormous graphic novel by Alan Moore, which we might talk about in our final episode. For those people who you can't tell from Tom's reading, a lot of that is misspelt, isn't it? So preserved or sore. Yeah, kind of faintly Irish, perhaps. Yes, exactly, which we will come to.

49:33Lusk took the kidney to a pathologist to examine it with a microscope and said he thought it was human. There are some claims, you see them often repeated in Ripper books, that he identified it as the kidney of a 45-year-old woman who was a heavy drinker. But actually the pathologist said that was completely invented and made up by the newspapers. The city police surgeon agreed it was a human kidney, but there's no evidence that it came from Catherine Eddowes. It could have come from any recent autopsy. And it could have been sent in by medical students, for example. The handwriting analysis of this letter is that this is not somebody disguising their writing.

50:10There are lots of mistakes, and it is very clearly written quickly and smoothly, you know, not by somebody painstakingly trying to disguise their hand. But it's clearly not the same person as the dear boss person. Yeah, and also the postcard. So those two Jack the Ripper messages. And Tom, as you said, the spelling looks like it could be Irish. So presaved, for example, which is a more kind of Irish formula, apparently. Sor. Sor, exactly. Writing S-O-R, sor. So there are people who think there is a link to, as we'll come to in the final episode, an Irish-American suspect, Dr. Tumblety, who is a very, very peculiar person indeed.

50:52It's harder to dismiss this, I think, than the other letters. We don't know who the kidney is. You know, could this be a letter from the Ripper? We just don't know. Now, the police, as we've said, are deluged. I mean, these are not the only hoax letters they get. They're the most famous ones, but there are others. If you read the memoirs of the policemen or interviews with them, they basically say, we were totally overwhelmed. So Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who was leading the investigation at Scotland Yard, he said that on just the Elizabeth Stride murder alone, His men detained 80 different people.

51:27They followed up leads on more than 300 other people, and they had 994 different files open at once. Inspector Abbelein, who's in charge of the investigation in Whitechapel, remembered later that his team had 1 ,600 different files. And he himself was patrolling the streets to set an example to his men, very Nelsonian, till four o 'clock in the morning. Then he'd often come home, and then he'd immediately get a telegram saying, come back to Whitechapel, we've got a new suspect. So they are exhausted and they are getting nowhere near finding the killer. And what all these letters suggest is that Jack the Ripper is already becoming a literary figure.

52:06Yes. There are people who are writing words for him or writing, composing actions for him that are filling in the gaps. And this, of course, is something that will be repeated decade after decade after decade. So we come towards the end of October. The police have really got no clues at all. Robert Anderson writes a report saying that CID has not got the slightest clue of any kind. And on 24th of October, Sir Charles Warren reports to the Home Office, he says, despite numerous and searching inquiries, they've produced no tangible result. The vigilante patrols are starting to dry up now because the weeks have passed and the Ripper is not killed again.

52:46The Mile End Vigilance Committee runs out of money and has to appeal for public subscriptions. one of the constables on the case Michael Walter Jew notes in his memoirs many years later he says at this point the prostitutes of the East End who had previously sort of vanished from the streets start to come back and when he passes them they will sometimes shout out to him jovially I'm the next for Jack you know they're making light of it now yeah making a joke to cheer themselves up now one of the women he sees calls herself Mary Jane Kelly we know that she used to read about the killings because she used to ask her partner, who's a guy called Joe Barnett, who lives with her in a little kind of court called Miller's Court off Dorset Street, and he would read her stories about them.

53:30But it didn't deter her from going out on the streets because PC Dew, as he then was, says, often I had seen her parading along Commercial Street between Flower and Dean Street and Allgate or along Whitechapel Road. She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron but no hat no hat not respectable so we come to the morning of the 9th of november it's the day of the lord mayor's show and like a lot of people mary jane kelly has been looking forward to it now that morning her landlord who is a shopkeeper called john mccarthy has been checking his books he notices that she She's 29 shillings behind with the rent.

54:12And he sends his young assistant, Thomas Bowyer, to see if she has some of the money. And at 10.45, Bowyer goes and he knocks on the door of 13 Miller's Court. And there's no answer. And he knocks again. And there's still no answer. He goes around the corner where there's a broken window. And he pulls aside the curtain. and when he pulls aside the curtain, he reels backwards in absolute shock and horror. He goes and gets his boss. They end up going to the police station and they fetch two officers, Inspector Walter Beck and this guy, Walter Dew, I've already mentioned. And Beck, the inspector, peers through the window first and then he staggers back, we're told, his face as white as a sheet.

55:00and he says for god's sake jude don't look but jude cannot stop himself he puts his face to the window and then he says when my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light i saw a sight which i shall never forget to my dying day so next time we will um reveal what he saw through the window of 13 Miller's Court. We will tell the story of Mary Jane Kelly and her terrible fate. And we'll also be looking at the cultural hinterland of the Ripper murders. We'll be looking at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We'll be looking at Sherlock Holmes. And we will be asking how it was that Jack the Ripper came to be enshrined as history's first serial killer.

55:51And then our final episode, our fifth episode in the series, we will be examining the various suspects and for the first time ever unveiling the definitive killer and if you're not a member of the rest is history club and you would like to hear them then you can sign up at the rest is history.com but for now goodbye bye