In the latest transmission from his regular column, K.PATRICK GLOVER, author of A WICKED LITTLE TOWN, turns his sights away from politics to examine a controversial and enduring true-crime mystery - the identity of Jack the Ripper. What's more, he reckons he's cracked the case...
In the autumn of 1888,
Jack The Ripper brutally murdered five women in the east end of
London. It is a murder spree that remains officially unsolved to this
day. Over the past hundred and twenty plus years, literally hundreds
of theories about the crimes have been proposed. I believe them all
to be wrong. I also believe I have uncovered the identity of the
killer. I’m going to share my thoughts on the subject with you now.
First, let’s set the
stage. The east end of London was one of the most extreme examples of
squalid poverty imaginable. Vastly overpopulated, with a high
percentage of immigrant families, many of them Russian Jews fleeing
oppression, and an even higher percentage of unemployed people. The filthy
tenement houses of Whitechapel were a fertile breeding ground for
crime and horror.
As is often the case in
such environments, anti-authoritarian political organizations
thrived. Socialist, Labour, Democratic: however they chose to label
themselves, in scare tactics familiar to anyone who pays attention to
modern politics, the opposition lumped them all in with what they
considered to be the most frightening of the bunch, the anarchists.
In November of 1887,
the Social Democratic Federation, in partnership with several other
radical, left-leaning groups, organized a protest against Irish
coercion in Trafalgar Square. The protest turned into a bloodbath
when Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren sent 5000
officers and troops to quell the protest. The resulting riot killed
three and sent two hundred more to the hospital.
The radicals blamed
Warren and were determined to see him removed from his position.
Other protests followed and the police response was much the same.
Tensions between the police and the population of the east end grew.
It was a powder keg, waiting for the match to be lit. That match was
Polly Nichols.
Mary Ann “Polly”
Nichols’ body was discovered in the early hours of the morning on
the 31st of August, 1888. Her throat was severed down to
the vertebrae and several other incisions had been made to the
abdomen.
It’s instructive at
this point to watch the response of the local press. For the first
day or so after the murder, the story is everything. Huge headlines
and lengthy reports sensationalize the crime. But the murder of a
prostitute in the east end is not so uncommon an occurrence and by
the end of the week the story is reduced to a couple of paragraphs
reporting that no progress has been made.
Annie Chapman’s body
was discovered at 6:00AM on the morning of September 8th.
Like Polly, her throat was cut to the bone, however her other
injuries were much more severe. Her intestines were removed and left
on her shoulder, her uterus cut out and taken away.
The press, of course,
went ballistic, but it’s important to note that the killings were
being referred to as The Whitechapel Murders and were even being
lumped in with several previous killings, not in a way that implied
they were all committed by the same man, but that they were all
symptomatic of the poverty and crime of the east end; a sociological
problem. A political problem. No mention was yet made of the name
Jack The Ripper.
As with everything, the
press eventually tired of the case and by the end of September the
coverage had gone from the sensational to the mundane, with the press
reporting matter-of-factly on the findings of the inquest.
Shortly after 1:00AM on
September 30th, the body of Elizabeth Stride was
discovered in Dutfield’s Yard by Louis Diemschutz. Her throat was
severed much like the two victim’s before her, but that was all. It
appears that Diemschutz’s arrival interrupted the killer’s work.
A mere forty-five
minutes later, the body of Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre
Square, throat cut and mutilated much like Annie Chapman. In addition
to the uterus, a kidney was also removed and taken away.
The following day the
police released to the press a letter they believed to be a fake,
mostly to cover all possibilities. The letter (known as the “Dear
Boss” letter) was signed “yours truly, Jack The Ripper." Although it was probably authored by a member of the press in order
to amp up the story, this letter coined the killer’s name.
The coverage in the
papers exploded again following the double murder and the release of
the letter. Much was made of the inability of the police to solve
the crimes and they were often accused of not caring about the
killings because the victims were only prostitutes.
Other letters came soon
after, one by the same hand that crafted the “Dear Boss” letter,
another that may well have been from the killer himself and contained
a segment of human kidney. All served to amplify the furore in the
press, much of which was directed at Police Commissioner Warren.
It was more than a
month before things began to drop off and during that time there were
no more Ripper killings. Then, on the morning of November 9th,
Mary Kelly’s body is discovered in her flat in Spitalfields. Her
throat is slashed and her body mutilated almost beyond recognition.
This time, her heart is taken.
Later that day, Sir
Charles Warren resigned his post as Commissioner of Police.
Jack The Ripper never
killed again.
Those are the bare bone
facts of the case. Many more details are known, books can and have
been filled with details on this case, from the letters written to
the press to the graffiti found on the wall near Catherine Eddowes' body. The vast majority of those details, like the vast majority of
the details in any homicide case, lead nowhere.
We do get several
descriptions from witnesses of men that the victims were seen
speaking to shortly before their deaths. As is often the case with
witnesses, descriptions vary wildly, but we do get a strong
inclination that the man was foreign.
However, the two most
important details, or patterns, can be found in the paragraphs above.
Oddly, in almost every theory of the Ripper case, they are ignored,
which is why I believe every theory of the Ripper case is wrong. They
all start with the same conclusion, that the Ripper was what we refer
to now as a traditional serial killer and that the killings were
sexually motivated.
That conclusion is
erroneous.
Sexually motivated
serial killers have a fairly common characteristic. Escalation. The
time between murders gets shorter and shorter because the killer
can’t control his impulses, he always needs more.
Look at those dates.
Eight days between the first two. Twenty-two days between the next.
Forty days between those and the final. It’s the opposite of what
would be expected.
Why the lengthening
dates? Look at the press coverage at the time and you start to get an
idea. After the first, each subsequent killing happens as the
coverage is starting to drop off. The more victims added to the list,
the longer the coverage lasts, so you get a longer period between
killings.
So, now we have a
killer who isn’t sexually motivated and seems to be pushing for
attention. The press coverage is drawing attention to the living
conditions in the east end and it’s making the police look
ineffectual. More importantly, it’s making them look like they
don’t care.
So, a killer with a
political motive, probably: considering the proliferation of such
groups in the east end, a social radical. From the killings we can
assume he had some medical knowledge or training. Not necessarily a
doctor, but at least an educated man, someone who took a class or two
in anatomy and such. From witness statements, a man believed to be a
foreigner.
Now, let’s make an
educated guess. He’s not one of the poor Russian Jews that are so
abundant in Whitechapel. They wouldn’t have the necessary medical
knowledge, they were mostly tailors or merchants. However, many
well-to-do Russian anarchists also fled Russia following the
assassination of Tsar Alexander II, because of a crackdown on various
socialist groups.
Educated men, many of
whom ended up in London and naturally gravitated to the hotbed of
socialism and anarchism, the east end. Whitechapel.
So, a well-educated
Russian anarchist.
That’s a fairly
specific profile and, to be honest, that’s as far as I expected
this column to get. You see, none of the conventional Ripper suspects
come close to fitting that description. But as I dug deeper, I went
back to the original suspects, the people that Scotland Yard was
looking at back during the time of the murders themselves.
Which is where I came
across the name Nikolay Vasiliev.
At first, I dismissed
him out of hand. Although he was Russian and educated in Odessa, the
early rumors (and the reason the police were looking at him) placed
him in a weird religious cult that castrated themselves and despised
sexuality in any form. That made sense to the detectives, but not to
me, not with the profile that I had devised.
Then I got to a report
from a newspaper in St. Petersburg. That report dismissed the rumors
about the cult and instead pegged him as an Anarchist.
Now, it’s hard to
nail this guy down. Apparently the cops didn’t consider him for
long and when you start to dig for evidence the man appears to be
made of smoke. There’s little to prove that the man even existed
outside of the numerous reports of his name in the contemporary
papers.
It’s easy to see why
the police dismissed him from consideration. They were looking for a
madman driven by some form of sexual rage. I have no doubts that
Vasiliev was mad, but what drove him was not a hatred of prostitutes,
but a hatred of government, of the powers-that-be, of the
authoritarian state that drove him from his home, and of the figure
that represented that same form of authority here in his new home.
The man who had ordered 5000 men to brutally shut down a peaceful
protest less than a year before.
Sir Charles Warren.
There’s no physical
evidence to tie this up in a nice, neat package. After one hundred
and twenty plus years, how could there be? I’m drawing conclusions
and making intuitive leaps, I know that.
But what are the odds
that, without ever having heard about the guy, sitting at my desk in
2012, I could draw up a profile of an educated Russian anarchist and
then find an educated Russian anarchist among the early suspects?
Coincidence? No, that
stretches credulity too far past the breaking point.
No.
I have no doubt left in
my mind. Nikolay Vasiliev was Jack The Ripper.
Case closed.
See you next time,
