Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [2]
The lies that surround him are enough to send anyone mad: He removed Kelly’s foetus (she wasn’t pregnant), he fed his victims poisoned grapes (greengrocer Matthew Packer, the only witness to this fact, changed his story every day), he left ritualistic patterns of the victims’ belongings near the corpses (nope), and so on and on. Stephen Knight quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an early 20th-century anti-Semitic hoax) as being Masonic oaths. Donald McCormick dramatises scenes, complete with Cockney sing-songs, but insists that the dialogue is authentic. Jonathan Goodman named ‘Peter J Harpick’ as a suspect, complete with background and history in his book Who He?
(1984). Although this was clearly an anagram, requests for further information about ‘Harpick’ over the years left Goodman with a low opinion of Ripper enthusiasts. AP Wolf starts by claiming Ripperologists’ infighting has obscured all truth behind the Ripper case and then savages Colin Wilson. Paul Feldman as good as invites anyone who doubts the veracity of Maybrick’s diary outside for a fight. The myth sucks you in. Each step you take pulls you harder, deeper. You fight your corner by whatever means necessary, because you, and you alone, have The Truth.
The truth? The incredible police investigation into the crimes derived not from sympathy for the victims but from politics. In 1876, corruption on a massive scale had been uncovered in the higher echelons of the CID. The Metropolitan Police, under Sir Charles Warren, were regarded as an increasingly militaristic force.The press, previously in favour of the forces of law and order cracking down on the unruly poor, suddenly began to support those they had vilified. The police in all areas had to be seen to prove themselves.
Jack was born just as the popular press was finding its feet and they helped each other immeasurably. He gave them murders to boost their circulation and they, in turn, made him into a legend. No detail was too titillating or unpleasant to be left unreported or undistorted. Researchers hoping to provide a correct history of the murders are left with the daunting task of sorting the lies from the truth through acres of print, reports, statements... The coroner, Wynne Baxter, held lengthy inquests into many of the victims. These supplied the press with every possible detail of the victims’ backgrounds, their murders, their mutilations. Gaudy posters advertising the latest reports from the press were pasted up around Whitechapel, saturating the people of the area in the deeds of the monster. Peter Turnbull in The Killer Who Never Was (1996) suggests that the Ripper was a product of such heightened awareness.The hysteria that greeted each crime, fuelled by so much information, created copycat killers, each of whom murdered another prostitute and further fanned the flames. One theory amongst hundreds. But it happens. The ‘Halifax Slasher’ of 1938 was the product of such increasing hysteria.Women were found to have slashed themselves and blamed a mystery assailant. It is entirely likely that the reign of The London Monster contains similar elements. But these were phantom crimes.The trouble with Jack is that there really were murders. Someone did it. Whether a legion of copycats or a single-minded individual, someone did it.We have the bodies, and the same constantly reproduced photographs to prove it. Tabram, Nichols, Chapman and Stride, just sleeping. Eddowes naked, bloody, propped up and sewn up, empty. Kelly at rest, Manet’s Olympia adapted by the Chapman Brothers.
So who was Jack? We have no more idea than you do. Pick a suspect. MJ Trow showed how easy it is to make anyone fit the Ripper’s clothes in his essay The Way to Hell (1999). Pick a name and then find the isolated incidents in his (or even her) life that you can bend to your theory. We have no new theories to propose and no new names to put forward.What you find here are the speculations of other, more qualified people, members of