Bruce Robinson - They All Love Jack - Busting the Ripper

But that wouldn’t do for the hierarchy at Scotland Yard; it was not even up for consideration. For mischievous reasons that will explain themselves, the authorities needed a maniac, preferably a foreigner or a Jew.

Havelock Ellis’s hysterically funny but apparently serious book The Criminal (1890) gives a thumbnail sketch of the kind of thing the Metropolitan Police were trying to sell. The following is a description of one such murderer in the dock:

Imagine a sort of abortion, bent and wrinkled, with earthy complexion, stealthy eyes, a face gnawed by scrofula, a slovenly beard framing a yellow bilious face of cunning, dissipated and cruel aspect. The forehead is low, the hair black and thrown backwards, the muscles of a beast of prey. His repellent head was photographed on my memory, and lighting up the sinister features with a sinister gleam, two small piercing eyes of a ferocity which I could scarcely bear to see.18

This perceived horror and ‘lair-dweller’ – as widely prescribed for our world-famous gent – was an unquestioningly well-enjoyed camouflage, relished and accepted not only by the press and public, but by a majority of experts (the Ripperologists of their day): Jack was a Hebrew frightener with the eyes of a ferret, a sort of Elephant Man with no laughs, and on a moonless night his complexion approached hues of the earth from a freshly violated grave:

The eye of the habitual criminal is glassy, cold, and fixed; his nose is often aquiline, beaked, reminding one of a bird of prey. The jaws are strong, the canine teeth much developed, the lips thin, nystagmus frequent, also spasmodic contractions of one side of the face, by which the canine teeth are exposed.19

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was a hardened, streetwise East End whore, half-sloshed and desperate for fourpence or not, I would definitely avoid going up an alley with this man. Forget the canine teeth, it’s the spasmodic contractions of one side of the face that would do it for me.

No whore in Christendom is going to entertain it. But just in case she does, there’s more. Let’s overlook Talbot and his ‘degenerate ear’ (1886), and move straight to Ottolenghi (1888), who described the ‘extraordinary ape-like agility noted in criminals’, a characteristic sometimes accompanied by ‘unusual length of arm’; he also drew attention to the prevalence of the ‘prehensile foot’. In 1886 Giovenale Salsotto apparently found ‘abundant hair round the anus’. So you knew what to look out for.20

What the Victorians feared in their Ripper was a manifestation of their own prejudices, and it was rubbish like this that got women killed. ‘Your suspect, ladies, is an anthropophagite goon, and local Israelite. Avoid large noses and hair round the anus and you’ll be all right.’

It all kicked off with this, fly-posted and hawked all over the East End immediately after the murder of Annie Chapman, with no complaints from the police.

Another murder of a character even more diabolical than that perpetrated in Buck’s Row, on Friday week, was discovered in the same neighbourhood, on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman [Chapman] was found lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging-house in Old Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields.

The hunt was now on for a man called John Pizer, a.k.a ‘Leather Apron’, who was ‘known to carry knives’. This was not entirely unreasonable, since his trade was as a boot-finisher – which is presumably why he also wore an apron.

Pizer was a Jew, well known to the police in Whitechapel. In the light of what was to evolve, it is noticeable that the authorities showed little care for Hebrew sensibilities. When they weren’t accusing Jews, the police were destroying potential vital evidence in the ridiculous pretence of protecting them from anti-Semitic attack. As will be seen, from various schools of Ripperology there’s been a catalogue of excuses for the police concerning the obliteration of some writing on a wall at Goulston Street, near the scene of one of the murders. (Ripperology calls this writing ‘graffito’. This unhelpful sobriquet has attracted a good deal of explaining away and very little explaining.) But, as is my intention to demonstrate, not a few senior policemen had a vested interest in the maintenance of bafflement and the dissemination of fairy tales.

Let’s just have a brief look at the sad case of another utterly innocent little Jew, called Kosminski. His star rose when certain Ripperologists gave credibility to a bit of worthless moonshine in the margins of a book. This scribble is known, with some reverence, as ‘the Swanson Marginalia’.

Donald Swanson was a Met cop, and the book in question, in which he proffered his note, was a volume of reminiscence by Sir Robert Anderson, who at the time of the Ripper crimes was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at Scotland Yard.

Hearts got in a flutter at the discovery of this ‘marginalia’. Amongst other non-starters, one of the names endorsed as a possible suspect by Swanson was the aforementioned Kosminski, who, according to the later Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, was a prime candidate due to his addiction to ‘solitary vices’ – in other words, jerking off.

Here’s what a Victorian expert on jerking off has to say:

The sin of Onanism is one of the most destructive evils ever practised by fallen man. It excites the power of nature to undue action, and produces violent secretions which necessarily and speedily exhaust the vital principles. Nutrition fails; tremors, fears and terrors are generated; and thus the wretched victim drags out a miserable existence, till superannuated, even before he has time to arrive at man’s estate, with a mind often debilitated, even to a state of idiotism, his worthless body tumbles into the grave, and his guilty soul (guilty of self-murder) is hurried into the presence of his Judge.21

To give credibility to Macnaghten (and Swanson too), one must give credibility to this. Kosminski may have been a local imbecile, but if he was creating pathological history by masturbating himself into a froth of homicidal lunacy, surely these sessions would have taxed his imagination to something beyond a bunch of toothless, half-drunk hags? We can’t know what Kosminski was tossing off about, but I can’t believe it was over Annie Chapman in her underwear.

More often than not, sexual killers seek to destroy the object of their attraction, a phenomenon corroborated by some notable contemporary criminologists. ‘I only shoot pretty girls,’ said David Berkowitz, a.k.a. ‘the Son of Sam’. By any modern understanding, the Ripper wasn’t a masturbator. It was hate rather than sex that attracted him to whores. As a matter of fact, we might question whether he was any more sexually motivated than Jane Caputi’s charmer. What he unequivocally was, was a powerful, cunning, intelligent man, attributes confirmed by one of the more objective voices of the time, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond, who wrote: ‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and great coolness and daring.’22

In Kosminski’s case, I imagine the tossing arm must have been highly developed, engendering a formidable bicep, and this speaks in his favour. But other than fitting the loony Yid stereotype, Kosminski is just about as likely a Ripper as the man with the involuntary spasmodic contractions exposing his canine teeth.

If the Ripper got hold of you, you were dead. He overwhelmed an entire society, let alone his victims. Apart perhaps from Mary Jane Kelly (and that’s a big perhaps) there were no defensive injuries, not even a moment to hurl a scream at the night. He owned you. You were dead. This nineteenth-century psychopath could have snuffed anyone he liked, anywhere he liked – men, women and children – and indeed he did kill all three.