Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sudgen Read Free Book Online

Anderson, head of CID in 1888, made the preposterous suggestion in his memoirs that his policy of withdrawing police protection from prostitutes drove them from the streets and thereby put an end to street murders in the Ripper series. Not true. Contemporary evidence demonstrates that the policy was never implemented and could not have worked.
    In producing reminiscences there is also a tendency for our memoriesto become contaminated by later stories and influences. A case in point is Mary Cox. Mrs Cox lived in Miller’s Court in 1888. She knew Mary Jane Kelly, usually regarded as the Ripper’s last victim, and saw her with a man only hours before she was murdered. Many years later Dan Farson interviewed Mrs Cox’s niece at her home off the Hackney Road. According to the niece’s story, Mrs Cox remembered the man as a gentleman, a real toff: ‘He was a fine looking man, wore an overcoat with a cape, high hat . . . and Gladstone bag.’ Now this is very like the classic villain in Victorian melodrama. And by then that is precisely how East Enders had come to think of Jack the Ripper. But it is poles apart from the man Mrs Cox really saw, the one she described before detectives and at the inquest back in 1888. Then she spoke of a short, stout man, a man with a carroty moustache and blotchy face, a man who dressed shabbily and carried only a quart can of beer. 8
    ‘I can remember it now as though it were yesterday.’ Such protestations are common enough in reminiscent accounts. I urge my readers not to be fooled. Rather, take to heart the words of John Still: ‘The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.’
    Sadly, the misinformation propagated in books today is not simply a product of reliance upon untrustworthy sources. For, as far as most Ripperologists are concerned, the truth runs a very poor second to selling a pet theory on the identity of the killer. This means that evidence in conflict with the theory is liable to be suppressed or perverted, that fiction is frequently dressed up as fact, and that evidence in support of the theory is sometimes completely invented. There is a long history of dishonesty and fraud in Ripper research.
    We have had some notable cock-and-bull stories in recent years.
    Many readers will remember Stephen Knight’s bestseller, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution , published in 1976. In Knight’s complex tale, Mary Jane Kelly witnesses the secret marriage of Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson and Heir Presumptive to the throne, to a shop-assistant called Annie Elizabeth Crook, and then bands together with a group of fellow East End whores to blackmail the government. Salisbury, the Prime Minister, is alarmed. Annie Crook is a Catholic. And anti-Catholic sentiment is rife amongst the population at large. So if it comes out that the prince has taken a Catholic bride the very future of the monarchy itself might be endangered! Without further ado Salisbury hands the problem to Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, and Gull, assisted by Walter Sickert, the artist, and John Netley, asinister coachman, promptly tracks down and slices up the blackmailers.
    The falsehoods and absurdities in this yarn have been exposed in many books and there is no need to repeat them here. Even Joseph Sickert, who told Knight the story in the first place, denounced the Jack the Ripper part of it ‘a hoax . . . a whopping fib’ in 1978. What is disconcerting about the whole episode, however, is the attitude of Stephen Knight himself. His research is now known to have uncovered evidence which proved that the story was untrue. Yet he shamelessly chose to suppress it.
    Later Joseph Sickert retracted his confession and supplied further material to Melvyn Fairclough, who used it in his book The Ripper and the Royals. It included three diaries supposedly written by Inspector Frederick George Abberline between 1892 and 1915 and given by him to Walter Sickert in 1928.