The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper by Paul Begg, John Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

painter Walter Sickert,whose family had been painters to her own Royal Court in Denmark – at the time, Walter Sickert lived in the Cleveland Street area, and when Prince Eddy went there during his vacations at Cambridge he was passed off as Sickert’s younger brother and was known as ‘Mr S’. He also met a close friend of Sickert’s, a girl called Anne Crook, who worked in a tobacco shop at no. 20. She actually lived at no. 6 Cleveland Street. She was very beautiful and in fact she looked very much like Eddy’s mother.
    Eddy fell in love with her, and she became pregnant, and there was also some sort of a wedding ceremony at St Saviour’s private chapel in 1888. The two lovers, Clarence and Anne Elizabeth, were parted after a police raid on a party in Cleveland Street, and Anne Elizabeth was in Guy’s Hospital for 156 days before she had been put into a smaller hospital at 367 Fulham Road. She was supposed to be mentally ill. She was kept in the Fulham Road hospital until her death in 1921. The servant girl also disappeared at the same time. Her name was Mary Kelly. The little girl Alice Margaret was then looked after by old Walter Sickert with the help of various local friends.
    Now one day, when she was about seven years old, in 1892, a woman friend was taking her for a walk along Drury Lane when a carriage ran the girl down. The driver of the carriage was recognized as John Netley, a man who had been used as an outside coachman by Clarence on his visits to Sickert, a man who knew the story of the lovers and the child and their Irish servant girl, Mary Kelly.
    The girl, Alice Margaret, was fortunate; after a spell in Charing Cross hospital she recovered from her injuries. Mary Kelly was not so lucky. She was of course a Catholic girl. She was known by the nuns of the convent in nearby [?] Place. She went first of all to an assistant convent which was in the East End.
    What happened then was that various people behind the government and the royal household were very worried indeed about the possibility of the news getting out, that the heir presumptive to the throne of England was married and had a child and that the child had been born of a Catholic mother. You have to remember that it was a time when the possibility of revolution was thought to be a very real one and that the problems and violence surrounding Ireland – it was decided that Mary Kelly would have to be silenced.
    The operation was undertaken by the driver, John Netley, and the royal physician, Sir William Gull. To conceal the dangerous motive behind Mary Kelly’s death and the enquiries they were making for her, she was killed as the last of five women in a way that made it look like the random work of a madman. The child, however, survived – she was protected by Walter Sickert and had two sons by him. The first one was Charles, who disappeared at the age of two, and I am the other son.
    The prince appeared to be vindicated, no doubt because his alibi for the murders had been firmly established. However, the ‘scion of a noble family’ was still the source of so much trouble. Now Sir William Gull was firmly in the frame, not merely as the guardian and protector of a homicidal prince, but now fulfilling Robert Lees’s story of the ‘eminent London doctor’ by actually being Jack the Ripper himself. But even before this episode could be broadcast, the first glimmers of doubt were beginning to show. One newspaper columnist, having done his homework, mentioned the inconvenient matter of Sir William Gull’s health, namely the strokes he suffered in 1887, which caused partial paralysis and prompted his early retirement from general practice. In fact, by 1888 Gull’s health was so poor that ‘this wouldsurely not have allowed him to launch into a series of grisly murders, with or without help’. 8
    With interest in a ‘royal conspiracy’ in the ascendant, City of London Police officer Donald Rumbelow put his considerable knowledge of the