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They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
Bruce Robinson
LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONA book like no other – the tale of a gripping quest to discover the identity of history’s most notorious murderer and a literary high-wire act from the legendary writer and director of Withnail and I.For over a hundred years, ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists, and endless volumes purporting finally to reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorised Victorian England.But what if there was never really any ‘mystery’ at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice?In THEY ALL LOVE JACK, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history’s most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is much more than a radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend, and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption.Polemic, forensic investigation, panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson’s inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, THEY ALL LOVE JACK is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts – the so-called ‘Ripperologists’ – to make clear, at last, who really did it; and more importantly, how he managed to get away with it for so long.
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Copyright (#u8cd8812c-b826-5dc1-ae8b-3284730be996)
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
Copyright © Punditbest Ltd 2015
The right of Bruce Robinson to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
Cover image © Getty Images
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007548873
Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780007548897
Version: 2016-07-08
Dedication (#u8cd8812c-b826-5dc1-ae8b-3284730be996)
In memory of Sergeant T. J. Hageboeck
of the Los Angeles Police
Epigraph (#u8cd8812c-b826-5dc1-ae8b-3284730be996)
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame
A mechanised automaton.
Shelley, 1813
Contents
Cover (#u9bd626fb-0ddc-56da-a117-3249c5829d10)
Title Page (#ulink_6284a590-09b2-57e8-8de7-a93a2f4d028f)
Copyright (#ulink_1b361719-0b25-523c-8adb-48dcb769805e)
Dedication (#ulink_d26f0a42-d4e8-519a-9466-5c28cc161ee5)
Epigraph (#ulink_8b446249-8d59-5bcb-8e9e-dc15fe23fe56)
Author’s Note (#ulink_6303c8d5-d681-57fb-9253-13d562498024)
1 All the Widow’s Men (#ulink_f6dd7264-1646-5b9b-83f0-5df80de45621)
2 A Conspiracy of Bafflement (#ulink_fd88993e-3b52-573a-97f9-a9144eae10d4)
3 The Mystic Tie (#ulink_261355f6-4b93-5200-a472-7931967d0a17)
4 The Funny Little Game (#ulink_683623e7-7321-5f5d-aee3-585484e28dfa)
5 The Savages (#ulink_5349cd83-bb6f-59c4-b162-462780401bea)
6 On the Square (#ulink_c3478e1a-8812-55d2-bf3a-ac366f3db9d5)
7 The Ink-Stained Hack (#ulink_fdb003c9-76a7-5100-97bd-50b761cb2636)
8 The Double Event: Part Two (#ulink_f9ec1899-486c-58d9-9c12-dce0a5ba0b4f)
9 Rotten to the Core (#ulink_6ddfa66f-b8ea-50b7-bd85-f2d841bf34b5)
10 ‘They All Love Jack’ (#ulink_4b7b0513-a0f9-5167-b2e3-53bc205a2822)
11 On Her Majesty’s Service (#ulink_c435dbad-6f1c-5e8f-b973-6c5a8ac3aad1)
12 The Mouth of the Maggot (#ulink_fc5315e2-bf8a-5c3b-af94-16ff3790797e)
13 A Gentleman’s Lair (#ulink_e7bf2d5c-7f7a-57b5-9e4d-fe86ac5b2252)
14 ‘Orpheus’ (#ulink_ac991c32-b5d7-51e0-8154-96346330d217)
15 ‘The Ezekiel Hit’ (#ulink_8c37bf0d-f54a-5b2b-9594-99732e7f4f88)
16 ‘Red Tape’ (#ulink_495b8595-416a-5d57-bec8-7fde6e6e0d00)
17 ‘The Spirit of Evil’ (#ulink_d45d1233-282f-50b3-a529-395325187970)
18 ‘The Maybrick Mystery’ (#ulink_4670a163-39f0-5acf-b231-21d2f607f25c)
19 Victorian Values (#ulink_d5adee36-d1da-526a-9fcb-3e35b7b7e553)
Appendix I: The Parnell Frame-Up (#ulink_e0f3fd50-5a53-55f6-8530-73128a832231)
Appendix II: A Very Curious Letter (#ulink_f7d62644-9de3-5d3d-a78d-d5c4d1d423e7)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_42ed2ce3-ac6f-5a0b-aa86-7a0146a7aae3)
Sources (#ulink_af82999a-8d1b-5d9e-bdd1-002e48697dbd)
Picture Credits (#ua7adb72c-b27b-58ae-acdb-2b24fe74c32c)
Index (#ulink_f63763d1-c710-5195-83a2-6904a5f27ffe)
Also by Bruce Robinson (#u3ced32d0-2de2-5fd7-b89d-434f7ea64c32)
About the Publisher (#u1cbf41ee-cbc8-5515-8d8b-9256edf60abc)
Author’s Note (#u8cd8812c-b826-5dc1-ae8b-3284730be996)
There is an aphorism. When you see a giant, make sure it isn’t a dwarf standing in a favourable light. Thus we approach ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’.
He’s in a house of smoke and shifting mirrors. There are glimpses of amorphous faces. Many Jack the Rippers are in here, feeding off what historical fragments their keeper can throw into the pit.
Middle-aged men with disturbing expressions lean over the safety rail, clutching files. These are the Ripperologists. They are waiting for the Rippers to come out.
‘There he is!’ bellows one. ‘It’s the wall-eyed onanist from Zadonsk! Look at him, he’s playing with himself! Can’t you see him? He’s got a satchel of wombs!’
Nobody can see him. Attention migrates to another man, and he’s just seen somebody else. ‘There, there,’ he barks, shuffling his Metropolitan Police files. ‘The Jew! The Jew!! Mark the Jew!!’
An inflamed, bespectacled authority fights his way to the front. ‘Shut this farce down!’ he demands. ‘You are all duped!’ He struggles to get a pedometer past a pack of egg sandwiches. ‘I’ve measured his routes,’ he charges, thrusting his instrument as proof. ‘I challenge you all with the routes!’
Insults begin to fly, and argument breaks out between him and a man with a compass. But the lights have already started to dim, and the shutters have gone up. It’s time for the Ripperologists to go home and save their arguments for another day.
This book has no interest in the house of mirrors, and despite selective admiration for some, no interest in Ripperologists. I don’t believe this collective could catch the object of its aspiration in a thousand years, and furthermore, I don’t believe in ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ either.
We all know the story, at least the blurb on the paperbacks.
It is the autumn of 1888. The cobbled streets of Whitechapel echo to the chilling footsteps of a ruthless killer … Out of the foetid darkness came this subhuman nemesis of blood-hungry evil. Taunting the frantic police, he visited merciless death on five desperate women, nothing to speak as his witness but their hideously mutilated remains. He left no clue, but went as silently as he came, leaving nothing but a name that will forever be etched into the annals of criminal infamy: ‘Jack the Ripper’. Ah! Jack the Ripper. (Fog to taste.)
This book is a repudiation of virtually everything Ripperology has ever written. Anyone who wishes is welcome to have their Ripper back, and retire with him to the nearest gaslit alley. I tend towards a cynical point of view. In politics I expect the worst, and usually get it. But I had no idea of what I was in for with this. Buried in the ‘mystery’ of the Ripper atrocities is a scandal that ain’t much short of incredible. Exploring it was like pulling at a small, wizened root that as it disinters is discovered to be connected to an enormous root-system, deeper and more protectively concealed than I could ever have imagined.
I’ve spent rather a while enquiring into this ‘mystery’, and incrementally I have learned to loathe much of what was the Victorian governing class. Wealth was a deity in Victorian England, and everything was subservient to the maintenance of it. Underpinned by their ‘right to rule’, their cupidity and institutionalised hypocrisy, these defects constituted a potent amalgamation of the forces that conspired to turn this monster into a ‘mystery’.
There’s a perverse, almost heroic status that has evolved around this prick, as though he were someone special, rather than the epitome of all that is cruel, and a God-damned repugnance. His only claim to the extraordinary is his anonymity, his so-called ‘mystery’; and even that doesn’t belong to him, but was the gift of others.
There’s a hybrid of Ripperology responsible for a dizzying variety of publications over the last half-century. By a process of attrition and endless industry, this coterie of authors has come to ‘own’ this history. They are self-appointed ‘experts’ and guardians of flat-earth thinking. Under constrictions of the herd (and by some by design) they have constructed a formidable camouflage around this criminal. It is necessary to break through it before there is any possibility of discovering the identity of our Victorian psychopath.
Busting Jack entails an unravelling of the root-system that is way beyond the constipated strictures of Ripperology.
During the Second World War there was an interrogator for Army Counter-Intelligence by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto. It was his task to break the cover of enemy spies, and he’s one of my weirder heroes. In 1942 Pinto had a man at the other side of his desk who instinct told him had to be an enemy agent. Before arriving at the Colonel’s office (just off The Strand in central London), this suspect had been through many searing investigations and survived them all. Notwithstanding that, the authorities continued to harbour suspicions; but nobody could break him. So what did Pinto think?
Pinto interrogated his man over a period of days. The suspect had an impeccable Oxford accent, excellent socio-geographic knowledge, backed up by documentation that was as good as it gets. Down to the last little parochial nuance, he had an answer for everything, and seemed totally and utterly kosher.
Even so, Pinto was convinced he was dealing with an exceptionally talented spy whose true provenance was Berlin. But he couldn’t crack him, so he invited him out to lunch. Ten minutes later they were walking up The Strand, about to cross it to go to the chosen restaurant when, as they stepped off the kerb, Pinto screamed, ‘Look out!’ – and he got his German because the bastard looked the wrong way.
‘We drive on the left in England, old boy.’
That is an expert in action. In that one inspired moment, all the lies, all the carefully contrived subterfuge, and all the mystery fell to bits. I’m afraid my narrative will take rather longer to make its point than that flash of inspiration from Pinto. But I believe that the Ripper is just as vulnerable. Nailing this aberration means looking beyond the masquerade and requires but a single word. So look out, Jack! We’re stepping off the kerb, and I’m going to bust your arse.
B.R.
2 May 2015
1
All the Widow’s Men (#u8cd8812c-b826-5dc1-ae8b-3284730be996)
We must return to Victorian values.
Margaret Thatcher, 1983
Reactionary nostalgia for the proprieties of Victorian England is unfortunate, like a whore looking under the bed for her virginity. Thatcher was perhaps confused because there were no drug busts in nineteenth-century England, few prosecutions for cruelty to children, and little recorded sex crime.
But who needs to force his attentions, with twelve hundred harlots on the streets? There was sex aplenty, at prices all could afford. At the bargain end you could fuck for the price of a mug of tea.
As far as narcotics were concerned there was even less of a problem, because getting smashed wasn’t illegal. Any toff on his way to the Athenaeum could stroll into Harrods and demand half an ounce of their finest cocaine. There was no ‘war on drugs’. The only drug wars in the Victorian epoch were those conducted by Englishmen in soldiers’ uniforms trying to get the Chinese hooked. If they refused to become junkies, they murdered them. Hundreds were strung up outside their own homes. When Victoria’s Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had finally achieved stability of the market, the dealers moved in, shipping their opium out of British Calcutta – 5,000 tons a year by 1866. What today are quaintly called ‘street values’ were astounding, and the revenues to the Crown require no less a word. British ‘administrators’, i.e. pushers, computed that in Fukien province eight out of ten adults were addicted, and nine out of ten in Canton. A complete marketing success.1 (#ubdcaf678-bd1a-5e44-b852-b636b3ff17b9)
One of the outstanding paradoxes of the Victorian age was its obsession with morality, when morality there was none. When it came to sex, Victorian hypocrisy rose to the very ether. The age of consent (determined by an all-male Parliament) was twelve. More often than not, however, consent didn’t come into it. Children were regularly sold into upmarket brothels as a leisure facility for gentlemen (little girls sometimes having their genitals surgically repaired to sustain the fiction of fresh goods). Champagne on the house, of course, padded chambers available on request. The beating of a common child into bloody insensibility with a whip may not have gained you the epithet of a ‘good egg’ at the club, but it wouldn’t have put you into prison either.2 It was men like W.T. Stead who got banged up for trying to do something about it.
William Thomas Stead was one of the great Victorians, a powerful and influential journalist, frequently vilified by the midgets of his trade who were anxious of his sincerity and success. He and Bramwell Booth, of Salvation Army fame, attempted to expose upper-class depravities by going out and buying a thirteen-year-old girl for a fiver. He published a full report of it in the Pall Mall Gazette, titled ‘The Modern Babylon’.3 This didn’t go down at all well with the Establishment (many politicians being punters), and the pair of them ended up in the dock at the Old Bailey.
‘Nothing less than imprisonment’, farted The Times. Mr Justice Lopes got on with it. ‘William Thomas Stead – I regret to say that you thought it fit to publish, blah, blah … and that you deluged our streets and the whole country with an amount of filth, blah, blah, blah … and I don’t hesitate to say, will ever be a disgrace to journalism.’4
Three months’ hard labour.
In 1888 you could fuck a child for five shillings, but you couldn’t read Zola. What the Establishment didn’t like about Emile Zola was his treatment of the working class, who he had the French neck to represent as human.
