Chapter 1: Who are the prime suspects in the Jack the Ripper case?
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Your physician in ordinary to the queen, entrusted with the well-being of the heir to the throne. Only you had reason to believe that these unfortunates, these whores, these traitors, destroyed your life's work.
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Chapter 2: What theories exist about why the killings stopped?
He was bearded. And also, he had an unusual way of creasing his trousers, which would have been identifiable to witnesses, right? He creased them at the sides. Okay, so the argument about Prince Eddie is that he's dissolute, he's depraved, he contracted syphilis in the Caribbean. So that syphilis thing again.
He's been driven mad because of the syphilis, and he started killing prostitutes for revenge. He killed Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, and at that point, the royal family realized what he was up to, and they put him in a mental hospital. He escaped. He killed Mary Jane Kelly. They locked him away, and he died as a madman, raving in a locked chamber at Sandringham in 1892.
The flu thing was not correct. So, Dominic, any problems with this theory? Loads of problems. So first of all, Stowell claims that he got this information from the secret notes of the prince's doctor, Sir William Gull, a man we'll be hearing from later. But Dull died in 1890 before the prince, so how could he know how this story would have played out?
Well, he could have been a mason and have had supernatural knowledge of it.
Right. Yes, he could, and we should be coming to this. Second point, I think a massive hurdle for the Prince Eddie theory. The Prince does not have a close working knowledge of the alleys of Whitechapel, and he would stand out massively. He's not a working man. He's taller than the Ripper descriptions. He's immediately identifiable. His voice would give him away. He's got a weak chin, hasn't he?
No one has a weak chin in the East End. No, no, no, not in the East End. Finally, I think another insuperable obstacle, he has an unbreakable alibi for every murder. So the murder of Polly Nichols, he was in Yorkshire with Viscount Downe. For Annie Chapman, he was at a cavalry barracks in York. You see, he's somebody whose every movement is recorded.
He was in Scotland with Queen Victoria for the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. I suppose it's plausible just that Queen Victoria might be lying and covering up for him, but it's highly unlikely. So what then happens is that in the 1970s – obviously, this theory is rubbish – But then in the 1970s, it gets a twist.
And I'm sorry to say, it gets the twist originally from the BBC. The BBC made a mad series in 1973 called Jack the Ripper. And it was hosted by the fictional detectives from the then popular series Zed Cars, who sort of were investigating the crimes. And in the final episode, they had an interviewee called Joseph Gorman.
And Joseph Gorman said, my real name really should be Joseph Sickert because I'm the son of the artist Walter Sickert from the 1890s and 1900s. We'll hear more from him later. And Joseph Gorman said, there is a royal angle, but the true story is more complicated. Now, Tom, you've done a lot of digging on this, so maybe you should take over at this point.
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Chapter 3: How does the search for Jack the Ripper's identity reflect societal anxieties?
Sickert was fascinated by city culture, by kind of cedar-ness, by prostitution, by musical scenes. He painted lots of pictures of lodging houses and doss houses. This is not terribly unusual in the late 1880s. I mean, he's very influenced by the French Impressionists, by Edgar Degas in particular.
We know that he was fascinated by murders and mysteries, so he's very interested in a case that we've done before on this podcast with Zadie Smith, the case of the Titchbourne claimant. He was really interested in that. Sickert painted a picture called Jack the Ripper's Bedroom in 1996.
It was his bedroom of his own lodging house in Six Mornings in Crescent, and the landlady told him that she thought the previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper. We don't know on what basis, though. No. She said he used to go out a lot at night, and I noticed he went out on the nights of the killings. Of course, if Sickert was the Ripper, he must have concealed a wry smile at that.
Then in 1908, he painted a series of pictures called the Camden Town Murder. So the Camden Town Murder was the murder of a prostitute called Emily Dimmock, and she was murdered in her lodging house bedroom in, I think, 1908. And the case was very much in the news at the time.
And Sickert's pictures, they show, the pictures in this series show a man who's fully dressed sitting on a bed next to a naked woman now. Some critics think that actually they weren't really pictures of the Camden Town murder. The Sickert was a great self-publicist. He had a brilliant eye for getting people's attention.
And that actually he painted the pictures and then came up with the title afterwards to explain them. Anyway, that's a kind of side note. Patricia Cornwell and her people who believe her theories believe that these paintings actually depict the murders of Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, that Sickert arranged the characters in the pictures to mimic the murders.
And that these are his little clues and he is kind of taunting us with his knowledge of his own crimes. Now the thing is, if you look at the pictures, the pictures are not as graphic and gory as you might expect from my description. They actually, if you Google them, they feel kind of sad and shabby and kind of melancholy.
They do not feel to me like the works of a man who eviscerated his victims in a frenzy. I mean, and if it's Mary Jane Kelly, they certainly don't replicate the horror of her dismemberment. No, not at all. And actually, I mentioned it a couple of times, there's a brilliant website. I mean, this is the kind of rabbit hole down which you fall and you will never come back up again.
called The Casebook, I think, Jack the Ripper Casebook or something. And there's an essay on this website by a guy called Wolf van der Linden, all about Sickert's art and whether it relates to the Ripper. And he points out that Sickert painted prostitutes in Venice in 1903, and he wrote afterwards how much he enjoyed doing it.
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Chapter 4: What are the characteristics of the killer based on witness accounts?
But he then comes up with, later on, he comes up with another theory. And this is held to be plausible, isn't it? Much more plausible.
So Philip Sugden, it kind of says unproven on this. Yeah. So this is the first person that some listeners to this may say, this could actually be Jack the Ripper. This is a guy who was known by the name of George Chapman, but that wasn't his real name. He was actually a Pole. He was born Severin Kwasowski in Nagorna in Poland in 1865, and he became a surgeon's apprentice. He went to Warsaw.
He trained in surgery at the Praga Hospital in Warsaw. Sometime in late 1887 or early 1888, Kowalski moves to London and he becomes a barber's assistant in the East End and then he opens his own barber's shop. He marries another Polish woman in 1889. You'll notice I've skipped over the period of the murders. In 1889, by this time, he's calling himself Ludwig Zagowski. He speaks.
We know at this point he speaks a mixture of Polish and Yiddish. He's a medium height. He's got dark hair. He and Lucy emigrate to Jersey City. They have a massive row. He attacks her with a knife. She returns home to London. He follows. They end up separating. By the middle of the 1890s, Kowalski is a barber in Leytonstone, and he calls himself now George Chapman. He's taken an English name.
He has a series of lovers and he pretends to marry each of them. They have a kind of bogus marriage ceremony because he says, this is how we do things in Poland. He's clearly a very violent and abusive partner. He beats up his so-called wives, and he escalates from that to murdering them. And he murders each of them with a thing called tartar emetic, which is a white powder.
It's soluble in water. If you dissolve it, it produces something called antimony. And if you have a large dose of this, it will make you sick, and so you'll vomit it up. But if you have small doses over time, it will kill you. And this is how he kills them. He kills a woman called Mary Spink, then a woman called Bessie Taylor, and then a woman called Maude Marsh.
But Maude Marsh's family demanded an investigation. The bodies are exhumed. Antimony preserves the bodies. So he's detected and he is caught and he is hanged. And in court, one writer who was watching him said he seemed a particularly callous murderer. While most people in court were horrified, he appeared to be amused.
And on one occasion, while a sarcastic smile was spreading over his face, he caught sight of me and he straightened his face and assumed a serious expression. So Chapman, or Kowalski, is a very unpleasant man. Why would he be the Ripper? So this is Abberline's theory. Abberline laid out his thoughts in 1903 to a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette. He said, this guy ticks a lot of boxes.
He's single at the time of the killings. At the time of the killings, he is working in his barber's shop in Cable Street nearby. So he's in regular work. In other words, he would strike at holidays and weekends. And don't forget, he trained as a surgeon's apprentice. He's within walking distance of all the murder sites.
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Chapter 5: Why is the identity of Jack the Ripper still a mystery?
He was an excellent cricketer. He was a member of the MCC. He spent most of the summer of 1888 playing cricket variously in Dorset and Blackheath, which is now a part of South East London. What was he doing in Dorset? He'd been born there and he worked part time as a barrister on the Western Circuit in neighbouring Hampshire.
And the reason that he was in Blackheath is that outside of the holidays, he was teaching at a boarding school there. So he's very well off. He's both a barrister and a schoolteacher. And, you know, he has an active social life. He seems to be very popular. He seems to have his whole life before him.
But then, as McNaughton says in his memorandum, on the 31st of December, 1888, his body had been fished out of the Thames and he had clearly committed suicide. And everyone was shocked by this. So the local newspaper in Blackheath commemorated him. He was well known and much respected in the neighborhood. He was a barrister of bright talent.
He had a promising future before him and his untimely end is deeply deplored. So what on earth could have driven him to commit suicide? And McNaughton's theory is that he is overcome with grief and despair at the horrors that he inflicted on the body of Mary Jane Kelly and on all the previous victims.
And that after the climactic apocalypse of Miller's court, he was so appalled that he threw himself into the Thames. So to put it in McNaughton's words, The murderer's brain gave away altogether after his awful glut in Miller's court, and he immediately committed suicide. Now, as we've said, we're not psychologists, but I gather that this is not how serial killers operate.
There is apparently no example of a serial killer being so ashamed of a killing spree that he or she then commits suicide. So I think that this is a massive problem for the Montague-Druitt theory because there isn't really any other evidence aside from that that he might have been the murderer.
Just a quick question. If he didn't kill himself because he was the Ripper, do we know or do we have any idea why he would have taken his own life?
His mother had been confined to an asylum in July 1888. So I don't know, perhaps he's upset about that. Perhaps depression runs in the family. I mean, there's no evidence aside from what McNaughton says that he was insane, let alone sexually insane. Nor is there any evidence that anyone has ever found that Druitt's family suspected him of having been the Ripper beyond what McNaughton says.
And it's notable that even McNaughton is expressing himself in a kind of quite a havering way. So I have little doubt but that. I mean, that's, you know, he's not saying he definitely was.
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Chapter 6: What role did the media play in shaping the Ripper narrative?
I mean, he's walking up and down, but he's sufficiently suave... Yeah, he could be played by Peter Bowles or something. He's pretending to be a Polish count and getting people to play the Polish national anthem. He also wears often clerical garb. Like Calvin Robinson. Like the self-styled priest Calvin Robinson. So basically, he's a bonkers person.
He ends up being transferred to a lunatic asylum in the 1880s. But a lot of the police said, he's not a lunatic. He's just a bad bloke. He's just a petty criminal. Is he out of the asylum in the summer of 1888? He is out of the asylum in the summer of 1888, in the autumn. So it could be him. Now, he was suspected at the time because the Police Gazette issued a notice saying this guy is out.
He's meant to be reporting to the police on bail, but he hasn't been. Special attention is called to this dangerous man. And I think this is because... They think he's probably not the Ripper, but he could be because he pretends to have medical knowledge, he has a criminal record, and he has a foreign background. However, there are some pretty big obstacles. He's almost six feet tall.
Now, at a time when people are shorter, he stands out. But also, there are so many accounts that say the Ripper is probably five foot five, five foot six. He's too tall. He is far too old. He's in his mid-50s. And he has absolutely no record of violence or sexual assault. He's a practiced con man, not a serial killer. And dare I use the expression, the nail in the coffin.
In the summer of 1888, a man with the name the Grand Guidon was arrested in France and imprisoned for two years for petty crime and theft. This was an alias that Ostrog had used in France, and it was almost certainly him. So I think here McNaughton is indulging himself in, you know, there's a bad, there's obviously the word has gone out to the old Etonians.
This guy Ostrog has made a, has made a fool of us. Let's frame him as the ripper. So I don't think it's Ostrog by any, I don't think anyone seriously thinks it's Ostrog.
Okay, so those five candidates are the ones that we get from police at the time. And listeners can decide how plausible any of those are. Obviously, there have been lots more since. And we'll just look at a couple of the more salient ones. And then there's a particular group of suspects as well that we'll end with.
So, a recently proposed suspect is a guy called James Maybrick, who was a Liverpool cotton merchant who died in mysterious circumstances in May 1889. So, again, in that sense, perhaps this might be an explanation for why the murders stopped. But he actually is the only suspect for the murders so far who actually ends up murdered himself. Or was he?
Because his wife, Florence, was accused and then convicted of having poisoned him with arsenic. Although in due course in 1904, the case was re-examined and Florence actually ended up being acquitted. But this is obviously the kind of thing that, you know, Victorians love reading about in the newspapers over toast and marmalade.
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