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Jack the Ripper,
by Colin Wilson.
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Wilson deals next with Jack the Ripper in Chapter 27.
" ... Jack the Ripper still remains far and away the world’s most famous – or infamous – serial killer. This is not due simply to the grisly picturesqueness of the nickname but to the fact that the murders took place in the fog-shrouded London of Sherlock Holmes and that – unlike the three killers mentioned above – the identity of Jack the Ripper is still a total mystery."
Wasn't there a whisper about it possibly being the eldest son of the then Prince of Wales, who subsequently met an untimely death in bed after an illness that was the last of life for him, having never been known to be in good health for that matter?
" ... But the majority of criminals throughout history have killed or robbed for purely economic reasons. ... "
That certainly fits, for example, Dyer and his usage of tank, apart from soldiers bearing rifles, barring the only escape for a crowd of purely civilians enjoying a public park in Amritsar, Punjab, and having hundreds shot dead, including women, children, babies and old people - looting India was, after all, chief and a very serious financial enterprise of British, as evidenced in the collapse from a first power and globe gelding empire to a small fry that Britain was brought down to, after 1947.
" ... The lower classes were too hungry to bother about “forbidden” sex, and the upper classes could obtain it so easily that rape would have been pointless. ... "
Wilson disregards the obvious - most authority being comprised of male, few bothered to question if a woman had consented to a physical relationship; in most of Europe, when not confronted by victorious soldiers going berserk, feudal lines of caste were maintained in male assaults against women, so not only women had little recourse to justice but weren't even recognised as victims. Of course, victorious soldiers going berserk murdering civilian population of the defeated was accepted in Europe as norm, and women being raped as normal part thereof; this attitude prevailed well into 1980's.
"Compared to these, there was something utterly calculated about the Jack the Ripper murders, which took place in the Whitechapel area of East London, in the autumn of 1888, and which produced a morbid sense of shock and panic.
"It was still dark on the morning of September 1 when a cart driver named George Cross walked along Bucks Row on his way to work. It was a narrow, cobbled street with the blank wall of a warehouse on one side and a row of terraced houses on the other. In the dim light Cross saw what he thought was a bundle of tarpaulin and went to investigate. It proved to be a woman lying on her back, ... "
" ... A few hours before her death she had staggered back to the lodging house, her speech slurred with drink, and admitted that she lacked the fourpence necessary for a bed. The keeper had turned her away. ... "
"Oddly enough, the murder caused little sensation. Prostitutes were often killed in the slums of London, sometimes by gangs who demanded protection money. The previous April a prostitute named Emma Smith had dragged herself into London Hospital, reporting that she had been attacked by four men in Osborn Street. They had rammed some object, possibly an iron bar, into her vagina with such force that it had penetrated the uterus; she had died of peritonitis. In July dismembered portions of a woman’s body had been recovered from the Thames. And on 7 August 1888, a prostitute named Martha Tabram had been found dead on a landing in George Yards Buildings, Whitechapel; she had been stabbed thirty-nine times with a knife or bayonet. Two soldiers were questioned about her murder but proved to have an excellent alibi. Evidently some sadistic brute had a grudge against prostitutes, it was hardly the kind of story to appeal to respectable newspaper readers."
" ... Hysteria swept over the whole country. There had been nothing like it since the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families were slaughtered in East London, and householders all over England barricaded their doors at night.
"On 29 September 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter that began: “Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet”. It included the sentence; “I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled” and promised: “You will soon hear of me with my funny little games”. It was signed “Jack the Ripper” – the first time the name had been used. The writer requested: “Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight”. The Central News Agency decided to follow his advice.
"That night, a Saturday, the “ripper” killed again – this time not one, but two prostitutes. ... "
"The policeman who found it also found a chalked message scrawled on a nearby wall: “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing”. The police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, ordered the words to be rubbed out, in spite of a plea from a local CID man that they should be photographed first; he thought they might cause a riot against the Jews, thousands of whom lived in Whitechapel.
"Macnaghten admitted later: “When the double murder of 30th September took place, the exasperation of the public at the non-discovery of the perpetrator knew no bounds”. The “Jack the Ripper” letter was released, and the murderer immediately acquired a nickname. And early on Monday morning the Central News Agency received another missive – this time a postcard – from Jack the Ripper. ... "
There were several theories later about the identity, all proven false due to inconsistencies.
"When, in 1960, I published a series of articles entitled “My Search for Jack the Ripper” in the London Evening Standard, I was asked to lunch by an old surgeon named Thomas Stowell, who told me his own astonishing theory about the Ripper’s identity: that it was Queen Victoria’s grandson – the heir to the throne – the Duke of Clarence, who died during the flu epidemic in 1892. Sowell told me that he had seen the private papers of Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, and that Gull had dropped mysterious hints about Clarence and Jack the Ripper, as well as mentioning that Clarence had syphilis, from which he died. When, subsequently, I asked Stowell if I could write about his theory, he said no. “It might upset Her Majesty”. But in 1970 he decided to publish it himself in a magazine called The Criminologist. Admittedly, he did not name his suspect – he called him S – but he dropped dozens of hints that it was Clarence. Journalists took up the story and it caused a worldwide sensation. Stowell was so shaken by all the publicity that he died a week later, trying to repair the damage by claiming that his suspect was not the Duke of Clarence."
Wilson gives another story involving the Duke of Clarence, the painter Walter Sickert and a young woman Annie Crooks, and then proceeds to say it was full of holes too; but this time the inconsistencies seem less of an obstruction to the main story, that of Joseph "Hobo" Sickert, son of Walter Sickert, being grandson of Clarence; and the ripper murders being caused by blackmail that his mom's nanny subjected royals to, and her having taken several persons into confidence.
"It was, in fact, Hobo Sickert himself who pulled the rug out from under Knight by publicly admitting that the Jack the Ripper part of his story was pure invention. He insisted, however, that the story of Annie Crook giving birth to the Duke of Clarence’s daughter – and the daughter becoming his own mother – was true. And in this he was probably being truthful. The most convincing part of Knight’s book is his description of the various “clues” to the affair that Sickert slipped into his paintings."
"What the Florence Pash evidence does seem to prove is that the Duke really fathered an illegitimate daughter, who became the mother of Joseph Sickert. It also confirms the unlikeliest part of Hobo Sickert’s story: that Mary Kelly acted as a nursemaid to the baby. She may even have tried to blackmail Sickert. But even without the blackmail motif, we can understand why Sickert thought he was the custodian of a frightening secret. When Mary Kelly became – almost certainly by pure chance – the Ripper’s final victim, he must have felt certain that the long arm of Buckingham Palace was involved. ... "
Wilson continues for a few more pages ending up with two plausible candidates, one whose son migrated to Australia soon after learning it from his sadistic father who intended to confess publicly but didnt; another, added by Wilson in a postscript, gets his vote.
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November 17, 2020 - November 18, 2020 -
December 24, 2020 .
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