One Saturday morning when I was about sixteen I was browsing in the book department at Kaufmann’s and found a book that I knew my mother would never approve of.
I wasn’t loose in the store by myself, of course. Mum and my aunt Betty were on one of the other floors shopping for something or other. Kaufmann’s in those days offered anything a shopper might want, from designer clothing to exotic birds to the fine selection of Steuben glass, Orient & Flume paperweights, sterling silver, and carefully excavated fossils in the 9th floor Vendome Shop, next to the faded elegance of the restaurant. There was even an art department, where Betty acquired a large, dramatic, well executed but extraordinarily ugly painting for her spare bedroom/TV room.
This painting, almost all in shades of white, gray, greige, and beige, showed what appeared to be a slightly pregnant woman with bouffant hair and a broken nose cuddling a belligerent Persian cat with acid yellow eyes. Mum hated it because the cat seemed to be glaring out at the viewer with a “FEED ME NOW DAMN IT STUPID HAIRLESS APE OR I’LL REMOVE YOUR UVULA THE HARD WAY” expression, plus she couldn’t see why Betty wanted a painting of a pregnant woman with a bad hairdo and a broken nose. Betty insisted that it matched the décor of the sitting room, and it was her room, so it was none of Mum’s business.
She also professed to like the cat’s glare, even though she disliked actual cats.
As awful as it was, that painting held pride of place in the sitting room for the rest of Betty’s life. I actually considered shipping it up to Massachusetts and donating it to the Museum of Bad Art after her death until I read the mover’s estimate and realized it would cost about forty times as much to transport it as I’d be able to deduct on my Schedule C.
I don’t remember if Mum and Betty were squabbling over that particular painting or just flirting with Pedro the scarlet macaw down in the pet department when I picked up the book Mum wouldn’t like. It was called The Complete Jack the Ripper LINK, and though I’d heard of Jack the Ripper, I knew very little about him except that he’d killed several people a long time ago in thrilling, dramatically bloody ways.. I wasn’t quite prepared for just how bloody the thrills were when I opened the book and saw exactly what the Ripper had done to his victims, but despite nearly throwing up on the spot at the photograph of poor Mary Kelly, I was so fascinated by the book that I bought it, stuffed it into my purse, and got it home without Mum noticing.
That began my fascinating with true crime. For all their love of mysteries, my mother and her sister disliked accounts of actual murders. Today we would call them fans of the mystery subgenre called the “cozy,” a genteel sort of book where someone dies in a domestic setting, usually with little or no blood, and the culprit is unmasked by a talented amateur such as Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. They read other types, of course, particularly classic mysteries by authors like Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, and Ellery Queen, but they rarely read the likes of Hammett or Chandler or Robert B. Parker, and I’m all but certain that Betty took a pass on The Silence of the Lambs when it was published in the early 1990s.
I’m not sure why I enjoy true crime, or why I’ve worn out Fatal Vision, various books about Ted Bundy, and both volumes of Colin Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Murder. Perhaps it’s because I’m fascinating by the sociological background of the victims, or the detectives racing against time as they strive to learn who’s killing the whores/schoolgirls/socialites/teenagers before it’s too late. Perhaps it’s simply that I like reading in the bathtub, and am less likely to be upset at ruining a story of a sociopath injecting his hapless victims with a rare poison than I am a book with actual literary merit. Or maybe I just like what Dr. Watson referred to as “sensational literature.”
Some of these books are actually very good; the best of them, like Helter-Skelter or The Devil in the White City, offer a vivid portrait of their particular time and place. And is there a greater irony in non-fiction than Ann Rule learning that the charming graduate student she’d met volunteering at a suicide hotline was the serial killer she’d been hired to write about? A skilled true crime writer, like Rule, Truman Capote, Colin Wilson, or the late Jack Olson, can strip a social milieu and its particular variation on evil right down to its bones with a few well chosen words
For all that some true crime books are enjoyable, well written, and insightful, all too many are quick potboilers churned out to capitalize on a particular crime or criminal. They’re the equivalent of the old broadsides about the Tragickal Christian Dethe of Cornet Briggs, the Notorious Highwayman of London, sans woodcut illustrations and moralizing verse allegedly recited just before the miscreant climbed the scaffold for his appointment with the Newgate hangman. And some transcend mere mediocrity to take their places as True Crime So Bad It’s Good.
Tonight’s selections both center on Jack the Ripper, the infamous butcher who sliced five prostitutes to bits between late August and early November of 1888. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Kelly were the sort of desperately poor women who grubbed for every dollar they could in the mean streets of Whitechapel, and if that meant whoring themselves occasionally (Eddowes, who only turned tricks when in need of money) or professionally (Kelly, who had worked in a high class brothel and briefly been a kept woman), that was what they did. All were alcoholics, and all died horribly at the hands of one of the first known serial killers, especially Kelly, who was literally hacked to pieces in her bedroom. Their deaths were so violent, and seemingly so random, that the resulting firestorm of controversy brought down a police commissioner and caused the sort of feeding frenzy later identified with the Son of Same murders in New York.
That no one actually knows who Jack the Ripper was, or why he committed his crimes, is a major factor in his posthumous fame. Victorian forensics were crude, to say the least, and there were so many prostitutes and so many clients that eyewitness testimony and diligent police work proved fruitless. The police's job was complicated by the piles of letters allegedly by the killer sent to Scotland Yard, the newspapers, and the Home Office, only one of which, the infamous "From Hell" letter, was likely genuine. Some were humorous, like a letter from George Bernard Shaw signed "I am, sir, & etc., Jesus Christ," while others, such as the Openshaw letter, tried to piggyback onto other evidence.
Ultimately Jack the Ripper was never caught, and life went back to normal in London. Theories abound as to who his actual identity, from a royal duke to a black magician to a closeted teacher to a famous artist, but even the most plausible ultimately fail for lack of hard proof. The Casebook, a huge, incredibly thorough web site founded by Stephen Ryder, is probably the most comprehensive source of information on the Ripper and his crimes, but be warned be clicking: some of the pictures are are gruesome beyond belief.
So many of these theories, and the books explicating them, are so ridiculous that it’s hard to winnow them down to a manageable few, but the pair I’ve found surely must rank among the very worst. One is an infamous hoax, the other a prime example of Alexander Pope’s old dictum
“A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper:: The Discovery, the Investigation, the Authentication, by Shirley Harrison. James Maybrick was in many ways the epitome of the Victorian businessman. A cotton broker with business interests in both Liverpool and the United States, by 1889 he had a lovely young American wife, Florence, two beautiful children, James and Gladys, and an impressive mansion, Battlecrease House. His equally successful brother, Michael, was a well known composer of popular songs and hymns under the name "Stephan Adams," including the sentimental favorite "The Holy City". Well fed, well married, money in the bank and a son to take over the business - was there a better example of respectable and successful middle class citizen?
Unfortunately, just as thriving, glittering London had a dark and ugly side, so did James Maybrick. His seemingly robust health was undermined by chronic malaria picked up on a visit to the cotton lands of America, and he took regular doses of arsenic to preserve his vigorous façade. Prior to his marriage to the lovely Florrie, he had a twenty year long common-law relationship with Londoner Sarah Robertson that produced five more children and ended only after he'd married his blushing American bride. His brother Edwin was far too close for comfort to his wife, leading to hushed whispers among family and friends. And Florrie, beautiful, neglected, twenty-three years younger Florrie, was openly carrying on with one of James' business associates.
It was little surprise, then, that when James finally collapsed and died in May of 1889 that his foreign wife was immediately suspected of doing away with him. After all, hadn't she bought arsenic-laced flypapers shortly before her husband's final illness? Hadn't she betrayed her marriage vows with at least one other man? That James seemingly didn't mind her adultery was not relevant, nor was his own long history of eating arsenic; Florrie was found guilty after a highly publicized trial that went down in British legal history as a prime example of bias and judicial mishandling, and spent fourteen years in prison for feeding arsenic to her arsenic-addicted husband. She eventually made her way back to America and died in Connecticut in 1941, her identity known only to a few, while her late husband's family did their best to forget she had ever existed.
James Maybrick rested in peace for over a century. He was known, if at all, only to true crime buffs and anti-death penalty activists, since poor Florrie had nearly been hanged for a death that was almost certainly the result of years of drug abuse. Then, about twenty years ago, James Maybrick once again made headlines, this time as a murderer, not a murderee.
Michael Barrett, a Liverpudlian scrap metal dealer with literary aspirations, appeared at a publishing house with a most interesting document. Originally a Victorian scrapbook or photo album, it contained an anonymous handwritten account of the 1888 Ripper murder purportedly by none other than Jack the Ripper! Barrett claimed to have been given the diary by his friend Tony Devereux, who handed it to him in the pub one day and said, "Do something with this."
The diary itself was more confession than actual account of the writer's life. Luridly written, with passages like :
“My dear God my mind is in a fog. The whore is now with her maker and he is welcome to her. There was no pleasure as I squeezed […] what a joke it would be if I could gouge an eye out and leave it by the whores body for all to see. To see. Ha ha”
And
"She ripped like a ripe peach"
the diary was rife with clues as to its authorship. The writer was a cotton merchant from Liverpool, with a beloved wife named Florrie, two children, and an arsenic habit….
I'm sure you see where this is going.
Despite never actually signing his name to the diary, it was clear that it was written by none other than James Maybrick, who had seemingly decided one day in the fall of 1888 that it would be jolly fun to murder a prostitute while visiting London as a way of getting revenge on his emotionally distant wife. Alas, the fun soon turned to self-disgust, and after absolving Florrie of any complicity in his death, Maybrick/Jack ended the diary with a treacly passage about what love could do to a "gentle man born," signed it "Yours truly, Jack the Ripper," and dated it mere days before his own sudden collapse. The reader is left with the strong impression that Maybrick, after brutally killing several women, returned to his respectable life for the next half year, then overdosed on arsenic and left the diary as his final testament to the world.
Needless to say, historians, true crime buffs, and Ripperologists immediately suspected a hoax. The handwriting didn't match any known examples of Maybrick's own, and the author of the diary had had a suspicious penchant for 20th century slang like "one-off." Actual diaries were readily available in Victorian Britain, so why had the author mutilated a photo album? Profilers pointed out that it was extremely unlikely for a middle aged man with no history of violence to go on a two month murder spree and then act as if nothing had happened for the next six months. That Barrett repeatedly changed his story about how he'd gotten the diary, and from whom, only increased the likelihood that the diary was a forgery.
The controversy died down briefly when a man's pocket watch crudely engraved with the initials of the Ripper's victims, the name "J. Maybrick," and the words "I am Jack" surfaced in 1993. Forensic tests seemed to indicate that the engraving was not recent, and it seemed for a few months that Jack the Ripper had indeed been identified a century after his death.
Alas, it was too good to be true. Barrett, whose marriage had collapsed under the pressure of his new-found fame, confessed that he had written the diary in an old photo album. Ink analysis proved inconclusive, and the watch, for all the forensic analysis, was simply too much of a coincidence for most historians to believe. Barrett recanted his confession, then insisted that no, he'd written the diary, then recanted again….
At this point the matter is still resolved, but most criminal historians are inclined to regard the diary as a hoax, Michael Barrett as a hoaxer, and the watch as an intriguing mystery. It would certainly be one of the great ironies of true crime if James Maybrick, long seen merely as the corpse in a notorious case, was actually the creator of five corpses in the most notorious case of all.
Ha ha! indeed.
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, by Patricia Cornwell. James Maybrick is far from the only suspect in the Ripper murders. Others include the impossible (Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria, who was in Scotland during two of the murders), the absurd (Lewis Carroll, and no, I'm not joking), the credible (Francis Tumblety), and the non-existent (Dr. Pedachenko). There are literally hundreds of books advocating dozens of possible murderers, and even the best, most objective authors can't help but reveal their preference for one Ripper over another.
One possibility that has emerged in the last few years, largely due to the influence of a popular crime novelist, is Walter Sickert. Sickert, an artist, was heretofore best known as a transitional figure between Impressionism and Modernism. He studied briefly with James MacNeill Whistler before striking out on his own, and his moody, darkly colored, frequently disturbing canvases of suburban life were great favorites of Lord Beaverbrook, among others.
Sickert was fascinated by the Ripper killings. He believed that he had lodged in the very same room as the Ripper, and some of his best known works, most notably 1908's The Camden Town Murder, were partially inspired by the Ripper's crimes. So great was his obsession that his name occasionally came up in connection with the crimes; the late Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, was purportedly based on the family story of a name who claimed to be Sicket's illegitimate son and the grandson of Prince Albert Victor through his mother's birth to a Catholic that the Prince had married illegally in the late 1880s. That "Joseph Sickert" eventually admitted that he had made the whole thing up, including his relationship to Walter Sickert, did little to quell the association between the artist and the murderer.
Then came Patricia Cornwell, best selling author of the Kay Scarpetta crime novels. And Walter Sickert shot to the top of the suspect lists, at least for brief, frenzied moment.
Cornwell's book promised to be definitive, or so the initial publicity would have one believe. She had spent hours reading Sickert's papers, as well as the hundreds of letters received by the press and Scotland Yard during the Ripper scare in 1888. She'd purchased 31 of Sickert's paintings in search of visual clues, and studied many others through photographs. She'd hired DNA experts to see if any genetic evidence of Sickert's involvement could be found, and had spent approximately $2 million of her fortune amassing evidence and artifacts connected with the crime, Walter Sickert, and Victorian London.
After a year of study and research, Cornwell announced she had indeed proved that Sickert was the Ripper, based on DNA found on a stamp on the Openshaw Letter. This DNA, plus fingerprints found on several of Sickert's paintings, was definitive proof in her eyes that the painter was indeed the Ripper. Not only that, she claimed to have found enough similarities between the figures in Sickert's paintings, especially The Camden Town Murder, to prove that Sickert had continued to murder prostitutes for at least twenty years after the Ripper's frenzy had left poor Mary Kelly in unrecognizable shreds in her lodgings. That no one else had seen this, including experts on Sickert's paintings, Ripperologists, or any of Sickert's friends (or his three wives, or his family) noticed that he was a sociopath with a violent hatred of women, she dismissed as unimportant.
It is hard to tell from the actual book if Cornwell's case has any merit. Her loathing of Sickert is so strong that she frequently veers into rambling digressions about Sickert's love of costume, or his lack of a normal sex life thanks to a penile fistula, or tendency to doodle. Worse, a quick look at the biography shows that she didn't consult the single best book on the Ripper killings, Philip Sugden's magisterial 1994 The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, or the still useful tome that I picked up all those years ago in Kaufmann's, former police sergeant Donald Rumbelow's The Complete Jack the Ripper. For someone who claims to have produced a "definitive" account to have ignored these books is disquieting indeed.
Worst of all, though, are the flaws in Cornwell's own evidence. There is no proof that Sickert was in London during the murders, and much evidence, such as family letters, that he was actually on holiday in France with his brother between mid-August and mid-October of 1888. Sickert himself was cremated after his death, so getting a full DNA sequence to match against anything found on the Ripper letters or other evidence is impossible. The Ripper letters she analyzed at such length are all, with only one or two exceptions, hoaxes not actually composed by the Ripper himself; the much touted DNA match obtained from the Openshaw letter, her main piece of evidence, proved only that whomever had licked the stamp shared his/her mitochondrial DNA with Walter Sickert...and about 400,000 other Victorian-era Britons.
And despite her allegedly extensive research into Sickert's art, Cornwell seems unaware that The Camden Town Murder, which she claims was inspired by the mortuary photos of Kate Eddowes, was originally titled What Shall We Do For the Rent?, which puts an entirely different spin on the composition.
Needless to say, Cornwell's essay into solving the Ripper killings is not well regarded by Ripperologists. And unlike the smoothly written The Diary of Jack the Ripper, it's not even a fun, trashy read; Cornwell is not a particularly graceful writer at her best, and her hatred for Walter Sickert frequently renders her incoherent. There are even allegations that she deliberately destroyed one of Sickert's paintings in an effort to find usable DNA or fingerprints, which is going well beyond the pale.
Kay Scarpetta, or another forensic pathologist, solving the Ripper crimes using modern methods would be a terrific story. It's a pity Patricia Cornwell preferred to write non-fiction instead of sticking with what she actually knew.
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And so, my friends and fellow crime buffs…what allegedly true accounts of famous murders have you tried and found wanting? Stephen Knight? One of the Manson family autobiographies? Something I've never heard of? The days are growing shorter, so it's a perfect time to curl with a terrifying book and share….
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