Read Complete History of Jack the Ripper for Free Online Page A
Authors: Philip Sudgen
Killers. Unfortunately, Marriner’s account of the murders, brief as it is, proceeds to repeat a number of old canards. 3 And where an author as knowledgeable as this stumbles, one is tempted to caution the general reader, approaching the groaning shelf of Ripper books for dependable information, with those famous words from Dante: ‘Abandon hope, ye who enter here!’
There are several reasons for the lamentable state of Ripper studies.
One has been the tendency of writers to draw the bulk of their primary source material from newspaper reports and later reminiscences of police officers and others. This practice should not have survived the 1970s, when police and Home Office records on the Ripper casewere first opened to the public, but it continues because of the relative accessibility of newspapers and memoirs. Every sizeable library has its microfilm backfile of The Times , and published memoirs are readily available through interlibrary loan services. Unfortunately, as sources of factual information on the crimes and police investigations, they are simply not reliable.
At the time of Jack the Ripper it was not the policy of the CID to disclose to the press details about unsolved crimes or their inquiries respecting them. Reporters were not even permitted to enter premises in which such a crime had been committed. Naturally, they resented it. ‘The police authorities observe a reticence which has now apparently become systematic, and any information procured is obtained in spite of them,’ carped one. ‘However much or little they know, the police devote themselves energetically to the task of preventing other people from knowing anything,’ fumed another. 4
The purpose of the police precautions will be discussed later. Primarily it was to prevent villains being forewarned as to what the CID knew and might do. But at present the rationale behind the policy concerns us less than the effects of its application upon newsmen. It placed them in an impossible predicament. For they were confronted at the height of the Ripper scare by a massive public clamour for information and possessed few legitimate means of satisfying it.
Gathering news at that time was a particularly frustrating business. Sometimes, by following detectives or hanging about police stations, reporters were able to identify and interview important witnesses. We will have cause to thank them when we encounter Israel Schwartz and George Hutchinson. But more often press reports were cobbled together out of hearsay, rumour and gossip, picked up at street corners and in pubs or lodging houses.
There seems to have been no shortage of informants. A Star reporter, investigating the Miller’s Court murder in November 1888, found the locals basking in their new-found importance, anxious to please and ready to regale him with ‘a hundred highly circumstantial stories’, most of which, upon inquiry, proved ‘totally devoid of truth’. Even true anecdotes might be passed from mouth to mouth until they became unrecognizable. Sarah Lewis, who stayed in Miller’s Court on the fatal night, had heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ By the time the Star ’s man got to the scene of the crime her story had got round and ‘half a dozen women were retailing it as their own personal experience’, a circumstance which may explain why Sarah’s storyis sometimes credited, in aberrant forms, to a Mrs Kennedy in the press. 5
Inevitably much of the press coverage was fiction. Inevitably, too, the press were happy to blame the police. ‘We were compelled in our later editions of yesterday,’ observed the Star after the Hanbury Street murder, ‘to contradict many of the reports which found admittance to our columns and to those of all our contemporaries earlier in the day. For this the senseless, the endless prevarications of the police were to blame.’ 6 But journalists themselves, determined to exploit the astonishing runs on the papers after each murder, were more than
There are several reasons for the lamentable state of Ripper studies.
One has been the tendency of writers to draw the bulk of their primary source material from newspaper reports and later reminiscences of police officers and others. This practice should not have survived the 1970s, when police and Home Office records on the Ripper casewere first opened to the public, but it continues because of the relative accessibility of newspapers and memoirs. Every sizeable library has its microfilm backfile of The Times , and published memoirs are readily available through interlibrary loan services. Unfortunately, as sources of factual information on the crimes and police investigations, they are simply not reliable.
At the time of Jack the Ripper it was not the policy of the CID to disclose to the press details about unsolved crimes or their inquiries respecting them. Reporters were not even permitted to enter premises in which such a crime had been committed. Naturally, they resented it. ‘The police authorities observe a reticence which has now apparently become systematic, and any information procured is obtained in spite of them,’ carped one. ‘However much or little they know, the police devote themselves energetically to the task of preventing other people from knowing anything,’ fumed another. 4
The purpose of the police precautions will be discussed later. Primarily it was to prevent villains being forewarned as to what the CID knew and might do. But at present the rationale behind the policy concerns us less than the effects of its application upon newsmen. It placed them in an impossible predicament. For they were confronted at the height of the Ripper scare by a massive public clamour for information and possessed few legitimate means of satisfying it.
Gathering news at that time was a particularly frustrating business. Sometimes, by following detectives or hanging about police stations, reporters were able to identify and interview important witnesses. We will have cause to thank them when we encounter Israel Schwartz and George Hutchinson. But more often press reports were cobbled together out of hearsay, rumour and gossip, picked up at street corners and in pubs or lodging houses.
There seems to have been no shortage of informants. A Star reporter, investigating the Miller’s Court murder in November 1888, found the locals basking in their new-found importance, anxious to please and ready to regale him with ‘a hundred highly circumstantial stories’, most of which, upon inquiry, proved ‘totally devoid of truth’. Even true anecdotes might be passed from mouth to mouth until they became unrecognizable. Sarah Lewis, who stayed in Miller’s Court on the fatal night, had heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ By the time the Star ’s man got to the scene of the crime her story had got round and ‘half a dozen women were retailing it as their own personal experience’, a circumstance which may explain why Sarah’s storyis sometimes credited, in aberrant forms, to a Mrs Kennedy in the press. 5
Inevitably much of the press coverage was fiction. Inevitably, too, the press were happy to blame the police. ‘We were compelled in our later editions of yesterday,’ observed the Star after the Hanbury Street murder, ‘to contradict many of the reports which found admittance to our columns and to those of all our contemporaries earlier in the day. For this the senseless, the endless prevarications of the police were to blame.’ 6 But journalists themselves, determined to exploit the astonishing runs on the papers after each murder, were more than