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usually willing to invent copy of their own.
    Perhaps the most important myth created by the press was Fairy Fay.
    The first trace of her appeared in a verse broadsheet, Lines on the Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel , printed at the beginning of September 1888. This referred vaguely to an early and unnamed victim of the murderer, killed ‘twelve months ago’, i.e. in 1887. However, it was the Daily Telegraph that really got the ball rolling. In its issues of 10 and 11 September 1888 it stated that the first victim of the Whitechapel murderer had been slain in the vicinity of Osborn and Wentworth Streets at Christmas 1887. A stick or iron instrument had been thrust into her body. She had never been identified. The story was repeated again and again – in newspapers and broadsheets, in a parliamentary question of November 1888, and in Dr L. Forbes Winslow’s widely read memoir, Recollections of Forty Years , published in 1910. Terence Robertson, writing for Reynold’s News in 1950, embroidered the tale still further. He gave the unknown woman a name – Fairy Fay – and said that she was killed on Boxing Night 1887, when she was taking a short cut home from a pub in Mitre Square.
    No such event occurred. There is no reference to it in police records. No mention of it can be found in the local or national press for December 1887 or January 1888. And a search of registered deaths at St Catherine’s House reveals no woman named Fay or anything like that murdered in Whitechapel during the relevant period. There is no doubt that the Telegraph story was a confused memory of the known murder of Emma Smith in the spring of 1888. Emma was attacked in Osborn Street and a blunt instrument, perhaps a stick, was savagely thrust into her. She died the next day in the London Hospital. Obviously the Telegraph ’s writer recalled this incident veryhazily. He remembered, for example, that it had occurred on a public holiday and opted for Christmas 1887. The correct date was the night of Easter Monday, 2–3 April 1888. 7
    Today writers still regularly list both Fairy Fay and Emma Smith as possible victims of Jack the Ripper. But Fairy Fay is a phantom, born of sloppy journalism back in 1888.
    The deficiencies of newspaper files cannot be redressed from reminiscent evidence, whether memoirs of retired policemen or interviews with aged East End residents. These sources, although often readily accessible, have special problems of their own.
    Over time our memories deteriorate more profoundly than many people inexperienced in the use of historical evidence realize, and reminiscences recorded long after the event are characteristically confused on chronology and detail. There is a very human tendency, too, for us to ‘improve’ upon our memories, to make a better story, to explain away past mistakes, or simply to claim for ourselves a more impressive role in past dramas than we have acted in life.
    In 1959 a ninety-year-old Mr Wright could still show broadcaster Dan Farson the spot in Buck’s Row where one of the murders took place. He had lived in Buck’s Row as a boy, he explained, and it was he who had washed the blood from the pavement. Contemporary records reveal that there was, in fact, very little blood and that what there was was washed down by a son of Emma Green, who lived adjacent to the murder site.
    At the time of the murders a greengrocer called Matthew Packer told police that on the night Liz Stride was killed in Berner Street he had sold grapes to her killer. More than seventy years later an aged Annie Tapper remembered the story and retold it for Tom Cullen. She insisted, however, that as a girl of nine she had sold the grapes to Jack the Ripper and, of course, she remembered him perfectly. ‘I’ll tell you what he looked like as sure as this is Friday,’ she said. But her murderer was a fantasy, disguised in a black, pointed beard and togged out in a bobtail coat and striped trousers.
    At a more exalted level Sir Robert