Page 71 of Secrets in the Dark
“Can’t hurt. It’s too early to head out to the pubs and dinner is on its way. What have you got?”
“All right, let’s go with ridiculous first—according to my humble opinion. Though they made a few cool movies on the theory, there’s Prince Albert Edward, or Eddy. He was heir to the throne when he was born, being the first boy born to his father, heir to Queen Victoria. He was suspected of a scandal when the murders occurred. Supposedly, he loved art and the well-known artist Sickert introduced him to a girl who something modeled for him, Annie Elizabeth Crook. She was definitely a no-no for him, being a Scottish Catholic. But he was madly in love and she bore him a daughter, Alice Margaret. The story has it that Queen Victoria was incensed and the Sickert house was raided. Poor Annie was taken to Guy’s Hospital where another suspect, Sir William Gull, proclaimed her insane. She died there twenty-eight years later, totally insane by then, probably true after all that was done to her. The plot thickens! Supposedly, Mary Kelly had also worked for Sickert and was friends with Annie and saved the baby until Sickert was able to get her to safety. Fast-forward to the Ripper. Theory one—Eddy and Sir William Gull created the murder spree to hide the murder of Mary Kelly. Theory two—Sir William Gull did it all by himself to protect the Crown, making use of hints about Mason ritual, as in theJuwesmentioned on the wall, wanting to throw off suspicion. Elaborate, brutal, unhinged murders—to hide what might be a disastrous scandal for the Crown. Some even suspected the artist, Sickert—he was known to paint some pretty gruesome pictures. But, in my opinion, you don’t help someone and then head out on a killing spree. Okay, so, in my mind, Eddy didn’t do it—and evidence is on my side. He wasn’t even in London on the nights of several murders. Then, as profilers today would tell you—”
“The killer evolved. By the time he murdered Mary Kelly, he had slit throats and slashed abdomens and genitals and removed organs, but Mary Kelly was just about stripped of all flesh and her face was left as a disaster of blood and bone,” Della said, joining the conversation. “I don’t believe—even though I agree it made for good movies—that the killer was Eddy or Gull. Not with what we’ve learned from profiling, except, of course, profiling is a tool, not an exact science.”
“Right. But a useful tool more often than not.” Sean grinned at her. “On to Montague Druitt. A possible, I say. Numerous members of his family were in the medical field. He’d been dismissed from his post and it was suspected that the dismissal might have had to do with sexual misconduct. He knew the area. He kept an office there when he might have kept it elsewhere with his family’s influence. The real kicker—his own family thought that he might be the Ripper, and...drum roll, he committed suicide and his body was found in the Thames after the Mary Kelly murder—and the murders stopped there, right before his death. In a private memorandum, Sir Melville Macnaghten of the Metropolitan Police suggested that Druitt was the suspect he considered to be the killer.”
“A possible,” Della agreed. “Then, of course, there was the wholeleather apronconcept that it was a man named Kosminski in the police reports, a hairdresser and barber, but as time went by, no one was even sure if Aaron Kosminski was the man referred to, though he was a Polish Jew, as identified. There is tremendous confusion with some of the names because police referred to a suspect deranged and rambling at the end of the murder spree as David Cohen, possible real name Nathan Kominski, who was going to be taken to the parish workhouse but became so violent when they tried to take him under restraint that he had to be sent to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and died there in 1889.”
“Far less movie worthy than a tainted heir to the throne!” Sean said.
“Back to the name confusion. Kosminski wound up in an asylum in 1891 after threatening his sister with a knife,” Della said. “But I can’t imagine a man to have evolved into the killer who murdered Mary Kelly just stopping—and then winding up institutionalized that much later for threatening someone with a knife. What would he have been doing until that time?”
“I’m looking at notes by Scotland Yard and Ripperologists, but you’re... You just know all this?” Sean asked Della.
“I had several classes with members of the Behavior Analysis Unit at Quantico,” Della explained. “This was a favorite topic for one of my instructors. Another suspect he didn’t think belonged in the pool was George Chapman, born Seweryn Klosowski in Poland, who was finally executed after poisoning three wives and caught because the last wife’s mother demanded he be investigated. My instructor disagreed with him as a suspect because of the monetary gain he achieved through his liaisons and because poisoning as a method of murder is far different from brutally hacking them to ribbons. He did, however, have medical training in his youth when he apprenticed to a surgeon and while some think that the Ripper had such training, others believe anyone who had ever butchered a large animal would have the same fundamental knowledge.”
“And what about James Maybrick?” Sean asked.
“The diary claiming him to be Jack the Ripper didn’t show up until the 1990s and the materials and all else about it are too questionable,” Mason put in. Sean and Della both looked at him and he shrugged. “I had similar—though not the same—classes,” he reminded them.
“All right, so, who was Jack the Ripper?” Sean asked.
“More important,” Mason said, “who does this new Ripper think he was?”
“Robert Mann was a morgue attendant—plenty of scalpels and knives available, but he wasn’t really a suspect at the time,” Della said. “Then there was Dr. Francis Tumblety—”
“American!” Sean said.
Della made a face at him. “Irish-born American—though we don’t claim that America produces no monsters, you know! But he spoke often enough about his hatred for women, he was a huge self-promoter, pulled the wool over many eyes, and most importantly, he was in Whitechapel during the time of the killings. The Metropolitan Police arrested him forgross indecencyin November of 1888 but knowing that he was a subject of interest in the Ripper case, too, he managed to escape to France with a false ID and moved on with his life from there. Detective Chief Inspector John Littlefield wrote to a journalist in the early 1900s that Tumblety was one of his main suspects, largely because of his blatant hatred toward women and because of his arrest record. But Tumblety died of heart disease in 1903, and whatever he might have shared with the world died with him.”
“William Bury,” Sean murmured, “The last person hanged in Dundee! He strangled his wife with a rope in January of 1889—also stabbing her many times and living in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. Just another person of interest,” he added dryly, “in the mystery with no definitive answer.”
“He wasn’t taken seriously as a suspect at the time, but some modern researchers and behavioralists believe it might have been him,” Mason said.
Edward groaned. “Listening to you... Well, I wish that I might have had a few more classes with some of your BAU professors.”
“Or you can open a computer, too,” Sean said.
Edward shrugged. “I don’t think I need to—seems we have a much lovelier version of such a fountain of knowledge right here!” He nodded toward Della.
Sean grinned at that. “Yes, Della is stunning and a computer is not. But, hey, computers can hold more information than even the most amazing of human brains. I’m not seeing many other serious suspects. Joseph Barnett was a one-time lover of Mary Kelly and certainly knew the area well enough, so, of course, he receives mention. Then there’s Albert Bachert—or Backert. He changed the spelling of the name in 1889.”
“He is someone studied by profilers these days,” Della said. “They’ve learned through many cases that serial killers sometimes like to thrust themselves into an investigation, to be especially helpful, talking to police. Bachert was a citizen of Whitechapel and he played with politics and letters—sending many to the newspapers and having them published. He claimed to have spoken to a man at a pub who kept asking him questions about streets where he might proposition the ladies of the night. Then he claimed to receive letters from the killer as time went by, sending them all on to the papers.
“But he was never associated with the women nor was there ever any evidence found regarding him—but he did crave attention and, at a later date, he claimed to have been part of the vigilante committee when the murder spree was going on, but he wasn’t listed anywhere. So,” Della said. “While that behavior is suspicious, he might have just been a man craving attention.”
“The morgue assistant was in the right area—and certainly had the right tools,” François commented.
“And that iscertainlytrue,” Sean agreed.
“I say Montague Druitt might be high on the list,” Della said. “He had a shady reputation despite the respect afforded his family, his father was a surgeon so he had tools and knowledge. He knew the area. He was respectable looking enough and cordial enough to have lured a woman into a dark alley. And, maybe the most major point, he committed suicide right after the Mary Kelly killing. And that was so savage that it could have sent someone over the edge,” Della said.
“Do we think this killer sees himself as a Montague Druitt?” Edmund asked.
“I think he’s far too much of a narcissist to commit suicide. But he believes that he’s going to be superior to the original Ripper, so, maybe,” Della said.
“We know that Jesse Miller has told people that he lives or is staying in the Whitechapel area of the city,” Mason offered. “We know that he does odd jobs—movies and digs, manual labor—to keep his finances going. These aren’t full-time jobs and they afford him the ability to work when it doesn’t interrupt his planned activities. And, I believe, he’s organized and careful, that he’s a sociopath or psychopath with a fine line distinction between the two. And I do believe that until he kills again and in fact completes his spree of the canonical murders, he will be prowling the streets every night, stalking possible victims, watching for the patrols, times bartenders leave... He’s watching, constantly.”
