Page 159 of If Looks Could Kill
We do not know who Jack the Ripper was.
All the evidence, if it can be so called, against any suspect who has been put forth is circumstantial. They fit a certain type. They had tendencies and personalities that aroused suspicion. They were, or may have been, approximately near the right place at the right time.
Police detective work, recordkeeping, and evidence cataloguing were very different in late Victorian times than they are today. Most documents pertaining to the original investigation have been lost to fires, to purges of old files, and to fake researchers given access to old police records and pillaging them of anything interesting to a Ripper collector. We rely upon newspaper articles detailing inquests, police statements, and coroners’ reports for details, yet those sources vary wildly in their accounts of the same events and are riddled with sensationalism, misogyny, and xenophobia, not to mention sloppiness. We’re left, in short, unsure of what to believe.
We aren’t even certain which of the brutal murders of women in East London that occurred between 1888 and 1889 can be firmly attributed to the killer called Jack the Ripper. Scholars generally agree upon five killings as being the work of the butcher of Whitechapel, though some debate remains. They are: Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, found August 31, 1888; Annie Chapman, found September 8, 1888; Catherine Eddowes andElizabeth Stride, both found September 30, 1888; and Mary Jane Kelly, who features twice in this novel, found November 9, 1888. They are known as the Canonical Five. I limited my fictitious Jack’s gruesome work to them.
I cannot recommend with enough urgency the bookThe Fiveby Hallie Rubenhold. It’s an engrossing read. Her meticulous scholarship into the lives of these five women offers an absorbing and heartrending portrait of each one.
It was taken as undisputed fact in 1888, and has been ever since, that the women the Ripper murdered were “East End prostitutes.” This label attaches both scathing judgment to the victims and sexual titillation to the true-crime mystique surrounding the Ripper. For one thing, it suggests, as people tend to assume, that the murders followed sexual encounters. They did not. As Rubenhold’s work persuasively demonstrates, the default assumption held by the police and the press was that any unhoused woman who begged and did small jobs to earn her day’s “doss” (housing) money also engaged in the sex trade. When these impoverished women were found murdered, their status as “prostitutes” was scarcely even questioned. Though the newspapers referred to them as “unfortunates,” a dismissive subtext was often apparent and sometimes heartlessly blatant: as “immoral” women, they deserved what they got, in the eyes of a British society that attached great weight to “respectability.”
Rubenhold shows through abundant documentary evidence that what these five women were, along with many like them, was vulnerable—to poverty, to homelessness, to hunger, to alcoholism, to abandonment, and to a culture that indulged and protected perpetrators of violence against women. “The Five” had names, families, histories, marriages, children, friendships, and sorrows. They had fallen upon hard times in a world with no safety net. Most had lost husbands to death, divorce, separation, or betrayal. If, in fact, they supplemented their income as occasional sex workers, they did so at extreme risk to their health and safety, even beforethe “Whitechapel killer” came on the scene. Venereal disease, sexual assault, and physical violence were frequent hazards. Only desperate need would have driven these women to that choice. After the onset of Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror, in an East End gripped with fear over when and where the unnamed killer would strike again, why would any woman be outdoors at night? Only if she had no other option—no shelter and no way to procure it.
Lacking housing money, the Ripper’s victims found the streets preferable to the humiliating, hostile treatment they received at overcrowded workhouses—London’s answer to the “problem” of the urban poor. The poor were seen by the middle and upper classes as thoroughly to blame for whatever brought them low, even though wider economic realities left thousands of working-class people, who were devoid of employee protections or social services, susceptible to unemployment, homelessness, starvation, and substance abuse. Where addiction played a role in their misfortunes, the “respectable” middle and upper classes viewed them with contempt for weakness of character rather than as sufferers of disease.
The speed and stealth with which the unknown Ripper killer carried out his butcheries, mostly out in the open, clothes him with a mantle of daring and skill. I can think of few more cowardly acts than to cut the throats of poor, homeless women and then brutalize their dying bodies while they are unable to make a sound.
Jack the Ripper is a massive tourist attraction today. He remains an object of popular obsession while his female victims are all but forgotten. This lopsidedness is itself problematic: the murderous male monster gets all the fame and fascination; the expendable women are an afterthought. The irony is not lost upon me that here I am, writing a book in which he features prominently. (In my defense, it is also a book in which one of his victims unleashes a monstrous vengeance upon him, and other women help to finish the task.)
As uncomfortable as it may be to read about his exploits from his(fictionalized) point of view, I felt it was important to unmask Jack the Ripper as legend and let him be what he was: an ordinary human animal who came and went, ate and slept, had earwax and trimmed his nails, and pulled on his trousers one leg at a time. When we glamorize Jack, we implicitly reinforce violence against women, even if we feel horror at what he did or pity for his victims. Like everyone else, he bore the emotional weight of being sentient, mortal, and human in a depersonalizing world. He varies from the average only in what he did with that weight. He was a coward with a hateful disregard of his victims’ right to live. In a culture that afforded women such meager crumbs of respect, safety, and bodily autonomy, what he did was grotesque and extreme, shocking and deplorable, but not at all unprecedented. What surprised the world was not that a man was brutally violent toward women, but simply how repeatedly and efficiently violent he was, for no clear reason, and how well he eluded capture.
Jack the Ripper was neither the first, nor the last, nor the most prolific of serial killers. He is simply the most famous. This may have more to do with timing—rising literacy and newspaper consumption made it more possible for word of his disgusting and reprehensible exploits to spread—and with branding than anything else. The nickname “Jack the Ripper,” almost certainly coined by a newspaper writer, just stuck. Incidentally, he wasn’t referred to as “Jack the Ripper” until after the October 1, 1888, publication of the “Dear Boss” letter in the newspapers, a letter written by someone claiming to be the killer. For stylistic reasons, I chose to refer to the killer as Jack before the moniker had emerged.
Jack is a global multimillion-dollar industry, and since we have so few proven facts about him, wild conjectures and fabrications abound. He is, in effect, a story in the public domain, and anyone is free to say anything they like about him. A strict academic caution and skepticism about sources is advisable when it comes to believing anything we read about the Ripper case.
Once more I must stress: we don’t know who Jack the Ripper was.
About Francis Tumblety
Francis Tumblety is a real person and Ripper suspect, though he fell off the radar of Ripperologists for over a century until a letter found in an old book in a used bookshop in London in 1993 reminded the world of his existence. The author of the letter was Chief Inspector John G. Littlechild, who led Scotland Yard’s Special Branch in the deadly autumn of 1888. He wrote in 1913 to British journalist George R. Sims, stating that, in his mind, Tumblety was “a very likely suspect.” (Note that it’s often misspelled Twomblety or Kumblety.)
The details of his arrests, of being followed to New York, staying on East Tenth, and giving the detective the slip are all true to known events as reported in the newspapers. He did have a sister named Elizabeth Powderly living in Waterloo and may have fled to her home following his disappearance from Manhattan. A Waterloo newspaper report seems to suggest he was there, though its wording is somewhat ambiguous. We know that Francis was the youngest of eleven children and that their family was poor, but we know little else about dynamics within the family. The scene showing Francis remembering his father assaulting his mother is a creative license on my part.
When initially presented to the world as a Ripper suspect, Tumblety was dismissed for reasons that I believe to be invalid—not because I can say with any certainty that Francis Tumblety is the Ripper killer, but simply because I don’t believe the objections raised against him as a suspect hold weight; rather, they are dated, biased, and lacking the full facts. He is described as having an “inveterate hatred for women,” and this was read for many years to mean a euphemism for a homosexual orientation, which ruled him out as the Ripper in the minds of many, since only heterosexual men were deemed likely to commit such murders. While he did prefer men as partners, researcher Michael Hawley, in his bookJack the Ripper Suspect: Dr. Francis Tumblety(Sunbury Press, 2018), persuasively demonstratesthrough numerous eyewitness testimonies that Tumblety, on multiple occasions, expressed unabashed loathing of all females and was reported to have said that all “nightwalkers” (prostitutes) should be disemboweled.
He also kept a collection of specimens of actual human body parts and was especially proud of his collection of uteruses, though it’s important to add that in this macabre fascination, he was not entirely alone among nineteenth-century men of a quasi-scientific bent.
When seen in the years following the Whitechapel killings, Tumblety was described by several to exhibit a baffling, terrified aversion to women, cringing away from them, sometimes hiding (such as behind a newspaper) and loudly ordering them, if they entered the same room as him, not to touch him, even though they were yards away.
Tumblety made his fortune as a seller of patent medicines, chiefly a pimple-removing cream, throughout the eastern United States and also in Britain, principally in London. He wasn’t formally educated, but styled himself “Dr. Francis Tumblety, the celebrated Indian herb doctor.” His medicines were dubious remedies supposedly containing Native American herbs. He didn’t have any lasting home base, but traveled throughout his life, setting up temporary shops in various locations, selling his preparations to ever-new markets, and renting temporary lodgings in each city where he stayed. He was an effective promoter if not healer; those who saw through his façade frequently referred to him as a “quack doctor.”
He also suffered from kidney disease and heart disease, and from around 1880 onward, he was known to be obsessed with his ailing health and with finding a cure. He would often complain to his acquaintances that he could die at any moment, instantly and without warning. Given his habits and the prevalence of the disease, combined with certain known aspects of his appearance, there is a strong chance that Tumblety suffered from syphilis, which was as yet untreatable, as antibiotics would not be invented for another fifty years. Syphilis comes and goes in stages, and in the active stagethat he may have been experiencing, extreme and erratic forms of mania and violence were well-documented side effects.
Tumblety frequently set up shop in the Bowery vicinity of the Lower East Side. He was known to roam the streets at night, to favor slums, and to frequent seedy establishments. Chief among these were the Bowery’s “dime museums,” which catered to men and exhibited gruesome specimens of body parts in jars, scientific curiosities (often forgeries), and a wide array of pornographic entertainments, including peep shows and nude female dancers. A mainstay attraction at dime museums, until they were removed by police in 1888 under the aegis of US Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock’s enthusiastic and far-reaching anti-vice campaigns, were waxwork displays entitled “The Anatomical Venus.” They depicted the full-size body of a naked woman, lying as if on a bed in an erotic posture of sexual desire, yet her abdomen was ripped open with some organs placed outside her body to show virtually all of her organs, as though she were a cadaver or scientific model.
This is exactly what was done to Mary Jane Kelly, who was butchered and dissected in her own bed and left in the position of an Anatomical Venus. Catherine Eddowes’s body was left in a similar arrangement.
The bizarre combination of lust for and violence toward women’s bodies in these macabre, lifelike (or deathlike?) waxworks can be seen as a commentary upon a male-dominated culture that both coveted and commoditized female bodies. Although we can’t assert positively that Tumblety had seen an Anatomical Venus, given his known nighttime proclivities, his preoccupation with amassing women’s body parts as his private “scientific collection,” and the fact that he lived, while in New York, within easy walking reach of four dime museums, it would be astonishing if he had not seen one.
One more Tumblety detail of interest to the Ripper killings is this: Annie Chapman was known to always wear two cheap brass rings, a pairsold as a set—a wedding ring and a “keeper ring” such as a couple of scarce means might use when marrying. (Brass can be seen as a low-cost imitation of gold; Queen Victoria’s use of such a pair of rings had popularized them.) Witnesses who knew her assert that Annie Chapman had her two brass rings on when last seen hours before her death. When her body was found, the rings were missing, and her fingers showed signs of them being forcibly removed. The presumption was that the killer kept them as souvenirs.
When Francis Tumblety died in a St. Louis hospital in 1903, the items in his possession at the hospital (such as in his pockets) were catalogued. They included large diamonds and diamond rings—Tumblety was known to flaunt his wealth and to prefer the finer things of life—and “two imitation set rings, valued at $3.00” (Gerrard Strode, public administrator, quoted in Hawley, p. 225).
I am profoundly indebted to the scholarship of Michael Hawley, who has devoted years to locating and examining the copious documentary records available of Tumblety’s life and movements, legal and financial entanglements, and social relationships. His aforementioned book,Jack the Ripper Suspect: Dr. Francis Tumblety, was an invaluable resource to this project.
A Possible Motive
The body parts my fictional Tumblety-as-Ripper uses to concoct his strange brews are exactly those parts that coroners found to be missing from the bodies of most of the Canonical Five.
