Jack the Ripper: The Policeman: A New Suspect

By Rod Beattie

Imagine you were a police officer and had been dominated as a child by an abusive mother who didn’t really want you and as an adult had been served bastardy orders twice, firstly by a woman in whose house you lived and then by a woman you had a relationship with. Then, to top it all after you had become a police officer in another city you arrested a woman you thought was a prostitute, whose subsequent actions caused you to be accused of perjury and you ended up in court at the Old Bailey. Although you were found not guilty, it ruined your career and left you seriously in debt and though you were still a policeman you were taken off the streets and assigned to a menial job guarding a museum. As a police officer you were in a perfect position to take revenge on those people you thought had ruined you, prostitutes. This book contains the complete reason Jack the Ripper came to be. It sheds new light on the mystery of the killer. After all, who is going to suspect a policeman going about his daily duties of being one of the world’s most infamous serial killers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399017534

Book preview

C

HAPTER

1

A Disgruntled Officer

In a survey run by a national newspaper, it was revealed that readers consider Jack the Ripper to be the most evil Briton of the last 1,000 years. The only reason for this, I believe, is that the identity of Jack was never revealed. This makes him someone to be frightened of, a man who can kill at will and never be captured – the antithesis of everything wholesome that normal people believe in.

Could it be that the identity of Jack was known but withheld for the well-being of the country? If it were acknowledged that the man who became known as Jack the Ripper had at one time been partially responsible for riots taking place in London, and had nearly brought down the government, there would have been absolute chaos, especially when it was revealed that Jack was in fact a policeman.

When I began to do research for this book I thought, as many of my contemporaries have done in their own books, that my suspect could have been the real murderer. It was only after many visits and countless hours wading through the files at the Public Records Office in Kew, and trips to Devon where my suspect was born, that I began to get a picture of exactly who he was and what he was like, and the more I delved into the records of the Metropolitan Police, the more convinced I became that at last the truth about the murders – and who committed them – had been found.

With the amount of police officers that had been drafted in to patrol the East End of London as the murders progressed, no one could have continually got away with the attacks unless that person was involved with the police. A police officer is the only person who could have walked the streets at night knowing that he would not be questioned or suspected of being the killer.

It is my belief that he continued to murder up until at least 1892, but changed his modus operandi because he knew that the police suspected him. But even knowing the risk he was taking he was still unable to control his thirst for revenge (more of why I believe this was revenge later).

It is impossible to believe that during the later murders by Jack the Ripper, when the whole area was on alert, anyone who was not in hiding in plain sight – as an officer of the law – could have walked around the streets at night, committed the murders and just walked away again. There were far too many police officers patrolling the area, and as the prostitutes knew that any of them could be the next victim they were wary of all strangers. There have been countless theories as to who the murderer was, but if you look at the murders logically, only one type of person could have committed them all and got away with it. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

Bowden Endacott photographed upon his retirement. (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Police)

The ‘improbable’ fact that we have to look at is that the only person who would not have been suspected and who had a reason for being on the streets is a police officer. Someone whom the prostitutes knew and believed they could trust. Eddowes, the fourth victim of the so-called canonical five (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly), stated that she had come back to London to earn the reward offered for the capture of the killer as she thought she knew him. She was later seen by three witnesses talking to the killer in a friendly way. No prostitute would have taken that chance unless it was someone she knew well and believed that, because of his position in society, she could trust him. Mary Jane Kelly, who was murdered in her home, would not have taken a man to her room unless she was sure she could trust him. It has to have been someone the prostitutes knew well and the only person this fits is a man who, as a police officer whose job it was to keep them off the streets, they knew extremely well.

Although we can look at old photographs and read old reports and documents, it is difficult for us to comprehend in these days of plenty the complete and utter poverty and deprivation people in the East End of London were forced to live in during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Crime, violence, immorality, and drunkenness were the normal way of life for most of the people who lived there.

Many of the streets were small and dingy, with back-to-back housing. In 1893, Thomas Henry Huxley gave a lecture at Oxford entitled, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, and said of the area: ‘I have seen the Polynesian savaging and in his primitive condition, before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beachcomber got at him. With all his savaging, he was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East End slum.’ It was estimated that of a total population of 47,000 living in the Whitechapel area, 23,000 – almost half – were living in poverty. By poverty, it meant those people faced starvation on a daily basis, and had no way of earning money to feed themselves or their families.

The area was nothing more than a network of narrow streets, courts, and alleyways, with offshoots often ending in rookeries: it has been compared to a rabbit warren. Gangs terrorised different areas, taking protection money, primarily from the prostitutes, or ‘unfortunates’, as they were known. The cry of ‘Murder!’ was so common at night that invariably it was ignored.

The members of the community who were lucky enough to find employment either worked in one of the local markets – such as Spitalfields Market – or at London Docks. There was high unemployment and in 1888 it was estimated that 20-25,000 men were out of work in the East End, the majority of them their family’s sole breadwinner. Wages were also low and this made for a largely transient population – those that did stay lived in one of the many tenements or common lodging houses that saturated the area. In many parts of the East End, particularly around the back streets off the Whitechapel Road, some houses similar in aspect to those a century or more ago can still be seen. To give some idea of what it must have been like, we only have to look at a letter from Sir James Frazer, commissioner of the City of London Police, to Godfrey Lushington, the permanent under-secretary of state, in which it was stated that the area in Whitechapel covered by Metropolitan Police’s H Division, had 233 common lodging houses, sixty-two brothels and 1,200 prostitutes. It was an area that Victorian writer Jack London called ‘the abyss’.

H Division required heavy policing and officers usually made their rounds in pairs. Some parts of the district were no-go areas where the police never entered, and the Whitechapel police met with so much habitual crime and street deaths that by the 1880s, inquest juries were very reticent about describing bodies found as murder victims unless they showed obvious signs of having been murdered.

The Ripper murders caused a wave of horror that pervaded all aspects of the normally staid society of Victorian England. Questions were asked in Parliament, and even Queen Victoria sent a telegram to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, insisting that the new detective service must improve and that the courts and alleyways in Whitechapel, where the murders had occurred, must be better lit. Three days later, on 13 November 1888, she sent a letter to Home Secretary Henry Matthews, stating that she thought the detective force was inefficient, and offered her own suggestions of what steps the police should take in order to find the murderer.

At the time of the Whitechapel murders, much infighting and squabbling was taking place between the police and the Home Office. Many observers at the time believed that there would have been a better chance of solving the mystery had the assistant metropolitan commissioner in charge of CID – James Monro – been left to do police work with no interference from the Home Office. Monro was liked and admired by practically everyone who worked with him – he fought for pension rights for the ordinary policeman on the beat, and this endeared him to them. Apart from the Home Office, the only other senior police officer who disagreed with Monro’s methods and attitudes was his immediate superior, Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Police commissioner. Warren’s background was in the military service and on appointment to the post, he assumed he would rule the force with military discipline. Monro, on the other hand, knew that this was not the way for the police force to be accepted by the public, nor by the ordinary policeman, who, in the majority of cases, was an ordinary person with no military experience.

Monro had also been given his own secret department, operating separately from CID and the uniformed branch. This department, known officially as ‘Section D’ and unofficially as ‘Special Branch’ had been set up to observe anarchists and subversives, and also immigrants who might use asylum in London to plot terrorism. This gave Monro direct access to the Home Secretary and Warren resented this; his military career having given him the notion that as commissioner he and he alone should have access to the upper echelon of the land. The Home Secretary, however, was quite happy with the situation and this caused the relationship between him and Warren to become even more strained. It should be noted here that the opinion at the time was that Matthews, whilst being an exceedingly able lawyer, was quite incapable of dealing with men.

The majority of the radical press disliked Warren, and The Star newspaper demanded his resignation as the Whitechapel murders developed, with the conservative press ultimately following suit. Warren was accused of introducing mindless militarism into the police force, of demoralising the CID, and of following Matthews’ frivolous do-nothing lead. He was mocked for letting bloodhounds try to track him through Regents Park, but then decided they would not be able to track through the crowded city streets in order to locate the Ripper. It was claimed that one of the two dogs – Burgho and Barnaby – who had been offered to Warren by a Mr Edwin Brough, who was keen to do his bit to get the Ripper off the streets, bit Warren at the trials, but this has proved to be an invention of the press in order for them to make Warren appear as comical as they believed he was. Warren responded to press attacks on him by publishing an article in Murray’s Magazine entitled ‘The Police of the Metropolis’. This was against approved procedure and Warren must have been aware that officials were expected to seek clearance from Home Office senior civil servants before submitting articles for publication. He could not have relished the idea though of asking for approval from men with whom he had such a bad relationship.

The Home Secretary responded to Warren’s article by issuing a memorandum inviting his immediate resignation. Warren offered it in response, stating that had he realised the rule regarding the publication of articles also applied to him, he would never have taken up the post as commissioner. His resignation was announced on 9 November 1888, ironically only a few weeks after that of Monro who had resigned in October. The details of Warren’s resignation were released on the day that the mutilated body of Mary Jane Kelly was found. It was claimed that the murder had forced his resignation but the fact is that it was the climax of a struggle that had been going on between the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police for fifty years. It was only a coincidence that his resignation occurred on the day of the murder, his resignation letter having been sent a few days earlier. Cynics have suggested his departure was deliberately announced a few hours after the murder in order for the Home Office to be able to show that they were in fact doing something about the murders.

Through all of this infighting, the work of the police on the front line had to continue. H Division station was, and still is, situated about half way down Leman Street. Adjoining it at the time was the Garrick Theatre, which later moved to the Charing Cross Road. It was between the officers stationed in Leman Street that questions about the similarity of the murders first began to be asked.

The body of Mary Ann, or ‘Polly’ Nichols, a prostitute, had been found on 31 August 1888 in Buck’s Row in Whitechapel. She had been murdered, and her body had been mutilated. A similar murder had taken place two weeks earlier, that of Martha Tabram, also a prostitute. Her body had been found in George Yard, Whitechapel on 7 August. Although Martha’s injuries were not exactly the same as those of Polly Nichols, the severity of the attacks made the police believe that they were connected. The officers feared that a maniac was possibly on the loose, and those fears were founded when another body was discovered on 8 September. The victim, another prostitute, was Annie Chapman. The police noted that the body, found in a back yard in Hanbury Street, again in Whitechapel, had also been mutilated; this time a lot more severely than the previous victims.

The night of 30 September came and with it not one but two murders, again two prostitutes, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, and again with similar mutilations. Then a month went by with no more murders. Suddenly, on the morning of Friday 9 November, the murderer struck again. The victim was Mary Jane Kelly and her body was found in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street. She was the only one of the victims to have been murdered indoors and the assailant virtually tore her body apart. She was the youngest of the victims and most people now believe that she was the last of the victims of the man who became known as Jack the Ripper.

* * *

In 1988, a number of psychological profiles were drawn up to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the worldwide phenomenon of Britain’s most infamous serial killer.

An analysis of the Ripper’s background, behaviour and modus operandi was made at the pioneering Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, and the files were studied in an attempt to understand his personality and build up his history. It was surmised that the killer was raised in a family with a domineering mother, and a weak or absent father. The boy would have grown up without the constant care and attention of a stable, adult role model. He would have had a diminished emotional response towards people in general and his anger would gradually have been felt when he realised exactly what his family life was like. This anger would have been internalised, and he would have probably developed a fantasy life in order to compensate for it. This fantasy life would have probably included the domination of women.

As an adult, his colleagues would have seen him as a loner and he would have been noted as being quiet, shy, and obedient, but with an inner rebellious streak that sometimes made him resist authority. His dress would have been neat and orderly and he would have looked for employment in a position where he could work alone so that he could control his surroundings. He would not have been proficient at meeting other people and would have preferred his own company.

The murderer must have had a disciplined mind in