As I said in my last blog post, almost exactly ten years ago Simon & Schuster published my thriller The Ripper Secret. Their marketing was quite successful, with the novel being available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house also broadcast a podcast I recorded on its website and featured a short article I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the site’s ‘Dark Pages’ section.
It looks as if the timing was quite providential as well, with the second of a two-part BBC documentary being broadcast on the same day as the book’s publication, and with the level of interest in this most notorious of all serial killers still remarkably high. Inputting the search term ‘Jack the Ripper’ into Amazon a decade ago, it came up with just under 3,400 items, an astonishing number of books and films bearing in mind that his unresolved and unsolved killing spree took place almost a century and a half ago. Doing the same thing on Google produced almost ten million hits.
Today, we’ve moved on a bit. Now the Amazon search brings up over 4,000 items and Google produces just under twenty million results, so if anything general interest in this subject has grown.
I remember recording and then watching the BBC documentary. It was interesting, though the conclusions it came to were somewhat predictable and – like a lot of the things the BBC produced then and still produces now – very selective. Their principal suspects were Montague John Druitt and a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski, though no believable evidence was advanced to indicate that either man could have been Jack the Ripper. It’s worth pointing out that in all over 200 different suspects have been suggested over the years, and some 30 of these have been seriously considered, ranging from the sublime (Prince Albert Victor with or without the assistance of Queen Victoria’s Physician-In-Ordinary Sir William Gull) to the ridiculous (‘Jill the Ripper’ or the ‘mad midwife’).
The documentary also provided reconstructions of some of the recorded events, and these were not always as accurate as they certainly should have been. For example, when Israel Schwartz witnessed an altercation between a man and a woman who might have been Elizabeth Stride, he also described another man on the opposite side of the street, a man who then began following him. In the BBC’s version, this man didn’t appear at all, and the scene showed Schwartz passing very close by the arguing couple and getting an excellent look at the man involved, which certainly wasn’t the case according to his own sworn testimony.
The programme makers also were highly selective when considering the medical evidence. With one single exception, every doctor who examined any of the victims of the Ripper concluded that the killer had to have had at least some medical and anatomical knowledge. The single exception was Dr Thomas Bond, who stated that he didn’t believe the murderer had any surgical ability, but both he and the BBC conspicuously failed to explain how the Ripper had managed to remove Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney, without damaging any of the surrounding organs, and in complete darkness in Mitre Square in under 15 minutes, a difficult and complex surgical procedure even on a corpse.
With regard to the killing of Annie Chapman, the divisional police surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips stated that if he had performed the mutilations to her body, even in the well-lit and ordered surroundings of an operating theatre, the procedure would have taken him at least an hour. His views were echoed by the other doctors involved in examining the victims.
Probably unsurprisingly, the BBC very clearly had a couple of villains in mind from the start and ignored all the evidence recorded by every other doctor at the time, and simply took Bond’s statement as gospel, claiming that the killings showed no medical knowledge or ability whatsoever. This was presumably so that they could offer both Druitt and Kosminski – neither of whom had had any medical training – as believable suspects.
Personally, I believe that it is undeniable that Jack the Ripper – whoever he was – had had some medical or surgical training, or at the very least had worked as a butcher or slaughterer, and if that supposition is correct it would of course narrow the field of suspects very considerably. It would also, incidentally, eliminate at a stroke all of the most popular contenders.
The man who was Jack the Ripper in my novel is a far better fit than most of the usual line-up. Records from this period are notoriously patchy and incomplete, but there is evidence to suggest that this man was living in London at the time of the killings, had trained and then worked as a surgeon, and had a history of violence against women, with quite probably at least one murder behind him before he arrived in the city. He is also one of the least known of all the Ripper suspects.
The Ripper Secret was and is a novel, obviously, but the story is tightly woven around the killings which were described as accurately as possible after such a passage of time. I took considerable care to make sure that all the facts were right, and in my opinion the story did and does work as a possible explanation for the murders. In particular, it provided logical answers to six questions which almost no non-fiction writer has ever managed to resolve satisfactorily:
- Why did the murders start?
- Why did the mutilations get progressively more severe?
- Why were there two murders on one night?
- Why did the murders stop?
- Why did Sir Charles Warren resign simultaneously with the final killing?
- What was the significance of the geographical locations of the murders?
If you read the book, let me know what you think.
