Chapter 7(London, Sept. 28-30, 1888)

Dear Boss,I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just

yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. Yours trulyJack the Ripper

Dont mind me giving the trade namePS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my

hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha haWe all looked at Abberline after he’d impassively read this letter aloud

to us from two photographs what had been made of it. We didn’t know whether to be dumbfounded or angered that he never told us about this. Registering the looks on some of our faces, the inspector sought to defend himself.

“It should be made known this letter was sent to the Central News Agency in London yesterday and forwarded to Scotland Yard just today. Obviously, there was no time to inform you of this since you were still aboard the SS City of New York.”

“You think that’s him? Your boy?”“No, Mr. Cody. This is one of several letters we have received over the

last fortnight from all over England. They all tend to be in different hands, meaning they are works of fiction, hoaxes by miscreants who think nothing of wasting police time and resources.”

Doyle took the photograph of the first page from Abberline’s hand and read it more closely.

“Obviously, the work of a frustrated writer,” he sniffed and at that moment I wondered if Doyle himself would’ve contributed to the crank letters if he hadn’t gotten his little detective story published last year.

“It would be easy to dismiss it as such,” Abberline said while retrieving the photograph, “were it not for several things: Number one, he gives himself a name for the first time, something none of the others do. Secondly, he feels confident enough to make a prediction. Note the part where he writes, ‘The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off.’ None of the other missives we’ve received made such a specific prediction. I do not believe this is the work of the killer neither does it fit in with the others. Yet, it does beggar greater attention.”

“Was the original letter written in red ink?” I asked as I looked down at the pair of black and white photographs.

“It was,” Abberline admitted. “Scotland Yard will hold this letter back but not to appease the killer who’d allegedly written it but to see if his prediction comes true. When you read the copies of the case files I’d had made, it’ll be abundantly clear we’re chasing after a pattern killer. But the last thing we need to add to the mix is a copy cat murderer who may or may not get his cues from this letter.”

“Smart,” Bill said, nodding his head. Doyle seemed to concur but added,

“I agree that holding this letter back is a good idea but only in the interests of not giving some fraud unwanted inspiration. I do not believe this was written by the killer.”

“And why do you say that?”“Because, Mr. Butler, this is plainly a masculine handwriting. It is my

opinion that our quarry is a woman or, at most, a man masquerading as a woman while he’s trolling. But I’m of the firm belief our killer is female. I’m certain of it.”

“And what are you basing this on?” This time it was Bill who challenged Doyle.

“Up to this point, there have been at minimum three slayings by the same hand, perhaps as many as four and perhaps even five. London may outwardly be a city on the move, conducting its business as usual but psychologically, the entire metropolis is under a state of siege. The same is

certainly true of women, particularly among the prostitutes here in the East End. For many of these wretched creatures, they are still forced to ply their trade merely to stay alive for another day. However, while they’re about walking the streets, do not think for a minute that very many of these women are not armed or watched by trusted associates. Suspicion and paranoia, as you can expect, is rampant.

“And yet, despite three, four or even five slayings, the Ripper is still able to approach these unfortunate creatures, obtain trust or exploit a pre-existing one, strike, then mutilate them and melt back into the city without attracting suspicion. My theory, if you’ll permit me to elaborate, is that the Ripper isn’t a Jack, as this forgery attests, but rather a Jill. There are many midwives who ply their own trade here in London as well as their counterparts who perform abortions in back alleys and hovels for a few shillings. A woman would not so readily distrust another and then be permitted to walk unmolested through the streets with her clothes stained with blood if she could pass as a midwife. With the aid of a bonnet and a bit of cosmetics, a man could briefly impersonate a woman, I imagine, until getting to within a few inches of another person’s face but then the ruse would be revealed. That is, why, Inspector, you need to look not for a man but a woman.”

Doyle seemed pretty satisfied with himself as he finished his peroration but then Frank, who was by now quietly reading the case files with none of us noticing, interjected with his own thoughts.

“That’s all good and well, Mr. Doyle, but according to what I’m reading, the killer would’ve gotten very little if any blood on his or her clothes.” Doyle obviously did not like having his triumphant moment deflated with an inaudible pop but he retained enough politeness to ask Frank to elaborate.

“Well, I’m reading the findings of the coroner’s inquest of… let’s see, the Chapman and the, uh… Nichols murders. Apparently, both women had their throats cut from left to right, almost surely from behind. Now, I’ve seen men get shot in the neck and even saw a guy get his throat cut during a card game in the Arizona territories. While the heart still beats, there’s a large volume of blood that sprays out several feet.”

“I’m well aware of that, Mr. Butler. I’m a physician.”“Oh, well, I didn’t know that. My apologies,” he said in his soft Irish

brogue. “Then you’ll be even more aware than me that if you come up behind someone,” and to illustrate his point, Frank moved behind me and dragged his index finger across my throat, “and cut their throat like so, you won’t get any blood on you, since the blood would spray away from the victim and killer. That would seem to eliminate the need for a disguise or an excuse for bloody clothes.” Frank then released me and I rubbed my neck. Doyle wasn’t ready to go down without a fight.

“Then how else do you explain the killer being able to gain the confidence of the victims, especially at this stage with suspicion running rampant? Who else could achieve that level of trust?”

I then looked at Abberline and Bill and Frank followed but even the outspoken Buffalo Bill Cody dared not speculate aloud who else could. A Bobbie could. It was certainly worth exploring while the inspector wasn’t around.

#Over the next two days, we were in a profound state of quiet but it was

the kind of quiet one hears just before or after a bomb detonates. We couldn’t help but think about the Ripper’s alleged letter what promised to cut off another murder victim’s ears. Doyle wasn’t around very much during the next 48 hours. On the night of our arrival, he seemed extremely uncomfortable standing in the middle of a bordello, former or no. I didn’t cotton to the man but I privately shared his unease at being in the middle of a place where human flesh was sold as openly as fish or chestnuts.

But that unease was nothing compared to the excruciating anticipation of whether this Jack the Ripper character was going to make good on his threat. Having just arrived in Whitechapel, we were essentially all fishes out of water. The part of London in which we’d been installed in 1887 and earlier this year (and I left long before Bill’s English tour was over in May) was in a tonier part of the capital city far from the East End. I still could not easily forget the culture shock I’d experienced on coming here. The stench and filth in the streets, the grimy faces of the wheezing poor was on a slightly different level from what Jacob Riis and I had photographed in the Lower East Side and Five Points. Abberline had tossed off a statistic what alarms me to this day: About 55% of all Whitechapel children didn’t live to see their fifth birthday. It was indeed a horrifying number to contemplate. I didn’t know the numbers but I am confident the child mortality rate even in the impoverished Lower East Side was not nearly as high. How could the mightiest nation on earth allow this to happen within its midst? I often wondered to myself. The East End of London struck me as the part the British government chose to forget, a sick and deformed relative what one keeps in the basement and never lets out.

While I wasn’t contributing to the ongoing discussion about how to approach this series of gruesome murders, I would venture outside while thinking of what Mr. Cody said about my needing to immerse myself in the matrix of this hellhole, as disgusting as the prospect was. True to his word, the more I ventured out, the city’s foul, never-ending stench grew less objectionable. And while I cannot claim to be an expert on poverty in New York, I found it difficult to believe that even the poorest in my native city would be reduced to such desperate measures just to sustain basic life. If one remained vigilant and observant of their immediate surroundings it was possible to see at least one petty crime being committed every 60 seconds or so, from street urchins robbing greengrocers for apples or bakers for crusts of bread to pockets getting picked. And, of course, there were prostitutes a’plenty. I sadly looked at them even as they solicited me for custom, as the British would say, and wondered if any of them would

be the Ripper’s next victim. I didn’t dare talk to any of the inhabitants. And that especially applied to the tall redhead I’d seen on the 30 th just as Bill left to go to Gravesend to supervise the landing of the rest of his show.

She plainly didn’t belong there. Her dress, petticoat and bonnet weren’t much better than that worn by the others. And, while I’d seen her approaching men for obvious and immoral reasons, she still didn’t quite blend in with her surroundings. She was almost supernaturally beautiful, perhaps a bit older than me and stood a head taller than many of the males she’d solicited. I’d first seen her on Flower and Dean Street, the one south what ran parallel of Fashion St., and on following her I noted she was a regular patron of the dreadful pub at the end of our temporary street, the Queen’s Head. Like many prostitutes and sturdy beggars, there was little to do in the East End but drink which, I’d rightly suspected, only contributed to the criminal element. Yet, no matter how poverty-stricken Whitechapel was, and it most certainly was, the pubs always remained in business, both benefiting from and exacerbating the situation.

And yet the object of my attention if not my outright affections still did not seem to belong, as if she was an Irish angel who’d fallen off God’s throne and landed in squalor yet inexplicably insensible to her misery. It had utterly escaped me how such a ravishing creature who’d obviously come from a far more preferable locale could maintain her cheerfulness. At times, while feigning interest in the wares of one vendor or another, I could get close enough to hear her. Often, she sang.

By the second day, I was smitten by her, I must admit. Lord only knew what I was thinking.

After all, she was a Londoner, by birth or otherwise, and I from New York City in the United States. She was obviously one of Abberline’s “daughters of joy”, also called a “pinchprick” by the much more undiplomatic Conan-Doyle and I could not countenance even looking at the others knowing what they did behind closed doors and in open alleyways. But this girl… this girl had a way of making the immediate world fade into a haze like old photographs would be hazy around the edges, highlighting the subject in more conspicuous relief. She was then, and still is, the most shockingly beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

As difficult as it was for anything or anyone to tear my attention away from that red-headed beauty, somehow Bill managed to do just that when his Wild West show finally arrived in London. It required hiring perhaps every hackney in Gravesend to transport to the bordello all the performers, stagehands, canvas tents, props, signage and everything but the animals, for which Bill obviously had to arrange alternative travel and accommodations. This, as he’d explained to me, was one of the easiest aspects of the arrival since he merely needed to contact the local English stables what had accommodated the horses and other animals the previous year. The real challenge, he’d said, was in housing the various performers,

many of them being Sitting Bull’s Lakota Sioux people, whom he’d greeted with rare smiles and much mutual clasping of forearms. It was obvious the Indian performers still regarded him as something like their chief or one of them. Sitting Bull informed me during our last visit here that Indian tribes typically do not have one chief but several that settle the affairs of the rest of the tribe.

Yet, while on the face of it, it may have made for an ingenious cover to Bill, by pretending to do a show, it only brought him into more conspicuous relief. If the redheaded “daughter of joy” could capture and hold my attention for so long, how would Buffalo Bill Cody and half his Wild West Show elude that of the natives?

“Bill, your logic utterly escapes me,” I’d said to him as he was busy helping the performers and stagehands pull rolled canvas tents from a wagon, “How is willingly putting yourself and your show squarely in the sphere of paranoid suspicion supposed to aid in this investigation?”

“Scottie, I really don’t have time right now. I’ll explain the method to my madness later but right now I got a show to unpack and I ain’t got time for palaver.” Then he disappeared into the basement of the bordello what he’d appropriated as his temporary warehouse. He didn’t seem to care I’d gotten first dibs on it as my darkroom.

Yet I knew I was making a good point. From Abberline’s and Bill’s own lips had I heard that the latter’s Indian performers, or one of them, was briefly mentioned as a suitable candidate for suspicion in the Whitechapel murders. All Bill did was to put every one of them, starting with Sitting Bull, under the microscope of public scrutiny.

As proof of this, later that night there came a panicked knock at the door. The same day that Bill’s Indians had arrived, Jack the Ripper had struck again. Then again.