The ‘Mad Men’ Who Became Jack the Ripper Suspects in 1888
We don't know who Jack the Ripper was and yet many of us will have an idea of what he might have been. An image shaped by stories we’ve heard, books we’ve read or films we might have seen.
He was a royal prince, a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, a writer, a butcher, a barber, a lunatic. Whatever else he was he is certainly famous. Among the world’s serial killers Jack the Ripper is by far the most recognisable name.
Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer but he was the first serial killer to get a modern international press launch.
There is no question the ruthless exploitation of these murders by journalists simply to increase circulation has had a lasting impact on how we view the Jack the Ripper murders.
In the decades preceding the Whitechapel murders the newspaper industry had changed. New printing machines could turn out newspapers by the hundreds of thousands and they just needed good stories that would sell them.
The newspaper coverage coloured the impressions that people received of these murders. The desire by creative journalists to create a story that would sell newspapers has certainly had an impact on our perceptions right up to the present day.
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Detective stories and stories about crime, in general, make compelling stories. It's a strange coincidence that the world's best-known detective made his appearance the year before these murders.
In 1887, A Study in Scarlet, written by Arthur Conan Doyle, launched the career of Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle's stories are filled with colourful characters, exciting situations, sinister motives, and, of course, clues
In 1888, the police investigating these crimes concentrated on the same aspects. The motive was sought. The police focused less effort on the opportunity.
In both of the first two murders, the police knew of men who were, by their own admission, at the scene of the crime within minutes of the time that the murder was carried out.
This gave each of these two men the opportunity to have carried out the murder. Something that cannot be proved for any other suspect.
Despite this, the police quickly dismissed these two men as suspects.
The police were busy gathering clues which led them to expend a good deal of mental concentration and time following up eyewitness evidence.
Motive also guided them. The concept of motiveless murder, killing for its own sake, was a new idea, and the police were probably still only just getting accustomed to the idea that somebody might simply be killing for entertainment.
The police were focused, for the most part, on looking for someone with a reason for targeting and killing prostitutes.
This wouldn’t include suspecting an ordinary working man like Charles Allen Cross, who was standing by Polly Nichols’s body just minutes after she was murdered.
Or John Richardson, who said he visited the yard where Annie Chapman was murdered close to the time that Dr George Bagster Phillips estimated that she’d been murdered.
Today, we know from experience that very ordinary individuals who have never aroused suspicion, even among their nearest and dearest, can commit brutal murders.
And more than 30 years before the Whitechapel murders, Dr T.G. Davey had explained, in a lecture on insanity delivered at the Bristol medical school, that “a morbid perversion of the feelings” could coexist “with an unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties”.
People who appeared to be perfectly normal could experience very unhealthy feelings. You didn’t have to look like a monster to act like a monster.
Contributors writing in the newspapers about these murders in 1888 added to the debate. One journalist wrote that a number of parallel cases had occurred some seven years earlier in Westphalia.
A murderer there had been lassoing women and treating them in exactly the same manner as the Whitechapel victims:
“After many fruitless efforts on the part of the police to catch the perpetrator of the outrages, they had, at last, arrested a gypsy who was duly sentenced to death and beheaded. Unfortunately, a few days after his execution, the murders recommenced! The assassin had the impudence to write to the magistrate of the district saying that he meant to kill a certain number of victims and would then give himself up.”
The newspapers labelled such a murder as “lustmord” or pleasure murder.
Dr Julius Koch
An early researcher into mental illness was a German doctor called Julius Koch, and he published a book about his research, which he called A Short Textbook of Psychiatry.
In it, he popularised a word that is still used by psychiatrists. He was describing a condition that he called ‘soul suffering’, but he used the Greek for soul suffering: psychopath.
It's an interesting coincidence that Dr. Julius Koch published his book in 1888, the year of the psychopath—the psychopath we know as Jack the Ripper.
The idea arose that these murders were being committed by somebody who was insane. A lunatic, a homicidal maniac, and the sexual nature was not overlooked. He could be a serial killer who was a sex maniac.
The police also thought Oswald Puckeridge, born near Arundel in Sussex in 1838, might fit the picture.
Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in a report, said that:
“A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on August 4th, 1888. He was educated as a surgeon and has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.”
Charles Warren also mentioned Jacob Isenschmid, who came under suspicion. Isenschmid was a butcher living in Holloway.
On the 11th of September, two doctors, Dr Cowan and Dr Crabb, told the police that Isenschmid’s landlord, George Tyler, had become suspicious of the man because he often stayed out late at night and had not returned to his lodgings since the 8th of September, the date of Annie Chapman’s murder.
Isenschmid was born in Switzerland and was known in Holloway as the Mad Butcher. He was arrested on the 12th of September and taken to Holloway police station, where he was judged to be insane and sent to the Bow asylum.
Inspector Frederick Abberline reported:
“Although we are unable at present to procure any evidence to connect him with the murders, he appears to be the most likely person that has come under our notice to have committed the crimes”.
Fortunately, unlike the gypsy in Westphalia, he was not beheaded because the murders continued after he was safely locked up.
Another suspect was Charles Ludwig, a German hairdresser from Hamburg who arrived in London 1887 and found employment in the Minories quite close to where the murders took place and very close to where the fourth murder took place in Mitre Square.
On the 18th of September 1888 in the early hours of the morning in Three Kings Court he pulled a knife on a prostitute called Elizabeth Burns. Her cries of murder brought a police officer to her rescue.
Later, at 3am, Ludwig was at a coffee stall in Whitechapel High Street where he pulled a knife on a bystander. He was arrested so like Isenschmid he was under lock and key when the other murders took place.
All of these suspects, like more than a hundred more, must remain just suspects because there is no solid evidence that connects them to any of the murders. So, of course, ‘Jack the Ripper’ remains a mystery and a continuing source of fascination.
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