Carl Feigenbaum: German Sailor And Jack The Ripper Suspect
In 2005, Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation was published. The cover says, “A Top Murder Squad Detective Finally Uncovers the Truth”.
Ex-policeman Trevor Marriott first became interested in Jack the Ripper when he was at a gig in the 1960s and heard Screaming Lord Sutch singing his song Jack the Ripper.
In the song, Lord Sutch describes Jack the Ripper in the way that we have come to know him.
“He walks the streets of London late at night
He’s got a little black bag that’s oh-so tight
He’s got a big black cloak hanging down his back”
But if you think that makes him hard to miss, well Lord Sutch says
“Scotland Yard will never catch him, he’s too clever
He’s much too clever”
Scotland Yard did fail to catch him, which has made Jack the Ripper an irresistible quarry for amateur and professional detectives.
Marriott looks at the evidence offered for eleven other suspects and concludes that they got it wrong.
He says he long suspected that Jack the Ripper was a merchant seaman, which he believes is a new theory.
It is though quite an early theory.
Around the time the last victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was murdered in November 1888, Edward Larkins, a clerk in the civil service, suggested that there might be more than one Ripper.
One Ripper might be a crewman on the Portuguese cattle boats that frequently visited the East End docks.
Even Queen Victoria had her eye on those foreign visitors. In a letter to Henry Mathews, the Home Secretary, she wrote, “Have the cattle boats and passenger boats been examined?”
It’s interesting that the suspect that Marriott identifies was put forward less than a decade after the murders of 1888.
A lawyer, William Lawton, told the American press that Carl Feigenbaum was Jack the Ripper.
Lawton was one of the lawyers who defended Feigenbaum in a murder case. He was arrested and found guilty of murdering his landlady, Juliana Hoffman, on the 31st of August 1894, at 542 East Street, New York.
Lawton said that Feigenbaum had told him: “I have for years suffered from a singular disease which induces an all-absorbing passion; this passion manifests itself in a desire to kill and mutilate every woman who falls in my way; I am unable to control myself.”
The lawyer remembered the Whitechapel murders and asked Feigenbaum about them. Feigenbaum replied: “The Lord was responsible for my acts, and that to him only could I confess”.
Marriott says this is crucial to his investigation although he adds that: “As hearsay, Lawton’s evidence would not have been admissible in a court of law up until now.”
Now, it must be said that hearsay evidence has to fulfil some stringent conditions in order for it to be admissible.
A defence lawyer could argue that a lawyer reporting what a client told him would not meet those stringent conditions.
He would certainly argue that Feigenbaum’s response to a question about the Whitechapel murders, namely: “The Lord was responsible for my acts, and that to him only could I confess”. Is far too ambiguous to convict the man.
Marriott says: “However, in England, the laws of evidence with regard not only to hearsay evidence but also evidence of bad character . . . have recently been changed”.
From this, he says, “These changes have had a major impact on my investigation, strengthening my belief that it can be proved that Feigenbaum was Jack the Ripper.”
Whilst investigating officers might consider hearsay and evidence of bad character, it must be hoped that our police officers and legal system would require much more solid evidence before trying to get a conviction.
On the issue of the conduct of those involved in law enforcement, Marriott ends his book with this paragraph:
“By way of conclusion, I would add that, despite the wealth of sophisticated technology now available to law enforcement agencies throughout the world, my work has proved that there is still a place in crime investigation for good old-fashioned investigative techniques. I just wish that today’s police detectives would spend more time physically investigating crimes instead of relying so much on current technology to solve crimes for them. JACK THE RIPPER 1840 — 1896 REST IN HELL.”
Old-fashioned investigative techniques, when applied by a law enforcement officer determined only to find the material that will lead to a conviction, might not be the best way to proceed in a criminal case.
It might be better to adopt an open-minded search for the truth.
Marriott supports his case that Feigenbaum was Jack the Ripper by commenting on a murder that took place on the 25th of October 1891, in Berlin.
“This murder again had all the Ripper’s hallmarks. The victim was a prostitute who took her killer to a known location for the purposes of sex, as in the Whitechapel murders.”
As somebody who has read many books and articles about the Whitechapel murders, I can state that there is no solid evidence that any of the Whitechapel murders resulted from a prostitute accosting a man and taking him to a dark and unfrequented spot for sex. There are only assumptions.
Indeed, such evidence as there is points to three of the victims never having sold sex.
Marriott believes that Feigenbaum, who was born in 1840 in Germany, was a merchant sailor who sailed between Bremen and the Whitechapel docks.
Marriott discovered that there were several ships docked in London on the dates of the murders.
Unfortunately, there are very few records available to us of the shipping that took place at that time, so Marriott was unable to pin down any particular person who might have been on board.
The evidence is similarly vague about the other murders in Europe, the USA and Nicaragua that Marriott suggests Feigenbaum could have committed.
The only murder for which there was clear evidence was the murder of Juliana Hoffman — who was definitely not a prostitute — on August 31st, 1894, in New York.
It was this murder that sent Feigenbaum to the electric chair in Sing Sing prison on the 27th of April 1896.
There is still no evidence that allows anyone — even an ex-police officer — to say: “JACK THE RIPPER 1840 — 1896 REST IN HELL.”
Thank you for checking out this post.