I, Ripper

s I had anticipated, the excess butchery of my method, satisfying though it might be to mind and soul in and of itself, had an electric effect on London journalism. It was the new rag, the Star, that took up the clarion most energetically. It is run, so it is said, by an Irishman; therefore all is understandable by virtue of the cruder Irish temperament, their propensity for the bottle, their impulsiveness and natural tendencies to violence, all of which are manifest in the Star.

MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN, it announced in a headline smeared across leader boards all throughout London. The newsboys bustled about, screeching, “Mad butcher, mad butcher, mad butcher!” You could not escape these tribes of annoying urchins, noses all runny, pouty faces red, the glee of greed in their beaming little rat eyes. I’m betting the dim, dull shopkeeps and salesclerks of the town couldn’t resist such titillation. More deliciously yet, an artist had provided a detailed drawing of the poor woman’s major wounds, by my memory quite accurately evoked. There, in all their glory, were the two fatal cuts, deep and profound, that settled the issue. And, flirting with the very limits of propriety, there was the abdominal excursion, with its sloppy jag halfway down as it veered to center.

A debate soon developed in the rags as the week wore on. This is excellent. Now, five days after the event, they have yet to put this bone down. It seems to be breaking along evening and morning lines. The Star and the Pall Mall Gazette, our leading afternoon exponents, are purveyors of the single-killer theory. Can you see why? It’s obvious. Unlike their morning brethren, whose product arrives by discreet carrier, the unruly afternoon boyos must sell their wares to walkers-by, people headed to the train stations or coming off shift from some coal-powered hellhouse or waiting to get aboard the horse trams or looking to amuse and edify themselves as they are trotted crosstown in a cabriolet. Thus, the fare offered them will be more salacious, more provocative, more tainted with the odor of sex, blood, and ruin. Their baser natures must be appeased. At the same time, at the end of their journey home, the dirty rag itself, sucked dry of the lubricious, can be stuffed in a refuse can, and our hero may enter his home under the fraud of being morally sacrosanct, ready to speak the blessing before the dinner of meat and potatoes that his spouse has so dutifully and lovingly prepared.

The morning papers, by contrast, do go into the home, to be devoured along with breakfast. They are limited in the extent of the gore and nastiness they can allow; it is of significantly lesser denomination than among their opponents. No filth can be allowed to besmirch the purity of the hearthside and the little nippers frolicking there before being shipped off at age seven to a decade of buggery and horsewhipping, plus proficiency in Greek. The same rags are also more likely read by women, whose delicacy in most cases cannot stand exposure to the rawness of life and death.

The morning fellows – the Times, the Mail, the Sun, the Standard, all the others – backed the gang theory. It held, quite absurdly, that possibly the lady, in her peregrinations for customers, had bumbled into a robbery by a set of hooligans and, as a witness, had to be silenced. Had the poor girl failed to pay up or witnessed a robbery? Was it part of some initiation rite by which a novice proved himself manly enough? The gang theory was meekly buttressed by the lack of blood along the street, held to be evidence that she had been killed elsewhere and deposited along Buck’s Row. Obviously, the authors of this nonsense had not looked at the soppage in her knickers, which had absorbed all those pints of the vital life fluid.

The Star led the pack, and the Gazette was not far behind in pursuing the mad-butcher thematic. It was a newsstand natural. It played brilliantly on primordial fears of lurkers with knives, and what evil simmered and boiled down dark city alleys or in precincts where whores sold their bodies to the night. There was probably a sense of divine punishment, unstated because there was no need to state it. The victim was beyond the pale of Queen Victoria’s formal, dark-garbed, earnest empire of rectitude, where the strength of conformity was just as strong on the home island as a bayonet’s steel in the outer rings of our Christian conquest of the world.