I, Ripper

ince the aftermath of the famous “double event” is so well known, it hardly needs dramatization; summary will suffice. As it turned out, the murder of the two shocked not merely London and the empire that sustained it but the entire world. At the precise point in the hysteria, the name Jack the Ripper arrived out of nowhere (that is, if my fevered imagination can be considered nowhere) and, taken with the coincidence of the chopped ear and the brilliance of the contrivance (ahem!), became instantly accepted by that same world, a globe terrified with Jack and yet desperate for information about him. By midweek the enigma of “Juwes” had emerged, lodged as it was in an opaque sentence, to further excite comment, fear, hysteria, and all sorts of bad behavior. Various suspects were named, their curricula vitae examined, and ultimately, when their regrettable innocence was proved, they were left to fade back into nothingness. We did our best to keep the hubbub hubbing along nicely, as O’Connor insisted on running a letter, a postcard actually, that he knew to be fraudulent, simply because it rehammered the Jack idea and contained the felicitous self-identifier – clearly inspired by my insouciant tone – “Saucy Jacky.”

Jack became a virtual industry, as all papers went all Jack, all editions. Replate, replate! (I still hadn’t figured out what that meant.) I’m not sure if fear was driving the frenzy or something a little bit more dubious, being some kind of secret, sick fascination with the hideous tragedy of others. As long as Jack limited his slaughter frenzy to whores, he’d have hundreds of thousands of fans among the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, safely fenced from his hunter’s dementia as they were. Let him knock off one of those poofs, however, and he’d be less titillating and by far a more palpable threat.

In all this, I was kept incredibly busy. On Sunday the first, Harry Dam and I worked through the night with Henry Bright, who united our two stories into a single seamless piece of reportage that I thought, having read what the Times and the Evening Mail and the Gazette offered, was quite the best. Henry was a talented journalist and an ethical one, and he knitted the stories into a calm tapestry of murder, mystery, mayhem, and official police ineptitude. It can be read today with profit, I say with some pride. It was my best journalism.

I will merely allude to subsequent developments of the next week or so, among them the upping of various rewards, the holding of inquests, funerals, the staging of a bloodhound test at Regent’s Park that produced yet more humiliation for Warren (his prize beasts, Barnaby and Burgho, managed to find only a couple copulating in the trees!), who was rapidly becoming the laughingstock of Western civilization. The victims of the double event were quickly identified, and their names became as well known as any West End ingenue’s. Poor Elizabeth Stride, who is always short-shrifted, as her murder is so much less interesting, was the lady who met her end at Dutfield’s Yard, being a Swedish immigrant, who, despite her nickname Long Liz, was another dumpling, she having just returned from the country where she and her paramour had been hop picking, though without much success. The second was Catherine Eddowes, in Mitre’s, where Jack had taken his time to do right by her and left some kind of hideous exhibition on the theme of “her guts for garters” for all to see.

When everything had been reported, we in the journalism business, knowing a good thing, rereported it with embellishments, theories, illustrations, and so forth and so on. Issues emerged: How had Jack miraculously escaped from Dutfield’s Yard when the pony wagon clearly trapped him in it? How had he then gotten cross town, near a mile by the shortest street route (shorter by crow, but as far as was known, he was not a crow) to butcher Mrs. Eddowes within forty-five minutes under the very noses of two separate City constables, without a noise being sounded, and then, still more intriguing, how had he escaped from that locked box, surrounded as it was by patrolling coppers, to arrive at Goulston Street and the Wentworth tenements to deposit his obvious clue and leave his opaque, tantalizing inscription? And what could those words mean? What was the secret of “Juwes”? Was it a code, was it a foreign word, was it a willed misspelling, was it a Masonic symbol, was it a tsarist ploy, was it an obscure cockneyism? Many a tea and crumpet were downed over consideration of the Juwe jigsaw.

At exactly this moment, what should arrive but a note from my new friend Professor Thomas Dare. Eager to keep acquaintance with so brilliant a mind and keen a wit, and still hungry for his alluded-to theories of Jack, I tore it open.