Read Online Jack the Ripper by The Whitechapel Society - Free Book Online
Authors: The Whitechapel Society
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friends, led by Mary Kelly, tried to blackmail the government to keep the scandal secret. A worried Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury), anxious to save the Royal Family’s face, and to prevent a potential collapse of government, called in his old Freemason friend, William Gull, to silence Kelly and co. in any way he saw fit. Because Gull had medical training, he could kill easily with a surgeon’s knife and he left Masonic ritual mutilations as a warning to others. To explain how an eminent physician could track down the women concerned, find his way around Whitechapel and get away unobserved, Sickert and Knight brought in a coachman, John Netley. Netley not only drove the doctor to the murder sites, but allowed the killings to take place in his cab. With Walter Sickert – who knew Mary Kelly personally – as lookout (Joseph Sickert claimed that this was actually Robert Anderson, head of the CID), the Ripper became not one man, but three. All with the aim to conceal the terrible secret of the clandestine marriage, and the birth of a daughter (Alice Crook) who, it could be argued, should have become Queen of England.
The Spiritualist medium, Robert James Lees.
Further ‘evidence’ against Gull comes from a rather tortuous source. Articles began to appear in various American newspapers, including the Chicago Sunday Times Herald in April 1895, claiming that the Ripper was an eminent London doctor. The information came from tittle-tattle from Dr Benjamin Howard, an American who had been working in London, and he had told the story to a prominent San Francisco citizen, William Greer Harrison. Although the doctor was unnamed, there were sufficient links with Guys Hospital – and the vivisectionist lobby, of which Gull was a member – for the well-informed to draw obvious conclusions. Even though Howard wrote a strenuous denial, via the People in January1896, to the effect that he had never discussed Jack the Ripper with anyone and knew no more than the sketchy newspaper reports back in 1888, the public were hooked.
The same series of articles concerned the spiritualist medium Robert James Lees, who claimed to have offered his services to both the City and Metropolitan Police in early October, 1888. Lees’ story was that whilst riding on a bus, he had the strongest sensation that he was sitting near the Ripper. He followed his suspect to an elegant house in the West End (later said to be Brook Street), and this led to police questioning the inhabitants. Lees’ fellow traveller turned out to be William Gull, who had recently suffered from serious bouts of memory loss. Over a period of time, the physician’s wife had come to recognise her husband’s increasingly violent mood swings and had become so afraid of him that she had locked herself, and her children, in a room in the house. At one point, she discovered blood on her husband’s shirt for which he could not account. A court of inquiry was held by Gull’s fellow doctors (or Masons, or both, depending on which subsequent version of the tale you read) and, convinced of his guilt, they sentenced him to an asylum under the pseudonym ‘Thomas Mason 124’. The word was put out that Gull had died, but the coffin contained either another body entirely or a pile of rocks, depending on how far down the conspiratorial path you want to go.
Nothing is more delicious to a researcher, especially of conspiracy theories, than to stumble upon a collection of papers which blow the lid off an accepted body of evidence. When Frank Spiering wrote Prince Jack in 1978, some of the material for the book came from the Academy of Medicine Library, in New York. This was a straight, 1896, reprint of the memoirs that had appeared two years earlier, written by Dr Acland, Gull’s son-in-law. What intrigued Spiering was the sheaf of 120 handwritten pages – apparently in Gull’s handwriting – which contained the extraordinary information that Gull had told the Prince of Wales that his son,
The Spiritualist medium, Robert James Lees.
Further ‘evidence’ against Gull comes from a rather tortuous source. Articles began to appear in various American newspapers, including the Chicago Sunday Times Herald in April 1895, claiming that the Ripper was an eminent London doctor. The information came from tittle-tattle from Dr Benjamin Howard, an American who had been working in London, and he had told the story to a prominent San Francisco citizen, William Greer Harrison. Although the doctor was unnamed, there were sufficient links with Guys Hospital – and the vivisectionist lobby, of which Gull was a member – for the well-informed to draw obvious conclusions. Even though Howard wrote a strenuous denial, via the People in January1896, to the effect that he had never discussed Jack the Ripper with anyone and knew no more than the sketchy newspaper reports back in 1888, the public were hooked.
The same series of articles concerned the spiritualist medium Robert James Lees, who claimed to have offered his services to both the City and Metropolitan Police in early October, 1888. Lees’ story was that whilst riding on a bus, he had the strongest sensation that he was sitting near the Ripper. He followed his suspect to an elegant house in the West End (later said to be Brook Street), and this led to police questioning the inhabitants. Lees’ fellow traveller turned out to be William Gull, who had recently suffered from serious bouts of memory loss. Over a period of time, the physician’s wife had come to recognise her husband’s increasingly violent mood swings and had become so afraid of him that she had locked herself, and her children, in a room in the house. At one point, she discovered blood on her husband’s shirt for which he could not account. A court of inquiry was held by Gull’s fellow doctors (or Masons, or both, depending on which subsequent version of the tale you read) and, convinced of his guilt, they sentenced him to an asylum under the pseudonym ‘Thomas Mason 124’. The word was put out that Gull had died, but the coffin contained either another body entirely or a pile of rocks, depending on how far down the conspiratorial path you want to go.
Nothing is more delicious to a researcher, especially of conspiracy theories, than to stumble upon a collection of papers which blow the lid off an accepted body of evidence. When Frank Spiering wrote Prince Jack in 1978, some of the material for the book came from the Academy of Medicine Library, in New York. This was a straight, 1896, reprint of the memoirs that had appeared two years earlier, written by Dr Acland, Gull’s son-in-law. What intrigued Spiering was the sheaf of 120 handwritten pages – apparently in Gull’s handwriting – which contained the extraordinary information that Gull had told the Prince of Wales that his son,
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