Читать книгу They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper - Bruce Robinson - Страница 10

You shall be cautious in your words and carriage, that the most penetrating stranger shall not be able to discover or find out what is not proper to be intimated; and sometimes you shall divert a discourse, and manage it prudently for the honour of the worshipful fraternity.

Colonel T.H. Shadwell Clerke, Masonic Constitutions (1884)

In chronological terms, Annie Chapman was the third in the series, but it was the most shocking yet in terms of Masonic signature. Mrs Chapman was a forty-seven-year-old nothing with progressive lung disease that would probably have killed her if the Ripper hadn’t. In the early hours of Saturday, 8 September 1888, in want of four pennies for a bed, she went out hawking the only thing she had. Just before six o’clock that same morning, her grotesquely mutilated body was discovered in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Whitechapel.

Her killer had clearly performed some kind of postmortem ritual. Her throat was cut across, her abdomen had been slashed open and her intestines removed, and deposited on her left shoulder. A ring or rings had been wrenched from her fingers, and together with her womb were missing from the crime scene. The assailant had also cut her pockets open, making a neat display of their contents at her feet. Amongst ‘other articles’ these consisted of a piece of muslin and a pair of combs. ‘There was also found,’ reported the Telegraph, ‘two farthings polished brightly’ – coins soon to be named ‘the Mysterious coins’, and to become the subject of trivial controversy.

A little over a week before Annie Chapman, a forty-three-year-old dipso called Mary Anne (‘Polly’) Nichols had suffered a primitive version of the same penalty. She had her throat cut across, her entrails hauled out and a worthless ring purloined from her finger. It is very probable that her murderer took it.

As has been mentioned, the removal of metal is axiomatic in Masonic ritual – ‘What ever he [or she] has about him made of metal is taken off,’ order the statutes of lodge initiation, ‘as buckles, buttons, rings, boxes, and even money in his pocket is taken away.’

No chance of any leap in forensic thinking here, then? It seems worth thinking about to me, particularly in the context of Scotland Yard’s comic mantra, ‘No clue too small.’

Bearing ‘clues’ in mind, and as a consideration, is it not possible that the assassin was indulging in some kind of postmortem compulsion that dictated entrails on a shoulder and the removal of metal? No need to get off one’s perch about it – just consider it along with a cut throat, cut pockets and coins as part of a broadening debate.

The following enquiry, in respect of metal, is one of the first put to an Entered Apprentice on Masonic initiation:

WORSHIPFUL MASTER: Brother, your Conductor thinks you have money about you. Search yourself. (Candidate feels in his pockets and insists he has none.)

SENIOR DEACON: I know the Candidate has money and if he will suffer me to search him, I will convince you of it.

In the above example, the Senior Deacon surreptitiously supplies the coins, and it’s my view that Jack supplied the farthings that were found near Annie Chapman’s body. Although these coins were described in contemporary press reports, a stalwart voice with special historic insight raises conjecture. Boss Ripperologist Mr Philip Sugden denies that they were there, citing Dr Phillips (who conducted the autopsy) as impeccable support for his argument. Because neither Phillips nor Inspector Chandler mentions coins at the inquest, hey presto, they couldn’t have been there. But Bro Dr Phillips is no more reliable than Bro McLeod, and both occasionally suffer the tribulations of amnesia. Memory loss is a shared phenomenon among certain Masons that will grip the corporate brain as we progress with this narrative. In the meantime, if the metaphor can be forgiven, I’d like to argue the toss of these coins in a later chapter, leaving the politics of metal until then.

On Wednesday, 26 September 1888, presiding over Chapman’s inquest, the coroner, Mr Wynne Baxter, said this: ‘But perhaps nothing was more noticeable than the emptying of her pockets and the arrangement of their contents with business-like precision in order near her feet.’

These murders were part of an evolving homicidal signature, the significance of which would have been as clear to Charles Warren as the nose on his face. For the sake of illustration, I’d like to consider Chapman’s demise from a different perspective. Let us create and evaluate an alternative battery of mutilations. Instead of a throat cut across, let us suppose the fatal wound was a deep gash, as might be caused by a spear or something similar thrust into her side. And let us imagine, subsequent to death, that her killer had opened her arms into the position of a crucifixion, and had taken the time (and the risk) to drive rusty nails through the palms of her hands, then positioned these nails at her feet before he fled. Would you not expect that someone of even moderate intelligence might hazard the possibility that the murder was the work of a ‘religious nut’? A one-eyed vicar up for the day could put it together. Yet of inquisitiveness over a similarly glaring distortion of Masonic ritual there was none. Warren and his detectives were positively stumped. There were no clues whatever, they said. No scream, and nothing to go on. ‘So far from giving a clue,’ comes a perceptive echo, ‘they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.’ ‘It exemplifies their worst fault,’ agreed the Daily News: ‘they cannot put two and two together.’

Maths was not a problem for a journalist by the name of George Sims, who wrote a weekly column for the Referee under the title ‘Mustard and Cress’. Sims’ derisive comments don’t do a lot for the idea that nobody said anything about Freemasonry in connection with the murders until the arrival of Mr Stephen Knight.

On 9 September 1888, the day after Chapman’s death, Sims wrote this: ‘The police up to the moment of writing are still at sea as to the series of Whitechapel murders – a series with such a strong family likeness as to point to one assassin or firm of assassins’ (my emphasis).

‘Assassins’ and ‘ruffians’ are interchangeable in the mythos of Freemasonry. Notwithstanding that, what did Sims have in mind when he wrote of a ‘firm of assassins’? Is it the same question posed in a pamphlet dedicated to Bro Sir John Corah, published in Anno Lucis 4954? ‘What is this drama of Assassination?’ he asks. ‘And whence is it derived?’1

Sims needed no explanation. He was a Freemason himself, and on 16 September 1888 he returned to his theme. ‘The police may be playing a game of spoof [swindle, humbug or fraud, according to The Oxford English Dictionary], but the fact remains that in no suggestion made by the authorities up to the present is the slightest technical knowledge of the “speciality” of the Whitechapel atrocities shown.’

Bro Sims doesn’t elucidate what he means by ‘speciality’,2 but that didn’t prevent him adding a bit of cynical doggerel to underline his drift:

The Summer had come in September at last,

And the pantomime season was coming on fast,

When a score of detectives arrived from the Yard

To untangle a skein which was not very hard.

It puzzled the Bar, and puzzled the Bench,

It puzzled policemen, Dutch, German and French,

But ’twas clear as a pikestaff to all London ’tecs,

Who to see through a wall didn’t want to wear specs.

‘Clear as a pikestaff’ it was, to Bro Sims as it is to me. But the Metropolitan Police didn’t want to see anything, through spectacles or anything else. Warren and his ‘’tecs’ would have seen nothing worth investigating if they’d been staring at the Ripper in action through an open window.

During the stalled Chapman inquiry, Inspector Abberline of H Division, Whitechapel, consulted with Detective Inspector Helson of J Division, CID, an officer who was (or should have been) still working on the Nichols horror at Buck’s Row in Whitechapel. There were clear similarities between the two cases, and Abberline was palpably having a problem with his. According to the Daily Telegraph on 15 September, ‘Inspector Abberline himself says that the Police Surgeon [Bro Dr George Bagster Phillips] has not told him what portions of the body are missing.’3

Is this not extraordinary – that a police surgeon should hoard evidence to himself? If true, it means that Abberline was in the dark, riding around on flat tyres. ‘From independent testimony,’ continues the Telegraph, ‘it has been gathered that the description of them [body parts] would enable the jury, if not the public, to form some idea of the motive of the singular crime, and at the same time it would perhaps enable the police to pursue their investigations on a wider basis, and probably with the object of showing that the guilty man moves in a more respectable rank of life than that to which the larger proportion of the inhabitants of Spitalfields and Whitechapel belong.’

At this point, then, the mutilations peculiar to Chapman had not yet been revealed to the public, nor apparently to one of Whitechapel’s most senior detectives. Astonishing as it seems, we have a police surgeon withholding evidence crucial to Abberline’s investigation. Hence the Inspector’s liaison with Helson. No progress there, either. Joseph Helson was no more forthcoming than, and just as baffled by it all as, Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. ‘They have nothing to suggest,’ was the sum total of it, according to the Daily News, ‘and in the case of Nichols, to judge by an observation of Inspector Helson on Saturday, they have no hope of any further evidence.’4

In which case we may as well look at a photograph to pass the time. Inspector Joseph Helson is the Freemason with the beard on the right.

So that’s that, then. Bro Helson doesn’t know any more than Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. Meanwhile, Phillips was poised to show equal reticence in a coroner’s court.

The coroner in question was a forty-four-year-old solicitor, fond of elegant clothes and his own opinions. By any definition, and certainly his own, Wynne Baxter was a man of importance. He had written one of the standard works on the coroner’s trade, Judicature Acts and Rules, and, never shy of his stature in the Victorian scheme of things, his telegraph address was ‘Inquest London’. Conservative to the marrow but of sincere social conscience, Baxter had risen inexorably through Establishment ranks, becoming Junior High Constable in 1880 and first Mayor of his home town, Lewes, the following year. In 1887 he’d been elected as Coroner for East Middlesex (Whitechapel included), and in that capacity almost all of Jack’s outings became the business of his court. He presided over inquests into Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles.

Baxter was Establishment to his manicured fingertips, but he was no Establishment stooge. Minions of the state were no less immune to his searching invective than stupid witnesses (the cops got a crisp bollocking over allowing Nichols to be removed to the morgue without noticing she’d been disembowelled).

An adjournment in respect of Nichols meant that Baxter’s summing-up was delivered in concurrence with the inquest following it. He was thus able to compare the postmortem atrocities she had suffered with those of Chapman. ‘The similarity of the injuries in the two cases was considerable,’ he observed. ‘There were bruises about the face in both cases, the head nearly severed from the body in both cases.’ It was at this point that his perceptions diverged from those of the police surgeon assigned to Nichols: ‘Doctor Llewellyn seemed to incline to the opinion that the abdominal injuries were inflicted first, and caused instantaneous death; but, if so, it seemed difficult to understand such desperate injuries to the throat. Surely it might well be that, as in the case of Chapman, the dreadful wounds to the throat were first inflicted and the abdominal afterwards?’ ‘That was a matter of importance,’ he remarked, ‘when they [the jury] came to consider the possible motive there could be for all this ferocity.’

A matter of importance indeed; and but for the intervention of the System via Bro Dr Phillips two days later, a matter that would doubtless have been explained. Phillips was a Pecksniff of classic self-delusion whose misguided loyalties would debase Baxter and turn his court into a national laughing stock.

The inquiry into the death of Annie Chapman began on 12 September 1888 at the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel. It was a virtual rerun of Nichols. A string of witnesses and protracted testimony over who, what and where led to the inevitable verdict ‘Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’.

The hearings lasted over five sessions. In my view there was only one witness of real significance, and he was the one who didn’t want to talk. Bro Dr Phillips arrived on day three. His evidence was punctilious and comprehensive, until he came to the tender question of the mutilations. There was then a change of tone. These horrors, he insisted, had been performed after death, and therefore had no relevance to the cause of it.

Predicated on such vacuous nonsense, it was of no importance that, for example, John George Haigh dissolved his victims in acid after shooting them through the head.5 It was a .45 bullet that killed them, and the carboy brimming with H2SO4 was merely a bit of local ephemera. There was nothing left of Haigh’s last victim but a couple of gallstones and a pair of dentures. Teeth with no face, but what a story they chattered. You don’t need to be William Shakespeare to hear whispers from the throats of the dead. But according to The Times, Phillips ‘thought that he had better not go into further details of the mutilations, which could only be painful to the feelings of the jury and the public’.

The jury weren’t here for a lullaby, and this was tosh. Baxter formulated this view with more diplomacy. ‘The object of the enquiry,’ he reminded Phillips, ‘is not only to ascertain the cause of death, but the means by which it occurred. Any mutilations which took place afterwards may suggest the character of the man who did it.’

‘The character of the man who did it’ was precisely what Phillips was trying to avoid. While feigning concern for the sensitivity of others, his posture was actually obscene, of utility to no one but the bloody outrage rampaging around Whitechapel. Phillips was covering up, cynically playing the same shabby card Warren was about to pull from his sleeve in Goulston Street.

Stand by for the obligatory dose of fairy dust, courtesy once again of Mr Philip Sugden. ‘Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal,’ he soothes. ‘He was simply conforming to the code of practice that Howard Vincent had bequeathed to the CID, a code that required the utmost discretion on the part of police officers in all cases in which the identity of the culprit has not been established.’6

Irrespective of the fact that Bro Dr Phillips was not a police officer, this is one of the most singularly ridiculous sentences in Mr Sugden’s book. I shall be returning to ‘Vincent’s Code’, and the contempt in which Warren held it, in the following chapter. Meanwhile, to evoke Vincent here is to reduce his ‘Code of Practice’ to the musings of Donald Duck.

Are we supposed to believe that Phillips was withholding information for the public good, that ‘caution’ was somehow the bedfellow of impending forensic breakthrough? Was he poised – together with the indefatigable efforts of Scotland Yard – for a triumphant exposition that would make sense of Vincent and shortly reveal all? I’m afraid not. In fact, nothing could be more distant from reality. At Elizabeth Stride’s inquest some few weeks hence, Bro Phillips would dissemble like a common delinquent, and at the shameful ‘inquest’ into the death of Mary Jane Kelly he attempted not to show up at all.7

Vincent’s Code? The only man laughing was a psychopath. Plus, I’d like to know to which code Mr Sugden refers. I have a copy of Vincent (1881), and in the context of homicide he properly makes no reference to a coroner’s court. He had no jurisdiction in such a place – its procedures were conducted under the Rules of the Coroner. I suggest some other excuse for Phillips’s obfuscation must need to be hammered to fit. Nor should we forget the superannuated nonsense riding pillion: ‘Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal.’ Well, thanks for that, but I think we’ve already got the gist, which I believe appears as points 6 to 11 of Instructions to a Freemason under interrogatory distress.

But at least there’s something over which Mr Sugden and I can agree: Phillips was not party to a hush-up of any royal scandal (Bro Stowell hadn’t yet invented it), and the Duke of Clarence had nothing whatsoever to do with Jack the Ripper. Clarence was not Jack. And let it be understood that by hauling this hapless royal idiot back from the grave to dismiss ‘royal scandal’ does not by a process of osmosis dismiss an ‘Establishment hush-up’. No, Phillips was not covering up for the royal family. But yes, he was covering up for Freemasonry.

A week later he was back on the witness stand, and this time Baxter wasn’t in the mood for waffle. Once again he wanted to know about the mutilations, and once again Bro Phillips didn’t want to tell him.

BAXTER: Whatever may be your opinions and objections, it appears to me necessary that all the evidence that you ascertained from the postmortem examination should be on the records of the court for various reasons which I need not enumerate. However painful it may be, it is necessary in the interests of justice.

DR PHILLIPS: I have not had any notice of that. I should be glad if notice had been given me, because I should have been better prepared to give evidence.

This pretence hit the deck when Baxter offered another postponement. Such delay was worthless if it meant returning to the issue, and Phillips declined. What exactly did Phillips think he was there for? He was a police surgeon called to give evidence at a coroner’s court, and ‘notice’ of his requirements was surely implicit in his summons. Shuffling his notes, he tried to get away with a rehash of the evidence he’d already given: ‘I think it is a very great pity to make this evidence public. Of course, I bow to your decision, but there are matters which have come to light now which show the wisdom of the course pursued on the last occasion, and I cannot help reiterating my regret that you have come to a different conclusion.’

How Baxter was supposed to arrive at a conclusion over matters he was unaware of isn’t explained. He was just as much in the dark as everyone else. Phillips then went on to rehearse his descriptions of the bruises on Chapman’s face, as though this were the information everyone sought. Both Baxter and the jury had heard it before, but apparently it was all they were going to get.

DR PHILLIPS: When I come to speak of wounds on the lower part of the body I must again repeat my opinion that it is highly injudicious to make the results of my examination public.

BAXTER: We are here in the interests of justice and must have all the evidence before us.

Exasperated with this obstruction, Baxter ordered that ‘several ladies and [newspaper messenger] boys in the room should leave’. Phillips had now run out of excuses, but still flapped about like something the tide had left. Shifting from jurors’ sensibilities, he had a go at the ‘ends of justice’: ‘In giving these details to the public, I believe you are thwarting the ends of justice.’

Baxter had had enough, and so had the jury.

BAXTER: We are bound to take all the evidence in the case, and whether it be made public or not is a matter for the responsibility of the press.

FOREMAN: We are of opinion that the evidence the doctor on the last occasion wished to keep back should be heard.

Several jurymen endorsed this with cries of ‘Hear, hear.’

‘I have carefully considered the matter,’ ruled Baxter, ‘and have never before heard of any evidence requested being held back.’ Considering that during his long career Baxter was to preside over thousands of such hearings, this was quite a statement. Doing to death by unpleasant means was the stock in trade of a coroner’s court, and he had never before heard of any evidence being held back. So what was the game, doc?

‘I have not kept it back,’ whined Phillips. ‘I have only suggested it should not be given out’ (which to the average ear sounds remarkably like keeping it back). Presumably he was defending the police’s claim that there was ‘not the slightest clue to the murderer’. Well, if he never left a clue, why withhold it?

In reality the mutilations didn’t represent anything as mundane as a ‘clue’, but were the essence of what these murders were, duplicated with escalating symbolic ferocity time after time. They were irrefutable evidence of ritualistic murder, and the only question outstanding was: What was the ritual?

Baxter had skated into dangerous territory, insisting on his court’s rights even as the ice cracked under his feet.

BAXTER: We have delayed taking this evidence as long as possible, because you said the interests of justice may be served by keeping it back; but it is now a fortnight since this occurred, and I do not see why it should be kept back from the jury any longer.

DR PHILLIPS: I am of opinion that what I am about to describe took place after death, so that it could not affect the cause of death you are enquiring into.

BAXTER: That is only your opinion, and might be repudiated by other medical opinion.

DR PHILLIPS: Very well, I will tell you the results of my postmortem examination.

The newspapers declined to print his description, which was ‘totally unfit for publication’ according to The Times. Seekers of sensation would have to make do with the medical journal the Lancet, which limited itself to précis: ‘It appears that the abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body and placed by the shoulder of the corpse.’8

Chapman’s shocking list of injuries must have chilled the court, and especially the coroner who had demanded it. As the doctor enunciated each telling word, Baxter must have realised what all the reticence was about. Bro Phillips was describing a ritualised enactment of Freemasonic penalty, something any Freemason would have recognised immediately. Bro Wynne Baxter was a Freemason, and recognise it he surely did.

I have no doubt that (with the exception of the case of the Ripper) both Phillips and Baxter were men of integrity. But, like Shelley’s pestilence, Jack poisoned the very soul of all that was honourable, and with Baxter we can actually see the process of enmeshment in action. Cue the ‘Mystic Tie’. By tradition it is juries that are nobbled. In this case the process was reversed. At the next and last session of Chapman’s inquest, this seasoned coroner, of previously unimpeachable repute, concocted one of the most ridiculous lies ever told in a coroner’s court.

Baxter had put his foot in it, and it was now incumbent upon him to conjure up something that might serve to explain away Jack’s Masonic surgery in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street. As the finale to his deliberations, the compromised Bro Coroner implanted a preposterous fiction in the jury’s mind. The Ripper had made off with Chapman’s uterus, and this, according to Baxter, was the crux of the matter. Repugnant as this act was, monstrous as it was, there was no reason to suspect that anything other than market forces was at play, ‘For it is clear,’ he shitmouthed, ‘there is a market for the object of the murder.’

The object of the murder had become the financial value of a body part. Mrs Chapman was the victim of a commercial enterprise.

Would you now please welcome ‘the American Womb-Collector’.

‘Within hours of the issue of the morning papers,’ opined the newly accredited zombie, ‘I received a communication from an officer of one of our great medical schools, that they had information that might or might not have a distinct bearing on our enquiry. I attended at the first opportunity, and was told by the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum that some months ago an American had called on him, and asked him to procure a number of specimens of the organ that was missing from the deceased. He stated his willingness to give 20 pounds for each, and explained that his object was to issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication in which he was engaged.’ (His publishers must have been well pleased that the projected dissertation wasn’t upon the pathology of testicles.) ‘Although he was told that his wish was impossible to be complied with, he still urged his request. He desired them preserved,’ continued the unlikely entertainer, ‘not in spirits of wine, the usual medium, but in glycerine in order to preserve them in a flaccid condition, and he wished them sent to America direct. It is known that this request was repeated to another institute of similar character.’

It was proved almost immediately by newspaper enquiry that no prominent medical school had ever received such an application. But the jury couldn’t know that, and Bro Baxter was hardly interested. Without pausing for breath, he deftly linked author with assassin. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘is it not possible that this demand may have incited some abandoned wretch to possess himself of a specimen?’

At last the jury was party to the classified forensics Bro Phillips had so assiduously tried to hide behind. It must have all sounded so obvious when you knew it. Jack the Ripper was working for a publisher! What Baxter would have had the jury believe was that ‘some abandoned wretch’, converted into an entrepreneur by something that was never said at a non-existent medical school, had then set about terrorising East London, burgling uteri, which he would post to America, where they would be packaged with a book. A sort of ‘buy one get one free’.

‘I need hardly say,’ confided Bro Baxter, ‘that I at once communicated my information to the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. Of course I do not know what use has been made of it.’

I’m happy to supply the answer. None. None, because it was diversionary junk for public consumption; and none, because the Detective Department was busy doing what you were now doing, Coroner Bro Baxter, and that was covering up.

As far as the ‘Fiend’ was concerned, Baxter had learned his lesson the hard way. He would never again make the same mistake. At the Stride inquest he would preside over an ‘in-house’ conspiracy that should have put him in prison. Baxter had joined the automaton, and what a pitiful little maggot Jack had made of him. He all but blew it with ‘the Womb-Collector’, stretching credulity into a backlash of press ridicule.

‘Of all the ludicrous theories,’ mocked Henry Labouchère’s Truth, ‘the theory of the coroner is assuredly the most grotesque. I don’t know if there is any way of getting rid of a Comic Coroner, but if any machinery does exist for the purpose, it ought without a moment’s delay be put into force.’ Truth wanted Baxter ‘retired summarily and quickly’, lest ‘the bibulous gentlemen about Pall Mall might get their livers torn out and offered with some number of a temperance magazine’.9 Baxter’s theory was ‘altogether preposterous’, according to the Observer.

But much more damning for ‘the Comic Coroner’ was the reaction of his peers in the medical profession. ‘My purpose in writing,’ intoned one eminent croaker, Sir James Risden-Bennett, ‘was simply to demonstrate the absurdity of the theory that the crimes were being committed for the purpose of supplying an American physiologist with specimens. It would be extremely easy, here or in America either, for a physiologist to secure this portion of intestines. The notion that they were wanted in order that they might be sent out along with copies of a medical publication is ridiculous; not only ridiculous indeed, but absolutely impossible of realisation.’10 In other words, you don’t have to go through the perversions of obvious Masonic ritual to publish a non-existent book.

No one agreed more than the world’s most respected medical journal. ‘The whole tale is almost beyond belief,’ judged the Lancet, ‘and if, as we think, it can be shown to have grown in transmission, it will not only shatter the theory that cupidity [twenty quid] was the motive of the crime, but will bring into question the discretion of the officer of the law [Bro Baxter] who could accept such a statement and give it such wide publicity.’11

Baxter was no more believed than had he proposed Jack’s disappearance from Hanbury Street up a beanstalk. His artful little fairy tale had backfired. The Lancet hadn’t finished: ‘And what is equally deplorable, the revelation thus made by the Coroner, which so dramatically startled the public last Wednesday evening, may probably lead to a diversion from the real track of the murderer, and thus defeat rather than serve the ends of justice.’12

Or, put succinctly, it was a resounding success. Diversion and defeat of the ends of justice were what it was all about. The felony that terminated inquiries into the death of Annie Chapman shows just how easy it was for bent officials to corrupt justice. It was ‘preposterous’, it was ‘deplorable’, it was ‘comic’, it was a false lead that could only serve to assist the criminal. But it was also an unaccountable system in action. Bro Baxter kept his job. The only individuals with the authority to get rid of him were those who needed him most.

The hostile reaction to his desperate lying, however, panicked the authorities, who realised that some urgent news management was required. Feeble as it was false, the conservative Standard delivered a wriggling little effort, attempting to portray Baxter’s flight of fantasy as the result of a ‘mistake’ by a ‘minor official’. Dismissing the £20 as an unhappy nonsense, the paper went on to dismiss the very notion of the American quack and his fabulously laughable book. ‘The person in question was a physician of the highest respectability,’ assured the Standard, ‘and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities of his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real information for the hypothesis, and the information communicated, which was not at all of the nature which the public had been led to believe, was due to an erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard, and to which a negative reply was given. This theory may at once be dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained even by its author.’13

It wasn’t. But never mind what ‘the public had been led to believe’ – what about the jury? It got the same despicable earful of Establishment camouflage. If ‘the Womb-Collector’ was a ‘theory that may at once be dismissed’, should not the court have immediately reconvened under an honest (non-Masonic) coroner to examine the true nature of Chapman’s mutilations? Was not Bro Dr Bagster Phillips withholding a reality, converted by Bro Coroner Wynne Baxter into a comic fantasy? Such patent rubbish had now been rejected, so what exactly were the pair of them hiding?

Such questions were emotive, and remained bereft of answer. But let no one fret – we’ll soon be back in the gaslight, a sedative is on its way. ‘Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt,’ writes Mr Sugden from his usual altitude, ‘but it would be instructive to learn just how much truth there was in the information he was given.’14

As in, how brown is this shit? The tenor of this sentence is breathtaking. If Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt, might we please know Mr Sugden’s definition of integrity?

Baxter’s ‘integrity’ was shot to bits, and all subsequent evidence reveals him to have been a Masonic dupe. He should have been summarily fired, and prosecuted for misfeasance of office. And he would have been, had he not been protecting the Establishment that owned him.

The answer to the second part of Mr Sugden’s sentence is none. There was no truth in ‘the information he was given’, because he was never given it. It was merely a contribution to what the Telegraph called ‘the scandalous exhibition of stupidity revealed in the East End inquests’. In short, it was a confection of diversionary twaddle, and once it had served its nefarious purpose, Bro Baxter (like Bro Stowell after him) denied it.15 There was no American in London seeking uteri in glycerine. There was no medical school that could confirm such an approach. There was no £20 on offer for the merchandise, and there was no mind-numbingly ridiculous book to go with it. The ‘minor official’ referred to by the Standard, incidentally, was almost certainly Bro Phillips himself. In apparent ignorance of the impending backtrack, he turned up at Baxter’s court with ambitions to confirm the theory. The witness who previously hadn’t wanted to say anything was now canvassing the ear of any reporter who would listen.

Baxter, meanwhile, was in full mendacious flight on the bench. The Masonic doctor had not been called that day, and was present at the court on his own account, claiming that he had ‘attended the inquest for the purpose of answering further questions, with a view to elucidating the mystery; but he arrived while the Coroner was summing-up, and thus had no opportunity’.16

Phillips was there in order to confirm what everyone else was about to deny. ‘When told by a reporter of the startling statement in the coroner’s summing up [the Womb-Collector], he [Phillips] said he considered it a very important communication, and the public [and, in time, Mr Sugden] would now see the reason for not wishing in the first place to give a description of the injuries. He attached great importance to the applications which had been made to the Pathological Museum, and to the advisability of following this information up to a probable clue.’17

To ‘follow this information up’ was to pursue an utterly false lead, and Phillips knew it as surely as did the Lancet. This creepy little profferer of deceit had no business to be at this court, talking up such junk. ‘The American Womb-Collector’ had about as much credibility as Robert Anderson’s ‘Ink-Stained Journalist’, who was about to make his entrance, poised with his quill, in anticipation of the Ripper’s correspondence. The American Womb-Collector was never to be heard of again, soon to be replaced for the duration by a character of no less fabulous provenance: to wit, ‘the Insane Medical Student’. Their differences were few, but while ‘the Womb-Collector’ gathered in human organs, ‘the Insane Medical Student’ handed them out.

Nothing happens by accident. Bro Baxter didn’t invent his nonsensical theory by accident, and it was no accident that Bro Phillips reappeared at his court to support it. Both were lying, and the Ripper was on a win–win. They knew he was a Mason (or someone pretending to be one), but they didn’t yet know who he was. Was he someone close to the System, or even a part of it? Until this was found out, he had to be accommodated.

Evidence was therefore manipulated, degraded and distorted, and in the case of the imminent outrage at Goulston Street, literally wiped out. When Sir Charles Warren finally got his silly arse down to Whitechapel, he found the vernacular of the ‘Three Assassins’ flaunted like an advert for Freemasonry. In a crazy onslaught, the crime scenes were saturated with it. But Jack’s extravaganza was also his immunity. ‘The feeling,’ accused the Bradford Observer, ‘is that the helplessness of the police is the most discreditable exhibition of their incapacity that has been witnessed for many years.’

Discreditable it was, but they hadn’t seen nothing yet. Under Warren, detectives regarded the office of a Freemason as superior to that of a serving police officer. Dispensing with any sense of duty to the public who paid them, they got into line like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. ‘He never left a clue, lads! He never left a clue! Keep those truncheons up, lads! Not a one! Not a one! Not a one!’

What they actually meant was that he left far too many of the sort of clues they didn’t want to know about. ‘Sir Charles Wakes Up’ was the headline in the New York Herald.18 Warren had just had the kind of door-knock in the dead of night that presages dismay. When he left his home in Westminster at about 4.15 a.m. the last thing he wanted was any further intimation, be it overt or oblique, of Freemasonry. A carriage was waiting outside in the drizzle. This was the Bro Commissioner’s first ever trip to the East End in respect of these murders. He must have rattled out of the Establishment heart of London expecting the worst. And he got it.