Читать книгу The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick - Shirley Harrison - Страница 17

In 1993, while I was hard at work exploring the background to the Maybrick Diary, policeman Stewart Evans and press officer Paul Gainey discovered the Littlechild letter naming an ‘American quack’, Francis Tumbelty, as a hitherto unknown police suspect. Their book, Jack the Ripper, the First American Serial Killer appeared in 1995. Chief Inspector John Littlechild, head of Special Branch, was a greatly respected detective in 1888 and this letter, written 24 years later, suggests that the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letters which gave the name of Jack the Ripper to the world were not written by Jack at all, and names the alleged authors.

Curiously, research into the Littlechild letter was to present some interesting similarities with the information I was receiving about James Maybrick. Both focused heavily on Liverpool and America — as did police enquiries at the time. But, at the end of the day, in a book of 274 pages only 40 relate to the alleged connections between Tumbelty and Whitechapel. He is a fascinating man with a murky history but the hard evidence against him is thin.

In 1997, the finger of suspicion was pointed at Jimmy Kelly, the Broadmoor escapee and lover of Mary Kelly (no relation) in a book by Jim Tully; horse-breeder Terry Saxby was compiling evidence at his home in Australia to support his belief that Henry Tabram, estranged husband of Martha, was the man, while Andy and Sue Parlour launched their own publication, written by Kevin O’Donnell, Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Murders.

The entire Ripper industry and its magazines, such as Ripperana and Ripperologist, have been built on such speculation. Meetings of the Cloak and Dagger Club are held in the City Darts public house, Whitechapel; the first national conference was organised in Ipswich in 1996. The regular lunches hosted by the internationally renowned true crime book specialist, Camille Wolfe, at her house in Portobello Road, London, are a forum for civilised discussion. Daily groups of amateur sleuths trail behind professional guides around the backstreets of Whitechapel and The London Dungeon attracts some two and a half thousand visitors per day to its Jack the Ripper Experience and, not surprisingly, there is a strong lobby by various women’s movements who protest at the commercial exploitation of the ‘unfortunates’.

The internet is buzzing with theories and, interestingly, the results of a surfers’ poll conducted in January 1997 placed James Maybrick at the top of the list of 29 Ripper suspects.

As Philip Sugden, the academic, himself proposes: ‘eye witness testimony is at best treacherous’. In fact, after 500 pages based on impeccable original source material, Mr Sugden admits:

Sadly, by the end of my study two things had become painfully apparent… First, there was no single police view on the matter. Different officers espoused different theories… The second conclusion is… none of their theories seems to be based on tangible evidence linking a suspect to the crimes… History can take us no further. Perhaps psychology can…

So my attention was now focused. I knew that I had a unique opportunity. So far everyone had tried to solve the Whitechapel murders by examining unreliable evidence. I had a document, which tallied in some ways with what was known and differed in others. This no longer troubled me. Suppose the Diary was right. Suppose the police, the witnesses and the Ripperologists had all been wrong!

* * *

By July 29th 1992, Michael Barrett and I had signed a contract with Robert Smith of Smith Gryphon publishers. We were in business! A publication date was set for October 1993. A formidable prospect.

Towards the end of November 1992, Paul Feldman burst on the scene. He was a film and video maker, working on a documentary based on his then belief that Montague John Druitt was Jack the Ripper. Like me, he sought the advice of Paul Begg, Keith Skinner and Martin Fido who warned him, without breaking their confidentiality agreement, that he should not go ahead until he knew the facts about a ‘remarkable new document’ that had come to light. They told him, at that stage, that they ‘could not fault it’. Paul went to see Robert Smith who would not reveal the Diary’s author. But, little by little and with some inspired guesswork, Paul linked the name of James Maybrick to the Diary. Eventually the two men re-met and discussed the video and film rights on my book. At this stage Paul would have been very happy had the Diary vanished altogether leaving him free to revert to his original researches into the Druitt theory. So before signing any contract he decided to invite Anna Koren, a leading international document examiner, who also works for the Israeli Ministry of Justice, to fly to England and examine the Diary. He did not tell her of its content or its claim to fame. I shall tell the story of that extraordinary meeting later. It resulted in Paul Feldman’s overnight conversion and in December 1992 he bought the video rights to my book with an option on a film.

From then on he was a man obsessed, working with his own team (Keith joined him as an independent researcher in 1993) all day, every day and most of the night. His research was aggressive, exhaustive and often, I felt, ruthless, creating new plots within plots at every twist and turn. Cigar in one hand and a large Scotch in the other, he worried at that Diary and anyone connected with it for five years, spending a fortune and all but breaking himself, financially, emotionally and physically. But, from the unparalleled amount of information and photographs, he unearthed many new and often valuable leads on both Maybrick and the Ripper. Paul Feldman has told his own story about his special relationship with the Diary in his own book Jack the Ripper — The Final Chapter, published by Virgin in September 1997.

While my own team began, painstakingly, to reconstruct the bones of the story, I went first in search of its soul. I wanted to explore and understand what life was like in Victorian London and Liverpool. On June 28th 1992, we joined one of the Ripper walks around Whitechapel with Martin Fido as our guide and then drove, for the first time, to Liverpool where it had all begun.