Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution is a book written by Stephen Knight first published in 1976. It proposed a solution to five murders in Victorian London that were blamed on an unidentified serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper".
Knight presented an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the British royal family, freemasonry and the painter Walter Sickert. He concluded that the victims were murdered to cover up a secret marriage between the second-in-line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and working class girl Annie Elizabeth Crook, and that the killer was physician William Gull, aided by coachman John Netley. There are many facts that contradict Knight's theory, and his main source, Joseph Gorman, later retracted the story and admitted to the press that it was a hoax.
Most scholars dismiss the theory, and the book's conclusion is now widely discredited. Nevertheless, the book was popular and commercially successful, going through 20 editions. It was the basis for the graphic novel From Hell and its film adaptation, as well as other dramatisations, and has influenced crime fiction writers, such as Patricia Cornwell and Anne Perry.
Origins
Between August and November 1888, at least five brutal murders were committed in the Whitechapel district of London. Although Whitechapel was an impoverished area and violence there was common, these murders can be linked to the same killer through a distinctive modus operandi. All the murders took place within the distance of a few streets, late at night or in the early morning, and the victims were all women whose throats were cut. In four of the cases, their bodies were mutilated, or even eviscerated. The removal of internal organs from three of the victims led to contemporary proposals that "considerable anatomical knowledge was displayed by the murderer, which would seem to indicate that his occupation was that of a butcher or a surgeon." Media organisations and the police received many letters and postcards purportedly written by the killer, who was dubbed "Jack the Ripper" after one of the signatories. Most of the anonymous confessional letters were dismissed by the police as hoaxes but one, known as the "From Hell" letter after a phrase used by the writer, was treated more seriously; it was sent with a small box containing half of a preserved human kidney. It is not clear, however, whether the kidney truly came from one of the victims or was a medical specimen sent as part of a macabre joke.Despite an extensive police investigation, the killer was never found and his identity is still a mystery. Both at the time and subsequently, many amateur and professional investigators have proposed solutions but no single theory is widely accepted.
Claims of Thomas Stowell
In 1970, British surgeon Thomas E. A. Stowell published an article entitled "Jack the Ripper – A Solution?" in the November issue of The Criminologist. In the article, Stowell proposed that the Ripper was an aristocrat who had contracted syphilis during a visit to the West Indies, that it had driven him insane, and that in this state of mind he had perpetrated the five canonical Jack the Ripper murders. Although Stowell did not directly name his suspect in the article, he described in detail the suspect's family and his physical appearance and nicknames, all of which pointed to Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Stowell wrote that following a double murder on 30 September 1888, his suspect was restrained by his own family in an institution in the south of England, but later escaped to commit a final murder on 9 November before ultimately dying of syphilis. To back up his theory, Stowell drew comparisons between the evisceration of the women and the disembowelment of deer shot by the aristocracy on their estates. Stowell said his information came from the private notes of Sir William Gull, a reputable physician who had treated members of the royal family. Stowell knew Gull's son-in-law, Theodore Dyke Acland, and was an executor of Acland's estate.Stowell's article attracted intense attention, and placed Albert Victor among the most notable Ripper suspects, but his innocence was soon proven. Gull died before Albert Victor, and so could not have known about Albert Victor's death. All three doctors who were attending Albert Victor at his death in 1892 concurred that he had died of pneumonia, and given the timescale of syphilitic disease progression, it is highly improbable that Albert Victor had syphilis. The first symptoms of mental illness that arise from syphilitic infection tend to occur about 15 years from first exposure. While the timescale of disease progression is never absolute, for Albert Victor to have suffered from syphilitic insanity in 1888, he would probably have to have been infected at the age of nine in about 1873, six years before he visited the West Indies. Stowell claimed that his suspect had been incarcerated in a mental institution, when Albert Victor was serving in the British army, making regular public appearances, and visiting friends at country houses. Newspaper reports, Queen Victoria's diary, family letters, and official documents prove that Albert Victor was attending functions in public, or meeting foreign royalty, or hundreds of miles from London at the time of each of the five canonical murders.
On 5 November 1970, Stowell wrote to The Times denying that it was his intention to imply Prince Albert Victor was Jack the Ripper. The letter was published on 9 November, the day after the elderly Stowell's own death from natural causes. The same week, Stowell's son reported that he had burned his father's papers, saying "I read just sufficient to make certain that there was nothing of importance."
Claims of Joseph Gorman
Though Stowell's hypothesis was incorrect, his article rekindled interest in the Jack the Ripper case, and in 1973 the BBC launched a television series, Jack the Ripper, which investigated the Whitechapel murders. The series mixed documentary and drama; it featured real evidence but was hosted by fictional detectives Barlow and Watt, played by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor, respectively. The series was made into a book, The Ripper File, by Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd in 1975. The sixth and final programme included a testimony by Joseph Gorman, who called himself Joseph Sickert and claimed to be the illegitimate son of noted painter Walter Sickert. Gorman claimed that Sickert had told him a story that implicated not only the royal family but also a host of other famous people in the murders. According to Gorman, Gull committed the murders with the help of accomplices. Stowell had mentioned rumours implicating Gull in his article, but had dismissed them as unfair and false.Gorman said that his Catholic grandmother had secretly married Albert Victor, and that his mother, as the legitimate daughter of Albert Victor, was the rightful heir to the throne. He claimed that the Ripper murders were staged as part of a conspiracy to hush up any potential scandal by murdering anyone who knew of the birth. In the original television series, the story is depicted as the belief of Gorman but not of the detectives. Captivated by Gorman's story, journalist Stephen Knight decided to investigate the claims further, and eventually published his research as the book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution in 1976.
Content
Gorman's story
The book begins with Knight explaining how he came to meet Joseph Gorman, and then he tells Gorman's story which "did not come in clear, precise, chronological order but I had to glean it from rambling and sometimes vague discussion". Gorman says that Albert Victor's mother, Princess Alexandra, introduced Walter Sickert to her son in the hope that Sickert would teach Albert Victor about art. Gorman claims that Albert Victor met one of Sickert's models, Annie Elizabeth Crook, a Catholic shop girl, at Sickert's studio at 15 Cleveland Street, London. They had an affair, he says, and married in a secret ceremony with Sickert and Annie's friend, Mary Jane Kelly, acting as witnesses. Gorman alleges that Albert Victor and Annie's daughter, Alice Margaret Crook, was born on 18 April 1885, and that Albert Victor settled Annie and Alice into an apartment in Cleveland Street. In April 1888, Gorman continues, Queen Victoria and the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury discovered Albert Victor's secret. Gorman accuses Salisbury of ordering a raid on the apartment because he was afraid that public knowledge of a potential Catholic heir to the throne would result in a revolution. Gorman claims that Albert Victor was placed in the custody of his family, while Annie was placed in the custody of Sir William Gull, who certified her insane; she spent the next 30 years drifting in and out of institutions before dying in 1920.Meanwhile, Gorman alleges, Kelly was looking after the daughter, Alice, both during and after the raid. Gorman asserts that at first Kelly was content to hide the child, but then she, along with her friends Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride, decided to blackmail the government. Gorman accuses Salisbury of conspiring with his fellow freemasons, including senior policemen in the London Metropolitan Police, to stop the scandal by staging the murders of the women. Gorman says Salisbury assigned the task to Gull, who lured the four women into a carriage individually where Gull murdered them with the assistance of coachman John Netley and Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. Gorman claims a fifth victim, Catherine Eddowes, was killed accidentally in a case of mistaken identity because she used the alias Mary Ann Kelly and was confused with Mary Jane Kelly. Gorman alleges that Netley tried to kill the young Alice twice but after the second unsuccessful attempt several witnesses chased Netley, who threw himself into the Thames and drowned. Gorman completes the story by saying that Alice lived well into old age, later becoming Walter Sickert's mistress, and that Alice and Walter Sickert are his parents.