The Man Who Would Be Jack:
The Hunt for the Real Ripper
by David Bullock
The Robson Press, 2012
294pp, 1 illustration, 3 appendices, no index
ISBN: 9781849543408
A Review by Gene Stewart
In the prologue we witness an inmate of the Lambeth Infirmary’s Lunatic Ward escape on the night of 5 March 1891. It’s Thomas Hayne Cutbush, and the book will go on to detail why he might well have been Jack the Ripper.
Initially, Inspector William Race began suspecting Cutbush of the Ripper murders when he was assigned to capture the escaped lunatic, who had a fixation on knives, a penchant for cutting women, and a taste for general mayhem. He was young enough to be acrobatic and quick, nimble over fences, able to climb walls, and sly at evading pursuit.
Race gathered information on Cutbush, learning that he liked drawing mutilated women and studied anatomy on his own, hearing hair-raising stories of her nephew’s violence and moods from the aunt with whom Cutbush lived, and discovering that he was periodically sent to a small coastal town to “recuperate” after his worst outbursts.
Inspector Race duly catches Cutbush and a trial occurs on 14 April 1891, attended by some of the major players in the Ripper murders, even though Cutbush was not charged with any of those. His own crimes sufficed, and, in a move that surprised Race and other onlookers, the trial was brought to a swift close without hearing evidence when a Dr. Gilbert pronounced Cutbush hopelessly insane and unable to understand the proceedings.
Thomas Hayne Cutbush was sent to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane and there this would have ended had it not been for Inspector William Race’s suspicions and research. These findings gnawed at him; he became convinced Cutbush had been Jack the Ripper and after a year’s investigation presented in 1892 his case to his superiors, including Chief Constable McNaughten, whose name figured prominently in the hunt for the Ripper. Without explanation, Race’s conclusions were rejected.
This unsettled him and in 1893 he did something remarkable, especially for those times: He approached the press. Walking into the Fleet Street offices of The Sun, Race discussed his case and caught the interest of the paper’s chief editor, T. P. O’Connor, who immediately assigned one of his top reporters, Kennedy Jones, or KJ, and seconded Louis Tracy.
It would be these young men who pursued the case in minute detail, compiling a file on Thomas Cutbush that was used by David Bullock to produce this book.
He makes a compelling case. Unlike other favorite suspects such as Aaron Kosminski, Cutbush was neither incapable of taking care of himself, nor impoverished. He was apparently available for all the crimes, knew East End London and the Whitechapel area, and moved about freely on foot. He was the type even a frightened prostitute would trust, clean-cut and with enough cash to entice them. He was a young man, strong and agile, fast and controlled despite his obvious insanity.
Even more interesting, he not only fit the aggregate descriptions of the Ripper, and there were several, but was seen a few times smeared with blood and striding along at a rapid clip with a savage scowl, fists clenched, carrying a small Gladstone bag or package.
He even, on the night he escaped from Lambeth Infirmary’s Lunatic Ward, stated, “I have only been cutting up girls and laying them out,” when asked what he’d been up to. He’d been brought in after a bout of mania and had, at first, lain motionless and incommunicative for hours, apparently awaiting the exact moment to pounce and flee, which he did, effectively, some time after he spoke to the examining doctor.
No one book will prove conclusively the identity of the killer we know as Jack the Ripper. A cottage industry exists on never knowing, for one thing. For another, proof is elusive; a recent claim that DNA had solved the case ended up debatable both on grounds of flawed provenance and the ambiguity of mitochondrial DNA. Close but no bloody knife.
David Bullock writes clearly but tosses dramatizing into the reporting of the facts. Many scenes read like fiction, including extrapolated dialogue and actions. While this makes it engaging, it tends to undermine the tone of factual reporting one expects from Ripper books. It should be emphasized that this is a small flaw; the book is worth reading and Bullock does a good job of keeping his facts straight and presenting them in a coherent way.
He editorializes only a little, making his case more by a preponderance of evidence than persuasion.
In the first of three appendices he covers some of the other Ripper suspects, demonstrating why they were not as good a fit as Cutbush.
In appendix two he gives brief biographical sketches of the victims, lest we forget those poor women who died so appallingly.
In the third appendix he tells us what happened to KJ and Tracy, the Sun reporters who brought the details of this story to light. While their series about Cutbush was published to much interest, other newspapers scoffed, not the least because O’Connor decided not to use Cutbush’s name, an error on the side of caution. Worse, on the day the last installment was published, bringing it all to a conclusion, a terrorist bombing at Greenwich Royal Observatory gardens swiped everything else off the front pages and seized the public’s attention.
The story of why Thomas Hayne Cutbush was probably Jack the Ripper languished and its reporters went on to other successes interesting in themselves but not germane to this discussion.
An interesting aside: When Thomas Hayne Cutbush was summarily declared criminally insane and sent to Broadmoor, short-circuiting what surely would have been a sensational trial, it turned out one of the people who would possibly have been called to testify was none other than his uncle, Police Executive Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush, the guy in charge of policing Whitechapel’s lodging houses in 1888 and actively involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper in 1888.
Charles Henry Cutbush’s boss, Macnaughten, defended Thomas Hayne Cutbush, even using his blood relation to one of his chief officers as a reason to exclude him. Add this to the swiftness of Thomas Cutbush’s commitment to Broadmoor, where he would be safely out of circulation and we are forced to wonder if this was a cover-up to prevent the public from knowing for certain, or even from suspecting, that the nephew of one of the highest police officials was Jack the Ripper.
Scandal that intense could have destroyed the London Metropolitan Police, already under such pressure due to the Ripper murders. Whether they were sure of Thomas Cutbush as a suspect or not, it behooved them to have him tucked away in a lunatic asylum, the most-heavily guarded in Britain where the worst of the most dangerous were kept.
Hint, wink, and innuendo shading circumstantial evidence and a fog of suspicion does not a solid case make but this is certainly a worthy book to add to your Ripperology mental file. You may come away from it, as you perhaps have from so many others, sure you now know the name hidden by the nickname Jack the Ripper.
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