Cawthorne Nigel - Jack the Rippers Secret Confession: the Hidden Testimony of Britains First Serial Killer

S ECRET C ONFESSION

S ECRET C ONFESSION

T HE H IDDEN T ESTIMONY
OF B RITAINS F IRST S ERIAL K ILLER

David Monaghan & Nigel Cawthorne

A Herman Graf Book
Skyhorse Publishing

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monaghan, David.
Jack the Ripper's secret confession : the hidden testimony of the world's
first serial killer / David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60239-799-6
1. Jack, the Ripper. 2. Serial murders--England--London--History--19th
century. 3. Serial murderers--England--London--History--19th century.
4. Whitechapel (London, England)--History--19th century.
5. London (England)--History--19th century. I. Cawthorne, Nigel,
1951- II. Title.
HV6535.G6L6565 2010
364.152'32092--dc22

2009035656

Printed in the EU

The pain a murderer inflicts can last 100 years. It stabs through generations like a knife through flesh.

I saw such pain in a Philadelphia hotel room in 2005. I was there to make a film about two lovely sisters, Beth and Brenda Pietzel. Their great-great-grandfather, Ben, had been one of the 200 or so victims murdered by Herman Webster Mudgett, a Chicago insurance scamster and corpse seller who went by the name H.H. Holmes. Mudgett was like Walter. His last two victims were girls, found naked. He had cashed in on his crimes with two book-length confessions before he was hanged in 1895. I did not know Beth and Brenda had not read Mudgetts frank confession of how he had tied Ben to a chair and burned him alive. I asked them to read aloud Mudgetts 110-year-old words about their great-great-grandfather. I watched horrified when the sisters flinched, then cried on camera over the suffering of a man they had loved, but who had been killed so long ago. I felt as if Mudgett had reached across a century and had me inflict wounds for his pleasure.

The tears of Brenda and Beth made me wary about writing a book about Jack the Ripper. His killings tore branches from many family trees. People alive today still suffer. Airing the words of a killer must be done with caution, for a murderer confesses for his own motives and a sadists impulse is to inflict pain. I had no intention of being the tool for Walters sadism to inflict more pain on this generation. But now is the time to set the record straight.

A century of state bans and underground hype elevated Walters 1888 sex memoir to near-mythical status. Literary types praised him as an erotic genius, a tell-it-straight liberal out to pop the hypocrisy of the corseted moralists of his age. By 2009, my home citys hippest magazine, Time Out, voted Walter to be Londons most erotic writer, ahead of Shakespeare. I felt sick.

I had fed this hype. Id first read My Secret Life to make a documentary about Walter. The film saluted him as a racy pornographer and a saucy cad. But after seeing the tears of the Pietzel sisters in Philadelphia, I reread the book. For the first time, I was able to read the bits still banned in Britain at the time I made my film. This time, I wasnt falling for Walters tales of pleasure. The uncensored memoirs reeked of his victims pain. My nerves jangled. The smug text chimed with what I knew about killers, particularly the jumbled chronology that marked Mudgetts 1894 confessions. I sat bolt upright when I got to the end of Volume 4, Chapter 1. At the heart of a memoir about lovemaking, the diarist dropped in the identity of a murdered corpse floating in the Thames. Why would a man want to boast of his connection to a corpse?

By then, I had been studying serial killers confessions for years. Id travelled to Florida to see the so-called Charm Killer Glen Edward Rogers convicted. He had confessed to some heavy-metal kids that he had killed Nicole Simpson before going on a cross-country spree. I had gone to Cambodia to see Pol Pots torture chamber, Tuol Sleng, a factory for false confessions. I wanted to get to the bottom of the tale told by a tortured soldier, of shooting British academic Malcolm Caldwell in the last days of the Khmer Rouge.

Gloucester builder Fred West had killed thirteen women and girls with his prostitute wife, Rose, before confessing in 1994. To make a film series, I had combed every word of his mammoth admission. The grubby handyman fancied himself a Lothario, was obsessed with sex and had a stab at a biography, too. And, like Walter, Fred West killed to cover up the fact that he had sex with children. West killed his teenage daughter Heather when she threatened to leave home and tell of his incest. Wests first wife and childminder had been killed and cut up before they had a chance to expose his paedophilia. Here was a powerful motive for multiple violent murder, with no need to reference Masonic rituals or royal affairs, such distractions as which had given the unknown killer of Whitechapel with the veneer of sophistication. A killer of prostitutes would be more likely found by looking for the perverted, than by looking into a palace.

By chance, my life in London has dogged the Whitechapel killers footsteps. I lived in the old Commercial Street police station building. It was where my investigations into Walter began and where many detectives on the trail of the Ripper were based in 1888. If those bobbies had got their hands on My Secret Life, with its ramblings of blood, rape and virgin-buying in 1888, Walter would have been considered a very likely candidate for arrest indeed.

David Monaghan

London 2009

Locked in the closed cupboard at the British Library is an extraordinary work. Deposited there with a huge collection of pornography, it has lain virtually undisturbed for more than fifty years. It is called My Secret Life by Walter and, when various abridged and facsimile editions were produced, it was billed as a classic of Victorian pornography. Indeed, it was once referred to as the Koh-i-noor of English erotica.

The original edition under lock and key in the British Librarys Private Case the nations repository of obscene and other banned material comes in eleven volumes. They were printed secretly in Amsterdam between 1888 and 1894. No one knows how many sets were produced. A preface to the index says: six copies only having been struck off and the type then broken up. But this claim, like much in the book, is disingenuous. The author may have been trying to boost its rarity value, for at least twenty sets have been identified in private collections over the last century. However, it is generally assumed that the printer, thought to have been the Belgian publisher of erotica, Auguste Brancart, would have run off a few extra for himself. Charles Carrington, a British publisher of erotica working in Paris, produced a limited run of 200 copies of the first six chapters of the first volume under the title