Bruce Robinson - They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper

FICTION

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman

Paranoia in the Launderette

FOR CHILDREN

The Obvious Elephant

Harold and the Duck

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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

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Source ISBN: 9780007548873

Ebook Edition October 2015 ISBN: 9780007548897

Version: 2015-09-09

Clench the fingers of the right hand, extend the thumb, place it on the abdomen, and move it upwards to the chin, as if ripping open the body with a knife.

Richardsons Monitor of Freemasonry (1860)

The Double Event, as the Stride/Eddowes murders were christened by their perpetrator, is not original to the Saucy Jacky postcard he sent, but was a vulgar colloquialism of the age. It meant to simultaneously suffer venereal disease of both the anus and the genitals. Jacks choice of such a pleasantry may be trivial, but I dont think it is. Although characteristic of a pun, I think it had a more substantive meaning for the murderer, and I interpret the Double Event as both sobriquet and expression of disgust.

The Rippers choice of target was opportunistic, but not accidental. Self-evidently he was looking for a type, his selection of a victim in life no less specific than the signature he wrote into their deaths. This fabulously cruel man didnt rip the sex out of East End whores because he lacked the wit to kill elsewhere. He killed in Whitechapel as part of his statement. He wanted sex as low as it got. The furnace of his rage was in his victims womb, the filthiest part of her being, and he was disgusted with her for what his hatred would have him do.

Theories seeking to link these women to their killer (as in Clarence) are as risible as the use Freemasonry attempts to make of them. The victims were linked only in circumstance, and insomuch as they were available. As far as this narrative is concerned, Catherine Eddowes life lasted about thirty-five minutes: from the time she left the police lock-up to the time the Ripper killed her. Many accounts detail whats known of her past, her lousy life and those in it, but none of that is of much interest here. Eddowes biography matters no more to me than it did to the man who eviscerated her. On her drunken arrest earlier that evening she gave her name as Nothing, and thats just about it. She was just another bit of trash in the ugly East End rain.

A psychopath is at his most dangerous when hes having fun. Jack was having a lot of fun, playing off the angels and the ogres in his own homicidal fairy tale. Authority would feel the weight of his spite, and women the depths of his revenge. Angels dont fuck, and in the vernacular of his hatred, I believe thats how Jack saw women, as either mother-angels or whores. Its my view that he killed these women as surrogates, punishing them for the sexuality of another, and I believe one woman in particular was on his mind. She was a mother-angel who had proved herself lower than the filthiest whore. Until he got to her, and destroyed her, he owned her in Eddowes and the rest, cut out her mother-part for a trophy, like a huntsman with the head of a vanquished animal. He was walking with God, as the great detective Robert Ressler characterises the mindset of such a psyche, and what fault there was belonged to the victims.