Sunday, August 31, 2008

This Day in Criminal History (Jack The Ripper Kills First Victim)


August 31, 1888—A frightening new chapter in urban violence—and one of the great unsolved crimes in history—began in the wee hours of the morning in the Whitechapel district of London, as the body of a prostitute, Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, was discovered—the first victim of the archetypal serial killer: Jack the Ripper.

Occurring as they did in Victorian England, the Whitechapel horrors may be a bit hard to recreate for 21st-century readers and filmgoers. In a way, it seems so quaint, like the gaslit streets in those days.

It shouldn't. To understand the climate of fear The Ripper created, remember—and my readers in the New York area who are now of a certain age won't have trouble doing this—how unnerved you felt by the "Son of Sam" in the summer of 1977. (Even his letters, taunting police with their inability to solve the case, harked back to the London correspondence in which The Ripper christened himself). Remember the criminal patterns: the location of the victims, the manner of their deaths, the evil that came out of nowhere only to strike again with sudden insistence. Remember the media trumpeting of the story.

But you can also plunge yourself into the circumstances of the Ripper case itself. Start with the mortuary photographs of the five victims who died at the Ripper's hands between August and November 1888 in London’s East End--if you dare. The photos are gray, almost ghostly, but the faces register tumultuous shock and, as time went on, greater and greater mutilation.

As time goes on, with more and more scientific techniques, literary deconstruction, etc., the number of theories proliferate. On one of the more comprehensive Websites devoted to the event, the “Casebook,” I counted no less than 21 suspects, including, of all people, Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll!
A couple of years ago, a new, composite electronic photograph was even produced of what was deemed “the most likely suspect.” (See the photo accompanying this post.) Hmmm… Somehow I doubt this is going to end the speculation about his identity...

Establishing a Pattern

I’m not sure why fiction writers have gone to such extraordinary lengths to reinvent the facts of the case. In actuality, even the physical environment in the immediate hours before the first murder was ominous. Heavy, incessant rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning, blanketed Whitechapel the night before—adding to the desperate circumstances of 44-year-old Polly Nichols.

Nichols was already on the downslope of a profession that, then as now, had no use for the aging. Her brown hair was turning gray; five front teeth were missing; and others were slightly discolored. A turbulent marriage had ended several years before when her husband was able to demonstrate in court that his wife was a hooker.

In the grip of alcoholism, Polly was running through all her last chances, having stolen money in a job as a domestic servant in which she’d been placed by a social agency, then being kicked out of her lodging house because she couldn’t produce enough “doss money” (slang for the money for a night’s lodging). Never mind, she said: “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” At 2:30 a.m. she told a friend she’d met by chance that she’d drunk away her doss money already three times that night, but she’d find a way to get it soon.

She never had the chance. Sometime between 3:15 a.m, when two policemen passing separately along Buck’s Row noticed nothing unusual, and a half hour later, when the body was discovered, Nichols was murdered. Whoever did it, the coroner’s report concluded, the results were brutal: “A circular incision…completed severed all the tissue down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed....”—and a lot more in this vein.

Remembering the Ripper in Fact, Fiction and Film

Much like another media phenomenon, the sinking of the Titanic, Jack the Ripper has inspired all kinds of studies. In a few months, there’s even going to be a conference on him, held in, of all places, Knoxville, Tenn. (a most unlikely setting for violence, it seems to me—the only things that get murdered down there with any regularity are cheating-hearts ballads by Hank Williams wannabees).

Just how much the case has sunk into the modern consciousness is revealed by this fact I discovered from the Internet Movie Database Web site: There have been no less than 52 films or teleplays that have dealt with The Ripper. They include some obscure TV shows that, if they're likely, will turn up periodically for cable (recycled trash TV—what a great way to save the planet!).

Other treatments, however, are at least intriguing, often deeply satisfying—and even classic:

A) "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"

As a teenager, I came across this short story in a crime anthology. By chance a few years later, I discovered what seemed even then a rather old TV adaptation of this. Several factors made the original story and the adaptation worthwhile:

1) The story was written by Robert Bloch, who achieved fame more than a decade later for penning the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was based. Like fellow horror-suspense practitioner Richard Matheson, Bloch did much of his best work at mid-century, starting out in pulp publications, graduating to novels, and dabbling in TV series to pay the bills. Bloch’s fiendishly clever tale, set in Chicago in 1943 (the same year in which the piece was published), follows a London detective and an associate, John Carmody, who believe that The Ripper, 55 years after the Whitechapel murders, has turned up in the Windy City.
2) Bloch was inspired to write this story (which, if this essay by Eduardo Zinna is to be believed, was "the first modern work of fiction in t he English language to call him by his trade name") by the fact that the killer had christened himself in a letter to a news agency. "I was fascinated," Bloch wrote in his autobiography, "by the phrasing the murderer used for self-identification and upon due reflection, realized that these five words could constitute both the title and the plot of a short story."
3) Bloch saves his best stroke for the last line, one of those trick endings that make you re-read everything that came before it to see if it coheres (it does).
4) In 1961, an episode of the TV series Thriller (is this where Michael Jackson got the title?) aired, an adaptation of Bloch's story written by one "Barre Lyndon." (It sounds to me like a pseudonym for a scribe disgruntled by what had been done to his handiwork—though IMDB lists "Alfred Edgar" as an alternative name. Maybe that's a pseudonym, too--aren't the Edgars awards for best mysteries of the year?) The British detective chasing the modern Ripper was the familiar British character actor John Williams; the director was, of all people, Ray Milland. (I guess film work was getting scarcer for a former Hollywood leading man who was now struggling with a receding hairline.)
5) More than two decades after this short story, an episode of Star Trek, “Wolf in the Fold,” aired in which the suspect in a Ripper-style crime was chief engineer Scotty. (No, he didn't do it. I'm not even going to dignify that twist by calling this comment a "Spoiler Alert." Only an idiot could think good ‘ol Scotty could have done the foul deed!) The author of the teleplay was—natch!--Robert Bloch.

B) "The Lodger"

I don’t know why I’ve never gotten around either to reading the original mystery novel on which this was based, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes (sister of British man of letters Hilaire Belloc), nor the 1926 Alfred Hitchcock adaptation, his first thriller. Well, one of these days I will!

The story itself sounds irresistible: an elderly couple, fallen on hard times, are glad to take in a lodger who appears to be a gentleman. For a long time, they’re willing to put up with his little oddities, such as carrying around a long, brown bag and conducting all kind of “scientific experiments.” Still, there’s something about him…

I’m not at all surprised that Hitchcock directed this. It wasn’t just because one of his later films (Frenzy) concerns a modern Jack the Ripper type, or that two of his finest films (Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt) gradually peel away the criminal chaos lurking beneath a seemingly normal exterior. No, as Donald Spoto noted in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, Hitchcock had been addicted to sensational crimes as a Cockney youngster in London. I’ll bet he couldn’t wait to read everything he could get his hands on concerning the Ripper.

C) “From Hell”

I’m not a fan of this Hughes Brothers film, even though it’s interesting to see Johnny Depp try out a variation on the moody Victorian outsider that he later assayed, to Oscar-nominated effect, in Sweeney Todd. The problems are twofold: a) Heather Graham is miscast as Irish prostitute Mary Kelly, and b) The violence, though necessary, is still way over the top.

The film holds interest because of its source material, one of the “graphic novels” that Hollywood has turned to increasingly over the last decade. Film has been, from the inception of this communication form, an image-centered genre, with dialogue and story decidedly subservient. (Not too many people can remember the plots of Josef von Sternberg’s Hollywood collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, but more than a few people can recall her electrifying look from Blonde Venus.) Directors, however, have turned to the graphic novel as a new form of film noir, including such movies as The Road to Perdition, Sin City, and 300.

D) “Murder by Decree”

In an essay in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, British historian David Cannadine undercuts any claims for the theory of the Ripper offered by this film, which took its thesis from Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. So don’t watch the film with any belief that you’re watching, God forbid, historical fact—though, to be fair, the only person who might think that any film featuring Sherlock Holmes on the trail of the Ripper could be historical would be Dan Quayle. (David Letterman had to instruct the former V-P, of course, that Murphy Brown was fictional. And he wasn’t the only politico who ever mistook a fictional character for real life: Former Gov. Hugh Carey of New York gave a speech in which he cited Miss Jane Pittman as a historically important African-American.)

No, Murder by Decree is just plain fun to watch. Forget about Professor Moriarty: History’s most elusive killer is easily the greatest adversary ever faced by history’s greatest detective. It was inevitable that somebody, somewhere, would pit the great Victorian detective – who had gotten his start, after all, shortly before the Whitechapel murders—against the killer. The notion of a great royal conspiracy to squelch the truth about royal involvement with a crime does not, at this juncture, seem so far-fetched. (Why, for instance, would Anthony Blunt remain in the royal family’s employ as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures for 15 years after they knew of his involvement in the Cambridge spy ring—unless he had discovered something about the Duke of Windsor’s embarrassing involvement with Fascism when Blunt ferreted out materials in private German archives late in WWII?)

Watch this film, finally, for two actors at the top of their game—Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Dr. Watson. It’s easy to understand here how Holmes and Watson became such fast friends. And for once, a film shows that the greatest detective of them all was not only possessed of a mighty brain but a mighty heart.

E) “Pandora’s Box”

The great Louise Brooks silent film about Lulu, dangerous symbol of sexuality, features Jack the Ripper in its final minutes. He becomes the force of society reaching out to punish Lulu for the unrest and destruction created when men come in contact with her. I

nitially, many felt that the American actress was completely wrong for this product of late German expressionist symbolism. Instead, Pandora’s Box became her most lasting cinematic monument—so much so that her luminous essay collection, Lulu in Hollywood, used her character’s name as an instant touchstone in selling the book.

It’s highly doubtful at this juncture whether the identity of Jack the Ripper will ever be conclusively established. It’s not just that many documents connected to the investigation have been lost over the years; it’s also that any definitive conclusion would put out of commission a virtual cottage industry of criminologists, conspiracy theories, scholars and hopeless obsessives.

No comments: