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Authors: The Whitechapel Society
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knew very well. Geo-profilers would add that Jack killed in his ‘circle of comfort’, which again points us to the Abyss. None of this fits William Gull, at all. He was a doctor, but not a surgeon. He worked in Guys Hospital, which is half an hour’s walk from Whitechapel and south of the river, well out of any geo-profiler circle of comfort. There is nothing to connect Gull with the Abyss, except the highly tenuous links via Walter Sickert and his supposed studio in Cleveland Street (which did not exist either!), as told to Ripperologist Jean Overton Fuller, by Sickert’s friend Florence Pash.
The whole tale of the mad Mason, whisking Annie Crook off to a private asylum and operating on her to remove her memory, is high melodrama but has absolutely no basis in fact. Neither was Gull an expert on syphilis, and if he did recommend the use of mercury as a potential cure for the disease, he went along with 90 per cent of the medical profession at the time. How the twenty-four-year-old Eddie was supposed to be suffering from tertiary syphilis, when that stage usually takes fifteen years to develop, has never been explained. Gull was never a Freemason, so the ‘highest in the land theory’ collapses on that score alone, making a similar nonsense of the pseudonym Thomas Mason – the name given for Gull’s supposed incarceration in an asylum, following the Ripper Murders.
The only ‘evidence’ against Gull – and it is flimsy in the extreme – rests on the claims of Robert Lees and the supposed police visit to Gull’s house, in Brook Street. Everything else – the memory lapses, the mood swings, the bloody shirt, the unofficial doctors’ ‘jury’ and the fake funeral – is just smoke and mirrors. There is no mention, in any police record, of Lees offering his services to them, nor were there any enquiries in Brook Street or the involvement of a doctor named Gull. The so-called corroborative evidence, provided by Stephen Knight, of a letter sent by a crank in July 1889, is a simple misreading: ‘With all your “Lees”, with all your blue bottles…’, should actually read ‘tecs’ (i.e. detectives). Without that all-important police corroboration, all we have is the speculative nonsense that has been launched against an innocent man for forty years.
Those who put Gull in the frame, from Dr Stowell to today’s filmmakers, should have read the words of the great doctor, recorded for posterity in 1894: ‘Fools and savages explain; wise men investigate.’
Mei Trow is a member of the Society of Authors, Crime Writers’ Association and Welsh Academy. He has over fifty books to his credit, both fiction and non-fiction, and has written extensively on Jack the Ripper. He has lectured to The Whitechapel Society and has appeared in a number of Jack-related documentaries.
6
The Mysteries of Aaron Kosminski
Philip Marquis
The elderly man had been absorbed in the book from the very beginning, but when he reached page 137, his pulse began to quicken as he read the words, ‘and the conclusion we came to was that he and his people were certain low class polish Jews…’
He nodded in agreement and turned the page. Excitement surged within him as he read on. When he came to the passage, ‘I will merely add that the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him, but he refused to give evidence against him’, he could contain himself no longer and, picking up a pencil, he scrawled underneath:
…because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to be left on his mind. DSS
Splaying out into the left-hand margin of the page, ‘DSS’ continued, ‘and after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London.’
Running out of space now, he turned to the end of the book,
The whole tale of the mad Mason, whisking Annie Crook off to a private asylum and operating on her to remove her memory, is high melodrama but has absolutely no basis in fact. Neither was Gull an expert on syphilis, and if he did recommend the use of mercury as a potential cure for the disease, he went along with 90 per cent of the medical profession at the time. How the twenty-four-year-old Eddie was supposed to be suffering from tertiary syphilis, when that stage usually takes fifteen years to develop, has never been explained. Gull was never a Freemason, so the ‘highest in the land theory’ collapses on that score alone, making a similar nonsense of the pseudonym Thomas Mason – the name given for Gull’s supposed incarceration in an asylum, following the Ripper Murders.
The only ‘evidence’ against Gull – and it is flimsy in the extreme – rests on the claims of Robert Lees and the supposed police visit to Gull’s house, in Brook Street. Everything else – the memory lapses, the mood swings, the bloody shirt, the unofficial doctors’ ‘jury’ and the fake funeral – is just smoke and mirrors. There is no mention, in any police record, of Lees offering his services to them, nor were there any enquiries in Brook Street or the involvement of a doctor named Gull. The so-called corroborative evidence, provided by Stephen Knight, of a letter sent by a crank in July 1889, is a simple misreading: ‘With all your “Lees”, with all your blue bottles…’, should actually read ‘tecs’ (i.e. detectives). Without that all-important police corroboration, all we have is the speculative nonsense that has been launched against an innocent man for forty years.
Those who put Gull in the frame, from Dr Stowell to today’s filmmakers, should have read the words of the great doctor, recorded for posterity in 1894: ‘Fools and savages explain; wise men investigate.’
Mei Trow is a member of the Society of Authors, Crime Writers’ Association and Welsh Academy. He has over fifty books to his credit, both fiction and non-fiction, and has written extensively on Jack the Ripper. He has lectured to The Whitechapel Society and has appeared in a number of Jack-related documentaries.
6
The Mysteries of Aaron Kosminski
Philip Marquis
The elderly man had been absorbed in the book from the very beginning, but when he reached page 137, his pulse began to quicken as he read the words, ‘and the conclusion we came to was that he and his people were certain low class polish Jews…’
He nodded in agreement and turned the page. Excitement surged within him as he read on. When he came to the passage, ‘I will merely add that the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him, but he refused to give evidence against him’, he could contain himself no longer and, picking up a pencil, he scrawled underneath:
…because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to be left on his mind. DSS
Splaying out into the left-hand margin of the page, ‘DSS’ continued, ‘and after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London.’
Running out of space now, he turned to the end of the book,
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