Trigger Warning: This post talks about brutal violence against women.
This is for entertainment purposes only and is nothing but a hypothetical answer to true crime’s most infamous “whodunnit” question. My sincere apologies to the named men and their legacies if they are actually innocent, which, I concede, is theoretically possible too.
I have candidly never shared the same level of intrigue over Jack the Ripper as so many others hold, but, in wanting to put my cards to the test, I decided to tackle one of the most challenging cases I could and few exceed his in this regard.
I knew of the terror that haunted the streets of London in the 1800’s, but little beyond that there was a series of gruesome murders in that century and that they culminated in one especially grotesque attack. The last victim’s name, Mary Kelly, was the only I vaguely knew- like, if being tested on it, I probably would have gotten right a multiple-choice question, but not a fill-in-the-blank. I knew very little, if anything, about the speculated suspects, including their names, and I certainly did not have an opinion, let alone a “favorite”. I only knew that the killer darkened the already dark alleyways of London dressed in a dapper suit and hat, and that it itself was an image most likely conjured out of “romanticized” myth. Oh, and I knew that he may or may not have shown above-average skill with a knife and/or knowledge of anatomy that may or may not have risen to that of a surgeon. And I believe I had heard speculation of a royal culprit.
But going against my typical MO (now my typical), I decided to consult the cards before doing any meaningful research and then use the clues they provided to focus it. But in the end, it was a cyclical pattern of the cards leading me to further research certain suspects and then that further research leading me back to the cards with more questions or information to confirm. Until, after countless spreads, I DID IT. Just 133 years too late.
Since I have seen the horror of online comment sections before, as a preemptive caveat… I did do a fair amount of research into JtR when all was said and done and included some contextual information about the case to show how the actual evidence might support the cards’ story. However, there was a limit to the depth and skill of my research and I did not hold myself to scientific/academic standards with it. And there are very few facts about JtR that are universally accepted as such to begin with. So, I almost certainly included details that are wrong when compared to what actually happened, but I have, even worse maybe, included some *you* might think are wrong and you very well might be right. However, the viability of my theory is not contingent on my researched details being historically perfectly accurate. The alternate details or versions of events, that I know of, being proved right would perhaps prove my suspect(s) less suspicious, but not innocent. So you don’t have to board it, but please don’t cast off my ship for sunk, and its captain for a moron, over a hole its foundation isn’t built around.
That said, I welcome hearing any opposing theories, and if anyone does know of a solid piece of evidence that rules out anything that I share below, I would genuinely love to know about it! If I have to choose one, I would rather know the truth than to believe I was never wrong in my proclaimed pursuit of it. All I’m asking is for you to not damn my theory as disproven if I said the man was standing 5 feet from something, and you believe it was 10 feet but that 5 feet gap is not truly unbridgeable… But please do damn my theory as disproven, or even unlikely, if you truly can.
But… until someone knocks me off of it, I will continue to believe that I successfully climbed my metaphorical and metaphysical Everest with this case. And my apologies for the public shaming this inflicts on the many Ripperologists out there. I should probably also apologize to those out there who don’t truly want the JtR case to be solved, as I think having a definitive answer will dilute the fascination for some and the bankability of the intrigue for those still cashing in on it (no judgment!). But to add insult to injury, in doing so, I also accidentally solved the Thames Torso murder case. And not as simply as this might imply.
So mock-ish gloating aside, here we go…
Early Clues/General Context
The most notable thing that popped out at me straight away is that three Kings were consistently coming up in my reads- and always of Swords, Cups, and Wands. There were multiple ways I could make that work. I thought at first that perhaps JtR had 3 personas that he adopted in his public and private life, but ultimately concluded that there were actually 3 killers responsible for the deaths of the canonical 5 victims. I believe now that JtR is guilty of 3 of those murders, plus 1 other that has been speculatively linked to him, with varying degrees of conviction, bringing his total to 4. But the blame for 2 of the canonical murders should be cast elsewhere. (For the record, I was highly suspicious of my cards’ accuracy on this point and resisted this conclusion, but they stuck to their guns and I ultimately felt my research supported that this isn’t quite as far-fetched as I first thought…)
As I mentioned earlier, the only victim I had a degree of familiarity with was Mary Kelly, and I think this influenced my early reads as I used her as a focus point when shuffling. I actually should have known better than to do this because though there is near universal consensus that she was a victim of JtR and though I didn’t know enough about her case to form a credible opinion on it, something about it didn’t quite sit right with me. From what little I knew- namely that it involved an especially vicious mutilation that potentially displayed less skill with a knife and/or knowledge of anatomy than the other murders did- it seemed to depart *just* enough from his typical MO to safely declare it “case closed” as a JtR attack. MOs can be somewhat fluid and/or evolve though and it wasn’t by any means a stretch to accept him as the most credible suspect, so I ignored my whispering doubts and accepted the more widespread belief in his guilt. But she is 1 of the 2 canonical victims that my cards ultimately cleared his name for. So my focusing on her as a way of centering my energy did lead to some early red herrings as I actually led them to speak of her murderer more than who actually turned out to be the man most behind the grisly legend. But, though she was the last of the canonical victims, since I did start with her there, I will start with her here too.
Mary Kelly
Mary was killed on November 9, 1888.
The cards were very consistent throughout multiple readings that Mary’s killer had recently suffered a fall from grace, including a dramatic financial setback due to the sudden loss of his job. To compound his pain, he then suffered the loss of a relationship. And the timing of the two losses may not have been coincidental. Generally, the man felt that he was the victim in his circumstances and that he was forced to do what he did to avenge other people’s wrongs towards him. The cards also shared that though the man put out the “light” in his life, his ultimate outcome was that he went on to marry someone else.
I took to Google at this point and then whittled the long list of suspects down to the two men known to have had wives at some point in their lives, who were Robert Barnett and the man who my cards ultimately named as JtR. FWIW, later research did discover there were other named suspects that fit this bill that were left off of the first couple of lists I looked at. But they are irrelevant now as the two I found were the two that weren’t ultimately cleared anyway. The latter wasn’t a clean fit as there is no evidence to suggest he lost a job (in fact, there’s plenty to the contrary) and he was already married at the time of the attacks. But I thought perhaps the cards were speaking more vaguely than I initially took them to be and that maybe he had suffered a financial setback for another reason and maybe he just returned to his life as a settled family man once his killing streak was over. So both men stayed on the list pending further investigation.
I dropped “JtR” from my questions and asked the cards to tell me about Mary Kelly’s murderer. And they spoke of a relationship that had fallen apart and left him feeling resentful over a perceived betrayal and his inability to win her back. They suggested he held a rather sanctimonious view towards her and wanted to “save” her from the lifestyle he judged her for living. Towards this, he would have been advocating for more moderation in indulgences and overall behaviors better aligned with the religiously-tinged moral codes of the day. The cards also indicated that he hoped her murder, ultimately a crime of passion, would be pinned on JtR and, to promote this, he did his best to imitate his work. Clearly, he succeeded in this.
All of the above points the finger squarely at Barnett. I could have easily written the above synopsis of their relationship, word for word, based only on my subsequent research of it. It isn’t universally agreed on that Barnett and Mary were romantically involved, but it is that he at least very much wanted them to be. But whether as romantic partners (probably) or just hopeful roommates, they did live together. She was a prostitute, but he worked hard as a fish porter to try to bring home enough money to keep her off the streets. He also tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to “save” her from her heavy partying ways. But when he lost his job and ability to offer financial support, their relationship came to an end with a massive fight and he moved out. She is said to have possibly then invited another woman to share the room with her instead. It is speculated by some that they engaged in a romantic relationship with each other, which, if true, would have been especially controversial given the widely held religious views at the time. Any new relationship of Mary’s would have been unwelcome for Barnett, but his emotions would likely have been compounded if it was a same-sex one.
Mary and Barnett continued to be seen together after he moved out, but it wasn’t long before she was found dead in her bed at their once-shared home. If she was one, she would have been JtR’s last victim (probably, but at least canonically speaking), but she had been brutally mutilated degrees beyond what he had done before. JtR had killed his earlier victims out in the open, so the reasonable theory is that the privacy of her bedroom afforded him the time to fully indulge the depths of his fantasies. But this and other slight variances in the overall MO left me just shy of convinced that JtR was responsible. And my cards did validate that they were not because JtR’s had evolved or because he let loose in a private setting, but because it was the work of someone else attempting to mimic and frame him as the murderer. In only knowing, through hearsay, high-ish-level details of the grotesque mutilations that JtR’s victims were subjected to and in not wanting to fall short of the bar, Barnett overshot. Interestingly though, while many had speculated from the earlier murders that JtR had more-than-a-commoner’s skill with a knife and/or knowledge of anatomy, the investigator of Mary’s murder said that her remains did not suggest either to be true.
Beyond just the privacy factor, those who favor Barnett as JtR speculate that the intensity of the attack on Mary was also due to the fact that she was the only of his victims he had a strong emotional tie to. And that would make sense, but I just don’t think Barnett had other victims to compare his work to. Barnettists speculate that he killed the other women, also alleged to be prostitutes, to scare Mary off the streets, which it may have temporarily done. But desperate or not, this seems a very extreme strategy, especially for someone aiming to get another to live a more bible-approvable lifestyle. He wouldn’t have been the first and only hypocrite in history, but while it isn’t an implausible theory on a possible motive, it still seems a more dubious one than not to me. I can more easily believe that a man, otherwise demonstrably concerned with a soul’s salvation, would commit a crime of passion in the furious heat of perceived provocation.
On a side note, Barnett did go on to marry someone else.
In fairness to Barnett, the cops did interrogate him and cleared him of suspicion due to his having an alibi. I just don’t know what his alibi was or how thoroughly they vetted it, if at all. Whatever it was hasn’t kept his name off of enduring lists of suspects though, so I can’t imagine it was rock solid.
TL;DR: Robert Barnett murdered Mary Kelly, but was not JtR.
“The Double Event” | Elizabeth Stride & Catherine Eddowes
Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were both murdered on the night of September 30, 1888, soon to be coined the night of the “Double Event”. Both women were victims of a knife attack and, both are almost universally believed, at the hands of JtR. Elizabeth was killed first and was subjected to far less severe wounds than Catherine was. So the commonly held (and reasonable) assumption is that he was interrupted and forced to abandon his attack on Elizabeth before his compulsions were satisfied and that Catherine was then forced to pay this debt just 45 minutes later.
The evidence of this being the case is the improbability of two women being murdered with the same category of weapon so near to each other in time and distance by mere coincidence. But an improbability isn’t an impossibility, and the cards shared that, like Mary, Elizabeth was attacked by a spurned former and/or would-be lover. Her killer had also drawn inspiration, albeit to a lesser degree, from JtR and hoped that the blame would be cast his way, but he didn’t have it in him, let alone the time or the privacy, to mutilate the body to anywhere near the same level. He simply cut her throat and fled. It was a stroke of luck for him that JtR next struck where and when he did as that linked the two murders in people’s minds. Had this not been the case, people would not have been nearly so quick or confident to dismiss the different MOs.
I couldn’t find enough information to identify a specific suspect for Elizabeth’s murder. She was said to have been seen shortly before her death with a well-dressed man (they say unlikely to be JtR), and it is believed they parted company mere moments before she crossed paths with JtR. It is widely assumed that her earlier companion was a prospective customer of hers, but at least one article said she was recently out of a volatile relationship, so her former partner has to be considered a pretty strong suspect as well. All the cards could tell me though was that whoever she was seen with wanted more from her than she was willing to give and he took her rejection as poorly as one possibly can. So he was not in it for a dark thrill, her death was a wounded ego’s act of retaliation.
FWIW, with more research, I have learned that the cards are not as alone as I believed in believing JtR innocent of Elizabeth’s murder. Definitely not a popularly held opinion, but there are some vocal dissenters amongst reputable Ripperologists, and discovering this was a somewhat validating surprise.
TL;DR JtR was only guilty of the murder of Catherine Eddowes. Elizabeth Stride was killed by a spurned suitor and/or former lover.
Jack the Ripper’s Actual Victims
The man whose brutality gave life to the persona of JtR, and convenient cover to the two men responsible for the murders of Mary and Elizabeth, was guilty of murdering the other 3 canonical victims and 1 more that shortly preceded them. Martha Tabram is believed by many to possibly be one of JtR’s victims, but too few are convinced of it enough for her to be considered canonical. The doubts exist because, though she was cruelly stabbed an excessive 39 times on August 7th, her corpse didn’t suffer the more sadistic mutilation his other victims’ would. However, it is not unusual for a serial killer’s earlier victims to suffer “tamer” attacks as the killers gain confidence and knowledge of what excites/satisfies them through experience, and Martha would have been JtR’s first. So she remains firmly on people’s “maybe” list, but the cards do validate those who lean towards believing “yes”.
The remaining 2 women that would soon become known as his canonical victims were Mary Anne Nichols and Annie Chapman who were murdered on August 31st and September 8th, respectively. The cards did confirm that they are rightfully attributed to JtR.
TL;DR: JtR was the murderer of Catherine Eddowes, Martha Tabram, Annie Chapman, and Mary Anne Nichols.
Jack The Ripper
While walking to work in the very early, and still very dark, morning, Robert Paul came upon another man standing over a woman lying in the street. Noticing him too, the stranger began to approach him, which Robert claimed triggered his own survival instincts and he had to resist the urge to run. However, the man only asked for his help examining the woman he had just found and Robert obliged. Both men then stood over her, expressing uncertainty over whether she was still alive and what it was they could do to help. They touched her face and chest for indications of breath or a pulse, but when Robert then suggested they prop her up to get a better sense, the other man adamantly refused to handle her any further. Both men felt pressure to still report to their jobs on time, so concluded they would continue on and find a policeman along their commute to report the scene to. They then repositioned the dress to cover the body as modestly as easily possible and walked away.
The woman they left lying in the street was Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols and she was sadly already beyond help. While her dress covered up some ghastly wounds to her torso, the men both seemingly missed that her more visible throat had also been deeply slashed- almost to the point of decapitation. She was likely killed by manual strangulation before her throat was opened, which would have greatly reduced the volume and speed of blood loss from the gash. And it has been postulated that she had so recently been killed that she hadn’t yet spilled enough for it to have been immediately obvious to the men, given how very dark it was at that time of day. But if Robert’s suggestion to prop the body up had been indulged, regardless of how much blood had time to pool, the fact that her head was barely still attached to her body could not have been overlooked and they would have had no room to claim doubt over her fate.
Robert had been the one to suggest they find a cop, but when they readily encountered PC Mizen, it was the other who stepped forward to infom him of the woman lying in Buck’s Row. He omitted the key detail that he had been the first one to discover the body. But oddly, told him that a policeman was already at the scene and had asked for them to find another to help. And by pure coincidence, by the time Mizen got to the scene, PC Neil had stumbled on it already, so there was no immediate cause to question the truthfulness of the claim, and subsequently, the motivation to mislead. It wasn’t discovered until later that the man’s credibility was just the benefactor of a random stroke of luck. (I have recently read that Mizen may have just misunderstood his more ambiguous ‘you are needed over there’ statement to mean another cop had expressed said need. The man denied explicitly saying this when later testifying.) Incidentally, PC Neil reported that a pool of blood was immediately noticeable around Polly.
The man did turn up to the inquest for Polly’s murder and identified himself there as Charles Cross. It was only relatively recently discovered that his true surname, that he should have obligatorily provided, was Lechmere. Cross was actually the surname of the first of his two step-father’s (long deceased), so there was some basis for using it, but it was not his or one he should have offered in a legal proceeding. Charles was known to have used it on at least one other occasion, so there is also some precedent for him claiming it, though incidentally, that was another situation he might not have been eager to be associated with.
Somehow, in the contemporary JtR investigation, he was seemingly never seriously speculated to be anyone more interesting than the unlucky first person to find Polly, but his popularity as a lead JtR suspect has been growing steadily in more recent years. The case against him is compelling, but the supporting evidence is admittedly, without exception, entirely circumstantial. Much is, understandably, made by some Lechmerians of his providing a fake name at the inquest, but there is a plausible explanation of this (that I won’t get into here) that would make it a fairly reasonable thing for him to have done. But some anti-Lechmerians point to this explanation as irrefutable proof of his innocence, which is, in my mind, a leap too far. You don’t have to be guilty of everything to be guilty of something. Most criminals do non-suspicious things and tell the truth most of the time. And even if circumstantial, the remaining evidence against Charles lines up almost too perfectly, and certainly stacks up too much to be dismissed as irrelevant or uninteresting.
On a side note, I found I almost didn’t want him to be JtR, partially because his guilt feels obvious to the point of being anti-climactic once you hear the full case against him mapped out. But I also realized that I didn’t like him as JtR from the onset, because I didn’t like him as the murderer of Mary Kelly, and I hadn’t yet separated the two killers when I first looked at his photo. I had no reason to not, I just didn’t “feel” it when I tried to connect the man in the image to the victim I was, at that point, still using to focus my energy. And I’ve learned to trust my instincts as a fairly reliable, but admittedly not infallible, data point over the years as well- at least when I have no personal stake in the game and I definitely don’t here. But what I’m still learning is to also first question, or intentionally uncover, what unproven assumptions I might be operating under that might lead me to follow good instincts to the wrong conclusions.
Lechmerian’s strongest argument is centered around the pool of blood, in my opinion, as it speaks to just how soon before Robert came upon the scene that Polly would have been killed and had her throat opened. Buck’s Row was apparently a long street without easy off-shoots so it wasn’t a location one could easily make a hasty retreat from. And research suggests all shoes were hard-soled back then, meaning people could hear others coming and going from a fair distance, especially at that otherwise quiet time of day. If there wasn’t enough blood by the time Robert came onto and then left the scene for it to be noticeable, but there was a few minutes later when PC Neil did, then her throat would have had to have just been opened. If Lechmere wasn’t the person to do it, for him to have already been right there, meant he should have at least seen or heard the person who did as they fled. And this seems like something he would have mentioned if it was the case. So Lechmerian’s argue that he was in the middle of his attack on Polly when he heard Robert approaching and had to act fast to cover his tracks. So he pulled her dress down over the wounds inflicted on the torso and stood over her body as if he, too, had just encountered it on his walk to work and adopted the role of a concerned citizen. He then pulled Robert into it as a way to assess what was seen and control what the narrative was from there. There’s a lot more to the timeline of that morning that gets really interesting, and it’s worth learning about, if the interest is there.
But while I wanted to provide a relatively complete narrative here to build a case against him, I learned most of the above only after, and only because, the cards had pointed me in his direction. Charles was the second of the suspects that I had put on my short-list of married ones. So though it already seemed pretty clear that Barnett was Mary’s killer, I still decided to do a quick read on him, just in case, in the name of thoroughness. And once I did, the cards wasted little time in confirming his significance. The King of Swords had already come to represent JtR (the cards can be very literal!), but the Knight of Pentacles had shown up an uncanny number of times as well. So it was clear that whoever/whatever the latter represented was very important to this case but I didn’t know what to make of it- something that frustrated me enough to unintentionally declare it out loud multiple times and then dramatically gasp when the Knight of Pentacles was the very first card I pulled as Charles’ significator. Though I wouldn’t fully make sense of it until much later, it was instant confirmation that he was, at the very least, crucial in the JtR story. I then pulled a second Knight and then The Devil. And with this third card, I knew that Charles was, in fact, the most crucial figure in the JtR story. The cards continued to validate this and to provide greater insight into why JtR came to exist within him.
TL;DR: Charles Lechmere (aka Cross) was JtR.
Jack the Ripper’s Origin Story
The cards made clear, as they do, that a failed relationship was central to his descent (ascent?) and my early assumption was that it was a romantic one, but soon pulled the two cards in the deck most explicitly tied to a mother figure and then one tied to a daughter. They spoke of someone feeling a sense of rejection and unwanted isolation that stemmed from a betrayal that they feared ended a relationship for good. However, the cards also shared that though they remained troubled, the relationship(s) were repaired enough to temper the emotions and heal the deep hurt enough to quell the rage and restore peace. So JtR didn’t harbor an innate drive to kill women, he harbored the inability to manage emotions and channel pain appropriately. Once the triggering grievances were appeased, he ceased being an active danger to others.
So again, I hit up Google to see how well this might apply to Charles and again, it did pretty perfectly, relative to how very little is known of him. His father had abandoned his family when he was very young, and his mother remarried twice. Incidentally, his parents never actually divorced, so she was legally committing bigamy with both of the step-fathers. The one he occasionally borrowed the name of had been a cop and would have been considered an unusually great catch for a “single” (*cough*) mother. However, their family bounced around to various homes throughout his childhood, which was just one of the reasons it wouldn’t have been considered a stable one. Charles was married and had 12 of his own children, but he always lived with or very near his mom. There aren’t any details as to why, but a few weeks prior to the first JtR murder, he moved away from his mom, leaving one of his daughters behind to live with her instead. It is speculated by those who believe him to be JtR that whatever went down with them was possibly what set him on his infamous course. There did seem to be a reconciliation of sorts not long after, where they at least re-entered each other’s lives. So this, again, mirrors the story my cards told perfectly.
I didn’t know it beforehand, but one of the ways that Mary Kelly didn’t fit JtR’s MO is that she was in her mid-20’s, which would make her the only of his victims that wasn’t in her 40’s and wasn’t a mother. The age is the discrepancy that bothered me the most when I learned of it, but with Charles emerging as JtR and being driven primarily by mother issues, it becomes an even more important one, to me anyway. I’m far from an expert on criminal psychology, but I believe that though MOs of serial killers can evolve and, though it is not unheard of, their preferred victim profile is less likely to vary. I know availability is often a trump factor, but there, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be a shortage of vulnerable women in White Chapel in 1888. And the victim that departs from the killer’s preferred MO does not seem the likely one to trigger and suffer the greatest brutality, as Mary did. That said, in fairness, the rare opportunity for privacy may have played the biggest role in the severity here, regardless of victim profile, so my musings here admittedly amount to speculative garbage.
On another note, until diving into the story with my cards, I had always found it surprising that the women were not also sexually assaulted. But it makes sense to me that they weren’t if he was projecting his mother on them and making them suffer his punishment of her ‘offense(s)’ in her stead. He had mommy issues, but they didn’t run Oedipal. I also found it surprising that he seemed to kill the women via strangulation before mutilating them. To me, this suggested he potentially didn’t want to maximize their suffering. Strangulation is one of the basest and most personal ways to kill someone. But it also seems a small act of mercy from someone who has far more grotesque plans in mind. I could see it suggesting there is some underlying love still within the rage to not want them to endure the worst of the pain and/or still potentially being intimidated by the woman and needing to be sure he had total control and a strictly one-way dialogue. That said, it may have just been a decision made for practical purposes, potentially including to limit the amount of blood splatter and the potential for the women to scream. Particularly, if he was committing these acts en route to work. So again, more speculative garbage since it could mean any number of things or nothing at all. I guess it just surprises me that someone so uniquely savage didn’t seek to also torture his victims- their actual deaths were relatively quick, efficient, and sadly run-of-the-mill, the stand-out sadism only came after they were past the point of feeling. But lastly, on the mother track, I think this is why some of the women’s uteruses seemed to have been targeted for removal, which I believe is the case, but am, admittedly, not sure.
Incidentally, the Chariot appeared enough times in my spreads to be clearly important as well. I didn’t know why until I later learned that Charles was a carman (cart driver) and delivered meat throughout London. This would explain how he could have moved around with some blood on his clothes without rousing suspicion. It could also explain why he might know a little more than the average person about anatomy, but not be an expert. And why he might be better at wielding a knife than the average person, but not be surgeon-esque. His route to and from work also happened to pass right by the sites of the murders and at the right times. The exception was the one committed outside of his work hours and it was carried out in a location where he might reasonably be expected to be at the time, i.e., near his mother’s house on a Saturday night. The locations would track even adding back in the two murders my cards cleared him of, with Elizabeth’s being the only one that takes even some spin to make make sense, and it doesn’t take much.
TL;DR: Charles Lechmere was more spree killer than serial killer. His spree was fueled by deep rage against his mother following a fight and doused with their reconciliation.
Timeline
I was pulling an unusually high number of 8’s and 9’s in my spreads and it took me awhile to piece together what I now think is the reason for it. I believe that the cards were saying from the start that the months were significant and that JtR was only responsible for the murders committed in August and September of 1888. I still feel like I might be missing an element of why the months are significant (potentially some symbolism to them), but I think the cards were mostly just highlighting that this was his active time frame and any of the murders that fell outside of it were at the hands of someone else. The time period immediately followed a significant falling out with his mother and daughter, but the restoration of his relationships with both, not long after the last murder in September, quelled his rage enough for him to put down his wrathful, cruelly mis-aimed knife for good. In short, his 8 week spree amounted to a very sadistic temper tantrum.
Thames Torso Murderer
My early assumption was that one of the other two killers the cards brought to my attention from the start was the serial one responsible for the Thames Torso Murders, since he was active over the same time period, albeit for a longer one. But though I knew this was wrong by the time I got to this part of my investigation, and though I personally didn’t find it likely, enough people believe that JtR was behind those deaths too to warrant my trying to explicitly confirm or deny it. The cards ultimately led me to conclude that a man named James Hardiman had murdered the victims that turned up between 1884-1889. The cards suggested that a father, mother, daughter, and son were all central to the underlying psyche/circumstances that led him to commit the murders. Unlike JtR’s victims, all his victims, save Elizabeth Jackson, were unidentifiable, but like JtR’s, all were believed to have been prostitutes. It is believed that James had picked up syphilis from his illicit dalliances with prostitutes and then passed it to his pregnant wife who then passed it to their unborn daughter. The daughter was sickly from birth and died within a year. It is speculated that James lashed out at the prostitutes in revenge for giving him the illness that led to the loss of his daughter. Accountability clearly wasn’t his thing.
However, the two murders committed in 1884 preceded his daughter’s death, so while it may have fueled his rage and led to an uptick in activity, it wasn’t his villain origin story. What may be ties to the nearly identical murders that were carried out in 1873 and 1874. Some believe that they were all done by the same person, who just then went quiet for a decade, but interestingly, the cards point to Edward Hardiman, James’ father, as that decade’s Thames Torso Murderer. I could find next to nothing about Edward, let alone anything tangible to support or debunk this even being a remote possibility, so the cards have to stand completely alone in this claim. James was said to be deeply misogynistic, and it is not unreasonable to suspect if he was, then his father was likely to be. And that it may not have been the only trait he inherited from him. But this can’t be definitively concluded to be true and many misogynistic people (most even!) do not turn out to be murderers.
James’ family, including extended, were all part of the slaughter trade. Even his mom sold cat meat on the street. Again, that doesn’t damn them as a family of murderers, but it adds an interesting element to the case. Like JtR’s victims, his/theirs were said to have been dissected with some degree of skill, though fell short of displaying medical-level expertise. Further, James’ brother had died when young, which could be the “son” the cards were referring to in my first general reading on this case. Perhaps Edward’s son’s death was part of what sparked his murder spree. But again, I have nothing to base this pure speculation on. The cards’ seem to be the lone finger pointing his way so no one seems to have felt his life worthy of chronicling, at least that my rather superficial research uncovered.
TL:DR: James Hardiman was the Thames Torso Murderer who was active from 1884-1889, but was not JtR. His father, Edward Hardiman, was the Thames Torso Murderer active in 1873-1874, but was not JtR.
Connection Between the Killers
This is finally where the Knight of Pentacles started to make sense. The three killers behind the canonical deaths attributed to JtR were consistently (uncannily so) represented by the King of Cups (Barnett), King of Wands (Liz Stride’s), and King of Swords (Lechmere), but it became clear that the Knight of Pentacles also represented JtR. And I couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t just use King of Swords for him every time, or if they were both pulled in one spread as did happen a few times, why he wouldn’t at least show up as the Knight of Swords for the sake of continuity. But when I started shuffling the cards to dive into the Thames Torso Murderer for the first time, I thought “how weird would it be if he turns up the King of Pentacles?” But though I was half-expecting him to, I still gasped loud enough to scare my cat off my lap when I turned that card over first for his significator. (These are the validating moments that quiet my moments of skepticism that I’m not just willingly naive to believe in these cards- and I love them even when they simultaneously creep me out.)
But then an explanation fell into place. It did seem like too much of a coincidence that there were two serial killers roaming the streets of London at the exact same time with such similar MOs, so I could understand people’s temptation to believe there to be just one person responsible for all the grisly deaths. And I had formulated at least one possible explanation for one person displaying similar, yet significantly different MOs (i.e., one subset represented his mom and the other his daughter, and they were ‘punished’ accordingly), but I still wasn’t inclined to believe it true. I also considered the possibility that the men were connected somehow and had formed a serial killer club of sorts, but ultimately ruled this out too.
I think it is, more simply, that JtR was, like most Londoners, aware of the Thames Torso Murders and was, unlike most Londoners, inspired by them. In a manner of speaking, and unbeknownst to Hardiman, he fashioned himself as an apprentice of his of sorts and copied his crimes, albeit with his own signature mutilation patterns. Barnett and Stride’s murderer showed up, respectively, as the Pages of Swords and Pentacles a few times, and I think similarly, it is because they too adopted the MO, to their own degree, of the two much discussed/highly publicized killers. But while JtR, as the Knight of Pentacles, was one level down from Hardiman, as the King of Pentacles, they were represented by the lower ranked figures because they weren’t serial/spree killers in the making and didn’t possess the same ongoing sadistic thirst and/or rage as the higher ranked men did. They weren’t motivated by the rush or release of the kill, theirs were one-off, unplanned crimes of passion and they simply borrowed from other current playbooks as an opportunistic way to then deflect suspicion.
TL;DR: The four killers were not directly connected, but drew inspiration from each other to varying degrees and/or hoped their crime(s) would get blamed on another.
Unrelated Victims
It has been speculated by some that Emma Smith (murdered April 3), Rose Mylett (December 20), Alice McKenzie (July 17, 1889), and Frances Cole (February 13, 1891) were possibly victims of JtR. They were not.
From Hell/Letters to the Cops
JtR did not write any of the letters received by the cops or newspapers, including the infamous From Hell one. They were all hoaxes from bored individuals or opportunistic journalists. JtR sought no notoriety, only to release his pain.
The End
No one would guess this based on the long length of this post, but I did leave out a fair number of more nuanced details on the dynamics at play in every scenario that I found fairly interesting as a former psychology major, but I think the above captures the gist of the core answers I got to the core questions about the case.
And incidentally, I am not sure how to get their attention but feel strongly that my successfully solving their most elusive and obsession-inspiring case legally obligates England to grant me dual citizenship. I hear Frogmore Cottage is newly available to regift, so will consider myself on standby and require just 2 days’ notice to move in.
But more seriously, I would like to truly end with a nod to the women who didn’t choose to be characters, sometimes even demoted to footnotes, in the Jack the Ripper story. Regardless of who made victimhood their enduring legacies, I hope Mary, Polly, Catherine, Martha, Annie, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Emma, Rose, Alice, Frances, and the unnamed victims of the Thames Torso Murderer(s) found the peace, ease, and kindness in their afterlife that were denied to them during their lives, from their start to their unfathomable finish. They deserved to die of old age in graceful anonymity, as most are granted by history, remembered only by those who knew and loved them for who they were and wanted to be, not for what the darker sides of (in)humanity made them do to survive before the darkest ensured that they didn’t. But I’m a hypocrite, because not even I granted that to them here. RIP.
talesofthetarot.com 