You don’t know Jack … but Mei Trow doesNew book on Ripper murders is lesson in reasoned investigating
On Dec. 30 I posted a blog about British historian M. J. “Mei” Trow and his candidate for the Whitechapel murderer who terrorized London in 1888: the maniac better known as Jack the Ripper. Trow’s findings are largely founded on the relatively new criminal investigative concept of “geographic profiling” – by which the area where a serial killer resides or works may be plotted with great accuracy using the locations of his crime scenes – as well as on the older and more familiar method of criminal profiling, in which the evidence of the crimes themselves offer clues to the perpetrator’s identity.
Trow is featured on the Discovery Channel program “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed,” which I saw in December; the show is based on Trow’s book “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009; distributed in the U.S. by Casemate Publishing), which I have just finished and also recommend. Here’s why …
Students of philosophy know the concept of “Occam’s razor”: Named for the medieval English Franciscan friar William of Occam, the “razor” – designed to cut through baloney in any era – is defined by our friends at Merriam-Webster as “a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.” Put more simply: Don’t reach for a complicated answer to a problem when there’s a simpler explanation available; or, as medical school students have been taught for generations: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
In “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer,” Mei Trow has done just that: waded into the morass of Ripper lore – rife with and blind alleys and “red herrings” (a favorite term among the Ripperologists, I note) – and come up with a logical suspect for the murders who was, unfortunately, written off as a mental incompetent and subsequently ignored at the outset of the original investigation.
That man was Robert Mann, a workhouse inmate who not only lived in the very part of London where most of the murders occurred but was employed as an attendant in the mortuary that served that area of the metropolis: Therefore, as a matter of procedure, Ripper’s gruesome handiwork would be brought to Mann’s workplace for forensic medical examination. Mann was not a doctor – far from it: His job was to unlock the morgue and take receipt of the bodies that the police brought in at all hours of the day and night. Like the eponymous Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz, in the original 1931 film, he would have done the heavy lifting for the investigating physician: washed the corpses, helped hoist them onto and off the slab, held the specimen jars waiting to be filled, cleaned up the mess afterward … In that capacity, he would also have observed trained surgeons at work, incidentally gaining some anatomical knowledge. And he would have had ready access to sharp instruments.
Mann would also have been called to the stand at inquests. This struck me as odd, and I asked Trow about it in my original interview last year on AmeriCollector.com (“The Ripper reexamined,” Dec. 30, 2009): Would his responsibilities in a mortuary gone beyond moving corpses around and cleaning up? Trow replied: “We know … that he was trusted to go out of the workhouse to collect corpses, so he is not merely ‘moving bodies around’ in the confines of his own mortuary. Anyone connected with the deceased, from relatives and friends to any eyewitnesses, the police and auxiliary staff (e.g., Mann), would be called to an inquest as a matter of routine.” In fact, Mann was called to testify at the first two Ripper inquests but was written off as disoriented and incoherent and therefore an unreliable witness.
In other words, while Londoners lived in fear of – and London’s finest frantically searched for – a babbling maniac (the “disorganized killer” of modern police parlance), the authorities actually dismissed the very first babbling maniac they encountered: one who could look forward to being physically close to his victims again and again and again.
Certainly, with over a century of criminological advances to draw on – including the relatively recent observation that serial murderers operate close to where they live and/or work – Trow can take the long view of the Whitechapel murders in identifying Mann as the killer, which he admits may never be proven conclusively. Nonetheless, the Ripperological community is a meticulous one: While police blunders are often cited, it’s interesting to note not only that no one has proposed Mann as a possible perp till now – I mean, why not check out EVERYONE with a tangible connection to the crimes, instead of Freemasons and Queen Victoria’s nephew? – but that Ripper investigators through the years have suffered from the same nearsightedness as Jack’s contemporary pursuers. It took Trow, wielding Occam’s discerning blade, to finger Mann as a geographically logical choice; as someone who would know bureaucratic procedure well enough to anticipate reunions with his victims in his morgue; and who would benefit, intentionally or not, by acting naturally when investigators shined their light on him, earning him his “REJECTED” stamp early on and enabling him to “hide in plain sight” from then on.
It’s not a novel concept, only one that’s newly and elegantly applied to the world’s most enduring murder mystery. Trow himself noted in our December interview that “the idea of a disturbed mortuary attendant first surfaced in the profiling carried on in 1988 by John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.” He also recounts in “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” how David Canter, author of “Mapping Murder: The Secrets of Geographical Profiling” (Virgin Books), once submitted a screenplay to a film company “in which the offender was as banal as his motive”: “It was turned down, said the company, because ‘the audience would feel cheated by such a denouement. They would want to learn that it was all even more complicated than they could have imagined, not less so.’ And so it is with Jack. This does an appalling disservice to the truth. Murder is very rarely exotic and conspiratorial; the only thing that is bizarre about serial killers is the crimes they commit. Everything else IS ordinary” (emphasis in the original).
Historians – and, I think, collectors as hobbyists and as “history detectives” – can greatly benefit from the levelheadedness of Trow’s work. You may not agree with his conclusion that Robert Mann was responsible for the “ ’orrible murders” in London in 1888 and possibly a couple more in 1889, but you’ll learn a thing or two from his mind-set and methodology, such as trying to get into another person’s frame of mind, accepting that people are usually guided by commonplace motives and, certainly, that they often make simple yet enduring mistakes. Fiddle with the key words in an eBay search, or type in common misspellings for a personal name, and you may well be rewarded with an item that other people miss; imagine where a folder may “logically” be misfiled and you may unearth information that has been long lost to other researchers.
This is a good, fast read that, thankfully, forgoes the usual lurid police photographs of the victims, which are on any number of Web sites anyway. Give “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” a try, and mind those hoofbeats …
Photos from “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” courtesy of M. J. Trow
Have you read “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer”? We welcome your impressions of Mei Trow’s book. Please post here or send them, along with a line or two about yourself, to LetsCollect@AmeriCollector.com.
JACK THE RIPPER: QUEST FOR A KILLER
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