Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (2 page)

I decided that morning to call the auction rooms to see what would happen to the shawl. Thankfully the auctioneer remembered me and told me that it was to be returned to the vendor. I asked him
if he thought the owner would be interested in selling it to me if I offered to pay the reserve price. I was told to wait by the phone. The auctioneer wanted to call the vendor there and then. A
few tense minutes later, the phone rang and the auctioneer’s voice came through.

‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘If you can meet our fee and pay the reserve, the shawl is yours.’

I was elated. It had crossed my mind that somebody else might have tried the same thing, but it seems I was the only one. I had, provisionally, bought it. The relief that flooded through my body
was immense.

‘I’m going to need a letter of provenance. I need the history of this from the owner, in writing,’ I said.

It was very important for me to establish as much information as possible about how the shawl had come down through his family.

But the deal was done, and I put the phone down in a much happier mood than I had been in since the auction.

I had to wait for the letter to arrive with the auctioneer, which took a few days. It was a strange feeling, knowing that this thing was mine, but I could not confidently believe it until it was
there in my hands. As I waited in limbo I was riddled with doubt – what if the vendor had changed his mind? I couldn’t stop going over my secret, and wondering what would
have happened if somebody else had stumbled on it before I did. As it turned out, my life would have been a whole lot different.

I went to collect the shawl on 2 April 2007, just over two weeks after I first saw it. I picked up a banker’s draft from a branch of my bank in Bury St Edmunds, and walked to the auction
house, aware of my own heartbeat. As I saw the people of Bury St Edmunds going about their daily lives, it felt surreal that I was going to collect something that meant so much to me and that could
have so much historical significance, and yet nobody else shared my excitement.

I was kept waiting at the auction house, they weren’t ready to hand over my precious purchase. The auctioneer asked why I hadn’t made a bid for the shawl on the day, and I explained
I felt too nervous, with all eyes focusing on the item, and I was waiting for the right moment, but that moment never came.

He smiled, no doubt used to customers suffering auction nerves, but also possibly thinking that I had played a long game, and never intended to put myself out in public as the purchaser of the
shawl. I wish I had been that clever! Eventually he passed me a large piece of card folded in half and taped with yellowing Sellotape.

Within it was the shawl, wrapped in red tissue paper. On the card was the name and profession of the previous owner, David Melville-Hayes, along with the inscription: ‘Shawl in two pieces
(1) approx 71ins by 24ins, (2) approx 24ins by 15 ins.’ I was also handed the letter from Mr Melville-Hayes, and was immediately struck that it was written on an old typewriter, which somehow
added to the huge sense of history I already had.

‘Keep in touch and let us know how you get on with the thing, won’t you?’ the auctioneer said as he shook my hand.

‘Of course I will, my pleasure,’ I replied.

I walked back to my car, carrying the inauspicious-looking parcel, and feeling immensely pleased with myself.

I knew I was only at the beginning of my own personal crusade to unmask the Ripper. But the journey had begun.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM BIRKENHEAD TO BRICK LANE

T
he story of Jack the Ripper is well documented. Whole libraries have been written about it, countless theories have been expounded, television
documentaries and feature films have been made. It is the greatest true crime mystery ever, world-renowned, lingering in the collective imagination, a constant source of fascination. There are
serial killers with much bigger death tallies, even some just as vicious in the way they dispatched their victims. But none, ever, has held the public interest in the same way as this case. In a
short killing spree in 1888, Jack the Ripper carved his way into history as surely as he carved up the unfortunate women he came across as he prowled through the Whitechapel alleys and
passageways.

Many people have tried to solve the case, both at the time and in the years since. I am the latest in that long line: but unlike anyone before me, I believe I have incontrovertible proof, the
kind of proof that would stand up to any cross-examination in a courtroom today.

I am not the most likely of candidates to solve this puzzle: in fact, I stumbled into it almost by chance. But I believe it was
my ability to think laterally that helped
me to see a link that nobody else had spotted. With no background as a researcher, I have had to learn as I go along, and I have been down countless blind alleys. I have been rebuffed, discouraged,
and at times I have given up entirely. But the project niggled, and I never completely let go of it.

I don’t come from London’s East End, so I have no direct connection with the history of the crimes: I was born and grew up in Birkenhead. We started out as a regular family: Mum,
Dad, me and my sister living in a council flat in a tower block in a tough area. But by the time I was four my parents had split up. They both went on to marry again, and through Mum’s new
partner I acquired a stepbrother and a stepsister, and through Dad’s I gained another stepbrother, stepsister, and then a half-sister. So it was always a complicated, fragmented upbringing,
and the greatest stability in my childhood came from my grandmother, who lived across the road from us when we moved, when I was five, to a two-up, two-down terraced house, with a toilet out the
back, and weekly trips to the public baths for a bath.

After my stepfather accidentally set fire to the house while cooking, we were rapidly moved to a council estate. But I always gravitated back to my grandmother, and by the time I was thirteen I
was staying with her every Tuesday night and from Friday through to Sunday. I am sometimes asked how I first became interested in crime, and I believe it dates back to my early childhood. My mum
and stepfather were often working: they ran market stalls. My sister and I were looked after by a succession of teenage babysitters, and my grandparents, and they didn’t insist on early
bedtimes: we stayed up watching
Frankenstein
,
Dracula
,
The Mummy
,
The Wolfman
and other
horror movies. At the same time I was collecting
and painting small plastic models of monsters and characters from horror movies.

When I was ten, the news was dominated by the Yorkshire Ripper, and I followed the case closely, with no idea that his nickname derived from an earlier murderer. It became an interest as I moved
into my teens: I was fascinated by TV programmes on American serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and then the British killer Dennis Nilsen.

It wasn’t a serious obsession: I didn’t go out of my way to study murderers. But I was always intrigued by the big question: what makes someone become, not just a murderer with a
clear motive, but a serial killer, who strikes again and again, seemingly randomly? Where does that urge to kill come from?

I did well at school, working hard for my O levels, putting up with the bullies who dubbed me ‘Half Mast’ because my trousers were always too short: my parents didn’t have
enough money to buy me new ones each year. I was in the O-level class with the posh kids, but I was on free school dinners: I didn’t really fit in. I did my revision at my grandmother’s
house, my favourite refuge. It was then that I realized nobody would ever fight my battles for me, and I developed a strong sense of having to look after myself.

I wasn’t encouraged at home, where schoolwork wasn’t particularly valued. I started doing A levels in Chemistry, Biology and Music, but a spectacular row with my mother and
stepfather sent me running to North Wales to live with my dad at the guest house he ran in Rhyl, North Wales. I was even unhappier living with my stepmother, so I went back to Birkenhead and went
to college to carry on studying. My
mother and stepfather had moved from the council house into a shop in Wallasey, and then when I was eighteen they returned to the terraced
two-up, two-down opposite my grandmother. There was no bedroom for me, so I slept on a camp bed underneath the stairs in the living room, still spending a lot of time with my grandmother, whose
health was declining (she died when I was 21). I was also playing the saxophone in a band, and devoting more time to this than to college work: I took two A levels, in Biology and Chemistry, and
when the results came out I had an F (fail) for Biology and an O (O-level grade) for Chemistry. I stared at them: FO. At that moment, I felt the letters were spelling out a message to me, to give
up my academic hopes and just get on with life.

One thing that both my parents unconsciously handed to me was a desire to be my own boss. My dad ran his own guest house, my mum and stepdad made and sold soft toys on market stalls. I’d
been helping them since I was thirteen, I knew everything I needed to know about making teddy bears and other popular stuffed toys, and I was soon running two market stalls of my own. It was my
first taste of business success. I was nineteen, I had seven outworkers (women who made the toys), two stalls, and a business supplying soft toys as arcade prizes to all the concessions along the
seafront at Rhyl.

With my girlfriend, I was also soon buying property, jumping at the chance to buy a rundown place in Toxteth, Liverpool, then another one in Birkenhead, where we lived, then another one. The
band took up all my spare time: we were punk rockers, and we went by the name of Dust Choir, which makes me cringe today. But it was good fun.

Then I crashed and burned: I lost it all. My girlfriend split with me, and I was devastated because I did not see it
coming. At the tender age of twenty-two I
couldn’t deal with the rejection. I needed to get away, and with a mate we left Merseyside in an old red Escort van which I bought for £200 from a bloke in a pub, which needed a pair of
pliers to keep the choke out, and which I had to rev up at traffic lights in case it stalled. I had £130, a suitcase of clothes and a tent. We more or less stuck a pin in a map and decided to
go to Cambridge, because it sounded like it would be a beautiful place, which it is. But what I saw for the next few months was not the lovely city, but potato fields, where we worked as pickers, a
car components factory, where I worked on a production line, and a campsite where we pitched the tent.

Even the campsite did not last: when my mate bailed out and went back home, I couldn’t pay the site rent and I wasn’t allowed back to get my tent and my possessions. The van had been
towed away by the police as it had no tax and MOT, and was, after the journey down, undriveable. I was, for a short time, truly homeless. I switched my shifts at the factory to mainly nights, and
during the day dozed on a bus shelter seat, and occasionally in a trench halfway from the town centre to the factory. I was washing at the railway station and walking to work. In desperation one
cold night I asked a couple of policemen in a police car to arrest me, just so that I could get warm: they declined. I was so rundown and filthy that I actually caught scabies, which was horrible,
and I felt ashamed because to me scabies meant dirt and poverty. I must have been a bit smelly because my workmates at the factory showed me where there was a shower to clean myself up.

It was a very bleak time, but when I look back it was important. It reinforced my need to be successful, to make something of myself, and my strong feeling that I would always have to
do it myself, without any help. It also gave me a great empathy with people who find themselves at the bottom of the heap, with nobody to turn to and nowhere to live: eventually, years
down the line, this helped me understand the dire poverty of the Ripper victims. I knew, as they knew, the overpowering drive for the basics of life: shelter and food.

Luckily, I kept on working and with my wages could afford a bed and breakfast. I was soon back on my feet, raising the deposit to rent a house, which I shared with my new Spanish girlfriend.
Eventually, I got some money from the properties in Birkenhead and decided to get back into studying, but this time a subject that would be relevant to me: Business Studies. I applied to various
seats of learning, and in the end landed a place at the Polytechnic of North London in Holloway Road, a complete contrast with the tranquillity of Cambridge and my first introduction to the
metropolis. For the first couple of weeks I commuted from Cambridge: a ridiculously long journey. I would doze on the four-hour coach journey and wake as it came into London down Commercial Road,
through the heart of the East End. This was my first impression of the area, and I remember thinking it looked sad and rundown.

I was soon living in London and having a great time, making good friends, girlfriends, finding the college work easy. I decided to go on to do a postgrad course in Management Studies at the
Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), funding myself with grants and casual work. I was, like all students, permanently broke and always with an eye out for a cheap
place to eat.

That mission to eat cheap, often in the middle of the night after strumming guitars or arguing pretentious philosophy with my student friends, took me for the first time into the
East End. We patronized the famous twenty-four-hour Beigel Bake at the north end of Brick Lane, where we could have, in those days, a delicious, filling, cream cheese bagel for the
princely sum of 40p. And as we discovered this manna, at the same time I discovered the whole area, a place I knew nothing about but where, for some inexplicable reason, I felt at home. It was
rough back then – it still is, in parts. But I loved the buzz, the coolness of the place. It spoke to me in a way no other area has ever chimed with me before. There were hookers and their
pimps, knots of dodgy-looking men outside the pubs, and spicy, exotic smells drifting from the Asian restaurants and cafes. I was used to the rougher areas of Liverpool, but this was different in a
way it is hard for me to explain. I loved the place, still do, and if it was not for family reasons I’d live there today.