RED JACK, SAUCY JACK, A JACK BY ANY OTHER NAME
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
It’s been well over 100 years since the gory murders committed in the Whitechapel district of East London, and the identity of Jack the Ripper is still in question. Just how many others were masters in their own right of similar, bloody handiwork?
The Reign of the Servant Girl Annihilator
In the shadows of history, years before Jack the Ripper carved his name into legend, a savage killer haunted the dusty streets of Austin, Texas. While the world fixates on Whitechapel’s Autumn of Terror, few realize that a bloodthirsty phantom struck earlier — and with equal brutality — in the American South.
On New Year’s Day 1885, terror descended on Austin. Around 3 a.m., Walter Spencer staggered into his brother-in-law’s room at 901 West Pecan Street, blood pouring from deep gashes on his head. “Mr. Tom,” he gasped, “for God’s sake, help me — somebody has nearly killed me.”
His common-law wife, Mollie Smith, a black cook for the Hall family, lay in the backyard behind the outhouse. Neighbors discovered her body at 9 a.m., floating in a pool of her own blood. She had suffered a massive head wound and savage cuts to her torso, arms, and legs. Signs of a desperate struggle filled their small quarters, and a bloodstained axe rested at the foot of the bed.
Police arrested William Brooks, Mollie’s former lover, but released him after he provided an alibi. At the time, investigators believed it was a crime of passion. They were wrong.
Five months later, the killings escalated into a full-blown reign of terror. Eliza Shelley, another black cook, had her head split open with an axe. Two weeks later, on May 23, Irene Cross was stabbed and scalped. The city reeled.
On August 30, the killer claimed 11-year-old Mary Ramey. He dragged her into a washhouse, raped her, and stabbed her through the ear. Her mother, Rebecca Ramey, was seriously wounded.
Not every attack belonged to the same hand. A week before Mary Ramey was killed, neighbors on North Avenue were roused from sleep by screams and moans coming from the house of E.J. Christmas, who lived at 203 North Avenue.
Neighbors rushed in to find Clara Dick lying on her bed with a crushed skull. She’d been stuck just above the left eye, and blood flowed freely. She was unconscious. Her mother, Rebecca Christmas, had been wounded in the right arm.
Later, it turned out that Charles Dick, a native of Waco, visited the house a few moments before, and had reached through the window in his wife’s room and made an attempt to kidnap their baby.
The couple had separated several months before, and in April, he asked her to live with him again. She said no, and he responded, “Damn you, you shan’t have my baby then,” and grabbed the child. Eight months before, Dick had attacked his father-in-law and seriously wounded him. Dick had been a horse thief in his youth, and beat his wife, which is why she left.
Clara Dick survived; her husband, Charles Dick, was found not guilty of intent to murder in November 1885.
In late September, the Annihilator struck again. Alderman Duff was awakened about 1 a.m. when his mother said something was occurring at Major Dunham’s house. The home was located at 2310 San Marcos Street, where Gracie Vance and Orange Washington lived in a small wooden shanty behind the house.
Orange was found lying across the bed, close to death. Gracie was missing, but neighborhood men followed a bloody trail that started at the window and ended behind a stable. Gracie Vance had been beaten savagely about the head with a brick and raped while she lay dying.
Patsy Gibson, who was a cook for Dr. Graves along with Lucinda Boddy, had been sleeping on the floor in the room with the couple. The murderer had snuck in through a window and attacked both women. Their skulls were fractured by a sandbag.
Lucinda regained consciousness and lit a kerosene lamp. She had seen the man returning to the cabin, and she said, “Oh, Dock, don’t do it!” and he replied, “God damn you, don’t you look at me. Blow out that light.” She jumped out of a window and went to get help.
When she ran into Major Dunham, she said, “Dock Woods did it!”
It seemed Dunham had already awoken, roused by noise, which he took to be Orange whipping Gracie, which he frequently did. He came out of his home with a gun, and the killer who had caught up with Lucinda at the front gate fled.
Another neighbor saw a man running away. A crowd pursued him, and a couple of shots were fired after the fleeing suspect, but he got away from them.
Lucinda survived, and so did Patsy despite her serious injuries. Lucinda told authorities again that the man who attacked them was Doc Wood.
Police arrested him and found he was wearing bloody clothes. He said the blood was a product of a venereal disease he suffered from. Woods produced an alibi for his whereabouts, but it took months before he was released when it was found that the blood was indeed his own.
Orange Washington succumbed to his wounds.
The Christmas Eve Slaughter
Almost exactly one year after Mollie Smith’s murder, the killer delivered his most shocking blows.
He targeted the home of Moses Hancock, a carpenter who lived at 203 East Water Street. He came to after hearing groans and went into the next room, where his wife, Susan, slept. He found it empty, and blood stained the bed and floor. He followed the trail of red out the front door and around to the side of the house into the back yard. There, he found his wife dead. Hancock threw a brick at the figure of a man standing over his wife. Even though he had an ax in his hand, the man fled and disappeared into the darkness.
Police and doctors were called. Susan Hancock had been hit twice with an ax on the left side of her head, and her skull was fractured. She barely clung to life. Like other victims before her, she had been raped, and something thin and sharp was stuck in her right ear that reached her brain. She died on December 28.
Among Susan Hancock’s things was a letter she had written telling her husband she was leaving him because of his drinking, an act she never carried out.
After the death of his wife, Moses Hancock kept drinking heavily and threatened and abused his in-laws and others around him. He made up strange stories and accused others of committing the crime. Ultimately, he was exonerated of Susan’s murder in 1887.
An hour after Susan Hancock was attacked, another victim was claimed. Eula Phillips lived with her in-laws on West Hickory Street. She occupied a room along with her husband and their 18-month-old child.
The older Mrs. Phillips heard her son groaning and came to his room. There she found her grandbaby sitting up in bed next to her son Jimmy, who was “weltering in blood” with a deep gash under the ear, extending from the back of the head to the throat. Beside him in the bed lay a bloody ax. His wife Eula, was missing.
A bloody trail led out on the gallery, which connected the two houses, and then into another yard to some outbuildings that were surrounded by a rail fence.
There, they found Eula, who had been struck in the forehead above the nose with the butt of an ax. Fence rails were placed across her chest, and it was evident she had been raped.
The perpetrator, as usual, had used an ax that belonged to the premises.
Four hundred men were arrested. Jimmy Phillips, Eula’s husband, was accused, the prosecutors claiming he copied the murderer’s methods to punish his unfaithful, young wife. He was sentenced to seven years, but the sentence was overturned, and the second trial ended in a hung jury.
The city descended into panic, and outrage grew. The police force was blamed for being ineffectual. In December, 1885, City Marshal H. Grooms Lee was replaced by James E. Lucy, an ex-Texas Ranger, and the city police force was tripled in size. In response, a curfew was imposed, saloons were closed at midnight, and vagrants were run out of town. Pinkerton detectives were hired, and they failed to find the culprit.
Theories abounded even if an exact identity for the killer was absent. The Servant Girl Killer was never apprehended, even though there were varied suspects through the years. No further crimes were reported after December, 1885.
The Suspects
Investigators eventually focused on Nathan Elgin, a 19-year-old black cook. In February 1886, he was shot by police when he dragged a girl named Julia out of Dick Rogers’ saloon, where he was drinking. He had taken her to his brother, Sylvester’s, house a block away. Neighbors could hear him beating her as she cried out for help.
A policeman arrived with two neighbors, whom he threw to the ground. When he brandished a knife, he was shot and died the following day.
Julia later told police he was drunk and meant to rape her after savagely kicking her various times.
During his autopsy, they discovered he was missing a toe on his right foot. Sheriff Hornsby compared a plaster cast of Elgin’s foot taken after his death with a bloody track on the Phillips’ porch the morning after the murder, and they matched.
This was important since examination of earlier crime scenes indicated the perpetrator would discard his shoes in order to be stealthy. The prints were not distinctive except for one thing, which is that one of the footprints had only four toes.
The authorities realized that Nathan Elgin’s corpse provided a direct link to the killer. Austin in those years numbered about 15,000 residents, with strangers coming into the city on a daily basis, looking for work at the many construction sites spread throughout the growing city. Suspects numbered beyond any that they could hope to question, and perhaps it was a stroke of good luck that Elgin came to their attention.
Unsure if Elgin was the killer, the authorities decided to keep quiet in case the crimes continued, so none of these findings were shared with the public or the press during 1885.
When Phillips and Hancock went to trial for their wives’ murders, the defense used the fact that Elgin was probably the killer, but the prosecution wanted to present a case where the killers used the murders as a cover for their own nefarious deeds.
Was there something in Elgin’s background to have produced such a deviant psyche? He was born in 1866, and his family moved from Arkansas to Wheatville, Texas. He was one of 5 five children; however, his 3 younger siblings were born to a different mother. It’s possible Elgin was brought up by a stepmother, who, it’s been theorized, abused him.
Coincidentally or not, the night Eula Phillips and Susan Hancock were murdered, Elgin’s wife Sallie was giving birth to their child. They had married in 1882; at the time of the birth, they were not living together.
Elgin’s wife would go on to bring up the child using the surname of Davis.
Jacks by Other Names
Some pointed to a Malaysian cook named Maurice who worked at the Pearl House, located close to where many of the victims lived.
He left Austin in January 1886, bound for London. This coincided with the time period when the murders ended.
The murders in Whitechapel started in 1888.
There have been attempts to tie the Servant Girl Murders to crimes along the Eastern Seaboard. Other similar crimes were then perpetrated in Galveston. There was a hodge-podge of murders of women in port cities all over the world.
Perhaps the answer to the identity of the Servant Girl Killer lies in a recent theory about the Jack the Ripper crimes, which is that more than one man was perpetrating the murders.
For example, in Whitechapel, which was a slum area, women were accosted and killed long before the Ripper murders; it seems that the coverage provided by the press, which captivated a newly literate population that existed at the end of the 19th century, is what drove the idea that it was a lone perpetrator who stalked prostitutes in the murky alleys of London.
Because of their lifestyle and acquaintances, the women were easy targets, despite the so-called expertise the killer displayed when dissecting them, which could have been acquired in numerous types of work.
The Lambeth Poisoner
Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1850 and emigrated with his family to Canada in 1854. His father, William, was successful enough to send Thomas, the eldest of eight children, to McGill University in Montreal. Cream graduated with merit, receiving his medical degree on March 31, 1876. The address given to his graduating class was titled The Evils of Malpractice in the Medical Profession.
In 1876, while studying medicine, he courted Flora Brooks. She became pregnant, and he performed an abortion on her that left her very ill. He escaped to Montreal, but Flora’s father found him and forced him to marry his daughter. The day after the wedding, he left for England to continue his studies. In 1878, he qualified for a license in midwifery from the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons in Edinburgh. Flora recovered, but she died of tuberculosis a year later. Her death at the age of 24 would be viewed with suspicion since her husband had prescribed medicine for her before he left and told her to take nothing else.
In 1878, Cream returned to Canada and set up a medical practice in London, Ontario. The following year, Kate Gardener, a servant, was found dead in a privy closet behind his office. She was pregnant, and she was killed with a handkerchief soaked with chloroform. Cream said she had killed herself after he refused to perform the abortion.
Kate’s roommate, Sarah Long, testified at the inquest that Kate had been pregnant and had gone to Dr. Cream to “bring her right.” She said that Cream had not only given her medicine, but suggested that money could be made by accusing a wealthy resident of her boardinghouse of being the father of her child.
A doctor testified that it would be impossible for a person attempting suicide to hold a chloroform-soaked sponge over her own nose long enough to cause death. The coroner’s jury ruled the death was murder by persons unknown.
There was not enough evidence to indict Dr Thomas Cream, but his reputation was damaged, and he left Canada.
Cream’s next stop was Chicago, in its tenderloin district, where many brothels were located. He offered illegal abortions to prostitutes. By 1880, Cream was known to Chicago police as an abortionist, sometimes assisted by a black midwife named Hattie Mack. In August of that year, Hattie Mack hastily moved out of her Madison Street apartment when the decomposing body of Mary Ann Faulkner was found in her home.
Hattie Mack was tracked down and arrested. She promptly turned on her employer and reported he had performed as many as fifteen abortions at a single brothel, and at least 500 abortions in total. Mack claimed that Dr Cream had forced her to take in Mary Ann Faulkner while she recovered from an abortion he performed on the girl on August 13. Something went wrong, and she died two weeks later.
Dr. Cream countered that Hattie Mack had come to him for help after she had tried an abortion with instruments on Mary Ann Faulkner. Mack’s testimony was not enough to convict the handsome, young doctor, and he was acquitted.
Despite having been nearly convicted of murder only four months before, one of his patients, Ellen Stack, died after taking strychnine-laced medicine he had prescribed.
He tried to extort money from Frank Pryatt, the druggist who filled the prescription, claiming he had filled it wrong. Pyatt went to the police, but the investigation was inconclusive.
Dr. Cream had also tried to blackmail one of his patients who had not paid his bill.
In July 1881, Daniel Stott died from strychnine poison, which Cream gave him as a remedy for epilepsy. Initially, the death was listed as natural, but Cream wrote to the coroner, blaming the pharmacist, as he was again attempting to blackmail the person who supplied the drug. He also helped Julia Stott sue the druggist in court.
When the coroner ignored his letter, Cream insisted that the district attorney exhume the dead man’s body. By then, his relationship with Julia Stott, who had become his mistress, had soured.
Daniel Stott was exhumed, and it was found that his stomach and intestines contained enough strychnine to kill him three times over.
Cream was arrested along with Julia Stott for colluding with him to murder her husband. She had married Daniel Stott in 1865 and was 26 years younger than him. She cooperated with the prosecution to avoid jail and let him face the charge of murder. Cream’s father disowned him, and his brother and sister provided some money for his legal defense. Cream was sentenced to life, to be served at Joliet Prison.
In 1891, William Cream died and left his son a $16,000 inheritance. Soon after, he was declared “a fit and proper subject for executive clemency”. Governor Fifer commuted his sentence, and he was released, taking into account the 10 years he had served. It’s assumed Cream’s brother paid bribes to secure his release.
Cream tried to track down Julia Stott for revenge, even employing the Pinkerton Detective Agency, but eventually gave up the search. Unbeknownst to him, Julia changed her name to ‘Jennie Scott’, and married widower Isreal Krack, on December 17, 1885, in Iroquois County, Illinois. He was 30 years old than her. She became a widow once more in 1900, and married widower Jacob Wentz in August of 1906. Jacob dropped dead in his living room three months after the nuptials. The physicians concluded the cause of death was paralysis of the brain or the bursting of a blood vessel. Before this, the 78-year-old had been in good health. Julia died in 1933, at the age of 86.
Using the funds left by his father, Cream sailed for London. He took lodgings at Lambeth Palace Road, which was a slum area riddled with poverty and prostitution. Prison had not rehabilitated him, and he had picked up a drug habit.
Someone who knew him in London described Dr. Cream this way:
“Women were his preoccupation and his talk of them far from agreeable. He carried pornographic photographs, which he was ready to display. He was in the habit of taking pills, which, he said, were compounded of strychnine, morphia, cocaine, and of which effect, he declared, was aphrodisiac. In short he was a degenerate of filthy habits and practices.”
On October 13, 1891, Nellie Donworth, 19, a prostitute, was poisoned by Cream with strychnine as part of his plan to blackmail a businessman, and ask for a hefty reward for naming the perpetrator.
A week later, he did the same thing to Matilda Clover, a 27-year-old prostitute who died after he gave her pills to take. Following the same M.O., he tried to blackmail a prominent physician who went to Scotland Yard. They set a trap, but Cream didn’t fall for it.
He conveniently decided to visit his brother Daniel in Canada. He met Ana Sabatini, and after a whirlwind romance, they became engaged on December 23, 1891. A month later, he named her his executor. Laura Sabatini grew suspicious and broke off the engagement. He returned to London in April 1892, bringing 500 strychnine pills he bought from a drug company in Saratoga, New York.
Once in London, he followed the same pattern; he offered two pills to Louise Harvey, insisting she swallow them right away. She became suspicious, pretended to take them, and instead threw them away.
A week later, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, both young prostitutes, spent a night with him, and then he offered them each three pills. They died a few hours later from strychnine poisoning.
The killer was now referred to as the “Lambeth Poisoner” in the press.
Thomas Cream entertained the delusion that he was immune to justice. He wrote letters under false names in an attempt to cast suspicion on innocent people and extort money from potential suspects. He even went so far as to take his friend, a former New York detective named John Haynes, on a tour of the murder scenes.
Cream’s attempt to blackmail two doctors for the murder of Matilda Clover brought him to the attention of the police. Since Matilda Clover had supposedly died of natural causes, the case was reopened.
Scotland Yard started to surveil him and realized Cream frequented places where prostitutes were. They extended their investigation to the United States and Canada and learned of the suspect’s history, including his conviction in 1881. At some point, they realized they were dealing with the “Lambeth Poisoner”.
Dr. Cream was charged with Matilda Clover’s murder. The following month, they charged him with the deaths of the other prostitutes and extortion.
The jury deliberated 12 minutes, and he was sentenced to death on October 21, 1892. He was hanged at Newgate Prison on November 15, 1892, and buried under the flagstones of the prison with other criminals. In 1902, his remains were moved to London’s municipal cemetery into an unmarked grave in section 339.
James Billington, who executed Cream, claimed his last words on the scaffold were “I am Jack the…” Despite Billington’s claim, Cream was imprisoned at the time of the Ripper murders in 1888. He was also wearing a hood, which would have muffled anything he said.
Cream’s murderous actions were committed to satisfy his appetites as a sexual sadist who enjoyed the victim’s agony while they died. There was also his greed, as exemplified by his blackmail. The day before he was hanged, he changed his will and named his attorney as executor instead of his former fiancée, Ana Sabattini.
Vach the Ripper
Six years after the Ripper stalked the alleyways of Whitechapel, a series of rapes and murders occurred in rural France. The victims were young people herding sheep.
Magistrate Emile Fourquet gathered the details of each of the cases. The victims were hacked on the back of their necks, indicating the attacker approached them from behind.
Reporters of the time posited that perhaps Jack the Ripper had traveled across the English Channel to find new victims in France.
Fourquet developed a profile based on reports provided by witnesses. He would watch to make sure his target was alone, approach them stealthily from behind, and then hack the person in the back of the neck. He would drag the bodies to a hidden place, where he would sodomize and mutilate the victims. The man was described as being in his thirties with dark hair and eyes, and he had a menacing manner.
Joseph Vacher was one of 15 children born to an illiterate farmer. In order to escape poverty, he joined the army in 1892. Slow to receive a promotion, probably due to complaints against him for being brutal. He was a good soldier, but he believed he deserved more merit. During this time, he met Louise Barant, a maidservant who worked in Beaufort. Sensing that perhaps she was not interested in him, and his disappointment from not being promoted, pushed him to commit suicide by slitting his own throat. He survived but was dismissed from the military.
He pursued Louise, and when she rejected his proposal, she also made fun of him, which resulted in Vacher shooting her four times. Then he tried to commit suicide again by shooting himself twice in the head.
Louise survived the attack, and he did as well. A bullet had lodged in his ear and remained there for the extent of his life, causing paralysis of the right side of his face, damage to one eye, and mental instability, which only increased his emotional psychosis.
After his second suicide attempt, he was sent to a mental institution in Dole, Jura, called the Asylum of Dole. From there, he was transferred to the asylum at Saint-Robert. He was released in April 1894 when doctors said he was cured.
Vacher became a disgruntled homeless vagrant, living in the woods. He drifted from town to town in the southeast of France. He worked as a day laborer, but was reported as having a filthy and frightening appearance.
He was 25 years old then, and he started killing soon after.
Starting in 1894, he killed and mutilated eleven persons (one woman, five teenage girls, and five teenage boys), the majority of whom were teenagers. They were stabbed repeatedly, disemboweled, raped, and sodomized. Most of the victims were alone, watching over their flocks in isolated fields.
In 1897, he assaulted a woman in Ardeche. Her screams brought her husband and son to rescue her. Vacher was overpowered and taken to the police. The authorities suspected he was the culprit who had killed other people in the countryside, but they had no evidence to tie him to the crimes. However, the case was resolved when Vacher confessed to the murders, saying, “I committed them all in moments of frenzy.”
He demanded two things from the authorities before giving a full confession. He wanted his deeds to be published in the leading French papers and that he should be tried separately for each crime in the district where they were committed. Apparently, his vanity demanded the publicity, and he thought of himself as a hero for having killed so many people.
The police agreed, and he admitted to slaughtering the following persons:
“Louise Marcel, a girl of thirteen, found murdered in a wood near Draguignan in the Var in November 1984; Augustine Mortueux, seventeen, found with her throat cut on the high road near Dijon, on May 12, 1895; a widow named Morand, sixty, assaulted and murdered in an isolated house at Saint Ours, in Savoy, on August 24, 1895; Victor Portalier, a shepherd boy, sixteen found in a field with his throat cut, and horribly mutilated on August 31; Pierre Pellet, a shepherd boy, fourteen, discovered with his throat cut in a lane at St. Etienne de Boulogne, on September 29; Marie Moussier, a young married woman of nineteen, found at Crusset in the Allier, on September 1, 1896; Rosine Rodier, a shepherd girl of fourteen, at Varenne St. Honorat, who had her throat cut and was disemboweled and mutilated; Pierre Laurent, a shepherd boy, fourteen, murdered, … found in a field with his throat cut and the body hacked and dreadfully mutilated.
Police traced Vacher’s travels as best they could and found he had been killing people for about ten years. His crimes occurred at an unknown frequency, and there were large gaps of time that he could not account for. His nomadic lifestyle made it almost impossible to determine how many he people he murdered.
Despite having tried to kill himself twice in the past, Vacher wanted to avoid the death penalty. He claimed at trial that he was insane and told a story of being bitten by a rabid dog when he was a boy. The village doctor gave him a tonic that made him brutal and irritable, even though he had been a quiet child before. The drink also gave him a hunger for human blood.
He also compared himself to Joan of Arc and said God had sent him.
Vacher’s claim of insanity was defeated by his clear remembrance of the details of each crime, and how, after each murder, he quickly found a pool where he could bathe and remove bloodstains from his body. Any clothing that was stained was destroyed, and he planned for this eventuality by carrying a change of clothing in his sack.
Vacher was tried at the Cour d’Assises of Ain in 1898. A team of French doctors, which included the eminent criminologist Alexandre Lacassange, pronounced him sane.
He was executed by guillotine in December 1898. He refused to walk to the guillotine and instead had to be forcibly dragged to his death by the executioner.