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Sept. 24, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:25
Edition 758 - Sarah Bax Horton
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Very many thanks for being part of my show.
A lot to get into on this edition of The Unexplained.
Weather in London, pretty autumnal, clear sky so far, but boy have we had a lot of rain.
Makes you wonder how the drains, well, I don't think they can actually, how the drains can cope with it.
We'll see what happens, but the temperature has plummeted from the 30s about 10 days ago down to the 20s and now into the teens.
And, you know, starting to get cool in the mornings, which is refreshing on one level, but also makes you think, oh, no, we've got all the winter to go through now.
We've got, well, let's count the months, October, November, December, January, February, March, and then we're clear again.
The thick end of six months of it to go.
I'm not even going to think about it.
Many thanks for your emails.
Don't forget, of course, to consider the Unexplained Live 2023, the cruise that I'm doing with Morella.
Morella preparing the holiday for you, delivering that brilliantly.
And I will be hosting the events, including some fine guest speakers.
If you want to get details of the events on board and the marvelous cruise up the eastern seaboard of North America and back down again, October 22 it begins, so not a lot of time to be booking and considering it.
There is a special edition of the podcast on my website, theunexplained.tv, and the text that goes along with it will include the booking link, does include the booking link, and the information link about the holiday.
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That is one word, Podcast100.
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Actually, it's a beautiful experience.
You will definitely enjoy it.
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Helps to keep everything going and the wheels oiled, as they say.
This edition, a longer conversation with somebody I only had a few minutes for on the TV show, which is so often the case.
Sarah Bax Horton, somebody who has investigated and has a personal connection with the Jack the Ripper murders.
Now, the details of the Jack the Ripper murders have become clouded by time.
And the seriousness, the horror of the crimes, perhaps sometimes because they're dramatized, talked about in popular culture, the horror of what the perpetrator did is sometimes forgotten.
We're talking about, if I'm right here, up to 11 killings in an era that was very different from today.
You know, no telephones for most people, no internet, difficulty in communication, police using rudimentary means by today's standards.
But the identity of the killer remains a mystery.
That's not to say that over the years, suspects have not been identified.
I've been reading up about this this week.
And there are claims that there have been up to 100 people who have been suggested as possibly being involved in these crimes.
100 people, some of them more famous and more well-known than others.
Sarah Baxhorton has a new view and a view that's backed by an awful lot of research.
Let me tell you about Sarah Baxhorton, a true crime writer, researcher and analyst, previously worked for the Foreign Office, born in South Wales, educated in Monmouth, graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English and German from Somerville College, Oxford.
A fascination with genealogy and the Whitechapel murders led her to write the book One Armed Jack, and we're going to be talking about that.
Now, I have to say before you listen to another moment of this, and thank you very much for listening if you are, please bear in mind that we're going to be talking around murder cases and particularly brutal ones.
There is a possibility that we may get into some of the details, so I have to say here this is probably not an edition, well certainly not an edition for children and listener discretion advised.
Please bear that in mind as we go into this conversation.
I think that's everything I have to say.
I might have some news about the TV show, the broadcast arm of everything I do, quite soon.
Please watch my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
There I can explain freely what is going on.
And of course, here on the podcast, I will explain too.
So first port of call is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition, Sarah Bax Horton.
Sarah, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
Do you know, it's always quite frustrating when you do these television interviews.
You have to keep them very short and they're always counting you down.
The one great advantage, Sarah, as you may have discovered doing publicity for your book, there are some interviews where you have time to let the conversation breathe and I hope this is going to be one of those.
I agree.
It makes a big difference to have a longer interview and have a proper chat and get into some of the issues in depth.
I've been reading your biography.
Your biography said you worked at the Foreign Office.
How so, if you can tell me?
So I worked there for nearly 20 years in a variety of roles.
And I actually took voluntary redundancy and later became a management consultant before I launched my career as a writer.
Now, the genre that you're in is true crime, certainly for this book.
Was your work with the Foreign Office, and obviously I don't want to pry in if you've signed confidentiality agreements, I don't want to breach those, but was your work connected with investigations?
I did a lot of work with research and knowledge management, and one might possibly say slightly wider than that.
However, I think something that's been a great skill that I've drawn on in writing my book is that of family history research, which I've done for many years as a hobby.
And through that, I made the chance discovery that I had a police ancestor who worked on the Jack the Ripper case.
And that really inspired me to write my book, One Armed Jack.
Right, because it is a very specific thing.
And also, it's a very chilling thing.
It's a difficult area to go in because the details of these crimes, you know, have been written down over many, many years, but they're pretty brutal.
It's a difficult thing to research, is it not?
I agree.
I took the perspective that I was fascinated by the police approach to their investigation.
And so it was quite an analytical approach.
And I quickly discovered that the police of the day claimed to have solved the crimes, which was not something of which I was previously aware.
And in fact, a lot of the received knowledge about the case is that it was unsolved, one of the greatest mysteries of all time.
And in fact, a police failure.
Well, that's certainly, I've been doing some research beyond the book this week.
And that certainly is the impression we get.
But I also get the impression that all of this is a little clouded by history.
You know, Jack the Ripper and the details of these crimes have become a little muddy, a little clouded over the years.
And, you know, these things have even appeared in entertainment.
You know, the picture of what was a very, very serious, very brutal and bloody and terminal string of events for the people involved in those things, you know, that picture doesn't seem to be as clear as perhaps it should be.
I agree.
I feel that the case has been mythologised and I feel also that there have been varying perspectives regarding the killer and, of course, his victims.
So I tried to write a book from a very modern perspective.
And because of my fascination with my police ancestor who inspired me, I wanted to really get back to the basics of what the police of the day said publicly about the case.
And what they said was that it had been solved without any doubt, the perpetrator was known, that it had not been possible to prosecute him owing to insufficient evidence, and that he was neutralized by his admission to what was then called a lunatic asylum.
And this really set me on the trail of my prime suspect, Chaim Hyams.
Which we will talk about, but I think we've got to build the story before all of that, because your conclusions are fascinating.
We talked about them on the TV.
Now we can expand upon them.
Talk to me about this relative of yours.
Harry Garrett is my great-great-grandfather, and he joined the Metropolitan Police in the early 1870s when his family in Sittingbourne in Kent fell upon hard times.
His father was a master saddler and harness maker, but he had a cart accident.
And because of his injuries, he was unable to work.
And this threw the family into disarray.
Harry ended up being a cobbler on one of the back streets of Sittingbourne.
And he saw the newspaper interview inviting men to apply to join the Metropolitan Police Force.
And luckily for him, he was successful in joining because his mother and sisters were teachers.
So they were educated and literate.
And this was an important feature of being a police officer in the day because of the need to write reports and so on.
And he transferred to Greenwich's R Division, so the Metropolitan Police Divisions were alphabetically named.
And he served 15 years on the beat as a constable until he was promoted to sergeant.
When promoted, you always transferred division because otherwise you'd be managing your mates.
And he was transferred to Whitechapel, H Division, in January 1888.
And in my analysis, an event which may have triggered the Ripper killings occurred in February 1888.
And the killings themselves stretched between August and November of that year.
So are you surmising that he was involved in the case or do you know?
What we know is that he was based at Lemon Street Police Station as a sergeant.
Lemon Street was the police headquarters for the Ripper investigation.
And not only would all men have been involved in some capacity, but periodically 100 men were drawn in from other divisions as a surge of capacity, capability, because the H Division force could not cope with the magnitude of having a serial killer at loose.
We also know that Harry and his family lived in at the station, but that was only from April, May 1891 when it had suitable premises.
It had a massive refurbishment at that time.
And Harry's youngest child, Nora, would have been the first baby to have been born at Lemmon Street Police Station.
She was born in May 1891 at the station.
And that's on her birth certificate.
My father was a police officer for many years of his service.
He was a sergeant, certainly when I came into this world.
Police, especially the older, smaller forces, And, you know, the Met was divided into those very localized areas, as you said.
And in my father's case, reports were written upon you all the time.
And, you know, you would know the people commanding your local area very well.
They would be the people who are assessing you.
Were you able to find out anything about Harry?
Yes, I was able to find out a certain amount.
So the pension records of the police merely, it's like a form, basically, a two-page form.
And that still exists because the police retained that kind of record because it had financial implications.
And if the officer died, then his widow would receive the pension.
And so from that, I have his beautiful copper plate handwriting of his signature.
So he signed the bottom of the form, and some information about his appearance, because I only have one photograph of him, and I actually received that much later than my original discovery of his existence and identity.
And so I have this handwritten description of his appearance.
And we know from the photograph that he was a very good looking man, which you have to forgive me for my triviality, but that very when I found it out.
And in fact, I credit that in the epilogue to my book because he also looks decisive and confident and capable.
And, you know, I'm very proud of his endeavours in the 23 years that he was in the fools.
And it's not a big leap of assumption, is it?
And here I am sorry for jumping in, but it's not a big leap of assumption to assume that he would have been involved in that investigation because all the stops, as you say, were pulled out for it.
It was so serious.
Yes, and I also discovered something else completely amazing about him, which is that he and colleagues saved 11 people from a house fire on Lemon Street in October 1888.
So Harry was on night duty as sergeant, and it was really at the peak of the Ripper Scare.
They became aware of a fire in a cooperative store opposite that was inhabited by the family who ran it.
And they charged up the smoke-filled stairs and led and in one case carried a member of that family from the scene.
And Harry was commended by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner of the Day and he received a small reward, but it was really all about the honour and the glory of what he did.
And he was also commended by the Royal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire.
And in terms of lifetime achievements, I do believe that to save a life is probably, you know, the ultimate in heroism.
So I'm really proud that he did that.
I'm not sure whether these things still happen.
My dad served in Liverpool and it became Merseyside Police in the end, but it started as Bootle, then became Liverpool, then became Merseyside.
And as you say, police are always involved in fires and accidents and all the things that other people don't want to be and couldn't be qualified to deal with.
And there were organizations that would present commendations and certificates to people.
My father saved a man from drowning in the River Mersey, I think in a storm one night when he fell between a ship and the landing stage in Liverpool.
Now, literally, if that ship had lurched, that guy would have been crushed.
And my father went down between the landing stage and the ship.
And the point of the story is that, you know, when he was, my dad was presented with this award in the 1970s, and I was a schoolboy and was able to attend this thing.
And the Liverpool Shipwreck and Humane Society presented him with a parchment that we've still got.
Sadly, our father is not with us anymore, but, you know, for his services, which they'd been doing probably for 200 years.
You know, they've been doing it for a very long time.
So there was that kind of tradition within public service and the police of recognizing achievements like Harry's.
There was indeed.
I mean, we don't have the certificate or anything apart from the official records in archives about it.
But I think it is important and was very important.
And it also helped bind the men to the communities that they served.
Indeed.
So we're getting a picture of a man here, knew what he wanted to do, quite a presence, somebody who was quite brave.
And if he was based at that police station, then it's not a big stretch to say that he would have been very actively involved in this investigation.
Is that where we're coming from?
That's exactly it.
Thank you.
Right.
What do we go now?
I think we have to, for those who don't know, and I was brought up reading about these things, they were in the newspapers all the time, but can we put some detail on the crimes themselves?
I know they started in 1888, didn't they?
And from what I've been reading, there could be up to 11 victims.
Is that so?
The surviving Metropolitan Police Whitechapel murders files have 11 unexplained deaths on them.
And it's a generally held view, partly because it was held by some senior police officers of the day, that five were by the same hand.
So the women that I write about, who are the victims, Polly Nichols, and so on, they are commonly called the canonical five.
I add Martha Tabram as a precursor because I don't believe that the five were an entity in their own right and I have reasons for adding an earlier murder into that collection.
And I also believe that two non-fatal attacks in Whitechapel, one in February and one in November 1888, Might have been by the same hand.
And those women were all local residents in Whitechapel and they were destitute.
So they worked on the streets, hawking, selling small items like needles and thread.
Some of them also worked as cleaners.
When they were very down on their luck, they sold their bodies as casual prostitutes.
Was that all of them?
Yeah, and they lived in the local doshouses.
But when they couldn't afford their money for the night, they slept rough.
And when you slept rough in those days, you were moved on by the local police.
So it was a very uncomfortable existence.
And the police believed the killer to be a local man of a similar class to them, so poverty stricken, you know, not doing too well, possibly a working man, but with a lot of issues in his household.
It's impossible to have a conversation like this without talking about the crimes.
So with a warning of listener discretion to people who will be hearing this, can you give me a rough outline of the, if there is a single, which I think there was, modus operandi way of operating?
You know, what was the nature of these crimes, I think is what I'm asking?
The crimes were believed to be carried out by a man who was accosting the women as prostitutes and going with them to private, dark, secluded places, ostensibly for the act of sex.
But his intention was to kill.
And as I put in my book, my preferred suspect, Chaim Hyams, had an injured left arm.
And I believe this might explain the Blitz-style attacks.
So he very quickly immobilized the women, I believe, because of the fear that they might fight back.
And he would partially strangle them, push their bodies to the ground, quickly cut their throats.
And then, if not interrupted, as he was in more than one case, he would perform abdominal mutilations.
And his intention was to remove their wounds.
So they were highly misogynist attacks and they were aimed at those parts of the women concerned.
And the crimes escalated as they continued.
So in the last two murders, he started removing more organs from their bodies, which he probably removed as trophies and took away with him.
And there was some estimation, there was some thought by investigating police, I think, that the person who did those terrible things, and my apologies to my listener, but you can't have this conversation without some of those details, I don't think, that the person who did this had some experience, either in a surgical capacity or as a butcher, which is a horrible thought, had some experience of doing this.
I've looked deeply into that level of analysis, and certainly the police surgeons and indeed the police of the day were quite horrified by any suggestion that it might be a doctor or medical student.
They did not believe the person had that level of anatomical knowledge.
And so they were bringing it down several notches to the idea of it possibly being maybe a butcher or slaughter man, but somebody with some working knowledge of the human anatomy.
Although that has been hugely questioned both then and since.
What I put in my book is that people in those days had a much greater knowledge of domestic butchery because they didn't receive their meat neatly packaged as we might today and they would have had their own livestock to some extent or bought meat in far larger cuts than we're traditionally used to.
And so I put that as a possible explanation for having some degree of medical knowledge or anatomical knowledge.
And the other theory that I posit is that there were waxwork shows, and one of which was very popular in the East End a few years before the Ripper time.
And they had prone women whose waxwork in it could be removed like a jigsaw puzzle so you could see how it all fitted together.
although posited as an act geared towards gentlemen and medical students it was quite clearly intended for titillation.
How did police react when it became clear, and I'd be interested to know at what stage it became clear, that they were dealing with what we would call today a serial killer?
What did they do?
From my research, I believe that point was from the murder of Annie Chapman.
So she's the second in the canonical five, but in my analysis, the third by the Ripper.
And it just became clear that there was somebody at large in an extremely localised area within Whitechapel.
And Scotland Yard put their best men on the case.
So there's no suggestion that the women's lives weren't valued or that the police didn't try to stop the murderer.
And they carried out house-to-house inquiries, they put up posters.
The Metropolitan Police were reluctant To offer a reward, but other parties did, very prominent people, MPs, also the Corporation of London.
They followed up numerous eyewitness accounts.
And I should say that the RIPA murders, by which I mean the run-up to and the aftermath of, were surprisingly well-witnessed.
And we have a number of statements from people saying they saw a man accosting the women and chatting to them in the minutes before their murders.
And I'd like to go on and say a bit more about that.
Oh, no, very keen to know, maybe descriptions, that kind of thing.
Yes, so no stone was left unturned.
And they very quickly brought in reinforcements, put more men on plain clothes duty on the streets in an attempt to catch the man in the act.
Because in those days, with the lack of the modern tools and techniques, they were very reliant on an eyewitness, catching the man red-handed, confessions, and so on.
Okay, so they saturated, we would call that saturation policing.
And that often in the modern era, but then we have better communication and all sorts of things, that often yields results.
Did it in this case?
It possibly yielded too many results in the sense that the police had a huge number of suspects to deal with owing to the public response.
So they became deluged with letters and people claiming to have a lodger with blood-stained cuffs and so on.
And although helpful and well-intentioned, the volume of material that was emerging was almost too great for them to deal with.
However, CID Chief Robert Anderson wrote in a published memoir in 1910 that the police had solved the crimes without a shadow of a doubt.
They had an identified perpetrator, but who could not be prosecuted because a key eyewitness refused to testify against him as a fellow Jew.
And that was the point where my personal investigation into the case became interesting.
Did that lead you to think that maybe there was somebody who got away?
Yes.
So what Robert Anderson said was that the killer was an identified man whom he declined to name.
And he declined to name him because of the laws of libel and presumably because he thought the man who was actually still alive at that time might be hounded or pursued by the press, who were as active then as they are now.
So that sounds like he wasn't entirely sure.
He was sure.
He said, and I quote, there was no doubt whatever as to the identity of the criminal.
And what he said was that the man was a Polish Jew, an EastEnder, living in the immediate vicinity of the murder locations, what he called low class, which he meant living on the poverty line.
He started to kill when the mania or paroxysms, meaning fits, seized him and ended when admitted into a lunatic asylum.
The only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer at once identified him, but when he learned that the suspect was a fellow Jew, he declined to swear to him.
How well is that documented, that fact that this man was reluctant to go any further?
It's well documented, not only by Anderson, by other police of the day, and indeed the City of London police, because I'm currently talking about the Met, but with the murder of Catherine Eddowes, which was actually one of two in the same night,
which occurred within the square mile of the City of London at Mitres Square, the City of London police force were brought into the investigation and they provided a huge boost to the investigation in terms of manpower.
Do you know to what extent, how many people?
So the acting commissioner of the day, Henry Smith, said that he basically put all of his men onto the Ripper investigation.
He had them in plain clothes on the streets and he had them doing things that police officers would never normally be allowed to do.
Eating, drinking, chatting, living their lives on the doorsteps and the flagstones and cobblestones of the streets of Whitechapel, smoking, buying people cigarettes, totally immersing themselves into what was happening on the streets with the aim of catching the criminal.
And in fact, two City of London police officers went a lot further with what they said.
Robert Sagar, one of the top detectives, said that the Ripper was chased from the scene of Mitres Square to a nearby set of buildings called Artisans' Dwellings.
And I note with interest that Chaim Haim's brother Mark was living there in the North Block at that time.
Harry Cox, another top detective, said that the City of London Police had a three-month surveillance operation against the Ripper.
And according to Met Inspector Donald Swanson, he was watched by the city CID night and day.
And Cox also said the man was a misogynist and neutralized by his admission to an asylum.
And I should mention that Chaim Hyams, who had several periods of being admitted to workhouse infirmaries and lunatic asylums over the period of late 1888.
And we just have to say that that is the terminology of the time here, in case that term causes anybody offence.
All of the things we're saying are within the prism and within the purview of a previous era.
It is not the way that we would look at anything today.
Sorry, you were saying.
Yes, so the City of London police watched the suspect for three months, and Haim Hyames was at liberty for a three-month period at a critical time between January and April 1889.
And in my book, I posit that this is also a good piece of evidence that Hyams might potentially be Jack the Ripper.
When he was locked away, did he confess to anybody?
Did he indicate to anybody who might have been within the asylum, anybody treating him, anybody dealing with him, that he might have done something untoward?
There are a couple of aspects to mention here.
One is that his wife, Sarah, when he was admitted to various institutions, was with him and gave details about him to medical staff, which they wrote down in the surviving files.
And she said that he was very violent and dangerous.
She lived in fear of his violence.
And much of this was connected to the fact that he had severe epilepsy, which was not well treated at the time.
And he was noted in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum and elsewhere that he was extremely violent after fitting.
And this lasted for a period of days.
So his wife reported on his intermittent behaviour, which might explain the periodicity between the murders.
But she also said that he was a very kind, industrious man when in normal health.
And this was also noted in the medical facilities where he was housed.
So we have information about him from his wife.
And then when he was in medical facilities, he was described as dangerous, treacherous and violent.
And he was assessed to be insane.
And what he did is he would periodically attack his wife when she visited him.
He would attack the medical officers and fellow inmates.
And on one occasion, he managed to get hold of a sharpened piece of metal.
And he partly cut the throat of one of the medical officers, saying, I've done something that you're better than you'll ever do, which is a phrase which is potentially open to interpretation.
So have I got this right, that police, some police, felt that they knew who it was, but they had insufficient evidence and this person was locked away for medical reasons, as we've just been discussing.
So going all the way back that far, it seems that police might have felt that they had their man but couldn't touch him.
Is that right?
According to more than one source of the day, there was a reluctant eyewitness who was also Jewish.
So the ripper was a Polish Jew, the eyewitness was also Jewish, and he refused to testify against him in court.
And I think that we can understand this, not least because it was the death sentence in those days, unless the criminal was declared to be what they called criminally insane and sent to Broadmoor.
As I put in my book, spending the rest of one's life in Broadmoor and spending the rest of one's life in Colney Hatch were actually very similar, because although Colney Hatch didn't have the degree of security that Broadmoor had, it was for the more dangerous and difficult to manage patients.
How come then there were so many subsequent suspects?
I'm looking at names.
I mean, the list of names in the frame is mesmerizing.
I mean, Thomas Cutbush, Carl Feigenbaum, that's two of them.
But also in one article that I read, the list of people put under scrutiny, Prince Albert Edward Victor, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Barnardo.
Outlandish suggestions.
I mean, it looks like somebody, I don't know if it was the investigating officers, subsequently were flailing around to give the public something by way of elucidation.
When I investigated the case myself, I was extremely impressed by the police of the day because when they identified, I beg your pardon, when they investigated or questioned the suspects, they were actually very quick to release them when they discovered, you know, that they were in the wrong place at the time.
You know, that they, when these men were discounted from the investigation, they were very quickly released and in one case, publicly exonerated.
So there was no sense that the police were just trying to find someone to put them in the frame.
That They were seeking to publicize.
Yeah, not at all.
And I was kind of looking for that, and I was surprised at the speed in which they were turning around the suspects and saying, okay, it's not you, you can go.
And they were moving on because they were continually working to effect an identification.
And in terms of the list of suspects, it has got bizarrely long.
And when I looked at the case, I did find it a distraction, the amount of subsequent commentary.
And I worked out my own way of dealing with it.
And what I decided to do is to be heavily reliant on contemporary accounts, so from the police and eyewitnesses and to some extent in the press, and also to cut a clean line through all of the obfuscation and speculation and not be distracted by that.
And that's something that I believe has served me well and why I've written a very clearly argued and, I believe, compelling case.
Science.org recently wrote this and other organs of media did too.
Forensic scientists say they finally fingered the identity of Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer who terrorized London more than 100 years ago.
Genetic tests published this week, that's I think earlier this year, point to Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish barber and prime police suspect at the time.
Critics say the evidence isn't strong enough to declare this case closed.
The results come from a forensic examination of a stained silk shawl that investigators said was found next to the mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes, the killer's fourth victim, in 1888.
What do you make of this?
To provide a piece of context, Kate Eddowes was so destitute that her partner pawned the boots that he was wearing in an attempt to secure them lodgings for the night.
She was so poverty stricken that she carried her entire possessions in her pocket, including a tin of tea leaves.
So the concept that she had this most beautiful silk shawl that was discarded next to her dead body is not convincing to me.
On the subject of Kosminsky, this is a surname only that was name-checked by Inspector Donald Swanson.
And basically, we don't know who Kosminsky was.
Swanson wasn't the only person to name-check him, but we only have a surname.
And so the attribution that Kosminski was someone called Erin Kosminsky, who was actually assessed to be not dangerous and downgraded from Colney Hatch to Leveston Asylum.
So that's not necessarily a compelling or verified match.
So it's very difficult for us to handle Kosminski.
First of all, we need to identify him and secondly, we need to work out who he really was.
But as I say, I personally don't set much store by the idea that a scarf of unclear provenance could be DNA tested and then matched to relatives of a Kosminski who, as I say, has not been verified.
Of the many, many suspects who've been trotted out over the years or potential suspects in people's minds, who are the most interesting?
Can you think of any who have raised your eyebrows as being either outlandish suggestions or strange suggestions?
I'm not very keen on the suggestion of Walter Sickert, who was a famous artist.
And the interesting thing about Sickert is that he had a genuine fascination with murder, not only the Jack the Ripper case, but something called the Camden murder.
And he also painted prostitutes and so on.
So he's very interesting in that regard.
He had an interest in the case, but I don't personally give any credence to the suggestion that he might be the Ripper himself.
And indeed, really with all of the suspects, I did feel a degree of disappointment that I didn't feel that they were well evidenced.
And when I came to write my book, I thought, I'll look at what the police of the day said.
I found considerable profiling to help me.
And I suddenly realised that it might be possible to identify this man who was described in the writings of the day.
And then when I found my prime suspect, Chaim Haims, being epileptic and so suffering from the fits or paroxysms directly quoted by Robert Anderson, the CID chief, I suddenly started to think that I might be onto something.
And my continuing researches found incredible physical and also psychological matches between what we seem to genuinely know about the Ripper and my prime suspect.
Physical and psychological matches.
I guess the psychology of it is his behavior when he was locked away, the fact that he attacked somebody and said, I've done something worse than that.
Is that the psychological material?
He suffered from paranoia and he was delusional.
And he believed that his wife was unfaithful to him, including with his own brothers.
He had a paranoia of the police whom he believed were following him.
And in fact, Ironically, it may be factually correct that the police were following him in that three-month period when the City of London police were particularly active in their surveillance operation.
In modern times, he was dangerous and violent after he had the epileptic fits, which could not be controlled in those days.
And he was diagnosed as suffering from insanity.
So from that perspective, he was a good match to what we understand about the Ripper.
In modern times, we've had awful crimes like the execution-style killing in 1999 of a television newscaster in the United Kingdom called Jill Dando.
She was, well, it had all the hallmarks of a hit job.
And people, the only reason I raise this now is that in modern day, there have been documentaries, there was one recently, and people, some on that documentary were saying, why have the police not continued to investigate this?
Which seemingly on the surface, and may not be under the surface true, but seemingly is the case.
Was there any sense of that after these killings where perhaps things went a little quiet, police felt they'd gone as far as they could, they talked to, what was it, 2,000?
They'd had 2,000 people on the books.
They'd interviewed 300, I think, something like that.
Was there a sense that it was all allowed to go into abeyance because there simply wasn't time to carry on?
In no sense, and this is where the police Whitechapel murders files are extremely interesting.
There were other murders, and when they happened within the East End vicinity, police had to investigate them as though they might have been carried out by Jack the Ripper.
And so with subsequent murders, they always re-examined, could it be by the same hand?
And they used the same police surgeons.
So the medical men who examined the bodies and carried out the post-mortem examinations were recognised as being key advisors in the case.
And they were reused or asked to give a view on a post-mortem examination done by a colleague or even to attend and observe it because the police were continually asking the question, is this by the same hand?
And they were continually coming back with the answer, no, we don't believe so.
But the files stretch until the early 1890s.
So there was a continual preoccupation.
And I believe it was responsible policing to do so.
So it sounds to me like, given the limitations of technology and everything else, police at the time did all they could.
They did everything they could.
And they took descriptions from the eyewitnesses.
As I said before, these are people who saw the ripper accosting his victims or running away from the scene of the crime afterwards.
And there was a consistency in what was said.
So he was a man of medium height and build, between about 5'5 and 5'8 inches tall, stout and broad shouldered, aged between 30 and 40, with a lot of consensus around the ages of about 35 and 37,
with a full face, dark head, wearing dark clothing, speaking colloquial English in a mild voice.
And some people saw a man with a stiff arm and two with what they called a peculiar gait and walking with bent knees.
And what I discovered from his medical records, which were only released in 2013 and 2015, about Hayam Hayams, was that at the time he was age 35 with dark brown hair, 5'7.5 inches tall.
He weighed 10 stone 7 pounds and he was towards the top end of the modern BMI.
He was noticeably broad-shouldered.
He talked with a slight hesitancy of speech, which might explain why eye and ear witnesses said that he had a mild manner and a mild voice.
He had a broken left elbow, which left him unable to fully bend or extend it, although he could use it.
And he had an irregular gait or way of walking, which presented as asymmetric foot dragging.
And he couldn't fully straighten his knees and he walked with them bent.
And this was seen by two key eyewitnesses at two different murder locations.
And this is really the basis of my claim to be the first person to have an evidence-led hypothesis with a prime suspect as Jack the Ripper.
Now, this man was in the asylum.
He was locked away.
And, you know, he was a concerning individual for a whole variety of reasons, as you say.
Why didn't police go to where he was and do what I suspect they'd have done in my father's day, and that is interview him and re-interview him until he confessed?
That's a difficult question to answer.
He was considered to be insane.
And in such occasions, if there was a well-developed case to be brought against such a person, they might be admitted to Broadmoor.
What the police of the day were very clear in saying is that they couldn't prosecute.
They didn't have the evidence because the key witness refused to testify in Court, and that's all that we have.
I don't know what more could have been done.
And presumably, you know, being sensible here, that any confession that might have been extracted at that time, even if it was a true admission of a true series of crimes, because of his state of mind, probably would have been inadmissible anyway in court.
Yes, I mean, my understanding is, is that they kind of certified that kind of person as insane, and they didn't necessarily attempt to prosecute them.
If an insanity plea was put, then that went through the courts in the usual manner, and that the person might end up in Broadmoor.
But in this case, this isn't what happened.
And to be very clear, the crime stopped, did they, when he was away?
They did.
So they ended in November 1888.
That's the last of the Canonical Five, Mary Jane Kelly.
And Hayyam Hyams was actually twice released from medical facilities.
So he was a chronic alcoholic and he suffered from delirium tremens, which may also cause hallucinations.
And he started off in Stepney Workhouse Infirmary in the turn of the year between 1888 and 1889.
And once he'd been treated for that, he was released for three months.
And at the end of that time, in attempting to strike his wife with a chopper or axe, he hit his mother.
And he was readmitted.
And he went to Colney Hatch at that point.
But extraordinarily, in August 1889, he was released because his behaviour was considered to have improved.
He was only out for a week when he stabbed his wife, not seriously, I believe, because I can find no real reports of it other than in his medical files.
And indeed, his wife continued to visit him in medical facilities.
And he then went to a City of London workhouse infirmary very quickly to Stone Lunatic Asylum in Dartford in Kent.
And from there, he was transferred back to Colney Hatch, where he spent the rest of his life.
And the reason I mention these places so specifically is that the lead inspector on the case, Donald Swanson, said that the Ripper was at Stepney Workhouse, which is the first workhouse where Haimes went to, and then Colney Hatch.
And Robert Anderson's wife said that the ripper was interned at Stone.
So we have Stepney, Stone and Colney Hatch.
And the distance between Stone and Colney Hatch is over 30 miles.
It's diagonally across the whole of London, Colney Hatch being in North London at Free and Barnet, and Stone, as I said, being near Dartford in Kent.
And in the Victorian era, that would have been a significant distance.
So he was held at these three disparate places exactly like the Ripper.
Put all this way, put this way.
All of the details that you've given me sound incredibly compelling, and I suspect that with computer technology, artificial intelligence, and all the rest of it, modern policing techniques, they'd have got their man.
And yet, this case was left hanging there.
Maybe unfortunate choice of wording there.
Apologies for that.
But it was left dangling.
It was left unsolved and has become a great mystery of our time.
Of course it has.
Is the case still open?
Are you able to approach the Metropolitan Police and say, I think you can close your file now because look at what I've written?
I don't think that's really possible.
I mean, the files were closed in the early 1890s.
What I'm really interested in is the public reaction to my book.
And so far, it's been very positive.
People have also enjoyed not only the case that I put for my prime suspect, but to have a generally much better understanding of the case and the police investigation.
And they also enjoy my family connection to the case because that was my inspiration for writing the book.
And I had a very wonderful comment recently, a piece of feedback from a reader who said that my familial link resonated across the whole book.
And that's certainly how I felt when I wrote it.
But when I looked back, I thought I kind of introduced Harry Garrett in the beginning and I say goodbye to him in the epilogue.
And I just wasn't aware that a reader could perceive that I totally wrote it in tribute to him and his brother officers.
And my thoughts were of him, you know, throughout the whole writing process.
I love the clarity with which you explain all of this, Sarah, because I was aware of this.
I've even done other interviews about it.
But I was, because it is so complex and because there have been so many supposed suspects over the years, it's always been a little unclear in my mind, you know, precisely what conclusions, if any, I'd come to in those conversations.
I think you put a very compelling case.
Has anybody been in touch and disagreed with you?
Not directly, no.
I mean, I expect it might be coming.
I enjoy having an intelligent debate.
And I think that over the coming months, more people will read the book.
I'll get more feedback.
I do speak at events.
I'm speaking at the Clapham Book Festival in October.
I always take questions.
So I look forward to finding out more about the reaction to my book.
Far as you know, with your genealogical background, does Hayam Hayams have any relatives alive today?
I don't feel comfortable answering this question, and in fact, I haven't fully pursued that into the modern day because I just felt it was not the right thing to do.
And I've had the immense joy of discovering my police ancestor and learning a lot about Victorian policing and the Jack of the Ripper case.
And I just felt that I just didn't want to be negative regarding, you know, other people's experiences and memories of their family.
Completely, I mean, there would be some who'd say you need to pursue that side of it, but I totally understand what you're saying.
I mean, what could you do?
If you found a link, could you get in touch with somebody and say, by the way, in your family tree, there is this person?
I don't think so.
I don't think that's very nice.
And what benefit could there be in that?
I totally understand that.
I think it's an amazing piece of research.
So Chaim Haims presumably died of natural causes.
Did he?
Locked away from society?
He did.
He had quite a sad end because he had increasingly dementia, so he became very ill.
And I do believe that the severe epilepsy that he had weakened him.
And on his death certificate, he died in 1913, is stated exhaustion from epilepsy.
And I believe it's also cardiovascular issues.
But he became very unwell towards the end and just took to his bed and just died overnight one night.
I would think that the methods you've used for this, which have been very literally methodical, very systematic in the way that you've done it, I think you could probably apply this to other cases.
Do you intend to?
I'm very interested in all of the unexplained deaths on the Whitechapel murders files.
And I do have a second book underway of a similar subject, but not dealing with Jack the Ripper himself.
And I very look forward to hopefully having that published one day.
Do you think Jack the Ripper had a copycat?
I personally don't.
However, that was a consideration of the police of the day.
And I can certainly understand why other commentators might believe that.
It's not my personal belief, having looked at the files and looked at comparable deaths and murders.
Well, I think a remarkable book, a remarkable piece of research.
How long did it take you, Sarah?
The total elapsed time was six and a half years, which I feel slightly nervous about saying to other aspiring writers because it does seem like a long time.
That's from being inspired to the actual publication and the elapsed time of actually writing and working on the book and preparing it for publication is probably at least four years.
So that's a lot of work to expend.
And are book sales going well?
They are, thank you.
It's all going extremely well.
And it's going to be launched in the United States in the new year and hopefully in other countries as well.
Sarah, thank you very much for describing all of this and for outlining it so clearly.
And for my listeners' sake, can you give details of the book and where people might obtain it?
My book is called One Armed Jack by Sarah Bax Horton.
It's widely available in the shops and online.
It's a hard book back, an e-book and an audiobook.
Sarah, thank you very much indeed for talking with me.
Thank you.
Darkly chilling, but all the same fascinating material there from Sarah Bax Horton.
Your thoughts on her contribution to this show?
Gratefully received.
You can always go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
Remember, when you do send me an email, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
It's always nice to hear from you.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until we meet again here, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all else, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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