The Study In Red Trilogy

5. Countdown to Mayhem

23rd August 1888

23rd August 1888

I’ve felt quite well for the last few days. Even the voices have been silent, they’ve been resting I think, as have I. Only a couple of jobs, nothing taxing, and no-one suspects a thing. I’m ready now, I could start the job tomorrow if they call, but they’re silent. Never mind, the blades are sharp, my mind is clear, and everything’s in place ready to begin. so call me, call me, talk to me, my friends, my voices, lead me on the path of destruction, and I’ll eradicate the w****s, the filth, the harlots of the filthy streets, I’ll put them all to sleep, for ever

I’ve felt quite well for the last few days. Even the voices have been silent, they’ve been resting I think, as have I. Only a couple of jobs, nothing taxing, and no-one suspects a thing. I’m ready now, I could start the job tomorrow if they call, but they’re silent. Never mind, the blades are sharp, my mind is clear, and everything’s in place ready to begin. so call me, call me, talk to me, my friends, my voices, lead me on the path of destruction, and I’ll eradicate the w****s, the filth, the harlots of the filthy streets, I’ll put them all to sleep, for ever

It’s so quiet tonight, tried reading for a while, but my eyes grew heavy, so tired, I need sleep, the one thing that evades me, a fair night of slumber. Why do the headaches come so hard at night? I wish the headaches would go away. Perhaps they will when I’ve done for the w****s!

It’s so quiet tonight, tried reading for a while, but my eyes grew heavy, so tired, I need sleep, the one thing that evades me, a fair night of slumber. Why do the headaches come so hard at night? I wish the headaches would go away. Perhaps they will when I’ve done for the w****s!He was calm now, or so I thought; calmer than in some of the previous entries in the journal. He seemed to be almost at peace with himself, as if he were adrift in the eye of a hurricane, alone and in the midst of calm, but with the threat of a violent raging storm waiting just around the corner. In light of my own experiences with certain disturbed patients over the years, I could sense that this man was a highly strung individual, almost driven to breaking point by the incessant clamour of the ‘voices’ in his head, and yet, there again, was the plea for the pain to stop, for the headaches to go away. Within the darkest recesses of his mind there remained a small, tenuous link with reality, a spark of humanity remained within him, but, as was proved by the events to follow, that spark was soon to be extinguished.

24th August 1888

24th August 1888

Results of the inquest on w***e Tabram. As expected, ‘Murder by person or persons unknown’. A long report made by an Inspector Reid, who knows nothing at all. Ha! Stupid, bungling fools. They’ll never know, never find me, never find US! I was invisible at the back of the room, unseen and unnoticed by anyone. I’ll be even more invisible when I go back to work, to do the job. Oh, the sport that awaits, better than all the trophies in the cabinet. I’ll be top of the league, best in show, holder of the blue riband. They’ll know my work if not my name, and I’ll wash the streets clean with the blood of harlots. The darkness shall be my friend, the night my close companion, the sewers my safe refuge from prying eyes. Let them all be damned, let them weep and cry for their own bloody souls, while I cut the w****s in droves.

Results of the inquest on w***e Tabram. As expected, ‘Murder by person or persons unknown’. A long report made by an Inspector Reid, who knows nothing at all. Ha! Stupid, bungling fools. They’ll never know, never find me, never find US! I was invisible at the back of the room, unseen and unnoticed by anyone. I’ll be even more invisible when I go back to work, to do the job. Oh, the sport that awaits, better than all the trophies in the cabinet. I’ll be top of the league, best in show, holder of the blue riband. They’ll know my work if not my name, and I’ll wash the streets clean with the blood of harlots. The darkness shall be my friend, the night my close companion, the sewers my safe refuge from prying eyes. Let them all be damned, let them weep and cry for their own bloody souls, while I cut the w****s in droves.In referring to my printed reference notes, I found that an Inspector Reid did in fact submit a report on that very date to Scotland Yard detailing the results of the Tabram inquest, though how our man came to glean such knowledge so quickly I couldn’t fathom. Of course, until the Ripper struck again, the police had no idea who or what they were dealing with. Martha Tabram was consigned to history at this point as one of the many unsolved and unsolvable murders which were all too frequent in the great city in those murky, far away days. Things were soon to change; however, tragedy was lurking in the dark, dank, mist enshrouded streets of Whitechapel.

My thoughts turned for a moment to the days on which our man had made no journal entries. What was he doing? Where was he? Was he still sufficiently sane and lucid that he was holding down a good job, or some job at least, and that no-one of his acquaintance had noticed anything unusual in his recent behaviour? Was he so in control of himself in public that he could appear totally normal in every respect? The writer of this journal was indeed a phenomenon; I suspected that he may have been so disturbed that the man who wrote the journal would have been unrecognisable, (even to himself) from the man who went about his daily business in the most normal and orderly fashion. This would explain the gaps in the journal. The writer would see no anomalies in the missing dates. Those days belonged to someone else, someone apparently sane. For him, they simply hadn’t existed! I had to admit that, as a case study, most psychiatrists would give their eye teeth for a chance to work with such a patient, to study at close quarters the gradual decline from sanity into the abyss of the psychosis that was about to envelope the tortured soul of the hapless victim. Yes, it’s true I used the word victim, for to be afflicted with such an illness, and an illness it most surely is, must be one of the most frightening and disorientating experiences for the human mind to endure. The writer of the journal, if indeed he was Jack the Ripper, was himself a severely tortured individual, as much a casualty as those poor wretched women who were to achieve lasting and tragic fame as his victims. Added to that, the diagnosis of such a psychosis would have been almost impossible in those early days of psychiatric science, and any treatment, if attempted at all, would have been arbitrarily punitive and painful: the administration of electric shocks and the use of water hoses the probable and wholly unsatisfactory methods of approach. We have to remember that there were no specific drugs available to those physicians who did their best to help the mentally ill in the nineteenth century. There were no anti-depressants, no tranquilisers, and no comforting specialist nurses trained to help the afflicted. The asylums of Victorian England were little more than places of unhappy incarceration for those interned in them, hell holes by modern standards, where the sick and infirm of mind could be locked away out of the sight and mind of the public conscience, where they could do no harm, and be ‘protected’ from self harm; in other words, detained in chains and kept confined in solitary confinement. Such was the civilised treatment of our mentally ill in the age of Victoria.

I wasn’t prepared to criticise my great-grandfather at that point of course, he could only work within the confines of his profession at the time, and I’m sure he always thought he was doing his best for his patients, as did all doctors of the time. No-one was deliberately cruel or unfeeling. They were simply ignorant of things which we in these enlightened times are only too aware. I was relatively sure that the journal was the work of someone suffering from a form of paranoid schizophrenia, though that would have meant little to the physicians of my great-grandfather’s day. I should add that at that point of course, such a theory was based purely on what I’d read so far and could at best be seen as little more than hypothetical guesswork. I supposed it could never be more than that, as I’d obviously never have the opportunity to talk to the writer in order to arrive at an informed diagnosis.

Schizophrenia, an awful illness, perhaps needs a little explaining at this point. At certain times in history, sufferers of this dreadful ailment were thought to be possessed by demons, and many unfortunates were locked away in terrible institutions, tormented, often exiled, reviled and at times, hunted down and killed like wild animals. Even today, despite tremendous advances in our understanding of the disease, and many effective treatments being available, the public conception of it is still clouded by fear and suspicion.

The sufferer will in general appear outwardly ‘normal’ to most people he or she encounters in daily life. Should the disease take a firm hold however, the individual may begin to display unusual behaviour caused by their radically altered thought processes. They may suffer from hallucinations and become delusional. Many hear imagined voices, normally as a precursor to some form of self-harm, or in some case leading to highly intense false beliefs, (delusions). Violence is not always a by-product of schizophrenia, and, when it is evident, it is usually self-directed by the individual into attempts to end his or her own life. Only in exceptional cases, (one of which I felt I was examining in the journal), will the violence be directed outwards towards strangers or groups of individuals as in this case. In our enlightened modern society the sufferer, once diagnosed, has the options of psychotherapy, group therapy, and drug therapy at his disposal in the search for a means to control and alleviate his suffering. A combination of antipsychotic, antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications can go a long way towards relieving many of the day to day symptoms of the illness. The disorganised speech pattern displayed in the wording of the journal also provided me with a clue, this, together with the equally disorganised thought processes revealed in the writing, being a classic symptom of the disease.

None of these medical corrective therapies were available to our Victorian counterparts however, and the chances of effective diagnosis and, more importantly, any form of controlling or curative treatment were virtually non-existent. If, indeed, the writer of the journal was a sufferer of this dread illness, then his chances of obtaining help or of even managing to control his illness were almost non-existent. The only prognosis for this poor individual, had he sought help, or, worse still been committed due to his actions, would have been dreadful incarceration and inhumane treatment in one of the aforementioned gothic asylums of the day. Understanding and compassion were not the bywords of the Victoria era when dealing with the mentally ill, but I think I’ve already made that point!

25th August 1888

25th August 1888

Visited The Alma again tonight. w****s everywhere! What a vile house of ill-repute that is. Smelled of stale beer, cheap tobacco, and w****s! Cracked music from a cracked piano. Such false jollity, and voices, voices everywhere. Singing, shouting, making merry as though there were no tomorrow, and there won’t be soon for some of them w****s. No tomorrows at all. I’ll see to that! So loud in there, I could hardly hear my voices when they spoke to me. They made me retreat, it’s not time yet, not the time to start the work, but, it won’t be long, I’ve seen them, watched them, I know where they are, where to find the pestilence, where to go to rid the world of their smell, their sickness.

Visited The Alma again tonight. w****s everywhere! What a vile house of ill-repute that is. Smelled of stale beer, cheap tobacco, and w****s! Cracked music from a cracked piano. Such false jollity, and voices, voices everywhere. Singing, shouting, making merry as though there were no tomorrow, and there won’t be soon for some of them w****s. No tomorrows at all. I’ll see to that! So loud in there, I could hardly hear my voices when they spoke to me. They made me retreat, it’s not time yet, not the time to start the work, but, it won’t be long, I’ve seen them, watched them, I know where they are, where to find the pestilence, where to go to rid the world of their smell, their sickness.

My headache got so bad I had to leave, why won’t it go away?

My headache got so bad I had to leave, why won’t it go away?So, the next bloody rampage was getting closer, and the headache was getting worse. I found it strange that my great-grandfather hadn’t added any notes to the journal so far, the first inserted page of notes was still quite some pages further into the journal. Then I realised that, at this time, he obviously hadn’t met the writer! His own notes, when they came, would evidently appear after some form of meeting or communication between them In other words, he didn’t know the writer before the murders began or, if he did, he had no inkling of his illness, and this I couldn’t believe. My great-grandfather was a physician after all, and though not equipped with the knowledge and science of today, I’m sure he would have recognised the delusional state of the writer had he been a personal acquaintance of the man. His notes, stuffed into the later pages of the journal, were therefore of importance in respect of the aftermath of the killings, I would wait and bide my time. They were arranged in that way for a purpose, and I decided to stick with the original plan, and read every page chronologically.

A look at the printed texts I’d obtained showed me that the writer was now only six days away from the next murder, that of Mary Ann Nichols. The last entry I’d read showed that the writer was indeed becoming angrier and angrier with each passing day, his headaches were getting no better, and the voices were speaking to him at what appeared to be ever decreasing intervals. As his anger continued to build I knew that the pain in his head and the delusions in his brain would increase exponentially until something gave way. The next few entries would be crucial in helping to determine his state of mind at the time immediately before the night of the ghastly s*******r of the poor unfortunate Mary Ann.