The Last American Vampire

  “The woman in question was Martha Tabram,” said Doyle. “Aged thirty-nine. A prostitute, like the Nichols woman. Roughly the same height, though a good deal heavier. She was found stabbed to death in Whitechapel three weeks ago.”

  “On the street?” asked Henry.

  “In a tenement stairwell. She was stabbed thirty-nine times.”

  “Good Lord,” said Stoker.

  “Scotland Yard thinks it’s the same killer,” said Doyle.

  “Do you?” asked Henry.

  Doyle shook his head. “Too clumsy. Too savage. One doesn’t stab a woman thirty-nine times unless one of two things is true: one, the murderer was caught up in the throes of anger, which means the victim was familiar to him. A lover, perhaps. Unlikely, given that our victim, by the very nature of her trade, would have had many lovers. The second possibility is more likely—that the murderer was not in control of his senses and that this murder was not planned. The facts, gentlemen: he killed her in a tenement stairwell, where they could have easily been discovered, had another tenant come home or peeked his head out the door. Two, he stabbed her repeatedly in the torso but left the throat untouched, giving her ample time to scream, as the majority of her wounds were not instantly fatal. No… the man who stabbed Martha Tabram was careless. But the man who killed Nichols… he was in complete control, from the choice of victim to the location of the murder to its execution. See here…”

  Doyle slid his journal across the table for Henry and Stoker to see. He’d copied down every detail of the Scotland Yard reports, including drawings and diagrams.

  “Her throat was severed to the spine in two swift strokes. Like this…” Doyle demonstrated, moving his right arm back and forth across Henry’s throat in level, precise strokes. “Then he repositions his body and makes three deep, successive wounds across the abdomen and genital area, before disemboweling her.”

  Literary titans and erstwhile Ripper investigators Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker pose together in a previously unreleased photograph from the private collection of Henry Sturges.

  “A madman,” said Stoker.

  “A very strong madman with a very sharp blade,” said Doyle. “To make such severe wounds in single strokes.”

  A chilling thought bounced around my skull as Doyle spoke. The brutality, the precision, the wallowing in gore and detail; I wondered, Could it be Grander? But then why murder common streetwalkers? Unless, of course, the real target was the man who would get the blame. The man who’d been sent to London to find him. Was this Grander’s way of warning me off?

  “There was ash and a small amount of pipe tobacco found at the scene, quite near the body.”

  “Oh, a pipe smoker,” said Henry. “Well, that narrows it down.”

  “Sometimes,” said Doyle, “there is nothing so significant as a trifle.”

  “Well, trifle or not,” said Stoker, “it doesn’t get us any closer to finding out why Henry’s card ended up on that woman’s body.”

  Doyle turned to Henry. “There is, of course, one possibility that we haven’t discussed.”

  “Oh?” said Henry. “And what’s that?”

  “That you are, in fact, the killer, and that you left your card on the victim—whether intentionally or not.”

  “Are you mad?” asked Stoker. “He came to us. He’s the reason we’re investigating this in the first place.”

  “Precisely what a clever murderer might do to deflect suspicion. If we’re to conduct a thorough investigation, we must consider every possibility—no matter how unlikely.”

  Doyle noticed Henry glaring at him.

  “Even those that are… extremely unlikely,” said Doyle.

  “Is there anything else in the report?” asked Henry.

  “Nothing definitive, though Scotland Yard seems strangely certain that the killer is a foreigner. A theory they base entirely on the statement of one witness who claims to have seen the victim with a ‘dark, shabbily dressed foreign type’ an hour before her murder. There is, however, one detail that puzzles me. See here—at the top of the Inquest Testimony, it states that her torso was riddled in lacerations. Yet here, at the bottom of the same page, the coroner states, ‘No blood was found on the breast, either of the body or the clothes.’ If her throat was indeed cut with the severity described earlier… what happened to all of the blood? In his own notes, Abberline states that, for all of the woman’s injuries, there was not blood enough to fill two wineglasses at the site. Strange, given the severity and location of the wounds. It’s almost as if it was… collected.”5

  Stoker and Henry exchanged a glance. It was brief, but enough for both men to acknowledge—Let’s keep that part to ourselves.

  “Still,” Doyle continued, “one thing is clear. Unless apprehended, our murderer is likely to strike again.”

  Henry sat in a small room in Scotland Yard, watching Inspector Abberline pace back and forth. It was a small, windowless room in the middle of a lower floor, a precursor to the interrogation rooms that would become ubiquitous in detective films fifty years later—ash-gray walls, a wooden table in its center, a single light hanging over the suspect’s head. Henry had been there for more than three hours, answering the same questions, over and over. Deflecting accusations. Inspectors Moore and Andrews were there, too, both men slouched in stiff wooden chairs against the wall. They looked bored beyond comprehension.

  The killer had indeed struck again, just as Doyle had predicted. Polly Nichols had been killed on August 31st. A little more than a week later, on September 7th, the body of Annie Chapman was found in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, just after sunrise.

  Like Nichols, Chapman was an East End prostitute. And like Nichols, her throat had been cut in two deep gashes, her stomach sliced open, and her entrails pulled out. But there were a pair of key differences. One, Chapman’s uterus had been removed. And two, the white letters “H” and the “S” on the “Hanbury Street” sign had been smeared over with blood, though this detail was kept out of the papers at the request of the investigators. Abberline had almost screamed when he’d seen those two letters. He felt as if he was being mocked, and he had a pretty good idea of who was doing the mocking.

  Once again, he and his colleagues knocked on Henry’s front door in the early hours, and once again, an aggravated Henry answered it. This time, Abberline wasn’t willing to wait until later in the day. He took Henry directly to Scotland Yard, intent on keeping him there until he confessed.

  It was a time-honored policeman’s tactic—wear the suspect down. Aggravate him. Do anything in your power to make him slip up or lose his temper.

  But Henry wasn’t taking the bait, and now it was Abberline who was growing aggravated—rolling and lighting his brown cigarettes with increasing frequency. Pacing back and forth, beads of sweat visible on his lip, just above his splendid mustache.

  As [Abberline] grew more impatient, I quietly grew more paranoid. Whoever he was, [Grander had] possessed the resources to track down and assassinate five of the Union’s top men in Europe. Surely he knew I was here in England looking for him. Was I being set up? Had Grander infiltrated Scotland Yard?

  “Let’s start from the beginning, Mr. Sturges.”

  “Very well.”

  “You say you were home all night.”

  “You know that I was. You had two men posted across the street from my front door.”

  Abberline flushed red but recovered quickly.

  “Well, if I did have men posted there, and if you were aware of them, then it stands to reason that you might have evaded them somehow. Taken another route out of your home.”

  “Mr. Abberline—”

  “Inspector Abberline.”

  “Forgive me. Inspector Abberline, do you mean to suggest that—with the full knowledge that I was under your suspicion and under your watchful eye—I crept out of my house like a spirit, committed a ghastly murder on the other side of London, and then crept back in, all without being noticed? Perh
aps you think me able to change form at will or render myself otherwise undetectable to the naked eye.”

  “Do you know what I think, Mr. Sturges? I think you know more about these murders than you’ve let on.”

  On this point he was technically correct, but seeing that I was, in fact, innocent, I thought it best to keep that information to myself.

  “Perhaps,” Abberline continued, “you committed them yourself, or perhaps you’re merely an accomplice. But I’ve learned to trust my instincts over the years, sir, and my instincts tell me you are holding back.”

  “Mr. Abberline, if I were the killer you’re looking for, would I be here right now, answering your questions? Don’t you think I would have fled at the first hint of suspicion?”

  “It is my experience that guilty men are often the most confident in the face of questioning. And you, Mr. Sturges, have an unnerving confidence about you.”

  It was an interesting observation. And maybe I did. We don’t really know how we’re perceived by others.

  “If you aren’t the killer, Mr. Sturges, then why did you make such a desperate attempt to evade our man on the train? Hmm? Why such desperation to disguise your movements?”

  “Perhaps the issue is not that I evaded him, but how easily I did so.”

  “Now, look here!” cried Andrews, standing up.

  Abberline turned and gestured to Andrews—steady, steady. Andrews settled down and took his seat. Abberline turned back. Crept closer to Henry… almost nose to nose.

  “Mr. Sturges… I am going to catch you, if it takes me the rest of my life. And I am going to see you hang.”

  From the front page of the Evening News, Monday, October 1st, 1888:

  THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS

  HORRIBLE MURDER OF A WOMAN NEAR COMMERCIAL ROAD

  ANOTHER WOMAN MURDERED AND MUTILATED IN ALDGATE

  ONE VICTIM IDENTIFIED

  BLOOD STAINED POSTCARD FROM “JACK THE RIPPER”

  Two more ghastly tragedies were, yesterday, added to the appalling list of crimes with which the East-end of London has been associated during the last few months; and there is every reason to believe that the whole series is the work of one man. The first of the two murders was committed in a yard turning out of Berner-street. The body was discovered by a Russian Jew named Diemschitz, about one o’clock yesterday morning, on his return from the neighbourhood of Sydenham, where he had been selling cheap jewellery. He drove into the yard, which is situated next to a working man’s club, of which he is steward, and noticed that his pony shied at something which was lying in a heap in a corner of the yard. Having fetched out a friend from the club, he looked more closely into the matter, and then found a woman lying on the ground, dead, with her throat cut clean to the vertebrae. The body was quite warm, and blood was still flowing freely from the throat, so it is pretty certain that the murder must have been committed within a very few minutes of the time when Diemschitz discovered the body. Indeed, all the facts go to show that it was the arrival of Diemschitz in his trap which disturbed the murderer, and we may safely assume that, but for this disturbance, the miscreant would have proceeded to mutilate the body in a similar way to that in which he mutilated the bodies of the two unfortunate women, Mary Anne Nichols and Annie Chapman. The wound in the throat is almost identical with the throat wounds of the other victims––a savage cut severing the jugular and carotids, and going clean down to the vertebrae. It bears, if we may be permitted to use the phrase, the trade-mark of the man who has so infamously distinguished himself before, and leaves no room for doubt that the three murders were committed by one and the same person.

  Having been disturbed in his first attempt, yesterday morning, the murderer seems to have made his way towards the City, and to have met another “unfortunate,” whom he induced to go with him to Mitre Square, a secluded spot, lying off Aldgate, and principally occupied by warehouses. He took her to the south-western corner of the square, and there cut her throat, quite in his horribly regulative way, and then proceeded to disembowl her. He must have been extremely quick at his work, for every portion of the police beat in which Mitre Square is included, is patrolled every ten minutes or quarter of an hour, the City beats being much shorter than those of the Metropolitan Police. Police-constable Watkins 881 passed through the square at about 1:30 or 1:35, and is quite certain that it was then in its normal condition. Within a quarter of an hour he patrolled it again, and then found a woman lying in the corner with her throat cut from ear to ear. On closer examination he found that her clothes had been raised up to her chest, and that the lower portion of the body had been ripped completely open from the pelvis to the sternum, and disemboweled, just as were Mrs. Nichols and Annie Chapman. Indeed, this last murder is in its main features an almost exact reproduction of the horrible tragedies of Buck’s-row and Hanbury Street, and, humanly speaking, it is absolutely certain that it also was committed by the same man. There were certain deviations from the murderer’s ordinary plan, but they are not inexplicable, or very significant. He gashed her face in several places, but there is evidence to show that the woman at the last moment suspected his design, and struggled with him, and it is not improbable that he stabbed her in the face before cutting her throat and committing the other atrocities.

  This brief summary of the facts connected with the two tragedies which startled London, yesterday, brings us then face-to-face with the almost indubitable fact that there exists somewhere in the East-end, at this moment, a fiend in human shape.

  Abberline was furious.

  He held a written report in his hands. It was a report he’d demanded on his desk every morning since the investigation had begun. A summary of the previous night’s surveillance. He read it again, just to be sure:

  The subject left his house before dark, which we took note of being somewhat unusual. His coach was waiting, and drove him to Chelsea—we following discreetly in our own carriage. The subject’s coach stopped at No. 18 Leonard’s Terrace, where he picked up a burly man of about forty, with reddish hair and a beard. The two rode to Rules Restaurant in Covent Garden, making no stops along the way. There they were met by another man—closer in age to the subject, though shorter, and possessing brown hair and whiskers. It was a few minutes past eight o’clock when they arrived. Despite the restaurant being quite full with the Saturday night crowd, and despite others waiting in line, the subject and his companions were seated straightaway at one of the better tables, which happened to be at a large window that faced Maiden Lane. We were quite able to see the subject and his companions from the street. The three sat, talking intensely at times, for nearly four hours. When their dinner was concluded, the shorter man left the restaurant and walked on Maiden Lane, at which point we lost sight of him. The other two drove off in the subject’s coach. We followed, never losing sight of the target. The carriage dropped the bearded man at No. 18 Leonard’s Terrace at half past midnight, making no stops between, then proceeded directly to the subject’s home. We observed the subject enter his home at five minutes past one in the morning. We remained until five. The subject did not appear again.

  Faithfully submitted on this day, 30th September, 1888,

  W. Andrews

  H. Moore.

  Henry Sturges couldn’t be the Ripper. Not unless he had wings.

  Elizabeth Stride’s body had been found at one in the morning—five minutes before Henry Sturges had walked in his front door, halfway across the city. The body of Catherine Eddowes was found shortly thereafter. Abberline sent for Andrews and Moore, had them roused from their beds and brought before him to verify everything in the report. Were they absolutely certain? Perhaps they lost sight of Sturges without realizing it. Perhaps he was able to slip away during that four-hour dinner. No, they’d said. They were certain. They would swear by every word in the report.

  Doyle and Stoker were holed up in Henry’s parlor, poring over the Scotland Yard reports. Proposing theories. Arguing, much like they’d done when they’d dined
at Rules the night before, discussing the Nichols and Chapman murders in detail. They’d made a list of every business card Henry could remember giving out and divided the task of following up with each recipient among the three of them. While these follow-ups continued, Doyle was also busy analyzing the new postmortems and crime scene reports from Scotland Yard, working on a sketch of the killer. Based on the force and angle of the wounds on all four victims, he’d concluded that the killer was a tall man and probably left-handed. This theory seemed to be corroborated by a new discovery at the scene of the Stride murder—one that the investigators had once again taken care to keep out of the paper: a set of footprints in the mud of the yard leading away from the woman’s body. They were roughly size fourteen, an almost unheard-of size that would help narrow the search. There was no doubt in Doyle’s mind that their killer was tall and strong, nor was there any doubt that he was clever and cautious, and possibly trained in anatomy, given the swiftness and cleanliness with which he removed his victims’ innards.

  “What can we infer from the fabric found clutched in Ms. Stride’s right hand?” asked Doyle, looking pointedly at Henry.

  “What?” asked Stoker. “There’s no mention of any such fabric in the report.”

  “Not in the official report, no,” said Doyle. “Scotland Yard is playing its cards close to the chest. But I have here a sample of the fabric in question. It’s velveted herringbone, of English origin and of exceedingly high quality, probably torn from a gentleman’s topcoat.”