The House That Jack Built

Battlecrease House, Aigburth

In many ways, it's amazing that it didn't occur to me sooner. Some of you may remember, about 15 years back, that a man in Liverpool claimed to have found Jack the Ripper's diary, implicating a Liverpool cotton merchant named James Maybrick as the murderer.

It occurred to me to wonder where Maybrick lived in 1888, and it turned out that it was at Battlecrease House, just up the road from where I live now. So on Saturday I went to take a look (Yes, I felt that finding the house of a possible Victorian serial killer was a perfectly normal way of spending a nice spring afternoon. Why do you ask?).

The diary, of course, is a fake. However, we can be certain that one Victorian murder case did involve Battlecrease: Maybrick's wife Florence was convicted of poisoning him with arsenic in May 1889, in one of the most famous murder trials of the era. As Alan Moore noted in From Hell, Maybrick being the Ripper would be like Sharon Tate turning out to be the Boston Strangler.

Of course, the diary being fake doesn't rule Maybrick out as a suspect, and while there's nothing to place him in London at the time of the murders, there's also nothing to establish that he wasn't. There are also a couple of curious details.

A few years back, interviews with elderly Liverpool residents indicated that, in the early years of the 20th Century, children used to run past Battlecrease and shout "Look out, look out, Jack the Ripper's about!". An urban legend about Maybrick may go back quite way.

There's also a detail of a letter that Florence Maybrick sent to her lover shortly before James' death, in which she reports that he is "Delirious...perfectly ignorant of everything", before going on to say that "The tale he told me was a pure fabrication and only intended to frighten the truth out of me."

There is, however, no indication as to what that tale was.