RebeccaFrostWrites

Who was America’s first serial killer? Part III

H. H. Holmes has already taken us on quite the adventure. We know he got accused of committing insurance fraud with his mysteriously absent friend, Benjamin Pitezel; that three of the Pitezel children were also missing; and that he (eventually) accused his friend Miss Minnie Williams and her new beau, Mr. Hatch, of killing the children. His October 1895 trial resulted in a single guilty verdict for the death of Benjamin Pitezel, and Holmes hanged for it.

But he didn’t simply quietly wait out the rest of his life.

Let’s take a peek at the headline of the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday April 12, 1896.

He’s bumped up the number, certainly. At the trial Holmes was accused of a single murder – even the deaths of Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel were not mentioned, since they did not happen in Pennsylvania. Now he’s progressed to “the greatest criminal in history” with 27 murders.

Granted, this is a newspaper headline. “The most awful story of modern times told by the fiend in human shape” is clearly meant to sell copies. They had advertised it in advance, too, to make sure they’d sell. Holmes had been paid for his story, and naturally the paper still wanted to make money on it. But we only know about Benjamin, Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel. How did he get to 27?

First, he lied. Some of the people Holmes named actually came forward before his execution two weeks later to inform the world that Holmes had not, in fact, murdered them.

Second, he made other people up completely, either borrowing parts of names from people he did know, or not naming them at all.

And third … remember Miss Minnie Williams, who was supposed to be with the Pitezel children? Previously Holmes had said she was on the run for the murder of her sister, Nannie, but this new confession has Holmes murdering both of them. (Since neither sister had been seen since going to Chicago, these two seem to be likely instances of the truth.)

Holmes also used the paper to confess to murdering some of his mistresses, as well as one mistress’ young daughter. He varies the method from death to death, including suffocating unsuspecting victims in a large, room-sized safe that he had in his Chicago “Murder Castle.” So … Holmes completely qualifies as a serial killer, right?

Well …

He wasn’t done yet. After two spoken confessions, a written autobiography, and a further confession in the newspaper, he spoke his final words on the subject while on the scaffold. In spite of the 27 murders outlined in the Inquirer, Holmes’ final confession was only to two deaths, one of them a woman who died during an abortion. He argued that the real killer of Benjmain Pitezel had not been brought to justice and still needed to be found.

Then, after he was hanged, Holmes was interred in an extra-large coffin that had been half-filled with cement before he was laid inside. He had a clear fear of grave robbers – one that has been continually linked to his own role as a medical student and the ways cadavers were likely procured for lessons – and refused many offers of money for his brain or his body after his death. Once he was laid inside the coffin, more cement was put over him before burial.

But of course, the story didn’t end there. The world was far from done with the story of H. H. Holmes.

How can you be sure your ideas are good enough to be published?

It’s the most common slash dreaded question for all writers: “where do you get your ideas?” And it might seem simple, but there are layers to it. It’s not just “where do you get your ideas?” but “where do you get ideas that are good enough to be published?” Really, how do you find an idea that someone else is going to look at … and then agree to put in the time needed to work with you on it?

I’m with Stephen King on this one, or at least on half of his advice for fiction writers: you have to read a lot. In grad school they tell you to look for the gap – the thing that nobody’s talking about – but it’s a bit trickier than that. You have to make sure it’s a real gap and not just that you haven’t personally read about it yet. So you can’t identify a gap, stop reading, and immediately start investigating it.

What I’ll do is write the idea down immediately. I’ve got plenty of notebooks – this one is actually a cover for four different notebooks (and my husband added the engraving on the front for me), which can help me keep my ideas separate – and when a lightbulb goes on, I’ll write it down. And then keep reading. Both of those are equally important, since I don’t want to forget my brilliant insight … but I also want to make sure it is indeed brilliant before telling the world. (Or at least before writing up a proposal.)

The next step is usually some serious time with Google. I remember going to propose an early Stephen King paper for the Pop Culture Conference and thinking “There’s no way nobody else noticed this!” This is the connection between Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes that ended up as a chapter in The Modern Stephen King Canon, and even up until the Q&A session at the end of my presentation, I was sure someone was going to stand up and tell me of course they all knew it. They just weren’t talking about it because it was so darn obvious.

The thing is, even if I can’t find someone who’s made the same connection I have, I’m still never convinced that my idea is actually original. If little me could think of it, then someone else more brilliant has to have already come up with it … right? So I keep looking, and even when I send out a proposal, I’m waiting to hear back that actually, of the 20 people who responded, 15 of them had exactly the same point, sorry, thanks for your time.

This is my other notebook. It’s a Leuchtturm 1917, and a gift from my husband. He said he picked it because he’d seen Neil Gaiman call it his favorite. (The leather cover is completely custom – my husband printed it all over with a map of Whitechapel.) It’s my more recent notebook, and you can see from these pages that it’s set up to almost force you to do what I’m already doing: keeping a lot of notes on a lot of different things, but trying to stay organized.

All the pages are numbered so you can fill out your index as you go or as new ideas occur to you. This helps me take it a step further beyond “having an idea” and “being pretty sure the idea is original” to “brainstorming more about the idea.” By putting the main thought at the top of the page, this leaves a whole lot of open space to be filled. Then I can shift to having more thoughts about the idea, supporting it and making more connections as I continue to fill in the gap.

Again, we’re back to that difficult step: you won’t actually know for sure if your idea is interesting enough to other people until you actually show it to other people. But you can take your time in developing it to make sure that the gap you think you see actually exists, and isn’t simply a gap in your reading.

If you ever come across someone asking “Why isn’t anyone talking about this?” the answer is usually “Because you’re not reading the right people.” Once the idea strikes – as you write it down before it can get away – your job is to make sure you’re not missing out on that conversation. You Google, and you comb through bibliographies, and you talk to people, and you satisfy yourself as well as you can that you’re not just missing it. Then you develop that idea – use your lightbulb to look into all the corners of the room, maybe – and take a deep breath and put it out there.

But mostly … you read a lot. And then a lot more.

Who was America’s first serial killer? Part II

Last week I started to introduce you to H. H. Holmes, aka Herman Webster Mudgett, aka any number of other pseudonyms. We ended with Holmes in prison in Philadelphia, awaiting trial for the murder of his friend, Benjamin Pitezel. At that point three of Pitezel’s children had been discovered dead, too, and Holmes had to do some quick thinking.

He’d already given two different spoken confessions. Let’s sum them up:

First confession in Boston, right after being taken into custody: at this point nobody was all that concerned about the children, so Holmes said that they were with their father, Benjamin. Who was totally alive. In South America somewhere, but totally alive. He had first stolen and then mutilated a corpse to be buried in Pitezel’s place.

Second confession, once the newspapers warned him that people were looking at disinterring Benjamin Pitezel, aka B. F. Perry, for a second time: the danger here was that Holmes was being held for insurance fraud. If he confessed that the man was indeed Benjamin Pitezel, then there was no insurance fraud. Aha! thinks Holmes. He confesses that he discovered his friend dead of suicide and merely staged the body to look like an accident, thereby ensuring that his widow and children would have the money. And, uh, those children? The missing ones? They’re with Holmes’ old friend, Minnie Williams, who also happens to be a school teacher, so you know they’re being taken care of. At this point Holmes even managed to get a “secret message” into some foreign newspapers, calling Miss Williams to come out of hiding and bring the children, alive and well.

This is where Holmes’ story sat last week when the newest headlines declared that Alice, Nellie, and Howard’s bodies had been found.

This is also where Holmes switched from spoken explanation to written. Holmes’ Own Story, published before his autumn trial for Benjamin Pitezel’s murder, is a multi-part book that starts with Holmes’s autobiography. It continues into the second part which is meant to be his prison diary. Then, once the diary structure falls apart, he finally gets around to his explanation of how Alice, Nellie, and Howard could be dead … but it wasn’t his fault.

It turns out, according to Holmes’ Own Story, that the strange journey around the Midwest and into Canada involved two other people Holmes hadn’t previously mentioned. One was Miss Minnie Williams, who had some history with Holmes, and the other was Mr. Edward Hatch, Miss William’s new love interest. Hatch looked very much like Holmes and had even styled his hair to look the same, Holmes stressed, and the last time he saw any of the children, they were going into the care of Miss Williams.

Hatch is, of course, the man various witnesses claimed to have seen with the Pitezel children near the time of their deaths. Holmes himself was nothing but loving and caring toward them, and he didn’t harm them a bit. He simply made the poor choice of selecting Miss Williams as their caretaker and entrusting them to a near-stranger simply because Miss Williams had chosen him.

So here we have a completely innocent Holmes. He is guilty of insurance fraud, yes, fine, because he came upon his friend after Pitezel had committed suicide and proceeded to stage the scene, but he can’t be hanged for that. And even Mrs. Pitezel will tell the court how much Holmes has done for her family since. It pains him, truly, that the children are dead, but none of it was his fault. Holmes could go to trial confident that he would not be convicted of murder.

In October 1895, Holmes was found guilty of the murder of Benjamin Pitezel and sentenced to hang.

And yet … we’re still not done with him.

5 tips for tackling multiple writing projects at the same time

I know I’m not the only writer who works on more than one project at the same time, but I think I might also be an outlier. At a writing retreat it seemed like everyone else was amazed when one of the presenters said he’d have more than one in progress at any given time. I wouldn’t recommend it, exactly, but we don’t always have control over when special issues are announced or ideas strike. I do have a pretty solid idea of my personal limit, though, considering how many things I was juggling over the summer of 2019.

So last week’s writing post showed you the top of this index card, held on my bulletin board by my helpful star carrier pin (the lantern glows in the dark!). I wanted something more fun and cheerful than just a thumb tack because the list itself is anxiety-inducing. At the top, marked with the red checkmark, is the chapter from last week on the heroic criminal: final edits due on July 12, and hey look, it’s done! Except … there’s more underneath that bird.

In 2019 I took on more than I should have. It didn’t turn out to actually be too much, but … let’s not do that again. I had three book chapters due – heroic criminal, a chapter on IT, and one about post-WWI male violence (which can all be found here) and the book proposal for Media and the Murderer. Those were all planned. The last one on the bottom – “Stephen King likes to kill kids” – was a request from another publisher … which led to another book proposal. (That one got rejected with a suggestion for a shift in topic, but since I wasn’t the right person to write the new suggestion, I tore things down and rebuilt them into my upcoming book for McFarland.)

But that’s five projects going on in the same year. Not everyone can – or should want to – work on that many at once, but if you get yourself into a similar situation, there are a few things you can do to keep from running around in circles.

Have a clear idea of what each project is about. This can be the abstract, the proposal, or just a sentence. What makes this one different from the others – especially if two of them might be similar enough to use the same sources? Make sure your main argument is clear in your own mind. My index cards are turned backward for the photo because hey, I’m protective of my little idea nuggets, but they’re summed up in a short phrase on my corkboard.
Keep track of due dates. Each of the cards also has a date on it, and you can see on the printed sheet – a call for proposals – that I’ve got the due date for the proposal and the actual piece written large in red. When you have the big end dates in mind, you can work backward on where your project should be at any given time.
Focus on one at a time. On any given day, I’ll make it my intention to work on one of those projects. Sure, ideas might pop up for another, but that’s what notebooks are for. Write it down and let it go. Focus on the project you really need to work on for today. (Don’t forget to jot down your other ideas, though. “I’ll remember it later” is often a lie.)
Try to keep your projects in different phases. This, like having your main ideas very clearly spelled out, helps you switch back and forth between them without getting too confused. Of the four cards currently on my board, one is at the proofreading stage, one has been proposed and is in the “waiting to hear back” stage, one actually has an intended home and due date (the CFP), and the other is currently “just” an idea. This way you’re not trying to write two intros at the same time or trying to keep two methodologies straight. (Although once the editors have it, your timeline is in their hands and you might end up doing edits on two pieces at once.) As much as you can, control the stage of your project.
Don’t forget to take a step back for the long view. It can be easy to get involved in a project, especially when you hit the really interesting sections, but don’t get lost in something and lose sight of your other commitments. That’s the main reason for my corkboard, which is near my desk: to remind me of the due dates. That way I can take a deep breath and, at a glance, see if i need to shift my focus for today to work on another project.

There are pluses to working on multiple projects at the same time – bored with one? Switch to a different one! – but it also takes a lot of discipline to make sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin. It can be hard to say no when an apparently perfect opportunity knocks, but it’s also important to know the best way you work and how much you, personally, can handle.

What do you do when you have the chance to work on multiple projects at once? How many have you worked on at the same time?

Who was America’s first serial killer? Part I

Jack the Ripper gets advertised as the world’s first serial killer. Any book about the phenomenon of serial killing has to include a mention. Granted, most of them argue that he’s not really the first – just the first to get such widespread media coverage – but he’s known by the title, anyway. So who’s America’s first (media-reported) serial killer?

Please meet H. H. Holmes. If you did actually meet him, though, sometime between his birth in 1861 and his execution in 1896, he might not have given you that name. He was born Herman Webster Mudgett and didn’t adopt the Holmes name until he’d completed medical school at the University of Michigan and then moved away from home (and his first wife).

His habit of changing pseudonyms actually makes it all the easier to distinguish his wives. Holmes married new ones without divorcing the old ones, so at one point there were women thinking they were Mrs. Mudgett, Mrs. Holmes, and Mrs. Howard. Mrs. Howard testified at his murder trial, although she’d found out about the other two by then and reverted back to being Miss Yoke.

Holmes was hanged for a single murder: that of his friend Benjamin F. Pitezel. Pitezel thought he was in for an insurance scam. He moved to Philadelphia and opened up a patent shop using a pseudonym. The plan, as far as Pitezel understood it, was that Holmes would procure a cadaver – a relatively easy endeavor for someone who had been to med school and might have done a few shady dealings to get medical samples – and use it to fake Pitezel’s death. The two men would collect the $10,000 life insurance on the pseudonym and happily split it.

Unfortunately for Pitezel, Holmes wasn’t going to stick to the plan. A body was discovered in the patent shop and initially identified as the pseudonym, but Holmes and one of Pitezel’s children, fourteen-year-old Alice, attended a disinterment and identified the man as Pitezel. (Mrs. Carrie Pitezel was ill and could not go herself, and she needed her eldest daughter, Dessie, to help her with the baby.) Then, after Alice had made the statement that her mother was indeed a widow, Mrs. Pitezel sent her next two children, Nellie and Howard, to meet up with Holmes and Alice while she went to visit her parents. Throughout the next complicated steps, Alice, Nellie, and Howard traveled together, and Carrie, Dessie, and the baby were in a separate group.

Holmes began moving these two groups, along with his third wife – Mrs. Georgiana Howard – all throughout the midwestern United States and even into Canada. He had to control all of them and make sure they didn’t run into each other. Georgiana had no idea that the other two groups even existed. Carrie believed that she would be reunited with her husband at the next city, and Holmes kept telling her that the police had spotted them and that’s why they had to keep moving. It’s unknown what he told the three children, but by the time the police did catch up with them in Boston on November 17, 1894, Alice, Nellie, and Howard were nowhere to be found. Holmes was arrested, and so was Carrie Pitezel, on suspicion of insurance fraud. She was utterly confused and kept demanding to know where her children were.

The answer to that question wasn’t uncovered until the following summer when Detective Frank Geyer finally managed to trace Holmes’ convoluted backtrail, including his many pseudonyms, to two rented houses. The girls had been killed and buried in a house in Toronto; Howard had been killed and stuffed up a chimney in a house outside of Indianapolis.

Detective Geyer made use of the newspapers in his search of the various cities so that he didn’t have to keep explaining himself to various realtors. In Toronto, he gave an interview to numerous reporters so that the story of Holmes and the three children became front-page news. After this, he only had to walk in for the realtor to tell him no, he had never rented to anyone matching Holmes’ description – or that yes, he did indeed remember a man using Holmes’ favorite cover story. Geyer was able to speed through his list of realtors and find the house where Alice and Nellie had been killed.

But the newspapers play another major role in this story because Holmes, sitting in prison, had access to them, too. He heard the commotion outside of the prison after the girls’ bodies were discovered and immediately called for the papers. By the time someone came to grill him about the discovery, Holmes already knew about it … and had used his time to prepare a story.

To be continued …

How do you know if your writing is “good enough”?

So you’ve done it: you’ve written something with a beginning, middle, and end. All the proper headings are in place. You’ve even combed over the citations to make sure you’re caught up on the current punctuation preferences. (Okay, you’ve resigned yourself to probably missing a comma or something.) You’ve done all the revising and editing that you can do on your own, but how do you know if it’s good enough to submit somewhere?

You have to – gulp – show it to someone else.

It’s a necessary step in the process no matter what. It’s even very logical: if you want someone else to read your work, someone else has to … read your work. It just feels safer in some sort of distant dream where it’s strangers far off somewhere eagerly devouring every word. Not … someone carefully reading it and holding the power of rejection in their hands.

I suppose, if you go for self-publishing, you can skip this step. It’s just all you, all the time, and nobody else has to see it until they’re far enough away that they can’t touch you. But publishing – especially academic publishing – means a lot of eyes are going to be on your work before it gets printed.

Take my most intense process so far. A call went out for people who wanted to write about heroic criminals in American popular culture. A friend of mine sent it to me and I debated, but … well, rejection on a proposal hurts far less than rejection on a full paper, so I submitted. Even before something was really written, the two editors had their eyes on it.

They got too many submissions for their special issue, so they asked a number of us if we’d be willing to do book chapters. I agreed. First hurdle passed: someone liked my idea! Two someones, even. But now, try to follow the bouncing ball …

I wrote and submitted the chapter. The editors read it, commented, and sent it back. I revised the chapter. The peer reviewers read it, commented, and sent it back. I revised the chapter. The editors read it, commented, and sent it back. I revised the chapter. The publisher got it, formatted it, and sent it back. I made final small edits and clicked the final big button.

And that’s the main thing, right? It’s not just that other people are reading it – they’re going to tell you what to change. Between the editors and peer reviewers, I was getting feedback from five people. (Who didn’t always agree, but that’s a story for another time.) The point is that first, writing is never “good enough” – it’s just due. Second, people will always want you to change things, so you can’t go into it thinking you’re perfect anyway. And third … you have to show it to people.

It doesn’t have to be a submission straight off – you can show it to your peers or colleagues or anyone who might be interested in reading it – but there will always, always be more feedback once you submit it officially. It’s basically never going to be “good enough” to be accepted exactly as-is, but you won’t know if it’s “good enough” to be accepted at all until you show it to someone else.

What do you do to help yourself get to the point where you’re willing to show your writing to someone else?

What’s your favorite Ripper theory?

With hundreds of potential Ripper suspects, there are hundreds of stories about the Ripper. Who was he? Why did he kill the Canonical Five? The choices are nearly endless. But my favorite …

It’s complicated. That’s why it’s my favorite: it’s unique and also ridiculous, weaving in some of the more believable or standard elements with new conspiracies. So, here we go: John Wilding’s theory of what actually happened.

Wilding published Jack the Ripper: Revealed in 1993 and an updated version (Jack the Ripper: Revealed and Revisited) in 2006. He starts with Mary Jane Kelly, the final victim of the Canonical Five, putting her in a difficult position. Wilding’s Mary is pregnant, and the father is the Crown Prince himself. For some reason, once she discovers her pregnancy, Mary goes to lawyer Montague John Druitt to inform him of her situation.

Druitt has long been associated with the Ripper case simply because he committed suicide shortly after Mary Jane Kelly’s murder, providing theorists with a convenient explanation for why the murders stopped. He is not considered to be a serious suspect by any means, but Wilding’s Druitt has some interesting twists in and of himself. Druitt is only half of the Ripper in this story, since he turns to his friend, J.K. Stephen, to ask him for help and advice.

Stephen is tutoring Prince Eddy – shorthand for Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the Crown Prince’s elder son – and both Stephen and Druitt anticipate being in positions of power once their friend Eddy ascends to the throne. They can’t risk Eddy’s inheritance on the unborn child of an East End sex worker, so, keeping the secret between themselves, Druitt and Stephen decide to kill Mary Kelly.

When they try to follow her one night, keeping track of Mary by her unique bonnet, Mary Kelly passed that bonnet to Mary Nichols in order to throw off her tail. She did not recognize Druitt and Stephen, and they did not realize that they killed the wrong woman. Thus Mary Nichols’ death was a case of mistaken identity. Mary Kelly worried that it was her bonnet that got her friend killed and told another friend, Annie Chapman. She also made the mistake of expressing the same concerns to Druitt and telling him Annie’s name, turning Annie into the second Canonical victim.

Liz Stride’s death is more difficult to explain, since Wilding argues that she recognized one of the killers and had to be eliminated before she publicly identified them. However, while Mary Nichols and Annie Chapman were killed because of their association with an unknowing Mary Kelly, Catharine Eddowes was purposefully chosen.

By this point, Queen Victoria has discovered that her son is expecting another child. Rather than being aghast, she wishes to preserve any possible descendant of her beloved deceased husband. Druitt, Stephen, and Mary Kelly herself are roped into a new scheme: to continue the series of murders so that Mary Kelly can be made to disappear and no one will question it.

Mary Kelly chooses Catharine Eddowes are the next victim, trying to get her drunk so she presumably won’t feel a thing. Eddowes ends up arrested for public drunkenness, but Druitt and Stephen manage to catch her once she’s released and take care of business. Finally, Mary Kelly chooses another of her friends, this woman nameless, to be murdered and mutilated in her rented room and therefore mistaken for her. In this version, the woman discovered at 13 Miller’s Court is not Mary Kelly, but this anonymous friend.

Mary Kelly, perhaps feeling a bit of guilt about getting two of her friends brutally murdered, is thus able to slip away and give birth to the Crown Prince’s child in peace and luxury. Druitt and Stephen sadly both die young, as does Prince Eddy. Their chances at holding high positions at court were dashed all around, and it seems they murdered five innocent women for nothing.

This conspiracy hasn’t caught as much attention as From Hell and the Freemasons, but it certainly makes for a good story. It’s not true in the least, but it’s fascinating all the same.

What’s your favorite Ripper theory?

What’s the best way to keep notes for your writing project?

One of the most important things I learned early on in grad school was to simply keep my notes. All of them. Because, at some point, I’m going to remember a keyword that could lead me to an important quote … if I can find it.

Finding it is usually the problem. Past Rebecca was good about making notes, but she also tended to write them longhand. Take a look here – these are my notes from my independent study course on Jack the Ripper’s victims from way back in 2011. The box is full. That’s a lot of information. And at least it’s divided by subject, with sources up front, and at least Past Rebecca had neat handwriting, but … that’s not the easiest thing to search. It’s a nice physical representation of the research that went into that paper, which turned into my first conference presentation and then my first book. Still, it’s not very user-friendly.

At the time I wasn’t thinking about future projects or what all it might become. I was focused on getting through the semester, so it was all fresh in my head. I hadn’t yet made the shift to thinking long-term. What if I want to come back to it? What if I have a vague memory of a certain phrase from a certain book? At least all the cards are labeled by source, but …

Digital. Digital is your friend. Digital is how you make sure Future You doesn’t curse your name.

Oh, I still print things off. Here’s my notebook that I worked from while writing Ripper’s Victims. You can see some of my quirks – teeny font, two columns, printed sideways and then stuck in sheet protectors so I can scribble over it with markers. I find it’s easier to have the pages sitting by my laptop when I’m working on that specific section, and if you know me, you know I love my colored pens.

But all of the files with notes from all of those books on my shelf – over 100 of them – are saved in a single folder on my computer, and there’s that lovely search function. Now when I just know someone called Mary Jane Kelly an “Amazon queen,” I can type the phrase in and pull it up, no sweat. (Cullen, Autumn of Terror, 1965, page 166: “It was among such flotsam that Mary Kelly drifted on Thursday night, 8 November, borne along by the tide, yet remaining aloof, as befits an Amazon Queen.” Boom.)

And they’re saved in multiple places, too. I’ve got the printed version as a sort of fail-safe, but it’s also on my computer and in the cloud and on a USB stick. Part of taking the time to make the notes is also making sure you won’t ever have to repeat the same task again.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I won’t ever go back to the books themselves. When I took these notes, I took them for a very specific project, with that project’s focus. Even trying to narrow things down like that, I’ve got a very full binder. But, if I want to look at a different angle of the same topic … I’ll probably have to go back to the books and compile more notes with the new research question in mind.

Digitally, of course. I have to look out for Future Rebecca’s research needs.

But haven’t they used DNA to identify Jack the Ripper?

When the Ripper murders happened in the fall of 1888, police had very little to use in the form of forensics. This was before fingerprints – and long before DNA – at a time when murder victims were rarely even photographed at the scene of the crime. It was also at a time when people thought that taking good, close-up photographs of people’s eyes would reveal the last thing they had ever seen. Forensics in 1888 definitely did not look like an episode of CSI.

But we’re in the 21st century now, and we do have access to a lot of forensic technological advances. DNA was first used in a criminal investigation in 1986, and since then advances mean that we could certainly test the Ripper’s DNA – right?

Well, so far two people have tried.

If you’ve only read one book about Jack the Ripper, chances are it’s Patricia Cornwell’s 2002 Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. Here she is on the back, examining a document carefully while wearing clean white gloves to apparently indicate she’s in an archive. Known for her fiction, especially her series about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell decided to use her personal wealth to investigate the Ripper crimes. Her research, which was updated first in a Kindle single and in a 2017 follow-up book, directed her toward accusing artist Walter Sickert as having been Jack the Ripper.

Although Cornwell did buy a number of Sickert’s paintings – and have to defend herself against accusations of wantonly destroying them in her search for evidence – her source of the Ripper’s DNA came from some of the Ripper letters. (We’ve talked about those before …) By swabbing the flap of the envelope and the stamp, Cornwell hoped to collect the Ripper’s DNA to compare it directly to Sickert’s.

There are a couple issues here, in spite of how cool she might look on the back cover of the second book in her Matrix-style coat. First, her methods assume that the Ripper himself licked the stamps and the envelopes. This means both that the letter wasn’t handed over to an employee who sold the stamp and did the honors, and that the Ripper actually wrote the letters. And second, because of the age of the letters, only mitochondrial DNA could be tested. At best, mDNA showed that Sickert could not be excluded from the tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of possible people who could have licked the envelope. Cornwell’s experts told her she had narrowed the Ripper down to about 1% of the Victorian British population, and in her book she translates this as indicating that yes, it was Sickert.

So mDNA from the likely hoax Ripper letters not excluding Sickert from the possible thousands to have licked it does not prove that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. (Cornwell also has the difficulty of explaining how her chosen Ripper was meant to be in France at the time of the murders, on top of her theory that Sickert wrote most, if not all, of the Ripper letters himself. As an artist he was apparently amused by disguising his handwriting.)

The second example, most recently hitting headlines as the results were published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, involves a shawl. This shawl was supposedly removed from Catherine Eddowes’ possessions after her murder and never officially recorded as having belonged to her. A police officer is meant to have taken it as a gift for his wife (since somehow it avoided being covered in blood) but then, mysteriously, the shawl passed from hand to hand and traveled through the decades … without ever having been washed.

In 2007, Russel Edwards bought the shawl at auction, believing the story of its provenance when other Ripper scholars present scoffed at the idea. Like Cornwell, he had DNA tests run, this time checking for matches to two people. (Again, note the CSI-style photographs.) Edwards concluded that the blood found on the shawl could indeed have come from Catherine Eddowes, and that the semen did not exclude his personal choice for Ripper, Polish barber Aaron Kosminski.

But we’re left with the same sorts of issues. Edwards’ expert, Jari Louhelainen, was also limited to testing for mDNA. His results were like the ones Cornwell was given: they did not exclude the people Edwards was looking for, but it’s hardly a conclusive test when it only narrows the pool down to some thousands (again, in a range that might be from tens to hundreds). The shawl itself, like the letters, is questioned, since there’s no trail that actually connects it to Catherine Eddowes and it has a lot of traits that mean it probably didn’t belong to her. (The dye was not water-fast, for example, making it an unlikely possession of a woman who frequently slept rough. On top of that, Eddowes’ boyfriend had just pawned his boots so they could eat, while she supposedly hung on to this elaborate shawl long enough to die wearing it.)

Edwards’ book came out in 2014 and I spent a week greeting people with “Yes, I know about the shawl.” The journal article came out in 2019 and I gave a talk on Jack the Ripper and the limitations of these DNA tests to hopefully cut down ont he number of people who asked me about it. These books certainly sound good, with all this talk about 21st century science and the greatest criminal mystery of all time, but, in spite of their expense and the photo opportunities, these tests are far from conclusive.

No, DNA evidence has not identified Jack the Ripper.

5 tools for dealing with the slow writing days

Some days – the good days – writing seems to fly. The next word is waiting right there for you and you have a laser sight guiding you down the path of your argument. You don’t have to wait around for a thought because they’re lined up in a row for you to knock down like dominoes. Those are what I call “the fast days” because I can churn out my word count with no sweat.

But the other days … the slow days …

Those are the days when Anne Lamott’s famous KFKD radio station plays in your head. You suck. This was never a good idea. There’s not enough here to make any sort of point. And come on – you think some editor somewhere will want to read this? Nope. You’re delusional. And definitely not a writer.

So, to borrow from another of my favorite writers – Stephen King this time – we need hedges. Hedges against the dark.

Today I’m going to share five tools I have in my writing toolbox especially for those slow writing days.

Here are two of mine in one convenient photograph. The rest is just desk clutter that’s migrated to the same spot (and makes it look like I might have set up some sort of shrine to the writing gods).

My stuck duck. I got a whole bag of novelty rubber ducks last fall before National Novel Writing Month and my writing group each picked one out. Mine is named Abra Cadaver, and when I get stuck in my writing, I explain to Abra why I’m stuck, and why I’m stupid, and why it’s never going to work. She doesn’t judge. Her expression never changes. And, when I tell her why it’s not working, usually I figure out what I then have to do to fix it.
My writing candle. I have a few different kinds, all from Frostbeard Studio because they’re book-themed and just fun. (One of the scents in “Gatsby’s Mansion” is “Daisy.”) By lighting a candle within my line of sight even on the good days, it helps set up the mental association: when the candle is lit, I’m supposed to be writing. It helps with the focus.

3. A progress keeper. This one is for Book Four, which is due to my editor in October, and it’s super pretty because it’s so consistent. Most of mine aren’t, but it’s important to keep track of your progress no matter what. When you’re just putting words into a computer, the only evidence that you’re actually doing anything is that you have to scroll a bit further in the file next time. I make up these little charts where each square is 500 words and I color it in at the end of the day to give myself that visual proof that I’ve at least done something.

4. A break. Sometimes, as a wise woman once said, you need to simply sit there with butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. But, other days, I find that I actually need a break. I don’t have a strict writing schedule so I can always get up and go for a walk or do something else for a while, and then come back later, once my thoughts have had a chance to sort themselves out. The important part, of course, is that you do have to actually come back later. You can’t just get up and walk away forever. It takes some time to recognize when you need to force yourself to sit and when you can let yourself take a break, but writer, know thyself.

5. A new document. This one is probably the strangest because the blank page can be so intimidating when I start out, but I find that, on my slow days, I’m worried about “ruining” what I’ve written so far. I know it’s all in a computer and I can cut and paste to my heart’s content, but sometimes I still get a block. So I’ll open up a new file, name it something inconsequential, and start writing a section there instead. Once Abra and I have talked it through, it usually gets inserted into the working document, and then I can color in a square or two of my chart.

Whatever tools you use to keep yourself writing, don’t forget to back up your work. I email myself the file at the end of the day, no matter how much or how little I’ve written. This is especially important on the slow days when you’ve worked so hard to make any progress.

What do you do to help yourself through the slow writing days?