Did Jack the Ripper Kill in the North East?
January 26 1889 was a busy day for the staff at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle as several dramatic stories crowded for attention on the same page. Readers learned that on the previous day there were two serious collisions on the Tyne which damaged vessels, a man named Alfred Parkinson hanged himself in the gaol using an upturned bed as a scaffold, and a young woman named Jane Leod was charged with taking laudanum with intent to commit suicide. Dominating the page, however, were details of the “Terrible Tragedy at Wrekenton” in which a policeman was murdered in broad daylight in a village near Gateshead.
On the morning of January 25 Edward Wilkinson attended proceedings at Gateshead Police Court to answer charges of brawling and using indecent language. The court heard that on the night of January 16 P.C. John Graham found Wilkinson forcibly putting his wife out of their home on High Street in Wrekenton. Graham intervened and was threatened by Wilkinson who said he would “do for” the policeman. Wilkinson was known throughout the borough as a hot-tempered character and was nicknamed “The Flying Butcher” for his casual butchering jobs. For the incident with Graham Wilkinson was fined 2s. 6d. and 6s. costs, and said he would rather pay it than spend two weeks in prison. Before he left the court, however, he turned to the Chief Constable of Gateshead, John Elliott, and said “I will fettle you” - a remark Elliott was happy to brush aside.
At around 3.40pm the same day Graham returned back to Wrekenton and passed Wilkinson’s house when the butcher rushed out carrying a knife. He seized Graham and stabbed him through the heart with a razor sharp blade, before grabbing the policeman’s truncheon and hitting him over the head with it several times. Graham collapsed near the telegraph pole and died shortly after leaving a widow and four children who resided close to High Street. Wilkinson made off in the direction of Birtley holding the knife and witnesses followed for some time before the police took over the chase. When help arrived from Gateshead it was reported that Elliott was “completely overcome by the spectacle, and had to sit down for a time before he recovered his composure”.
Wilkinson was tracked through the evening as he went from village to village drinking in pubs and boasting of his crime before he was arrested across the River Wear in South Hylton at 7.30pm and charged with murder. The remains of P.C. Graham were interred with full honours at Greenhead near Carlisle on January 29 and on February 26 Wilkinson was found guilty at Durham Assizes and sentenced to death. Wilkinson’s wife mentioned there was insanity in her husband’s family and his solicitors appealed to the Home Office for a reprieve on the grounds of unsound mind. After several weeks deliberation Wilkinson was reprieved and saved from the hangman’s noose.
The murder of P.C. Graham was all the more shocking because it was just a few months after another brutal killing in the district. On September 22 1888 the body of a young woman named Jane Beardmore was found near the railway track at Birtley Fell, just three miles from Wrekenton. She had been stabbed through the neck down to the spine and her abdomen was cut open and horribly mutilated. People soon began to draw links between this and the similar murders of two prostitutes in Whitechapel by “Jack the Ripper” in August and September 1888. The theory of a connection between the crimes was strong enough for the C.I.D. at Scotland Yard to send up Inspector Thomas Roots to investigate the Birtley horror. However in this case a chief suspect emerged in the person of Beardmore’s boyfriend, William Waddell. Soon after the murder Waddell went on the run before he was arrested on the road to Scotland and hanged in December 1888.
So to return to the edition of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle for January 26 1889, beside the coverage of the Wrekenton murder a small column appeared detailing how the Mayor of Newcastle, Thomas Richardson, received a letter from someone purporting to be a mate of “Jack the Ripper”. The letter had been posted the previous day, but before Wilkinson’s attack on P.C. Graham. In the letter the correspondent claimed to know Jack the Ripper and his movements. The Ripper was, says the writer, an escaped lunatic from America who had been in Newcastle for two days before leaving due to the cold weather. The letter goes on to refer to the murder of Annie Chapman in Whitechapel on September 8 and names the Ripper as Mr. Hutchinson.
This was not the first Ripper-related letter to the newspaper. On October 4 1888 a letter from “Jack the Ripper” was sent to the newspaper’s Byker offices claiming he was coming to Newcastle to “put away about 12 of the prostitutes that walk Newcastle’s streets”. The writer said he would start the killings in Pink Lane, then a red-light district near the Central Station. Just a few days later the River Tyne police contacted the Metropolitan police to inform them of a suspicious Australian seaman whose signature bore a resemblance to the letters signed “Jack the Ripper” in London.
The Newcastle Evening Chronicle was unsure of the connection - if any - between the 1889 letter to the Mayor and the events at Wrekenton. What is clear is that there was a sense of panic in the air that hoaxers and the newspaper press could capitalise on. Unfortunately many innocent members of the public in Britain and farther afield were harassed or attacked by mobs under the notion that they were “Jack the Ripper”. One such case took place in Newcastle one evening in October 1889 when a man dressed in a “long park coat” and having a “singular” air about him was chased from Grey’s Monument by a crowd of juveniles chanting “Jack the Ripper!” The man bolted down Grainger Street and Newgate Street, before eventually finding sanctuary in the offices of the Newcastle Journal on Clayton Street. Here the employees managed to sneak him out, without the distinctive coat, and onto a tram on Newgate Street.
Certainly, there were more than enough brutal murderers of women in Newcastle, Gateshead and the North-East without the need for hypothetical killers coming up from London. Several modern investigators believe the Ripper may have travelled north during his killing spree, and in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer the author Patricia Cornwell implausibly suggests that the artist Walter Sickert was responsible for the Birtley murder. Yet despite these dead ends the strange letter below demonstrates the long shadow that the events in Whitechapel cast over the nation and the role of the press in circulating news, theories, and myths about the murders.
What do you think of the Newcastle Ripper letter?