Opium, Visas, and The Dead 

Chiang Mai. Friends and recent visitors said I would hate the place if I returned. It was busier, louder, more commercial. The smiles had vanished, the charm had moved on, and it was definitely the wrong season to go. Temperatures were approaching nuclear proportions.
And they were all wrong. Except about the heat. For nothing had changed except me.
It was a late April pilgrimage-that took me to the place that six years ago, lured me with its wats and eccentrics, slow pace and high hills-to discover how time had changed us both.
Messages from the north had filtered down through the years from the odd bar owner, motorcycle rider, and a few traders-all hinting at movement, success, and failure. I had no illusions about returning, but had plenty of expectations on arriving. Must be a family thing.
Lanna and its capital Chiang Mai, is I believe, a foreign country. The locals, both Thai and foreign, have no time for Bangkok, and can’t imagine why anyone would want to live there unless they were forced to.
Leaving the railway station, I was soon heading down the same snoozing sois behind Thapae Gate that take devious and compromised routes on their way to nowhere in particular. Pigs loitered in the shadows, chewing on old shoes and dead leaves. I was home again.
There was one survivor from the past, still running a small guest house with a pool. Knowing the language, he could afford to linger with intent. I had always thought he was deaf, but now realized his deafness varied according to what was being said. Six years ago, I used to dream of staying here – yet having now checked in, it wasn’t a dream come true, but a nightmare with extra cheese. The showers hissed like but produced no water at all. The toilets were Balkan. Nothing worked. When the maid came in with the missing soap and towel, she found me standing on a broken chair head-butting the airconditioner – which sounded like the engine room of the Titanic.
I later heard that the owner had returned one night after one drink too many, and, according to which account you believed, he either drove into the full swimming pool or dived into the empty one.
Checking out the old haunts, I was crestfallen to discover the gate to The Black Cat Bar firmly chained and bolted. A forlorn air hung over the garden. This had been my centre of operations-for knowledge, laughter, and love; the bar where I had annoyed the dung out of everyone when I gleefully discovered that people actually LIVED in this country without working for a multinational or the UN, and had kept asking, “So what do you do?”
I was on a role, and even asked the young, urbane US Consul at the time what he did. “Opium, visas, and the dead,” he replied.
Seeing my jaw drop, he added, “1,200 tonnes, 90 visas, and about 12 deaths.”
Deaths?
“A mixture of bike crashes and heart attacks.”
It was also the bar where I was persuaded to leave. Not so much for my behaviour, but more to get out and go for the adventure.
To prepare for the greater solo journeys ahead – the Triangle, Mae Hong Song, and Mae Sot – I vividly remember taking the bike up Doi Suthep mountain for a practice run, and then hurtling back down the switchbacks, which resembled a spiritual slalom. Like most English adventures, I had no fear, no style, and no control.
I learned that one of the owners of The Black Cat had split – leaving behind debt and revenge – and was now back in London driving a cab. Another regular had been shot at by the police, but according to a local, “They missed, unfortunately.”
Clearly, his absence was required.
The town wasn’t exactly jumping. In the post-Songkran letdown and the debilitating heat, the social whirl was basically pond life with a few interesting egos bobbing on the surface. I’ve seen more action in a dozing amoeba. But then, that’s the beauty of this place. The absence of action is a welcome presence.
There were new owners of old bars, and old owners of new ones; raffish, amiable, and interesting drifters who have stayed to became vagabonds with a fixed address – at least for a while. Men who think twice about drinking brandy for breakfast only when pouring a second one. For many, the taste of their produce far exceeds their ambition to sell it. Indeed, many foreigners doing business here look wasted – which is hardly surprising when most of them have spent their entire lives trying to outrun the truth. We are the choices we made.
Down in the extended night market, which still brims with interesting gear, was a gaggle of pensionable Americans dangling deaf aids and asking each other where they lived in the US. The word “operation” recurred frequently.
Most restaurants in Chiang Mai still look inviting and decorous. But the business of catering is to cater, and in some places the food is rarely up to the standard of the furniture. As they say of duff musicals, you come out whistling the set.
McDonalds has finally landed too. No surprise there – just regret. Did you know the company selected a bright orange colour as being “optimally attractive” for luring customers in but which would drive them out again after forty minutes? And I always thought it was the food. How silly of me.
I awoke every morning to the sound of two maids giggling outside my room on the verandah. They were watching the eccentric French gay leading his cat on a yellow cord. He was so camp, he winked with a lisp. He always humoured them, and then went downstairs to take his coffee and to dip a lean finger into his wooden box of Gauloise. I have no idea what the cat smoked.
The English lolled around the pool in the intense heat, looking pallid, with short cropped hair. It was the Addams Family on acid. The Thais don’t “do sun,” and stared at them, amazed. These world travellers could be seen later in the bar watching mindless violence on video – to “normalize themselves” as one put it. Which says a lot more about the culture they come from rather than the culture they were visiting.
On a table in the guesthouse restaurant was a clumpy, shapeless stone figure of a forgotten Chinese sag. One evening, trying to get away from the gunfire in the bar, I approached, curious. The note next to it read, “12th-13th century. Ying Dynasty. Asking price, $25,000.” One of the waitresses grinned and asked if I wanted to buy it.
Buy it? I couldn’t even lift it.
Then there was an interesting English guy who introduced himself with, “Trust me, I’m a chemist.” Which was just fine by me. He’d been in town two days and was hopelessly in love with the cashier in one of the bars. Like your average Labrador dog, he just sat there grinning at her and looking slightly foolish. If he’d had a tail, it would have wagged. To be perfectly honest, I was in love with her too.
He was moving on soon. “So, where to next?” I asked him.
“Heaven,” he replied, gazing dreamily at the girl. “Nearly everyone goes to heaven.”
Well, maybe, but in my case, I don’t see the point. I mean, I wasn’t anyone. “I think I’d prefer hell,” I said.
“What? Why?” he said aghast.
“I like the music and I’m used to the heat.”
Then I had a glimpse of change. I no longer felt the need to live in Chiang Mai, just the chance to meet those who have.

By Roger Beaumont
  Available at Bookazine

Jack the Ripper (part 2) the suspects

FROM THE testimony of many eyewitnesses, certain probabilities emerged about the Whitechapel killer who came to be known as Jack the Ripper. Most of the victims had been seen with one or two men before their murders, and from descriptions police were able to compile a list of probabilities. The Ripper was probably:
(a) A white male, of average or just below average height. (b) Between 20 and 40 years of age. (c) Well dressed, not a labourer. (d) Either had lodgings in the East End of London, or knew the area very well. (e) Had medical expertise as five of the victims were sliced up with great anatomical skill. (f) May have been a foreigner. (g) Was right handed, as the slashes to the throats of his victims went from left to right. (h) A person with a regular job since all the murders occurred on weekends. (I) A single man who was able to roam the streets of Whitechapel at all hours.
Sir Melville MacNaghten succeeded Sir Charles Warren as the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in June 1889 after the Ripper murders had officially ended; though the investigation was ongoing. Macnaghten's final report included his theory on why the murders ended with the monstrous destruction of Mary Kelly and the identity of three key suspects he believed could be the killer. He wrote: "A rational theory is that the murderer's brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller's Court, and that he committed suicide; or was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations that he was confined in some asylum.
"No one ever saw the Whitechapel killer. Many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one. I will mention the cases of three men, any one of whom could have been likely to have committed this series of murders.

Mr A J Druitt, said to be a doctor and from a good family. He disappeared soon after the murder of Miss Kelly. His body was found in the Thames on 31 December 1888. He was insane and from private information I have little doubt that his own family believed him to have been the Ripper. (2) W Kosminski, a Polish Jew resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years' indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, especially of the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies. He was removed to a lunatic asylum in March 1889. There are many circumstances connected with this man, which made him a strong Ripper suspect. (3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor and former convict, who was subsequently detained in an asylum as a potential homicidal maniac. Ostrog's whereabouts at the time of the murders in 1888 could never be ascertained."
The most important detective in the Ripper case was Chief Inspector Frederick George Abberline. He did not agree on the viability of the three suspects listed above. In 1903, he told reporters, "You can state most emphatically that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject of the Ripper murders than it was fifteen years ago."
However, Abberline did have a favourite suspect of his own - a man named George Chapman, who was hanged in 1903 for poisoning his wife. Chapman's real name was Severin Antoniovich Klosowski, and he was born in Warsaw in 1865. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and went on to complete his medical studies at a Warsaw hospital. Klosowski immigrated to London early in 1887. He took a job as a hairdresser's assistant before opening his own barber's shop at 126 Cable Street.

He was most likely at this Whitechapel address during the Ripper murders. He bigamously married Lucy Badeski in 1888, hoping that the wife he left in Warsaw wouldn't find out about it. Ms Badeski bore him a son in 1890. The boy died of pneumonia in March 1891 and the couple moved to Jersey City in New Jersey, USA.
It was during this time that he violently attacked his wife, holding her down on the bed to prevent her from screaming and then reaching for a long sharp knife under the pillow. At that moment a customer entered the shop in front and saved her life. Later, Klosowski told her that he had meant to cut her head off and then bury her. "But the neighbours would have asked where I had gone to", she protested. Klosowski retorted calmly, "Oh, I would simply have told them that you had gone back to New York."
Lucy went back to London alone in May 1892 and Klosowski followed her in June that year. In 1893, he moved in with an Annie Chapman (obviously not the Ripper victim), but he left her in 1894 for another lady named Mary Spink, who gave him her inheritance of 500 pounds sterling. He changed his name to George Chapman, and they set up a barbershop, which prospered because of their "musical shaves": Mary played the piano whilst George shaved the customers. But Chapman beat his wife frequently, and in 1897 she died from severe stomach pains. Chapman had used tartar emetic, a colourless, odourless and nearly tasteless poison containing antimony. In small doses it brings on a gradual and painful death and the drug also has the effect of preserving its victim's body for years after death.
Chapman then moved in with Bessie Taylor, whom he also mistreated. Bessie experienced the same stomach problems as Annie Chapman and died in 1901 from "exhaustion from vomiting and diarrhea." Chapman then found another "wife" named Maud Marsh and treated her just as badly as all the other women in his violent life. When her mother became suspicious of Maud's illness and consulted a doctor, Chapman gave Maud a huge dose of poison, which killed her the following day. Chapman was arrested and Maud's body was found to contain a lethal amount of antimony.
His other two wives were exhumed and found remarkably preserved from the amount of antimony in their bodies. Chapman was charged with three murders, but was convicted only of Maud's. He was executed by hanging on 7 April 1903. Inspector Abberline was convinced that Chapman was the Ripper. He wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1903, "There are a score of things which make me believe that Chapman was our man. The date of his arrival coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel, and the murders ceased when Chapman left for America, whilst similar murders were perpetrated in America after he went there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Poland and Russia is well established. It is curious to note that the first (Ripper) murders were the work of an expert surgeon, whilst the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. And Chapman's attempt to murder Lucy Badeski with a long knife in America is significant."
Chapman also had a regular job in Whitechapel, which kept him occupied during the week but free at weekends when the Ripper murders occurred. He was violent and homicidal with women and committed multiple murders of women. As Abberline wrote: "A man who could watch his wives being slowly tortured to death by poison, as he did, was capable of anything." But murderers very seldom change their MO. Could the terrible mutilator known as Jack the Ripper change his style to become the smooth

poisoner who changed his name to George Chapman? The jury is still out on that important question. There is also the question of the unsolved murder and mutilation of Carrie Brown in Jersey City on 24 April 1891. Chapman was living in the vicinity at the time, and may also have committed this crime, though no direct evidence implicates him.
There is also a popular theory that a royal conspiracy was behind the Ripper murders. This was the premise for the recent movie "From Hell" starring Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Robby Coltrane and Ian Holm, and has spawned many documentaries and books. The theory goes like this: Prince Albert Victor, later Duke of Clarence and known as Eddy, was the grandson of Queen Victoria and in direct line to the British throne. His father later became King Edward V11. Had Eddy outlived his father, he would have become king.
Eddy frequently went slumming in the Whitechapel area. Here he had an affair with a shop girl named Annie Crook. Ms Crook became pregnant with his child, and then secretly married Eddy in a Roman Catholic wedding. Marrying and impregnating a Catholic girl of low social standing was a huge handicap for a future king and when this scandal got to the ears of his grandmother, she insisted on a drastic solution to the problem. The prime minister (The Marquess of Salisbury) then delegated this task to Queen Victoria's royal physician, Sir William Gull. Dr Gull had Annie removed to a mental home where he crudely lobotomised her, leaving her institutionalised for the rest of her poor life. Mary Kelly was caring for Annie's daughter, Alice Margaret, when special branch officers kidnapped Annie. Now Mary, along with her friends Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Kate Eddowes and Liz Stride all attended the secret wedding and knew about the unofficial royal birth. They talked, and became a major liability to the Crown.
Dr Gull then cleverly created the persona of Jack the Ripper, and set out to silence these troublesome whores. Gull's coachman locates each of Mary's friends and individually persuades them to get into his coach where Gull drugs them with grapes laced with laudanum, and then slashes and mutilates them. In the movie, Depp plays Inspector Abberline as an opium addict with visions who has an affair with Mary Kelly. He sends Alice and Mary to Ireland before Sir William ghoulishly butchers a young French girl who happens to be visiting Ms Kelly in her apartment. Of course, this poor French streetwalker is mistaken for Mary Kelly, who is then safe from the Ripper, and lives happily ever afterwards, treating Alice as her own daughter.
In the movie, Dr Gull is a demented ritual executioner and Gull's Masonic group, a virtual who's who of London's upper class, including police officials like Sir Robert Anderson, help Gull in his efforts to protect the throne from scandal. Martha Tabram's murder is included as a Ripper killing to tie in with another fanciful theory: Gull carefully deposits the bodies around Whitechapel so that they make up the six points of the Star of David when a line is drawn through the locations on a map. And a young Inspector Abberline (Johnny Depp with a cockney accent) falling in love with Mary Kelly is just pure romantic slush from Hollywood screenwriters.
Most of us love a conspiracy theory but this one is peppered with falsehoods. There DID exist a woman named Annie Crook, who worked in a shop in Cleveland Street and she did have an illegitimate daughter named Alice Margaret. But there is no evidence that she ever knew Eddy, who anyway preferred men to women. However, he did go slumming in

Whitechapel, where there was a brothel in Cleveland Street that catered to wealthy homosexuals. It was often raided by police, but if Eddy was there when one of these raids occurred, it was obviously hushed up. (Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967). There is no evidence that connects Mary Kelly to Annie Crook or nothing to suggest that all the victims knew each other. In the movie, they form a tight-knit group who would often gossip together in a Whitechapel pub. This is more screenwriter's fantasy. The victims were murdered where they were found, and not in a coach. Also, from witnesses at the crime scene areas, it is very unlikely that more than one man carried out the murders. And how, among Whitechapel's 1,200 streetwalkers, were Dr Gull and his coachman able to locate and track down the six women who had witnessed the secret wedding? Sir William Gull was 70 years old in 1888, and only partially recovered from an attack of severe paralysis the previous year, which prevented him carrying out any surgery. He did not die in a lunatic asylum as the movie depicts, but expired in his home on 29 January 1890 after a third and final stroke.
There is also no evidence that Dr Gull and high level police officers involved in the Ripper investigation were ever members of the Freemasons. The word "Juwes" as written in chalk on a wall after the double homicide on 30 September is not an ancient term used by Masons to describe Jewish people.
Another theory has Eddy, Duke of Clarence, being the Jack the Ripper. Suffering from tertiary syphilis, he goes into murderous rages and haunts the streets of Whitechapel searching for victims. His appalled royal keepers discover this, and finally lock him away until his death from syphilis. Again, there is little evidence to support this. Eddy died from the influenza epidemic of 1892, and never showed an inclination to violence. Anyway, when the double murders of Stride and Eddowes took place on 30 September, Eddy was at the royal estates in Balmoral, Scotland - a cast iron alibi.
In 1992, Mr Michael Barrett, a scrap metal dealer from Liverpool, made public a diary reputedly written by a man named James Maybrick who died in 1889. In this amazing diary, Maybrick confessed to being Jack the Ripper. Barrett said that his late friend Tony Devereux gave him the diary, though his own family had no knowledge of it or how it came into his hands. Maybrick was a cotton merchant who prospered in the USA before returning to Liverpool, England in the 1880's. He had contacted malaria whilst in America and was taking a combination of strychnine and arsenic to keep it under control. His wife Florence (Florie) was charged with his murder when Maybrick died from arsenic poisoning on 11 May 1889. After a very hasty and unfair trial, Florie was convicted and sentenced to death. The judge had not allowed any evidence of Maybrick's long arsenic addiction to be introduced into the trial. Florie spent 15 years in jail before her appeal on these grounds was upheld, and she was released.
Experts who studied the Maybrick diary found inaccuracies in the accounts of the murders that seem to have been taken from contemporary newspaper reports. For example, expert Philip Sugden writes of the Kelly murder: "We are told that the various parts of her body were strewn all over the room, that her severed breasts were placed on the bedside table and that the killer took the key of her room away with him. None of these statements are true."
Finally in 1995, many Ripper experts who had labelled the Maybrick diary a brazen hoax were justified by Barrett's confession that he was the author of a fake diary supposedly

written by Jack the Ripper. He stated that his wife Anne Barrett had written it in ink, working from his typed notes taken from newspaper reports of 1888.
Before this, Ripper experts John Douglas and Mark Olshaker had rejected James Maybrick as a suspect based on his personality and history. They wrote: "How does a 50-year-old man with a family, children and no sociopathy suddenly blossom into a disorganised serial killer? The answer is that he cannot, and did not."
Also it is extremely unlikely that a man living in Liverpool would travel all the way to London to stalk and kill prostitutes on weekends. Maybrick had no detailed knowledge of the streets and alleyways of Whitechapel, whilst the serial killer certainly did.
So here we have some of the major suspects: M J Druitt, Wadislaw Kosminski, Michael Ostrog, Severin Klosowski/George Chapman, Sir William Gull, Eddy, the Duke of Clarence, and James Maybrick. Remember that some conspiracy theories concerning Jack the Ripper stretch credibility to the bursting point. Take your pick from any of the above.
Only two things are certain about Jack the Ripper. (1) He is dead, and probably has been for many years. (2) The case will never be solved.
(Research: Jack the Ripper, Crime Library.com. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, and Most notorious serial killers by Marilyn Bardsley).

IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979.

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