by One of history’s greatest unsolved crimes has a tantalising local connection: was Jack the Ripper in Melbourne?
On March 3, 1892, prospective tenants arrived to view a house at 57 Andrews Street, Windsor, in the suburbs of Melbourne. The area was working class but respectable, the house a small terrace, on a quiet street.
During the inspection, the group noticed a bad smell coming from the hearth in one of the bedrooms. They reported this to the landlord, John Stamford.
Displacing some stones beneath the fireplace, Stamford was suddenly overwhelmed by a foul odour. Fleeing the room, he then contacted the police.
When they arrived they excavated further, and found the body of a woman buried in a shallow grave. This was later identified as Emily Williams; the victim had suffered head trauma, and her throat had been cut.
Emily and her husband Albert had been the previous tenants.
The couple had moved in a few months beforehand, but had vacated after only a short stay. Stamford told police that the departure had come suddenly, Albert giving no explanation but a month’s rent for the inconvenience.
Stamford did not know his whereabouts.
When the story broke the next day, the local press published a sketch of Williams, noting that he was wanted for questioning. What the police did not know, at least not yet, was that this was the final act in a much longer drama.
Albert Williams was an alias: the man they were after was Frederick Bailey Deeming.
Deeming was born in Leicestershire, England, in July 1853. Very little is known of his early life but it seems to have been unremarkable: his father was a metalworker, his mother a homemaker.
He had one brother, Albert.
Deeming was a difficult child, and something of a misfit. Uninterested in his studies and frequently in trouble, he ran away from home when he was 16, and found work as a merchant seaman.
There he disappears from the historic record for a decade, but presumably he spent some time at sea.
He resurfaces in Cheshire in 1881, where his marriage to a local woman, Marie James, is recorded in the parish register. Later that year he took a job on a ship bound for Sydney, where he arrived in August.
A jack of all trades, Deeming found work in Sydney as a plumber and gas fitter. The 1880s were a boom time in the colonies, the economy surging on the back of high agricultural prices and land speculation.
Work was plentiful, Deeming did well enough to send for his wife, who joined him in Sydney in July 1882. He spent the next several years working up and down Australia’s east coast.
During this time he and his wife started a family, and would eventually have four children. He also had a few minor run ins with the law, being convicted of petty theft and fraud.
Returning to Sydney in 1884, Deeming went into business for himself, running a small store.
Deeming’s fortunes faltered in 1887, when his business ran into financial problems. He declared bankruptcy in December, but during the associated court proceedings mispresented his finances, and was found guilty of perjury.
The judge gave him 14 days in jail.
Believing his reputation ruined, on his release Deeming decided to leave Australia. He departed in January 1882, headed for South Africa.
Taking his first pseudonym, Harry Lawson, Deeming styled himself as an Australian businessman looking to invest in the local mining industry.
Ruggedly handsome, well turned out and supremely confident, Deeming’s act was convincing. He conned several potential investors out of their money, then participated in a diamond robbery at a mine in Klerksdorp.
Before the authorities could connect him to these activities, Deeming left the country again for England.
Exactly when he left South Africa is not known, but it is thought to have been sometime in 1888. His departure date would later take on significance.
Whenever he left, Deeming was back in England by 1890, still posing as Lawson. Now claiming to be a wealthy Australian sheep farmer, he bigamously took a second wife, Helen Matheson, who he married in February.
Where his first wife, Marie, and their children were during these adventures is uncertain. But they seem to have made their own way back to England, also arriving in 1890.
Deeming supported himself in England through small scale cons. He had a knack for winning trust, borrowing money, and vanishing before repayment was due.
He used fraudulent funds to pay for his second wedding and honeymoon, after which he told his new wife he had to travel overseas for business. Deeming then sailed for Uruguay, hoping to continue his scams in an area where he was unknown.
But his luck would run out. Arrested in Montevideo, he was extradited back to England and would spend 9 months in jail for fraud.
On his release, Deeming moved to the rural village of Rainhill, outside Liverpool. There he rented a house, Dinham Villa, and was joined by first wife, Marie, and their children.
To his new neighbours, Deeming introduced himself as ‘Albert Williams’, a retired military officer. Marie was explained as his sister, visiting with her kids.
In 1891, Deeming let it be known that there were drainage problems at Dinham Villa, and he would be overseeing extensive renovations. These were completed in July, he vacated the property shortly afterwards.
He told people that his sister and her children had returned home.
While in Rainhill, Deeming had met and begun courting Emily Lydia Mather, the daughter of a widowed shopkeeper. The pair were married in September 1891, Deeming proposed they move to Australia, where he said he had extensive business dealings.
Travelling as Albert and Emily Williams, the pair arrived in Australia in December. Deeming rented the house in Windsor, for the couple to live in.
Emily would not leave the property alive.
After the discovery of her body, police began an intensive investigation. The public outcry was enormous, and significant resources were put into finding the perpetrator.
Perhaps feeling the net closing in, Deeming’s life then went into overdrive: a frenzied few months of alias’s, courtships and schemes.
Under the name Duncan, Deeming spent a few days at a Melbourne hotel. There he arranged to sell some of his wife’s jewellery, and amazingly contacted Holt’s Matrimonial Agency about finding a wife (read more about this colourful organisation, here).
Funds secured, he then departed by ship for Sydney.
Now billing himself as ‘Baron Swanston’, an engineer looking for work in the mining industry, he met and charmed one of the other passengers, Kate Rounsefell. Shortly after reaching Sydney, the pair were engaged to be married.
Using forged documents, Deeming then secured a position for himself at a gold mine in Western Australia. On January 22, 1892, he set sail for Perth, believing WA a good place to lie low.
Rounsefell was supposed to join him a few weeks later.
Meanwhile, police were making progress with their investigation. The sketch of Deeming in the press prompted more witnesses to come forward, several of these had seen him selling women’s jewellery in the city.
This information allowed the police to trace each link in Deeming’s subsequent movements: from Baron Swanston, to Sydney, then on to WA. They were also able to locate and warn the Rounsefell family.
The authorities finally caught up with Deeming in Southern Cross, a small town halfway between Perth and Kalgoorlie. He was arrested there on March 12, 1892.
Initially denying he was Frederick Deeming, he finally confessed when police found personal items of Emily Mather still in his possession.
Deeming was brought back to Melbourne and faced trial in April 1892. His guilt was already assumed by the press and public, who gave him a hostile reception whenever he appeared.
Still being tried under the name Williams, Deeming did not deny murdering Emily Mathers. His defence was insanity, brought on by an acute epileptic condition; he also claimed that his mother’s ghost spoke to him, telling him who to kill.
While two different doctors were produced to support this claim, the jury were not swayed. The prosecution, including future Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, kept the focus on the lurid facts of the case.
The trial ran for only four days, notably short for a capital crime.
After this, Deeming was quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Melbourne gaol on May 23, just two months after his arrest.
The report of the Windsor murder, and Deeming’s capture and trial, also made headlines in England. This led to an investigation of his activities there, which brought police to the house in Rainhill.
Excavating the lower floor that Deeming had renovated, they uncovered the bodies of Marie and their four children. Deeming had murdered them all before leaving the house, much as he had done Emily Mather.
And there the case may have rested: a psychopathic killer brought to justice. Only, even in 1892, people were already speculating that Frederick Deeming may have a connection to another series of crimes.
Between August and November 1888, the labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys in London’s East End were terrorised by a serial killer, stalking the night. Five women were brutally murdered in this period by an unidentified person, dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’.
It may be history’s most famous unsolved case.
Jack the Ripper remains of fascination to the police and public. Unsolved mysteries are often compelling due to their open-ended status; here there is also shocking violence, and hard-to-explain elements like the lack of witnesses in crowded public areas, to deepen the intrigue.
Books, films, TV shows and many articles have been written about the crimes, and speculating who the Ripper may have been. Could Frederick Deeming have been the perpetrator?
The brutal nature of Deeming’s known crimes suggest that he had the capacity for the violence of the Ripper murders. He also used a knife on his victims, as the Ripper did.
And there was certainly a good chance that he was in London at the time the crimes were committed.
As noted, sometime in 1888 Deeming left South Africa for England; exactly when is unknown, but he could have been back by August, when the Ripper’s spree commenced.
Another element of the Ripper murders that has baffled investigators is how rapidly they ceased. Modern serial killers usually do not stop unless external factors are at play: Jack the Ripper committed five perfect crimes in a few months, before suddenly stopping.
If Deeming were the killer, this could be explained by his departure from England and subsequent imprisonment. When he did get out of jail, he commenced killing again.
But other elements do not fit the Ripper case.
Deeming’s crimes had a financial motivation; the women he murdered he tried to profit from, by selling their belongings. The motivation for Jack the Ripper’s crimes appears to be psychological, or psychosexual.
The Ripper’s victims were sex workers: disadvantaged, poor and marginalised. Far removed from the middle-class women that Deeming preyed on.
Nevertheless, the theory persists.
In 2011, Robin Napper, a former Scotland Yard detective, produced a documentary for the Discovery Channel that named Deeming as the Ripper. As well as re-examining the evidence, Napper cited case notes from the original investigation, where Deeming was nominated as one of the prime suspects.
Other investigators have drawn the same conclusion, still more have debunked it.
To confirm the theory, it may have been possible to attempt a DNA match, between Deeming’s remains and the physical evidence from the Ripper case files. Deeming’s skull and femur were retained by Victoria police after his execution.
But when private researchers requested the bones in 2009, they were found to be missing from the government’s archives.
Deeming was buried in an unmarked grave at Melbourne Gaol cemetery. Emily Mather was buried at Melbourne Cemetery in Carlton; a public subscription paid for a memorial over his grave.
