The jury is still out on whether Dr Charles Hebbert, who died in Armidale in the 1920s, was a credible suspect in the unresolved case of Jack the Ripper who murdered five prostitutes in London between August and November 1888.
According to Dr Xanthe Mallet, the UNE forensic anthropologist who mediated a Hypothetical on the subject at the Armidale Court House, the case is “ground zero” when it comes to serial killings.
The Hypothetical ac-companied the Touching Hands with Jack the Ripper exhibition, assembled by Susie Dunn, with the help of Jack Bedson and Margaret Bain, which is now on display above Legal Minds in the Armidale Mall.
Ms Dunn’s thesis, follow-ing her accidental discovery of Hebbert’s death in Armidale during research at the Hospital library, is that the English doctor touched many lives at the time of the Ripper murders and to the present time.
He was Assistant Police Surgeon to Westminster Division in London and worked alongside famed forensic expert Dr Thomas Bond on both the Ripper and Thames Torso murders. He had an affair with a barmaid, took up an academic post in Sheffield from which he was dismissed, moved to the US and his new wife, whom he married bigamously, died six months later. Down on his luck, he sailed third class to Australia where he took up a job in Armidale working as a medical referee for AMP Insurance in 1921.
A pile up of circumstantial evidence could reasonably make him a suspect in the killings, as panel members from medicine, law, police, court, media and politics participating in the Hypo-thetical all agreed.
Proving his guilt was beyond them all, but the question before them was a scenenario where the Ripper murders happened in present day Armidale.
The police, Detective Sergeants Roger Best and Matthew Crotty, suggested that, with modern day forensics and investigation techniques, the serial killer would have been arrested after victim one.
Dr Brian Glover said that, despite the bizarre mutilations of victims which pointed to a killer with extreme scalpel skills, it could by the same analysis be a butcher, a veterinarian, a theatre orderly, a scientific dissector or any number of others.
Psychologist Carolyn Croft, MP Richard Torbay, and ABC radio journalist Kelly Fuller dealt with the forensics of managing the issue in a frightened community; the need for full public disclosure of the investigation which would go viral in the social media. Magistrate Mark Richardson had to cope with the issue of how to find an unprejudiced jury after such frantic media exposure.
The killer blow, so to speak, was Dr Mallett’s revelation in her summing up that, after Dr Hebbert’s death, two preserved
human hands were found amongst his belongings.
Go figure!
The exhibition continues until Friday, November 30 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 11.30am-1.30pm and 4.30-5.30pm.
