When they went to write the account of the murders of the spring of 1895 many people thought history would be better to just forget they ever happened. Most, especially in their comfortable mansions near Madison Avenue or in their plush seats at the theater, shuddered at the mere mention of them and hushed others from relating the tale to the uninitiated. Their children told the story to replace the boogeyman in their games or to frighten the younger ones from playing with them.
In the end, history decided to forget.
Or perhaps, was made to.
The same people who hoped the world wouldn't remember the horrors that lined their soot darkened streets or dampened the polluted air thought New York City would be better remembered for the large statue that beckoned from the harbor.
Barely twelve years earlier Emma Lazarus wrote her declaration to the world and they inscribed it on a plaque at the base of that statue that stood both as guard and gatekeeper to the city of dreams. Those words read:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Many looked to these as their personal call, their comfort, and their mantra in those dark nights when many a person feared perhaps they would be next. The boogeyman would come for them.
But he didn't.
The rich slept fitfully in their beds worrying over their money or their mistresses. The poor coughed and groaned in their close quarters but stumbled through all the same. Those neither rich nor poor sought to rise to the former and not sink back to the latter.
And those who caught the man? Those who made sure the killer who rivaled the Ripper, and who put even Mary Ann Cotton to shame, lay buried six feet under in a paupers grave… what of them?
History lost them too.
And maybe they're better for it.
But history isn't.
Nor are those who could learn from the courage of those who stared into the darkest abyss of the night and did not fall. Those who felt terror grip its icy claws about their necks and fought anyway. Those who, in the depths of deepest sorrow and agony, never failed.
History would learn from those brave souls.
More importantly, could learn from those who never saw themselves as brave. Because no man who thinks himself brave can truly claim to be. Those who are brave think they do no more than what another would do.
They're wrong.
They did more. So much more.
In the spring of 1895 they saved a city.
More importantly, they saved themselves.