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Even though it’s a peripheral part of the case, and not part of the actual investigation one cannot ignore the importance of the “Dear Boss” letter. It is, after all, the letter which gave us the name “Jack the Ripper.” There has been great speculation as to the authorship of this famous letter. Several names have been offered as the writer of the letter, but the most common name mentioned is Tom Bulling. A facsimile of the “Dear Boss” letter can be found in nearly every book about Jack the Ripper, but the book “Jack the Ripper: Letters From Hell” by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner (Sutton Publishing, 2001) is near required reading for anyone interested in the “Jack the Ripper” letters.
The name Tom Bulling is usually connected with the writer of the “DB” letter because of a letter he claimed to have copied, and sent the copy to the police. He told the police he kept the original for the press. The “copy” he forwarded to the police, in which he attempted to copy the handwriting of the letter writer, can be found in the book by Evans and Skinner. The “copied” portion appears to be identical to the “DB” letter, leading people to speculate Bulling was the author of the original “Jack the Ripper” letter.
Another name that has popped up regularly in conjunction with the letters is a man with the last name “Best.” No first name has been given to this man, but he claimed to be a Fleet Street reporter, and going back through the records of the newsmen on that street during the relevant time the only one with that last name was Frederick Best. Best said he and a “provincial colleague” wrote the Ripper letters to keep the story going. If this story is true who could the “provincial colleague” be? Perhaps Tom Bulling?
I’ve been looking at the “DB” letter for years now. Indeed, it was one of the things which got me interested in the case. Upon close examination it appeared to me the postscript is in a slightly different hand than the body of the letter. I’ve discussed this in the Casebook message board. It was shown to me letter by letter how they were all essentially the same. The schools at the time were teaching people to write in basicly the same form. It would have been difficult back then to have differentiated the writings of two people who never met each other. If indeed this is the case the letters would have looked virtually the same no matter who was writing them, but in my eyes I see enough of a difference to think it possible the body and postscript of the letter to have been written by two different men. At the same time, one must consider the different matterial used to write with. The body of the letter was written in red ink (debate still rages over the tip of the pen), while the postscript was written in red crayon. The slight change in handwriting might be explained by the switch of writing instruments, but I think it is just as well explained that two people wrote the different parts of the letter.
There are, of course, many other Ripper letters in Scotland Yard’s files, and I’ll probably talk about them in this blog. I’ll likely return to the “Dear Boss” letter before my last entry. You can’t overemphasize the importance of this, and all the Ripper letters to the staying power of the mystery that is Jack the Ripper.
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