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Rather than posting the entry I had originally planned to I thought instead I would post one of the things that brought me into the case. This is from the 1977 edition of “The Book of Lists,” and is what let me know Jack the Ripper really existed, and wasn’t just a Hollywood creation. Being from 1977, the artical is full of errors of one manner or another, but it is still fun to read. A side note to this artical: at the bottom of one of the pages was the “Dear Boss” letter with a caption that read: “Which of the 10 wrote this letter?” 10 POSSIBLE VICTIMS OF 10 POSSIBLE “JACK THE RIPPERS” ”…I am down on whores and shant [sic] quit ripping them…” warned the writer of an anonymous letter to London’s Central News Agency on September 28, 1888. The letter may have been a hoax, but it gave a lasting nickname to the murderer of several prostitutes in the slums of London’s East End in 1888-and possibly later. Jack the Ripper has inspired at least a dozen movies and stage plays; two operas, Alban Berg’s Lulu and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill; and several hundred books, both fact and fiction. Estimates of the Ripper’s victims range from the “dozens” of popular belief down to the 10 selected by serious criminologists. The 10 “most likely” victims are listed here in chronological order, with the 6 “favorites” starred.
THE VICTIMS 1. Emma Elizabeth Smith (Apr. 3, 1888) Fourty-five -year-old prostitude; died in hosptial from stab wound in abdomen inflicted by a “sharp spike.” No mutilations. 2. Martha Turner* (or Tabram) (Aug. 7, 1888) Thirty-five-year-old prostitue; throat slit and 39 wounds on body; autopsy suggested ambidextrous killer. 3. Mary Ann (”Polly”) Nicholls* (Aug. 31, 1888) Fourty-two-year-old prostitude; throat cut and body mutilated, almost disemboweled; examination suggested left-handed expert with “surgical” knife. 4. Annie Chapman* (Sept. 8,1888) Fourty-seven-year-old prostitute; nearly decapitated; kidney and ovaries removed “by an expert hand.” 5. Elizabeth (”Long Liz”) Stride* (Sept. 30, 1888) Fourty-five-year-old prostitute; throat cut but body unmutilated. The killer may have been disturbed at his work (at 1:00 A.M.) 6. Catherine Eddowes* (Sept. 30,1888) Fourty-three-year-old prostitute; found only 45 minutes after discovery of Stride’s body, some 15 minutes’ walk away’ throat cut, face and body mutilated, left kidney and other organs missing. 7. Mary Jane (”Jeanette”) Kelly* (Nov. 9, 1888) Twenty-four-year-old prostitute; body found in her room, horribly mutilated but no organs missing. 8. Elizabeth Jackson (June 1889) Prostitute, age unknown; headless trunk and other parts of body taken from the Thames. 9. Alice (”Clay Pipe Alice”) Mackenzie (July 17, 1889) Fourty-seven-year-old prostitute; body found near site of Nicholls slaying, throat cut and abdomen mutilated. 10. Frances (”Carrotty Nell”) Coles (Feb. 13.1891) Twenty-five-year-old prostitute; found dying of stab wounds in East End. THE SUSPECTS1. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (1850-1892) and “Another” Born in Scotland, Cream was taken to Canada by his parents in 1854. He was graduated as a doctor of medicine in Montreal in 1876, having already begun his criminal career with theft, arson, attempted blackmail-and the possible murder of his wife following an abortion. In 1876-1878 he continued his medical studies in England and was admitted as a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Edinburgh. Cream practiced medicine in Ontario, Canada, but an unsuccessful blackmail attempt, plus suspicion of his having murdered his mistress with chloroform, caused him to move to Chcago, where he was arrested for murder after a patient of his died following an abortion in 1880. He beat the rap, as well as another for attempted poisoning and blackmail the same year. Convicted of second-degree murder-strychnine poisoning of his mistress’s husband-in 1881, Cream served 10 years in Joliet penitentiary, going to England on his release. In 1891-1892 for the sheer joy of killing, Cream murdered at least five London prostitutes by strychnine poisoning. He was hanged on November 15, 1892. Billington, the executioner, stated that Cream’s last words were: “I am Jack the…”! Although Cream was in Joliet when the main Ripper murders were committed, reliable evidence suggests he had a “double,” also a criminal. Cream once beat a bigamy rap by claiming that he was in Sydney, Australia, at the relevant time; he never was in Australia, but was identified as a former prisoner by the governor of Sydney prison. The famous advocate Marshall Hall, who defended Cream-or his double-on the bigamy charge, believed Cream and his “twin” had an alibi pact and that one of them was the Ripper. The Australian con man and murderer Frederick Bailey (”Mad Fred”) Deeming (1853-1892) also confessed on the scaffold to being the Ripper: he would have had little opportunity to commit the crimes and, although both men were spectacularly ugly, he was not Cream’s double.2. John Druitt Montague (1857-1889) Oxford-educated Montague was a brilliant but unstable young man. Failing in his career as a lawyer (not a doctor, as sometimes stated), in 1888 he was teaching at a shabby private school near London. A month after the killing of Mary Kelly, he attempted suicide by drowning; a second attempt a month later was successful. In March, 1889, an anti-Ripper vigilante group was persuaded to disband when secretly informed by the police that “the Ripper dorwned himself two months ago.” Montague was a strong police suspect, according to the assistant chief of London’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1889. 3.”The General’s Secretary” (unnamed man) ”General” William Booth (1829-1912), founder of the Salvation Army, believed that his former secretary was Jack the Ripper. In February, 1891, a few days before the slaying of Frances Coles, the young secretary told booth: “Carrotty Nell will be the next to go”; immediately after that murder he vanished. Both was no liar-but the secretary probably was. Some writers say the secretary may have “ripped” Coles, but others state that she was almost certainly killed by Thomas Sadler, a drunken railroadman, who was arrested earlier but released for lack of evidence after the murder of Alice MacKenzie. 4. “Jill the Ripper”There has to be one theory that Jack was a Jill. Author William Stewart believes the murders were committed by a psychopathic midwife, who may have walked the East End disguised as a man. The thin evidence rests on the fact (not revealed at the time) that Mary Kelly was three months pregnant at the time of her killing, and that ashes in the fireplace of her room may have been the remains of the Ripper’s disguise. Others point out that the “mad midwife” could hardly have escaped in Kelly’s spare clothes. The unfortunate woman had pawned them. 5. James Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892) J. K. Stephen, who’s humorous verse is still to be found in many anthologies, was the cousin of Sir Leslie Stephen, who was the tutor of Prince Albert Victor and the father of the novelist Virginia Woolf. He was a friend of John Druitt Montague, another suspect. Basing his evidence on a detailed comparison of Stephen’s poetry and the “Ripper letters,” author Michael Harrison regarded the poet as the slayer. In spite of Stephen’s undoubted eccentricity and his connection with other suspects, this theory seems exploded by the fact that of the hundreds of letters to the police and newspapers supposedly sent by Jack the Ripper, only two are accepted by Jurgen Thorwald and other reliable criminologists as genuine. 6. “Leather Apron” Among the police suspects named by crime writer Maj. Aurthur Griffiths, “an insane Polish Jew” figures strongly. This unfortunate man, variously called Pizer or Kosminski, was a mentally deranged shoemaker (who got his nickname of “Leather Apron” from his working dress), and appears to have been the victim of local gossip which linked him with the killings as early as the Turner slaying. He was arrested, questioned, and freed-after the murder of Nicholls. A slogan chalked on a wall near Eddowes’s body-”The Jewes [sic] Are The Men What Wont Be Blamed For Nothing”- was probably the work of an anti-Semitic troublemaker, although both Sir Robert Anderson, appointed head of the CID in 1889, and Maj. Sir Henry Smith, then head of the City of London police, seem to have believed “Leather Apron” was guilty. Another authority also suggests the Ripper was a Jew-not a cobbler, but a shochet, emplyed to slaughter animals by the approved Jewish ritual method. 7. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (1864-1892) Although he would have been king of England had he lived, “Prince Eddy,” elder son of Edward, prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and brother of future king George V, was admittedly weak-minded and almost certainly a sexual degenerate. Contemporary gossip connected “a member of the royal family” with the Ripper slayings, but the prince’s possible guilt was not aired until Dr. Thomas Stowell, a surgeon of international repute, published evidence in 1970 pointing to “Eddy” as the possible killer. (Stowell later denied that the prince was his suspect.) Other attempts have been made to link “Eddy” with the case. 8. Sir William Withey Gull (1816-1890) and “Others” Gull’s rise in the medical profession was assured when he cured the prince of Wales of typhoid in 1871; he was made a baronet and appointed physician in ordinary to Queen Victoria. The famous spiritualis medium Robert James Lees (consulted by the mourning queen in 1868 after the death of her husband) claimed in the 1890’s that he had “dreamed” of the Ripper and had identified “a distinguished physician”-fairly obviously meaning Gull-to the police. The main case against Gull was put by Dr. Benjamin Howard in a sensational interview with the Chicago Sundy Times-Herald on April 28, 1895, claiming that Gull, who had “died” in 1890, was really still alive, a raving madman in a London asylum to which he had been confined after a private “trial” by 12 eminent physicians (Howard himself being one). A more circumstantial attempt to establish Gull as the Ripper was made by author Stephen Knight in 1976. He argued that a bastard child sired by “Prince Eddy” had been nursed by Mary Kelly, last of the “probable” Ripper victims. Having fallen from the status of nursemaid to that of harlot, Kelly attempted to blackmail the royal family, whereupon Prime Minister Salisbury, with the queen’s approval, ordered the “elimination” of Kelly and her closest associates. The murders were carried out by Gull, police chief Sir Robert Anderson, and “Eddy’s” former private carriage driver John Netley-the trio stalking their prey in a horse-drawn cab into which the women were lured, “ripped,” and later dumped. The painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), said to have been the guardian-and later the lover-of “Eddy’s” illegitimate daughter, is also alleged to have played an active part in the conspiracy. 9. George Chapman (1865-1903) In the opinion of three authorities, George Chapman is the likeliest of the named suspects. Born in Poland-his real name was Severin Klosowski-Chapman served an apprenticeship to a barber-surgeon before departing hurriedly to England (he was suspected of the decapitation of a woman) in 1887. At the time of the Ripper slayings, Chapman was working as a barber in the area. Early in 1890, he left suddenly for New York; attempts to link him with a supposed series of Ripper-type murders in Jersey City in 1891-1893 have been discounted. Back in London by 1895, Chapman turned tavernkeeper, and in the following years murdered a succession of barmaid-mistresses by antimony poisoning. He was arrested in 1902. Chief Inspector Abberline, formerly a top detective on the Ripper case, told the inspector who collared Chapman: “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!” Chapman was hanged for the murder of three mistresses. Much circumstantial evidence points to him as the Ripper; the main objection, that he was a poisoner by inclination and that mass murderers rarely vary their method, seems inconclusive. 10. “The Russian Doctor” A theory with more weight than some, supported by authors Sir Harold Scott and Richard Deacon, attributes the Ripper murders to “an insane Russian doctor” named Alexander Pedachenko, also known as Vassily Konovalov, Andrey Luiskovo, and Mikhail Ostrong (or Ostrog). Pedachenko was employed at a clinic for London’s East End poor, where Martha Turner, Mary Nicholls, Annie Chapman, and Mary Kelly all received treatment early in 1888. Deacon suggests that Pedachenko, who had already “ripped” a Parisian prostitute, was deliberately introduced into England by the Okhrana, the Russian czarist secret police, who hoped his activities might discredit the Rissian radicals living in exile in east London. After the Ripper murders, Pedachenko returned to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), where he died in an asylum after murdering yet another woman. Sir Basil Thompson, assistant head of the CID, was convinced of Pedachenko’s guilt. -R.O.
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