Mike Covell’s Blogg

Just another amusing News story to disect!! As usual my opinions in bold!!

Source, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4D91E30F937A35755C0A96E948260 

NEW YORK TIMES

 A Century Later, Ripper Mystery Remains

By HOWELL RAINES, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: June 4, 1988 

This is the centennial year of the Jack the Ripper murders. It seems a fair time to ask how the investigation is going.

The short answer is, not much better than it went 100 years ago, when Queen Victoria sent a grumpy suggestion to Scotland Yard: ”Our detectives must be improved. They are not what they should be.”

Now as then, monarchs, investigators and the general public do not know the identity of the psychopathic slasher who, between Aug. 31 and Nov. 9, 1888, killed 5 of the 1,200 or so prostitutes then living in the teeming Whitechapel slums of east London.

But the Jack the Ripper industry is in great shape. So far this year, five books have assessed the claims of suspects ranging from a mad Russian to the Queen’s physician to one of Oscar Wilde’s young men.

And at the moment, the entire Ripper industry is in an uproar over a new television mini-series being filmed in England for broadcast on Thames Television in Britain and CBS in the United States. According to the Thames Television publicity kit, the four-hour film will be able to identify Jack because century-old evidence from ‘’secret Home Office and Metropolitan Police files” has fallen into the hands of the film’s producer and director, David Wickes.

“This refers to the Michael Caine mini series “Jack the Ripper” which started with a reference to Documents being looked at, its a shame they didn’t research Abberline”

Orthodox Ripperologists use terms like ”absolute rubbish” and ‘’sheer baloney” to dismiss Mr. Wickes’s claim that he has unearthed new documentary evidence that solves the case. Mr. Wickes responds that they are angry because his film will expose most of their theories about Jack as ”pure fantasy.”

“Pure Fantasy” what like Abberline being a drunk ladies man?”

That language gives a fair idea of the level of discourse in the jealous little world of Ripperology, just as the dispute between Mr. Wickes and his leading critics gives a overview of what is known - or rather, how little is known - about the world’s most enduring whodunit.

The combatants include Daniel Farson, who unblushingly describes himself as ”the leading authority on Jack the Ripper”; Melvin Harris, the discoverer of this year’s most colorful new suspect, and Donald Rumbelow, a scholarly detective generally regarded as the most authoritative referee of the competing claims. A Drunken Barrister

“I have to agree with the “colorful suspect” Robert D’Onston Stephenson!”

Mr. Farson’s fame rests on his discovery in 1959 of notes in which a Scotland Yard official identified a drunken barrister named Montague J. Druitt as a main suspect. The murders ended after Mr. Druitt drowned himself in the Thames in December 1888, and Mr. Farson was able to show that the police, without naming Druitt, had spread the word that the murderer died in the river.

“Was Druitt really a drunk barrister?”

”People can say whatever they like, but they cannot deny that this is the man that the police thought did it and also that Druitt had drowned in the Thames,” he said.

Indeed, Druitt remains a betting favorite with many students of the case. But Melvin Harris stumbled on an oddball new suspect, Roslyn D’Onston, while researching a book on psychic hoaxes. A failed physician, a dabbler in black magic, an alcoholic and drug addict, D’Onston turned - quite naturally, some would say - to Fleet Street to make a living.

“No Proof of being a physician, never mind failing!  No proof he “dabbled” in Black Magic, and writing an article or two is not really deemed turning to “Fleet Street”!”

Thus began, Mr. Harris says in his book, ”Jack the Ripper, the Bloody Truth,” the ”incredible string of hoaxes” that have disguised the killer’s trail. ”In almost every case they were created by journalists,” Mr. Harris added with the tone of a man who has, at the least, placed Jack in the right professional company. Police Records Lost

“This should read, The Incredible string of hoaxes that fooled the public into buying books on Stephenson”

Mr. Harris contends that D’Onston’s newspaper articles on the murders were intended to disguise that he was the Ripper, but his detailed knowledge of the case aroused suspicion. D’Onston’s mistress and Aleister Crowley, a famous magician of the day, both considered him the killer. Mr. Harris contends that D’Onston was arrested as a suspect once, but the police records of the interrogation have been lost.

“How convenient, they have to exist in the first place to be lost”

Mr. Harris has joined Mr. Farson in charging Mr. Wickes, whose ”Jack the Ripper” is to be broadcast in November, with creating the latest hoax by asserting that he has seen documents previously unavailable.

In an interview, Mr. Wickes blamed overzealous publicists for mistakenly claiming the film was based on ‘’secret” files. ”There are no secret files,” he said. But with his $11 milllion budget, Mr. Wickes said, he has been able to do a thorough search of the archives and cull information ignored by ”all the other people who call themselves Ripperologists.” A Most-Balanced Roundup

Has Mr. Wickes found additional evidence on Druitt or perhaps the missing interview with D’Onston? Enter Mr. Rumbelow, in real life a City of London detective, in private life a Ripperologist whose artifacts include a postmortem knife that may have been used in the murders and whose book, ”The Complete Jack the Ripper,” is regarded as the most-balanced roundup of the evidence.

Mr. Rumbelow is dismissive of Mr. Wickes’s idea that Frederick Abberline, the Scotland Yard inspector portrayed in the film by Michael Caine, solved the case only to see his work covered up by his superiors. Mr. Rumbelow says he, too, had high hopes for missing evidence from Abberline when he found a long-neglected scrapbook compiled by the detective, who died in 1929.

”As I flipped through it, my heart sank,” Mr. Rumbelow said. ”I saw the words, ‘Why I Didn’t Write My Reminiscences When I Left the Metropolitan Police.’ One-hundred odd pages and hardly a line, a word about the Ripper. You want to lay hands on him and beat his head against the wall.”

The reason Abberline wrote nothing, Mr. Rumbelow concluded, is that he had nothing to tell. ”He was still hunting the Ripper in old age. He quite clearly hadn’t solved it.”

Still, Mr. Wickes promises his film will ”absolutely” identify the Ripper and show that there was a high-level decision to conceal the evidence.

“But it still failed to do so!!  He should have just read Final Solution and saved his 11 Million budget!”

This has led some experts to believe that the movie will go with a version of a conspiracy theory that has been kicking around for some time. According to it, a group of Freemasons led by Sir William Gull, the physician to Queen Victoria, killed the prostitutes to cover up the fact that the Duke of Clarence, the Queen’s weak-willed grandson, had fathered a child by one victim.

Mr. Rumbelow asserts that the case will be solved in the hereafter rather than by him or Mr. Wickes or any of the other competing experts.

”On the Day of Judgment,” he said, ”when all things are known, when generations of Ripperologists call on Jack the Ripper to step forward and call out his name, we shall look at one another in amazement as he does so and say, ‘Who?’ ”

”It will be someone none of us has ever heard of.”

“True poetry, spoken by a man who KNOWS!!”