General Chat

If Jack the Ripper was an ordinary, ie, not middle or upper class man, then it is extremely unlikely that he will ever be discovered.

Dear All

Hello

Didn't Michael Caine appear in a docu-drama in 1988, playing Inspector Aberline?

The culprit was unmasked as Sir William Gull.

On the 100th anniversary, the files were released about this case.
However, lots of them were missing as were certain statements and report pages.

I wonder why?

Best wishes
x

Other recent suspects include James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton broker who supposedly confessed to the killings in diaries which surfaced in the early 90s, and Francis Tumblety, an American doctor who before coming to England kept a collection of female body parts at his home in New York. Then there was American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell's claim two years ago that she had discovered DNA evidence tying the Victorian artist Walter Sickert to the Ripper letters. Like all similar claims to have "solved" the murders, Cornwell's thesis subsequently wilted under scrutiny.

In his book, Marriott makes no such claims. Instead, he revisits the crime scenes and the testimony of contemporary witnesses. One of this most startling conclusions is that the Ripper need not have been a skilled surgeon - a long-held assumption based on the fact that in the case of the Ripper's second victim, Annie Chapman, both her vagina and part of her bladder were removed, and that in the case of Kelly her kidney was missing.

But Marriott points out that those were the only two cases in which vital organs were expertly cut out and that they could have been removed at the mortuary before the police surgeon arrived to perform the postmortem, possibly by traders in body parts. He also says there has never been an adequate explanation for why the killings suddenly stopped. Most experts assume the murderer was jailed for other crimes or died. But if Marriott's theory is right, and Jack the Ripper was a crewman on the Sylph, then he may have been responsible for killings in Managua in January 1889 described in a report in the Times as "six of the most atrocious murders ever committed within the limits of this city".

According to the Times report, two of the victims were "butchered out of all recognition" with their faces "horribly slashed". Both the mutilation of prostitutes' bodies and face slashing were a hallmark of the Whitechapel murders and a feature which led detectives to believe the Ripper was a serial sex attacker. Marriott also argues that the Ripper may have been responsible for a later murder of a Whitechapel prostitute not included in the usual five canonical Ripper slayings.

Alice McKenzie was found mutilated in Castle Alley, north of Whitechapel Road, on July 17 1889. Like the other Ripper victims there were signs that she had been throttled before having her throat slit and her body mutilated. One of the police pathologists who conducted the postmortem on McKenzie concluded she should be counted as the sixth Ripper victim - a verdict with which the divisional surgeon disagreed at the time.

If Marriott is right and the Ripper was a merchant seaman it might also explain that the Washington Star, bearing the dateline, Hamburg, 18 October 1889, reported the discovery of "the mutilated body" of a woman in Flensburg, a seaport with frequent sailings to London.

The report was headlined, Jack the Ripper: has he left England to continue his crimes in Germany?

The unusual suspects

About 140 people have been fingered for the Ripper's crimes over the years, including:

· George Chapman A Polish immigrant arrested in 1902 for poisoning several women, including his wife. Chapman's arrival in England coincided with the start of the Whitechapel murders and the killings ceased when he went to America.

· Prince Albert Victor According to one theory, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's grandson, committed the murders after being driven mad by syphilis. According to another, the murders were committed with the aid of Victoria's physician, Sir William Gull, as part of a cover-up to protect the royal family from Albert's affair with a Catholic commoner whose nanny was Mary Kelly.

· Walter Sickert German-born painter who supposedly trawled the East End for prostitutes to model for him. One of his paintings, The Camden Town Murder, is said to bear a striking resemblance to the Mary Kelly murder scene.

· James Maybrick Liverpool cotton merchant who frequented brothels and was addicted to arsenic and strychnine. In the early 1990s Michael Barrett, a former Liverpool scrap merchant, "discovered" a diary in which Maybrick confessed to the Whitechapel murders. Barrett later confessed to forging the diaries.

· Francis Tumblety An American quack doctor who was in London at the time of the murders. Named as a suspect in 1913 by former special branch chief JG Littlechild, Tumblety was a sadist and homosexual who kept female body parts in a cabinet in his home.

· Sir John Williams Queen Victoria's former obstetrician and founder of the National Library of Wales, Williams is the latest Ripper suspect. According to his great-great nephew, Swansea author Tony Williams, he was obsessed with female anatomy and infertility because of his wife's failure to conceive. He also worked at the Whitechapel workhouse infirmary, where he treated Mary Ann Nichols and three other Ripper victims.

For all the blood spilt by Jack the Ripper, and all the ink expended since by authors claiming to know his identity, ripperologists generally agree that with the killing of the prostitute Mary Kelly in Whitechapel on November 8 1888, his frenzied murder spree came to an abrupt end.
After that "Jack" - if that was indeed his name - disappeared into the London fog, never to be seen again.

But what if the murders continued in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua? And what if, after a break of eight months, there was a further Whitechapel killing which, as in the Kelly case, ended with a prostitute's throat being cut and her body mutilated, followed, three months later, by a further killing in Germany?

That is the intriguing theory raised in a new book on the Whitechapel murders by Trevor Marriott, a former Bedfordshire police detective. Using modern police procedural techniques, Marriott has spent two years poring over the Ripper killings, re-examining the evidence given by police doctors and pathologists at the time.

His conclusions, published this week in Jack the Ripper: the 21st Century Investigation, challenge the conventional wisdom that the murderer was a skilled surgeon. Moreover, Marriott says the location and timing of the killings - not far from London docks with gaps of several weeks in between - suggest the killer may have been a merchant seaman.

There were rumours that the artist Walter Sickert was the ripper, due to the unusual and morbid nature of some of his paintings. It's known too that he didn't treat his wife too well. I have a copy of their divorce papers, and he was a womaniser and beat her regularly.

I don't think it was though. Wasn't there supposed to be some surgical precision in the mutilations?

There are so many theories, but without forensic evidence, it wouldn't be possible to find out who it was now. But it's certainly a mystery that will run for years and years.

im a scot hope he isnt in my tree very funny keith jock the ripper lol how horrible maddie to think you lived beside them

I think I would enjoy the notoriety, I mean its not as if it was yesterday.

Seriously though, I lived next door but one to the Wests in the 70's (other side of a church of all places) fortuntaly I was too young to really remember them.

i wouldnt be very happy to

I don't think I'd be very happy if he was in my family tree.

JOCK the ripper

i dont think we will ever know who he really was

the scottish pimps where trying to take over the red light districts of london
so you never know it could be anybody

wouldnt it be fun if they found some DNA
and solved who was related to him

Could well be, but depends who you think it was, I have read many books on the subject and each time I think I know who it was a new theory comes out - which could be plausible - the only non plausable book on the subject I have read was by Patricia Cornwall - she should stick to fiction - shes far better at it.

So are you from Scottish Decent, or maybe of Blue Blood, a Druitt with links to South East London but hail from the West Country?

My mum was told by her grandmother (b Bethnal Green, 1875), that they. girls and women presumably, were all so scared of Jack the Ripper at the time.

anniversary 121 years ago today (1888)
he stalked the whitechapel area off london
31st August 1888 polly nicoles met her end

just think he could be related to one of us