Jack The Ripper (Compendium Thread)

[OneWingedBird]

And played by Johnny Depp. :lol:

 

[Ravenstone]

Mr Abad, says: ‘I have no doubt Abberline was the Ripper. Handwriting does not lie.’

No, but the diary does.

I think it's fairly safe to reject any theory based on any handwriting analysis. Even the 'From Hell' letter could be nothing but a very convincing fake.

 

[Cochise]

Having wasted days - no, weeks or possibly months of my life studying JTR, I've concluded that sadly for me it is a waste of time and the killer(s) will never be identified.

Consider.

a) We have no direct evidence whatsoever (fingerprints, hairs, clothing, weapon).

b) We have no eyewitnesses (some sightings possible at best, not one single witness that can without doubt claim to have seen the actuial killer).

c) We have no agreement among the police about suspects (only Kosminski is mentioned more than once, and in ways that make it doubtful that they are talking about the same person, or that anyone other than Anderson thought he was the killer - and his statement is the one least useful in identifying him)

d) We have numerous letters but no evidence that any of them are from the killer (the only one I think might be is the one signed 'from hell' - and that doesn't mention JTR).

e) We don't even know who he killed, anything from 2 to 8 (or more) victims. So we cannot use modus operandi, we cannot easily include or eliminate people based on when they were or were not in the area, etc etc.. And therefore neither can we be sure that if we identifed the killer of one woman we would have who the hoi polloi regard as 'JTR'.

I therefore move for the dismissal of the case against any and all suspects, M'Lud, pending the highly unlikely discovery of credible new evidence.

 

[Ravenstone]

Just because we may never know for certain doesn't mean we've 'wasted' time investigating it. There's plenty of enjoyment to be had from the simple exercise in logic or intuition.

 

[Cochise]

I speak only of my own time. I edited my previous post to make that clear. In my view there simply isn't enough to profitably speculate on.

That doesn't mean that studying the case as social history or as a mass hysteria phenomenon might not be valuable to some. But investigating the merits or demerits of particular suspects no longer interests me because as far as I can see the actual undisputable facts are so few anyone who was in London in 1888 could be a suspect.

This is all a bit incosistent of me I know, cos I like weird and unexplanable things. But this isn't weird, its just a nasty series of crimes and it should be capable of solution, however I've sadly concluded it isn't. I really have gone into considerable depth on some of the suspects, and its actually intensly frustrating as the facts evaporate from under you.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

My own take has always been that celebrity candidates are a silly parlour-game. The idea seems to stem from the notion that the Ripper had to be middle-class because he would have needed privacy to wash himself after his butcheries. Yet one of the earliest people to find a ripper-victim was working as a night-shift horse-slaughterer. Anyone examining the actual living and working conditions of the poor at that time will see that they were present yet invisible. Mayhew and others took note, of course, and they are widely read today but we tend to over-compensate for the fact that the poor were collectively a challenge to the law or religion but their existehnce was in a sense underground - often literally.

So, with that established, I have to say that I have a soft-spot for an author called Richard Patterson, who has put online his volume called Paradox.

Paradox

His candidate is Cathollc poet Francis Thompson. The Ballad of the Witch Babies is certainly food for thought.

:shock:

Edit: Link fixed. P_M

 

[Cochise]

Francis Thompson was one of the candidates that interested me. I also paid a lot of attention to Kosminski/Kaminsky/Cohen. Cutbush, William Bury and some others. I've never been impressed by Tumblety, Druitt or the various conspiracies.

But the thing that disillusioned me is that there really is no way of proving the _innocence_ of anyone unless you can conclusively prove they weren't in the East End at the precise time of whatever murders you regard as canonical. (Even then, someone will argue - see what's her name the Great Forensic Person and Sickert). If you choose a local inhabitant as suspect, you can invent almost any explanation for how they comitted the crime or crimes and no-one can actually disprove it.

Hence there are 300 candidates put forward and there is no reason why there shouldn't be 600 or 10,000.

If a thesis is untestable, then as you say we have little more than a parlour game, and worse, a parlour game no-one can win.

 

[rynner2]

Is this the face of Jack the Ripper?
By Dr Xanthe Mallett
Forensic anthropologist, University of Dundee

On this day 123 years ago, Jack the Ripper claimed his first victim. But who was this serial killer? This new e-fit finally puts a face to Carl Feigenbaum, a key suspect from Germany.

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14207581

Well, now we've got an e-fit we should soon have the bugger locked up!

 

[mrpoultice]

Hmmm

Now apart from a book or two about it, I've read over the years, and the bits that turn up in Fortean Times, I can't claim to know much more than the next person on the street about JTR.

But I've NEVER heard of this Feigenbaum chap before today!

Is he a "new" arrival onto the list of usual suspects?

 

[Ravenstone]

Feigenbaum isn't exactly new. Marriott's 21st Century Investigation puts him forward.

Have a look here for a brief over-view :

http://www.casebook.org/suspects/carl-feigenbaum.html

 

[Yithian]

I don't know how good the artist is, or how accurate the description from which she produced her sketch was, but the face she has produced has several (East) Asian traits - specifically the face, the mouth - and, indeed, pretty much everything below the nose.
Could be Mongloid blood, perhaps Japanese or Chinese... doesn't really look European to me beyond the full nose with the raised bridge!

I'd also suggest he has either a big head or a bull-neck.

 

[mrpoultice]

Cheers

Thanks for the link Ravenstone.

Crikey, there's a lot of new stuff on that site! You turn your back on a 120+ year old murder and a whole new crop of suspects and witnesses come out of the woodwork!

Mr P

 

[Ravenstone]

Oh yeah. You can't leave it for long

 

[Ascalon]

Having become a JTR intrigued person, loathe to call myself a fan, some 30 odd years ago after reading an truly awful True Crime article putting forward the ritualistic elements of the case, I find myself concerned that the case I'd descending into meaninglessness.

The core of the case is the collection of victims. However, under recent scrutiny, it now seems as at least two of the canonical five are likely to have been the work of someone else. Long Liz it seems and Marie Jeannette 'Mary' Kelly may have been killed by a different hand to Annie Chapman, Polly Nichols and Catherine Eddowes. If this is the case, then the available pool of evidence from which to investigate is severely limited.

With Kelly in particular in doubt, much of what has come to signify the case must be thrown out.

Therefore, it is arguable that we may have to concede that what we call JTR is actually a montage of various individuals and so any hope of a single identity being proved is lost to us.

A disappointing thought.

A

 

[Ravenstone]

Seeing as Jack can be accused of killing anything between 2 and 202 women in the course of his 'career', it's really a matter of opinion rather than any degree of certainty who you count as a victim.

I stick with the canonical five myself.

 

[Zilch5]

The core of the case is the collection of victims. However, under recent scrutiny, it now seems as at least two of the canonical five are likely to have been the work of someone else. Long Liz it seems and Marie Jeannette 'Mary' Kelly may have been killed by a different hand to Annie Chapman, Polly Nichols and Catherine Eddowes. If this is the case, then the available pool of evidence from which to investigate is severely limited.

With Kelly in particular in doubt, much of what has come to signify the case must be thrown out.

Any sources re this, links etc? Thanks!

 

[Cochise]

Go over to 'Casebook Jack the Ripper' or one of the other Ripper boards and you will find arguments for and against most of the victims, especially Stride and Kelly. It's pretty much all opinion rather than fact, though. Both for inclusion and exclusion. Even the contemporary coroners and medical examiners disagree on who is or is not a victim of the same hand.

The canoical list of 5 is based on one policeman's opinion. I actually happen to agree, but there really isn't any definitve reason why the person we describe as JTR couldn't have killed as few as two or alternatively more than five victims - many observers would add Martha Tabram as a victim, for example.

 

[PeniG]

The list of victims varies directly in accordance with the commentator's preferred theory. The fascinating thing to me is not the crimes themselves - which are simply horrific, and I feel a little voyeuristic and sleazy playing intellectual games with them - but the processes by which people sort through the available data - which includes absolutely everything that happened in England, and for some theories in the world, within a year or two either side of events - and find a logical route through it by starting with one, choosing an adjacent one that can be connected, and discarding those that can't; then proceeding to the next step by the same method.

It's as if the Cosmic Jester were a sadistic bastard and designed a case to be illustrative of Fort's basic premise about how we make sense of our world.

 

[Ravenstone]

Most serial killers are caught by accident. And most of them raise the comment, "Oh but he was always so quiet!". So whoever we think the Ripper may be, we're probably wrong.

I've never really understood why anyone would put Martha Tabram under the Ripper's name. Even a cursory examination of the reports make her someone else's fault.

 

[Cochise]

I agree Martha Tabram is most likely not a Ripper victim. MO is different and there is evidence of two attackers.

I also have difficulty believing in any of the victims after Mary Kelly. Even allowing for the fact that he may not have had another opportunity to act at his leisure, he had shown himself capable of substantial mutilations in very short time periods and none of the later alleged victims show any.

Hence I basically support the 'canonical 5', although this can only be an opinion.

 

[Ravenstone]

I am of the same opinion. Martha Tabram is a Whitechapel Murder which doesn't seem to belong to the Ripper pattern. And anyone capable of Kelly's murder certainly would never be satisfied with any of the following pale imitations.

 

[MistyMisterWisty]

I haven't read this entire thread, because there's rather a lot of it, and the first half seems to have vanished anyway, so I don't know how original my theory is. But since I came up with it some years ago just to win a bet with a friend that I couldn't back up a chance remark made after a few pints with proof at least as plausible as you'll find in the published literature (which, by the way, I won), it's probably fairly off-the-wall.

I propose that Jack the Ripper was Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nitzsche always had problems relating to women. Raised by aunts after his father died young (certainly from something which affected his brain, possibly from syphilis), he never got on too well with girls, despite being keenly interested in them. They either rejected his advances outright, or cruelly toyed with him - one of the ladies he was seriously interested in made him pose for a photo in which he and his best friend were leashed to a cart while she stood over them with a whip. Seriously!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg

And then she ran off with his best friend.

His only known sexual encounter was with a prostitute, and this may have given him syphilis, resulting in his eventual mental collapse. It has been disputed that he actually died of syphilis, but it is a documented fact that, going by his own writings, he thought he had syphilis as a result of this encounter - a pretty obvious motive for Saucy Jacky!

Many theorists consider Jack to have been-left-handed - so was Nietzsche. His experience in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 as a medical orderly meant that he was essentially familiar with the layout of the human body, especially in terms of injuries inflicted by sweeping knife wounds - he also had basic training with a cavalry saber. And some years later, he attended dissections of human bodies because he was obsessed with the notion that a lesser type of human being existed, and their subhuman status could be determined by examining their internal organs. Am I starting to score a few home runs yet?

The stumbling block for my theory is of course that Nietzsche was in Europe the whole time. However, there does exist a perfectly serious book (it's been a while so I forget the author and title) proposing that JTR was in fact Niall Cream, the Lambeth Poisoner. Yes, he was nuts, and yes, he undoubtedly killed women in London, though in a totally different way. The fact that he spent the whole of 1888 in a maximum security prison in the USA (for murdering yet more women) is beside the point - obviously an exact double he had coincidentally met and somehow gained total mind control over agreed to go to prison in America on his behalf while he was going great salty scallibonkers in Whitechapel.

Here are the facts about Nietzsche. It's been a while since I reviewd them - hey, if I thought about this all day, every day, people would edge away from me on public transport more than they do anyway - but I can build an excellent case for Nietzsche being a patsy who was temporarily replaced by a double by persons unknown. For all but one of the murders, he was squirreled away in places where nobody could possibly identify him. For a couple of them, he was holed up in an off-season ski resort rendered literally unreachable by snow, where nobody knew him from Adam (though I'm sure he was much better dressed). For another, he hastily checked into a hotel, and then flatly refused to leave his room or confront anybody face-to-face for about a fortnight. The only time Nietzsche was actually seen by people who knew him, on a day when he couldn't possibly have killed that woman in England and then gotten back in time to establish an alibi, they commented on how out of character he was, and how much younger he seemed to be! And he didn't stick around very long.

Nietzsche's autobiographical writings on this respect are also curious to say the least. At this precise period in his life, he assumed for most of the time that he was in Turin, yet remained puzzled that Turin didn't actually seem to be Turin, but could almost be some totally foreign city. Though it's only fair to say that by this stage, he was also under the impression that he could cause earthquakes by telepathy. You can see why Hitler became a fan.

Oh, and that famous "God is dead!" pronouncement? It was so important that Nietzsche gave a date and time for the moment he wrote it down. About 45 minutes after Jack the Ripper killed two women in one night.

But you want the kicker? At the end of 1888 - the precise time that Saucy Jacky ceased his "funny little games", Nietzsche was carted off to an asylum after a spectacular public breakdown during which he admitted that he was (amongst other things) "a famous murderer". Now, given that his relatives (who later destroyed many of his more controversial writings) cleaned up that account, who, in Europe 1888, could that confession possibly have referred to?

I rest my case.

 

[Zilch5]

Makes more sense than the case against a lot of other suspects!

Now - do we know the exact dates he actually was in Turin - or was there a time where he just thought he was in Turin? Any Nietzsche experts here?

 

[MikeCovell]

Even Ripperologists agree on disagree on the candidacy of Martha Tabram as a victim of Jack the Ripper. Whilst the modus operandi differes, the location and time of the murder seems to fit the other murders. She is certainly very interesting, and it's a shame that the investigation into her death never went any further.

 

[emina]

I haven't read this entire thread, because there's rather a lot of it, and the first half seems to have vanished anyway, so I don't know how original my theory is. But since I came up with it some years ago just to win a bet with a friend that I couldn't back up a chance remark made after a few pints with proof at least as plausible as you'll find in the published literature (which, by the way, I won), it's probably fairly off-the-wall.

I propose that Jack the Ripper was Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nice one :lol:

Actually, I've long harboured a suspicion that Hercule Poirot was in actual fact a serial killer.

Think about it...

 

[Moooksta]

Source LA Times

The cold, cold case of Jack the Ripper
A retired homicide detective is trying to force Scotland Yard to release uncensored versions of files that might offer fresh leads on the identity of Britain's most notorious serial killer.

Reporting from London—
It's been called the world's most famous cold case, a source of endless fascination and speculation ever since the first mutilated victim was found in a bloody heap 123 years ago on the gas-lighted streets of East London.

So why is Scotland Yard suppressing information that some crime buffs think could offer fresh leads on the identity of Britain's most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper?

That's the question baffling Trevor Marriott, a retired homicide detective who's been waging a solitary legal battle to force "the Yard" to release uncensored versions of information recorded in thick Victorian ledgers that are gathering dust in an official archive.

The volumes contain tens of thousands of tidbits on the Yard's dealings with the public and police informants in the years that followed the Ripper's grisly two-month killing rampage in 1888. The shadowy figure is alleged to have slain five women in London's seamy Whitechapel district, slitting their throats and, in some cases, eviscerating them with almost surgical precision.

But the Metropolitan Police Service, as Scotland Yard is formally known, has staunchly refused to publish the documents in unexpurgated form, without names blacked out.

In a surreal tribunal hearing in May, which saw a senior officer give evidence from behind an opaque screen and cite Judas Iscariot to support his point, the agency argued that laying everything bare would violate its confidentiality pledge to informants, even those long dead, and undermine recruitment of collaborators in the present-day fight against terrorism and organized crime.

Naming names might even put the snitches' descendants at risk of revenge by the grudge-bearing heirs of those who were informed on, officials said. The three-person tribunal agreed.

And so the files continue to molder while Ripper enthusiasts like Marriott chafe, wondering what tantalizing clues remain hidden.

"There may be a little gem in there which corroborates something we already know," said Marriott, who has been working to unmask the killer since 2002. He has published a book outlining his own theory of whodunit centering on a lesser-known candidate who wound up convicted and executed for a brutal murder in the United States.

The ledgers, he said, could point out new avenues to dedicated "Ripperologists" and armchair detectives as they chase the solution to one of history's great unsolved mysteries.

Interest in the "Whitechapel murders" has seemingly never flagged since the gruesome crimes were committed toward the end of Queen Victoria's reign. The combination of sleaze (the victims were prostitutes), squalor (the East End was a den of poverty and drink), and blood and gore (buckets of it) has proved irresistible to amateur and expert sleuths alike.

Suspects at the time included an American quack who later fled London and a Polish Jew who lived in Whitechapel.

More recently, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell concluded in a 2002 book that Jack the Ripper was the painter Walter Sickert.

Conspiracy theorists finger a deranged member of the royal family and accuse Scotland Yard of colluding in a cover-up. And a Spanish author has just come out with a claim that the killer was a lead detective in the case.

"Unsolved murder — instantly everyone thinks, 'I can solve it,'" said Angela Down, a tour guide who has helped conduct a "Jack the Ripper Walk" around East London for 10 years. "We all love a mystery. If it were solved, all the interest would fall away."

The circuit is far and away the most popular attraction offered by tour company London Walks; on the nights that the walk is hosted by noted Ripper expert Donald Rumbelow, it can draw hundreds of participants.

As they meander through narrow streets and cross a square whose cobblestones were there when the fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, was found dead, listeners are reminded that the name "Jack the Ripper" is almost certainly a hoax. A taunting letter purporting to be from the killer and signed "Jack the Ripper" was received by a news agency on Sept. 27, 1888, not long after the slaying of Annie Chapman, the second victim.

"Dear Boss," the letter began, before describing how the writer was "down on whores" and wouldn't "quit ripping them" until he was caught.

But the letter is now widely believed to have been the work of a tabloid journalist intent on making the story even more sensational than it already was. ("Nothing's changed," a woman murmured during the guided tour one recent evening.)

Marriott's theory, which he has put forth on the BBC and the National Geographic Channel, is that the killer was a German sailor named Carl Feigenbaum who eventually ended up in New York, where he cut the throat of his elderly landlady. Feigenbaum was executed in the electric chair in 1896, but not before telling his lawyer that he had always suffered from an uncontrollable urge to "kill and mutilate" women.

Shipping records show that the merchant seaman's vessel was docked in London at the time of the murders, close to Whitechapel, a red-light district likely to have been popular with sailors.

Marriott's research has uncovered similarly brutal killings in Germany that occurred a few years afterward.

As a police officer in Bedfordshire, north of London, Marriott maintained a cursory interest in the Ripper case but was more preoccupied with the murders he was investigating as a homicide detective.

He retired in the mid-'80s. Eight or nine years ago, in search of a hobby, he figured he would try his hand at the one riddle that ruled them all.

"I decided to look at it as a cold-case file," said Marriott.

"There are a lot of dedicated researchers and people who have followed the Ripper mystery, but nobody with any real professional knowledge or expertise had actually sat down or gone through it in any great detail," he said. "That's where I think my knowledge and expertise has helped look at this in a different light."

His quest has taken him around Europe and to North America. But Marriott is desperate to find fresh nuggets of information in the Scotland Yard ledgers.

After his request for access was denied in 2008, Marriott looked for help from the Information Commissioner's Office, which sided with Scotland Yard. He then took the matter before Britain's Information Rights Tribunal, which adjudicates appeals based on the Freedom of Information Act.

During the tribunal hearing in May, a senior officer identified only as "Detective Inspector D" said from behind a screen that the passage of time was not a good enough reason to reveal the names of informants.

"Look at one of the world's best-known informants, Judas Iscariot. If someone could draw a bloodline from Judas Iscariot to a present-day person, then that person would face a risk, although I know that seems an extreme example," the officer said, according to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Marriott rejects that argument, saying that it would be "almost 99.99% impossible to trace" the descendants of the informants, who are often identified in the registers by pseudonyms or by surnames only.

In July, the tribunal upheld the Yard's right to keep the files secret. In response to an appeal by Marriott, the panel reaffirmed its decision Aug. 31, which, coincidentally or not, was the 123rd anniversary of the death of the Ripper's first victim, Mary Ann Nichols.

Marriott's only remaining appeal would be to the home secretary or Queen Elizabeth. Chances of success: close to nil.

"I've spent fortunes on this case.... I don't know where we go now. I suspect this will probably be the end game," he said resignedly.

If so, what's in the ledgers "will be lost forever," Marriott said. And the identity of Jack the Ripper will vanish in the mists of time, like the London fog that swallowed up a bloody killer and left an enduring mystery eddying in his wake.

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

September 20, 2011, 5:16 p.m.

Is the officer saying there would be a direct line between Jack the Ripper and someone alive today? Someone we all know?

 

[Ravenstone]

I think he's saying that some people may react badly to finding out that one of their forefathers was a suspect. Given the high profile nature of the case, I would have to - reluctantly - admit that he's probably got a point.

 

[MikeCovell]

There is also the issue of having one's forefather has a police informant, and how the police collected information on suspects from informants.

 

[Cochise]

So how do you weigh that one up in a case where relatives are demanding to know who killed their ancestor? (Not true in this case) Surely they have a right to have such things brought into the open?

 

[MikeCovell]

Very few relatives survive, and those that do are quiet happy to let bygones be bygones. It's Trevor Marriott that is persuing the opening of the Special Branch ledgers.