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By Root 151 0

be blood-spattered so could pass without question through the East End streets. A male killer disguised as a midwife could do so equally well.William Stewart in Jack the Ripper – A New Theory (1939) (and later, Ex-Detective Inspector Arthur Butler) advanced the theory that Jill was a backstreet abortionist, murdering and blackmailing prostitutes to cover up her trade.Their belief, that Kelly brought the ‘mad midwife’ into her house in order to abort a child she couldn’t afford, falls at Dr Thomas Bond’s autopsy findings that Kelly wasn’t pregnant. Stewart advanced Mary Pearcey as a suspect. Like George Chapman and others (see below), she seems to have been a suspect mainly because in October 1890 she murdered her lover’s wife and child. Pearcey was hanged in December 1890. Stewart saw certain similarities between Pearcey’s m.o. (slit throats, killing in private and dumping bodies in a public place) and the Whitechapel murderer.Tom Cullen suggested Stewart had overlooked the possibility of a vengeful lesbian lover. He singled out Kelly’s friend, Maria Harvey as the possible culprit, although she reportedly left before Barnett was ejected.

There was also ‘the nurse’. Appalled at finding out that her husband had gone with a prostitute, she set out to avenge herself upon the women who threatened her marriage. And speaking of medical types and Russians...

Dr Alexander Pedachenko (1857?-1908?)

Fingered by William Le Queux in Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks (1923) and expanded upon by Donald McCormick in The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959)

Bear with us, this is a good one. Pedachenko lived in Walworth with his sister. Along with a friend Levitski (who wrote the Ripper letters) and a seamstress Miss Winberg (who engaged the victims in conversation), Pedachenko killed prostitutes under orders from Ochrana (the then Russian secret police). Their aim was to discredit the Met, whom they hated for tolerating emigrant dissidents and anarchists in the East End.When their plan succeeded (with the resignation of Sir Charles Warren), Pedachenko was smuggled back to Moscow and exiled to Yakutsk (or sent to an asylum after trying to murder a woman in Russia). Le Queux claimed the information came from a manuscript entitled Great Russian Criminals, written by Rasputin. Pedachenko, supposedly, was an alias for Vassily Konovalov and, as well as being a surgeon, he was an occasional transvestite. He was wearing women’s clothing when he was arrested in Russia. An unsourced letter, attributed to Sir Basil Thomson (assistant commissioner of the Met 1913–1919), states that Konovalov also used the alias ‘Mikhail Ostrog’. It seems unlikely that Konovalov was the Michael Ostrog the Met sought at the time of the Ripper murders.

Donald McCormick furthered the madness by quoting from Dr Thomas Dutton’s unpublished notebooks (themselves not seen since 1935) that Pedachenko was the double of Severin Klosowski (see below). Both barber’s assistants, they knew each other and would exchange identities for their nightly excursions. Hope that’s clear, then.

Another Russian candidate was Nicolay Vasiliev (also called Nicolas Vassili, Vassily, Vasilyeff and Nicolai Wassili). He was mentioned in the British and international press, as well as in two American books on the Whitechapel murders, published between October and December 1888. Having become a leader of the Skoptsy (a Russian religious cult that preached castration),Vasiliev fled to Paris in 1872, at the age of 25, to evade persecution by the Russian government. He spent his time trying to convert prostitutes, including one known as ‘Madeleine’ with whom he fell in love. When she left him he tracked her down and killed her before butchering another seven prostitutes. Caught when his next victim called for help, Vasiliev was tried and sent to an asylum (in either Russia or France) for the next sixteen years. He was released on 1 January 1888 and announced his intention to move to London. Here he lived with friends in Whitechapel until Polly Nichols was killed. Since then, papers reported