Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [48]
A surgical knife discovered along with the doctor’s papers is claimed to match the weapon dimensions estimated during the autopsies. DNA tests are mooted but, as with Sickert, the question remains: to compare against what, exactly?
A Policeman
Fingered by Simon Whitechapel in ‘Guts ‘N’ Roses – Jack the Ripper, Heliogabalus and Meteorites’ (2001) Published in Fortean Studies Volume 7
…or at the least, someone disguised as a policeman. Whitechapel’s (sic) esoteric theory, involving a dark sacrificial ritual to destroy the world, concludes by suggesting the possibility of the Ripper hiding in plain sight. Appearing to be a policeman, the Ripper could approach his victims and could be bloodspattered without attracting suspicion. The more police were drafted into the area, the easier it was for such a disguised Ripper to operate.
There are, of course, many other theories. If you haven’t got enough to choose from already, what about the escaped gorilla theory? Or the Fenian seeking to destabilise the government? There are Ripper theories to suit every taste, no matter how strange. There are probably even stranger ones still waiting to be realised. For all the versions of the truth that are flying around out there one question remains: Would we know the absolute truth if we saw it?
Ripping Yarns
“I stopped being interested in Jack the Ripper when it became a cottage industry.” Tom Cullen, author of Autumn of Terror
Books
There continues to be a steady stream of theories and factual histories of the Ripper murders – many of these have been listed along with their suspects, or in the bibliography. A similar unstinting flow issues from the fiction market.To list all the titles would be a task beyond the length of this book, so we hope that this brief overview will be of some help.
Ripper historians, however sensationalist, were no slouches when it came to getting into print. G Purkess’ The Whitechapel Murders: Or The Mysteries of the East End was the first into print, published before Mary Kelly had even been murdered, and was billed as ‘a thrilling romance story’. Although the four-page broadsheet ‘Jack the Ripper at Work Again’ published on 9 November 1888 soon brought the readers up to date.
Not to be outdone, fictional accounts of the Ripper began to appear with equal speed. John Francis Brown’s The Curse Upon Mitre Square AD 1520–1888 was followed hot on the heels by Anon’s ‘In the Slaughteryard’ (a chapter in The Adventures of The Adventurers’ Club) in which the Ripper turned cop-killer. There were also policeman’s reveries, such as those written by ‘Detective Warren’ and George Pinkerton, founder of the detective agency, both published in 1889. While Ripper texts continued to be produced, readers had to wait until 1911 for the first truly popular novel based on the case. Inspired by Walter Sickert’s tale (see above) Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger was first published in short-story form in McClure’s Magazine, and later the same year in novel form. It continues to be reprinted to this day. Simply told, the mysterious Mr Sleuth rents a room from the Buntings. The Buntings begin to suspect their lodger’s nightly outings and fear that he might be the Ripper…
Ripper theory had died down noticeably by the early 1900s with Carl Muusmann (1908) and Leonard Matters (1928) the honourable exceptions. It wasn’t really until Donald McCormick’s The Identity of Jack the Ripper, along with Daniel Farson’s BBC documentary in 1959, that the post-war Ripper theory industry got under way. In the fictional world, however, the Ripper flourished. In pulp novels such as Death Walks In Eastrepps by Francis Beeding (1931) and short stories like Thomas Burke’s grisly ‘The Hands of Mr Ottermole’, Jack haunted readers throughout the war.
1945 saw the publication