Posted on 05/03/2005 1:50:52 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Murderer possibly a sailor rather than a surgeon, says new book
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.
Marriott thinks he may have identified the ship he arrived on - the Sylph, a 600-tonne cargo vessel which arrived in Britain from Barbados in July 1888, before the killing of the Ripper's first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, and which returned to the Caribbean on November 22, two weeks after the Kelly slaying, from where the same killer could have committed the Nicaraguan murder spree.
"The detectives at the time took a very blinkered approach,' says Marriott. "They were convinced the killer was someone who lived or worked in the Whitechapel area. They completely overlooked the fact that there was a pattern emerging which pointed to the possibility the killer may have been a sailor who only occasionally visited Whitechapel, hence the gaps between the murders."
Marriott is not the first person to claim to have uncovered sensational evidence about Whitechapel's most notorious unsolved murders. Hardly a month goes by without some revelation - the latest being the Swansea author Tony Williams's claim that the Ripper was his great-great uncle, Sir John Williams, Queen Victoria's obstetrician and a celebrated book collector who founded the National Library of Wales.
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.
From what I heard, Jack killed a lot of broads.
Damn! Beat me by seconds! ARGH.
bfl
Small problem: Jack was a guy named Sickert, as PROVEN by DNA work done by . . . dang, name escapes me, but she is a novelist who was a ME.
*groan* ;-)
Patricia Cornwell
Yep. Brain freeze. More coffee.
7
Guess she was wrong, eh?
Not really The most that can be said is that DNA does not rule out Sickert as the author of some of the hoax "Ripper Letters"
The Ripper had a Royal connection.
He had about as much of a royal connection, as you or I do.
Was it a doctor or a sailor? Couldn't it have been both? It should be possible to investigate shipping records and see what ships were in port during the sprees, who the ship's doctors were, and see if there's a correlation.
Didn't I see this on "Star Trek"?
That's not true at all. The police did consider the possibility that the killer was a sailor. They considered a lot of things.
The fact is serial killers are notoriously difficult to catch, because they usually have little connection to their victims (not friends, family members, acquaintances etc). The police did their best, but they never had much to go on, and this "New" Solution simply rehashes their old work by converting mere possibility into probability, based on no new evidence.
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