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Thread: Jack the Ripper

  1. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by ChrisGeorge View Post
    Hi all

    I am gearing up to write a couple of obituaries for Ripperologist for a couple of Philadelphians with Jack the Ripper connections. The two people are actor Jack Palance who has just died and journalist Ed Bradley. Palance played the Ripper in "Man in the Attic" based on "The Lodger." Bradley was the CBS News "60 Minutes" journalist who covered the Maybrick Diary for U.S. TV in 1993. For that piece, he interviewed author Shirley Harrison, Mike and Anne Barrett, and filmed inside Battlecrease House on Riversdale Road, the former mansion of the James and Florence Maybrick. Also he won an award for his report that helped to reopen the case of Emmet Till, the black boy killed in the south in 1955.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6139030.stm

    http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/fe...t_Bradley.html

    Chris
    Chris.. Whats is Jack Palances connection to the Ripper ? ...




    I have a secret about the Yorkshire Ripper by der way

  2. #17
    Senior Member ChrisGeorge's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by FKoE View Post
    Chris.. Whats is Jack Palances connection to the Ripper ? ...


    I have a secret about the Yorkshire Ripper by der way
    Hi FKoE

    I would be interested to hear your secret about the Yorkshire Ripper anytime you care to reveal it.

    Palance's connection to the Jack the Ripper is that besides making a career playing baddies, notably in the classic film "Shane", he played the Ripper in the 1953 film "Man in the Attic" based on Marie Belloc Lowndes' novel, The Lodger.

    Chris
    Christopher T. George
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  3. #18
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    The Yorkshire ripper contributed to the album cover of a 'ceramic hobs' album cover... The painting was of 'Shergar'


    So Jack just played a role, called 'the ripper', but other than that there is little connection, to the ripper ?

  4. #19
    Senior Member ChrisGeorge's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by FKoE View Post
    The Yorkshire ripper contributed to the album cover of a 'ceramic hobs' album cover... The painting was of 'Shergar'


    So Jack just played a role, called 'the ripper', but other than that there is little connection, to the ripper ?
    Thanks for that titbit about the Yorkshire Ripper. Very intersesting. Yes we're doing the obit on Palance because he played the Ripper in that 1953 film but also because he was notable for a career of playing bad guys.

    Chris
    Christopher T. George
    Editor, Ripperologist
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  5. #20
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    I never told you yeah ?

    The album is available from pumf.net

  6. #21

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    Jack the Ripper young and 'frighteningly normal'From correspondents in London

    November 21, 2006 04:35am
    Article from: Agence France-PresseFont size: + -
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    JACK the Ripper was short, stocky and about 30 years old - "frighteningly normal" - according to a profile of the notorious Victorian-era killer published today using state-of-the-art technology.

    In the profile unveiled in British newspapers, the man who strangled and butchered five London prostitutes looks probably very different from the man authorities were searching for at the time, police said.

    Laura Richards, head of analysis for the Metropolitan Police's Violent Crime Command, has drawn up what is believed to be the most accurate portrait of the murderer after analyzing evidence from the case using modern police techniques.

    She said that the evidence from 118 years ago shows that the ripper was between 25 and 35 years old, had a stocky build, and stood between five feet five inches and five feet seven inches tall.

    The evidence can also likely locate where he lived.

    "For the first time, we are able to understand the kind of person Jack the Ripper was," said Ms Richards, who in the past has studied serial killer Fred West and Ian Huntley, who murdered two girls.

    "We can name the street where he probably lived and we can see what he looked like; and we can explain, finally, why this killer eluded justice," Ms Richards said.

    Working alongside former Metropolitan Police commander John Grieve, she assembled experts like pathologists, historians and a geographical profiler to understand why the case was never solved and to see whether it still could be.

    "This is further than anyone else has got. It would have been enough for coppers to get out and start knocking on doors ... they would have got him," Commander Grieve said.

    Drawing on modern experience, the experts studied his legend, analyzed the Ripper's crimes and retraced his steps while examining 13 different witness statements taken at the time of the killings.

    The details produced a picture of someone who was "perfectly sane, frighteningly normal, and yet capable of extraordinary cruelty", Ms Richards said.

    Commander Grieve said: "It's a popular misconception that nobody ever saw the murderer, that he just vanished into the fog of London. Well that's just not right. There were witnesses at the time who were highly thought of by the police.

    "If we were doing this investigation today, we could pool together all these descriptions and the kind of face that the police were clearly looking for. You could come up with a composite and you can go beyond just a full face, you can get something that really helps the police to look for suspects."

    In January this year, Jack the Ripper was voted Britain's most hated individual in a BBC poll, which described him as the forerunner of modern serial killers.

  7. #22
    Senior Member shytalk's Avatar
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    ChrisGeorge, The Brit TV documentary,"Revealed-Jack the Ripper", is available for download on UKnova.
    You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
    Winston Churchill

  8. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by shytalk View Post
    ChrisGeorge, The Brit TV documentary,"Revealed-Jack the Ripper", is available for download on UKnova.
    Hi shy

    Thanks for this information, shy.

    I was asked over on the Merseyside & History Forum who Jack the Ripper was, so below is my answer which also talks about the Channel 5 documentary.

    No strong thoughts about who the Ripper might have been. The e-fit mugshot of the Ripper that Scotland Yard developed for the Channel 5 documentary that aired on Tuesday, which most people seem to think matches the late Freddie Mercury of Queen (!), does correspond to witness statements that describe a young moustachioed young man about five foot six or seven, perhaps wearing a sailor's cap with a peak. Since those witness statements have been known for 118 years, except for coming up with the face they thus have not produced anything new. FBI profilers in 1888 said it was probably a local man and the Yard now says the same thing. This is a view I agee with as well, and I rather think the Ripper may have been a nobody and we will never know for sure who the killer was. Liverpudlian James Maybrick is only in the frame because of the hoax Diary.

    Chris
    Christopher T. George
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  9. #24

    Default Jack

    I lost all respect for the Casebook.org site when someone suggested that Mary Jane Kelly might have been killed by - wait for it - A WEREWOLF!!!!!

    Gave me real fits .

    I don't recognise "Ripperology" and more than I would recognise "Scientology". A Ripperologist is just a name for someone who doesn't know who Jack was. I prefer 'Crime Historian', exemplified by masters like Vincent Burke, who research the facts of a crime, but "Ripperology"? May as well have Zodiacology and Zodiacologists if youre investigating the Zodiac murders. 'Are you a Black Dahliast? A Thames Torsologist?'

  10. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by chazza View Post
    I lost all respect for the Casebook.org site when someone suggested that Mary Jane Kelly might have been killed by - wait for it - A WEREWOLF!!!!!

    Gave me real fits .

    I don't recognise "Ripperology" and more than I would recognise "Scientology". A Ripperologist is just a name for someone who doesn't know who Jack was. I prefer 'Crime Historian', exemplified by masters like Vincent Burke, who research the facts of a crime, but "Ripperology"? May as well have Zodiacology and Zodiacologists if youre investigating the Zodiac murders. 'Are you a Black Dahliast? A Thames Torsologist?'
    Hello Chazza

    Your post is rather on the sneering side. The person who said that about Mary Jane Kelly on Casebook.org -- and I missed the post -- doesn't speak for the site much as you don't speak for Yo Liverpool. I understand from Stephen Ryder, the owner of Casebook.org, that as of this morning the site has 1,627 members. So that was an opinion of one out of 1,627. The best of Ripperologists, such as Stewart P. Evans, Paul Begg, and Philip Sugden, do exactly what you say should be done and "research the facts of a crime" -- so stop carping over the name.

    Chris
    Christopher T. George
    Editor, Ripperologist
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  11. #26
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    Default "Jack the Ripper’s Liverpool" by Christopher T. George

    The following essay originally appeared in Ripperologist magazine in August 2003 at the time of the Jack the Ripper convention held that month at the Britannia Adelphi Hotel.

    Jack the Ripper’s Liverpool
    By Christopher T. George

    Despite the popular success of the books by Shirley Harrison and Paul Feldman on the Maybrick ‘Diary’ that purports to be the ‘confessions’ of Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick, most experts on the case believe the document is not the real bill, although whether a fairly recent post-1988 forgery or one done closer to Maybrick’s demise in May 1889 is uncertain. If James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper, and speaking as a Liverpudlian I feel it unlikely, he was certainly the center of a real-life murder drama, one of the cause celebres of the nineteenth century. For, James’s Alabama-born wife Florence, 26 years his junior, was arrested and charged with poisoning him with arsenic. Her subsequent conviction of the supposed crime caused sonic booms on both sides of the Atlantic as British and American society reeled from the news. However, Maybrick is only one of a number of named suspects who had important ties to Liverpool. Interestingly, the judge at Mrs. Maybrick’s trial, Justice Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was himself the father of an alleged suspect, poet J K Stephen.

    Dr. Tumblety Comes to Liverpool

    One major suspect, Irish-American quack Dr. Francis Tumblety, born in Dublin in 1830 but raised in Rochester, New York, was a frequent visitor to the city. He had a sister, Bridget Brady, who lived in nearby Widnes, east of Liverpool. Mrs. Brady, was one of a number of relatives of Tumblety’s who received money under the terms of a will signed a month before his 28 May 1903 death in St. Louis.




    Dr. Francis Tumblety

    Tumblety is the most important suspect named in the last 15 years. He deserves special attention because he is one of the rare handful of suspects named in materials left by senior police officials familiar with the case. Specifically, Chief Inspector John George Littlechild in a letter of 1913 to George R. Sims, mentions Tumblety as a ‘very likely’ suspect. It was the purchase of this letter by Stewart Evans from rare books dealer Eric Barton that led to Stewart’s work on Tumblety and his 1995 book, written with Paul Gainey, The Lodger, later republished as Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer.

    Much is known about Tumblety, about his career as an ‘Indian Herb Doctor’ and about his scrapes with the law, usually for homosexual activity, but also, in Canada in 1858 for performing an abortion in Quebec, and for the suspicious death of a man named Portmore two years later in St. John’s, New Brunswick. He was also arrested after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 and incarcerated in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC. This arrest though was seemingly a case of mistaken identity—the authorities mistook him for a Confederate agent named Dr. Blackburn, the pseudonym of ‘Blackburn’ being one of the good doctor’s aliases.

    When you think of a doctor, you might think this implies that the person is used to doing surgical operations. In fact, Tumblety was a pills and potions man, not a cutter-upper of patients. When he performed an abortion, he used pills known as abortifacients. Among the testimonies to the good work he supposedly did and that he published on a regular basis in the press is the testimony of a Mr. King of Washington, DC. In a newspaper ad of 1862, King is cited as a man from whom Tumblety removed ‘a large tumor of a cancerous nature . . . from his head without resorting to the barbarous practice of cutting with a knife.’

    While Tumblety lived in Washington in the 1860’s he is said to possessed a collection of women’s uteruses in jars. However, it is likely that as with other shady practitioners, he actually bought this collection as ‘window dressing’ for his trade, rather than that he cut them out himself.

    Tumblety was tall, around five foot eleven, aged 58 about the time of the murders, and gay. Some commentators on the Whitechapel murders have questioned whether a homosexual man would target women, and that the sightings of men seen with the victims before their demise appear to be of younger and shorter men than Tumblety. He does also seem to have been a character who attracted attention. Possibly, as many believe, Jack was quite the opposite—a nondescript individual. Dr. Tumblety, though, for all the reservations that commentators on the case have against him as a suspect, is a most interesting character and a genuine prospect for Jack in that he was mentioned as a leading suspect by Littlechild, a senior Scotland Yard police official.

    Frederick Douglass, the great African American abolitionist recalled encountering Tumblety on a Liverpool street in a letter of 10 June 1887 to Amy Post—

    I met a man in the street a day or two ago—who introduced himself to me as Dr. Tomblety [sic]. . . . He told me much about himself in a very brief space, for he seemed to have more tongue than ears. I could not get a word in anywhere and you know I am too much in love with my own voice to like being suppressed and overtalked in that way, but enough of Dr. Tomblety. He seemed a good fellow after all.

    Fourteen years earlier, in late 1874, Tumblety had arrived in Liverpool and tried to set up a practice, and he was attacked in the Liverpool press. His friend and lover, writer Sir Henry Hall Caine, yet to become famous himself, helped write a pamphlet for the good doctor to help defend his reputation and named among other fictitious patrons none other than four-time prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. After the hostile reception in Liverpool, the restless doctor upped stakes and moved south to try his luck in London.

    Other ‘Liverpool Suspects’

    Gladstone, who was born on Rodney Street in Liverpool in 1809, himself has been named as a possible suspect—and the ‘Gladstone bag’ is a suspected receptacle for Jack to carry knives and organs. The great leader of the Liberal party had a penchant for wandering the streets at night to try to reform fallen women, though usually in the West End, not the East End. Did he take his reforming efforts a stage further? In 1888, as leader of her Majesty’s loyal opposition, and aged 79 at the time, he would seem to make an unlikely Ripper suspect. Supporters of the Gladstone-as-Ripper theory point to the fact that he remained a robust man even in old age, and could still chop wood on his Hawarden estate outside of Chester. But was he handy with a knife as well as an axe?

    Frederick Bailey Deeming, born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, across the Mersey from Liverpool in 1853, and thus aged 35 in 1888, was a brute who murdered his wife Marie and four small children in 1891, and buried under the floorboards of his house, Dinham Villa, at Rainhill, near Liverpool. His career of crime ended several months after he murdered his second wife Emily by slitting her throat and fracturing her skull on 24 December 1891 and buried her under the hearthstone of their home in Victoria, Australia. Deeming was finally caught in Perth, Western Australia, on 11 March 1892 masquerading as ‘Baron Swanston.’



    Deeming in the Illustrated Police News, 16 April 1892

    Deeming seems more of a domestic murderer than a serial killer of strangers, but who knows? He was also a sailor, and Colin Wilson and Robin Odell have written that evidence seems to suggest that Deeming was in South Africa at the time of the Whitechapel murders.

    The St. Louis Republican of 8 April 1890 noted:

    Samuel Mercier of Rain Hill, who was well acquainted with Deeming, as saying, ‘Deeming represented himself to me to be a military man, and said he had fourteen scars on him.’ He went on to talk very glibly as to hand-to-hand encounters which he had gone through as inspector in the army. He would not call himself a soldier altogether, although he said that he ‘had been under fire.’ Deeming showed me various weapons, including swords, knives, spears and an assegai which he said he had got from Zululand. He particularly dwelt on a very handsome sword which was adorned with silver and a band of gold, and which he said he had fought two hours for. He next showed me a beautiful knife with a sheath made of woven silver wire, and said it had belonged to Cetewayo.

    Indeed, Deeming appears to have had a fascination with edged weapons. The same newspaper reported,

    ‘In nearly every place that Deeming has been he has shown a really valuable collection of weapons of various kinds. At the inquest there were produced a battle-axe and a knife which Surgeon Mullins thought might have inflicted the wounds that killed the last Mrs. Deeming.’

    The dizzying array of odd weapons associated with the man would seem to be another reason to think that he was not the East End murderer, if we grant that the Ripper’s murder weapon appears to have been almost certainly exclusively a long and sharp knife, perhaps a surgical knife.

    Deeming, who met his deserved destiny with the executioner in Melbourne on 23 May 1892 appears to have been a thoroughly bad character, a bigamist, and a brutal murderer, but he was probably not Jack the Ripper.

    James Kelly, an unbalanced upholsterer, born in Preston, and brought up in Everton, Liverpool, stabbed his wife Sarah Ann in the throat with a knife in 1883 at 21 Cottage Lane, Clerkenwell, London. She lingered a few days then died. He was sentenced to be hung, then reprieved, and incarcerated in Broadmoor. He escaped in January 1888 and remained at large until 1927. According to the late author James Tully, makes a viable suspect with his ties to the East End of London and his violent history. Kelly, who spent time in Texas before returning to England, was apprehended in Birkenhead, and sent back to the asylum. Do the records on him, said to be under seal until 2030, hold the information that he was Jack the Ripper as Tully theorized? The tool shown in Tully’s book of the upholsterer’s tool known as a ‘ripping knife’ almost certainly would not fit the bill for the mutilations done by the Whitechapel murderer and even given his violent history there appears to be nothing to suggest he was a serial murderer.

    Sailor Jack?

    Given Liverpool’s importance in 1888 as a port, it is probable that most other suspects, whether named or not, passed through the port. Consider for example if Saucy Jacky was an unnamed and thus likely unknowable ‘Jolly Jack Tar sailor’, that the chances are good that he knew Liverpool well.

    Carrie Brown, a woman who, by some reports, was born as Caroline Montgomery in Liverpool in 1832, and a murder victim in New York, in late April 1891, was possibly killed by a sailor of the name of Arbie La Bruckman, whom researcher Michael Conlon has pointed out was also arrested at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Was La Bruckman Jack the Ripper?

    I am personally interested in a couple of sailor suspects. Or shall we say, as the police do, persons of interest. One of the men is John Anderson, a sailor who died in Chile in 1895 and reportedly confessed that he was the Ripper on his deathbed. The case of Anderson is reported in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of 1896, which was reprinted by Nick Warren in Ripperana a few years ago. Warren noted that the description of Anderson by shipmate James Brame of a red-haired man with a pitted face could match the description of the carroty haired man with Mary Jane Kelly on her last night. Anderson is said to have taken lodgings in and committed the murders after he was robbed by a prostitute. He is said to have worked with an accomplice who had a clean coat for him after each murder. The ship on which Brame and Anderson were on when the suspect died was the Annie Speer, thought to be a Liverpool registry vessel.



    The Dock Road, Liverpool, 1875, as depicted by Atkinson Grimshaw

    The other one-time sailor who interests me is Richard Brown, a man who committed suicide just after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, a man with a curious and somewhat mysterious life history. Supposedly from Adelaide, Australia, Brown was a Jew who was in succession a sailor, a soldier, and a Metropolitan Police constable. He was dismissed from the police on 13 November 1888 and committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth in Hyde Park three days later.

    City of Mysteries

    Of course, Liverpool itself is rich in mysteries as writers such as Richard Whittington-Egan and Tom Slemen have shown. ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’ a being with a fiery headdress who breathed blue flame and who is said to have been able to leap over buildings and walls is said to have been last seen in Liverpool’s William Henry Street in 1904. Excited newspaper reports, such as that in the News of the World, 25 September 1904, stated that the ‘man’ was able to leap in excess of 25 feet (7.5 metres) and who eventually leapt over the houses and vanished. But was the last sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack only a much exaggerated account of a demented man in his nightshirt loose on a city roof as Paul Begg suggested in his editorial in the July 2003 issue of Ripperologist?

    ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’ was reportedly seen on numerous occasions throughout the British Isles, as early as the 1830’s, over a period that curiously spanned the whole of the reign of Queen Victoria. Was the phenomenon a product of people’s overactive imagination, or as Paul suggested, a prank by a notorious nobleman named Henry de la Poer Beresford, the 3rd Marquess of Waterford (1811–1859)? And how much did ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’ have to do with the naming of Jack the Ripper, a name for the Whitechapel murderer that came either, depending who you believe, from the killer himself or, if the Sir Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard was correct, ‘an enterprising London journalist’ or possibly some unknown letter hoaxer.

    The Liverpool Jack the Ripper Letters

    A number of the Jack the Ripper letters were sent from Liverpool, but not more so than from elsewhere. Among the 200 plus letters noted by Evans and Skinner in Jack the Ripper Letters from Hell, around five were identifiably posted in Liverpool, and the postmarks of the other letters range from London to Scotland, and as far abroad as Ireland and Philadelphia. Shirley Harrison in her book on The Diary of Jack the Ripper shows the image of a Jack the Ripper letter written from London and penned on a newspaper that happens to have the name, ‘Liverpool’ next to the person’s script writing, which Shirley suggests could hardly be a coincidence. To me, the Diary seems a pastiche of the Ripper letters, and it is even signed ‘Yours truly, Jack the Ripper’ in emulation, it would seem, of the original ‘Dear Boss’ letters. Noticeably, however, James Maybrick’s known handwriting does not match the handwriting in the Diary nor that of the Ripper letter cited by Shirley.

    Victorian Remnants

    Liverpool as James Maybrick or Gladstone would have known it has largely been swept away as it fell victim to German bombs and the wrecking ball of progress and renewal. But there are still remnants: for example, St. George’s Hall in Lime Street, where Florie was convicted in September 1889 of murdering James, Gladstone’s birthplace on Rodney Street, the Maybrick’s mansion at 7 Riversdale Road, Aigburth. The Liverpool Exchange that Maybrick would have known was one of the major victims of the blitz. Luckily, the adjacent Town Hall, dating from 1754, survived the German onslaught and an attempt by rioting sailors to damage it with cannon fire at the end of the eighteenth century.

    An important piece of sculpture dating from 1812 is still extant in the quadrangle behind the Town Hall and would have been familiar to Victorians of 1888 as they walked under the ornate baroque façade of the Exchange. It is Nelson’s monument, a dramatic and morose piece of sculpture. In his early novel, Redburn: His First Voyage, American novelist Herman Melville described the monument as ‘a group of statuary in bronze, elevated upon a marble pedestal and basement, representing Lord Nelson expiring in the arms of Victory. One foot rests on a rolling foe, and the other on a cannon. Victory is dropping a wreath on the dying admiral’s brow; while Death, under the similitude of a hideous skeleton, is insinuating his bony hand under the hero’s robe, and groping after his heart. A very striking design, and true to the imagination; I never could look at Death without a shudder.’ A fitting design for the doomed Maybrick to ponder as he skipped by for his daily pick-me-up of arsenic!

    ‘Pestilent lanes and alleys. . .’

    Liverpool in the nineteenth century was a rough sailors’ town, and death was commonplace. In Redburn, Melville provided a graphic description of the Dead House in the crypt of the parish church of St. Nicholas by Princes Dock:

    In the basement of the church is a Dead House, . . . where the bodies of the drowned are exposed until claimed by their friends, or till buried at the public charge. From the multitudes employed about the shipping, this dead-house has always more or less occupants. Whenever I passed up Chapel-street, I used to see a crowd gazing through the grim iron grating of the door, upon the faces of the drowned within. And once, when the door was opened, I saw a sailor stretched out, stark and stiff, with the sleeve of his frock rolled up, and showing his name and date of birth tattooed upon his arm. It was a sight full of suggestions; he seemed his own headstone.

    Melville’s Redburn provides heartbreaking descriptions of the poverty he observed in the lowest areas of Liverpool, very reminiscent of the East End of London:

    The pestilent lanes and alleys which, in their vocabulary, go by the names of Rotten-row, Gibraltar-place, and Booble-alley, are putrid with vice and crime; to which, perhaps, the round globe does not furnish a parallel. The sooty and begrimed bricks of the very houses have a reeking, Sodomlike, and murderous look; and well may the shroud of coal-smoke, which hangs over this part of the town, more than any other, attempt to hide the enormities here practiced. These are the haunts from which sailors sometimes disappear forever; or issue in the morning, robbed naked, from the broken doorways. These are the haunts in which cursing, gambling, pickpocketing, and common iniquities, are virtues too lofty for the infected gorgons and hydras to practice. Propriety forbids that I should enter into details; but kidnappers, burkers, and resurrectionists are almost saints and angels to them. They seem leagued together, a company of miscreant misanthropes, bent upon doing all the malice to mankind in their power. With sulphur and brimstone they ought to be burned out of their arches like vermin.

    Reflecting on Whitechapel the murders and the poverty in which they occurred, the one of Liverpool’s leading clergymen called for his fellow clergymen to address the needs of the poor:

    The Bishop of Liverpool on Thursday night, . . . said he knew the East London intimately, and clergymen in that district could quite understand such tragedies as had horrified the Christian world taking place. Men were there living little better than beasts, and the state of that district illustrated the opinion of an old divine, that if the man was left to himself he was half devil, half beast. Whilst such tragedies aroused people, it brought them to a sense of what should be done for the neglected classes, so that no room and no house should be left unvisited by the clergy.

    Of course, Liverpool’s rollicking and seedy ‘Sailortown,’ crawling with sailors on shore leave, just like London’s East End had its share of prostitutes or ‘unfortunates’ willing to cater to their needs, and Lime Street was notorious for them. The sea shanty ‘Maggie May’ — no, not the more recent Rod Stewart song, an older traditional song, a snatch of which the Beatles sang on their ‘Let It Be’ album—goes,

    Oh, Maggie, Maggie May, they have taken her away,
    To walk upon Van Diemen's cruel shore,
    She robbed so many sailors, and dosed so many whalers,
    And she'll never roam down Lime Street any more.


    With prostitutes such as Maggie May readily available why would a Liverpool man, be he James Maybrick or whomever, need to go to London to murder East End prostitutes, when he had a ready supply to hand? This is one reason why to me, as a Liverpudlian, the Maybrick candidacy seems implausible, plus the rather twisted idea that he would travel 200 miles to slaughter prostitutes to get revenge on his unfaithful wife. No, to me, Maybrick has been more recently ‘fitted up’ as the murderer by someone who thought that as a man famous but not not too famous, he could have been Jack, but who knew that to be the Ripper, he had to travel to London, as if the only way to get his name up in lights was to have him go to the East End.

    From Liverpool’s thoroughfare named ‘Whitechapel’ to London’s ‘Whitechapel’ neighborhood. Hmmm…. It does seem, incidentally, as if Whitechapel, Liverpool, got its name in the late eighteenth century as one of a number of Liverpool streets that were named for London streets or locales, other examples being Cheapside, Islington, Paradise Street, Fleet Street, and Duke Street. On the 1764 map of Liverpool by John Eyes prepared for Lord Mayor John Tarleton, the thoroughfare that was later to be known as ‘Whitechapel’ is called Frogg Lane.

    A Plague of Flies

    On a lighter note, Paul Begg kindly pointed me to an article that might give some motive for someone wanting to get out of Liverpool to commit the crimes at this time. The Star of 25 September 1888 reported

    Within the past few days Liverpool has been visited by swarms of diminutive flies. In the busy streets of the city the little pests are met with as well as in the suburbs, causing much inconvenience to pedestrians. The flies are of the midge type, with a tiny black body and comparatively large wings. So numerous have they been, and so annoying to persons walking along that they have become a topic of general conversation. In Cheshire the flies have appeared in myriads, causing the same inconvenience.

    But what about a month earlier—presumably the flies were a new phenomenon in Liverpool at the end of September, or else the newspaper might have mentioned the same thing happened in August. Of course, the murders of Tabram and Nichols took place 7 August and 31 August, respectively, and the Annie Chapman murder on 8 September.

    Ripper Sightings in Liverpool?

    Just as with the sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack in Liverpool that I mentioned earlier, there were reports of people seeing Jack the Ripper in the city, as reported in the Weekly Herald of 19 October 1888—

    On Wednesday evening [a] young lady in question was walking along Shiel Road, Liverpool, not far from Shiel Park, when she was stopped by an elderly woman aged about 60, who, in an agitated and excited manner, urged her most earnestly not to go into the park. She explained that a few minutes previously she had been resting on one of the seats in the park when she was acosted by a respectable-looking man dressed in a black coat, light trousers, and a soft felt hat, who inquired if she knew if there were any loose women about the neighbourhood, and immediately afterwards he produced a knife with a long thin blade, and stated that he intended to kill as many women in Liverpool as in London, adding that he would send the ears of the first victim to the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post. The old woman, who was trembling violently as she related this story, stated that she was so terribly frightened that she hardly knew how she got away from this man. She could not see anything of either a policeman or a park keeper, but in addition to warning the young lady she appears to have mentioned the matter to some workmen whom she met afterwards in Shiel Road.

    The Manchester Guardian of 16 October noted—

    The story that the London murderer has been seen in Shiel Park, Liverpool, has created the utmost sensation in the neighbourhood. An extra number of police and detectives have been in the locality during the past few days, but nothing has been seen of the man who frightened the woman in the park. Many women residing in the streets adjacent to the park, it is alleged, are afraid to leave their houses after dusk. A number of low-class women in Liverpool have armed themselves with knives. One woman, who was recently arrested by the police, and in whose possession was a large knife, stated that it was for "Jack the Ripper." Several others declare that they have been accosted at the docks by a mysterious-looking man, and have fled from him in terror.

    Was this man Jack the Ripper, or just an unbalanced man, or perhaps a prankster? The Weekly Herald continued—

    The steamers leaving Liverpool for American and other ports are now being carefully watched by the police, and the passengers are closely scrutinised by detectives, there being an idea that the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders may endeavour to make his escape via Liverpool.
    What is the truth about Liverpool’s connections with the murder? Could Jack have been a Liverpudlian, someone with family ties to the Liverpool area, or at least someone who passed through the city at one time or another? Just as with so many questions about the case, the answers are unknown.

    A Postscript

    Liverpool is of course famous for two famous football teams, Liverpool F.C. and Everton F.C. At Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, founded in 1892, the most famous stand is called the Spion Kop, named after the 24 January 1900 battle in the Boer War. It was at this battle that the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time of the Whitechapel murders, General Sir Charles Warren, was blamed for losing in a significant defeat for the British. In fact, the legend is that he spent the time of the battle in his bath!

    London, April 17. The despatches which passed between Sir Redvers Bullers and his officers and Lord Roberts regarding the sensational British reverse at Spion Kop were published to-day. General Buller in his report condemns General Warren. He says:

    “We lost our chance because of Warren’s slowness. I ought to have assumed command myself.”

    The despatches of other officers also given indicate that matters at the battle were in a hopeless muddle. The publication of the reports is likely to cause renewed disputes and incriminations.


    Naugatuck (Connecticut) Daily News, 17 April 1902

    So in a way the same man who was 'responsible' in a way for not catching Jack the Ripper, could be held responsible for the British defeat at Spion Kop.


    Acknowledgements

    My thanks to Paul Begg, Claudia Oliver, Chris Scott, Mark Andrew Pardoe, Andrew Peake, and Stewart P. Evans. An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the Jack the Ripper conference at the Britannia Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool on 16 August 2003.

    Sources

    ‘Additional Testimonials. A Few of the Many Testimonials from the Citizens of Washington to Dr. Tumblety, the Indian Herb Doctor.’ Washington Star, 21 April 1862

    Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner. The Jack the Ripper A to Z. London: Headline Books, 1998

    ‘Called a “Demon.” The Name by which Deeming Was Known. . .’ St. Louis Republican, 8 April 1890

    Frederick Douglass to Amy Post, 10 June 1887, University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Project http://www.lib.rochester.edu/rbk/dou...llentr77.stm#1

    ‘East London as Described. . . (The Bishop of Liverpool on Thursday night,. . . addressing the Curates’ Society, . . .).’ East London Observer, 13 October 1888

    Stewart P. Evans and Paul Gainey. Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer. New York: Kodansha, 1998.

    Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner. Jack the Ripper Letters from Hell. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2001

    John Godl, ‘The Life and Crimes of Frederick Bailey Deeming.’ Internet article at http://casebook.org/dissertations/dst-deeming.html

    Alan Hunt, 'Sir Charles Warren in Africa,' originally in The Journal of the Whitechapel Society. http://www.casebook.org/dissertation...ninafrica.html

    Shirley Harrison. The Diary of Jack the Ripper. New York: Hyperion, 1993

    Lyrics to ‘Maggie May’ in ‘Across the Western Ocean: Songs from the Era of the North Atlantic Sailing Packets’ by John Roberts and Tony Barrand. Swallowtail Records., ST-03, CD 2000 (First published on LP, 1973, cassette 1994,). See http://www.sover.net/~barrand/rgh/we...l#MAGGIE%20MAY

    Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage. New York: Penguin, 1976

    ‘A Plague of Flies at Liverpool.’ The Star, 25 September 1888

    ‘Strange Occurrence in Liverpool.’ Weekly Herald, 19 October 1888

    James Tully, Prisoner 1167: The Madman Who Was Jack the Ripper. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998

    ‘The Whitechapel Murders.’ Manchester Guardian, 16 October 1888

    Colin Wilson and Robin Odell. Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict. London: Bantam Press, 1987
    Christopher T. George
    Editor, Ripperologist
    Editor, Loch Raven Review
    http://christophertgeorge.blogspot.com/
    Chris on Flickr and on MySpace

  12. #27
    Senior Member ChrisGeorge's Avatar
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    Hi all

    A colleague, Thomas Schachner, who runs a German language site on Jack the Ripper, posted the following URL from his site with excellent night time shots of sites in London's East End associated with the Ripper crimes. I am sure Victorian Liverpool looked much the same.

    Quote Originally Posted by Thomas Schachner
    hello everybody,

    our "autumn-special-2006" is online - nightshots of the east end.

    for that section i completely changed the layout of our site...
    have fun...and enjoy!

    http://www.jacktheripper.de/schaupla...achtaufnahmen/


    take care
    thomas.
    (editor www.jacktheripper.de)
    Also while I am on the topic, check out the site for my Ripper musical:

    http://www.jack-themusical.com/

    and another site which has samples from the music from a recent American production of the show:

    http://cdbaby.com/cd/asu3

    All my best

    Chris
    Christopher T. George
    Editor, Ripperologist
    Editor, Loch Raven Review
    http://christophertgeorge.blogspot.com/
    Chris on Flickr and on MySpace

  13. #28
    Maria Reiche
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    Quote Originally Posted by victorialush View Post
    Who was Spring Heeled Jack? I remember reading about this years ago, apparently he jumped from roof to roof in Everton Valley.*googles*
    Everton Valley? Hasn't it been established that the best Mary Jane Kelly candidate hailed from Liverpool and lived at 8 Victoria St., Everton according to the 1871 England Census? Father John...brother Henry...mother of famous Lancashire singer Christine Wilson...had a son in South London in the 1880s and then disappeared...connected with servants of the Earls of Carnarvon--pretty good match. Only problem is she would have been 33....although she would have been 16 when she was living on Victoria and working as a servant.
    On question though: Is there a Victoria St. actually in Everton because the only Victoria St. I can find is the one downtown, a block from Whitechapel....

    All the Best
    M Reiche
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  14. #29
    theninesisters
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    Spring Heeled Jack once jumped on to the spire of SFX RC Church in Salisbury Street, Everton. Been up there but couldn't find any marks myself!

  15. #30
    Senior Member ChrisGeorge's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Maria Reiche View Post
    Everton Valley? Hasn't it been established that the best Mary Jane Kelly candidate hailed from Liverpool and lived at 8 Victoria St., Everton according to the 1871 England Census? Father John...brother Henry...mother of famous Lancashire singer Christine Wilson...had a son in South London in the 1880s and then disappeared...connected with servants of the Earls of Carnarvon--pretty good match. Only problem is she would have been 33....although she would have been 16 when she was living on Victoria and working as a servant.
    On question though: Is there a Victoria St. actually in Everton because the only Victoria St. I can find is the one downtown, a block from Whitechapel....

    All the Best
    M Reiche
    Hello Maria

    Great to hear from you. I have to tell you that the background and family of Mary Jane Kelly remains totally undecided. There are many candidates if you follow the threads on Mary Jane Kelly at "Casebook: Jack the Ripper" with researchers coming up with many possibilities for her birthplace and family. I have no reason to believe the Everton family of Kelly was that of victim Mary Jane Kelly, or is a better candidate than others that have been mentioned elsewhere in the British Isles. Of course, her name is a very common one. Although she is undoubtedly the most famous victim of Jack the Ripper she is the one about whom the least is known in terms of her genealogy and origins.

    Best regards

    Chris George
    Christopher T. George
    Editor, Ripperologist
    Editor, Loch Raven Review
    http://christophertgeorge.blogspot.com/
    Chris on Flickr and on MySpace

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