This Scottish doctor left a trail of bloody mishaps. He became an abortionist. He poisoned more than eight victims, mostly women from Chicago, Canada and London. Finally charged with the slaying of prostitute Matilda Clover, he was sentenced to hang on Nov. 15, 1892. It’s said that as the noose was tightening the life out of him, his last phrase uttered was: “I am Jack the…” At the time, many believed this was true. It was later learned that he’d been sitting in an Illinois prison from 1881 to 1891 when the Whitechapel murders were committed. Cream’s lawyer, Marshall Hall, wrote in his biography that he believed Cream had a double, posing under the same name. One committed the Ripper deeds while the other sat in jail…
Sherlock Holmes scribe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle argued that the killer could easily have been a woman, as she could have wandered around with bloodstained clothing posing as a midwife. Mary Pearcy was convicted and hanged on Dec. 23, 1890, for the murder of Phoebe Hogg, her lover’s wife, and a baby. When the police searched Pearcy’s blood-stained house, she is said to have claimed she was killing mice, repeating over and over “Killing mice, killing mice, killing mice!” While many believe she could have been a Jack The Ripper suspect, evidence is scare, although a 2006 DNA study by an Australian scientist of licked stamps on the envelopes sent by Ripper to the police concludes that the killer could be female. (The Independent).
Marie Belloc Lowndes published a story in McClure’s magazine in 1911 entitled “The Lodger,” about an old couple who rented their upstairs room to a bible-thumping stranger who disappeared ’til the wee hours of morning every night. During the same period a murderer known as “The Avenger” was murdering prostitutes. This story appears to be grounded in fact. In 1889, famous alienist (old-fashioned term for psychologist) Forbes Winslow investigated a homeowner who had rented his upstairs room to a Canadian named G. Wentworth Bell Smith in 1888 London. Smith would alternate between rambling bible verses and condemnation of street walkers, and he would disappear every night until 4 a.m.
British royal Prince Albert Victor, born in 1864, is at the center of many different theories claiming he’s Jack The Ripper. It wasn’t until the famous casebook, “Jack the Ripper A to Z” was published that the allegations about the prince were exposed. The book points to Dr. Thomas Stowell’s 1970 article, alleges the prince was suffering from syphilis contracted by a prostitute, causing him to go insane. It sent him on a murderous rampage in London. It was covered up by the royal family. Prince Albert Victor was Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the oldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and grandson of the reigning British Queen Victoria. Another theory goes that he impregnated a shop girl named Mary Crook, and in order to keep this scandalous affair quiet, he had Crook institutionalized, and then employed his physician, Dr. Gull, to lure other women who knew about the affair — like Mary Kelly — into his royal carriage to murder them.
Source: Crime Library.
A fish porter at Bilingsgate Market near Whitechapel with his three brothers, Joseph Barnett fell into a relationship with Ripper’s final victim, prostitute Mary Jane Kelly. Her mutilated body was found at their home at 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, on Nov. 9, 1888. Writer Bruce Paley published the book, “Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth” in 1995, where he broke down the Barnett theory: wanting to provide a better life for Kelly off the streets, Barnett failed when he was fired from his fish porter job, and Kelly went back to being a prostitute. Enraged, he went on a killing spree of other street doves in order to scare Kelly, and when this didn’t work, offed her in a fit of rage at their home. Multiple witness descriptions of Jack the Ripper fit the profile of Barnett.
Bury came to London in 1887 after quitting his job as a horse butcher and married Ellen, an employee at a local brothel. He allegedly attacked various women on the street. When he contracted syphilis from one of the street hookers he is said to have frequented in 1888, Bury went mad and killed his wife, strangling her with a rope and slicing out her insides. When the police ransacked his house, they found the words “Jack the Ripper is in this sellar (sic)” scrawled with chalk on the wall. He was hanged in Dundee, Scotland on April 24, 1889 — the last person ever to be hanged in that city.
First introduced in Donald McCormick’s 1962 book, “The Identity of Jack the Ripper,” Ostrog was referred to as a “mad Russian doctor,” even when he was posing as a Polish nobleman. Although nobody knows much about him, even when he died, it appears Ostrog was in and out of English jails from 1863 to 1904 for stealing things like microscopes, watches, and a metal tankard. Known for aggression towards women and a penchant for carrying surgical knives around on his person, many theorists argue that Ostrog was none the less too old, and his crimes, too petty and consequential to actually commit ripper-style murders, although his whereabouts were unknown to police around the time of the Whitechapel killings.
Crime fiction novelist Patricia Cornwell was accused of being obsessed with proving that great British painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Spending excessively on forensic tests and Sickert canvases, Cornwell pinpointed Sickert’s painting series of a Camden Town murder of a prostitute as hauntingly similar to autopsy photos taken of Ripper victims, including the exact positioning of one of his subjects in the manner in which Mary Kelly’s body was found. Cornwell further claimed that a defect in Sickert’s penis prompted emotional issues that led him to go on a crime spree. Casebook has a more detailed article on Sickert and Cornwell.
A ridiculous but hilariously creepy Jack the Ripper candidate comes from Richard Wallace’s theory that Charles Lutwidge Dodson, aka Lewis Carroll — author of “Alice in Wonderland” — committed the most infamous string of slayings in history. In 1996, Wallace published “Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend,” in which he claimed he found a series of lines from Carroll’s works with clues to the murders and their perpetrator hidden in anagrams. Casebook describes the grisly sentences Wallace took the time to create from Carroll’s words.
This British thespian looks either older or younger than his age (54, he claims), but with his many incarnations as British lads like stuttering King George VI or Bridget Jones’s heartthrob Mark Darcy, it’s easy to see how Firth could time travel to be Jack the Ripper. In fact, who else could it be? This guy’s too charming for his britches, which by default is inherently creepy. Let’s do a DNA sample of his Oscar and see.
