Ripper Notes Extra

Another Aussie Ripper3
Alan posted in News on August 30th, 2008

Australian newspapers have all been reporting, on the eve of the 120th anniversary of the first Ripper murder, that “fanatical Ripperologists” are claiming that Jack is buried in a grave in Brisbane. However, none appear to provide the identities of which particular fanatics these might be, save for giving the views of one Paul Tully, a city councillor from nearby Ipswich, who is apparently in the process of writing a book about Australian connections to the Ripper case, and who describes the claim as unlikely, and “sketchy in detail.”

In truth, the story appears to be bizarre in the extreme, and cooked up by Tully and another local historian, Jack Simm. Aside from the fact that the suspect in question, one Walter Thomas Porriott, alias Andrew John Gibson, was apparently in London at the time of the murders, and shortly afterwards left for Australia, there seems to be no other evidence at all to connect him in any way to the murders. Gibson was jailed in Stoke-on-Trent in 1940 having been found guilty of manslaughter, but this was as a result of a patient dying through his negligence while he was posing as a doctor, and not through any actual act of killing. He seems to have had a long history of fraud and confidence trickery, but there is nothing to suggest he was ever wilfully a killer.

However, to add a bizarre twist to their tale, Tully and Simm claim that a “grainy image” of a man in a flat cap with a knife raised ready to strike had mysteriously appeared on Porriott’s grave. It seems highly unlikely that there is anything of interest in this tale whatsoever, and it appears to have been cooked up by Tully merely to self-publicise and to try to tout his own credentials as an expert on the case prior to publishing his book.

Tumblety expert to speak at 2008 JTR conference0
Dan posted in Events, Forthcoming Events on August 1st, 2008

The organizers of the 2008 Jack the Ripper conference are pleased to announce that Timothy Riordan will bring his extensive research on one of the most popular Ripper suspects to a talk on the mythology of Dr. Francis Tumblety. Timothy has recently completed a book about Tumblety, and has also unearthed the first-known photograph of the suspect. He is the chief archaeologist at Historic St. Mary’s City outdoor museum and is the author of the book The Plundering Time, which is about Maryland and the English Civil War.

Timothy joins previously-announced speakers Martin Fido, Philip Hutchinson, Robert J. MacLaughlin, Eugenia Parry and Alan Sharp at this year’s event on October 10-12th. For more details or to sign up, see the conference website at: www.ripperology.com/conference/

If you haven’t registered yet, please keep in mind that space is limited. Sending in a deposit now guarantees a place on the delegate list. Specific questions, including media inquiries and sponsorship opportunities, can be directed to ripperconference@gmail.com

Ripper-free since 20060
Alan posted in News on July 26th, 2008

A row has broken out between Ipswich Borough Council and the publishers of the Lonely Planet guide books, after they included a reference to the infamous 2006 “Ipswich Ripper” killings in the latest edition.

Forklift truck driver Steve Wright murdered five prostitutes in the town’s red light district during November and December of 2006. He was arrested on December 19th of that year, and found guilty in a trial in February 2008. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation of no possibility of parole. He is currently attempting to appeal his conviction.

The case was given the “Ripper” epithet despite the fact that no actual ripping occurred. Although the cause of death has not been revealed in all cases, at least two were murdered by strangulation.

The Lonely Planet guide now informs potential visitors to the town that “in late 2006, Ipswich made the headlines with its own Jack the Ripper.” Ipswich Borough Council leader Liz Harsant referred to it as an inappropriate reference, and said she was disappointed with the hurt it would undoubtedly cause.

The reference was also condemned by the Suffolk Development Agency, who emphasised that events of that period were still raw to the people of the county who wished to put the incident behind them and get on with presenting the area in a positive light. A spokesperson from Lonely Planet responded that their description was intended to give an unbiased overview, including any significant events in recent history.

Television Review - Revealed: Was Dr Crippen Innocent?1
Alan posted in Reviews, Television Reviews on July 2nd, 2008

(Channel 5, UK, first shown on 1st July, 2008)

The tale of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, the meek mannered homeopath executed in 1910 for the murder of his flambouyant wife Cora, tends to be of interest to those who follow the Ripper case, because of the involvement of Detective Walter Dew in both cases.

Dew was tasked with investigating the dissappearance of Cora Crippen and, after interviewing his husband and being satisfied by his story that she had left him for another man, had his suspicions aroused again when Crippen and his young lover, Ethel le Neve went on the run. Searching the house in Hilldrop Crescent, North London, where the couple had lived, he found human remains hidden under the flagstones of the cellar, and there followed a transatlantic chase to arrest the doctor who had taken passage on a ship under an assumed name and with Ethel disguised as a young boy.

Although there have been several suggestions over the years of Crippen’s innocence on the charge, this documentary was heavily publicised as providing “never before seen proof” that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. And so we were introduced to John Trestrail, a bull-headed toxicologist whose obsession with the case bordered on the unhealthy.

Very early in proceedings we were told that Trestrail had conducted a seven year reinvestigation into all the facts of the case. Then shortly afterwards we saw footage of him arriving at Hilldrop Crescent with the voice over announcing that he had come here today “to begin his investigation.” Of course, this latter was merely a case of artistic license, but it was also indicative of the sloppiness with which the film had been put together, and the liberties that the producers were willing to take with the viewer’s intelligence.

Because from the beginning it became clear that this was going to be the kind of “investigation” which proposed hypothesese, and then treated them as if they were now established facts. Trestrail began from the point of view that he had “always been bothered” by two aspects of the case which made no logical sense to him. The first was that Crippen would poison his wife, and then hide the body, Trestrail’s argument being that poisoners usually wanted to pass of the death as natural. The second was that of why Crippen would dispose of some of the body, but not all of it. What, of course, both of these thoughts failed to take into account was that in a crime of passion, as this undoubtedly was, the culprit is seldom thinking in a logical manner.

Trestrail had therefore concluded that the body in the cellar was not Cora, although how he arrived at this conclusion was somewhat muddy. But, undeterred, he obtained permission to have DNA tests run on the tissue samples from the original case still held by the Royal London Hospital. In order to have something to test them against, he obtained the services of a genealogist to trace members of Cora’s family, albeit we were never told exactly what this person’s qualifications were, or how she went about her task. We were simply told, she found some, and one of them agreed to provide the tissue sample for comparison.

Then we were treated to two dramatic denouments, one after the other, both filmed as if happening in real time but with the main players behaving in such a stilted fashion that it didn’t take a drama critic to realise they were “re-enactments,” although this was never stated. The first revelation was that the samples did not match, and that therefore the body could not have belonged to Cora. The second was that the original sample contained both an X and a Y chromosome, and that the body must therefore have been a man.

These findings were not challenged in any way by the programme makers, despite the fact that a hundred objections immediately leapt into my head, and this was without the knowledge, obtained from Jonathan Menges excellent article in Ripper Notes issue 28 that the testing had only been on mitochondrial DNA, a fact never mentioned during the documentary. Students of the Ripper case who have followed the Patricia Cornwell story over the years will be well aware of the unreliability of MtDNA comparisons, and the ease with which it can be contaminated.

And so the tale became more fantastical such that, although nothing else by way of actual evidence was presented, by the end of the programme we were being told that it was almost certain that Walter Dew had planted the evidence because he was under pressure from Home Secretary Winston Churchill to solve the case and he didn’t want another failure on his record as he had with the Ripper. This, of course, was utter nonsense, not backed up in any way, and was presented merely to get round the fact that taking away these “new findings,” everything else in the case pointed squarely towards Crippen’s guilt.

Overall, then, the film has to be said to have been something of a whitewash affair, giving Trestrail’s side of the story only and making no attempt to challenge his findings. It did have its moments of interest, but all too few, and in the end the whole tone was dishonest. Admittedly, if the test findings could be verified and duplicated using the tissue on the remaining slides, it would mean that the whole case would merit another look by the authorities. For the time being, however, all it left us with were a trail of ifs, buts and maybes dressed up as science, and really that is not nearly enough.

Ripper Short Wins Award0
Alan posted in News on June 24th, 2008

Jack the Ripper, a three minute short film made by Las Vegas filmmaker Jonpaul Lewis, was last week awarded a special jury prize in the CineVegas Film Festival.

The film follows the Ripper to New York, where he sends a letter taunting the London police and inviting them to track him down, before continuing with his bloody business in his new locale.

Lewis, whose background is in stills photography, shot the film using a revolutionary technique. The movie was put together from around 8,000 still photographs using stop-motion animation techniques but real actors. The idea, he said, was that any frame of the movie should be able to be viewed as a unique image in its own right.

He is currently working on a project about the Elephant Man using the same techniques, but once completed hopes to raise the funds to develop the Ripper idea into a full length motion picture.

More details about the film can be found at Lewis’s website, http://www.thestudioproductions.com/.

The Phantom Raspberry Blower Strikes Again0
Alan posted in News on June 20th, 2008

A 56 page hand written script for the Jack the Ripper spoof The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town sold at auction this week for £3,700. The A4 sized sheets were written in his own hand by Ronnie Barker, one half of The Two Ronnies who performed the skit in weekly segments on their show in 1976.

The story, in which London is terrorised by a madman who blows raspberries at the great and good of high society, originally appeared in 1971 as one episode of Barker’s own series, Six Dates With Barker. That episode was written by former goon Spike Milligan, and when Barker’s rewritten version was broadcast as the regular continuing serial segment of the Two Ronnies program it was credited as having been written by “Spike Milligan and a Gentleman.” In the programme’s main titles, the writing credit was given to Gerald Wiley, a regular alias used by Barker when writing for television shows.

The Phantom Raspberry Blower became one of the most popular and best remembered of the twosome’s serials, and was repeated recently on the Two Ronnies Sketchbook retrospective series, filmed shortly before Barker’s death in 2005.

The script went on sale at the Dominic Winter Book Auction near Cirencester in Gloucestershire, where it had been put up for sale by an anonymous source who had kept it in a drawer for over thirty years since obtaining it in 1976 at a charity auction for Kingsweston Special School in Bristol, to which Barker had donated it.

The buyer, 59 year-old Valentine Christensen from Buckinghamshire, proclaimed himself a long time fan of Barker’s and said that he did not intend to sell again, but to keep the manuscript as part of his private collection.

Kissing with Confidence0
Alan posted in News on June 20th, 2008

Jack the Ripper has loaned his name, in one form or another, to a postive rogues gallery of murderers, theives and villains over the years, from Jack the Stripper to Jack the Kipper. But the latest, a criminal case unearthed in St Louis by former police officer Allen E. Wagner, might just be the strangest.

Jack the Kisser roamed the streets of that city in the year 1889, just one year after the real Jack terrorised London’s East End. Late at night he molested local women with long kisses, after which he would present them with a card, proclaiming his “mission divine” and his “kiss devoid of sensuality.” Like the original Jack, he was never caught and his motive was never entirely apparent. The kisser, or someone with a similar MO, apparently later continued his activities in Cincinatti.

Wagner came across the story in a first hand account of one of the attacks, written by a reporter for the St Louis Post Dispatch, while researching a book on the local police department, which has now been published as Good Order and Safety: A History of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, 1861-1906, and is available from the Missouri History Museum.

Sign up now for the 2008 Jack the Ripper conference0
Dan posted in Forthcoming Events on June 15th, 2008

The web site for the 2008 Jack the Ripper conference, which will be held Oct. 10-12 in Knoxville, is now up and running. Hotel information and registration prices have been announced. Space is limited, so register soon to make sure you don’t miss out on the event. The address for the site is www.ripperology.com/conference/

2008 Ripper conference date and speakers announced1
Dan posted in News, Forthcoming Events on April 8th, 2008

The 2008 Jack the Ripper conference will be held Oct. 10-12 in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Speakers that have been announced so far include:

Martin Fido - Noted author of The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper and co-author of the classic Jack the Ripper A-Z, Martin Fido is recognized as one of the leading authorities on Jack the Ripper. Martin will be speaking on his experiences in the field of Ripperology, to which his contribution can not be overestimated.

Philip Hutchinson - Philip Hutchinson is one of the better-known Ripper tour guides in London and the co-author of The London of Jack the Ripper: Then and Now. His talk, “The Whitby Collection and Beyond,” will focus on the collection of recently discovered photographs of the Ripper murder scenes taken by John Gordon Whitby.

Robert J. McLaughlin - Robert J. McLaughlin, author of The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs, will be talking about the man responsible for taking most of the mortuary photographs of the Whitechapel victims and the history of their publication, from their beginnings in France to their rediscovery in the 1960s.

Eugenia Parry - A writer and adjunct professor in the Dept. of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Eugenia Parry also taught the histories of art and photography at Wellesley College and the University of New Mexico for twenty-five years. Her talk, “What to Do With a French Crime Album? A Writer’s Response,” will focus on her discovery of an album of 19th century French murder scene photographs and the resulting book, Crime Album Stories.

Alan Sharp - Writer and researcher Alan Sharp is the author of London Correspondence: Jack the Ripper and the Irish Press and an editor of Ripper Notes magazine. He will be speaking about his current research on the Special Branch and the Whitechapel murders.

There will also be an auction, a raffle, plenty of opportunities to socialize and some surprises. The hotel and prices will be announced in the upcoming weeks. You can email ripperconference@gmail.com with questions or if you wish to be among the first to know when registration is opened.

“Heartless” article online0
Dan posted in Our Next Print Issue on April 8th, 2008

“Heartless: The Evidence for a Copycat Killer” is the free sample article from issue #28, Ripper Notes: The Legend Continues.

Casebook: Jack the Ripper has it online in web format at: http://casebook.org/dissertations/rn-heartless.html

We also have it available in PDF format at: http://www.RipperNotes.com/media/Heartless-RipperNotes28.pdf