My research into the Jack the Ripper suspects involves reading books that seek to connect individuals to other crimes with no evidence other than his presence in the same area. Contemporaries also made unwarranted connections. An American newspaper in October 1888 thought that the Ripper was identical with the Austin Axe murderer of 1884-85, a totally different series of murders but not unique. The Axeman of New Orleans, 1918-19, and the Villisca Axe Murders of 1912 are perhaps the most famous of several axe murders in America.

In 1911 the press suggested that one man was responsible for a series of axe murders in the Midwest. Similar crimes followed in Texas and Louisiana then came others in the Midwest, including Villisca. On Sunday nights, in a small town close to the intersection of railway tracks, the killer broke into houses and slaughtered families with the blunt edge of an axe. Recently Bill James and Rachel McCarthy wrote a book, The Man on the Train, arguing that this person killed between 59 and 94 people in the period from 1898 to 1912. They even made a plausible identification of what would be the worst serial killer in American history.

Axes were the contemporary equivalent of guns, so it is easy to dismiss the theory. Yet there are over thirty similarities in the murders and that is without knowing the full details as some of them were not properly investigated. The concept of a man train-hopping from place to place to commit almost identical crimes, especially one who worked seasonally in the woodcutting industry, is more plausible than the notion that Jack the Ripper murdered overseas.