On 15 August 1914 the poet John Barlas died in the Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, aged 54. According to his friend, Robert Sherard, Barlas gave away his fortune and became destitute. On New Years Eve 1891 he fired a revolver at the House of Commons. Oscar Wilde paid part of his bail. Afterwards his mental health declined. Doctors considered him dangerous to others and delusional. Almost certainly he was the Jack the Ripper suspect mentioned in a New York Times article about the French serial killer, Joseph Vacher, on 24 October 1897.

The writer of the article was a friend of Sherard’s. He said that he was informed by a perfectly trustworthy authority that the police knew Jack the Ripper as a lunatic confined in a Scottish asylum. The killer was an Oxford graduate and had a reputation ten years earlier as a minor poet. He bore a distinguished name, famous in Scottish history in connection with a young woman who saved a King’s life in a heroic way. The suspect had a wife descended from a famous English Admiral and his latest delusion was that he was the grandson of Napoleon.

An Oxford graduate, Barlas wrote poetry under the name Evelyn Douglas, adopted in honour of his ancestor, a lady in waiting, who used her arm to prevent assassins from entering the chamber of King James I of Scotland. His wife was descended from Lord Nelson. At the time of the Jack the Ripper murders he was living with a prostitute in Lambeth. There is no evidence that the police or anyone else suspected him of being the killer.