Charles Stuart Parnell was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which held the balance of power in the British Parliament in 1885. Three years earlier he was in jail for supporting Irish tenants who opposed paying rent to English landlords. On 12 April 1887, the day that Parliament debated an act proposing tougher action against […]
Currently I am looking at the political impact of the Jack the Ripper murders or lack of it. The crimes in Whitechapel in 1888 made global headlines but were largely ignored by politicians, sitting a few miles away in Westminster. To understand why we need to appreciate the difference between the electoral system then and […]
One of the frustrating aspects of researching Jack the Ripper suspects is the lack of information. Some of the hundreds of people who came under suspicion are only mentioned once in extant records. Take the case of Friedrich Schumacher who was arrested on 13 September 1888. We only know about this because, two months later, […]
A biography of the famous barrister, Sir Edward Marshall-Hall suggests that serial killer Thomas Cream had an underworld double. Marshall-Hall once defended Cream on a charge of bigamy at the Old Bailey and was amazed to secure an acquittal with proof that Cream was in prison in Sydney at the time of the offence. Aware […]
Nobody knows how many people were killed by Jack the Ripper. Dr. Percy Clark, who assisted at some of the post-mortems on the victims, thought that one person was responsible for just three murders. He attributed the others to a weak-minded individual trying to emulate crimes published in the newspapers. Given that dozens falsely confessed […]
Six years ago, I published a book outlining the evidence for and against 333 Jack the Ripper suspects. Since then, the number of people accused has risen again. My most disturbing finding was the number of plausible candidates, men capable of committing such terrible atrocities. Given the lack of direct evidence my preference is to […]
On 30 May 1884 there were three explosions in London attributed to the Fenian Brotherhood. One was at Scotland Yard, caused by dynamite left in a urinal which the public had access to. The windows in the pub opposite, The Rising Sun, were shattered. Nobody was killed. Chief Inspector Littlechild, Head of the Special Irish […]
In 1960 author and researcher, Colin Wilson, wrote a series of articles for the London Evening Standard about Jack the Ripper. Afterwards he received several letters, three of which intrigued him. One alleged that Jack the Ripper had died in an asylum run by the writer’s father. Another recounted a story from artist, Walter Sickert, […]
On 13 February 1891 Police Constable Ernest Thompson was patrolling alone for the first time since he joined the Metropolitan Police. At 02:15 he heard the footsteps of a man retreating and then his lamp shone upon the body of a woman in Swallow Gardens. She was still alive. Instead of chasing the man Thompson […]
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