The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read Online Free PDF

The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history into the realm of myth.
    Since then, armchair detectives have proposed a host of suspects, from a kosher butcher to an heir apparent to the English throne (see Ripper Theories ). Most of these “solutions” make for colorful reading, but the Ripper’s true identity remains what it has been for a hundred years—a tantalizing, probably insoluble mystery.
    Ripper Theories
    There is a basic (and disheartening) law of police work: if a case isn’t cracked right away, then the odds of ever solving it rapidly shrink to zero. So the chances of coming up with the solution to a hundred-year-old crime are essentially less than nil. Still, that hasn’t stopped a host of armchair detectives from offering up theories on the most tantalizing murder mystery of all: Who was the knife-wielding serial prostitute killer known as Jack the Ripper? For the most part, these theorists are harmless cranks, like the people who spend their time trying to prove that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, or that Amelia Earhart ended up in a Japanese nunnery. The most likely truth is that—like virtually every other serial killer in history—the Ripper was a complete nonentity whose only remarkable trait was a staggering capacity for violence. But—as is so often the case with reality—that simple explanation is infinitely less satisfying than more colorful alternatives. Following are some of the more entertaining hypotheses put forth by various “Ripperologists”:
    1. The Mad Russian. Supposedly Rasputin himself wrote a book called Great Russian Criminals in which he claimed that Jack the Ripper was actually a deranged Russian doctor named Pedachenko, who was dispatched to London by the tsarist police in an effort to create consternation in England and embarrass the British authorities.
    2. The Black Magician. The Ripper was actually Dr. Roslyn D’OnstonStephenson, a self-styled conjurer obsessed with the occult, who supposedly committed the East End murders as part of a satanic ritual.
    3. The Jewish Slaughterman. A shochet, or kosher butcher, decided to use his carving skills on women of the night.
    4. Jill the Ripper. The homicidal maniac was not a man at all but a demented London midwife.
    5. The Lodger. An unnamed boarder in a London roominghouse acted suspiciously at the time of the Ripper murders and might have been the East End fiend. Although the vaguest of the Ripper solutions, this theory has distinguished itself as the basis for four entertaining movies, including an early Hitchcock thriller (see Le Cinéma de Jack ).
    6. The Deadly Doctor. A man named Dr. Stanley committed the murders as an act of revenge, after his son contracted syphilis from a prostitute.
    7. The Lethal Lawyer. A failed attorney named Montague John Druitt committed the Ripper crimes, then drowned himself in the Thames.
    8. The Polish Poisoner. A multiple murderer named Severin Klosowski (aka George Chapman), who poisoned three of his wives, presumably committed the Whitechapel slayings out of his pathological hatred of womankind in general.
    9. The Evil Aristocrat. HRH Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence—Queen Victoria’s grandson and heir to the British throne—went on a killing spree after he was maddened by syphilis.
    10. The Crazed Cotton Merchant A diary that surfaced in the early 1990s “revealed” that the Ripper was a drug-addicted businessman named James Maybrick. Unfortunately, the diary was declared a hoax by renowned document experts.
    11. The Psycho Painter. Patricia Cornwell, the popular crime novelist with a flair for forensic science, spent six million dollars of her own money to prove that Victorian painter Walter Sickert was the real Ripper. Cornwell’s theory—set forth in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed— rests partly on Sickert’s penchant for dark, sexually disturbing subject matter and partly on some highly dubious DNA testing that