The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper Read Online Free PDF Page A

version claimed to be ‘a true, honest, and as far as it is humanly possible – authentic account of the world-known “Jack the Ripper Mystery”?’, before dating his introduction ‘1837’. Despite being an obvious mistake on the part of the typesetter, this did not bode well. Although Woodhall claimed to have referred to the memoirs of Anderson and Macnaghten, as well as Leonard Matters’s book and numerous articles and newspaper accounts, one wonders whether he had actually read any of them. Non-existent witnesses were mentioned, Mary Kelly’s name was initially given as ‘Taylor’, Martha Tabram’s and Elizabeth Stride’s injuries sounded like a compilation of those received by other victims, and Annie Chapman’s head had been cut off and placed on her chest! It was no doubt written with a sensationalist market in mind.
    Woodhall’s own suspect for the Ripper crimes was Olga Tchkersoff, believed to be an immigrant from Russia whose sister, Vera, was lured by Mary Jane Kelly into a life of prostitution,later dying from the effects of an illegal abortion. Predictably, Tchkersoff avenges herself of her sister’s death and other supposedly resulting misfortunes by murdering prostitutes, culminating in her ultimate quarry, Kelly. Whether Olga Tchkersoff actually existed is open to question and, as Woodhall claimed that his information came from a number of sources, the answer is probably that she did not, considering the author’s alarming inability to get even well-reported contemporary facts correct. In fact, Woodhall seemed to have a thing about foreigners in general, but perhaps this was a sign of the times. It can be argued that perceptions of Jack the Ripper reflect the time periods from which they were generated, and in this instance Woodhall made a number of damning references to the immigrants of the time, describing them as ‘the foreign scum of the earth’ who were being ‘dumped into the great cities of this country’, conjuring up images of the neo-fascist sensibilities of Oswald Mosley, who was particularly active in the East End during the pre-war 1930s. 10 Woodhall would become virtually ignored by future researchers; in the forthright opinion of Richard Whittington-Egan, writing in 1975, Woodhall’s book was ‘badly written, shoddily researched, grossly inaccurate, it contributes nothing of importance’. 11
    Another attempt at pinning the identity of the Ripper upon a female suspect came with William Stewart’s
Jack the Ripper: A New Theory
, 12 published in 1939. Stewart suggested that a woman trained as a midwife could have committed the murders. The argument was that a woman could go about the streets of the East End without arousing suspicion (after all, Jack the Ripper had universally been considered as male). A midwife could do so even if her clothes showed traces of blood, something that would not be unusual for someone in such a profession. The nature of the job would also requirethe requisite familiarity with human anatomy, especially those parts which the Ripper was believed to have extracted on two occasions. Another piece of reasoning behind the theory was based on several contemporary newspaper reports that Mary Kelly was pregnant at the time of her death, giving the killer midwife every reason to be at Miller’s Court to undertake an illegal abortion.
    Stewart also noted similarities between the
modus operandi
of the Ripper and that of Mary Pearcey, who was hanged after stabbing her lover’s wife and child to death and cutting their throats in October 1890. With Pearcey, the notion that a woman was incapable of the thought processes and physical strength to commit such atrocities was dashed; even Melville Macnaghten commented that he had ‘never seen a woman of stronger physique … her nerves were as ironcast as her body’. 13
    Like Woodhall, Stewart would go on to be maligned, this time as an ‘uncaring fictioneer’, and his book dismissed as ‘one of the worst