The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper Read Online Free PDF

ever written on the subject’. 14 This is an unduly harsh condemnation. What Stewart did was to ask certain questions of the case; what sort of person could have roamed the East End at night without attracting suspicion, could wear bloodstained clothing without attracting suspicion, could have sufficient medical knowledge to carry out the murders and could have risked being found near the victim and yet have an alibi? In answer to these questions, Stewart went where this line of thought took him: the midwife. He was not necessarily looking for a name, as was becoming common in Ripper studies at that time, but a profession or occupation that could tie in with the execution of the crimes. The theory, however, fails because it hooks on to the notion that Mary Kelly was three months pregnant, a claim that was disproved many years laterfollowing the rediscovery of Dr Thomas Bond’s post-mortem report. 15
    It could be argued that theorizing about the identity of Jack the Ripper has spawned three, perhaps four subsequent eras, each bringing with it differing perceptions and approaches from both the wider public and those who would study the crimes and times specifically. The first era produced the crimes themselves, with the accompanying scramble for a motive. The second saw a move away from there to named individuals, primarily anecdotal by source, then anecdotal with supporting ‘evidence’ of an esoteric and often dubious nature. In 1959, Donald McCormick produced the next significant full-length study of the Ripper case,
The Identity of Jack the Ripper
, 16 a peculiar book for several reasons and one which could be seen as the final outing of the theorist scrabbling around with hitherto untraceable (or false) sources and strange foreign suspects who may or may not have actually existed.
    McCormick reintroduced Dr Alexander Pedachenko as a suspect, and the motive behind the killings was a Tsarist plot to discredit the Metropolitan Police, a wholly successful conspiracy which resulted in the resignation of Sir Charles Warren. The story was obviously a throwback to the one proposed by William Le Queux in 1923, but this time it was riddled with secret dossiers, obfuscating aliases and claims of counter-espionage. The sources for this theory were numerous and included the notes supposedly written in French by Rasputin. McCormick also claimed to have seen and taken notes from the three-volume ‘Chronicle of Crime’, handwritten by Dr Thomas Dutton. Briefly suspected of the Whitechapel murders in 1888, Dutton claimed that Jack the Ripper was ‘a middle-aged doctor, a man whose mind had been embittered by the death of his son. The latter had suffered cruelly at the hands of a woman of thestreets, and the father believed this to be the cause of his brilliant son’s death,’ which sounded very much like Leonard Matters’s ‘Dr Stanley’. McCormick said that Dr Dutton had made micro-photographs of the handwriting of Ripper correspondence and the writing on the wall in Goulston Street, but that Sir Charles Warren ordered the destruction of the prints of the latter. He also claimed that Dutton was a friend and adviser of Inspector Abberline. With no trace of Dr Dutton’s writings to be found, it appeared that McCormick’s book was wandering into the realms of pure invention, even in his examination of the events surrounding the murders themselves. Imagined conversations between witnesses or police officers littered the book, often lending an unintentionally comic air to the proceedings.
    McCormick has also been accused of instigating several Ripper myths which would dog subsequent serious studies of the case. One of the most notable was perhaps his references to the ‘Old Nichol Gang’. The ‘Nichol’, a notorious slum in Bethnal Green, no doubt had its criminal element, but evidence of a gang of that name has never been ascertained, and their presence in the East End in the 1880s has continued to surface in Ripper