The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper by Paul Begg, John Bennett Read Free Book Online Page B

Ripper mystery into print with
The Complete Jack the Ripper
. 9 Rumbelow, as a serving police officer, had used his professional acumen to further knowledge of the Ripper case by rescuing material from the City Police’s rather ad hoc archives – rescuing being the operative word, as the archives were not necessarily organized, and often material would be lying around ready for the refuse collectors. In this way, Rumbelow discovered a large cache of letters to the City Police and, perhaps more significantly, mortuary photographs of Catherine Eddowes and the police photograph of Mary Kelly in Miller’s Court. Through his interest in the subject, he had met many of the movers and shakers in the field and was well placed to commit himself to a factual and unsensational overview of the subject.
The Complete Jack the Ripper
, in an age where theories were becoming more convoluted and outlandish, was a breath of fresh air, a factual account of the Ripper crimes, placed within their historical context, with an overview of the suspects without moulding the narrative to put forward any one theory in particular.
    Similarly, Richard Whittington-Egan produced
A Casebook on Jack the Ripper
, 10 which, as well as attempting to redress the balance of fact over fiction, looked at the theories up to 1975 with a critical mind and made several important assertions in an attempt to dispel some of the more enduring errors. He also introduced rarely discussed ideas, such as the occult theories pertaining to Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson, whose prominence as a suspect would later find new supporters. However, Whittington-Egan was circumspect on the subject of suspectsand, unable to draw any solid conclusions after some considerable analysis, said, ‘I find no case to answer against any of the accused. They are dismissed. The verdict must remain undisturbed. Some person or persons unknown.’
    But naming Jack the Ripper was still the order of the day. By 1975,
East London Advertiser
journalist Stephen Knight was busy finalizing his own contribution to the steadily growing canon of Ripper literature. Knight was sent by the newspaper to interview Joseph Gorman Sickert about his royal cover-up story and found his subject so persuasive that he decided to undertake further research of his own. The results were published the following year in
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, 11 a book that would see phenomenal worldwide success and truly nail the ‘royal conspiracy theory’ into popular culture.
    The Final Solution
invariably took Sickert’s story as its central foundation. However, Knight had been busy examining other elements of the case that he believed dovetailed with the basic premise. He was able to consult the official files at the Public Record Office before they were legitimately accessible to the public and made several valuable discoveries, including naming Israel Schwartz as the man who saw the alleged attack on Elizabeth Stride in Berner Street a mere fifteen minutes before her body was discovered. But what Knight also brought to the story was a new level of intrigue and conspiracy, alleging the involvement of the Freemasons and that the clues to that complicity were plainly evident in the events of 1888.
    According to this amended version of Sickert’s tale, the murders were committed by Sir William Gull, a Freemason, in compliance with ancient Masonic execution rituals, specifically in the cutting of the throat and the throwing of the ‘heart and vitals’ over the shoulder of the corpse. This latter detail resembled mutilations in the murders of Chapman andEddowes. The victims were killed in a coach (driven by John Netley) after being rendered incapable by being fed grapes laced with laudanum; Knight was obviously keen to emphasize the detail of the grapes, therefore adding to their mystery and undoubtedly giving this confusing and controversial element of the Elizabeth Stride murder a relevance and even importance that was