List of Suspects for Pleasant Places of FL meeting November 2, 2013 - Anonymous Murderer

It is important to note that Sir , Chief Commissioner of the in 1889 named three suspects: (1) , a Polish Jew, who lived in and was known to hate women and have strong homicidal tendencies. He was admitted to a lunatic asylum in March 1889; (2) Michael Ostrogg, who was a well-known criminal who spent the majority of his life in prison for theft. He was a con man and sneak thief with 25 or more aliases, and was eventually transferred to a lunatic asylum where he registered himself as a Jewish doctor; and (3) Montague John Druitt, a teacher at a boarding school in Blackheath who was dismissed from his teaching job in late Nov 1888 because of an unspecified ‘serious offence.’ He drowned himself in the Thames in Dec 1888. Macnaghten destroyed all the documents pointing to Druitt. In fact, all Sir Melville Macnaghten's personal files - he headed the CIS and had first hand knowledge of 's entire investigation - simply "vanished" shortly after his death.

Inspector Abberline, heading the Ripper investigation, discredited Macnaghten’s suspects. He named his own suspect, George Chapman, whose real name was Severin Klosowski, a Polish barber’s assistant in Whitechapel who poisoned 3 wives and was hanged April 7, 1903. NOTE: Although he named Chapman, Chief Inspector Abberline's presentation walking stick is still preserved at Bramshill Police Staff College where the inscription reveals that the stick was presented to Abberline by his team of detectives at the 'conclusion of the inquiry'. According to Peter Underwood, Abberline believed beyond any doubt that the Ripper was Dr Alexander Pedachenko and the head depicted on the stick was based on his features.

18 of The Named Suspects – Alpha List

NOTE: List prepared by Diane Gilbert Madsen from Excerpt compillations from BBC Home - ttp://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A704567; Jack the Ripper & Me by Peter Underwood FRSA – From Casebook; http://voices.yahoo.com/Whos-Jack-the-Ripper- Some-Suspects-You-Wouldn’t-Suspect-348167.html.; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

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1. HRH Prince Edward Albert Victor

Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (8 January 1864 – 14 January 1892) was first mentioned in print as a potential suspect in 1962 when author Philippe Jullian published a biography of Clarence's father, Edward VII of the United Kingdom. Jullian made a passing reference to rumours that Clarence might have been responsible for the murders. Though Jullian did not detail the dates or sources of the rumour, it is possible that the rumour derived indirectly from Dr. Thomas E. A. Stowell. In 1960, Stowell told the rumour to writer Colin Wilson, who in turn told Harold Nicolson, a biographer loosely credited as a source of "hitherto unpublished anecdotes" in Jullian's book. Nicolson could have communicated Stowell's theory to Jullian. The theory was brought to major public attention in 1970 when Stowell published an article in The Criminologist which revealed his suspicion that Clarence had committed the murders after being driven mad by syphilis. The suggestion was widely dismissed, as Albert Victor had strong alibis for the murders, and it is unlikely that he suffered from syphilis. Stowell later denied implying that Clarence was the Ripper, but efforts to investigate his claims further were hampered, as Stowell was an old man, and he died from natural causes just days after the publication of his article. The same week, Stowell's son reported that he had burned his father's papers, saying "I read just sufficient to make certain that there was nothing of importance." Eddy frequently went slumming in the Whitechapel area. He supposedly met and had an affair with a shop girl named Annie Crook, who he kept in an apartment there. Annie became pregnant with his child and, according to one version of the story, married Eddy secretly in a Roman Catholic wedding. Other versions have the child being born out of wedlock. The Duke of Clarence allegedly made visits to a brothel in Cleveland Street in the East End. He had supposedly learned disembowelling techniques on hunting expeditions and was said to have suffered from syphilis. His official cause of death was given as pneumonia.

2. William Wallace Brodie

Brodie confessed to all the while in a drunken stupor, in 1889. Scotland Yard checked into his whereabouts at the time and it was discovered that he was in South Africa between 6 September, 1888, and 15 July, 1889.

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3. George Chapman

Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (alias George Chapman—no relation to victim ) (14 December 1865 – 7 April 1903) was born in , but emigrated to the United Kingdom sometime between 1887 and 1888, shortly before the start of the murders. Between 1893 and 1894 he assumed the name of Chapman. He successively poisoned three of his wives, and was hanged for his crimes in 1903. At the time of the Ripper murders, he lived in Whitechapel, , where he had been working as a barber. According to H. L. Adam, who wrote a book on the poisonings in 1930, Chapman - Inspector 's favored suspect - was arrested and charged by Frederick Abberline, who was in charge of the Ripper investigation at the time. This was later retracted. Others disagree that Chapman is a likely culprit, as he murdered his three wives with poison, and it is uncommon (though not unheard of) for a to make such a drastic change in modus operandi.

4. Thomas Neil Cream

(27 May 1850 – 15 November 1892) Cream was a doctor secretly specialising in abortions. He was born in Glasgow, educated in London and Canada, and entered practice in Canada and later in Chicago, Illinois. In 1881 he was found guilty of the fatal poisoning of his mistress's husband. He was imprisoned in the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, from November 1881 until his release on good behaviour on 31 July 1891. He moved to London, where he was living at the time of the Ripper murders. He habitually wrote to the Police giving false names and false accusations of a number of crimes. He resumed killing and was soon arrested. He was hanged for the murder of the Lambeth prostitutes on 15 November 1892 at Newgate Prison. According to some sources, his last words were reported as being "I am Jack the...", interpreted to mean Jack the Ripper. However, police officials who attended the execution made no mention of this alleged interrupted confession. Dr Cream raised suspicions following revelations that an American had been making enquiries as to the availability of certain organs at

3 medical schools in and around the Whitechapel district. Also, a letter received by the Police prior to the double killings of and Kate Eddowes contained many 'Americanisms'. Cream was actually imprisoned awaiting trial at the time of the Ripper murders, and most authorities consider it impossible for him to be the culprit. However, Donald Bell suggested that he could have bribed officials and left the prison before his official release, and Sir Edward Marshall-Hall suspected that his prison term may have been served by a look-alike in his place. Such notions are unlikely, and contradict evidence given by the Illinois authorities, newspapers of the time, Cream's solicitors, Cream's family and Cream himself.

5. Montague John Druitt

(15 August 1857 – early December 1888) A Dorset-born barrister who worked to supplement his income as an assistant schoolmaster in Blackheath, London. A schoolmaster, Druitt studied medicine for a time and became a barrister. He was from a good family and was well educated. He was also criminally insane. Two days after he was dismissed from his teaching job at a Blackheath school in late November 1888 because of an unspecified ‘serious offence,’ he committed suicide by drowning himself in the River Thames. He left a note saying: Since Friday I felt I was going to be like Mother and the best thing for me was to die. The note was found on his decomposed body recovered from the Thames near Chiswick on 31 Dec 1888. Some modern authors suggest that Druitt was homosexual, that he was dismissed because of this and that it may have driven him to suicide. However, his mother and his grandmother both suffered mental health problems, and it is possible that he was dismissed because of an underlying hereditary psychiatric illness. His death shortly after the last canonical murder (which took place on 9 Nov 1888) led Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten to name him as a suspect in a memorandum of 23 February 1894. However, Macnaghten incorrectly described the 31-year-old barrister as a 41-year-old doctor. On 1 September, the day after the first canonical murder, Druitt was in Dorset playing cricket, and most experts now believe that the killer was local to Whitechapel, whereas Druitt lived miles away on the other side of the Thames in Kent. Inspector Frederick Abberline appeared to dismiss Druitt as a serious suspect on the basis that the only evidence against him was the coincidental timing of his suicide shortly after a murder considered by some to be the final one in the series.

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Druitt's suicide made him a convenient scapegoat and the police closed the Ripper file.

6. Sir

(31 December 1816 – 29 January 1890) was physician-in-ordinary to . He was named as the Ripper as part of the evolution of the widely discredited Masonic/royal conspiracy theory outlined in such books as Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Coachman John Netley has been named as his accomplice. Thanks to the popularity of this theory among fiction writers and for its dramatic nature, Gull shows up as the Ripper in a number of books and films. The Royal Physician allegedly became involved in an attempt to silence all contacts of Mary Kelly. Rumor had it that she was the maid of the Duke of Clarence, the grandson of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert Victor. There was gossip that Prince Albert had married Annie Crook, a Catholic, and when she got pregnant, she was locked away in a mental asylum to avoid a scandal and cover up the illegitimate birth of a prostitute’s “royal baby.” Dr. Gull had Annie taken away to a hospital where he savaged her memory and intellect, leaving her institutionalized for the rest of her life. Mary Kelly was caring for Annie's royal daughter, named Alice Margaret, when Annie was kidnapped. Mary Kelly, along with her friends, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, and Elizabeth Stride, all knew about the relationship between Annie Crook and the prince, as well as their infant daughter. Mary Kelly was supposedly blackmailing the Government with her knowledge about the Duke of Clarence's illicit marriage. Gull was to slaughter the women inside the Royal carriage, then dispose of the bodies. This supposedly explains the lack of noise and blood at the scene of the murders. There were many who believed that there was a cover up by the authorities to protect someone very important. Queen Victoria's interest in the case could have added to the inevitable assumptions. This conspiracy theory is popular but the fact was that William Gull was 6' tall, much taller than the eye-witness accounts of the Ripper. He was also 71 years old at the time of the killings, he had suffered a stroke the year before and he died after another stroke in 1890.

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7. James Kelly

(20 April 1860 – 17 September 1929) Kelly was first identified as a suspect in Terence Sharkey's "Jack the Ripper. 100 Years of Investigation" (Ward Lock 1987) and documented in Prisoner 1167: The madman who was Jack the Ripper, by Jim Tully, in 1997. James Kelly murdered his wife in 1883 by stabbing her in the neck. Deemed insane, he was committed to the Broadmoor Asylum, from which he later escaped in early 1888, using a key he fashioned himself. After the last Ripper murder in London in November 1888, the police searched for Kelly at what had been his residence prior his wife's murder, but they were not able to locate him. In 1927, almost forty years after his escape, he unexpectedly turned himself in to officials at the Broadmoor Asylum. He died two years later, presumably of natural causes. Retired NYPD cold-case detective Ed Norris examined the Jack the Ripper case for a Discovery Channel program called "Jack the Ripper in America." In it, Norris claims that James Kelly was not only Jack the Ripper's real identity, he was also responsible for multiple murders in cities around the . Norris highlights a few features of the Kelly story to support his contention. He worked as a furniture upholsterer, a job that requires handiness with a knife. He also claimed to have resided in the United States and left behind a journal that spoke of his strong disapproval of the immorality of prostitutes and of his having been on the "warpath" during his time as a fugitive. Norris argues Kelly was in New York at the time of a Ripper-like murder of a prostitute named Carrie Brown as well as in a number of cities while each experienced, according to Norris, one or two brutal murders of prostitutes while Kelly was there.

8. Aaron Kosminski

Born Aron Mordke Kozminski; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish Jew and barber who was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. "Kosminski" (without a forename) was named as a suspect by Melville Macnaghten in his 1894 memorandum and by former Chief Inspector in handwritten comments in the margin of his copy of Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson's memoirs. Anderson wrote that a Polish Jew had been identified as the Ripper but that no prosecution was possible because the witness was also Jewish and refused to testify against a fellow Jew. Some authors are skeptical of this, while others

6 use it in their theories. In his memorandum, Macnaghten stated that no one was ever identified as the Ripper, which directly contradicts Anderson's recollection. Kosminski lived in Whitechapel; however, he was largely harmless in the asylum. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people, and a refusal to wash or bathe. In his book, The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI profiler John Douglas states that a paranoid individual such as Kosminski would likely have openly boasted of the murders while incarcerated had he been the killer, but there is no record that he ever did so. This was a man with an extreme hatred of women, especially prostitutes. He had strong homicidal tendencies and a history of brutal crimes. He was described by police as a self-abuser (he masturbated), he drank from sewers and ate scraps from the gutter. According to the records at the asylum, Kosminski was not considered a danger and he was never placed in a strait-jacket. He also only ever spoke Yiddish. He died of gangrene in 1919, still an asylum inmate.

9. James Maybrick

(24 October 1838 – 11 May 1889) was a Liverpool cotton merchant. He died from arsenic poisoning in 1889, and his wife was accused of his murder. At the time of the trial there was actually doubt that Florence Maybrick had poisoned her husband. The evidence against her was circumstantial, her defense attorney was worse than useless and the judge's remarks to the jury were unacceptably biased (the judge, Sir , the father of another modern suspect , later went mad). Florence was convicted of poisoning him with arsenic and it is generally acknowledged that no modern jury would have found her guilty. Her trial was one that contributed to the introduction of 'appeals' against convictions. In her book, Jack the Ripper: The American Connection author Shirley Harrison asserted James Maybrick was both Jack the Ripper and the Servant Girl Annihilator of Austin, Texas. A diary purportedly by Maybrick, published in the 1990s by Michael Barrett, contains a confession to the Ripper murders. In 1995, Barrett confessed to writing the diary himself, and described the process of counterfeiting the diary in detail. He swore under oath that he and his wife, Anne, had forged it. Anne Barrett, after their divorce, later denied forgery, and their story changed several times over the years. The diary was discredited by

7 historians who pointed to factual errors in relation to some of the crimes, and document experts pronounced the diary a fake; the handwriting does not match that of Maybrick's will, and the ink contains a preservative not marketed until 1974. However, there are as many believers as non-believers of the authenticity of the book. He was addicted to arsenic and strychnine, and he was obsessed with his adulterous wife. In 1993, a pocket watch was found with the initials of the five victims and his verified signature scratched on the case. Also scratched were the words: 'I am Jack'.

10.Michael Ostrogg

(c.833 – in or after 1904) A Russian doctor, Ostrogg (or Ostrog) was a confidence trickster who assumed numerous aliases, including that of a 'Dr Grant', and a ship's surgeon in the Russian Navy. He was a fraudster and a thief. He spent much of his time in Police custody. He was mentioned as a suspect by Macnaghten, who joined the case in 1889, the year after the "canonical five" victims were killed. Researchers have failed to find evidence that he had committed crimes any more serious than fraud and theft. Author Philip Sugden discovered prison records showing that Ostrogg was jailed for petty offences in France during the Ripper murders. No evidence exists he was in the Whitechapel area during the time of the murders. He wasn’t a violent criminal, and he was too old (in his fifties or sixties) to fit the eyewitness descriptions of the killer. Ostrog was last mentioned alive in 1904; the date of his death is unknown.

11. Alexander Pedachenko

(alleged dates 1857–1908) A Russian doctor, possibly also known as Michael Ostrogg. Pedachenko had trained as a barber's surgeon and worked at a Maternity Hospital. The Russian Secret Police Gazette, Ochrana, described Pedachenko as 'the greatest and boldest of all Russian criminal lunatics' at a time when Pedachenko was allegedly living with his sister in London. He was named in the 1923 memoirs of William Le Queux, Things I Know about Kings, Celebrities and Crooks. Le Queux claimed to have seen a manuscript in French written by Rasputin stating that Jack the Ripper was an insane Russian doctor named Alexander Pedachenko, an agent of the

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Okhrana (the Secret Police of Imperial Russia), whose aim in committing the murders was to discredit Scotland Yard. He was supposedly assisted by two accomplices: "Levitski" and a tailoress called Winberg. However, there is no hard evidence that Pedachenko ever existed, and many parts of the story as recounted by Le Queux fall apart when examined closely. For example, one of the sources named in the manuscript was a London-based Russian journalist called Nideroest, who was known for inventing sensational stories. Reviewers of Le Queux's book were aware of Nideroest's background, and unabashedly referred to him as an "unscrupulous liar". Pedachenko was promoted as a suspect by Donald McCormick, who may have developed the story by adding his own inventions. Pedachenko returned to Russia, where he was institutionalised for the murder of a woman in St Petersburg. Pedachenko died in the asylum.

12. John Pizer

(c. 1850–1897) A Polish Jew who worked as a bootmaker in Whitechapel. After the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman in late August and early September 1888 respectively, Police Sergeant William Thicke arrested Pizer on 10 September 1888. Pizer was known as "Leather Apron", and had access to five inch blades. Thicke apparently believed that he had committed a string of minor assaults on prostitutes. In the early days of the Whitechapel murders, many locals suspected that "Leather Apron" was the killer, even though the investigating inspector reported that "there is no evidence whatsoever against him". Pizer not only had a stabbing conviction against him, but also displayed a well known dislike for prostitutes. He unfortunately fitted the description of the suspect 'a short man with a dark beard and moustache and a foreign accent'. Upon his arrest, the press described Pizer as having a 'cruel sardonic look'. He was cleared of suspicion when it turned out that he had alibis for two of the murders. He was staying with relatives at the time of one of the canonical murders, and he was talking with a police officer while watching a spectacular fire on the London Docks at the time of another. Pizer and Thicke had known each other for years, and Pizer implied that his arrest was based on animosity rather than evidence, though he did have a prior conviction for a stabbing offence. Pizer successfully obtained monetary compensation from the libel courts against at least one newspaper that had

9 named him as the murderer. (Thicke himself was accused of being the Ripper by H. T. Haslewood of Tottenham in a letter to the Home Office dated 10 September 1889. The presumably malicious accusation was dismissed as without foundation.)

13. Walter Richard Sickert

(31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942) Sickert was a German-born artist of British and Danish ancestry, first mentioned as a possible Ripper suspect in Donald McCormick's 1959 book The Identity of Jack the Ripper. Sickert subsequently appeared as a character in the well-known royal/masonic conspiracy theory concocted by Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be Sickert's illegitimate son. The theory was later developed by author Jean Overton Fuller, and by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell in her book . However, Sickert is not considered a serious suspect by most who study the case, and strong evidence shows he was in France at the time of most of the Ripper murders. An artist, Sickert was 28 at the time of the murders and two decades later, he painted a series named the Camden Town Murders depicting prostitutes, either dead or alive, in a room with a clothed man. He also fitted a psychological profile similar to that of serial killers. His father was abusive and Sickert had a cleanliness compulsion as a child. Sickert endured painful surgery on his penis several times, which could have left him impotent or sterile. He married three times but had no children. Sickert also used the same stationery as the Ripper. In 2002, Patricia Cornwell accused him, based on his series of paintings portraying violent attacks on women in poses similar to Ripper victims, one titled “Jack the Ripper’s bedroom.” She noted the sketches were similar to drawings on Jack’s letters to police and claimed there was a DNA match with Sickert & the Ripper. Sickert, critics claim, was in France at the time of the murders and that the DNA results are tenuous and the Ripper letters were hoaxes.

14. James Kenneth Stephen

(25 February 1859 – 3 February 1892) Stephen was first suggested as a suspect in a 1972 biography of another Ripper suspect, Prince Albert

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Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale by Michael Harrison. Harrison dismissed the idea that Albert Victor was the Ripper but instead suggested that Stephen, a poet and one of Albert Victor's tutors from Trinity College, Cambridge, was a more likely suspect. Harrison linked J. K. Stephen to the crimes because it was presumed he had a pathological hatred of women, based on Stephen's misogynistic writings and on similarities between his handwriting and that of the "" letter, supposedly written by the Ripper. Harrison supposed that Stephen may have had sexual feelings for Albert Victor, and that Stephen's hatred of women arose from jealousy because Albert Victor preferred female company and did not reciprocate Stephen's feelings. However, Harrison's analysis was rebutted by professional document examiners. There is no proof that Stephen was ever in love with Albert Victor, although he did starve himself to death very shortly after hearing of Albert Victor's death. In 1978, Frank Spiering further developed the theory in his book Prince Jack, which depicted Albert Victor as the murderer and Stephen as his lover. The book is widely dismissed as a sensational fiction based on previous theories rather than genuine historical research.[107] Spiering claimed to have discovered a copy of some private notes written by another suspect, Sir William Gull, in the library of the New York Academy of Medicine and that the notes included a confession by Albert Victor under a state of hypnosis. Spiering further suggested that Albert Victor died due to an overdose of morphine, administered to him on the order of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and possibly Albert Victor's own father, Edward VII of the United Kingdom. The New York Academy of Medicine denies possessing the records Spiering mentioned,[108] and when Spiering was offered access to the Royal Archives, he retorted: "I don't want to see any files."

15. Dr Roslyn D'Onston Stephenson

Robert Donston Stephenson (alias Roslyn D'Onston Stephenson) (20 April 1841 – 9 October 1916) was a journalist and writer interested in the occult and black magic. He admitted himself as a patient at the London Hospital in Whitechapel shortly before the murders started, and left shortly after they ceased. He authored a newspaper article that claimed that black magic was the motive for the killings and alleged that the Ripper was a Frenchman. Stephenson's strange manner and interest in the crimes

11 resulted in an amateur detective reporting him to Scotland Yard on Christmas Eve, 1888. Two days later Stephenson reported his own suspect, a Dr Morgan Davies of the London Hospital. Subsequently he fell under the suspicion of newspaper editor William Thomas Stead. In his books on the case, author and historian Melvin Harris argued that Stephenson was a leading suspect, but the police do not appear to have treated either him or Dr Davies as serious suspects. London Hospital night-shift rosters and practices indicate that D'Onston was not able to leave on the nights of the murders and hence could not have been Jack the Ripper.

16. Francis Thompson

(18 December 1859 – 13 November 1907) Thompson was an ascetic and influenced the young J. R. R. Tolkien, who purchased the Works of Francis Thompson in 1913–14. Perceived as a devout Catholic, in 1889 Thompson wrote the short story "Finis Coronat Opus" (Latin: "The End Crowns the Work"). It features a young poet sacrificing women to pagan gods, seeking hell's inspiration for his poetry in order to gain the fame he desires. Thompson is alternatively seen as a religious fanatic or a madman committing the actions described in his story. In 1877 Thompson failed the priesthood and in the Autumn 1878 he entered his name on the Manchester Royal Infirmary register. The infirmary, in which he studied for the next six years as a surgeon, required that its students have a strong physique for the gruelling workload. The study of anatomy, with dissection classes, was a major part of study from the first term. Between 1885 and 1888 Thompson spent the majority of his time homeless, living in the Docks area south of Whitechapel. Thompson tried a number of occupations. As well as a surgeon and a priest, Thompson tried being a soldier, but was dismissed for failing in drill. He also worked in a medical factory. This may have been where, apart from his years as a surgeon, Thompson procured the dissecting scalpel which he claimed to have possessed when he wrote to the editor of the ‘Merry ’ in January 1889 of his need to swap to a razor for shaving.A poet, Thompson had a violent childhood and failed at medical school. A drug addict, he became a vagrant and had an unhappy love affair with a prostitute. Thompson's morbid poetry and prose likens his life tragically with tortured personalities such as Oscar Wilde.

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17. Francis Tumblety

(c. 1833–1903) Tumblety was an American 'doctor', though he had no medical training. He earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada, and made a fortune from making and selling his own tonics and elixirs. He was commonly perceived as a misogynist and a quack and was arrested for attempting to abort the pregnancy of a prostitute named Philomene Dumas. The charges were later dropped. In 1865, he was arrested for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but was released without charge. Tumblety was in England in 1888, and was arrested on 7 November, apparently for engaging in homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. On bail awaiting trial, he fled to France and then to the United States. Already notorious in the States for his self-promotion and previous criminal charges, his arrest was reported as connected to the Ripper murders. American reports that Scotland Yard tried to extradite him were not confirmed by the British press or the London police, and the New York City Police said, "there is no proof of his complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and the crime for which he is under bond in London is not extraditable". In 1913, Tumblety was mentioned as a Ripper suspect by Chief Inspector John Littlechild of the Metropolitan Police Service in a letter to journalist and author George R. Sims. He was almost certainly homosexual, after a brief marriage to an ex-prostitute failed. He was known to have a collection of uteri, which he displayed in his home and he produced the jars with their gory contents as a party piece to dinner guests. Tumblety lived quietly with his sister and died in America in 1903.

18. Jill the Ripper

Speculations regarding a female suspect are discussed because the victims were not sexually interfered with. Motive might be possibly a midwife trying to obtain knowledge of abortion techniques or seeking a pregnant uterus for study. This is the most highly unlikely scenario as women murderers do not, as a rule, mutilate women victims. One woman proposed as the Ripper was the convicted murderer Mary Pearcey, who killed her lover's wife and child in October 1890, though there is no indication she was ever a midwife.

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