Saucy Jack 3

Hello and welcome back to the third installment of our series about Jack the Ripper.

Last week we looked at some of the suspects, but due to space I left out a few. Today we look at them beginning with:

Lewis Carroll

Carroll was an Oxford don, and is most famous for writing Alice in Wonderland. So how can this guy possibly be the Ripper? Well, that is a good question. There is some evidence that he was sexually assaulted as a child, which will likely mess you up. Then there are his diaries that he wrote in purple ink, except on the nights the Ripper was at work. Those days he wrote in black ink. Why? No one knows.

Some psychologists who have analyzed his poem Jabberwocky, have found evidence of a psychotic nature in some of the made up words Carroll invented, and apparently if you deconstruct and reconstruct some of his works you can recreate parts of the letters Jack (allegedly) wrote. But, you can do that with any body of work written in the English language, even the Bible so that's no kind of evidence.

Does this mean Lewis was Jack? Very unlikely, if you ask me.

Next up is Walter Sickert.

Sickert was a painter, with a taste for the odd. Some of his paintings seem to depict the postmortem pictures of the Rippers victims, and similar scenes. Besides that, he was both influential and popular. In his time he painted many of the rich and powerful, including Winston Churchill.

Sickert was not a suspect in 1888 though, that came later when author Stephen Knight published his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution in 1976. Knight had spoken to Joseph Gorman who claimed to be Sickerts illegitimate son. According to Gorman, Sickert was forced to join in with the Ripper murders for reasons we'll get to. There is apparently no evidence that Sickert was Jack.

Alright, the last two men, Sir William Gull and Prince Albert Victor are on the list for the same reasons. This also ties in with the Sickert theory.

As the theory goes, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale and Queen Victoria's grandson had some slightly deviant tastes for a member of the Royal family. He liked to visit lowly prostitutes, including those at 19 Cleveland Street. That address was visited by many powerful men, as they served not only women, but also young boys. After the scandal broke, the prince was sent on a long tour of the Empire to make it impossible for him to be interviewed about the rumors of his involvement. Many witnesses were silenced or removed. A theory was put forward that he had contracted syphilis from a prostitute and sought revenge. Frankly the idea that an effeminate prince would roam around Whitechapel and brutally dismember women is ludicrous.

But there is another angle. Some say that the prince fell in love with a lowly shop girl, who happened to have been a prostitute for a while and was still friendly with a bunch of them. The story continues with the idea that Albert Victor would have married her in a Catholic ceremony and indeed gotten her pregnant. This would have been an unimaginable scandal. Since the Catholic Church forbids divorce, a commoner would suddenly have been in line to the throne, a Catholic commoner no less. At the time there were some grumblings that the Monarchy should be abolished, so they were extra keen on not having scandals like that. If you wonder why a commoner would have been such a big deal, keep in mind that Victoria wasn't just Albert's grandmother, she was also the German Kaiser's and the Russian Tzar’s grandmother. The royal houses were very interconnected with no outside blood to talk about.

So, we have a secret Catholic wedding complete with heir, and they have to go. The theory states that the bride was gotten rid of, possibly in an asylum like Bedlam, but that leaves the witnesses, the brides old friends.

Enter Sir William Gull, royal physician. According to this theory, Sir William was tasked with removing he prostitutes for the good of the Empire, but that he went quite a bit too far, possibly due to some medical issue of the mind. He is known to have suffered at least one stroke.

The Sickert connection comes in the form of the fact that he had used many of the prostitutes as models and had known about the wedding, but as a well known artist, he was too public to kill, and instead was forced to join in to make him keep silent.

One of the biggest draws of the Albert Victor theory is the idea that the police knew who the killer was but for obvious reasons couldn't arrest him. This would explain why they never caught the killer on indeed released the information they had.

The wedding theory became popular due to the graphic novel From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, which became a movie later on. The novel is amazing and the film is mediocre.

There we have it. There are of course many many more suspects, and I don't have nearly enough space to go through them all. Until next time, have a great week!