“JACK THE RIPPER”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5494, 30 October 1929, Page 3

“JACK THE RIPPER”

ALLEGED CONFESSION. AN INTERESTING STORY. The following article will possess peculiar interest at this juncture in view of the reports from Germany that eight women have been murdered at Dusseldorff by some person copying the methods of Jack the Ripper, who committed six murders in London in 1898. Who was Jack the Ripper ? What became of him ? Why did he kill six women in Whitechapel and Spitalfields in the space of three months in the year 1898 ? Answers to these questions are suggested by Mr Leonard Matters in a new book, “The Mystery of Jack the Ripper” (says the London Daily Express). The answers are these : Outcome of Revenge. 1. Jack the Ripper was—perhaps—a brilliant surgeon, living in Portman Square, W. He is called “Dr. Stanley,” but this name is admitted to be fictitious. 2. He went to Buenos Aires, where he made a confession just before dying of cancer. 3. He killed the sixth woman out of revenge, and he killed the other five to prevent them from telling anyone that he had asked them if they knew the whereabouts of the one he was hunting. He at last found and killed this one, and having had his revenge he gave up his work as Jack the Ripper. Why did he seek revenge ? It was, according to the Buenos Aires confession, because the woman—his sixth victim—had been the cause, of his only son’s death.

This Jack the Ripper had been heartbroken by the death of his young wife. He had built all his hopes on his son. Then his son, on the threshold of a career that promised to be famous, met Marie Jeanette Kelly, a young woman with a flat near Piccadilly. Within a year or so he was dead. Standing by his son’s dead body, the father swore that he would find the woman and kill her. He knew her name, and after a time he found that she had sunk swiftly down to Whitechapel.

The Search.

So this surgeon, who, as the story goes, was so clever with the knife that he looked on Lister as a “bungler” and scoffed at “young Treves,” bought some old clothes and prowled about Whitechapel at night looking for the young woman whose name he knew but whom he had never seen. He knew that if he went about Whitechapel asking people if they knew Marie Jeanette Kelly he would run the risk of being identified by somebody after he killed Marie Jeanette. He made up his mind that he would ask only women of the same class, and that when he had crossquestioned them about the women they knew, in the hope of hearing something about Marie Jeanette, he would kill them there and then, and so prevent them from telling anyone that a man had asked them about her. He killed one woman on the common stairs of a “building” and another in a street. He killed a third in a backyard, within almost arm’s length of sleeping people. He killed two others within three-quarters of an hour on one night—one of them in a square where there was a warehouse watchman in side an open door. He killed Marie Jeanette in the room she lived in. Swiftness and Silence. One of the features of the murders that appalled the world was their swiftness and silence. Five of the women were killed at a stroke, without a sound. Marie Jeanette gave one cry of “Murder,” but no one heeded it. There has long been current a story that the body of a mad doctor was found in the Thames, and that Scotland Yard was satisfied he was Jack the Ripper. Mr Matters suggests that this story is baseless. The name of the person to whom the doctor is said to have confessed is not stated, but he is said to have been a former student under the doctor in London. Mr Matters says that he does not vouch for the confession, the story of which he heard in Buenos Aires, where he was the editor of a newspaper.