MovieChat Forums > Jack the Ripper (1988) Discussion > Was Sir William Gull 'Jack the Ripper'?

Was Sir William Gull 'Jack the Ripper'?


The movie gives a pretty good argument.

Jack the Ripper cut up five women in the middle of the night in dark unlit alleys. He not only killed the women, but he precisely picked out body parts and displayed them in horrible ways that took very precise and expert work.

Ripper HAD to have been a surgeon, or possibly an undertaker, and he had to have been crazy. Why else would he have done what he did the way that he did?

By the way, this is my favorite Michael Caine movie :)

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This guy probably helped them hide..

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Netley


And the third one was probably Mary Lizzie Williams who was used as bait for the prozzies and an alibi after.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9SdiMjfJLs



Probably some truth in it.



There's 0 evidence for things giving birth to evolve species (horse and donkey can screw to make an infertile mule etc) yet we believe it.... there's evidence for Identified Flying Objects (or rather they are unidentified) yet we don't believe.



No evidence for evolution is evidence of no evolution etc.

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I always wondered if the Ripper was a butcher. Or someone used to handling meat. I've recently seen 'Jack the Ripper: Missing Evidence' on TV. An individual named Charles Lechmere is examined as a Ripper suspect in that. He carted meat around in his work which began in the early morning. Blood on his clothes wouldn't have alerted anyone's suspicions. He passed by the murder sites on each occasion.

I don't think that it was Sir William Gull. And I always have a feeling that the Ripper didn't die after the killings stopped. I get the impression that his last killing was so gruesome that he may have finally got the blood lust out of his system. But I don't suppose that we will never know for sure.

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I recently saw a programme presented by Ripper expert Trevor Marriott which named a German former merchant sailor called Carl Feigenbaum. He seemed a fairly strong candidate from the programme, but a bit of further research seems to indicate he's an unlikely "Jack" for a number of reasons. Feigenbaum later moved continents, living in New York and working as a gardener. He possibly killed a prostitute there (according to Marriott)and was later caught red handed trying to flee the scene of another murder. He was executed at Sing Sing prison in 1896.

Believing at least couple of the contemporary Ripper letters are possibly genuine, and he had a good knowledge of the Whitechapel area, I have doubts that the Ripper was a "foreigner" who only visited London for short periods, rather than someone who had lived there quite some time.

The royal doctors/royal Jack stuff is nonsense. No decent Ripperologist takes it seriously - it stems from yarns dreamed up by fantasists and people wanting sensational suspects/"toffs" to sell books.

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I would like to see that programme on Carl Feigenbaum as a Ripper suspect. Could have been a foreigner as you say. They would have been undetectable if they did nothing as bad in their own country.

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I was veering towards agreeing with Marriott about Feigenbaum, but stuff on the Ripper casebook website has told me a lot the programme didn't, and makes the case against him seem a lot weaker.

Supposedly serial killers don't totally stop - unless they're stopped, as it were - by death, getting caught etc. Though some of them occasionally seem to be able to leave off murdering for years.

I tend to think that Jack was a Londoner, probably living in the east end. He seemed to know it well and probasbly had a convenient bolt hole nearby - which is what helped him get away and "vanish". I doubt he was anyone famous/of public importance/from the upper classes - anything like the mythical "toff" in a topper with a black bag, the classic image. There are some eyewitness descriptions of a man seen with the victims - "shabby genteel", a peaked hat, possibly around 5 foot 7 inches, in his late 20's /30's. One candidate is George Hutchison, the itinerant man who supposedly talked to Mary Kelly and watched her on the night she was killed. He only came forward as a "witness" late in the day, and it seems possible only did so because he had been seen near Kelly's place on the night of the murder. Not saying it was him, but it was probably someone like him. The current favourite candidate for Jack seems to be Aaron Kosminski, a contemporary police suspect apparently, a poor Jew who lived in the area; he was later judged mentally disturbed enough to be confined to Colney Hatch lunatic asylum, where he died many years later.

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I will check that Jack the Ripper casebook website sometime. It's interesting that the description given is 'shabby genteel.' I don't know if that excludes my suspect, Charles Lechmere, or not. That programme that I saw described him as working class with re-occurring family problems from the records that they had. But it couldn't go into personality traits. Lechmere was an eye-witness in court at the inquest of one of Ripper victims. He did live in the East End and knew the Whitechapel district like the back of his hand.

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Yes. I saw that programme too. Certainly Lechmere is an interesting possibility. I know from decades of "Rippering" how a plausible circumstantial case can be built against such suspects.

I find myself able to say more positively who he was not than who he was, or probably was - so I can confidently rule out the ludicrous candidates like Clarence, Gull, Sickert etc - fairly confidently scratch Druitt, D'onston, Chapman...even Tumblety etc - but still remain open minded on the likes of Kelly, Feigenbaum, Kosminsky, Mann, Lechmere, Hutchinson etc.

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No.





I'm Deckard B26354, I'm filed and monitored.

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No and neither is any name that's ever been connected to this case.

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