Ripper's reign of terror 'began 25 years earlier'

Published on Saturday 6 September 2008 19:36

JACK the Ripper may have committed his first murder 25 years earlier than previously thought, it was claimed last night.

An investigation by retired homicide detective Trevor Marriott has also suggested that the notorious 19th-century serial killer did not in fact remove internal organs from two of his victims.

Marriott has uncovered case files on the murder of a London prostitute in 1863 which he believes fits the Ripper's "modus operandi" – a quarter of a century before the first official Ripper case.

A 28-year-old prostitute named Emma Jackson was found dead at a brothel in St Giles, central London, in April 1863. She had five wounds to the throat and had not been robbed. The case was never solved.

Marriott also uncovered a second case he believes may have been committed by the Ripper. Nine years after Emma Jackson's murder, on Christmas Day 1872, Harriet Buswell was found with her throat slit at her lodgings in nearby Great Coram Street, after returning home the previous evening with a male guest, who witnesses reported to be German. This case also remains unsolved.

Traditionally, Jack is alleged to have removed organs from the bodies of his victims, including his second "official" victim Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, his fourth, with a degree of medical precision. But Marriott in his new book The Evil Within claims it would have been impossible for the murderer to extract the organs at speed in a dimly lit street.

Marriott said: "The organs were not removed by the killer at the crime scenes, but by a person or persons unknown for medical research at some point between the bodies being removed from the crime scenes and the post-mortems taking place some 12 hours later.

"In both these cases the bodies had been left alone and unattended outside makeshift mortuaries."

Claims that Jack removed Eddowes' uterus and wrapped it in a piece of her apron were also incorrect, the book claims. Original crime reports of Eddowes' murder described the apron as "blood spotted". But an experiment involving a real hysterectomy conducted by a gynaecologist showed material used to wrap the organ would become blood soaked in such circumstances, Marriott said.

Marriott's previous book on Jack the Ripper claimed that the murderer was a German merchant seaman named Carl Feigenbaum. The sailor was responsible for the five recognised Ripper murders in Whitechapel, east London, in 1888, as well as others in Germany and the US, he said.

Feigenbaum was about 48 in 1888, and so was old enough to have been responsible for the earlier crimes now attributed to the Ripper by Marriott.

Marriott said shipping records showed it was possible that Feigenbaum was in London at the time of all the murders. The suspect was arrested in 1894 in New York for killing a woman in Ripper-like fashion, and executed in 1896.

In addition to the Ripper's five main murders, at least 13 other London killings between 1887 and 1881 are linked to Jack by investigators of the unsolved mystery, but none before the 1880s are widely recognised.