Who Was Jack the Ripper?

During three autumn months of 1888, five London prostitutes were murdered and all but one horribly disemboweled by perhaps the most famous uncaught murderer of all time, Jack the Ripper. According to an article published this week in The Criminologist, a British professional journal of police science, Jack may have gone uncaught, but his identity was known to Scotland Yard: "He was the heir to power and wealth. His grandmother, who outlived him, was very much the stern Victorian matriarch . . . His father, to whose title he was the heir, was a gay cosmopolitan and did much to improve the status of England internationally."

The article's author is Thomas Stowell, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, who in his youth studied under Sir William Gull, physician to Queen Victoria. Another of Gull's patients, writes Stowell, was Jack the Ripper. Although Stowell refers to the killer as "S" throughout the article, he drops enough clues to leave little doubt as to the madman's identity.

"S," says Stowell, caught syphilis in the West Indies while touring the world in his late teens. At 21, he was "gazetted to a commission in the army ... He resigned his commission shortly after the raiding of some premises in Cleveland St., which were frequented by aristocrats and well-to-do homosexuals."

One clue suggesting that Jack was really "S," an eminent personage, was the curious manner in which police dealt with the 1888 murder cases. When Sir Charles Warren, the Scotland Yard chief, arrived at one of the murder-mutilation scenes, he ordered that writing chalked on a nearby wall--presumably by the killer--be erased. Jack, Stowell believes, was certified insane and was quietly placed in a private mental home --although he later escaped and committed his last and most horrible murder, that of a prostitute named Mary Jane Kelly. He cut her throat, obliterated her face, removed her liver, heart and uterus, and hung pieces of her flesh from nails on a nearby wall. Stowell suggests that Jack learned his skills "on the family estate in Scotland," where he stalked deer and watched carcasses being eviscerated and dressed.

The following year, writes Stowell, Jack had recovered sufficiently "to take a five months'cruise, during which he enjoyed some big-game hunting." Following a relapse, he died "in his father's country house" of "bronchopneumonia." Adds Stowell: "I have seen a photograph of my suspect which suggests paranoia by the extravagance of his dress ... He is wearing a 4-in. to 4 1/2-in. stiff starched collar and is showing two inches of shirt-cuff at each wrist. (I was told that he was given the nickname of 'Collar and Cuffs.')"

As any student of modern British history can testify, Stowell's "S" sounds remarkably like Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, grandson of Queen Victoria, son of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and brother of George V.

After his 21st birthday, Prince Eddy was commissioned in the tenth Hussars, his father's regiment. On one occasion, according to Philippe Jullian in his book Edward and the Edwardians, "the police discovered the Duke in a maison de rencontre of a particularly equivocal nature during a raid . . . The young man's evil reputation soon spread. The rumor gained ground that he was Jack the Ripper . . ." Because of his unusually long neck, his father would tell children of the royal family, "Don't call him Uncle Eddy, call him Uncle-Eddy-Collars-and-Cuffs." Until his death at the age of 28 in 1892 from "influenza complicated by pneumonia," he was in the direct line of succession to the British throne.

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