Jack The Ripper In America. Did Jack The Ripper Visit The United States?

Saturday, April 3, 2010
Jack the Ripper in America?

Review:
Discovery Channel's
"Jack the Ripper in America"
Discovery Channel documentaries are a mixed bag. Their quality science programs, like the “Life” series currently running, are informative and entertaining, but Discovery also presents the supernatural, in shows like “Ghost Lab,” with no distinction between fact and fantasy. So it was with hope and trepidation that I sat down to watch “Jack the Ripper in America.” It was not their finest hour.

Amid the obligatory swirling fog and Victorian trappings, the show is hosted by Ed Norris, a former cold case detective (the truth, but not the whole truth.) He is here to bring modern forensic methods to investigate an 1891, New York murder that was rumored to be the work of London’s Jack the Ripper. Norris pulls the police file on the case of Carrie Brown, a 58 year old prostitute, nicknamed “Old Shakespeare,” who was murdered and mutilated on April 24, 1891. The murder bore at least a superficial resemblance to the London cases; all of the Ripper’s victims were prostitutes, and as in this case, the bodies were severely mutilated after death. The detective tells us that a serial killer’s modus operandi is as distinctive as a signature and goes to London to see if he can find the New York killer’s hand in the Ripper’s work.

Suspects

“Jack the Ripper” was the name given to the unknown perpetrator of a series of heinous murders in the Whitechapel area of London’s East End in the period between August 31 and November 9 in 1888. The killer was never found and over the years more than a hundred suspects have emerged including such notables as Oscar Wilde, Louis Carol, and Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor. Several of the more likely suspects were known to have been to the United States. Norris considers three: George Chapman, aka Severin Antoniovich Klosowski — a prime suspect among Ripperoligists (yes, that’s what they call themselves)— moved to Jersey City, New Jersey in 1891; Francis Tumblety, arrested in 1888 on suspicion of the Whitechapel murders, took a steamer to New York City while out on bail; and James Kelly who escaped from Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum just before the murders and was known to be in America after them. (Also listed but not mentioned was Dr. Neil Cream, who poisoned a man in America and several women in England.)