Free The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper by Paul Begg, John Bennett Page B

story, and his approach could be seen as ground-breaking, regardless of whether one agreed with his suspect theory. It showed a willingness, all too lacking in studies of the Whitechapel murders at that time, to deconstruct the case and not to get too precious about the established thoughts of other commentators, which had become set in stone and taken for granted over the years: hence Wilson’s place in the firing line.
    The same could be said for Philip Sugden’s highly respected book
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
. 23 Sugden was not actually a true-crime enthusiast who had spent years studying the Ripper, but a historian who had turned his attention to the Whitechapel murders and felt that the subject had becomeshrouded in myth and unreliable documentation and, as a result, resolved to cast a critical eye over the events of 1888 to produce a truly unbiased account of the crimes and times. In this, he was hugely successful, and the book is still lauded as possibly the best account of the murders to date. Although some have said that the book might discreetly lean towards Severin Klosowski as the killer, ‘the best of a bad lot’ in Sugden’s view, as an unsensational account it was enormously successful.
    Sugden’s book also contained some quite cutting criticism of the way Ripper studies had been going previously. Several years later he very critically wrote of the average Ripperologist that ‘First he decides who he wants Jack the Ripper to be. And then he plunders the sources for anything that will invest his candidate with a veneer of credibility.’ Few people outside the field at that time took Ripperology seriously – it was considered akin to the study of UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle and other oddities; during the rush of books on the subject in 1987, one journalist was moved to write:
Not until you read the dispassionate inquest testimony and compare it with the pathetic heaps of rags and flesh in the faded police photographs, are you brought face to face with the messy, stinking reality of what the Ripper did. These latest books prefer to titillate. They dip their pens in the blood of the five mutilated women as lovingly as the slaughterer’s thin-bladed knife. 24
    Sugden attempted to bring Ripperology out of the ‘fringe’ and give it academic kudos. However, his criticism was in some ways undeserved, as there were many Ripper authors before him who had been trying to do exactly that.
    A new and important suspect, in the form of the previously unconsidered figure of Francis Tumblety, re-emerged courtesy of Suffolk police officer Stewart Evans’s acquisition of Chief Inspector John Littlechild’s 1913 letter to George Sims. As we know, Tumblety ultimately fled to America, where he was considered a celebrity and a possible Ripper suspect, albeit a curious one, and it is odd considering his profile in the USA at that time, that he was never given any attention later. Subsequent research led to the publication of
The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper
, 25 which, along with a great amount of detail on Tumblety’s life, also highlighted several facts that could well link him with the Ripper murders: apparently he had a dislike of women; he had once boasted of his collection of uteri, linking him perhaps with the American doctor mentioned by Wynne Baxter at the Annie Chapman inquest; the possibility that he was a mysterious American lodger who had left some bloodstained shirts in his room in Batty Street in the East End after the double murder. There were, of course, as with any suspect theory, frustrating discrepancies.
    The considerable media attention afforded Maybrick and Tumblety re-energized interest in the Ripper story; serious television documentaries began to appear with greater regularity, and more books would be published which presented new suspects, including contemporary witness George Hutchinson, taking a lead from Bruce Paley by naming a significant witness in the