The Ripper’s Haunts

Hidden from history for over a century, the name of Scotland Yard’s key suspect in the mysterious Jack the Ripper murders was rediscovered in 1993. He was arrested, jumped bail, sneaked out of England–and then the murders stopped. Tracing his footsteps through Victorian London has revealed haunting finds. A macabre wax museum operated just yards away from the first vicious attack, in which the proprietor callously showcased explicit wax models of the fiend’s victims, presented to the public just hours after each untimely death. A clandestine police investigation was being quietly pursued, based upon a Jekyll-Hyde theory that the killer was harvesting female organs in his quest to create an elixir of life. Surprisingly, actor-producer Richard Mansfield’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was showing at the famous Lyceum Theatre in London during the 1888 Autumn of terror; incredibly, the employees of the theater were members of an organization that was also in search of the precious elixir. Recent studies on the Jack the Ripper murders performed by experts in forensic science, sociology, and criminal profiling support the conclusion that the person linked to these graphic killings would be someone interested in the three types of anatomical organs taken from the victims; someone like this very suspect.