h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

at my school (winchester college) there are engraved into 19th century oak panels the signiatures of several of the suspects, or so im told...

So who did it?!?!

I doubt we will aver know. One hundred years have passed and too much innuendo has been thrown up. That said, I would put my monay on James Maybrick. There is enough circumstantial evidence to place him at or about the area at the time, with enough psychotic displaced motive and arsenic madness, and there is of course the infamous diary.......

there was a diary?! tell me more about it

The diary of James Maybrick was unearthed by a descendant at a house once occupied by James in Liverpool, where he worked as a cotton (?) merchant. In the diary, Maybrick claimed to know much more about the murders than could have been known by the general public. True, he was a rich man and could have purchased such information from the police of the day, but the handwriting analysis indicated that the scribe probably truley believed what he was writing. The diary also included information that only came to light decades later and likey was unknown to anyone outside Inspector Abbelyne's(sp?) trusted few, if at all at the time. It also cast light on the "Juwes" graffitti as being a corruption of James, and on the marks gouged into the face of his victims as being reference to the name of his hated wife.

I'm sorry this is a bit vague, but my copy of the diary is thousands of miles away so I can't check up these facts. The official analysis of the diary was that it was either written in the last ten years (based on the facts included) or written by a contemporary of the crimes who had exceptional knowledge of each brutal murder. The analysis of the paper upon which the diary was written suggested that it was written more than eighty years ago. The diary is likely genuiniely that of Maybrick, the only question is, how did he know so much?

Hope this has given you a little more info. I recommend reading the book. It gave me goosebumps!!

Thanks for the info! I'm doing coursework on jack the ripper and thats why I needed to know. It's helped me loads! Thanks again

I think it should also be said that the Maybrick dairy is almost certainly a fake - if only by Maybrick.

We shall certainly never know who did it know, as the police investifgation at the time was bungled and hampered in equal measures (though this was no fault of Aberline's - he did the best he did with the materials he had to hand).

In actual fact, using the information available and a smattering of common sense, the man who has patently escaped scrutiny for all this time is the lover of Mary Jane Kelly, Joseph Barnett. We know he knew Kelly was pregnant (believed to be his child), and we know that he had made strenous efforts to get her to leave a life of prostitution behind. It is entriely plausible that he started killing girls in the area to scare off Kelly from the 'game'.