Druitt had suffered a series of personal crises during the 1880s, including his dismissal from a teaching post at a boarding school (which some modern authors have taken as evidence for his closeted homosexuality), his father’s death and his mother’s institutionalization due to mental illness. Investigators concluded that the cause of death was suicide and that the body had been at the bottom of the river for several weeks. On November 9, 1888, seven weeks after the fifth and final murder, this Oxford-educated lawyer was found floating in the River Thames, his pockets filled with stones. Holmes’ own great-great grandson, Jeff Mudgett, believes his ancestor was also Jack the Ripper, based on a series of diary entries in which Holmes’ purportedly outlined his involvement in the Whitechapel murders. The crowning achievement of his dark deeds was the construction of a building a hotel on Chicago’s south side that he engineered to be a factory of death, complete with a gas chamber, dissection room, trap doors and a basement furnace to destroy any trace of his sinister work.Īlthough Holmes was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death, some “Ripperologists” believe it wasn’t Holmes who was executed in 1896-and that his murderous spree wasn’t limited to the United States. Holmes took, but it’s believed he was responsible for killing as many as 200 people in the late 19th century. Official records, newspaper reports and other sources, however, offer strong indication that the prince was nowhere near Whitechapel when the victims died.Ĭould one of America’s first serial killers also be the Ripper? No one knows for sure how many lives H.H. This rather dubious claim took the international press by storm, and some contemporary conspiracy theorists continue to explore whether the man who could have been king was instead history’s most notorious serial killer. In 1970, the British physician Thomas Stowell published an article implying that Eddy had committed the murders during fits of insanity caused by an advanced case of syphilis. Known to his family as Eddy, the prince was second in line to the throne when he died of influenza at 28. One of the most intriguing-and sensational-contenders for Jack the Ripper’s grim legacy is Prince Albert Victor, the son of King Edward VII and grandson of Queen Victoria. Marriott also discovered that Feigenbaum’s defense lawyer had reached similar conclusions more than a century ago, telling newspapers that his client had admitted to being a serial killer and that he could place him in Whitechapel during Jack the Ripper’s killing spree. (The Ripper is believed to have targeted prostitutes.) He also noticed striking similarities between Jack the Ripper’s crimes and the slaying of Feigenbaum’s alleged victim, Julianna Hoffman, which took place six years later.Īrchival research revealed that Feigenbaum, who went by a string of aliases, had been a merchant seaman for the Norddeutsche Line, which owned ships that had been docked near Whitechapel on every date of the five Ripper murders. The detective, Trevor Marriott, a former member of the Bedfordshire homicide squad, points to the fact that two merchant docks were in operation near Whitechapel-and that the men who passed through them were known to frequent local brothels. According to one hypothesis, proposed by a retired English detective, Jack the Ripper was a German sailor named Carl Feigenbaum who was executed for murdering a New York woman in 1894.
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