The Diary of Jack the Ripper: The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick - Softcover

Harrison, Shirley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844549178 ISBN 13: 9781844549177

Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction, 2010

Synopsis

The pages of The Diary of Jack the Ripper reveal the unimaginable—that more than a century ago, the legendary serial killer at work in London’s Whitechapel kept a record of his bestial mutilations of women. The writer of the horrific journal is James Maybrick, a depraved, drug-taking, womanizing, 49-year-old Liverpool cotton merchant with a history of domestic violence. In this analysis of his diary, investigative author Shirley Harrison explains all about the origins of the text and the rigorous scientific analysis it has endured while revealing startling new information about Maybrick's shadowy background. This evidence, along with a chilling confession scratched into a watch—"I am Jack. J Maybrick," provide powerful justification that Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. The diary itself is reproduced in full, so that readers can judge whether these are the deeply distributing words of Jack the Ripper himself, reaching out from across the abyss of more than a century.

About this title

About the Author

Shirley Harrison is the author of Jack the Ripper: The American Connection.

From Booklist

There are signs everywhere that this is going to be a hot item. Hyperion rushed the book into print earlier than the proposed publishing date; 60 Minutes picked up the story and aired a debate on the authenticity of the diary itself; bookstores throughout the country are filling display-windows with copies of the book's handsome red-and-black cover. And then there's the evidence of the book itself. Whether or not this newly discovered diary of the Ripper is authentic--and the book makes a powerful argument that it is--the tale it tells is absolutely riveting. The suggestion is that the Ripper was actually a cotton merchant from Liverpool who, furious over his American wife's infidelity, went periodically to London to butcher whores who walked the streets close to where he had first seen his wife walking with her lover. The diary itself is either an elaborate and brilliant hoax authored early in the century (paper and ink dating have established that it is between 60 and 100 years old) or the genuine article. It is full of the sort of gruesome details that only someone with access to police records recently released could have known: for instance, that the Ripper took the heart of one of the victims home. The man himself, James Maybrick, was a drug addict who gradually became more and more unhinged throughout the authorship of his mad diary and ended up being murdered by his wife. From all angles, it is an extraordinary tale that, when accompanied by numerous arresting photographs and the text of the diary itself (in facsimile and in type), leaves one at the heart of a horrific and mesmerizing crime--one that somehow seems to define our terrible and frightening age. Stuart Whitwell

About this edition

• Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1844549178
• ISBN 13: 9781844549177
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288