Jack the Ripper: The American Connection - Hardcover

Harrison, Shirley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 185782590X ISBN 13: 9781857825909

Publisher: John Blake, 2003

Synopsis

When the gruesome diaries of James Maybrick were unearthed 10 years ago, the last piece of a century-old puzzle was in place. The discovery offered the strongest evidence yet as to the true identity of Jack the Ripper. It suggests that Maybrick, a Liverpool merchant who, furious with his American wife’s infidelity, went periodically to London to butcher prostitutes who walked the streets close to where he had first seen his wife with her lover. Now, Shirley Harrison presents startling new evidence that Maybrick was also in Austin, Texas at the time of a horrific killing spree—eight murders, all likened to those of the Ripper. Reproducing James Maybrick’s chilling diaries in full, Jack the Ripper: The American Connection reveals a shocking twist in the tale.

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Reviews

A decade ago, in The Diary of Jack the Ripper, Harrison identified Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick as the author of a confessional diary signed Jack the Ripper. Now she attempts to link the Ripper with earlier killings in the U.S., following the lead of R. Michael Gordon in The American Murders of Jack the Ripper (2003). The diary’s authenticity has been the subject of heated debate, but Harrison does little here to persuade, failing to acknowledge that proof Maybrick wrote the diary is not tantamount to proof he was the Ripper. Harrison devotes pages to an astrologer’s study, and merely states that Maybrick could have been in Texas in 1885 at the time of multiple slayings there. This claim is at odds with the diary’s suggestion that its author had committed just one murder, in Manchester, before the 1888 autumn of terror in London. In addition, Harrison provides scant details on the unsolved Texas murders treated with more care in Steven Saylor’s novel A Twist at the End (2000), and which will be the subject of a forthcoming nonfiction treatment, The Midnight Assassin, by Skip Hollandsworth. As psychologist David Canter concludes in his postscript, "The only thing that is certain is that the question of who exactly was Jack the Ripper will not go away."
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Edition details

• Publisher: John Blake
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 185782590X
• ISBN 13: 9781857825909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512