The Bell Tower: The Mystery of Jack the Ripper Finally Solved.in San Francisco

Veteran true-crime author Graysmith (Zodiac, Unabomber, etc.,) weighs in with an ambitious theory linking the Ripper killings with two murders committed in San Francisco in the spring of 1895. Graysmith's Ripper is John George Gibson, a Canadian-born Baptist preacher who resigned his parish in Scotland in 1887 and whose whereabouts are unknown until his arrival in the U.S. in December 1888, a month after the last Ripper murder. Although a medical student was convicted and hanged for the San Francisco murders, Graysmith makes a persuasive argument that only Gibson had the time and access to kill the two women, whose bodies were found in his new parish, the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco's Mission District. His own detailed drawings and diagrams of the labyrinthine church further his case. However, Whitechapel enthusiasts will find much to refute Graysmith's contention that Gibson was the Ripper. The San Francisco victims were not prostitutes; there was none of the careful mutilation that marked the Ripper as a man with some medical training; and the killer didn't boast to the authorities of his crimes. The book itself is gratuitously detailed, padded with too many diversions about the battle between newspaper tycoons Mike de Young and William Randolph Hearst, as well as with long biographies of the writers and artists who covered the slayings. As it stands, only devoted followers of the Ripper murders will remained interested to the end. (Aug.) FYI: Touchstone Pictures is making a film of Zodiac.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two murders and an ensuing scandal that the on-the-make Will Hearst's San Francisco Examiner headlined ``THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY'' are linked, seemingly inevitably, to ``Saucy Jack.'' At the 1895 murder trial, the prosecutor claimed that medical student and Sunday-school teacher Theo Durrant was a psychopath with the same motive that prompted and made into a monster Jack the Ripper.'' Durant allegedly killed Blanche Lamont, mutilating her body and hiding it in the bell tower of the scandal-plagued Emmanuel Baptist Church. The rhetorical connection to this killing and that of another young woman at the church is only slightly less than the evidence veteran true-crime writer Graysmith (Zodiac, not reviewed, etc.) has to connect it with the 1888 Whitechapel murders. While Durrant still professed his innocence on the scaffold, Emmanuel Baptist's pastor, John ``Jack'' Gibson, was never investigated as a suspect, even though the scandal couldnt be dislodged from his reputation. Pastor Jack was also in England during the Ripper slayings, left just after the last ``canonical'' killing, and bore a strong resemblance to one of the police sketches of the serial killerall of which Graysmith juxtaposes as he slowly narrates the Bell Tower Murders. Using the official police record and the considerable press coverage, Graysmith (a longtime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and the man who identified the Zodiac killer) has thoroughly researched his work. His novelistic approach, with an amalgamated journalist character, re-created dialogue and thoughts, and plenty of old-time Frisco atmosphere, reads like an aspiring Caleb Carr's draft. Graysmith painstakingly reconstructs the murders to prove Durrant had no opportunity to commit them in the labyrinthian church, with enough locked doors to confound Agatha Christie, and to show that Pastor Jack, with the help of a parishioner, did. Yet the highly selective evidence doesnt provide even circumstantial proof. True crime narrated like fiction but slowed by digressions and a hobbyhorse theory. (b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.