Jack the Ripper - Identified?

For those of you keeping score at home, we now have the identity of Jack the Ripper. I know this because History is airing a multi-part series about H. H.

H. H. Holmes

Holmes, a notorious 19^th century conman and killer. He was allegedly hanged in 1896 after being convicted for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. But according to those on History, they have linked, sort of, Holmes to the Ripper murders in 1888, a time that Holmes might have been in London according to passenger lists of various steam ship lines of the times. An H. Holmes does appear arriving in London prior to the first murder and seems to have left at the last. Of course, according to them, Holmes used a variety of identities and in a time in which no documentation was needed to move about the world, he could have traveled under one of those names… There is no evidence that the H. Holmes that appeared on the list was the Holmes. Many people have the same name and if you don’t buy that, just google your own name and see how many you can find.

But wait, there’s more, as they say on television. We now have a diary apparently kept by one James Maybrick. It surfaced a couple of decades ago, in 1993, when it was published. At the time most rejected it as an authentic diary of Jack the Ripper. The diary passed into the hands of Robert Smith (and to prove a point, I interviewed a Robert Smith in conjunction with the Roswell UFO crash but it was not the same guy, obviously) who claimed to have been a writer. Three years after that, Smith said that he had made up the whole thing… but, of course, he later retracted that statement.

James Maybrick

There has been a number of tests run on the ink in the diary and they all seem to confirm that it is from a period prior to the writing of the diary which simply means that it can’t be ruled out as an authentic document. Had the ink formula been developed after Maybrick’s death, that would have been proof the diary was forged.

As happens in Ufology, in Ripperology (if that’s really a word), nothing is ever that simple. There is now a team of experts who say that the diary is real. Bruce Robinson, who lead the team, said that they have evidence that the diary is genuine and that Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. The problem here? Robinson is a film maker and is working on a documentary about Jack the Ripper.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

So, we have two suspects being touted as the real Jack the Ripper, all of this coming out in the last few months. But what would Jack the Ripper be if there isn’t a third or fourth suspect? I mention this simply because, several years ago I completed a book, Conversations, that dealt with past life regressions that had originally started as an abduction case. In one of those lives, the subject, whom I called Jenny, told of being one of two men who had worked in tandem as Jack the Ripper.

Although originally reluctant to provide a name, she did give clues to his identity.

Montague John Druitt

Eventually, because of those clues she gave us we learned that the Ripper had been Montague John Druitt, a lawyer and the son of a doctor. That implied that he had some sort of the specialized knowledge that it is claimed the Ripper had.

As mentioned, she said that there were two men involved which explained some of the original problems with identifying the Ripper. There is legal precedence for this. There are cases in which neither person might have killed had the other not been there as some sort of symbiotic relation. That kind of thing was seen by the two men who killed the Clutter family in Kansas, or the Hillside Stranglers, or even the Manson clan.

Although these names all surfaced at some point, Maybrick and Holmes are the two being pushed today. I included Druitt because that was the name I had learned in those regression sessions, but also because of the suggestion that the Ripper wasn’t one man but two.

We are at the point, which is a point that has been around for decades, that you look at the evidence and pick your Ripper. There is solid evidence that points to each of these men, and other evidence that seems to exclude them. If I was forced to make a choice, I think it would be Maybrick, but I’d be rooting for Druitt just so that it would be another confirmation of Jenny’s weird tale.