

Despite this, there were still many who did not buy Kosminski as Jack and the search continued. Then, in 1992, the so-called Ripper Diary surfaced. Published the following year by Shirley Harrison as The Diary Of Jack The Ripper, it featured detailed accounts of the crimes and a final confession that the author was indeed Jack. The alleged author of the diary was a man named James Maybrick, a wealthy Liverpool cotton merchant. Although he never mentions himself by name, investigation into the information presented in the diary does conclusively point to Maybrick being the author. Maybrick died the year after the Whitechapel murders, allegedly poisoned by his wife, Florence.

The next and most recent entry into the always-expanding book of theories was the 2005 book Uncle Jack. A few years previous, writer Tony Williams had unintentionally discovered a connection between Jack The Ripper and his grandmother’s great-great-uncle Dr. John Williams. In Uncle Jack, he posed that the five women were used as guinea pigs, dissected in order to further the doctor’s medical research.
Here is a summary of the evidence Williams compiled that ties his distant relative to the Ripper.
-John Williams was a doctor, specializing in obstetrics.
-Based on the cutting pattern of neck wounds inflicted by the Ripper, he was left-handed. The statue of Williams in the National Library Of Wales in Aberystwyth shows him holding an item in his left hand, suggesting he also was a southpaw.
-All five victims were killed within a fifteen minute walk from the infirmary that Williams was thought to have worked at.
-Williams performed a documented abortion on a Mary Anne Nichols (the first victim) in 1885.
-Williams wrote a letter to a colleague saying he was attending a clinic in Whitechapel on the night Annie Chapman (the second victim) was killed.
-Chapman was said to have visited an infirmary after getting into a bar brawl a few nights before her death. Williams, though not documented, is thought to have worked in an infirmary in Whitechapel during the murders.
-Pills were found on Chapman’s body. Where would she have gotten those, if not from a physician?
-Liz Stride (the third victim) was a resident at The Lying-In Hospital in Waterloo in 1881-82, when Williams was also known to have worked there.
-Kate Eddowes (the fourth victim) was also at the Lying-In Hospital in June of 1887. She appeared in a study that year on Bright’s Disease – an afflction of the kidneys – that Williams would have been aware of through a colleague. Eddowes was the only victim to have her kidney removed. Why would this have been done if the killer didn’t have prior knowledge of her particular ailment?
-From records, we see that Williams was not at his usual post at University College Hospital on Aug 31 and Sep 25, both around the dates of the murders of Nichols, Stride & Eddowes.
-Relatives spoke of Williams having an affair with someone named Mary.
-Mary Kelly (the final victim), at the same time, was known to have lived in Kingsbridge and keeping the company of a ‘gentleman’ and resided five minutes away from the Williams’ home.
-A witness said Mary Kelly was spotted the night of her murder with a man about thirty five, five-foot-six, with a moustache and a thick coat. The witness also mentioned a red stone on his coat. After Williams’ death, a friend of wrote about as he had known him in the 1880’s. He said “he was of middle height, robust build, he wore a frock coat, silk hat, stand up collar and a dark silk tie held by a pin set with a red stone.”
-During 1888, Williams specifically asked to have weekends free from UCH. Then in 1889, he asked for the opposite, requesting Saturday morning shifts. Finally, in 1890 he asked to no longer perform ovariectomies, which was not only his specialty, but also the Ripper’s M.O.
This all adds up to some very compelling evidence. Of course, like the Maybrick diary, the pundits were quick to pick apart this theory, discounting many of the above points as conjecture. Shortly after Uncle Jack was published, Ripperologist Jennifer Pegg wrote a few articles discrediting Williams’ book. She outed the Mary Ann Nichols abortion document as a forgery and maintained his link to Mary Kelly was an exaggeration, if not pure fallacy. Under further scrutiny, it appears that Uncle Jack is as much fiction as The Final Solution was. Any new angle that comes along is automatically discounted because I think all these historians either want their theory to be the correct one, or they just don’t really want to know at all. If the case was ever solved, what would all those scholars do then?
So, the mystery continues. When it comes right down to it, we know very little about Jack. Even his infamous moniker was fabricated by the press in order to sell newspapers – all the letters sent to the authorities during the crimes have all since been proven as fakes. Jack was a ghost, able to seemingly disappear into thin air. Based on the constable patrols at the scene of the Eddowes murder, Jack would have had less than TEN minutes to perform his ghastly deed, yet no one saw or heard anything.