They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper

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A couple of the letters feel unconvincingly overinterpreted; for instance the commentary on the one signed 'Andy Handy', when compared with the text, sounds like too much has been read into it. The Ripper's murders mocked and perverted masonic rituals and beliefs, and were clearly the work of a Mason. Because I am of the mind that the Ripper diary is a decoy, a detailed confession that would be "found" if Maybrick were ever caught.

They All Love Jack: Beating the Ripper by Bruce Robinson, review They All Love Jack: Beating the Ripper by Bruce Robinson, review

But ultimately, unlike any other "expert" I've previously read, he offers his culprit and then makes all the evidence stick with facts from primary sources. The fact that none of these sources has sought to demolish any of the individual issues that Robinson raises rather strengthens his case. It's obvious their pictures were never taken while they were alive, a reflection of the times, technology, poverty and social attitudes.

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They all love Jack : busting the Ripper : Robinson, Bruce They all love Jack : busting the Ripper : Robinson, Bruce

Yet, in spite of the weight of argument, it is likely that we will never pinpoint definitively the identity of the killer; Ripperology will continue regardless. That aside, I think the author hit the mark on who Jack was, how and why he operated, and most importantly, why he was never apprehended. On 30 September, Catherine Eddowes suffered the same fate in Mitre Square, a name redolent of masonry. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption.

Reading They All Love Jack was at times an exercise in learning to understand noisy, rabid internet fandoms - like Doctor Who and Sherlock - when they pour forth questions and criticisms that made a semi-outsider like me wonder "why watch the damn thing in the first place if you don't like it? There would be no need for Warren to actively suppress evidence at every turn since every Freemason would know his part in the drama.

They All Love Jack by Bruce Robinson - Defrosting Cold Cases They All Love Jack by Bruce Robinson - Defrosting Cold Cases

Ultimately, and in contrast to other, reductive approaches, Robinson's takes the wider view, embracing events that span many years and involving many actors in a complex chain of events, to arrive at a candidate for the Ripper that explains or helps resolve a host of associated 'mysteries', many now almost totally forgotten (the murder of poor Johnnie Gill being particularly harrowing for this reader. Even those who believe that evidence of the killings was covered up will find Robinson's work speculative rather than conclusive. Against a setting of streetwalkers and junkies, the author opposes the old boys of the empire (“Kitchener was an imperious bully even when he didn’t need to be”), stout fellows who exchanged secret handshakes and kept one another’s secrets—good reason, one might think, to suspect that the penny-dreadful serial killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper might have been a card-carrying member. At the outset, the authorities were unsure who they were protecting, and it is unknown how many may have been aware of his identity as his "career" progressed.

The tone of the writing was often very harsh which sometimes made it unpleasant to listen to, plus there were certain derogatory names and phrases that were repeated throughout the book which were not necessary.

They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper by Bruce Robinson

The inference is that Maybrick wrote the diary in a bid to frame his brother - if indeed it is contemporaneous. Instead, the trail was permitted to go cold; various straw men – including phantom Irish and Jewish murderers – were set up for public calumny, and Maybrick remained free to go about his ripping business. Although I've taken months to finish the book, ever since publication I've been checking reviews and ratings, hoping that it's doing well with others. The story of the Whitechapel Murders has so many angles that a timeline would benefit the reader to follow along.After the trial, Michael Maybrick, aka Jack the Ripper, retired to the Isle of Wight where, according to the author, he bowed to Establishment pressure and ‘transformed himself from a celebrity into an anonymous recluse’, staying in his study, with his door locked for years on end. Florence Chandler was convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic in a probably unfair trial that was presided over by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the father of another Ripper suspect James Kenneth Stephen. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Which is why senior police officers and coroners – all Masons – were so keen to conceal the precise nature of what Jack did to his victims. What if there had been a whispering campaign in the Lodges that there would be signs and symbols announcing the coming of some Freemason event?