The Escape of Jack the Ripper: The Truth About the Cover-up and His Flight from Justice

by Jonathan Hainsworth, Christine Ward-Agius

Overview

“I doubt that anyone else will be able to offer a more comprehensive portrait of this Ripper suspect than these authors have done.”—DR. KATHERINE RAMSLAND, Psychology Today

A MYSTERY SOLVED

In 1888, five gruesome murders shocked the civilized public. A bloodthirsty killer was on the loose in the slums of London. The world was on the lookout for Jack the Ripper.

Scotland Yard never found their man—or so they said publicly. The police knew the killer’s identity but concealed it to save the ruling class from embarrassment.

The Escape of Jack the Ripper, the true story behind the Whitechapel murders, reveals how British elites manipulated the public to protect one of their own. Through meticulous research, including documents disclosed here for the first time, Jonathan Hainsworth and Christine Ward-Agius have uncovered the killer’s identity.

In The Escape of Jack the Ripper, you’ll learn:

• How a fit of madness transformed a reputable gentleman into a savage murderer
• That the killer was caught literally red-handed but talked his way out of police custody
• About the decades-long cover-up by the press and the police to protect a well-to-do family’s reputation
• About the harrowing social conditions in which the murders took place and why the killer may have been a frustrated reformer
• How the social privileges enjoyed by the ruling class led to a miscarriage of justice

A thoroughly researched and gripping tale, The Escape of Jack the Ripper solves the great Whitechapel murder mystery once and for all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684511785
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	07/20/2021
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	477,020
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Hainsworth is an Australian high school history teacher. In 2007, he began teaching about Victorian society. He chose “Jack the Ripper” as an entry point and, to his surprise, found that a Metropolitan Police chief had solved the case, albeit posthumously—but that in sharing the solution with the public he had carefully concealed “the Ripper’s” exact identity for reasons of propriety.

Christine Ward-Agius was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and is a researcher and working artist. She worked for many years in the welfare sector, gaining particular experience in a program designed to help empower women to escape poverty by means of education and employment. The insight gained from this area of work gave Christine an added interest while assisting her partner Jonathan Hainsworth in writing his first book on Jack the Ripper. Her patient detective work in the Druitt family archives, newspaper articles held in the British Library, and the records of English public schools unearthed previously unseen documentary and photographic evidence pointing clearly at Montague Druitt as the solution to the Whitechapel murders.

Table of Contents

Dramatis Personae ix

Introduction What Mystery? xvii

Chapter 1 In Defense of Murder 1

Chapter 2 Perfect Family … 9

Chapter 3 … Perfect Gentleman 19

Chapter 4 A Call to Rescue the Degraded 25

Chapter 5 "Rip" Murders Not by "the Ripper" 35

Chapter 6 From Tory to Terrorist 43

Chapter 7 The Reign of Red Terror 51

Chapter 8 Demoniacal Work Disturbed 59

Chapter 9 Panic Sweeps "Slumopolis" 67

Chapter 10 Scotland Yard's Fatal Blunder? 79

Chapter 11 Hell's Address: Dorset Street 95

Chapter 12 The English Patient 105

Chapter 13 Jack of Diamonds 129

Chapter 14 A Gentleman's Exit 137

Chapter 15 Cover-up at Chiswick 143

Chapter 16 Veiled Correspondence 151

Chapter 17 Saved by an "Honourable Schoolboy" 163

Chapter 18 Memos of Misdirection 181

Chapter 19 Knight Takes Bishop 201

Chapter 20 The Big Sleep 227

Chapter 21 The Smartest Man in the World? 237

Chapter 22 Grinning like a Cheshire Cat 249

Afterword 259

Acknowledgments 263

Bibliography 267

Notes 273

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

05/24/2021

Hainsworth (Jack the Ripper—Case Solved, 1891) and Ward-Agius overpromise and underdeliver in yet another volume announcing “the truth” about Jack the Ripper, who they argue was London solicitor Montague John Druitt. In 1965’s When London Walked in Terror, Tom Cullen identified Druitt as a suspect, based on notes from Sir Melville Macnaghten, an assistant chief constable of the CID, who was not on the force at the time of the murders. Macnaghten had listed three people he deemed possible Rippers, including Druitt, who was believed to have taken his own life in December 1888. The authors, who simply assume Druitt’s guilt, theorize that Druitt’s family knew he was the Ripper and had him confined to an asylum in France to spare the family name before assenting to his release and return to England. The paucity of their evidence, which amounts to little more than Macnaghten’s inaccurate notes and Druitt’s apparent suicide following the last murder considered an actual Ripper killing, is demonstrated by their noting as significant a photo of Druitt in front of “a chalk scrawl on the wall,” because the Ripper may have left a message in chalk on a wall. This adds nothing new to a case that continues to tantalize armchair sleuths. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary (U.K.). (July)

Publishers Weekly