Literally dozens of books have been written on the subject, and in almost every case the author has started out with the name of the killer already firmly established in his or her own mind, and has then cherry-picked the evidence to support that conclusion, in some cases to the extent of ignoring established facts, bending or at least shading the truth, or even inventing new ‘facts’ to help make the case.
If the same type of killings took place today, it is almost certain that the murderer would quickly be apprehended because of the enormous advances in investigative technique, and especially in scientific detection methods such as DNA analysis, which have been developed. But at the end of the nineteenth century, the apprehension of criminals primarily depended upon them being caught in the act, and Jack the Ripper seems to have been particularly adept at avoiding detection.
My personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Jack the Ripper was an intelligent criminal, not some common thug who just got a thrill from murdering women. I also believe that, because of the circumstances of the killings and the speed with which he is known to have carried out some of the mutilations, he almost certainly had had considerable medical training and experience. The removal of Catharine Eddowes’s left kidney, which had to have been accomplished in the dark on an open street in no more than about ten minutes using a single heavy knife, is sufficient proof of this. What he did to her body showed unarguable and impressive medical skill.
As described in this novel, an impartial analysis of the descriptions of the murders does show a steady progression from simple stab wounds – if Martha Tabram was the first victim of the Ripper, which has never been established for certain – through increasing mutilation which culminated in the horrific butchery visited upon Mary Kelly. That could suggest, as in this book, that the killer was trying to send somebody a message, and the escalating brutality in each case simply served to reinforce that message.
It could also, equally, mean that the Ripper was a lunatic and that his madness was getting progressively worse and that after the final killing he, for example, committed suicide, or was apprehended for some other offence, was incarcerated in an asylum, or simply left London. Or there could be a dozen other reasons for the way that the mutilations increased in ferocity, and why the killing stopped. The short version, in fact, is that nobody knows who Jack the Ripper was or why he was doing it.
Alexei Pedachenko
Although this man lies well outside the group of the more usual suspects, he was named categorically as Jack the Ripper by the equally notorious Russian monk Rasputin. Or, at least, that’s according to a man named William Le Queux, who in a book published in 1923 claimed that some six years earlier he had been given a number of manuscripts found in the cellar of Rasputin’s house by the Russian provincial government. Among these documents was a manuscript written in French entitled Great Russian Criminals, and this identified Pedachenko as Jack the Ripper. However, it’s also fair to say that as far as we know, Rasputin neither spoke nor wrote French and lived in a fourth floor flat, so it’s arguable that Mr Le Queux’s source is at best somewhat suspect, and at worst entirely fictitious.
There is evidence that Pedachenko was a real person, apparently born in 1857 and who died in 1908, and he may well have been an agent of the Okhrana. According to some sources, he had trained and worked as a doctor in Russia, principally in the maternity wards of hospitals in Tver. He was also believed to have been living in Paris in 1886, and may have killed a woman in Montmartre while he was there, as a result of which he fled to Britain, and in 1888, when the Ripper murders took place, he was supposedly living in Walworth in south London with his sister.
Another somewhat questionable source suggests that Pedachenko did carry out the Ripper killings, but that he had been ordered to do so by his Russian masters either to embarrass the British police or to try to have expatriate Russian anarchists blamed for the murders, but there is no documentary evidence for either of these suggestions. A further source claims that following the Ripper murders Pedachenko was recalled to Russia and returned to St Petersburg, but he murdered another woman there in 1902, after which he was confined in a lunatic asylum where he died six years later.
Pedachenko was known to cross-dress, as I’ve described in this novel, and was able to successfully pass himself off as a woman when he needed to do so.
There is no evidence that he was ever stationed, in any capacity, in Jerusalem.
The Young Woman in the Night
One chapter of this novel shows ‘my’ Jack the Ripper, Alexei Pedachenko, stopping a young woman on the street late at night and engaging in conversation with her. This is actually a fictionalized account of a real event. The great-grandmother of one of my good friends was actually walking back through the streets of Whitechapel after visiting her husband in hospital, when she was stopped by a well-dressed gentleman and engaged in a conversation very similar to the one that I have described. And immediately before the man continued on his way, he gave her a few words of warning about being out so late, and then handed her the enormous sum of £5.
She told and retold this story throughout her life and, although she obviously had no definite proof as to the identity of the man, she always believed that he could have been Jack the Ripper, and that he had only let her pass because she was so clearly terrified of him. The truth of this story, too, will never be known.
The Jewish Menorah
The fate of this most sacred of all Jewish religious artefacts has never been clarified. Beyond any doubt, at some point during the suppression of the Great Jewish Revolt it was seized by the Roman legions under the command of Vespasian and then his son Titus, and was carried back in triumph to Rome. The frieze on the triumphal Arch of Titus in Rome shows the relic quite unambiguously. Just as an aside, until comparatively recently tourists were able to walk through the arch unsupervised, and Jewish visitors in particular were known to spit on the sides of the arch as a somewhat messy protest against the events which had taken place almost two millennia earlier and which the arch commemorated.
It is also known that the menorah was placed on display in Rome and remained there for many years, but when the Western Roman Empire crumbled because of internal strife and attacks on the Eternal City by, particularly, the Vandal armies, the relic vanished from the pages of history, and has never been seen since. The Byzantine general Belisarius did conquer Carthage and managed to recover many of the Roman Empire’s lost treasures, but it has never been established whether or not the menorah was among these items.
However, if it was, and if the emperor Justinian decided to return the treasure to Jerusalem, then concealing the object in the maze of tunnels and chambers under the Temple Mount would have been a logical thing to do, in view of the situation in Jerusalem at the time. With Muslim forces governing the city, it would have been far too dangerous for the menorah to have been returned to Jerusalem openly. It would have had to be smuggled in and then hidden somewhere, and because of the enormous cultural and religious significance of the Temple Mount itself, the most obvious, and in fact probably the only sensible, place to conceal the relic would have been in the labyrinth underneath it.
It might even still be there today.
Get your next fix of conspiracy thrillers by James Becker with The Hounds of God Trilogy!
The Lost Treasure of the Templars
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Antiquarian bookseller Robin Jessop and encryption expert David Mallory follow the elusive trail of the mysterious Templars in this thrilling trilogy from Sunday Times bestseller James Becker. Centuries-old conspiracy, coded texts and ingenious clues mean that the hunters and the hunted are not so easy to tell apart…
First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Simon & Schuster
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by
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Copyright © James Becker, 2012
The moral right of James Becker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788631730
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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