I'm presenting this article in the form of a series of numbered Facts each of which tends to bring into question conventional views on the case. All of these facts are completely verifiable and you can check them out for yourselves.
FACT ONE: Jack the Ripper carried out all of his killings within the space of a little more than two months. The first victim Mary Ann Nichols on 31 August, 1888 and the final victim Mary Kelly on 9 November, 1888. Typically serial killers can be at large for a significant number of years before eventually being caught and often with periods of many months between each victim. It is a complete mystery why JtR stopped suddenly with his final victim and although a number of theories have been put forward to explain this circumstance, none of the theories have ever been properly substantiated.
FACT TWO: The third accepted victim, Elizabeth Stride, could not have been a victim of Jack the Ripper. It is an unfortunate statistic that murder was not an uncommon occurrence in the East End of the time and Stride lacked all of the classical Ripper injuries. The abdominal injuries were completely absent. To explain this it has been suggested that JtR may have been caught in the act by the coachman who happened to pull into the entranceway to the yard where Elizabeth Stride was found but the problems don’t stop here. Even the neck injuries are completely different. JtR had cut deep on both sides of the neck down to the bone and Stride had a fairly regular wound on one side of the neck only. Further the murder weapon had been completely different. JtR always used a long, straight blade which was compared to ‘a mortician’s knife’ whereas as the blade used on Stride was described as short and rounded, rather like a penknife. This means that JtR would needed to have used two quite separate murder weapons on the exact same evening since Elizabeth Stride had lost her life on the same night as Catherine Eddowes, the famed ‘double event’ students of JtR have heard so much about.
FACT THREE: The final victim, Mary Kelly, had spent a short period of time in Paris before returning to the East End not long before her demise. While staying in the country she had picked up the nick-name ‘Marie-Jeanette’ and indeed this was the name that appeared on her death certificate. This circumstance would surely make it highly plausible that her killer may have been French. Apparently the reason Kelly had returned suddenly from France was that she had disliked living there. It would seem quite likely she had been employed in one of the many licensed brothels that were to be found in Paris at the time. But what had caused Kelly to suddenly change her mind about her sojourn in Paris and return home? Had she got into some kind of trouble while staying in this city?
FACT FOUR: The penultimate victim, Catharine Eddowes, had also used the name ‘Mary Kelly’. She was previously in a relationship with an Irish porter called John Kelly from whom she had taken the name. When Eddowes had been arrested by the police for drunkenness just hours before her murder she had given the name ‘Mary Ann Kelly’. It would also seem that ‘Mary Kelly’ wasn’t that an uncommon pseudonym for prostitutes in the East End of the time. And it must also be noted that we can’t even be certain that ‘Mary Kelly’ was the actual birth name of the final victim of 13, Miller’s Court of the 9th November. The biographical details of JtR’s final victim are entirely based on hearsay and the ‘Mary Kelly’ in question has never been successfully traced in any shape or form whatsoever. This last situation would make JtR’s final victim completely unique in that all his other victims have been properly traced and their biographical histories are more or less fully known.
FACT FIVE: It seems to have been the circumstance that the Post-Impressionist artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had an English lady friend sometime around years 1884-6 who also would have been known as ‘Marie-Jeanette’. It was the case that Lautrec spent significant amounts of time in the brothels of Paris where Mary Kelly must surely have worked so had the two become acquainted as a result? A letter to his mother that has been dated to December 1884 mentions a lady with an English sounding name, one ‘Jeannette Hathaway’. No explanation is actually given in the letter as to why the name is included here and it almost comes across as a coded message. However Lautrec had been in the habit of adding the name of ‘Marie’ before the first names of all his lady friends which would have made ‘Jeannette Hathaway’ into a ‘Marie-Jeanette’, the very same name that had been entered on Mary Kelly’s death certificate.
Of course I am not suggesting that Lautrec himself carried out the killings as his physical handicap meant he couldn’t walk very far even with a walking stick. However his wealthy aristocratic friends and relatives (Lautrec himself was descended from the French aristocracy) may have taken the law into their own hands and paid some hireling to carry out the dirty deed. It is almost an accepted fact among some biographers that Lautrec had contracted syphilis from the very prostitutes he had visited and that this had ultimately contributed to his eventual demise. Lautrec’s close friends also later reflected that the artist’s lady friend and model of the time had ‘an unhealthy look about her’ even upon the occasion of the two first meeting. Does this sad set of circumstances combined with an aristocratic pedigree not count as a significant motive for murder?
[All the above facts come from the book “Jack the Ripper: Case Solved? – Had the Post-Impressionist artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec been connected in any way with the Whitechapel Murders?” by G Alexander, Lulu Press, 2015]