Howard Brown
02-13-2006, 08:48 PM
From a blog....
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
More Double Posting from Blottered
Sometime in the early hours of the thirty-first of August, 1888, Mary Ann Walker was murdered in London's East End. Known to friends and acquaintances as Polly, Walker was plying her trade as a prostitute through the night in an effort to earn enough for a bed at the flop-house where she was staying when she became the first of Jack Ripper's five known victims. (Some speculate there were more (http://www.casebook.org/victims/).)
The Ripper was never caught and his identity has never been established. The latest theory claims that the Ripper was a merchant seaman who performed similiar grisly acts in Latin America, according to the Mirror (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/latest/tm_objectid=15669130&method=full&siteid=94762%26headline=new-jack-the-ripper-theories-put-sleuths-in-a-spin-name_page.html).
Over the years there have been plenty of plausible explanations of the Ripper's identity. My personal favorite was told to me by a white bearded reactionary in a pub in southwest Ireland after we had both had a few two many pints of the dark stuff. He was convinced that the murderer was a woman named Annie Wood Besant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Besant). A socialist and feminist agitator, Besant had helped organize the Matchgirls Strike (http://www.mernick.co.uk/thhol/matchgirls.html)after the sources for an article she had published on the poor working conditions of women in London were fired by their employers.
As I recall, Besant's alleged motive for the murders involved the strike--the murdered women were either scabs or police informants. It was also possible, he told me, that the murders were part of Besant's initiation into the weird Theosophist cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophist#A_brief_history_of_theosophy) that was then lighting fires in the minds of the era's intellectuals. Or maybe it wasn't the Theosophists at all, but a far more sinister cult. The last thing the old guy said before wandering off was: "Feminism is a murder cult founded by Medea."
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
More Double Posting from Blottered
Sometime in the early hours of the thirty-first of August, 1888, Mary Ann Walker was murdered in London's East End. Known to friends and acquaintances as Polly, Walker was plying her trade as a prostitute through the night in an effort to earn enough for a bed at the flop-house where she was staying when she became the first of Jack Ripper's five known victims. (Some speculate there were more (http://www.casebook.org/victims/).)
The Ripper was never caught and his identity has never been established. The latest theory claims that the Ripper was a merchant seaman who performed similiar grisly acts in Latin America, according to the Mirror (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/latest/tm_objectid=15669130&method=full&siteid=94762%26headline=new-jack-the-ripper-theories-put-sleuths-in-a-spin-name_page.html).
Over the years there have been plenty of plausible explanations of the Ripper's identity. My personal favorite was told to me by a white bearded reactionary in a pub in southwest Ireland after we had both had a few two many pints of the dark stuff. He was convinced that the murderer was a woman named Annie Wood Besant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Besant). A socialist and feminist agitator, Besant had helped organize the Matchgirls Strike (http://www.mernick.co.uk/thhol/matchgirls.html)after the sources for an article she had published on the poor working conditions of women in London were fired by their employers.
As I recall, Besant's alleged motive for the murders involved the strike--the murdered women were either scabs or police informants. It was also possible, he told me, that the murders were part of Besant's initiation into the weird Theosophist cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophist#A_brief_history_of_theosophy) that was then lighting fires in the minds of the era's intellectuals. Or maybe it wasn't the Theosophists at all, but a far more sinister cult. The last thing the old guy said before wandering off was: "Feminism is a murder cult founded by Medea."