John Douglas on RDS

[admin tim]

I rotated the stock in the reading room this week and back in there is The Cases That Haunt Us. In the chapter on Jack the Ripper, we find the FBI's famous profiler evaluating the various suspects, among whom is D'Onston. Here is what he has to say:

...a self-publicizing con man who claimed to be a practitioner of magic.

....though the <black magic rituals> theory has its supporters, I have found nothing in his murky background that qualifies him as a good suspect.

This book was published in 2000, and so it predates JTRBMR by two years. Is that prescience or what?

"Who you gonna believe - me or your own lying eyes?"

[Mike Covell]

Walked past this book a million times, and never really looked into it, it's on the "list" now!!

[How Brown]

As to Douglas claiming RDS was a 'self publicizing con man",...well,I for one don't know where he got the idea RDS was a con man.

As to Douglas claiming he perused RDS' "murky background", I'd like to hear what his arguments against RDS are and were...other than what he said on page 77....that D'Onston was into witchcraft and could have lured women into alleys and all that superficial stuff.

D'Onston wrote about black magic and also religious themes and no one accuses him of being a religious "nut" or committing crimes based on Christian motives....and of course, he was in the LH,which Douglas did not mention or perhaps know about...if he had read "The Ripper File" first, because Mr. Harris did not know when RDS was in the LH at that time.

I have this book and have had it for 5 or 6 years.