What ? No Bangers N' Beans ?

[Howard Brown]

A rather excessive sentence for a half assed breakfast, wouldn't you say ?

The Clarion
London
March 5, 1892
***********

[Chris G.]

Hi Howard

This is important because I think apart from Maria Coroner in Bradford this might be the only example of someone caught after writing a "Ripper" letter.

Chris

[Howard Brown]

Chris:

I'm not sure, buddy.

I just posted a brief article mentioning Reg Saunderson :

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread....262#post169262

I also believe there was another woman/girl who was nailed for using the Saucy One's name in vain.

In what context do you mean "caught" here, CG ?

[Chris G.]

Originally Posted by How Brown

Chris:

I'm not sure, buddy.

I just posted a brief article mentioning Reg Saunderson :

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread....262#post169262

I also believe there was another woman/girl who was nailed for using the Saucy One's name in vain.

In what context do you mean "caught" here, CG ?

Hi Howard

I mean caught after provably having hoaxed a Ripper letter, even if it was not the Ripper letter for which they were prosecuted.

Chris

[Howard Brown]

CG:

I'm sort of busy doing work on my car ( fixing a motor, etc...), so perhaps someone else might like to step up and provide another name of an individual who was caught hoaxing letters.

Miriam Howells was another.

However, if you mean prosecuted for the act of hoaxing a letter, then Saunderson wouldn't be our huckleberry...just the two ladies, as far as I recall.

Other people who committed crimes and wrote Ripper hoax letters were prosecuted for the crime, not the hoaxing.

I guess we'd have to read the court transcript of the threadstarting post to see if these two schlubs were nailed for hoaxing a letter in addition to the B&E.

[Chris G.]

Hi Howard

Of course my theory is that hundreds if not thousands of people were having a fine old time hoaxing Ripper letters. I think theorists who try to base their theories of who did the murders on the Ripper letters are wasting their time. They are a nonstarter as far as knowing who was responsible the murders. There was the person who did the murders and there were the folks who were getting their jollies off writing letters.

Chris

[admin tim]

21st October 1888. A ‘respectable’ woman aged 21 named Maria Coroner is charged in Bradford with sending letters signed Jack the Ripper. She is the only one of the hundreds of Jack the Ripper letter writers to be prosecuted.

Lots of statement here that I thought was as yet unproven.


Who were the hoaxers? A few were discovered and prosecuted, including a young Yorkshire mantle-maker, Maria Coroner, who had written to her chief constable and to a local newspaper announcing in flowery language the arrival of the Ripper in Bradford, later claiming she had done it 'in a joke'. Asking what she had been charged with, she was told it was a breach of the peace under the common law, to which she replied 'I should like to see the common law, it is so common I have never seen it'. Despite this rash flippancy, she was only bound over to be of good behaviour for six months on her own recognisance of £20. Maria's landlady claimed that the girl was so excited by reading about the Whitechapel murders that she (the landlady) was afraid to go to bed at night. Miriam Howells, an Aberdare labourer's wife, wrote letters as the Ripper threatening to kill two local women, but claimed she 'only did it for a lark'. She, too, escaped with a similar sentence. Edward Grover, of Fletching in Sussex, wrote as the Ripper to threaten Lord Sheffield, who had issued an eviction notice to Grover's mother, but the results of his prosecution are not known. However, the great majority of the hoaxers went undetected. As to their motives, the authors do not attempt to investigate them here, if indeed they can ever be satisfactorily explained.

[Dave James]

Hi Chris, all,

You could have a look at Charlotte Higgins: