The Pros & The Cons

[Howard Brown]

If researchers wish to share their views on issues such as witness testimony....why one suspect is the best out of them all...why the Case has been solved already and its just a matter of us catching up 127 years later...why one victim was or wasn't a Ripper victim....you get the idea.

The catch with this is that once you present your idea on the thread....YOU have the option of having it discussed or not.

If you do decide to have it posted and don't want it discussed on the same thread as the shared material....then I will set it up in a separate section under Forums Dissertations.

Any questions, p.m. me.
Thanks to Lynn Cates for inspiring the thread/Forum.

[Lynn Cates]

fruitful

Hello Howard. Thanks for this.

Hopefully, it will engender some fruitful discussion.

Cheers.
LC

[Joe Chetcuti]

A topic that contained a lot of Pros and Cons was Home Secretary Henry Matthews' opposition to the offer of reward money for the capture of the Ripper. Matthews expressed that in past instances the offer of reward money was pretty much a failure.

I recently looked at one old London crime spree where reward money was offered.

I've been intending to purchase Jan Bondeson's excellent book "The London Monster" for the past 20 years. Well, I finally got around to doing that recently and Amazon delivered the book to me this week. I've read the first five chapters so far and it's really good. The book is a detailed account of the London fiend who went around stabbing women during the 1788-1790 period.

On a quick side note, those who are new students to Ripperology might want to begin their study by looking at this book even though the events described occurred about 100 years prior to the Whitechapel crimes. The 1790 accounts of vigilante groups, exploitive media headlines, and public frenzy were at times a prelude to how events would later shape up in 1888.

What I particularly noted was that the offer of reward money for the capture and imprisonment of the Monster really did more harm than good. Mobs of reward seekers would assault and capture many innocent "suspects" for baseless reasons. Family members would turn on other family members; there was story of a man arresting his employer for being the Monster; there was even an account of a team of pickpocketers successfully fleeing from their pursuing victim on the streets by shouting out that their victim was actually the Monster, thus causing a reward-seeking crowd to swarm the guy.

I wonder if Matthews feared that the offer of reward money for the Ripper's capture would have led to the police getting tied up even more so with dozens of innocent men being dragged into police stations under false accusations.