To ripperologists one and all:

I have with geometric logic proved the identity of the Ripper. It is a conclusion so shocking as to be almost unbelievable. Yet, as the great sleuth of 221B Baker Street has shown, when all other suspects have been eliminated then the one that remains, however implausible, must be the culprit.

You can read my iron-clad arguments for yourself in the attached article (too shocking to be published in the mainstream media): "Jack the Ripper Identified!"

P.M. Luchessa

The identity of Jack the Ripper has been a subject of spirited, contentious and informed debate for almost one hundred years. Evidence has been sifted and reexamined, suspects proposed and dismissed, among them mad Russian doctors, suicidal lawyers, psychotic butchers, as well as a member of the royal family. The latest research has conclusively borne out a royal connection to the Whitechapel murders. Considerable evidence points to James Kenneth Stephen, tutor to Prince Eddy, the Duke of Clarence. Suspicion has also fallen upon Sir William Gull, physician to the queen, and John Netley, a coachman who ferried these august personages about. The most fashionable theory names Prince Eddy, the feckless syphilitic who supposedly died insane, as the Ripper. A sickly deviate and known frequenter of lower class brothels, the Duke of Clarence is certainly a likely suspect. The sudden cessation of killings and Eddy's subsequent madness and death in 1892 lend much credence to the case against him.

Even more damning is the now firmly established existence of a cover-up and conspiracy at the highest levels, including the most important police officials in the realm and the Prime Minister himself, Lord Salisbury. Only the involvement of a royal personage could account for such collusion. But which royal? No one has looked beyond Prince Eddy, despite the inconclusive nature of the case against him. As Sherlock Holmes has taught us, if you eliminate all the plausible explanations, then the one that remains, however implausible, must be the correct one. And the solution is not only implausible, it is shocking, nay, earth-shaking in the extreme. Now, for the first time, it can be revealed that Jack the Ripper was not the Duke of Clarence, or Montague Druitt, Sir William Gull or William Sickert. The Ripper was not a jack, but a jill -- Queen Victoria herself!

As it will be seen, the queen had both the motive and the means to carry out the hideous crimes. After the second murder, when the entire east end was engulfed in fear and panic, who else but a woman with the greatest impunity in the land could roam the dark alleys of Whitechapel, dispatching hapless prostitutes and making a clean getaway? This explains the hitherto baffling fact that the victims went willing with their executioner. Imagine the scene: a tipsy, bedraggled prostitute tottering along a dark street, searching for her doss house, meets a small woman in a black frock, with a severe but kind face, who warns her of the dangers that lurk in the dark. Thoroughly abashed and humbly grateful in the presence of one she now recognizes as her sovereign, the unfortunate woman gladly accepts the offer of a ride home in the royal carriage, never suspecting that her queen is leading her to a brutally violent death.

The police, alerted by their superiors to the presence of a concerned royal personage, watching out for the safety of even her most humble subjects, never suspect either. The mutilated body is found in the small hours of the morning. Everyone thinks the madman has struck again. How else explain the "passionate concern" displayed by the queen over the ripper case -- from the very first murder? Queen Victoria gave orders to Lord Salisbury to stop the murders at all cost, but the Prime Minister knew, perhaps as early as the first or second murder, who the murderer was. Of course, he was obliged to undertake a thorough coverup in order to save the monarchy and the state itself.

So the murders continued, Salisbury and the police powerless to stop them lest a thousand years of English monarchy come to an end. Hundreds of letters poured in to the police and the newspapers from cranks all over the world, and a few from the mad queen herself. The genuine ripper letters make repeated reference to "work" and "job," reflecting the queen's obsession with the work ethic. Her life's work having been cruelly interrupted by the death of her beloved Albert, she turned to the devil's work, and wrote her letters "from hell." "The next job I do," she wrote, "I shall clip the lady's ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly, wouldn't you." The same delight in bloodthirsty butchery is foreshadowed in Victoria's strong identification with Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts. She was often heard by palace servants to chuckle expansively when she came to the line, "Off with her head!" uttered by the fictional queen. Chafing under the constraints of parliamentary government, she dreamed of the absolute power wielded by her great female predecessor, Elizabeth. It is said she particularly admired the virgin queen's ruthlessness in doing away with such powerful adversaries as Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Essex.

Yes, Queen Victoria was quite mad, and had been so years before the ripper murders. Her affliction was the best kept secret of Victorian times, knowledge that could have unleashed all the forces of anarchy, socialist terrorism and foreign intrigue swirling beneath her. The death of Albert in 1861 had unhinged her to a degree few suspected and had sent her into paranoid despair for the next forty years. The seven attempts on her life only increased her psychosis.

Yet, what sent her completely around the bend was the debauched behavior of her son and grandson, Bertie the Prince of Wales, and Eddy, Duke of Clarence. To a woman who lived in devout chastity before and after her one marriage, the knowledge that her son, heir to the throne was carrying on licentiously with a succession of infamous hussies, was simply too much. Victoria could neither control her son or her own consuming dementia. And when her beloved Prince Eddy turned out to be a libertine and deviate, she could bear it no longer.

The rage and madness in her demanded an outlet, scapegoats, and the queen found them in the lowest of her sex, the miserable harlots of the miserable east end of London. In her twisted mind they became responsible for all that had gone wrong with her male progeny. Her mind, under this unbearable burden of guilt and shame, split. She became two people. To the public she was the pious and wise sovereign, faithful widow and strong ruler, the underpinning of the mighty empire; in private, she was the bloodthirsty autocrat, the avenging angel, the instrument of god's wrath on earth. She had cracked under the weight of her own indomitable moral sense. Even such a harmless statement as the famous, "We are not amused," betrays the split. What other ruler, besides the Czar of backward Russia, stil employed the royal "we" in the nineteenth century? The split in Victoria's personality shows itself in the celebrated quatrain attributed to the ripper:

Jack and Jill went out to kill
For things they couldn't alter,
Jack fell down and lost his crown
And left a baby daughter.

Jill is, of course,the queen and author herself, but Jack is two projections: the murdering male half of Victoria's fragmented personality, as well as her grandson, Prince Eddy, who forfeited his right to the crown by begetting a bastard daughter off the lowly, and worse -- Catholic -- Annie Elizabeth Crook.

The queen did not kill Crook, but instead had her minions, Salisbuy, Anderson and Gull, incarcerate Crook in a series of work houses, driving her insane in the process. Before that, Victoria had slaked her bloodlust on the anonymous creatures of the east end, living symbols of all that was weak, destructive and detestable to her sick mind.

The clever Salisbury had taken every precaution. He had found a woman who was the very double of the queen, had her outfitted and trained to behave as the queen, and sat her on the throne for twelve years while the real queen lanquished in the cellars of Osborne House, the royal retreat on the Isle of Wight.

Mrs. Gladys Watley of Islington recalls, "My grandmum was the spitting image of Queen Victoria -- same round face, y'know, same steely eyes 'n all. People used to remark on it all the time. I can remember me ol' mum saying that her mum vanished into thin air one day, just like that. Oh, and I remember this -- she said it was just after the ripper murders stopped. Ol' gran and the ripper vanished at the same time."

When the ripper files become public no mention will be found of Hermione Watley. Salisbuy did his job well. He preserved the Victorian myth intact and saved the nation from revolution and republic anism, or worse.

And so the myth of Jack the Ripper will live on in the annals of unsolved crime while the real ripper sleeps her tormented sleep in a royal grave.

The Staff of Casebook: Jack the Ripper wishes to thank P.M. Luchessa for this contribution.

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