The 120 year old trail is freezing

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

I think we'll have to leave it there. Actually, it's a bit like something that's bang up to date - political donations. A certain company donates a large sum of money to a certain party. A year or two later that company is given a big tax break, or planning permission, or some such favour. You will never find a letter from a company to a politician talking about a bribe. But anyone can see that that's what it is.

Yes, but others may interpret it differently and dispute it or come with other explanations. And as long as that's possible, the solution can't be claimed to be a final one.
I think the experiences from the Anderson and Abberline statements, the Swanson marginalia etc. would have made us learn that lesson.
Needless to say, the facts in the Ripper case are so scarce that it is difficult to come up with enough strong evidence in order to even produce such strong circumstancial evidence.

And now, I must get my spade because I have to tunnel into an asylum.

Keep digging, Robert!

All the best

[Flagg]

I for one respect the opinions and experience of those on this board. And yet, however naively, I for one am attracted to this case - like many others - for being one of the most interesting unsolved crimes in history. And, as a consequence, I like to keep an open mind and believe that the more people who think about, and are exposed to this case, the more likely the truth will be known. And perhaps the truth is the case will never be solved. On the other hand, you never know ...

With respect,
Sasha

Sasha, it's refreshing to see one with your views after seeing much negativity and nay saying.

[Cap'n Jack]

The fact of the matter is that it would be illegal for police officers to act upon information relating to a murder inquiry, where such information had been obtained illegally from medical records relating to a prisoner who had been sectioned by Her Majesty's Pleasure; and such police officers would go to great lengths to obscure their pertinent knowledge in such a murder enquiry, even many years after the event.
Such knowledge would be a perversion of the true course of justice as the prisoner was never tried in a court of law as he was unfit to plead through insanity and was ordered to be detained until 'Her Majesty's Pleasure was known'.
Until the time of Her Majesty's Pleasure being known, one was dealing with an innocent man, who had been sectioned because he represented a threat to public safety... not because he had committed a crime.
Therefore to accuse him of a crime before HMP was known would mean that the police would have to arrest him, and this they could not do, because he was protected by the Queen of the Realm, under Her personal custody.
One could voice an opinion, a vague one at that, but to admit true knowledge of the circumstances of a Broadmoor patient who had been sectioned under HMP would have been an absolute impossibility for a senior police officer.
One has to remember that when Queen Victoria died, and the new king was crowned, one of his first jobs was to change all Her Majesty's Pleasure's to all His Majesty's Pleasure's, one by one he had to sign every HMP, otherwise everyone in Broadmoor could have just walked out of the door.

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

I'm sorry AP,
Interesting as it is, it is a bit too far-fetched for me.
As usual when people are trying to nail down someone for the killings they make things more complicated than they probably were.


Flagg,

Negativity? No, reality I am afraid.
Can you please tell me what type of 'evidence' that would be possible to obtain in order to prove the identity of the killer - 120 years after the event? I mean, really give me concrete examples.

And while doing this - please keep in mind the numerous documents from top police officials and investigators at the time, that have already surfaced and which people initially thought would be the solution to the case and it only turned out they weren't. Again, if those documents - even naming suspects - weren't able to solve the case, can you tell me what could?
And how it's actually possible to prove someone's guilt when there is no physical evidence from either victim or suspect to back up any claim in any documents? Please enlighten me.

All the best

[Cap'n Jack]

Glenn, the only thing I'm trying to nail down is your coffin.

[Brenda]

Something definitive, or definitive enough, could perhaps turn up one day. Probably the best chance of this happening would be in the police files. I know a lot was destroyed during WWII, but not all of them were, and I would imagine in the scurry to clean things up, some things may have been horribly misfiled.

As far as the attic - well, I guess it could happen. When my mother passed away, I boxed up her stuff and put it in storage. Its been five years now and I still don't have the heart to go through it. Maybe Jack the Ripper's lazy good-for-nothing great great great grandson will finally get up some energy and clean out that attic one day!

I don't know how everyone here feels, but I don't keep coming back here because I am obssessed with who Jack was. I keep coming back for the history, the press articles different ones here post, the old photos and maps, finding out more about the lives of the "peripheral players" in the story, that sort of thing.

[Cap'n Jack]

Glenn, this one is for your overstacked pipe, overlarge tasche, and general bullshit:

'August 19, 2005 -- The NYPD's longest-running unsolved missing-person case - the bizarre and legendary disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater - may finally be solved.

Judge Crater - who vanished mysteriously 75 years ago - was killed by a city cop and his cabby brother and buried under the boardwalk in Coney Island, according to a handwritten letter left behind by a Queens woman who died earlier this year.

"Good Time Joe" Crater was a dapper, 41-year-old judge known for his dalliances with showgirls and his ties to corruption-ridden Tammany Hall - until he got into a cab in Midtown one evening in 1930 and disappeared, earning the title of "the missingest man in New York."

The case triggered one of the most sensational manhunts of the 20th century - one that had city detectives fielding more than 16,000 tips from around the country and the world, all of them unsubstantiated.

Although he was declared legally dead in 1939, and his case - Missing Persons File No. 13595 - was officially closed in 1979, Crater's vanishing act has continued to intrigue professional and armchair detectives, clairvoyants and mystery buffs around the globe.

"Pulling a Crater" became slang for vanishing without a trace. But perhaps now, a trace will be found.

Sources told The Post that the NYPD Cold Case Squad is investigating information provided by Stella Ferrucci-Good of Bellerose, who died on April 2, leaving behind what may be a key to the mystery.

It's a handwritten letter in an envelope marked "Do not open until my death" that her granddaughter Barbara O'Brien found in a metal box in her grandmother's home, the sources said.

In the letter, Ferrucci-Good claimed that her late husband, Robert Good; an NYPD cop named Charles Burns; and the cop's cabby brother, Frank Burns, were responsible for Crater's death.

She added that the judge was buried in Coney Island, under the boardwalk near West Eighth Street, at the current site of the New York Aquarium.

The metal box also contained yellowed clippings about Crater's disappearance, with scribbled notations in the margins.

In her letter, Ferrucci-Good also claimed that Officer Burns was one of the cops guarding notorious Murder Inc. killer Abe "Kid Twist" Reles when he somehow plummeted to his death from the sixth-floor window of a Coney Island hotel in 1941.

Reles had become a mob informant to escape the electric chair, testifying against a slew of Murder Inc. killers. His suspicious death plunge came just hours before he was due to rat out mob boss Albert Anastasia.

O'Brien's father, William St. George, said the police told family members that five bodies were found when the aquarium was built. Police sources confirmed that skeletal remains had been found there in the mid-1950s. They said those remains are now being examined to see if they can be linked to Crater.

Police sources also confirmed that a police officer named Charles Burns served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946, and that he spent part of his career assigned to the 60th Precinct in Coney Island.

O'Brien, who lives in Valley Stream, L.I., doesn't know what to make of the letter and its claims.

When she found it, she said, "I thought it was a joke and I laughed and I gave it to police."

"I don't know if it's fact or fiction," she said, refusing to show The Post the letter or to say anything more about it.

But "the police were very interested in it," her father noted.

Asked if Ferrucci-Good had been obsessed with the Crater case, St. George said he couldn't recall her ever mentioning it.

Ferrucci-Good was 91 when she died in April. Her husband, Robert Good, a Parks Department supervisor and lifeguard, died in 1975.

Crater had been appointed to the state Supreme Court bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt just four months before disappearing on Aug. 6, 1930.

A few days earlier, while vacationing with his wife, Stella, at their summer cabin in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, he received a mysterious phone call that left him visibly upset. He never told his wife who called.

He left the next day for the city, telling her only that he had to "straighten those fellows out."

He stopped by their Fifth Avenue apartment and gave the maid the next few days off.

He spent the morning of Aug. 6 in his courthouse office, hastily going through his personal files.

He cashed two checks totaling $5,150, took another $20,000 - close to a year's salary - from campaign funds, and left for home with two locked briefcases.

He was last seen at 9:15 p.m. leaving Billy Haas' Chophouse at 332 W. 45th St. with two friends. He said he was going to the theater.

He climbed into a cab nattily dressed in a brown pinstripe suit, gray spats and a straw Panama hat - and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.

Could the cabby have been Frank Burns, brother of Officer Charles Burns? That's one of the questions cops are now grappling with.

It was four weeks before Crater was reported missing.

Friends and colleagues thought he was vacationing with his wife; his wife thought he was away on business. His disappearance was front-page news across the country - leading to reported sightings in every state and scores of foreign lands.

He was reported seen riding a burro and prospecting for gold in California, herding sheep in the Pacific Northwest, locked up in a Missouri mental hospital, shooting craps in Atlanta, working on a steamer in the Adriatic, and running a bingo game in Northern Africa.

His name became a punch line that guaranteed laughs for comics: "Judge Crater, call your office."

Mad magazine published a cartoon showing Lassie finding Crater.

A judge portrayed on TV in a episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" assured the sitcom's stars that he wasn't that Judge Crater - he spelled his name K-r-a-d-a.

There were dozens of theories about his disappearance: He had amnesia; he committed suicide; he ran off with a showgirl; he was rubbed out so he couldn't testify about Tammany Hall corruption; he died in the arms of a prostitute and it was being covered up; he was killed when he didn't pay a blackmailer.

At one point, gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond's name surfaced as his possible killer.

An Albany professor said he believed Crater had been dispatched by the notorious murderer in the basement of an upstate brewery.

Crater's wife remembered his disappearance every year for the rest of her life by visiting a bar in Greenwich Village on Aug. 6.

She'd sit by herself, order two drinks and down one - after saying, "Good luck Joe, wherever you are."

If the letter left behind by Ferrucci-Good is right, he's been sleeping with the fishes all these years. '

And if AP wants to charge me five bucks for that they can go **** themselves.

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Something definitive, or definitive enough, could perhaps turn up one day. Probably the best chance of this happening would be in the police files. I know a lot was destroyed during WWII, but not all of them were, and I would imagine in the scurry to clean things up, some things may have been horribly misfiled.

Problem is, Brenda, that the remaining files do actually indicate quite clearly that the police had no united view on the killer's identity and some even admitted that they never know who he was. So if any such document would appear it would only be about just another suspect.

They most certainly had a number of suspects but couldn't nail anyone for the murders. And if they - who had access to all the information, suspects and witnesses - couldn't, then we most certainly will never be able to do it either.

I don't know how everyone here feels, but I don't keep coming back here because I am obssessed with who Jack was. I keep coming back for the history, the press articles different ones here post, the old photos and maps, finding out more about the lives of the "peripheral players" in the story, that sort of thing.

I abslotely agree with that. And I believe it is in those areas that Ripper research can do its best efforts and be of most importance and not by trying to name the killer.

All the best

[Sam Flynn]

Hi Brenda,

Probably the best chance of this happening would be in the police files. I know a lot was destroyed during WWII, but not all of them were. As far as the attic - well, I guess it could happen.

...but that's somewhat diminished by the fact that so many attics (and basements) have disappeared either through slum clearances, the Blitz or general rebuilding during the past 120 years. I shouldn't be surprised if two or more "generations" of houses have come and gone in some areas. This, to me, is almost as bad as the loss of the police files.

However, I at least hold out some optimism in terms of our being able to identify more feasible suspects than the somewhat unconvincing Rogues' Gallery we've previously had at our disposal. That's not quite the same as "solving" the case, but it is at least a very useful avenue of research - and I'm sure Cap'n Jack will agree.

[Cap'n Jack]

Let us push it back a bit more, Glenn, and see where your mindless and uninformed mumbo-jumbo ends.
You really don't have a clue, eh?

'A19th-century murder confession scrawled on the back of a piece of window molding nailed to a bedroom wall went unseen for almost 100 years.

Now it's available for all to see at the Fountain Valley Historical Society and Museum.

The 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office donated the footlong section of decorative molding to the museum Wednesday, 22 years after its discovery in 1986.

"I've had that piece of wood in my evidence room for all these years," district attorney's investigator Larry Martin said.

The confession tells the story of the murder of John Sebastian, who was killed by John Spicer in March 1893.

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In pencil, Spicer detailed his crime on the unfinished back of the molding, which he nailed to the wall of the house he was building at El Paso Street and Alabama Avenue in Fountain.

It read: "To whoever may happen to find the confession, I, John W. Spicer of the City of Fountain, State of Colorado, being about to shuffle off this mortal act to make this my full confession in the hope that when I am gone it may be found and at last clear up the darkest mystery that ever embraced one in human murder."

Spicer wrote that he clubbed John J. Sebastian "four miles north of this city and two miles east of the foot of Cheyenne Mountain," which puts the scene on what is now the Army's sprawling Fort Carson, Martin said. Sebastian's body was never found.

In his written confession, Spicer said he killed Sebastian so that he could steal $5,000 in jewelry and cash from him.

Spicer dragged Sebastian's body into a ravine 500 yards away and wrote that he planned to spend his "last moments in prayer for the partial salvation of my soul," Martin said.

Martin said he's not sure when Spicer wrote the confession, but El Paso County assessor's records show the house was built in 1899. Spicer's confession remained hidden until 1986, when a new owner started remodeling, Martin said.

As the owner ripped out old wood, his kids helped remove embedded nails. "One of his daughters was pulling the nails out and said, 'Hey Dad, there's writing on it,'" Martin said.

The man called a reporter at the Gazette-Telegraph newspaper, and the reporter took the wood to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

The bureau said, "We're not going to give it back to him because it's a murder confession and it's authentic," Martin said.

CBI investigators determined the handwriting matched the compact, cursive style typical of the late 1800s, Martin said. They never found a sample of Spicer's handwriting to compare, Martin said.

But Martin kept digging into the case and eventually found Spicer's only living child, Marguerite Bulkley of Pueblo, then 89. In his first interview with Bulkley, Martin told her about the confession.

"She got real cold and turned off and said, 'My eyes are so bad, I can't look at that,'" Martin said.

But a week later Martin got a letter from Bulkley, who'd had a change of heart.

"She said, 'It's time the story was told,'" Martin said.

Bulkley said her father told her that he did kill a man, but that it was in self-defense after a transient attacked him.

Bulkley said Spicer told her that local law enforcement investigated and found Spicer not guilty. But Martin never found evidence to corroborate that version of the story.

Martin said he doesn't know of any relatives of either Spicer or Sebastian living in the Pikes Peak region. Spicer ultimately moved to Florida, where he died in the 1940s.

Spicer's confession will be displayed behind glass at the Fountain museum. The house where he nailed it still stands.'

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Well, AP,

That would indeed be a blast, would it? To find a confession from a killer, where the writing can be verified as genuine and the message containing information about the murder that only the killer would know.

I don't know about this case or if it's officially declared solved 'beyond doubt', but your story also contain two important question marks:

"They never found a sample of Spicer's handwriting to compare."

And the other is the statement from Marguerite Bulkely, which surely can't be proven beyond hearsay. It even clearly says: "But Martin never found evidence to corroborate that version of the story."

It should also be noted that Bulkely's statement came after she had been told about the suspicions against the suspect, so we have no idea whether what she said actually was true or a fabrication inspired by what she had been told.

So even in that case there obviously are unanswered questions and 'evidence' that can't really be regarded as evidence.

The best evidence in that case is probably the writing on the back of the molding (especially if it was proved that Spicer lived in the house), even though the handwriting couldn't be confirmed being by John Spicer at all.
And even if it were, how do we know that the 'confession' isn't made up by fantasies combined with facts that Spicer or anyone else at that time may have obtained in the national papers?
I am not saying he or they did, only pointing out how a critical mind would view it.
I am sure there are researchers or armchair detecives out there - informed on the case - who doubts Spicer's guilt or his confession. Just like in the Ripper case.

I admit that this particular case contains elements that points very strongly in one direction but from what I've seen there is really nothing that corroborates the confession. Unless the confession as such didn't contain some facts only the killer would know, one can never be sure of it being a real confession from a killer.
A confession needs to be corroborated, and a hearsay from a relative is not really what I had in mind.

Because I assume that you don't regard the fact that the mold is being displayed behind glass at the Fountain Museum as evidence?

All the best

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Fact remains, AP.
If you believe that clearing up an over one hundred year old unsolved murder case like the Ripper's - and that there is evidence out there strong enough to convince and unite a whole community of crime historians and researchers - then you are the one who simply don't have a clue.
It will never happen.

Well, maybe if you found a confession from the Ripper where
a) the handwriting could be confirmed and linked to the named suspect in question;
b) the age of the material is authentic;
c) the confession would actually contain facts about the murders that only the killer would know about at the time and couldn't have obtained from reading the press.

Then MAYBE there would be a chance.
But judging from the experiences from the Diary and the Maybrick Watch, I wouldn't hold my breath.

All the best

[Sasha]

I, personally, am saddened by where this thread has headed. Surely it is possible to state one's views without making disparaging remarks (and personal attacks) on others? If one's case is compelling, one does not need to resort to this, surely?

I, personally, have no expertise in this area and see this forum as an opportunity to redress this through exposure to all types of views and theories - those based on scholarly work and evidence AND those based on gut feeling. I see both as equally important because one tells us what may have happened and the other can reveal new ideas of where to look next. I think it would be a shame to see one party work in isolation because they believe their technique is superior but I s'pose if that happens, it's a personal choice. Nothing one can do about it.

The case is difficult yes and made more difficult by the passage of time. I believe that if they can find the two missing Romanovs (Anastasia and Alexei) after nearly a century, we can hold out hope that something can be found to solve this case. And I think we - as a community - have to decide whether it is a fair case of burden to demand that proof be found to convince a court of law when the crime was committed so long ago. I believe that it can be argued that we simply have to find enough to convince a court of law that Jack would have had to face at the time. Again, just an opinion. There are others equally, if not more valid. And the other thing to note is that people have been convicted today of murder without a concrete chain of evidence or even a body. I'm thinking of Bradley John Murdoch who was convicted of murdering Peter Falconio in Australia. This may be a rare case but they do exist.

Finally, there could be another reason why the killer has thus far not been found. In attempting to apprehend the killer, the police may have shot and killed him - along with the chain of evidence to protect the officer concerned from hanging. And that's why the murders stopped. They got him. Equally possible, he escaped to the South of France and spent the rest of his days sunning himself and drinking champagne. Maybe I'm being a little facetious with this last para but, for me, the important thing is to be open to possibilities because once you rule out these it is easier to hit a brick wall. But, hey, just an opinion.

Sasha

[Victor]

Sasha,

There are still arguments over the conviction of James Hanratty, even when the DNA evidence is absolutely clear that he did it - see the "a6 murder" thread, so that indicates to me that there is absolutely no chance of even getting a concensus that someone was JtR.

However, I do think that we will get a lot more interesting information about some of the suspects and some of them will get an alibi and be removed from the list.

Vic

[Sasha]

Sasha,

There are still arguments over the conviction of James Hanratty, even when the DNA evidence is absolutely clear that he did it - see the "a6 murder" thread, so that indicates to me that there is absolutely no chance of even getting a concensus that someone was JtR.

However, I do think that we will get a lot more interesting information about some of the suspects and some of them will get an alibi and be removed from the list.

Vic

Or alternatively, he's not on the list yet!

But I take your point!

Thanks Vic.
Sasha