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The following is an article by James T. Bartlett, who submitted it to Casebook for posting.
Bartlett is a journalist and author based in Los Angeles, though originally from London. He writes for the LA Times, BBC, Inflights Magazine, and other publications.
He's also published a couple of alternative Los Angeles guide books on true crime cases and a recent book about a 1953 murder in Fairbanks, Alaska titled The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America.
Eventually we'll be placing this article in the Dissertation section of the site.
Jack the Ripper – in Los Angeles?
by James T. Bartlett
Film database IMDB.com lists over 100 productions in every conceivable genre about or related to Jack the Ripper, with perhaps the most high-profile big screen version being 20th Century Fox’s 2001 From Hell starring Johnny Depp.
No doubt readers will have their own favourite, but while California and Los Angeles in particular has had a number of memorably-nicknamed serial killers – the Night Stalker, the Grim Sleeper, the Sunset Strip Killers, the Golden State Killer, Charles Manson and his Family – a connection between Los Angeles and the Ripper isn’t immediately apparent, besides inspiring countless Hollywood screenwriters.
The usage of words like “boss,” “right away,” and “fix me,” in some of letters written by the Ripper seemed to suggest an American slant, though that is of course assuming they were genuine, and that those words weren’t trying to shift suspicion to the ever-popular suspect: that of a “foreigner.”
That said, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle expressed the opinion that the Ripper might have been someone who had been in America, and there were American copycats/possibles reported on (Texas in 1885, Illinois in 1889).
Also, in New York in 1891 an apparent Ripper “suspect” named Ameer Ben Ali was arrested and railroaded into prison, but then released, and much later in 1995, Francis Tumblety from St Louis, Missouri, was a brief suspect sensation – though he hadn’t been high on the list for New York police at the time.
Even so, was there ever a chance that the Ripper went West?
In the 1880s, Los Angeles was a near-lawless backwater of 11,000 souls, but just a decade later it had 50,000 residents, and was growing fast. That meant people of every stripe were arriving, and there were real suspicions that Jack the Ripper had been roaming the streets back in 1888.
This was the headline in the Los Angeles Herald of March 17, 1892, and the story had hit the news in Los Angeles because an Albert Oliver Williams had been arrested near Perth in Australia, and charged with murdering his wife Emily in Melbourne.
Born in England, Williams had previously lived in Rainhill, Liverpool, but left there around July 1891. Some months later, workmen at the house noticed a noxious smell coming from under the kitchen floor. Digging down they found the bodies of two children, a 12-year-old girl, and Marie, who had the body of a young baby in her arms. They had all been murdered, and several of them had their throats cut. It seemed that Williams’s Australian wife, Emily, suffered the same fate.
Messages began telegraphing back and forth across 10,500 miles, and a theory emerged that Williams was the infamous Jack the Ripper, on the run from the police in London.
Police calculated that his regular trips from Liverpool to London coincided with the dates of the Whitechapel murders, and the Herald reported that Williams’ appearance “tallies exactly” with descriptions of a man seen with several of the Ripper’s victims.
The report added that the brutality of his murders suggested “the ferocity of Jack the Ripper,” and that “the question of who Williams really is, and how he lives, is a mystery.”
The next day the Herald reported that Williams’ real name was Frederick Bailey Deeming, a criminal with a long career of theft, bigamy, deception and murder around the world, though his confession to the last two canonical Ripper murders was seen by many as a desperate ploy to get himself extradited to England.
Several weeks later on April 17, the Los Angeles Times jumped on the bandwagon and added a fascinating further possibility to the story of Deeming, who they called a “phenomenal villain,” and “a fiend in human form.”
According to their report, a man named Charles H. Williams had lived in Los Angeles around 1887 and 1888, and had married a “worthy lady” named Nannie Catching before stealing around $2,500 from her (around $70,000 today), and disappearing without a trace.
Bartlett is a journalist and author based in Los Angeles, though originally from London. He writes for the LA Times, BBC, Inflights Magazine, and other publications.
He's also published a couple of alternative Los Angeles guide books on true crime cases and a recent book about a 1953 murder in Fairbanks, Alaska titled The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America.
Eventually we'll be placing this article in the Dissertation section of the site.
Jack the Ripper – in Los Angeles?
by James T. Bartlett
Film database IMDB.com lists over 100 productions in every conceivable genre about or related to Jack the Ripper, with perhaps the most high-profile big screen version being 20th Century Fox’s 2001 From Hell starring Johnny Depp.
No doubt readers will have their own favourite, but while California and Los Angeles in particular has had a number of memorably-nicknamed serial killers – the Night Stalker, the Grim Sleeper, the Sunset Strip Killers, the Golden State Killer, Charles Manson and his Family – a connection between Los Angeles and the Ripper isn’t immediately apparent, besides inspiring countless Hollywood screenwriters.
The usage of words like “boss,” “right away,” and “fix me,” in some of letters written by the Ripper seemed to suggest an American slant, though that is of course assuming they were genuine, and that those words weren’t trying to shift suspicion to the ever-popular suspect: that of a “foreigner.”
That said, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle expressed the opinion that the Ripper might have been someone who had been in America, and there were American copycats/possibles reported on (Texas in 1885, Illinois in 1889).
Also, in New York in 1891 an apparent Ripper “suspect” named Ameer Ben Ali was arrested and railroaded into prison, but then released, and much later in 1995, Francis Tumblety from St Louis, Missouri, was a brief suspect sensation – though he hadn’t been high on the list for New York police at the time.
Even so, was there ever a chance that the Ripper went West?
In the 1880s, Los Angeles was a near-lawless backwater of 11,000 souls, but just a decade later it had 50,000 residents, and was growing fast. That meant people of every stripe were arriving, and there were real suspicions that Jack the Ripper had been roaming the streets back in 1888.
This was the headline in the Los Angeles Herald of March 17, 1892, and the story had hit the news in Los Angeles because an Albert Oliver Williams had been arrested near Perth in Australia, and charged with murdering his wife Emily in Melbourne.
Born in England, Williams had previously lived in Rainhill, Liverpool, but left there around July 1891. Some months later, workmen at the house noticed a noxious smell coming from under the kitchen floor. Digging down they found the bodies of two children, a 12-year-old girl, and Marie, who had the body of a young baby in her arms. They had all been murdered, and several of them had their throats cut. It seemed that Williams’s Australian wife, Emily, suffered the same fate.
Messages began telegraphing back and forth across 10,500 miles, and a theory emerged that Williams was the infamous Jack the Ripper, on the run from the police in London.
Police calculated that his regular trips from Liverpool to London coincided with the dates of the Whitechapel murders, and the Herald reported that Williams’ appearance “tallies exactly” with descriptions of a man seen with several of the Ripper’s victims.
The report added that the brutality of his murders suggested “the ferocity of Jack the Ripper,” and that “the question of who Williams really is, and how he lives, is a mystery.”
The next day the Herald reported that Williams’ real name was Frederick Bailey Deeming, a criminal with a long career of theft, bigamy, deception and murder around the world, though his confession to the last two canonical Ripper murders was seen by many as a desperate ploy to get himself extradited to England.
Several weeks later on April 17, the Los Angeles Times jumped on the bandwagon and added a fascinating further possibility to the story of Deeming, who they called a “phenomenal villain,” and “a fiend in human form.”
According to their report, a man named Charles H. Williams had lived in Los Angeles around 1887 and 1888, and had married a “worthy lady” named Nannie Catching before stealing around $2,500 from her (around $70,000 today), and disappearing without a trace.
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