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Chris, whose work I always enjoy, posted the following in this thread some time ago:
The implication put forward in these pages is essentially this - that the man known as William Grant Granger never existed by that name except in prison, and that this name was actually an alias used by a dropout from the school at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1889 who, according to an unnamed relative of the man, admitted to his wife that he was Jack the Ripper and so sent her to an early grave. This would be in itself unremarkable, false confessions to both police and strangers being entirely too common in this case, save that the man disappeared as soon as he quit the school, and that very soon thereafter a man calling himself William Grant or William Grainger was arrested assaulting a woman in a manner very similar to the Ripper's MO. Needless to say it was this bit of the story that set the hairs on my neck on end.
Has this ever been looked into properly? While I'm normally not of a mind to put too much stock into the use of double identities by Jack the Ripper, this has just enough of a ring of truth to me that I feel it ought to be researched by better minds than mind. Would it be possible to cross-reference St. Bartholomew's registration directory (provided it still exists) with census records to ferret out any students who may have been widowed in that year and have dropped out simultaneously? My feeling is that if the tiny rabbit that was Kosminski can be pulled out of the gargantuan Whitechapel hat, this fellow ought to be rather simple to find, provided he exists.
An interesting little postscript to Kebbell's advocacy of Grant/Grainger comes courtesy of Google News Archive Search. It seems to have appeared originally in the Pall Mall Gazette, but the report below is from a New Zealand newspaper, the Grey River Argus, of 30 June 1910.
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Has this ever been looked into properly? While I'm normally not of a mind to put too much stock into the use of double identities by Jack the Ripper, this has just enough of a ring of truth to me that I feel it ought to be researched by better minds than mind. Would it be possible to cross-reference St. Bartholomew's registration directory (provided it still exists) with census records to ferret out any students who may have been widowed in that year and have dropped out simultaneously? My feeling is that if the tiny rabbit that was Kosminski can be pulled out of the gargantuan Whitechapel hat, this fellow ought to be rather simple to find, provided he exists.