Originally posted by Lewis C
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Hi Herlock,
Using this method of awarding points for mental illness, I would still give David Cohen a 2 for mental illness. Here are 2 links mentioning his violence:
I think it is at least reasonably possible that Deeming was in England at the time, and the only question is whether it is merely reasonably possible, or that it's more like a strong likelihood. In the rest of this post, I'm quoting Paul Begg from page 91 of Ripperologist 142:
The entry for Frederick Bailey Deeming in the current Jack the Ripper A to Z is depressingly short and dismissive, possibly because Martin Fido thought Deeming was in jail when the Ripper crimes were committed and Keith Skinner thought he was in South Africa. Begg was probably staring blankly into space, dribbling slightly, and entertaining no opinion about anything at all. Other writers such as Melvin Harris, Colin Wilson, Robin Odell, Donald Rumbelow and Stewart Evans also accepted that Deeming was abroad or in prison at the time.
But he wasn’t.
In 2011 there was a pretty dire Discovery Channel documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Australian Suspect, in which a trenchcoat-wearing former Scotland Yard detective named Robin Napper showed that Deeming was in Britain at the time of the Ripper murders. You may recall that this was the documentary that featured the famous Eddowes shawl being tested for DNA and showed that the DNA retrieved from the gummed back of the stamp on the Openshaw letter belonged to a woman. Somehow this swirling documentary concluded that Deeming ticked all the boxes to be Jack the Ripper and that all Napper needed was the DNA of Deeming’s murdered wife to clinch and close the case, which was a stretch even by the standards of TV documentary makers.
Anyway, the point is that the author this book, Roger Millington, had already discovered that Deeming was in England when the Ripper murders were committed, but it was in 2011 that he learned he had prostate cancer. He died in 2013 and the finished manuscript of this book was found among his papers.
I didn’t come to this book with any great enthusiasm, but it is an excellent and very readable account of the life of Frederick Bailey Deeming, who killed his wife and his four children at Rainhill, Liverpool, and his second wife, Emily Mather, at Windsor, Melbourne, Australia, and otherwise lived the life as a conman and fraudster. According to Millington, it was a detective named Brant who expressed his belief that Deeming was responsible for a triple murder in Johannesburg in September 1888 and thus scotched the idea that Deeming was Jack the Ripper. But the triple murder was committed in February 1888, so Deeming could have been in England to commit the two Ripper murders he confessed to.
According to Millington, Deeming was in Plymouth in early September 1888 and left there on 27 September 1888. He was using the name Lawson. The Double Event was two days later.
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