How strange is this

[RockySullivan]

Nice find ms marple! I have always thought the ripper knew the victims from pubs this seems to reinforce that

[MrBarnett]

You could'nt resist that, could you Mr B. It is odd though.

Miss Marple

Sorry;-)

[miss marple]

You could'nt resist that, could you Mr B. It is odd though.

Miss Marple

[MrBarnett]

The pub connection is very interesting, the names of the Yarmouth piers is to much of a coincedence. If the letter is coded to refer to the Whitechapel pubs, Brittania and Wellington, I thought I would look up Norwich to see if there was another usage.
Guess what, a Norwicher is slang for' one who drinks too much from a shared jug or glass. eg an unfair drinker' common usage 1860/1900. So perhaps the' Norwich women' referred to their drinking habits
This reference is from Partridge's dictionary of historical slang.

The letter gets more complex by the minute. So the murderer is planning to murder two heavy drinking women who frequent the Brittania or Wellington possibly?

Miss Marple

Miss Marple,

How do you know the two drinking women were heavy? Is it something to do with the Norfolk 'Broads' ?

MrB

[miss marple]

The pub connection is very interesting, the names of the Yarmouth piers is to much of a coincedence. If the letter is coded to refer to the Whitechapel pubs, Brittania and Wellington, I thought I would look up Norwich to see if there was another usage.
Guess what, a Norwicher is slang for' one who drinks too much from a shared jug or glass. eg an unfair drinker' common usage 1860/1900. So perhaps the' Norwich women' referred to their drinking habits
This reference is from Partridge's dictionary of historical slang.

The letter gets more complex by the minute. So the murderer is planning to murder two heavy drinking women who frequent the Brittania or Wellington possibly?

Miss Marple

[RockySullivan]

Well the word coincidence does, and who says it came from Mrs M?

I mean it came from her address. To accept the letter as only a coincidence your accepting not one but two coincidences which hard to believe. Your believing someone guessed the street location of the next murder AND your accepting that the letter randomly used the address that of a witness who claimed to see Mary Kelly. So if you chalking it up to a coincidence ...then you have to accept not one but two coincidences!! Pretty hard to believe, gut. There's something more to Mrs Maxwell and her account of seeing Kelly. She claimed to see Kelly hours after her estimated murder time. What does this mean and how could it relate to the letter. Coincidences happen but when you start to stack them up it's not believable anymore

[Amanda]

Thanks

Caroline Maxwell was the wife of Henry Maxwell, lodging house deputy at Crossingham's Lodging House, 14 Dorset St. She knew Kelly by sight but had spoken to her only twice. Walter Dew, for what it's worth, said she was a sane and sensible woman with an excellent reputation.

Thanks Rosella.

Based on your info I'll have a search & see what else I can find.

Amanda

[GUT]

Caroline Maxwell was the wife of Henry Maxwell, lodging house deputy at Crossingham's Lodging House, 14 Dorset St. She knew Kelly by sight but had spoken to her only twice. Walter Dew, for what it's worth, said she was a sane and sensible woman with an excellent reputation.

Spot on

[GUT]

gut'day, but that doesnt explain why the letter comes from an address that close to the next murder from a witness who saw Mary Kelly after she was dead

Well the word coincidence does, and who says it came from Mrs M?

[Rosella]

Caroline Maxwell was the wife of Henry Maxwell, lodging house deputy at Crossingham's Lodging House, 14 Dorset St. She knew Kelly by sight but had spoken to her only twice. Walter Dew, for what it's worth, said she was a sane and sensible woman with an excellent reputation.

[Amanda]

Perhaps...

How about someone not from Dorset Street wrote it and it is coincidence. After all if you wrote a hoax letter would you even use your own street in the address.

Hi Gut,
You might use your own street if you were trying to lead the police to a suspect.

Isn't it possible that Caroline Maxwell may have known the Ripper's identity but didn't want to implicate herself in his arrest out of fear ?

What details do we know for certain about Ms.Maxwell? Was she married?

Amanda

[RockySullivan]

How about someone not from Dorset Street wrote it and it is coincidence. After all if you wrote a hoax letter would you even use your own street in the address.

gut'day, but that doesnt explain why the letter comes from an address that close to the next murder from a witness who saw Mary Kelly after she was dead

[GUT]

How about someone not from Dorset Street wrote it and it is coincidence. After all if you wrote a hoax letter would you even use your own street in the address.

[Defective Detective]

This strikes me as warranting far more attention than it seems to have gotten.

Granted that the letter is almost certainly a 'hoax', in the sense that it wasn't written by Jack The Ripper, bolded, italicized, quoted, &etc., it's still easily more intriguing than this shawl nonsense that passes for a 'discovery' in the field today.

There are a number of things that make this letter an outstanding find to my mind:

* I have made as detailed an examination as I can on the Ripper letters I know of, and in none of the others do I find a letter that begins by speaking about the Ripper in a third-person, advice-giving fashion and then veering off into Dear Boss territory.There's none that follows this pattern in Letters From Hell or in the (admittedly limited number of) press accounts I have.

* Of course the fact that it originates from within visual distance of the Kelly murder side is suggestive, but I'd argue that the presence of Caroline Maxwell at the address is even more attention-grabbing and would be even if she lived clear across town.

There are a few possibilities, as I see them:

1. Mrs. Maxwell wrote the letter, thus injecting herself into the case a week before we know she did as a witness --

a. -- because she was a publicity-hound or an affectionado of the morbid.
b. -- because she suspected a co-tenant of Number 14 was, rightly or wrongly, Jack The Ripper, and wanted to get the attention of the authorities in a roundabout way because

- she was afraid he would read the letter and hurt her, hence the need for her indirectness; or
- she did not want to implicate herself to the police in writing it; --

c. -- because Caroline Maxwell knew who Jack The Ripper was and posted the letter to either

- draw the attention of the authorities to Number 14 and, consequentially, the Ripper, being indirect to avoid his own attention; or
- was trying to divert their attention from Dorset Street to a faraway city like Norfolk.

2. A member of the Smith family, possibly young Helen Smith, wrote this letter because

a. they were publicity hounds/fixated on the morbid/bored
b. thought they knew the Ripper and were trying to draw attention to him indirectly
c. knew the Ripper and were sheltering him by diverting attention to Norfolk.

3. The Ripper himself penned the missive, and sent it to Norfolk

- to throw the coppers off his scent.
- because he had a Norfolk connection and may even have intended to be true to the word of the letter.

4. Another resident of the house wrote it and it's merely a coincidence.

Those are four main possibilities, and twelve plausible scenarios, any of which can be mixed and matched.

Even the minor mysteries within the greater whole are mysterious.


I'm an American with no way at all to follow up on this, or I would. And I'm also hardly a trained researcher, and my advice is probably either obvious or nonsensical. But as I see it, there are several fields of inquiry here which ought to be pursued. I'd do them myself but I cannot.

1. The Norfolk police ought to be contacted to see if they still have this letter on file. It's tremendously unlikely, I know, and you're as likely to be dismissed as a crank and hung up on than to get even a negative answer. But it still ought to be pursued.

2. Were there any murders of women with special emphasis on either the throat or reproductive organs? Or even any strange deaths of women at all within the Yarmouth or Norfolk areas within a reasonable timeframe of the Whitechapel murders?

In conjunction with this, we need to establish whether or not Caroline Maxwell had some sort of connection to the Smith family, or to Norfolk. What do we know of her?

[Mabuse]

We need a hardcore statistician to come in and apply Bayesian modelling on these factors to determine the likelihood of any of these connections being a product of random alignment or actual linear linkage. Something like Richard Carrier's approach to historical analysis would be valuable here, I think.