Case of most interest besides JtR poll

[caz]

I barely mention the nude murders in my book...

I do like to see comedy written with so little effort.

Love,

Caz
X

[noel o'gara]

Jack The Stripper of course!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Stripper

Not wishing to be diverted but I noticed a reference to this and perhaps I can contribute to this debate as I was involved in this case in my research for my book about the Yorkshire Ripper.

It was the evening that the tube station in Kings Cross was on fire and dozens killed in the fire that myself and my friend Donal Brady, decided to travel from our Leicester Square hotel to a pub in Shepherds Bush that Billy Tracey, the man who is the real Yorkshire Ripper told me he had worked in years earlier. We wanted to go to Kings Cross where he had been shot, but not fatally and to Shepherds Bush. We made our way to Shepherd's Bush tube station about 7.0 pm and found the pub the Mail Coach pretty quickly as it is close to the station. I was about 43 at that time and looking around there was only one older man who was with a young lad, both having a pint and sitting alone in one side of the pub. The murders had been 25 years before.
I had reason to think that Tracey might have been responsible for those murders for many reasons chiefly, I knew he was the real Yorkshire Ripper. I knew he had lived a life of violent crime and spent many years in London. I knew his wife had solicited as a prostitute in that area and at that time while he pimped and led an alternative life of crime that even you guys seldom hear of. I knew he was a sex orientated pervert capable of anything and most things perverse and sexual. I also knew that he lived in London at that time and coincidentally I had lived in West London's Chiswick, Acton, Hammersmith area for six years at that time but long before I ever crossed his path.

And so I approached this old man who was also Irish and asked to join him and we sat down.
I told him I was doing research for a book and stated asking about the nude murders in a matter of fact way. He was talkative and said he knew Bridie O'Hara the last of the victims and could remember her vividly sitting at a table with a drink in her hand. He knew her very well by his talk. His nephew sat and listened as I tried to explain why I was researching and I started to tell him about my book about the Yorkshire Ripper and I told him the name Billy Tracey which didnt ring a bell with him. I wanted to know if he knew him and if he worked in that pub as Tracey had told me. He grew somewhat angry as I questioned him further and to appease him I finally produced a photo of Tracy and held it up for him to see.
With that the colour drained from his face and he stood up and almost ran out the door leaving his full pint and his dumbstruck nephew sitting there until he also went after him.

Tracey had told me in friendlier times that he knew Bridie O'Hara and more alarmingly he told me that he had served her a drink on the night she died.
Her body was found some weeks after she disappeared.
And that was the reason I went with Donal to see if we could corroborate what Tracey had said to me.

It is fact that there are many dozens of murders in London every year. Most are crimes of passion. Many are by pimps, but when a killer starts to link his killings he is sending a clear message to the police. Catch me if you can. The Ipswich murders linking of the victims had a clear motive also underlying their linkage and that has been explained in another thread.
I barely mention the nude murders in my book but you will appreciate that a man such as the Yorkshire Ripper must have had a life time of serious crime before he would embark on what he did in Yorkshire.

[AdamWalsh]

Jack The Stripper of course!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Stripper

[sdreid]

There were two programs on the Discovery Channel today about the Lizzie Borden Case. The second was basically a ghost hunter show but the first was pretty good I thought.

[sdreid]

Thanks Mack. I vaguely remember hearing a reference to a true story and that song but that's about all I knew before you mentioned it.

[macknnc]

Though the Lizzie Borden case also interests me, I voted other, thinking of the Tom Dula/Laurie Foster murder in North Carolina in 1866.

Though Dula (immortalized as Tom 'Dooley' in the hit song recorded by the Kingston Trio in1958) was convicted and hanged in 1868, there is a school of thought, (which I agree with) that the murder was actually committed by Laurie's cousin, Ann Foster Melton, with whom Dula was also having an affair with, and Dula simply took the fall for her. (this case was the basis for my unpublished novel "Bound to Die.")

[sdreid]

I voted for Torso which is currently tied for third with Lizzie among the named cases.

[Mayerling]

Hi again - it turned out that I did vote some time ago. I just discovered the graph said so.

Jeff

[Mayerling]

Hi Stan,

I haven't voted yet. But now I will. Enjoy your week off.

Jeff

[sdreid]

So Jeff, did you vote for other then? Off your list, Gorse Hall just missed my cut. Too bad I could only choose 9 along with the open category.

[Mayerling]

Some more

Warren Harding (1923) - Natural causes (coronary) or poison - and by whom and why?
Meriweather Lewis (1809) - suicide on way to Washington for a congressional investigation into so-called malfeasance, or murder by criminals on the Nachez Trace.
Chancellor John Lansing of New York State (1829) - disappeared while posting a letter on the Albany Mail boat one night in Manhattan. Thurlow Weed, a political heavyweight of thirty years later, hinted at a murder conspiracy but did not go into details to protect innocent third parties.
Judge Joseph Force Crater (1930) - left a resturant where he had been dining with friends, entered a cab to go to a theater, and was never seen again (officially).
Starr Faithfull - suicide or murder
Gorse Hall - which of three possible solutions is the correct one.
Peasanhall Mystery - Did William Gardiner kill his girlfriend, or was it an accident?
The Green Bicycle Case
The Princes in the Tower
Kasper Hauser
The Tichborne Claimant (was Orton connected to the family somehow)
Amelia Earhart (round-the-world flight or spy mission; death at sea by drowning, or executed by the Kamentai, or death on a desert island)

Jeff

[Mayerling]

The Bravo Case
The Maybrick Poisoning Case
The Bartlett Case
The Madeleine Smith Case
The guilt of John Williams in the Radcliffe Highway Murders of 1811 (see THE MAUL AND THE PEAR TREE)
The death of Sarah Milsom on Cannon Street, London in 1866
The death of Mayor Anton Cermak (victim in place of FDR in 1933 or targeted by Frank Nitti for revenge)
The death of Senator Huey Long (Victim of Dr. Carl Weiss or a trigger-happy guard)
The death of Governor William Goebel of Kentucky

Plenty of unsettled cases.

Jeff

[sdreid]

With one exception, all the victims were Caucasian as well.

[sdreid]

Cleveland and Texarkana are unusually similar in one way, that is, each killed both men and women with the slight majority going to the males.

[sdreid]

Yes, that's the Stripper Case.

I have seen both the Unsolved Mysteries segments on Cleveland Torso. The first was straight Torso and the second tried to relate the case to Black Dahlia. Some of the scenes were played in both episodes as I recall. I'm not sure if it was the only case Ness never solved. The first I heard of it was in the Introduction to Rumbelow's JtR book by Colin Wilson back in the 1970s