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They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
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They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
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They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
Ebook1,269 pages22 hours

They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

For over a hundred years, the mystery of Jack the Ripper has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists and endless volumes purporting to finally reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorized Victorian England.

But what if there was never really any mystery at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice?

In They All Love Jack, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is no mere radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites, and institutionalized corruption.

Polemic forensic investigation and panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, They All Love Jack is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts—the so-called Ripperologists—to make clear, at last, who really did it; and, more important, how he managed to get away with it for so long.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 13, 2015
ISBN9780062296399
Author

Bruce Robinson

Bruce Robinson is the director and screenwriter of Withnail & I, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Jennifer 8, and The Rum Diary. He has also written the screenplays for The Killing Fields, Shadow Makers (released in the US as Fat Man and Little Boy), Return to Paradise, and In Dreams. He is the author of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, Paranoia in the Launderette, and two books for children, The Obvious Elephant and Harold and the Duck, both illustrated by Sophie Windham. He lives in London.

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Reviews for They All Love Jack

Rating: 3.54687496875 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting theory possibly even true. But written so to be almost unreadable. It could also be a third as long with no loss of important info.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    His theories are ludicrous – he doesn't so much ignore Occam's Razor as tie it to a weight and dump it in the Thames – but there's a small degree of amusement to be taken in that, and some of the historical detail is genuinely interesting. If you can ignore the sanctimony.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Mr. Robinson subtitles his book “Busting the Ripper”. In my old age, I have come to enjoy investigating and busting conspiracy theories, and will write at length as to why I don’t believe much of what Mr. Robinson writes about.
    I don’t want to be too harsh on Mr. Robinson. He has done quite a lot of research and put in a tremendous effort to write this book, which is quite interesting. I simply think he has assumed facts not in evidence. This, with a tendency to often devolve into rants against Masons, Freemasonry, and the elite class in Victorian England, and use extremely crude language, distracts the reader from the essential information of the history he is looking at.
    The book makes two central accusations: (1) That Jack the Ripper was a Mason, and left signs at his crime scenes to show other Masons in the police force that Jack was a Mason, so that rather than try to find him, they would adhere to their Masonic vows to protect other Masons; and (2) That Jack the Ripper was Michael Maybrick, a singer/songwriter who was active in the at third of the 19th century.
    As far as the first accusation, we have to look at the first two murders known to be by Jack the Ripper. The first was of Mary Ann Nichols on August 31, 1888. Mr. Robinson doesn’t spend any print describing the details of this crime, only mentions that it happened. We can safely assume that there were no indications of Masonic activity at this crime scene. The second murder was of Annie Chapman. She had her intestines cut out and thrown over her shoulder, which mimicked a story in Mason lore, as one of the punishments visited upon the three murderers of Hiram Abiff, the first grandmaster of Freemasonry, and the architect of Solomon’s temple. It is only in passing that Mr. Robinson mentions that Mrs. Chapman’s uterus was cut out. I have to conclude that this was Jack’s real goal, and the intestines were in the way. The histories all says that Mrs. Chapman’s body was discovered at 6:00 AM in someone’s backyard, and two people said they saw Mrs. Chapman at 5:30 AM and 5:35 walking with a man. I don’t know when sunrise was in London on September 8th, but unless they were on summer time, the sun should have risen between 5:30 and 6:00. Jack had to work quickly to get what he wanted, and wouldn’t have worried about where he threw the intestines once he got them out of the way. Jack did the same thing with his fourth victim, three weeks later, taking her uterus and one of her kidney to boot. Mr. Robinson makes fun of the coroner involved in these cases, Mr. Baxter, for concocting a story about a “womb-collector” in Scotland, but it seems that Jack was indeed such a collector, as finite a shelf life as such organs would have. The people of 1888 didn’t know what we know now about serial killers, that they like to get a keepsake from their victims as a reminder of the enjoyment of the crime. From this point, any real connection with Freemasonry is gone and other signs at other crime scenes that seem to relate to Freemasonry are simply coincidental, as I will explain farther down.
    On the second accusation, Mr. Robinson uses Michael Maybrick’s scheming to get his sister-in-law hanged for the murder of his brother James as a sign of Michael’s psychopathy. He insists that Jack was not insane, and I certainly agree, at least by today’s standards, although he would have seemed such by the standards of the time he lived in. At least those people had moved up from believing that he must be possessed by a demon. The medical term for psychopathy is anti-social personality disorder. Mr. Robert Ressler, who coined the term “serial killer”, said that the trigger for a psychopath to become a killer was often some sort of affront, and that is what Mr. Robinson believes finally turned Michael into Jack the Ripper. I can believe that, but not at age 47, as Michael was in 1888. The brain tends to harden into certain firm structures as we get older, and they can’t change so significantly – for example, the development of schizophrenia most often happens in the teens, and is virtually unknown after age 30. Mr. Robinson fails to give any further evidence that Michael did indeed have anti-social personality disorder. He even married a woman and seems to have lived with her peacefully enough for 20 years until his death. Jack the Ripper getting married? I can’t believe that.

    Some other problems I see:

    I can’t understand what else Mr. Robinson expects to gain from the written message on the wall that references “Juwes”. The spelling of Jews in this way has particular significance to the Masons, but again anyone could be aware of this knowledge. Mr. Robinson says that leaving the message on the wall would have resulted in the capture of Jack in a few days. There is no explanation of how this would be done. No handwriting analysis is possible – the surface of the wall is different from the surface of paper. Paper will deform ever so slightly in response to writing on it, and these deformations can be seen under a magnifying glass or microscope. The wall will not deform at all. From what I’ve seen, the message was printed, so couldn’t be compared to someone’s writing in script. I’ve never seen any description of how large the letters were or how high above the ground the message was written. Anything that varied from someone’s usual mode of writing would further distort their output.
    Mr. Robinson says that there was plenty of other anti-Semitic graffiti around Whitechapel, and so there was no need to erase the message. I’m certain that there was, but none of it was in the area where some material had been taken from the scene of a major crime. I think it wasn’t unrest by Jews that Sir Charles Warren feared – it was unrest against them.
    Mr. Robinson says that Sir Charles didn’t show the same deference to the sensibilities of Jews when police were harassing a group of Jews near where Elizabeth Stride was murdered. However, Sir Charles was still asleep until 3:00 AM that morning, by which time the police had been questioning the Jews for two hours, and Sir Charles had to look at other things going on first.
    The story about the grapes in Elizabeth Stride’s hand has all the making of what we now call an urban legend – some story that someone “heard” about from someone else, and passed it and passed so that it’s still going 133 years later. The information provided is often confusing. People saw grapes and grape stems in Ms. Stride’s hand, or on the ground, but there is a reference that the night was so dark that the people at Ms. Stride’s body could barely see each other. In addition, Ms. Stride’s hand was supposedly in a death grip, yet she was also holding grapes. If her hand was truly in a death grip, she would surely have crushed the grapes. The grapes were supposedly bought at a nearby grocery store, and a Mr. Packer got a long look at a man who bought the grapes for Elizabeth Stride. The night was extremely dark and it was raining hard, yet Mr. Packer and his wife saw the man and Ms. Stride standing in the rain for more than an hour. It seems hard to believe that a criminal who was planning murder would let himself be seen for so long. Mr. Packer told two different stories to the police and a London newspaper, which compromised his value as a witness, so could not be called to the coroner’s inquest. It does seem strange that none of the people who were claimed to have seen grapes were not called to the inquest, but again, perhaps the story of the grapes came up later, after it was learned that a man had bought grapes for Ms. Stride 90-120 minutes before the murder (again, there is conflicting information). Mr. Robinson says that it was “common knowledge” around Whitechapel that Elizabeth Stride had grapes in her hand, but I have to point out that it is “common knowledge” in this time in this country that says that the previous president won the 2020 election by a landslide, and the election was stolen from him, and that just isn’t true. Mr. Robinson also criticizes the coroner, Mr. Baxter, for not mentioning the grapes in his summing up, but since it wasn’t introduced as evidence during the inquest, it would have been out of order to mention them in the summng up, facts not in evidence.
    I thought the story of Mary Kelly’s murder being part of a direction from the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel was an interesting hypothesis, but this can’t be directed at Freemasonry, since the text of Ezekiel is available to everyone, and any random man could have decided to follow Ezekiel’s instructions, and tear up Mary Kelly. If he did it because he heard voices telling him to do it, we go back to the insanity argument, because we would certainly interpret that as insanity in the modern era. Mr. Robinson says that Jack burned part of Ms. Kelly’s shoulder bone and femur in her fireplace. The autopsy report said that Ms. Kelly’s right leg and left arm had been severed, but says nothing about any bone being missing. Bone is very hard to burn – it isn’t naturally flammable, and takes a lot of heat to do thoroughly. Sieving of the material in Mary Kelly’s fireplace revealed nothing but ashes there. Bone fragments from passengers in the two planes that hit the World Trade Center were identified through DNA testing, and that was after they went through the ignition of 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. If Jack did cut the bones, perhaps he took them with him to burn in his own fireplace?
    There is confusion about when Mary Kelly actually died, since several people claimed to have seen her in the daytime up to 9:15 AM. She was reportedly seen talking to a short, stout man then, which would preclude Michael Maybrick, because he was a little over six feet tall. From there, she supposedly bought some milk and a drink in a bar, and on the way back home, supposedly ran into her killer, and yet she
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I bought this because I heard that it was viscerally angry in its refutation of the myth of Jack the Ripper. I think there needs to be more anger in history, especially anger directed against the disgusting and inhuman, and against corruption in high places. History written for an academic audience is often dry and inaccessible, while popular history sometimes lacks rigour. This book combines the rigour of academic research with the accessibility and humanity of popular history.I didn't know that I was all that interested in Jack the Ripper until I started reading this book. Because of what it involves, the reason behind Robinson researching the story isn't revealed until a fifth of the way into the book. His reason is interesting but not vital to the passion he has for getting to the truth behind the mystery being infectious. His historian as raconteur style helped, but this is a pacey, gripping read regardless of Robinson's voice roaring out in incredulity at you. There were times when what Robinson was describing was so farcical that I could imagine it being made into a very entertaining satirical film.This is one of the best books I have ever read. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me boil with rage, but most of all it consolidated things I have long held to be true into a coherent appraisal of the society we live in.

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