- Hardcover: 208 pages
- Publisher: Wharncliffe Books (November 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1845631269
- ISBN-13: 978-1845631260
- Product Dimensions: 24 x 16.5 x 2.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 540 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #677,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Close but no cigar, Nov 6 2011
By Frederick Reilly - Published on Amazon.com
This is a fairly good book on Jack the Ripper, particularly in its treatment of workhouse conditions and life in the East End of London in the late 1800's, which cites modern forensic techniques, particularly geographical and psychological profiling, to track down a new suspect - Robert Mann.It is actually a plausible candidate. He was the epileptic mortuary attendant of the Whitechapel workhouse, abandoned by his mother and sister to the workhouse when he was a teenager. He would have had some anatomical knowledge, expert knowledge of the area (even being raised in the dead center of the killings), access to what he would have needed, etc. Additionally his testimony was shaky, and he apparently had the habit of grooming the corpses, which is strange.
However, the case is stretched thin at various points (the timing of one killing would have been very difficult to explain), and more often the case is based on conjecture, owing to a lack of information about him.
The fatal flaw of the book is in a single paragraph on Aaron Kosminski. He admits that he is a plausible candidate, but dismisses Kosminksi as being the victim of Scotland Yard's commitment to finding a raving lunatic, and leaves it at that. In fact, the case for Kosminski is much stronger than that. There's a reason Scotland Yard at the time - and even retired FBI agents today - thought it was Kosminksi. Other serial killers of the "lust" variety - similar to the Ripper - were not temporal lobe epileptics as Mann may have been, but paranoid schizophrenics, as Kosminski was. All the arguments for Mann apply to Kosminmski, only moreso. The only element that would be missing is knowledge of anatomy, but that is not necessary. He quotes the FBI profiler saying that the killer might have had some anatomical knowledge "or curiosity" then acts as though the "or curiosity" part had never been said.
There are incidents of apparently circular reasoning, and he frustratingly refers to Jack the Ripper matter-of-factly as Robert Mann before he's made the case for him. Also, there are some irrelevant citations that clutter the body of the text.
In the end, the author provides an interesting read, but he fails to make the case that Robert Mann was Jack the Ripper. I would recommend Robert House's book, "Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect" instead.
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