Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
24 November 1888
A MYSTERIOUS ENGLISHMAN
He is Charged with Murders and Looks Like Jack the Ripper
New York, Nov. 24.
A mysterious man, who admits that he is travelling incognito, was arrested as he alighted from the steamer Wyoming. He was a steerage passenger and
registered the name of James Shaw. He was arrested on a cablegram from England to the British consul general, Mr. Hoare.
The cablegram asked that steerage passenger James Shaw be detained, as he was James Pennock, of Pickering, North Riding, Yorkshire, England, and that he had
murdered his wife on Nov. 7.
Shaw protested his innocence and declared that he had kissed his wife goodbye Nov. 9 at Leeds, near which town he lived. He was going west and had $5. He was
lodged in Ludlow street jail pending further instruction from England.
Shaw fully answers the description of Jack the Ripper and there was in his pocket a paper containing an illustrated account of the Whitechapel horror, and
the rumor spread that the Whitechapel murderer was a prisoner in New York.
But Marshal Bernhardt pumped his prisoner in his own peculiar way and satisfied himself that Shaw as not the Ripper, nor the Yorkshire wife killer either.
Shaw admits that it is an assumed name - he real name is Heddington - but he declines to say who he is travelling incognito.
He cannot read nor write, and is rather confused in his accounting for the presence in his pocket of the newspaper containing the Whitechapel story.
