Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
23 November 1888
A MYSTERIOUS ENGLISHMAN
He Is Charged With Murder and Looks Like Jack the Ripper
New York, Nov. 24.
A mysterious man, who admits 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 form England to the British Consul,
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 was not the Ripper, nor the
Yorkshire wife killer either.
Shaw admits that that is an assumed name - his real name being Heddington - but he declines to say why he is travelling
incognito.
He cannot read or write, and is rather confused in his accounting for the presence in his pocket of the newspaper containing
the Whitechapel story.
