Mitchell Daily Republican
South Dakota, USA
6 January 1889
EMULATING JACK
Many Murders Believed to Be Caused from Reading Accounts of the
Whitechapel Murders
London, Jan. 5.
The newspapers at present teem with accounts of fiendish murders.
Yesterday at Perchton, in Somerset, a girl 10 years of age, named Davy,
was outraged and then murdered. Her mother found the dead body in a ditch
with the head almost severed from the body shockingly mutilated after the
style of Jack the Ripper methods. The deed is supposed to have been
committed by a tramp. No one has been arrested for the crime.
At Glasgow yesterday morning John Stevenson, a young fellow about 19 years of age, enticed
a prostitute named Mary McKenzie into a dark court and stabbed her in the neck and
abdomen. There was apparently no motive for the deed but an insane freak. Stevenson was
arrested and a bloody knife found in his pocket. The only motive one can suggest for the
commission of such atrocities is that the persons responsible for them have been inflamed
by reading about the Whitechapel fiend and attempt to imitate him.
