Teenage Jack the Ripper
In 1962 while researching his book Jack the Ripper In Fact and Fiction, author Robin Odell, received a number of letters from a gentleman in Blackpool, Lancashire. The man made the claim that his father, who was born in Dundee in 1873, was Jack the Ripper. He stated that the man worked as an apprentice to an engineer's wood pattern maker, and was described by his son as an honest, kind and gentle fellow. Though presumably not kind and gentle enough to stop him murdering and mutilating women on the streets of Whitechapel. His motive, apparently, was revenge against prostitutes, because his master, a journeyman tradesman in his early thirties, had died at the London hospital in 1889 after contracting a venereal disease. The murder weapon he used was a Swedish lock knife. If the man, however, was born in 1873 this would have made him only 15 years of age at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
