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LET'S START FRESH: SUSPECT "X"

Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Suspects: General Discussion : LET'S START FRESH: SUSPECT "X"
Author: Sarah R. Jacobs
Wednesday, 18 October 2000 - 05:50 pm
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------ This Is A Call To Sart Where-----------
-------- The Police Of Today Would -----------
-------- Have Started: FRESH -----------------

Let's face it. We are doing no better than the cops did in 1888.

We're still working, for the most part, with the testimony of those *they* questioned, based upon ridiculous race- and class-based assumptions about murder. We're still reluctant to believe what true experts in the many fields believe:

First and foremost, we cling to ridiculous conspiracy theories. I am not immune to the "Conspiracy Bug." Neither is any human being. But, just as we would with any other disease, we must fortify our immune systems against it with the Echinacea of Common Sense, with the Vitamin C of Science, and with the Restful Sleep of Perspective-Taking .

Echinacea is a flower. It looks a lot like a purple daisy that mated with a shooting star. Its immune-system boosting properties, known for centuries if not millenia, make it the recommendation of even staunchly-conservative physicians such as my father, at the slightest hint of an upper respiratory virus.

Echinacea has only recently regained its popularity among the mainstream medical community. However, like Common Sense, Echinacea has been there, just naturally growing out of the earth, since before humans existed. Common Sense is what we all gained when (take this metaphorically or literally, as you will) Adam and Eve first saw what brought harm to the Family of Man. They believed that they had unleashed Evil on the world, but, really, they had only gained what the Tree's Serpent said *could* be gained from the eating of its fruit: ***The Knowledge of Good and Evil***.

They learned that both their acts (disobedience of sensical laws (God's)), **and their lack of action** (not clothing their nakedness), produced reactions (respectively, an ouster from the Garden, and an extra need, the need to get dressed to avoid embarrassment). They developed Common Sense, an asset which would lead, through a great deal of trial and error, to the laws we have now.

Author: David M. Radka
Thursday, 19 October 2000 - 12:26 pm
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It's true, the solution to the case is in your own mind. Everybody who's studied the case seriously already knows the answer, they just don't yet know they know. All you need is right there in the evidence, the published accounts, and the good books written by the better authors.

The best procedure, therefore, would be Zen Buddhism. Wearing loincloth assume the lotus position, and let's begin. OMMMMMM OMMMMMMM OMMMMMMMMMMMMMM OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

David

Author: Jon
Thursday, 19 October 2000 - 07:23 pm
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Another prime tip from Obiwan-kenobi-Radka.

David, do all these hot tips actually fit together somehow?
I guess we couldn't persuade you to be a bit more specific?

Ok, I'll wait for the book...........
:-)

Author: David M. Radka
Thursday, 19 October 2000 - 08:34 pm
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Jon,
You mean Yogi Sri Praneshradka, but that's okay.

David

Author: Sarah R. Jacobs
Friday, 20 October 2000 - 08:41 pm
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[Polite Laughter.]

Listen, I was attempting to be serious, here.

I am almost certain that the Freemasons are neither "Free" (they must pay dues and wear silly fezzes that no Turk would ever be caught dead in), nor "Masons" (unless by coincidence: The ceremonial pair of stones -- one "hewn", the other "unhewn," and God only knows what Freud would say to *that* -- is manufactured by non-Masons in some poor, developing country that even Oxfam forgot). I have read at least three of their official ceremonials, and there isn't even the slightest hint of whatever Knight wishes we'd believe in. The most sinister thing I've ever seen Masons do is drive home after three whiskeys and two beers past a primary school that was just letting out. That's evil, but *not* a Conspiracy.


SECOND: The Royal Family couldn't carry out a conspiracy against a prostitute if the pro' had both hadns tied to the bedposts, a blood-alcohol percentage of .30, and legs permanently disabled. Why? Because the Royals haven't the genetic variety in their pool, nor the amount of esteem for the "lower element" to conspire.

THIRD: Jews and Muslims drain *all* the blood. We don't eat "kidne", as the blood %'age is too high. Et cetera... For more, contact the nearest mosque or synagogue.

SO: Conspiracy is pretty much not an option, unless you've got a successful graphic novel, whose purpose is showing, as Tim Curry's character says, in "Clue," "the way it *could* have happened..."

ON ANOTHER NOTE: I think the idea of a cotton mrechant who kept records of all of his thoughts is silly. It is the mark of someone who wished to paint Mr. Maybrick as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

I've read R.L. Stevenson's novel, and in it is a Laboratory Notebook (or at least excerpts thereof; It is the same sort of thing that those of us who were assigned, as young children, to grow a lima bean or raise a tadpole and record each day's progress, kept as part of the assignment) kept in much the same fashion as the "Maybrick" "Diary" is, right down to the eventual takeover of the more vicious side's messy, gloppy, tearing hand, and the last, sweet, violin-tinged farewell of the sweet scientist as he realizes that the only way to rid himself of the beast (or, as his fevered brain asks itself, is it *the **Beast** *?!) is to admit all in a letter, sign it with the beast's own name, and die himself.

All For Now. I've Just Hit on a theory about the Diary (Involving authorship by an aged Brierly who, convinced that the entire Maybrick Family is out to get him, and embittered by his delusional love for the Murderess, Mrs. Maybrick, which never won her for him, even though she teased, caused him to write the thing himself, on a lark, and forget it even existed... )

Author: R Court
Saturday, 21 October 2000 - 12:07 pm
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Hi Sarah,

As Sugden wrote in his CH, the writing on the wall, attacks on Women near establishments frequented by Jewish people and so on did, in his mind, start to make a persuasive case for suspecting Jack of trying to pin the blame on the Jews. Maybe the idea came to Jacko-boy because of the anti-Jewish riots after Hanbury Street. In any case the evidence available then and now did and does nothing to cause special suspicion to be thrown on a member of that religeon, kidne or not.

The diary matter has been (dis)cussed in all it's forms for so long, I am pleased to hear something that could be new, even when not particularly likely. Brierly is supposed, after his hotel adventure with Flor, to have made it clear that he wanted nothing more from her however. He indeed left her to stew alone during and after the disgraceful murder charge court proceedings and miscarriage-of-justice death/life sentences that followed. (I can only suppose that she was a real dumbo.) Poor cow.

Esoterics are not the sole property of Freemasons, by the way. If being a Freemason entitles one to drive past primary schools at certain times or not is a question that I am not qualified to answer. I am certain it does not qualify one to be assumed to be the one and only Jack, or the 'single serial killer' theory is dead.

Best regards

Bob

Author: R.J. Palmer
Saturday, 21 October 2000 - 12:17 pm
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Sarah, bummed my way on a friend's computer for a moment to check out the action. The Stevenson connection to the alleged Maybrick diary is, um, interesting. Have you noticed Stevenson's 'Suicide Club' is included in the bibliography of 'The Diary of Jack the Ripper'? Always wondered about that. The story has the memorable line 'The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing', and is a rather Doylesque primer on 'slumming it'. Ms. Harrison recently solved this riddle; one of the slummers has the odd name 'Hammersmith', the very name that appears in the diary. Hmm. Wonder. Does this make Harrison an 'old forgery' theorist?
The jilted Brierly aside, have you considered your old friend Francis Thompson(I was just poking my nose in on that board) for the authorship of the diary? [Eek. It flies!] For he's the only gent in all of Ripperdom who could quote Crashaw's now infamous line 'O Costly Intercourse of Death'. My edition of 'Modern British Poetry' (Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1920) goes as far as to claims that Mr. Thompson was greatly influenced by the 'dazzling Crashaw'. (Muted grumbling) Everything seems (only seems) connected; everywhere is a false trail...if one goes looking.
Standing in an antiquarian bookstore in Seattle sometime back, I found Thompson's essay on Shelley (dated 1889). Universal love and esoteric musings. Very much what you would expect from someone who hung out with the Yellow book crowd and the members of the Rhymer's Club. Not Jack the Ripper. Yes, he wrote odd things about women. But this was the 80's! Who didn't? Laudanum, despair, Wildean aesthetics, the usual. The poetic types were still swooning over Rossetti & Company posing their girlfriends in icy streams so they could paint them as Ophelia. Bad time to be a woman, I imagine. Besides, Thompson, much like DeQuincey a couple generations before, found comfort & friendship from a kindly prostitute. No grudge here.
My own theory on the murders: committed by an 'ourang-outang' a la 'Rue Morgue'. Possibly living in the Tower of London, a vestige from when those noble structures were a zoo. I have discovered several anagrams that prove my theory, which I will soon publish. Also this: one witness described him as having a 'carroty moustache'!
PS. If you are drawn to things Victorian, next time in London do not miss seeing Highgate Cemetery. (Rossetti's wife is buried there, among others). There's a pseudo-Egyptian temple that is simply fantastic. Overkill abounds. A strange sprawling overgrown gothic testament to the Victorian obsession with death. Well worth a peek. (You have to hire a guide, though. In the 1960s vampire-types were breaking in after hours and performing strange rites, and it Highgate has since had to be kept under lock & key).
Well, I'm being booted.
Y'all take care.


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