return to normal view
 Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide 
This text is from the E-book Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide by Christopher J. Morley (2005). Click here to return to the table of contents. The text is unedited, and any errors or omissions rest with the author. Our thanks go out to Christopher J. Morley for his permission to publish his E-book.

Dr. John Hewitt

Suggested as a Ripper suspect by the researcher Steward Hicks. Hewitt was born in 1850 and was a Manchester G.P, who had become mentally ill and in 1888 was confined to Coton Hill asylum. The Coton Hill institution for the insane at Stafford was built in 1864 at a cost of £42,000 and housed 140 private patients from the upper and middle classes.

Despite Hewitt being released several times that year, he was safely incarcerated at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Hewitt married a nurse from the asylum and later moved to the seaside town of Bournemouth, Dorset. He died in 1892 at Kings Norton from paralysis of the insane. Defined in the 1844 lunacy act, the condition paralysis of the insane is the result, almost uniformly, of a debauched and intemperate life. It's duration is scarcely ever longer than two or three years, after which it generally takes it's sufferer to the grave.







« Previous Suspect Next Suspect »


Related pages:
  John Hewitt
       Dissertations: The Strange Case of Dr. John Hewitt 
       Ripper Media: Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide - Dr. John Hewitt 

Advertise with us | Link to us | Privacy Policy | Copyright © Stephen P. Ryder & Johnno, 1996-2024 Thomas Schachner