Who could Jack the Ripper be?

Answer 1

Trevor Marriott, a former Bedfordshire police detective has used modern police procedural techniques, to come up with a new theory about the Jack the Ripper murders (Jack the Ripper: the 21st Century Investigation).

Marriott challenges the conventional wisdom that the murderer was a skilled surgeon. Moreover, Marriott says the location and timing of the killings - not far from London docks with gaps of several weeks in between - suggest the killer may have been a merchant seaman.

Marriott thinks he may have identified the ship he arrived on - the Sylph, a 600-tonne cargo vessel which arrived in Britain from Barbados in July 1888, before the killing of the Ripper's first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, and which returned to the Caribbean on November 22, two weeks after the Kelly slaying, from where the same killer could have committed several similar murders in Managua in January 1889 described in a report in the Times as "six of the most atrocious murders ever committed within the limits of this city".

//Although Marriott has put forth an entertaining scenario for the identity of Jack The Ripper, the dates do not match the facts. It is known now that the Ripper's first kill was most likely not Mary Ann Nichols and was probably not even Martha Tabram but may have started before Tabram's death. It is also believed that Mary Kelly was not JTR's last kill. His later victims are not well known by the average person but it is accepted as fact that the Ripper killed for years after Kelly's murder. There is no validity to theories that are based on a century of falsehoods and half-truths.//