Jack the Ripper may get all the fame, but his 1960s counterpart, Jack the Stripper, will really send shivers down your spine. At least six women, all prostitutes, were murdered at his hand--possibly more.

Customer Reviews. Hill- This review is from: Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer (Hardcover) This is frankly one of.

Most intriguing of all.he was never caught. The crimes, though often forgotten today, inspired the crime novel 'Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square,' which Alfred Hitchcock turned into the 1972 movie, 'Frenzy.' Go inside the hunt for this brutal killer in this gripping short biography. “Jack the Stripper?

You’re having a laugh, right?” I could understand the librarian’s confusion. If I’d asked for information about Jack the Ripper I’d have been on solid ground; everyone has heard of the mysterious killer who stalked London’s Whitechapel district in 1888, committing a series of five increasingly atrocious mutilation murders that stopped as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun. The Ripper was never caught. Despite hundreds of books and academic papers on the subject his identity still isn’t known a century and a quarter after his final crime. That hasn’t stopped people from speculating, of course; there are now more than a hundred theories about who was behind the crimes and why. “Ripperology” is still big business, with a ready market for any new and interesting look at the notorious crimes. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day, especially with the mysterious graffiti that announced, “The Juwes are the ones who will not be blamed for nothing.” Was it the work of an illiterate anti-Semite – or a coded warning from a Freemason?

I wasn’t researching Jack the Ripper though. This time I was looking for information about a less well-known but equally ruthless killer, who between 1964 and 1965 left the nude bodies of six prostitutes scattered round Hammersmith. Two previous murders were probably his work too, and there’s a real possibility that he had started killing more than 40 years earlier. This maniac preferred to strangle rather than slash, but he killed with the same single-minded determination as the notorious Ripper.

Like his almost-namesake there is speculation about his identity and a few suspects, but nobody was ever arrested and there’s no hard evidence either way. Jack the Stripper never achieved the fame of the 19th century killer, but he hasn’t been completely forgotten. Over the decades since his mysterious killing spree ended several researchers have looked into the case, and some of them have made intriguing suggestions about his identity. Unless some new piece of evidence comes to light – and that doesn’t seem likely – we’ll never know for sure who he was.

All we can be certain of is what he did. Of course there’s nothing all that remarkable about a serial killer who stalks prostitutes. It’s a sad fact that ladies of negotiable affection make easy targets because their profession demands that they go off alone with men they don’t know, and the law doesn’t always pay their deaths the attention it should. Six – or even eight – isn’t even that high a death toll for a serial killer.

Instead of remarking that Jack the Stripper hasn’t been completely forgotten you could wonder why he’s remembered at all. In fact there are several reasons why the case continues to fascinate people. London is one of the world’s oldest and greatest cities; murder is something usually associated with its slums, and when nude bodies start turning up in respectable neighborhoods or floating down the Thames people tend to take notice. The brutal nature of the deaths helps, and of course there’s always an element of mystery about serial killers who evaded capture. The Stripper case also has hints of a bigger picture, of connections between the sordid business conducted by street prostitutes and the glamorous upper reaches of London society. It even touches on a scandal that extended into the British government. For all its brutality and squalor the story of Jack the Stripper is a fascinating one.

Researching it brought a new understanding of 1960s London and the dark currents that flowed beneath its surface. Reading about it may have the same effect, so let’s dive in to those currents and see where they lead. And don’t be surprised when you turn the page - the story begins forty years earlier and hundreds of miles away, in rural Wales.

Fred Burnell was frantic with worry. Early the day before his 8-year-old daughter Freda had left home to run an errand to the local store, and hadn’t come home. A visit to Mortimer’s Grain Store had confirmed that she’d been there – she’d been the first customer in fact, turning up at five after nine, then leaving at quarter past. Where had she gone then? The young shop assistant told Fred he didn’t know. The store was located on Somerset Street, a residential road lined with small, neat row houses built from brick and gray local stone.

Abertillery had grown quickly over the last 30 years as workers flooded in to the new coalmines – from a large village of 10,000 in 1891 it was now a tightly packed town of nearly 40,000. Despite the rapid expansion it was still a close community, though.

The hard, dangerous life of the men working down in the pits brought families together, and prompted people to look out for their neighbors; nobody knew when they’d need support because a husband was injured or trapped below ground, so it was natural for people to look out for each other. If any of the residents down Somerset Street had seen Freda they’d have got word to Burnell, and most likely walked her straight home. Burnell spent six hours searching the streets for his daughter, but as the afternoon wore on and the sun dropped lower in the sky he admitted defeat and went to the police to report her missing.

It wasn’t long before the local force were out on the streets, knocking on doors and asking questions. A wave of concern swept through Abertillery and search parties were quickly organized. It was getting late, though, and the weather was cold.

The search began well after three o’clock, and by quarter past five the sun had set. The searchers stayed out until midnight before giving up in the face of the darkness and weather. It was a long night for Fred Burnell; he had no idea where his daughter was, and the thought of a small child perhaps wandering lost in the bitter weather must have been torture for him. The searchers were worried too; at first light they were back out on the hills around the town. It wasn’t the police or the search parties who found Freda, though. Just before sunrise a collier, making the morning coal delivery, saw a bundle of rags on the lane behind Duke Street.

That wasn’t too unusual, but something made him take a closer look. That was a decision he almost instantly regretted.

The bundle of rags was the body of Freda Burnell, and she’d clearly been the victim of a savage attack. The police quickly concluded that she’d been raped and murdered, and a doctor concluded that she’d died not long after her disappearance. The Abertillery police were used to keeping order in the sometimes tough streets of a mining town, but an atrocity like this alarmed them; they called for help from Scotland Yard, and a team of London detectives arrived to join the investigation.

The key to finding Freda’s killer was to trace her movements after she’d left Mortimer’s Grain Store, and every inquiry was drawing a blank; nobody remembered seeing her after she’d left the store. The search began to narrow its focus, and when a witness claimed to have heard screams coming from a shed behind the store alarm bells started to ring. The police searched the shed and found Freda’s handkerchief, along with an ax. There was only one key to the shed and it was held by the young assistant who’d spoken to Fred Burnell the day Freda died, 15-year-old Harold Jones. On February 10, Jones was arrested and charged with murder. His trial began in Monmouth Assizes on June 17, and lasted for four days.

The Scotland Yard detectives firmly believed Jones was the killer, but the evidence against him was purely circumstantial and his denials couldn’t be disproven. Download Tekla Structures V15 Cracked. There was no choice - he was found not guilty.

When he returned to Abertillery many locals joined him in celebrating; they refused to believe that one of their own could have been responsible. George Little told him, “Well done son, we knew you didn’t do it.” Just 17 days after Jones’s acquittal, on July 8, Little’s daughter Florrie disappeared.

For two days terrified parents sheltered their children as search parties walked the hills around town, but no trace of the 11-year-old was found. On July 10 police began a door-to-door search through the town. When they knocked on Philip Jones’s door he invited them in and stood by as they searched; of course it was his duty to help find the missing girl. His son Harold didn’t share his feelings though, and quietly slipped out of the house. When one of the constables pushed open the trapdoor leading from the boy’s bedroom and looked into the attic, then gave a horrified yell, Philip Jones realized the appalling truth and dashed into the streets in search of his son. Download Free Symphonies Of Mozart.

He managed to catch him, and personally turned him in to the constabulary. Once again Harold Jones was put on trial at Monmouth Assizes, and this time he confessed.

He’d killed Freda Burnell, he said, because he had a “desire to kill.” After his release he’d lured Florrie Little to his home while his parents were out. He’d then assaulted her, cut her throat, bled her out over the kitchen sink and concealed her body in the attic. His parents had come home before he’d been able to dispose of it properly and with the town being searched he hadn’t had a chance since. It was clear that what Jones was talking about was a pair of premeditated murders, and there was no chance of a not guilty verdict this time. The only option open was the sentence. At the time of the verdict Jones was two months short of his 16th birthday.

If he’d been tried after that date there’s little doubt he would have been hanged. As it was he was sentenced to be detailed “At His Majesty’s Pleasure.” In effect that means an indefinite jail term.

In the end he served 20 years in Usk Jail – just ten miles from Abertillery – then in London’s Wandsworth Prison. In 1941 he applied for parole and, despite objections from the prison’s psychiatrist and governor, he got it. Aged 35 he was freed back into society, changed his name and vanished. Walk down Thames Bank in London’s Mortlake district – a pleasant, leafy street running along the side of the river – and you’ll come to The Ship, a traditional old English pub with big bay windows and baskets of flowers decorating the exterior. Most evenings the varnished bar is full of locals, but if you’re lucky enough to get good weather for your visit there’s an alternative. Beside the attractive building with its blue and white paintwork is a beer garden, where you can enjoy a drink outside.

It’s a pleasant place to sit on a sunny day; it’s been renovated recently and nicely landscaped, and you can relax there despite being in the middle of one of the world’s busiest cities. If you know the history of that patch of ground, though, some dark thoughts can creep in. That’s even truer if you’re there to learn about Jack the Stripper.

In the early 1960s Mortlake housed working class families and the workshops and warehouses that employed them, along with a transient population attracted by relatively low rents. Gentrification hadn’t yet begun and nobody was going to call it an attractive area, but it was respectable enough. Redevelopment hadn’t quite sorted out the damage done by the war, though. German bombers lost over London often used the Thames as an aiming mark for their bombs, and Mortlake had suffered its share of destruction. Vacant lots, known as bombsites, were a feature of many British cities for decades after the war. When the rubble was cleared residents often put them to use as parking lots, play areas or informal dumps.

As land values in London rose they began to get cleaned up and redeveloped, and on this Friday morning a crew of city workmen had come to clear away a trash dump beside The Ship. It was dirty work; as well as domestic garbage the patch was heaped with rotting produce discarded by local traders.

The cleanup crew was used to it though, and protected by coveralls and rubber boots they got on with it cheerfully enough. Load by load the festering mess was shoveled into wheelbarrows, run up a plank and tipped into the back of the Corporation truck. When the smell got too bad they retreated to a fire built from scrap timber, drank strong tea brewed in a blackened kettle, smoked a cigarette and then got back to the task. And then they found something horrible. A swung shovel, instead of scooping up a few pounds of loose garbage, splatted into something soft but heavy. At the same time a revolting stench erupted from the pit.

Perhaps wondering if he’d unearthed a dead dog a workman cleared the rubbish away – and exposed the partly decomposed body of a woman. They could tell it was a woman; it was naked apart from a single nylon stocking. In any big city decomposed bodies turn up from time to time. Many are old or ill people who die at home alone. Others are the homeless who, driven beyond endurance by sickness or weather, crawl into shelter and never come out again. A stripped corpse buried in a midden was different, though.

Most likely it meant murder; it definitely meant crime of some description, if nothing else because burying bodies in a dump is always illegal. The Metropolitan Police knew that the scene was too disturbed for much in the way of clues to be found, so they looked to learn what they could from the body. It didn’t take long before they established the dead woman’s identity. She was 22-year-old Gwynneth Rees, a former teenage runaway from south Wales who’d ended up selling herself in London. She’d last been seen alive getting into a van on September 29, which tied in with the state of her body.

Other working girls told the police that when she disappeared she’d been pregnant and had been looking for an illegal abortionist. At first that seemed a possible explanation for her death; perhaps she’d died during an illegal termination and the abortionist had panicked and disposed of her body. The autopsy on her corpse suggested something different, though. Several teeth were missing and the mark of a strangling ligature was found around her neck. That meant it was definitely murder.

More streetwalkers were questioned: Had Rees upset anyone before she vanished? It turned out she had. Her “ponce” (pimp) had been Cornelius “Connie” Whitehead, a minor gangster who worked for the notorious Kray twins. Whitehead was known for knocking his girls around, which would explain why Rees had left him in late September.

The word on the street was that Whitehead was looking for her to teach her a lesson. That avenue fizzled out though. Whitehead was the obvious suspect but there was no evidence to tie him to her death, and as an associate of the famously violent Krays he was protected by a wall of silence. Plenty of people would be willing to give him an alibi; none would inform on him. If he’d strangled Rees he was probably going to get away with it. Some of the detectives were wondering, though.

Over four years earlier but barely a mile away the body of 21-year-old Elizabeth Figg, also known as Ann Phillips, had been found propped against a tree. Marks round her neck showed that she had been strangled, and her dress had been ripped away from her upper body to leave her breasts hanging out. Figg was another runaway who’d drifted to London, this time from the north of England, and like Rees she’d had a violent ponce. Fenton “Baby” Ward, a former boxer from Trinidad, had quickly been picked up and questioned by the police but ruled out as a suspect. The Met had no doubt he was a violent thug and fully capable of killing if it suited him, but they just didn’t see him having killed Figg. The murder had puzzled them at the time and disquiet lingered.

Yes, prostitutes got killed, but it wasn’t normal for their bodies to be so publicly dumped. In the late 1950s and early 60s social attitudes were very different from today, and the death of a prostitute attracted a lot less attention than the murder of a “respectable” woman would have done.

There would be no press outrage, no local campaigns to find the killer. The police took it seriously enough, though. They weren’t going to get much help from other prostitutes – many of whom, in an era of routine arrests for “soliciting,” had no reason to love the police – but the idea of a killer stalking the city’s vice scene troubled some of them. Tarts died; sometimes it was an angry customer, sometimes a violent pimp, sometimes just their bad luck at being out on the streets alone and vulnerable. Rees’s death was the latest on a long, unhappy list.

Still, it was unusual enough that some of the detectives made a mental note, just in case something similar happened again. They wouldn’t have long to wait. Four years had passed since the death of Elizabeth Figg, but things were about to speed up dramatically. In a few short months the sight of a stripped and strangled corpse was going to become very familiar to the luckless members of the Murder Squad. In Masonic imagery the Master Mason, Hiram Abiff, was murdered by three young apprentices named – somewhat improbably - Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. Collectively they are known as the Juwes.

The Ripper’s spelling has caused much speculation about Masonic connections. Until 1967 anyone carrying out, or having, an abortion in the UK could be sentenced to life in prison. Since then it has been legal on health grounds if two doctors agree. Murderpedia, Harold Jones Serial Killer Crime Index, JONES Harold Wales Online, Nov 25, 2007, Author names new killer in Drinkwater case TruTV Crime Library, Jack The Stripper: Death of a Good Time Girl http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/unsolved/jack_the_stripper/2.html.