Writer names Jack the Ripper suspect in book
A former Stirling University student has written a book concluding that ‘Jack the Ripper’ moved to Dundee after committing his heinous crimes.
Euan Macpherson, who now lives in the Dundee, believes that an unemployed alcoholic named William Bury was responsible for the series of murders of prostitutes in London’s East End in 1888.
He puts forward the case in his new book ‘City of Dreadful Night : the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Jack the Ripper’. It follows his book ‘The Trial of Jack the Ripper’ published in 2005.
Euan – who studied English with Scottish literature at Stirling between 1980 to 1984 and is now a lecturer at Dundee and Angus College – said the Ripper is traditionally seen as a ‘Dr Jekyll’ character.
He said: “We assume that the Jack the Ripper murders are atrocities performed on whores from the East End by an upperclass toff.
“The principal suspects include barrister Montague John Druitt, Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence, physician to Queen Victoria Sir William Gull, cotton merchant James Maybrick and artist Walter Sickert.
“The Freemasons also figure prominently in many theories, suggesting that Jack the Ripper is a well-connected and powerful individual whose identity is being protected.
“Robert Louis Stevenson’s story about a respectable man leading a double life, Dr Jekyll, has become our idea of who we think Jack the Ripper is.
“But if we were to genuinely look for Jack the Ripper, we would look for a man who was known to have committed murders with the same modus operandi as Jack the Ripper and who was also known to have been living in the East End of London at the right time.”
Euan, said Bury, was such a man. He had been living in Bow, East London, at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. He also pointed out that Bury got on a boat and sailed to Dundee, where another “ripper” crime occurred.
He added: “Bury called himself a sawdust merchant (a man who sold sawdust to public houses and butcher shops, where it was scattered on the floor) but it would be more accurate to call him a thief and an alcoholic. He was a loser, unable to hold down a steady job and unliked by almost everyone who knew him.
“William Bury left London after the last ‘Ripper’ murder and moved to Dundee where he not only committed another murder but also left a partial confession. He was never considered as a suspect because he did not fit the respectable, silver-spooned image that we think the killer must have. He was hanged for the murder he committed in Dundee (April 24, 1889), and then forgotten.”