Tweet

 

From Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson’s investigation in Shanghai Knights to Johnny Depp saving Heather Graham in From Hell to the terrifying David Warner escaping to the future in Time After Time, we continue to be obsessed with Jack The Ripper. Hey, even David Hasselhoff got in on the Ripper act with the 1985 made-for-TV classic Terror At London Bridge where the Ripper is reincarnated because the original London Bridge is rebuilt as a tourist trap(!) in Lake Havasu, Arizona.

Between August 31st and November 9th of 1888, Jack The Ripper killed at least five prostitutes in the East End of London. Slitting their throats and then gutting the reproductive organs, the gruesome murders drew significant attention to the impoverished Whitechapel area of London. Scotland Yard had eleven different homicides under the label of Whitechapel Murders, but only conclusively linked five deaths to the murderer they called Jack The Ripper.

Why do we still care about the Ripper? There’s been plenty of serial killers with a higher body count since he stalked the streets of Whitechapel in the 1880s. There’s been killers who were even more disgusting in their crimes. So why do we keep coming back to Jack? Or if you like, Jack The Knife? (That one was for you Priest fans out there!)

Number one, we love the Victorian era, from Sherlock Holmes to A Christmas Carol to a thousand BBC Masterpiece Theatre specials, there’s just something about late Nineteenth Century London that we cannot get enough of.

But also the unsolved mystery has people coming back, 130 years after the original murders. Armchair sleuths want to be the detectives that finally cracks the case when Scotland Yard and over a century of true crime scrutiny haven’t been able to.

Enter Randy Williams. As a martial artist, private eye, and former bodyguard to Steven freaking Seagal, (yeah, we’ll definitely have to talk to him about that sometime), Randy has led several fascinating lives. But it’s his career as a Ripperologist that brings us to him today in our first foray into tackling the world’s most famous murderer.

Randy has just released a new novel, Sherlock Holmes and The Autumn of Terror which fictionalizes his theory about the true identity, or should we say, identities, of Jack The Ripper. Let me clarify that the book is the work of fiction, but his theory about Jack’s multiple identities is 100% based in his real-life historical research.

Randy Williams’ theory is unique because it takes Jack The Ripper away from the world of psychosexual serial murder and into the domain of political terrorism.

When we think of terrorists, we think of bombs. But why do terrorists use bombs and mass murder to further their political agenda? Because the more people you kill, the bigger the impact you make. Osama Bin Laden didn’t think that he was going to actually stop commerce in the United States by flying planes into the towers of the World Trade Center, but he knew that tens of thousands of people worked in those buildings and it could have a world-shattering symbolic effect. And those attacks changed the world, leading the U.S. into multiple conflicts in the Middle East and turning Al Qaeda from an organization of post-Soviet Mujahideens to the most feared organization on the planet.

Quick history, German economist Karl Marx releases his *Communist Manifesto* in 1848. Two years later, he moves to London, England and continues his writing. Karl Marx, to put it simply, believed that workers were being exploited by the owners of their companies and advo...