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The police were only minutes later upon the scenes of horrendously gruesome murders. They took down details immediately. We even know when blood stopped flowing and coagulated. Yet the perpetrator was never seen. It was the dead of night. Yet the perpetrator was never even heard fleeing a scene. Despite the pitch darkness, there was never a shoe print in blood or even half a heel print. The perpetrator himself was never officially identified. He was known only as “Jack the Ripper.”
It is necessary for the serious student of the Ripper crimes to place himself back at the scene. The reader must walk the streets, hear the Thames fog horns and the chimes of Big Ben. He must keep in his mind every clue. Everything is a clue. Even the weather provides a clue: the Ripper almost always struck on a rainy night. Fortunately, newspapers and journals of the time were detailed. They even recorded laughter from the inquest audience and sobs from the witnesses who had to identify the mutilated remains of their siblings or former lovers.
Scarlet Autumn is a vivid and graphic account because it is an investigation and a chronicle all in one. It starts at the beginning and works forward based only on the evidence. It is therefore free of the stereotypes and clichés that have derailed many investigations into the realm of folklore.
The reader will be introduced to much new evidence that will speak volumes. The evidence is provided by the nameless villain himself. He never identified himself except through the ghastly audacity of his crimes. Despite popular folklore about boastful letters sent by the murderer to a news agency, the killer popularly known as Jack the Ripper never communicated with police or newspapers. In truth, he is an enigmatic, cold-hearted killer who communicated only by the pattern he laid down. He killed on or near the weekends, thereby laying down a bold, repeating clue. He revealed how methodical he was. All but one of his victims were laid down in a place where the blood from the neck would flow away from the abdomen, where he stood or knelt and butchered the viscera with fanatical speed. He murdered in seconds and mutilated in minutes, all in public— dangerously unnecessary.
He haughtily sized up his victims, the least valuable citizens in a horridly overcrowded London, but humanely dispatched them like a butcher slaughtering an animal. His strength is testified by the fact he left bruises on their jaws and cheeks corresponding to his fingers and thumb, indicating he grabbed their mouths with a vise-like grip and his long boney fingers curled into their cheeks before one quick slice sent them away. In all but one case there is no indication that the blood even spurted from the cut jugulars, which it should have and yet somehow he prevented it. Then when bled enough, he sliced the abdomen and started his ruthless disemboweling.
None of this was impulse. Each scene was carefully chosen. Every police beat was timed. He was never seen coming from a scene of the crime. There was never a drop of blood leading away despite the ghastly carnage of blood and torn flesh left behind. No witness ever saw him do it. Minutes after a constable passed, moments before they arrived again, a prostitute was slain, flayed open, her uterus snatched or her gut mutilated. She was left, eyes bulged open and throat torn apart. Never did he step in blood, despite the depressing darkness. There was never a cry. Never an alert.
The Ripper was careful. When he murdered one victim in a room, he slit her throat on the right— the only time— and then let her bleed against the wall. The only time he allowed blood to spurt out. The blood thus collected under the far side of the bed and there was no chance he would ever step in it. He pulled the body across the bed to the left side and dissected her savagely. He calmly left the scene, and let the door close silently and re-lock— the theatrical staging of a mystery of a mutilated corpse in a room locked from the inside. That was Jack the Ripper’s game. No murderer before sought to baffle. None before ever used victims as an excuse to create a scene of apparent supernatural staging. Only Jack the Ripper.
Then something else happened. The Torso Killer struck. He was a brutal sadist who silently whisked away his victims— apparently also young prostitutes— and tortured them. He then dissected them, perhaps while alive, and parceled their body parts over London. His game of murder wasn’t a mystery. He killed them some place secret and far from prying eyes. But he challenged the Ripper in a duel of mystery. He snuck the torso of one victim into the basement of New Scotland Yard while it was under construction. Like the Ripper he would have needed eyes in the night to have done it. The piece of another body was found over the wall of Sir Percy Shelley’s Chelsea estate, the son of the very same Mary Shelley who had written Frankenstein, a human monster sewn together with body parts. Then the torso of another victim appeared magically in Whitechapel under a railroad arch. It appeared between a constable’s 30 minute beat. None saw a coach bring it or any man walk it there, and many constable beats crisscrossed the area. It sat upon soft rock dust from the nearby construction work. Yet no footprints or carriage wheels were around it. Only once was somebody seen who was suspected to be The Torso Killer. He was a respectably dressed man of around 35 years of age seen getting over the fencing around the construction site of New Scotland Yard the weekend before the body parts were found neatly wrapped there.
Yet the sadist left many clues. He had grabbed one victim so tightly on her thigh he left finger marks. The back of the hands and wrists of another headless and legless torso showed that the victim in life had been tied to posts and had struggled. They were heavily bruised. Her bloody chemise was partly folded over the naked torso. It was cut from arm holes to the neck and then down the front. More than anything this showed that the victim had been tied both hands and feet to posts. The only way to slip the chemise off to begin dissection was to cut the arm holes to the neck, then the front, then pull it down and under the body.
The late summer and fall of 1888 saw the bizarre murder sprees begin— both Torso Killer and Ripper. They were alike in many ways. They preyed upon prostitutes. They were both phantoms. Neither was never seen in the act. They both had superb night vision. They both knew London well. They both had incredible strength. They both had a butcher’s or mortician’s knowledge and skill. They both appeared to be decent middle-class blokes. Then they had one other thing in common: both series of crimes stopped by February 1891.
Those who dismiss Jack the Ripper as merely the first serial killer and that he simply went uncaptured know nothing of the macabre villain and his careful planning of each crime. At an opposite, many of those who have excessively theorized have done so only on popular folklore and in doing so they have obscured facts and evidence. Dots have remained unconnected. In folklore he has become a Victorian gent. In modern theorizing he has become some impulsive sex killer. But will the actual, detailed evidence indicate either?
Volumes of clear cut evidence have been left out of many renditions. The murders are only glossed over, not recreated. The Torso Killer is only a footnote . Yet he seems to have begun the whole concept of using murder to baffle the populace and challenge the constabulary. The Ripper made it popular in 1888 and The Torso Killer took up the challenge again. The goal of many tomes has been a race to propose and prove a pet suspect. But the actual contemporary evidence tells us more than guesswork. It alone can show us the mind of the killer.
In Scarlet Autumn, Gian J. Quasar does not overlook any detail. This is not a formula rehash or a debunk. This is meant to be the ultimate companion to all works on the Ripper. Quasar does not even put forth a dominant suspect. But his detailed investigation will cause many suspects to fall. He gives the reader the power to go back in time and transpose into the filthy world of Victorian Whitechapel. A Dickensian London was being squelched by modern industry. Whitechapel was a gangrenous wound. Molten poverty seeped up from the dirty cobblestones. A rusty, smoggy mist crawled over the ground. To this backdrop in the autumn of 1888 a “shabby genteel” fellow, described as clerkly and Jewish, about 35 years old to middle-age, murdered prostitutes for no reason except to retrieve organs and baffle the police. He was about 5 feet 6 inches tall, stoutish, possessing a soft voice. Theories tell us that he either committed suicide or was possibly locked up for something else. Yet there is no evidence for either. All that is truly known for sure is that he did mysteriously segue into the dirty sounds and daily life of a world he knew all too well. As mysteriously as he arrived he vanished, never to be revealed. No lucrative reward ever brought a witness. Hordes of vigilantes never caught sight of him. He was the first true phantom killer.
The result is the greatest crime mystery in history. It is purely phenomenal that his killings went unsolved, as elaborate as they were, in as crowded a place as London’s rookeries. We must look beyond the psychological generalizations of today. We must look at the specific trail of the Ripper. It is one in scarlet. It is an intentional trail. And the victims were killed to be clues.
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