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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 murderer who intended to appear a supernatural phantom.
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.
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 on popular folklore. In fiction he has become a Victorian gent. In modern theorizing he has become some impulsive sex killer. But will the actual, detailed evidence indicate either?
Scarlet Autumn 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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