Bøger af Richard Whittington-Egan

The case of Jack the Ripper and his savage serial killing and horrendous mutilation of five women in the East End of Victorian London is the greatest of all unsolved murder mysteries. For over 100 years the long line of candidates for the bloodstained laurels of Jack the Ripper has been paraded before us. Policemen and Ripperologists have tried in vain to put a name to the faceless silent killer. Richard Whittington-Egan, one of the founding fathers of the search, published, in 1975, his Casebook on Jack the Ripper, now eagerly sought after but long out of print and virtually unobtainable (except at mammoth prices), in which he documented the history, the crimes, the investigations and the investigators. He also included some fundamentally new discoveries and points, such as the real story of the kidney in Mr Lusk's renal post-bag, wrongly said to be that of Catherine Eddowes (Ripper Victim No. 4). The endless nightmare of Jack the Ripper has rolled on, unstoppable, and now Richard Whittington-Egan, in a completely revised and very considerably enlarged edition of the 1975 Casebook, has taken a new look, from a longer perspective, at the theories and the personages who advanced them, from the time of the murders right up to the present day.

This is the first book to tell the story of the Sherlockian mystery that is the classic London Battersea Flat Murder. On a beautiful July evening in 1910, Thomas Weldon Atherstone, at forty-seven a handsome and popular actor, was found dying on the ground at the foot of an iron staircase running down the back of a mansion block hard by Battersea Park, in south London. He had been shot. Some 104 years later, who shot him and why he was killed remains a total mystery. Earlier on the evening of his death, Atherstone had gone to the Battersea mansions, where Elizabeth Earle occupied a flat on the first floor. The tenant of the top-floor flat was away. The ground-floor flat was vacant, and Atherstone had managed to get into it. There, lurking in the darkness, wearing carpet slippers, his outdoor boots wrapped up in a brown-paper-and-string parcel and stowed away on the mantelpiece, he was crouched, waiting and watching. What for? In all probability for the stealthy advent of his imagined rival, the jealousy constructed, phantasmic, secret lover of Elizabeth Earle. But just what happened next, and how did it come about? Richard Whittington-Egan tells the tale, and explains the theories.