Who was Jack?

by Robert Gear (January 2026)

Much ink, speculation, and broadcast hours have been spent trying to solve the Whitechapel Murders, otherwise known as ‘The Jack the Ripper’ murders. Conspiracy theories abound. Many perpetrators have been proposed, from Walter Sickert, the impressionist painter, to a grandson of Queen Victoria. Other suspects include all the Jews, most of the Irish, Gilbert the Frog and Jill the Ripper, the latter perhaps working in tandem with Jack. Lewis Carrol of Alice in Wonderland fame, and and a host of lesser known individuals (of whom perhaps only Rupert the Toy Bear was truly celebrated) were soon discounted by the Metropolitan Police Service despite having poor alibis; last and not least was my own grandfather born in Whitechapel only three years before these events.

By the way, The Manchester Guardian proposed Tommy Robinson as the most likely culprit, but retracted this hoax, or sincerely held belief (rather reluctantly it must be said) when informed that Robinson had not been born. Since the BBC hadn’t yet been founded The Guardian had to shoulder much of the scorn by itself. Oh I forgot, Uriah Heep was in some way connected, but the Mets discounted the possibility of his direct participation in the murders since they had worked out that he was probably fictional. My own belief is that he was in some way peripherally involved as I will explain below.

The basic facts are not in dispute; five women were horribly murdered within the space of a few months in 1888 in the Whitechapel area of East London. Their names are known, their prior movements and their backgrounds are not in dispute. The manner of their deaths and dismemberment filled the scandal sheets and broadsheets of the time to the horror and delectation of the reading public.

But some documents have come into my possession which I believe clinches the truth about these atrocities. I acquired them through an auspicious windfall, a lucky find that will, I think you will agree, change the direction of historiography around this event. Perhaps, come to think of it, the luck may have been what John Milton called ‘that Power which erring men call Chance,’ but we can leave that to theologians.

I started my search at the the National Archives in Kew; but strangely enough my requests were rebuffed several times. I surmised that someone or something was being protected— possibly for ideological reasons. Fortunately, I managed to befriend a workman, a janitor at the premises whose face had been deformed through suffering an act of violence, apparently done by a cockerel; but that’s another story. He agreed to help me and, through clever stratagems, extracted the relevant documents. Most of these were scrawled in a most unusual language, and I had my work cut out to decipher the documents. To me it looked like the kind of scratchings that a chicken would make in the gravel outside his harem. But persevere I did, and with the help of a notebook found in the archives of the novelist, R L Stevenson, I pieced together the missing bits, and slowly but surely a picture of extraordinary malevolence and intentional carelessness became clear.

Of the many suspects only two, or perhaps three, in my opinion deserve further consideration: Otherpig, the Lizard Men and the rooster ‘who may have been known locally as ‘Mo.’ You laugh? But bear with me.

The true malefactor, I can now be almost certain, was Mo the rooster. However, we can say quite categorically that his actions were facilitated by Otherpig and his sow, sometimes known as Mrs. Otherpig, who also went by the alias ‘Harris.’ If we delve even deeper I have no doubt that financial and moral support was supplied by Lizard Men who have rarely been seen. Sitings of these creatures have been reported hiding beneath horse troughs outside Victoria Station in Londonistan. And famously, Gunga B. Dass, a court official at the time of the Hybrid-Spider Shogunate (and I must add a close correspondent of mine) also reported catching a glimpse of the flickering tongue of a Lizard Man during his astonishing adventure in the Western Desert (see The Strange Ride of Gunga B Dass, NER, October 2021).

All these must bear some responsibility. Yes, it was Mo who did the dirty work, but almost certainly the other creatures mentioned above made the dastardly deeds possible, through carelessness if not intention.

You may be wondering how the murders and dismemberments could have been performed in a public space, so quickly, so skillfully and so silently. This truly baffled the Metropolitan Police Service. And no wonder; they could not have imagined that the culprit was not entirely human.

I know this because I had access to some of Dr. Watson’s files after the death of Sherlock Holmes. One of his accounts described their visit to the laboratory of Dr Jekyll who at the time was experimenting with an elixir to prolong life and enrich the culture. Jekyll’s research into Oriental discoveries proved that the most suitable subject for such experimentation was a robust species of Phalaenopsis orchid (see Sherlock Holmes and the Red-Headed League Redux, NER, November 2021). Anyway, to come to the point, his concoction was successful enough to turn the leaves and petals of the orchid into a large rooster who forthwith uprooted himself from the pot. If it had not been for Watson’s use of his service revolver the bird would have attacked and possibly killed the great detective and Watson himself.

You would think that would be the end of the matter, with Dr Jekyll turning his undoubted cleverness to other areas of research; and no doubt he did pursue other avenues of study, as the novelist R L Stevenson claimed, there being as many ways to enrich a culture as to skin a cat. You see, Stevenson’s archives make clear that Jekyll returned to his passion and created a monster, a kind of rooster sapiens that managed to escape from the laboratory in Frith Street.  And this is were Heep came in handy. You may remember that this oleaginous character acted as a kind of concierge to Jekyll. Heep was easily persuaded to let the rooster leave the premises (Mo at the time had not learnt the tricky business of opening doors). Heep, by the way, appears to have later formed a close alliance with the bird; but that is another story.

And hey presto, the rooster got out and mingled with the crowds on Frith Street. He then made his way to the Whitechapel district, no doubt cocking a snook in hostile defiance at The Central Criminal Court and St Paul’s Cathedral en route. At that period of time farmyard stock including poultry were not an abnormality on the eastern side of the Metropolis and so we can be quite certain that few pedestrians would have taken much notice of this bird.

What was the date of Mo’s escape from Jekyll’s lab? By piecing together the evidence we can be sure it was in the last days of August 1888—giving the bird time to commit the first foul murder on August 31st of that year.  The other four atrocities occurred in relatively quick succession—the last being on November 9th of that year.

You may think this is merely circumstantial. But the clincher is surely comes from actual pathologist reports which show that the injuries sustained were unlikely to have been made by knife or sword. One junior pathologist is even on record as stating that the rips and the neck slicing could well have been made by the beaks and claws of gallus gallus domesticus. He was of course, cancelled for such an apparently preposterous claim. Despite losing his job, this young man of lower class origins stuck to his guns and followed up on his hunch, proving to those who would listen that indeed these foul murders were carried out by a real fowl.

And finally, and beyond contradiction we now have a long record of such attempted and successful decapitations and rippings inflicted with beaks and claws. When witnessed by the public the roosters often howl and screech in a farmyard tongue until recently untranslatable.

QED.

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Robert Gear is a Contributing Editor to New English Review who now lives in the American Southwest. He is a retired English teacher and has co-authored with his wife several texts in the field of ESL. He is the author of If In a Wasted Land, a politically incorrect dystopian satire.

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