A former murder squad detective has revealed that the 125-year-old mystery clouding the famous London serial killer, Jack the Ripper, was nothing but a sham, asserting that Jack never existed in the first place.
The detective in question, Trevor Marriott, who has previously worked with Bedfordshire police, has disclosed that the notorious killer was just dreamed up by a drunken journalist, Thomas Bulling.
Marriott believes that the Bulling wrote a forged letter to Scotland Yard in 1888, pretending to be "Jack" so he could obtain a scoop of the story, the Daily Express reported.
Marriott took 11 years to conduct a comprehensive cold-case evaluation of the killings, by going through Scotland Yard's files and using modern-day police techniques backed up with state of the art forensic analysis.
Marriott said that the facts of the case have been totally distorted over the years and the general public has been completely misled by any number of authors and publishers, who have written so much about the possible suspects, that included Queen Victoria's grandson, the Duke of Clarence, and 'Alice in Wonderland' author Lewis Carroll.
Marriott asserted that Jack is supposed to be responsible for five victims, but there were other similar murders before and after the ones attributed to him, both in this country and abroad in America and Germany.
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According to the detective, a German merchant seaman, called Carl Feigenbaum, whose ship regularly docked near Whitechapel, was responsible for some of the Ripper-style killings, but not all of them.
The serial murderer was known for slashing the throats of five women before disemboweling them on the streets of Whitechapel.