GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Robinson also insinuates darkly that, before
the East End crimes of the Ripper, while on a
singing tour of the United States, Maybrick,
a heart-throbbingly mellifluous baritone and
apparently, according to this writer, also a
globe-trotting serial killer, committed the
famous Ripper-like series of ‘servant girl
murders’ in Austin, Texas - the bloody murders
of eight African-American servant girls. Once
again this is erroneous and loose thinking. It is
well recorded that Maybrick toured the United
States and Canada in 1884, but the servant girl
murders occurred mostly in 1885, seven in all
in that year, with only one of the crimes, the
first, occurring in 1884 the year of the tour -
the murder of Mollie Smith, on 30 December
1884. 5 During the Texan crime spree, therefore,
Michael Maybrick was back in Britain and can
safely be exonerated of those crimes!
Getting back to my original mention of
‘Unfortunates’ - yes the downtrodden women
of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and St Georgein-the-East
who were the victims of Jack the
Ripper, are rightly called ‘unfortunates.’ But
perhaps, might I say, perversely, a large number
of men who have been named as suspects by
now, wrongly, are also unfortunates in a real
sense as well!
Michael Maybrick aka composer Stephen Adams, 1907. Courtesy of Rob Gallop.
5 Michael Corcoran, ‘Rediscovering Austin’s Jack the Ripper’ available at www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-austin.html.
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Ripperologist 146 October 2015 3