Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

David Monaghan · Nigel Cawthorne

yan, 2010 · Sotuvchi: Constable

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While Jack the Ripper spread fear throughout the East End of London in 1888, another man stalked the streets hunting flesh. He called himself "Walter". He was a rapist, voyeur, and fetishist obsessed with prostitutes. Walter was not only a wealthy man, but a literary one. In the same year as the Ripper killings, Walter first printed up his vast memoir of sex and perversion under the title My Secret Life. Fewer than 20 sets were struck off on a secret Amsterdam press between 1888 and 1894.

Long banned for obscenity, only censored excerpts of Walter's masterwork were seen for a century. One of the few complete sets not destroyed by the authorities was locked away in the British Library's closed cupboard. This is the story of the volumes in that locked room and the horrific clue they contain - a clue that unlocks the diary as the final confession of Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession shows how this notorious work of Victorian pornography reveals that its author had the means, the motive and the opportunity to be Jack the Ripper. As importantly, it delves into dark psychiatric motives within the text, to show Walter possessed the unique psycho-sexual fingerprint of a knife killer.

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David Monaghan is a Bafta-winning film-maker who has made documentaries about serial killers Fred and Rosemarie West, and HH Holmes. Nigel Cawthorne has a series of true crime books to his name, including House of Horrors: The Horrific True Story of Josef Fritzl, the Father from Hell.