True Crime, the Ripper and me

What is there about such grime and ghastly things which simply fascinate me? I wasn't one of those kids who pulled the wings off of flies or other things, in fact, I even recall crying once because I accidentally crushed a robin's egg which I discovered fallen from a nest. Also, there is the fact that in 'real life' I'm pretty squeamish about the slightest cut or appearance of blood.

Still I've enjoyed reading about murder and mayhem, both real and fictional, since at least my junior high school days. That was about when my mother & father began to allow me to read those issues of True Detective, etc. that my Mom loved. The National Enquirer, which my mother also picked up each week, back in the early 1960s was much different from the entertainment industry gossip sheet it is today, being much closer in appearance to the Weekly World News and glorifying in the retelling of the most horrible crimes from police departments around the world. Back then we subscribed to two daily newspapers (the Norwich Bulletin, a local paper and the New York Daily News) and had a third (the Boston Herald) delivered on Sunday. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the papers at the time seemed to revel in the then current crimes of the Boston Strangler.

Anyway, since then I've loved reading about this type of thing. I don't know when I first learned of Jack the Ripper, but I'm sure during the period when the Strangler was making his mark in the Boston area more than a few articles I read mentioned the earlier killer of women.

If you have any interest in Jack you might want to check out www.casebook.org . They have loads of material covering the crimes and people involved in the investigation. There are as many theories as there are suspects and this site will cover most of them. You can even spend time putting in dates and finding what happened in "Ripper History" on any particular day.

As I mentioned a few months ago in my review of DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, it seems amazing that America's own first serial killer (H.H. Holmes) never became the household word as his British contemporary. Probably Holmes wasn't flashy enough and did his business in private. Had the two ever met in some serial killer's afterlife I'm sure the conversation would have been pretty interesting. I think Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman could do something with that premise.