In 1888, a killer stalked the Whitechapel section of London, butchering prostitutes. Queen Victoria took a personal interest in these "dreadful murders of unfortunate women of a bad class," urging her ministers to take "some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be."
Perhaps the queen was right to question the efficiency of the detectives. The Ripper, after all, was never caught. But did Victoria really want him to be caught? Was she, in fact, related to the infamous Ripper -- and perhaps even involved in a cover-up?
Farfetched as it seems, some experts believe the Ripper was none other than the queen's grandson Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence. "Prince Eddy," as he was called, seems ill-cast in the role of the savage and calculating Ripper. His contemporaries described him as "languid," "listless and vacant," and so forth; his own father considered him hopelessly stupid. According to court circulars, he was in Scotland when two of the murders were committed.
So why is Prince Eddy so often mentioned in connection with Jack the Ripper? Could the real Ripper have been someone -- or several someones -- close to the prince?
In his book "Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution," author Stephen Knight claimed that a royal physician, Sir William Gull, and two accomplices committed the "Ripper's" crimes in order to protect the royal family. It all supposedly started when Prince Eddy's mother asked a well-known artist, Walter Sickert, to act as a mentor to her sensitive son. Through Sickert, Eddy met a Catholic shopgirl named Annie Elizabeth Crook. Eddy and Annie fell in love, had a child, and secretly married.
Unfortunately for the young lovers, the queen's ministers got wind of the affair. Fearing a scandal that would bring down the monarchy, they had Annie arrested, declared insane, and confined to asylums for the rest of her life. A more suitable marriage was arranged for the compliant Prince Eddy, but he died (or, according to some accounts, was murdered) before it could take place.
Eddy and Annie's daughter, Alice, ended up in the care of Sickert's friend Marie Kelly. Foolishly, Kelly and several female friends attempted to use their knowledge of Eddy's marriage to Crook to blackmail someone in the government. Prince Eddy's father was a Freemason, as was William Gull, and the Masons protected their own. Gull and his two accomplices systematically hunted down and killed Kelly and her partners in the blackmail plot; high-ranking Freemasons assisted in making the murders appear to be the random work of a lone madman; and the legend of "Jack the Ripper" was born.
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