Customer Reviews

Murder and Madness: The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper

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This is by far the silliest Jack the Ripper book I have ever read (then again, I haven't read Richard Wallace's _Light-Hearted Friend_).

Dr. Abrahamsen purports to psychoanalyze the Ripper based on his crimes, and decides that the Ripper is really two men: HRH Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward and his tutor, James Kenneth Stephen.

His evidence? None. Really. Not even a little bit. This is hardly surprising, since research has shown that Prince Albert Victor _could not_ have committed the crimes; his movements are accounted for on every one of the murder nights.

With this piece of nonsense, Dr. Abrahamsen forfeits his right to be taken seriously, either as a psychiatrist or as an author

I checked this book out, and found it to be of little worth. It is hard for me to believe that such an apparently emminent psychologist could possibly believe the preposterous theory he attempts to advance. Abrahamsen even quotes his own books as source material to back up his theories. It seems he takes great pride in having interviewed David Berkowitz (convicted "Son of Sam" killer) extensively, as he can't help but drop the name and details of that case incessantly throughout his writing; from what I've been able to gather, there's little similar between both cases. (I would hardly call the "Son of Sam" murders a "textbook" case of serial murder, though.) On the whole, a disappointing book. Read Sugden's "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper" instead...

There is no shortage of badly written books that claim to have solved the Ripper mystery and then point to some character or other without any actual evidence whatsoever. The fact that this book trumpets itself as having been written by a credentialed forensic psychiatrist with a background in serial murder makes takes this book from the merely laughable to the truly pathetic.

The bibliography to this book is extensive, but to describe it as eclectic would be an understatement. Only a handful of titles are actually about Jack the Ripper and one of them, perhaps tellingly, is a novel. One of the books cited is actually a book about how to recognize if your child is dyslexic.

It becomes quite clear fairly on that Dr Abrahamsen, while purporting to have researched and carefully analysed the evidence has done little more than scan a few books on the subject in a most superficial way. He repeats as fact many canards which have been effectively dismissed in a host of respected works and, most oddly for one who is supposedly looking for telling patterns in the killings, simply announces that there were five murders attributable to the Ripper. He never considers or discusses any of the other seven 'Whitechapel murders', even if only to dismiss them. Most shamefully, for a doctor of medecine, he cannot even manage to cite the medical evidence correctly.

The good doctor's focus, in this 'study' is ostensibly a psychiatric profiling of the killer (or killers as he later 'reveals'), from which he then names the pair who fit. A glaring weakness in this approach is that one of the major sources of the character 'evidence' is the famous 'Jack the Ripper' letter which apparently provides a wealth of psychological insight in to its writer. It's rather a shame that the author has not read enough of the literature to see that virtually all serious researchers have concluded that *none* of the so-called Ripper letters were actually written by the killer and that there are some very credible theories as to the identity of the journalist who actually wrote the letter this author relies upon.

Finally, having come up with this totally ridiculous profile, Dr Abrahamsen informs us, without any shred of connecting evidence whatsoever, that the killers were Prince Eddy and J.K Stephen. This is hardly original to begin with, but the idea, in the context of this supposedly forensic examination is not merely ridiculous, but says very little about this author's qualifications as an objective professional. Again, it is a shame that the good doctor didn't take the trouble to read enough to learn that book after book has conclusively pointed out that the Prince's whereabouts were well documented during more than one of the five murders.

A sad effort.

I felt this was a creative, fly by the seat of your pants theory, that was just as good as anyone else's guess. It's great!