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Review of America Unearthed S04E04 "The Ripper Unmasked"

6/18/2019

51 Comments

 
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​​Note: Normally, I wait to review an episode until it airs because that is when I see it, but this episode is already available on streaming video sites, so I am posting my review ahead of tonight’s airing.
 
Jack the Ripper terrorized London’s Whitechapel district in 1888, and for more than 130 years, he has loomed as an archetypical serial killer monster, largely because his identity remains unknown. Every year a new suspect is proposed, and each time a lack of evidence leaves the world outside the small community of so-called “Ripperologists” shrugging their shoulders. If 130 years of speculation has found no generally accepted candidate for the Ripper, it is too much to ask that Scott Wolter of America Unearthed would find him, but this episode was disappointing on so many other levels. 
​For one thing, given that the police commissioner at the time of the murders was Charles Warren, who dug underneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and has been implicated in some Ark of the Covenant conspiracy theories, this episode’s completely neutered approach to Ripper conspiracies is symptomatic of this season’s decidedly less extreme—and therefore less interesting—approach to fringe history. Wolter is nothing without his extreme Templar/Bloodline conspiracies, and this episode served instead as an apology for Masonry, as though trying to disassociate “true” Freemasonry from the “rogue Mason” who might (if you believe the conspiracies) have been the Ripper.
 
This episode was also wildly off-brand. It did not involve American history, nor did it involve geology or archaeology, and it had precious little connection to any of Wolter’s major themes, except Freemasonry. This is the first episode of America Unearthed to carry a content warning because of its graphic violence. In the end, the violence is all it really had going for it, but just barely.
 
Since my only interest in Jack the Ripper is the influence he had on the reception and adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I don’t have a lot to say about this episode except to note that its main claim—that Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle was Jack the Ripper—is basically ludicrous, and taking it seriously is silly.
 
Segment 1
We open with a recreation of one of Jack the Ripper’s murders, in a lurid but not particularly interesting fashion. After the opening credits, Wolter claims to have been fascinated by the Ripper killings for many years. He asserts that the hypothesis that the Ripper was a Freemason has been “overlooked,” though it is, of course, a wildly popular hypothesis and utilized in Alan Moore’s From Hell. Wolter, now a Mason himself, claims to have special insight into the Masonic connection.
 
Wolter meets with Eugene and Daniel Friedmans, a Ripperologist team with a 2015 book to flog, The Strange Case of Dr. Doyle, and they claim that the true Ripper was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, arguing that Doyle harbored a hatred for prostitutes because his father had syphilis, which they believe he had contracted from a prostitute. Their theory is not original to them, nor was it particularly well received when the book was released. Wolter is intrigued because Doyle was a Freemason like himself, and we go to commercial with the Friedmans alleging that Doyle had the skills and the rage to murder effectively and killed in imitation of Masonic rituals. Neither the Friedmans nor Wolter bother to tell us what the documentary evidence said Doyle was really up to in 1888, a year when he was writing, traveling, and commenting about the murders in the newspapers.
 
Segment 2
The Friedmans tell Wolter that the Ripper victims’ wounds followed the ritual punishments of Masonry, though the parallels—V-shaped wounds, for example—are rather generic. Wolter reviews some other claims for various Freemasons as the Ripper, but he says that the Masonic connection “cannot be ignored.” Newspapers of the era claimed that the Ripper wore a “leather apron,” which the Friedmans and Wolter connect to Masonry’s apron, but the newspapers weren’t referring to Masonic aprons. Leather aprons were common back in the nineteenth century, and the papers were almost certainly referring to something like a butcher’s apron, in keeping with the theme of bloody murder. Most scholars believe the nickname “Leather Apron” to have been a journalistic invention.
 
Wolter and Dan Friedman travel to Chicago to visit Doyle’s Masonic apron, which is housed in that city, and along the way they debunk some other claims about alleged Ripper suspects. The men view some Doyle memorabilia including Doyle’s apron, and Wolter becomes excited by a stain he thinks could be blood from a Ripper victim. We went through this nonsense when he tried to investigate Merriweather Lewis’s death during the original run. There is no way to connect a stain on an apron back that far since the aprons were not stored in hermetic conditions.
 
Segment 3
In the third segment, Wolter has the stain noninvasively tested and—no surprise—it wasn’t blood. Wolter, however, doesn’t take this for an answer and he vows to return to London to find more evidence to prove the Friedmans right, all while quoting Sherlock Holmes as though anything Holmes sad justifies trying to match evidence to a predetermined conclusion. Wolter travels to London to visit Baker Street, the fictitious home of Sherlock Holmes, and there he sees crosses carved into the curbstones (or, if you are British, kerbstones) on the street, and he uses this to discuss the question of whether stone masons and Freemasons are the same. The symbols are generally held to be the initials and marks of the Victorian masons who laid the stones, but Wolter suggests that they are secret markings leading to Masonic lodges. This has nothing to do with the Ripper, but Wolter suggests that Doyle’s Masonic involvement was “suspicious” because he was active in Masonry only for the three years surrounding the Ripper killings.
 
This leads to a discussion of whether Conan Doyle resembled the description of the Ripper given at the time. The description is generic enough that almost any Victorian man of the right age would have fit, but Wolter and one of the Friedmans think that a composite image of the Ripper created in the 2000s from Victorian accounts resembles Doyle. It also looks like H. G. Wells, but he was a smidge young, and Ambrose Bierce, though he was a bit too old. The point, though, is that dour mustachioed Victorians tended look similar. And they were legion.
 
Segment 4
Wolter travels to the National Archives in London in an awkwardly staged “research” expedition, and there he views the letters attributed to Jack the Ripper, including the infamous “Dear Boss” letter signed by “Jack the Ripper.” Wolter compares the handwriting of the letter to Doyle’s handwriting, and he sees key differences. He rejects this as evidence, too, because Doyle could have disguised his writing, but the expert that Wolter consults, tour guide Lindsay Siviter, informs him that the “Dear Boss” letter is probably the invention of a journalist for publicity. He looks next at a subsequent letter, known as the “From Hell” letter, that came with part of a human kidney attached and is most often cited as a genuine letter from the Ripper.
 
Segment 5
After the commercial, Siviter tells Wolter about the mutilations in the Ripper killings, and Wolter declares them “brutal” and decides that he needs to “prove” that the Ripper was a physician. At an operating theater, Wolter attempts to mutilate a silicon cadaver used for training doctors in under nine minutes in order to try to replicate the fourth Ripper killing. “I’m a geologist, not a biologist, and certainly not a doctor,” he says before adding that he did well in biology class half a century ago. That’s more than a third of the time gap between the ripper killings and now! “It’s going to get quite messy!” the doctor supervising Wolter enthuses. Then we go to commercial.
 
Segment 6
As the show moves toward its end, we watch Wolter mutilate a fake corpse. “This might be the craziest thing that I’ve done in an investigation,” he says. If it’s all the same to you, I don’t really have much interest in watching a mutilation, and I don’t care to describe it. Wolter concludes that his inability to mutilate a corpse effectively proves that only someone with medical training could do so, though he neglected to test whether a butcher (another popular hypothesis) could have achieved the same results.
 
Then episode descends into utter reproach when Wolter meets with Heretic magazine publisher and all around fringe history gadfly Andrew Gough, whom regular readers will remember from Forbidden History, where he was a regular and particularly insipid talking head and the first season of Zachary Quinto’s In Search Of, where he offered pointless speculation. Gough is awful as a historical researcher and an overdramatic shill as a TV personality, and he does nothing to disprove my evaluation here, where he has promoted his job description to an expert on cryptic “symbolism” for this appearance.
 
The men visit Mitre Street, where the so-called “Goulston Street graffito” was found during the Ripper months claiming that the “Iuwes,” believed to be Jews, would not be blamed. Why they are on the street when the graffiti is more than a 130 years gone, I cannot say, but Wolter claims that the unusual spelling refers to the “three ruffians” who killed Hiram Abiff in Masonic ritual, named Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, supposedly known collectively as “the Juwes,” though the names date back only to the late 1700s. While Wolter is very confident of this speculation, he neglects to note that there is no evidence for the use of the name “the Juwes” in the late 1800s, and the names Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum were of American derivation and not attested in any English Masonic texts of the time.
 
Even so, it is really of no particular surprise if Victorians would make reference to Masonry, which was much more prominent then than it is today. I don’t see it here, but whatever. Wolter’s concludes that medical knowledge and Masonic connections therefore prove that the Friedmans’ claim of Doyle’s murderous escapade is “not that far-fetched.” He says he reached this conclusion because, like Holmes, he eliminated possibilities that would have disproved. This is the kind of tortured reasoning used by kids who are struggling to make the word count on their book report. This entire episode is simply a summary of the Friedmans’ 2015 book and is therefore little more than a badly sketched book report by a notably dense student.
51 Comments
Dutch
6/18/2019 08:47:16 am

Watching SW dismantle the cadaver surrogate, it was clear that the network has completely thrown away any intention to entertain its audience; but has rather substituted "shock and awe".

At least Wolter's Templar preoccupations and story line have a semblance of continuity. This was just... well... jackassery.

Reply
Bill
6/18/2019 09:46:15 am

I watched the whole show, including the "mutilation". Maybe I've grown numb to this from watching TV cop dramas, but I thought it was quite tame. The "It's going to get messy" warning was hardly necessary. I didn't see any fake blood, just the silicon intestines.

Oh, and Walter pulled out the liver as he thought it was the kidney.

I'd have to watch again (not likely to happen), but Jason it was my opinion that SW came to the conclusion that if he could do it in under 9 minutes, then anybody could, so this was not compelling evidence that Doyle was responsible.

IMO the them so far has been to use a catchy title, and then disprove it during the show, or at least find nothing compelling to prove it.

The only time SW had anything to say from a professional point of view was when he looked at the markings in the bricks.

THis episode was only a tiny notch above the "cave of secrets" episode IMO. I can't see this series lasting much longer. It is more of a Josh Gates - Expedition Unknown travel / adventure show. Certainly nothing of consequence being revealed and a million miles from earth shattering or "history changing".

Reply
Dutch
6/18/2019 10:30:30 am

At the very least, Gates has somewhat of an engaging personality. Seems as though SW is turning into a curmudgeon

Joe Scales
6/18/2019 10:05:27 am

"{insert any of Wolter's televised investigations here}-is basically ludicrous, and taking it seriously is silly."

Reply
PWR
6/18/2019 10:06:13 am

The Masonic angle around Charles Warren, and the "Juwes" interpreted as Masonic rather than antisemitic in nature, is developed in far greater detail, and into a more compelling theory in Bruce Robinson's "They All Love Jack", without resorting to much of the circular reasoning that clouds Ripperology.

Robinson's is the most convincing theory I've read, but still so reliant on playing armchair detective and rifling through "evidence" and speculation from centuries hence, that it's ridiculous to think we could ever come to a conclusion.

I tend to stray toward the idea of the Ripper - if it was even a single person - being an unknown, likely a sailor, tradesman or otherwise transient, who was either arrested, perhaps somewhere other than London, at a later date or died without comment. People love a mystery, but I see no legitimate reason to ascribe the murders to a person of note.

Reply
With Apologies
6/18/2019 11:52:57 am

I'm a Freemason and I'm okay.
I slays all night and I writes all day.

I cuts down whores. I eats their guts.
I goes to the lavat'ry.
On Wednesdays I go shoppin'
And have kidney stones for tea.

Reply
Hilda Hilpert
6/19/2019 12:53:25 pm

I watched the show too. Various people have been suggested for the Ripper.Didn't know that the Masons wore leather aprons. However, perhasp "Leather Apron"might have been a butcher. My late father said that Jack could have been a sailor, and mentioned about some similar killings elsewhere.Could have been even a ship's doctor. Jay Robert Nash in his book on unsolved murders suggested this.That it was a doctor, perhasp a man whose wife left him and had become a prostitute. Or it could possibly be a doctor who contracted a venerial diesase In any rate it was someone with surgical skill. My grand father was a butcher. He could kill,skin and cut up a cow from start to finish.Forgot how long my dad said he could do it, but someone with this background wouldn't take long to do what the Ripper did to Catherine Eddowes. Also, Did Scott mention Mary Kelly? I thought he left her out. That was the most horrifying of the crimes, the way he carved her up. There's a photo of the room with her corpse in the bed, and what appear to be the letters FM on the wall. This is were some have claimed James Maybrick might have been the killer.James was later poisioned by his wife who stood trial for it.Yes James had a brother Micheal Maybrick,who was a singer and composer at the time. And he might have done it too, but I don't think he studied medicine and anatomy no had the skills for the work.
Funny thing is, a paranormal group in england did an investigation of the Maybrick home.Through an ouija board they somehow made contact with James Maybrick's spirit. When they asked him if he was Jack the Ripper, the reply he gave was NO! I am not the Ripper.

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Kent
6/19/2019 02:42:58 pm

Talking about a Ouija board session as if it's actual information is an automatic disqualifier.

Machala
6/18/2019 10:51:27 am

Sorry Scott, but once again you're not only wrong but absurdly stupid.Thanks Jason, from saving me having to watch the Masonic moron.
One of the most interesting characters who turn up as a VERY likely suspect for Jack the Ripper is Dr. Francis Tumblety. The eccentric con-artist certainly fits as a villain far better than Dr. Conan Doyle.

Dr. Francis Tumblety: One of the Best Jack the Ripper Suspects
https://www.historicmysteries.com/dr-francis-tumblety/

Dr. Francis Tumblety - An American Jack the Ripper Suspect
https://www.jack-the-ripper.org/francis-tumblety.htm

Dr Francis J. Tumblety: The American Ripper - JackTheRipper
https://thejacktherippertour.com/blog/dr-francis-j-tumblety-the-american-ripper/

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Naughtius
6/18/2019 01:11:58 pm

The thing about ripper suspects is that for every good piece if evidence there is a bad. George Chapman would be my prime suspect.
If you’re interested Philip Sugden’s book The Complete History of JTR is a great read, just looks at all evidence available.

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Machala
6/18/2019 02:17:09 pm

While Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski aka George Chapman was obviously a misogynist, wife beater, all-round brute, with barber/surgeon experience, his method of disposing of his unwanted paramours was poison - at least the ones he got hanged for. Still he's more viable a suspect than Doyle and many others.

I just like Tumblety for it, because he's so bat-shit crazy and his life was so fascinatingly bizarre. Any man who goes around with a small pistol concealed in his top hat gets my attention.

Kent
6/18/2019 11:32:26 am

"the world .... shrugging their shoulders" ?

I always knew it would be about Doyle and not the Alice in Wonderland guy but didn't say it at the time so can't claim that victory. Similarly I never mention my ten high school state championships.

Wolter didn't look at the stones in his professional capacity. He's not an epigrapher although he'd like you to believe his small store of knowledge makes him "dangerous".

How did they determine it was "part of a human kidney" and not a porcine or bovine kidney?

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Hilda Hilpert
6/19/2019 02:08:59 pm

Because it was submitted to medical testing at the time, and the condition of the kidney matched Eddowes. As far as the curbs go, where did the road builders get the stones from? They could have been from some very old building. Don't forget, Henry the Eigth and Sir Thomas Cromwell dissovled the abbeys and monasteries of England. Some of them were turned into manor houses, others torn down to provide building materials. There were priories and abbeys in London.Syon Abbey, Home of the Bridgettine Nuns (founded by St.Bridget of Sweden) was a house for high born ladies.That's were I think the marks come from,stones from an old building

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Kent
6/19/2019 02:51:11 pm

"medical testing"? This means THEY LOOKED AT IT. Consider the milieu: hand washing among doctors was still a recent thing. And when it arrived it was rotted. Did they have a large animal veterinarian or a butcher look at it? NO. Unless the Ouija board says otherwise of course.

Jim
6/18/2019 01:36:48 pm

Doyle didn't even live in London when the murders happened. (1888)
He was living in Portsmouth.

https://www.visitportsmouth.co.uk/conandoyle/exhibitions/conan-doyle-the-pompey-lad-exhibition

From what I can find, his father was not known to have had syphilis, he was just nuts.

Seems the norm. with Scott "Believes anything" Wolter, just make crap up to support his preconceived nonsense.
Oh well at least he didn't get conned as badly as in the alien caper, where he lent credence to those obvious fakes. And when he went to check them out, they wouldn't meet with him or show him anything, instead they further conned him into discrediting their competition.
They played him like a fiddle.

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Kent
6/19/2019 01:19:01 am

Portsmouth is 70 miles from London. That's a day on a bicycle, three days walking or two hours on a train. This is akin to Patrick Shekleton's assertion that Benjamin Arnold and everyone he ever met or hired to build a windmill couldn't have seen a windmill a hundred miles away from where he lived.

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Patrick
6/20/2019 06:08:45 am

Let’s see if I am understanding this correctly. Wolter does an episode on Jack the Ripper. Asserts that Doyle is the perpetrator. Can’t prove it – and doesn’t. Does a carrot and stick by writing on his blog that the evidence can be found in Masonic records, which are secret. Not an effective marketing ploy to induce folks to get involved with Freemasonry. Episode gets panned by nearly everyone.

Jim scoffs that Doyle was the perpetrator, explicitly questioning Wolter’s assertion. Points out that Doyle lived 70 miles distant from the crime scene. A logistic challenge, not insurmountable, but a challenge nonetheless.

Kent then turns around and provides support for Wolter’s assertion, rebutting Jim’s observation, remarking that 70 miles from Portsmouth to London is less distance than the 100-mile separation from Benedict Arnold’s home of record to the Chesterton Mill, purportedly the model for the Newport Tower.

Kent, I don’t think that you intended to do this, but you just laid out an argument supporting the Chesterton model for the NT based on Wolter’s analogous Jack the Ripper/Doyle/Portsmouth unproven contention.

The only facts here are 1) the Chesterton Windmill is in Chesterton, 100 miles distant from where Arnold resided, 2) Doyle lived 70 miles distant from the crime scene in London (per Jim).

Joe Scales
6/20/2019 10:02:05 am

"Kent, I don’t think that you intended to do this, but you just laid out an argument supporting the Chesterton model for the NT based on Wolter’s analogous Jack the Ripper/Doyle/Portsmouth unproven contention."

He only pointed out the obvious, which continues to elude you Patrick... you imbecile.

Jim
6/20/2019 10:32:26 am

Well Patrick, I am amazed, you finally got something right.

". A logistic challenge, not insurmountable, but a challenge nonetheless."

Let's look at Wolters main point of evidence.
Doyle murdered and hated prostitutes because one gave his father syphilis.
Is there any evidence at all that his father had syphilis ?,,,NO !!!
Nothing but made up evidence to support a bunch of other nonsensical speculation. As Harold would say "garbage in, garbage out".
This is just as bad as all his Norse in North America crap, the KRS and the Newport Tower etc. Is there any real solid evidence to show the Norse were here other than L'anse aux Meadows ? Nope, zip, nada.
Just the usual borrowed and made up crap that Wolter has to take from someone else because he comes up with nothing original.

Kent
6/20/2019 11:50:35 am

No Patrick you idiot (so as not to repeat Joe's equally apt characterization). Not based on Wolter's [anything]. Based on I've been a hundred miles away from where I lived. The problem with your version, "It's too far away" is that Rhode Island is more than a hundred miles away. Arriving in North America, Arnold moved from Hingham Massachusetts to Providence to Newport, a distance of ..... one hundred miles. And he took his family. Sorry, Patrick, you're just stupid.

Kent @Jim
6/20/2019 02:12:32 pm

I agree that there's no evidence other than l'Anse aux Meadows, but it bears reminding that I and others would like to see *actual* evidence of other Norse intrusion into the New World. Not the made up nonsense that one gets from Wolter and his ilk. It'd be funny if New York City was built on a Viking settlement but all the evidence is buried under tons of steel and concrete. We'd likely never know. I'd love to see something like that proven but the made up stuff doesn't get me going.

Patrick
6/20/2019 06:25:44 pm

Jim,
I have no fascination with Jack the Ripper or the perpetrator theories. I could care less what Wolter, or anyone, offers up on it. To be honest, I actually think this episode is a set up...the "secret" Masonic lore that Wolter can't divulge...by the time he gets to the KRS episode I bet that he'll be spilling Masonic lore to validate the KRS.

"However, Chesterton windmill stands on a ridge within half a mile of one of the main southwest–northeast roads of early modern Britain, which also runs past Limington, and it is entirely plausible that Arnold would have seen it, or perhaps another colonist in a position to influence the design of his "stone built windmill"." (Wiki)

Hmmm...no citation. The Wiki page is correct about Arnold having grown up ~100 miles away.

[You can find that discussion here....Arnold, Fred Augustus. 1921. An account of the English homes of three early "proprietors" of Providence. Providence: [Press of E.A. Johnson & Co.]. https://archive.org/details/accountofenglish00arno.]

Skeptics can't let go of the Chesterton windmill model connection theory, so now we are afflicted with the "mobility" argument - which is speculative bunk no matter how it is sliced up. Hey, there was a road that one could take to the Chesterton area! There were roads all across England by the 1600s. And it could have been anyone within 100 miles of Chesterton, as the guessing game now sits. All you critical thinkers who accept the editorialized Wiki entry...and that is where this road theory took root...subsequently replicated in your Fringe Archeology published works...need to look at this specific argument's merit a little more closely. It has no merit as it is absolute speculation.

Patrick
6/20/2019 06:45:41 pm

"Too far away." When it was thought that Arnold grew up six miles away from the Chesterton Mill, that was a great argument in support of the CM being the model for the NT. The argument couldn't have been any better. But when, as it turns out, Arnold was 100 miles away, the argument vaporized. Now you all are using the invented road theory to support the CM-NT-Arnold connection. And even if the Arnold thing is too implausible, which Hertz wrote in his 1995/1998 paper, have no fear, because one can find some other English emigrant to New England who lived closer to the CM. None of the above even matters. Arnold emigrated to New England in 1635. William Wood's map was published in 1634. William Wood was in New England from 1629-1633. The Old Plymouth Plantation, the remnants of it, were visible there in Newport long before Arnold ever arrived in Newport. Two other maps, both prior to the settlement of Newport, show the tower.

Jim
6/20/2019 07:01:24 pm

Patrick:

" All you critical thinkers who accept the editorialized Wiki entry...and that is where this road theory took root...subsequently replicated in your Fringe Archeology published works...need to look at this specific argument's merit a little more closely. It has no merit as it is absolute speculation."

Are you sure ? Or are you just speculating that it is just speculation ?

I believe there was another local fellow who built a wooden windmill in Newport at around the same time. Perhaps you should research where he was born ? You might be surprised.
You do realize that Arnold likely didn't actually build the windmill but paid for it's construction and hired hired a builder ?

Jim
6/20/2019 07:23:56 pm

Patrick:

"Two other maps, both prior to the settlement of Newport, show the tower."

Ya right you and your friggin maps.
Is it this one where you mistook a smudge for the tower ?

https://www.facebook.com/114338978642314/photos/a.994904277252442/2160628330680025/?type=3&__tn__=-R

Or, how about the time you mistook a photocopy artifact on a map for a house south of runestone hill ?

Or the time you mistook a scratch on an aerial photo for a chancel foundation attached to the Newport tower ?

Kent
6/20/2019 07:44:55 pm

Patrick,

Your infinite stupidity has made me very angry so I am going to type slowly while attempting to control my breathing and my drinking.

"Hmmm...no citation." Wait. What? You need a citation to show that unidentified people saw an object? No doubt you've eliminated the possibility that there were contemporaneous drawings or lithographs or memories of the object? And you've verified that the object was the only object of its kind on the planet, right?

Your extremely sucky argument is that "There were many roads in those days so we know Arnold didn't take that one road."

And he couldn't hire or enslave someone to build a windmill?

Seriously Patrick, what's wrong with you?

Kent
6/20/2019 08:04:44 pm

"When it was thought that Arnold grew up six miles away from the Chesterton Mill, that was a great argument"

That was never thought. You introduced it into the argument because you are stupid stupid stupid cubed.

Joe Scales
6/21/2019 10:02:22 am

"Skeptics can't let go of the Chesterton windmill model connection theory, so now we are afflicted with the "mobility" argument - which is speculative bunk no matter how it is sliced up."

Patrick, you complete imbecile, if anyone here has a handle on "speculative bunk", it would be your mantle; not the strawmen you make of skeptics. To join in with Kent, I must say your utter stupidity is quite maddening. Here you insist on knowing who saw what and when, which is not the issue. The issue is that the Newport Tower Windmill is not some unique specimen that must have predated colonial settlements based solely upon its construction. What, people back then didn't share construction models? They didn't build upon the designs of others? That's the point. Again, the blatantly obvious has always eluded you because simply put... you are an imbecile.

Why do you do it to yourself man? Why do you come here as if you have anything intelligent to add to any discussion? Do you pat yourself on the back after posting your moronic assumptions that display a lack of basic understanding for true discourse? Are you keeping score?

Jesus Christ man... Patrick you are the worst sort of imbecile. So oblivious to your own dearth of intellect, believing yourself to be on the verge of some importance. It is folly. It is imbecilic. It is Patrick.

Kent
6/18/2019 01:44:27 pm

Wolter, being a football major who played geology, is not smart enough to do this, but the real Masonic murder mystery would be Roberto Calvi whose body was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge ("where the tide goes in and out"), his pockets filled with bricks, likely murdered by P2 which was once a Masonic Lodge. The Catholic Church is tied into the case through the Banco Ambrosiano which makes it seem right up Wolter's street, but he simply lacks the necessary brainpower.

Alternatively, William Morgan of New York.

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Machala
6/18/2019 02:26:28 pm

Let's not forget the purported poisoning of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by the Freemasons ( or his rival Antonio Salieri - take your choice ).

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Kent
6/18/2019 02:51:42 pm

Another good idea! But again there's that troublesome brainpower issue. This is someone who claims he "did well in biology" but doesn't know where either the liver or kidneys are! Rest assured I know where all my internal organs are, at all times.

"Mozart? That's the cheese, right? I love that stuff!"

Accumulated Wisdom
6/18/2019 02:54:13 pm

Poisoning makes me suspect a woman, more than a Freemason.

"Murder Most Rare
The Female Serial Killer"
Michael D Kelleher and
C. L. Kelleher
ISBN 0-440-23473-5

Eileen Wuornos
6/18/2019 07:08:47 pm

Have you read it? Sleep easy, Sweetpea.

Jim
6/18/2019 03:03:22 pm

"Roberto Calvi whose body was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge ("where the tide goes in and out"), his pockets filled with bricks"

Sounds like a brick thief who jumped off a bridge to evade capture.
(Wolter Logic)

Reply
Alison M Gunn
6/19/2019 05:16:07 am

I watched the show tonight. I found the premise of Conan Doyle somehow being Jack the Ripper ludicrous, particularly because the one piece of circumstantial evidence this 'theory' is based on is that his father was given syphilis, and therefore the son was crazed and took out his rage on a variety of streetwalkers.

I try to imagine Conan Doyle, who I have researched in his role as a writer, writing completely cogent and interesting fiction, then returning to his piece of kidney that he'd removed from a victim the day before. I cannot make it work, and even worse, the nonsense that the Friedmans are spewing would be libelous if Conan Doyle were alive. As it is, their idiotic and groundless beliefs besmirch the man's character and reputation. What do they think Conan Doyle is or was, a cartoon? The only connection made to Conan Doyle beyond the syphilis accusation is that he was a Mason and a doctor. Then if you follow the Mason line of 'reasoning,' you will notice that in spite of what Wolter says, he does indeed attempt to make speculations fit the theory. It's very badly done and tells me this show is overdue for cancellation.

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Arthur Conan Doyle's Festering Nutsack
6/19/2019 12:43:36 pm

Yeah,well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. Doyle treated objects like women.

Saying that someone's dead father had syphilis isn't libelous even if the son is alive. Calm down. Take 'er easy.

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Hilda Hilpert
6/19/2019 02:21:07 pm

Well speaking of cartoons, they showed one that Conan Doyle drew when he graduated med school. It shows him with a scapel in one hand and a doctor's bag in the other , clicking up his heels saying "licensed to Kill," The friedmans didn't think that was appropriate. Doyle meant that as a joke., perhasp in reference to a couple of british doctors in the victorian era who were put on trial for murder. The one doctor, can't recall his name, used poison as his weapon of choice H.H.Holmes in Chicago born Herman Mudgget was a trained doctor. He gassed his victims in the Murder Castle..Dr.Thomas Cream killed several women, again I believe by poison. He was put to death, and as they were hanging him, his last words were "Iam Jack', and then he dropped. Most Ripperologists don't believe him for one moment.The majority of poisoners don't suddenly change modus oparendi and suddenly go crazy with the fancy knife work.

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Kal
6/19/2019 08:45:07 pm

"If you eliminate the impossible, the unlikely must therefore fit the facts."

But how did Wolter keep his Mason status and yet get to blab about it on TV? Assuming they are still a 'secret order', they probably don't like him going on about it.

The only logical conclusion therefore is that Wolter never was Mason, but took a course in it, or visited a lodge, and assumed he was. It might be interesting for the Masonic Order to actually do a check on this guy.

The Ripper was likely a part time butcher, part time surgeon, which in 19800s London was probably the same thing. They really didn't have medical tech yet. He probably also was rather unassuming and didn't act crazy when questioned, so they never pinned it on anyone. Surely an already crazy man was not going to be him, as it was too obvious. No, a true sociopath homicidal person can easily pass for normal. Then like the more modern Zodiac killer, he slipped away into the night, never to appear again.

He likely died in obscurity without any heirs, unless he came to America, but that would be silly to speculate on.

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An Anonymoous Nerd
6/20/2019 09:44:13 pm

Bizarre claims from a bizarre show. The increasing ratings for the show are a sad, sad commentary on our times. (One of many such sad commentaries.)

I note that the "Masonic Conspiracy"/"Royal Conspiracy" theory wasn't just the subject of the film "From Hell" but also a far-earlier movie called "Murder by Decree." The protagonist of which was one Sherlock Holmes. (The film wasn't based on a Doyle Story but of course Holmes originally was his character.)

-An Anonymous Nerd

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Kent
6/20/2019 10:10:07 pm

Inspector Morse (Endeavour) and Doctor Blake also came up against the Freemasons.

I'm leaning toward the idea that Scott Wolter's Wasonic initiation involved a cup of coffee. As Morse would say "He's got form".

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Kent
6/21/2019 10:31:16 am

And FWIW I spelled it that way on purpose; it represents the Templar hand gesture you see in paintings and sculptures all over the world, including the Statue of Liberty. Who is of course Venus to some people who really should be wards of the State.

Jim
6/23/2019 07:35:29 am

Here are the facts concerning Charles Altamont Doyle. (Arthur Conan Doyle’s father)
No known evidence of syphilis at all, despite being under the care of doctors for years and the fact that his son was a doctor.
Wolters whole case is dependant on baseless speculation.

http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/u_beveridge2.pdf

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Kent
6/23/2019 01:03:07 pm

My knowledge in this area is limited because I only have sex with the cleanest of all possible whores and always require that they wear a condom like a Howie Mandel surgical glove. There's a man at the gas station who will sell me beer but I'm sure he's clean too so I don't worry about it.

Were medical professionals able accurately to test for and accurately to diagnose latent syphilis in those days?

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Jim
6/23/2019 02:21:56 pm

"Were medical professionals able accurately to test for and accurately to diagnose latent syphilis in those days? "

Probably not, which leaves us at the same point, if he had it, Arthur wouldn't have known therefore why kill the women ?

As an aside (something I didn't know) it would seem likely that we were gifted syphilis by native Americans.

" Syphilis was present in the Americas before European contact,[55] and it may have been carried from the Americas to Europe by the returning crewmen from Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas, or it may have existed in Europe previously but gone unrecognized until shortly after Columbus’s return."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History

Kent
6/23/2019 02:57:25 pm

This is where Doc Rock would chastise you for using Wikipedia saying "I tell my students Wikipedia is not a source" but I'm not snooty so welcome to the knowing-about-syphilis club!

It's entirely possible that Doyle the elder told his tadpole about his whoring adventures. On the other hand the father wasn't really involved in his upbringing.

Jim
6/23/2019 03:53:06 pm

"It's entirely possible that Doyle the elder told his tadpole about his whoring adventures."

Sure, but then we are back on the speculation train to Dubiousville.

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Kent
6/23/2019 04:44:19 pm

But you can't prove it didn't happen. World's weakest argument I know. And of course the whole family and the whole town might have known about his whoring in addition to his drinking. If there was whoring; there is no evidence of that *that I know of*.

Where this particular episode falls down is relating the killings to Doyle's joining then quitting Freemasonry. He later rejoined his lodge for 9 years. That and the so-called "part of a human kidney". And Wolter's involvement. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Scott Wolter, the Human Kidney!"

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Jim
6/24/2019 02:33:21 pm

Leather Apron

There was no actual leather apron pertinent to the case.
Wolter and the Friedmans make much ado over nothing, it is all B.S. They try to insert Doyles Masonic apron as some kind of evidence all the while knowing it is a giant red herring.
The dishonesty of their make believe evidence is readily apparent.

Leather Apron was a nickname the streetwalkers gave to a man (who did wear a leather apron) that tried to extort money from the streetwalkers with the threat of violence.
He had solid alibis for his whereabouts on at least two of the murders.

Complete and total invented nonsense by Wolter and the Friedmans to put a fake Masonic spin on the murders.

https://www.jack-the-ripper.org/leather-apron.htm

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Ajesquire
7/1/2019 12:21:19 am

Wolter: I’ll prove it was Arthur Conan Doyle by matching his handwriting to this Ripper letter.

Also Wolter: oh, well. The writing doesn’t match. But THAT proves it was Doyle because OF COURSE he would’ve been smart enough to disguise his writing.

Wolter: I’ll prove it was Doyle because a non-doctor couldn’t cut up a body in less than 9 minutes.

Also Wolter: oh well. The fact that i did it in only 4 minutes PROVES it HAD to be Doyle because argle-bargle

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fed up
7/5/2019 01:53:13 am

Jack the Ripper was an Alien Time Traveler who stole Conan Doyle's identity.

America Unearthed and Scott Wolper's other supporters combined to finally
solve all problems at once.

Jack the Ripper was an alien who got to be an Aztec priest and got in the habit
of tearing out hearts and other guts of sacrificial victims and eating some of them.
Somehow he got wind of the secret high technology in an Aztec pyramid, crossed
some wires and accidentally got flang forward in time to 1880s London. Using
his secret powers as an alien and an Aztec priest he adopted Conan Doyle's
identity and looks, and went about sacrificing prostitutes.

In a failed attempt to get home, he destroyed the time machine and crashed in
Roswell.

Reply
JTP
8/6/2019 10:59:57 am

As an avid fan of Dr. Doyle's work: I've never seen any evidence of a hatred of prostitutes in his work. Probably the most prominent mention of prostitutes in any context, in fact, is a poem ("The Outcasts", 1911) in which three prostitutes are supporting their families, or forced by circumstance and lack of options, by their profession; while "a godly man,/Of goodly stock and blood," ignores and disdains them because of it. I have a hard time imagining that the author of that poem had, over two decades earlier, been driven to slaughter prostitutes by an insane hatred of them.

There's also no reason to believe that his father had syphilis; Charles Altamont Doyle suffered from severe depression and alcoholism as a result of numerous failures in his artistic career, as well as epileptic seizures and amnesia - without a doubt the result of said alcoholism - following his committal to an asylum. His state in 1862 - when he was not capable, according to his wife, of telling his own name or doing anything more than crawling - does not exactly lend itself to whoring; and in any event, he obviously could not have done so after he was sent to Blairerno House in '81, as he spent the rest of his life under guard in various asylums. His overriding obsession, clearly, was alcohol; and frankly, there is no evidence whatsoever of syphilis. When did he get it? Where are the medical documents diagnosing it? Why does no biography of Charles Altamont Doyle - even a paper specifically focusing on Charles Altamont Doyle's health in his final years - even suggest that he suffered from it?

TLDR: That Charles Altamont Doyle had syphilis is sheer speculation, without anything to prove it. If he did have syphilis, there are things that would exist - medical documents, mentions in letters, biographical mentions - which clearly do not exist. There is no evidence in his writings that Arthur Conan Doyle hated prostitutes. There is evidence in his writings that he felt compassion for them. There is no evidence, in fact, that Conan Doyle had anything to do with Jack the Ripper. Where is the evidence? His writing does not even match any writing attributed to Jack the Ripper - and as a calligrapher, I can personally attest that it is difficult to disguise one's handwriting so completely. When did Conan Doyle attain that skill?

(And by the way: Sherlock Holmes would not have started with a hypothesis in mind at the start; he held that starting with a conclusion predisposes the mind towards proving that conclusion, and "invariably" leads one to unconsciously twist evidence to prove it or ignore evidence that would disprove it. Wolter's claims to follow Holmes' methods, therefore, are not simply asinine - but also adds to Holmes' case against starting with a hypothesis.)

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    • Miscellaneous Documents >
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