‘Jack the Ripper – A 21st Century Investigation’. A lecture tour with Trevor Marriott.

Over 100 years after the Whitechapel murders, the fascination of the Jack the Ripper legend shows no signs of abating. In ‘Jack the Ripper – A 21st Century Investigation’, a retired British police murder squad detective (his own description) and Ripperologist, Trevor Marriott, presents the results of his cold case investigation in a two and a half hour show that dispels many theories previously accepted as fact.

I went to see the show at Venue Cymru, Llandudno. The show had been moved from the main theatre to a smaller conference room, presumably due to lack of numbers, but it was a decent enough room with a good sized screen. After a suitably Ripperesque video introduction, complete with foggy London and Top Hatted stalker, Marriott took the stage. He proved to be an engaging enough speaker although he does have that slightly obnoxious and superior air often found in policemen.

His coverage of the history and legend was excellent and engaging and, whilst not covering anything that fans would not have heard before, made a good introduction and lead to the second part of the talk where he introduced the elements of his own investigation.

A lot of his investigation covered familiar ground to the Ripperologist although that is not to his detriment and the facts, such as they are known, are explained clearly and illustrated by some excellent visual aids. Where he does present something new though, is in his debunking of several aspects of the canonical cases. For years, it has been argued that only someone with real anatomical knowledge and surgical skills would be able to remove a kidney and a uterus, whilst others have argued that it would take little more knowledge than a butcher would possess. Marriott blows these theories completely out of the water by demonstrating, with the assistance of coroners and morticians, just how improbable this would be and, when given the limited time frame and darkness, impossible. In some gruesome slides, he shows just how difficult it is to find the uterus and kidneys, even when you have the location pointed out to you and a conveniently drained abdominal cavity. The natural follow-on to this of course, is to ask how the organs came to be missing – I won’t spoil his talk / book any further by going into details but there is a logical and convincing  theory covering this which, although Marriott does not seem to realise it, lends weight to building a case against one of the Prime Ripper Suspects that he rejects. For this alone, it was worth the admission.

He did also show, as part of his slideshow, an obscure Rock video of Jack the Ripper by Screaming Lord Sutch, for which I was hugely grateful.

For all his ‘debunking ‘ of the Usual Suspects and Ripper theories, he makes the very same mistakes that he accuses other Ripperologists of making. An example of this is when he insists on a particular time frame of just a few minutes for one of the murders based on witness and Police statements. He does not seem to consider for a moment that the witnesses are unlikely to have known that they were in a particular spot at 3:23am precisely to the odd minute and he also takes the Police patrol timings as reported on paper without even querying whether the Officer in question, on a freezing cold night, may have just glanced into a courtyard rather than walking the extra few yards to investigate a quiet and seemingly empty spot.

He also presents some interesting evidence regarding the nearby docks but then makes a huge leap of faith to tie this to his own Prime Suspect. In the end, his own favoured suspect has as little to recommend him as the majority of others put forward over the years.

All in all, I left the theatre pleasantly surprised that, even now, there are still some new and interesting ideas that can be introduced to a seemingly overloaded and exhausted market.