Is This Really Jack the Ripper's ‘Autobiography’ ?

By Jennie Cohen

Written in the 1920s and rediscovered in 2008, a first-person account of what may be the most legendary cold case in history was published today as “The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper.” Its author, whose identity remains a mystery, presents himself as the eponymous serial killer who butchered at least five women in London’s Whitechapel district during the fall of 1888. Has “James Carnac”—who dedicated his manuscript to “the retired members of the Metropolitan Police Force in spite of whose energy and efficiency I have lived to write this book"—finally confessed to his crimes? 

Typed on yellowed pages with a handmade cover, the manuscript that inspired the new book comes from an unlikely source: Sydney George Hulme Beaman, the British author and illustrator who created the “Toytown” radio series for children. Beaman wrote in a preface that a one-legged acquaintance named James Carnac, whom he describes as having a “streak of cynical and macabre humor,” bequeathed the document to him in the 1920s and asked that it be published after his death. Beaman also claimed to have omitted certain “particularly revolting” passages from the original text and expressed his personal opinion that Carnac was indeed Jack the Ripper.

Did Beaman himself pen the alleged autobiography, using a centuries-old literary convention in which a writer presents fictional memoirs as a found document?

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