The fifth and final canonical Ripper murder occurred sometime in the hours before dawn on November 9th, 1888.
Although I began studying the murders sometime in 1974, my matriculation led me to Tom Cullen's masterly monograph, When London Walked In Terror, which presented the circumstances in far more detail than I had previously encountered. I read this over several hours, beginning on Friday, September 10th, 1976 and ending before dawn on Saturday, September 11th, 1976. It was a surreal experience, impacted by my grief at the prospect of this enforced, ten-week separation from my First Beloved. I believe that, on that weekend in September, 1976, I decided to focus my entire interest on Mary Kelly, and the fifth canonical murder.
When I first began to study the Ripper history (and that, again, was in 1974), I made a promise to myself and to one other that I would, someday, bring an original contribution to some aspect of the discussion. This contribution, which is set forth in my poem, "Whitechapel Woman" (which exists in two versions on postpoems), manifested itself in December, 2000 (more than a quarter century after I began), and was published, in Great Britain, at the website, casebookjacktheripper, in January, 2001. It was my first internet publication.
