Exposing Jack the Stripper: A Biography of the Worst Serial Killer You've Probably Never Heard Of

by Fergus Mason

The strangest killer you've never heard of!Jack the Ripper may get all the fame, but his 1960s counterpart, Jack the Stripper, will really send shivers down your spine. At least six women, all prostitutes, were murdered at his hand--possibly more. Most intriguing of all...he was never caught.The crimes, though often forgotten today, inspired the crime novel "Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square," which Alfred Hitchcock turned into the 1972 movie, "Frenzy."Go inside the hunt for this brutal killer in this gripping short biography.

Genres: Horror, Crime, True Crime

86 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 19, 2013

Reviews

[F.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jack the Stripper was the most prolific British serial-killer of the Twentieth Century to never be caught. (Probably we should have a caveat here though, as three more prolific killers – Fred West, Harold Shipman and Dennis Nielson – were all in police custody before anyone realised the extent of their crimes. So there might have been one or two other mass murderers whose crimes just escaped notice.) So why isn’t Jack the Stripper better known? Why isn’t this killer, who haunted the tabloid front pages and public imagination of the early 1960s, better remembered today? Partly, I think it must be the name. Having been given the soubriquet, Jack the Stripper, he was always going to be in the shadow of the other Jack. But also I think there’s something here which touches on an unpalatable part of the human psyche: we really like some sensationalism in our true crime. It’s a dark part of us but we revel in the new – acting shocked by the gory details but deep down being utterly fascinated by them. The cases that linger in the memory, the ones which really spark our collective interests, are crimes with terrible details that we haven’t seen before. Or they’re so suddenly and incredibly huge (like all those bodies found at once in Gloucester Road, for instance) that they are unavoidable. Maybe it’s conditioning we get from serial killer fiction, where there always has to be a new twist and gimmick; or maybe that fiction merely takes the lead from something that’s deep and unspoken of within our souls, but when it comes to murder – the violent ending of another human life – there has to be something darkly interesting to grab our morbid attention. And so even when it’s a serial killer leaving the bodies of prostitutes around London, we won’t give it our full attention unless we think it’s something we haven’t really seen before.

In 1964 the killer, who was soon dubbed Jack the Stripper, left the bodies of half a dozen women murdered women across London. They were all small, young, with dark coloured hair. They all worked in the sex industry. Each of the bodies was found naked, or nearly naked. Then one day the killer just stopped, and the case was never closed. This is a whistle-stop tour of the events, touching on all the main points in a way which avoids over the top sensationalism, and is instead calm, measured and almost sensitive. It does seem at the onset that Mason is loading the narrative to reveal just who Jack the Stripper really was, but in the end he does leave the question marks hanging.

Obviously it’s not for everyone, but if you have an interest in true crime (or the inspiration of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’) then I’m sure there are worse introductions.

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read, not because of exalted literary quality or in-depth analysis, but because the author summarizes the case so well and leads me in so many other directions in the area of further reading. The back pages of this book gave me several new titles to add to the JTS community reading list. I go now to find copies of those books for myself. Thanks Fergus!!!

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read. I loved the different version of a Jack the Ripper story. It had me hooked right from the first page the the last. The way the story was written it gave me a whole new point of view around this serial killer, and has left me with new questions that I want to find the answers to through further research.

[Maryann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not much of a book or much of a story. It was short and boring