Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Read Free

the latest in that long line: but unlike anyone before me, I believe I have incontrovertible proof, the
kind of proof that would stand up to any cross-examination in a courtroom today.
    I am not the most likely of candidates to solve this puzzle: in fact, I stumbled into it almost by chance. But I believe it wasmy ability to think laterally that helped
me to see a link that nobody else had spotted. With no background as a researcher, I have had to learn as I go along, and I have been down countless blind alleys. I have been rebuffed, discouraged,
and at times I have given up entirely. But the project niggled, and I never completely let go of it.
    I don’t come from London’s East End, so I have no direct connection with the history of the crimes: I was born and grew up in Birkenhead. We started out as a regular family: Mum,
Dad, me and my sister living in a council flat in a tower block in a tough area. But by the time I was four my parents had split up. They both went on to marry again, and through Mum’s new
partner I acquired a stepbrother and a stepsister, and through Dad’s I gained another stepbrother, stepsister, and then a half-sister. So it was always a complicated, fragmented upbringing,
and the greatest stability in my childhood came from my grandmother, who lived across the road from us when we moved, when I was five, to a two-up, two-down terraced house, with a toilet out the
back, and weekly trips to the public baths for a bath.
    After my stepfather accidentally set fire to the house while cooking, we were rapidly moved to a council estate. But I always gravitated back to my grandmother, and by the time I was thirteen I
was staying with her every Tuesday night and from Friday through to Sunday. I am sometimes asked how I first became interested in crime, and I believe it dates back to my early childhood. My mum
and stepfather were often working: they ran market stalls. My sister and I were looked after by a succession of teenage babysitters, and my grandparents, and they didn’t insist on early
bedtimes: we stayed up watching
Frankenstein
,
Dracula
,
The Mummy
,
The Wolfman
and otherhorror movies. At the same time I was collecting
and painting small plastic models of monsters and characters from horror movies.
    When I was ten, the news was dominated by the Yorkshire Ripper, and I followed the case closely, with no idea that his nickname derived from an earlier murderer. It became an interest as I moved
into my teens: I was fascinated by TV programmes on American serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and then the British killer Dennis Nilsen.
    It wasn’t a serious obsession: I didn’t go out of my way to study murderers. But I was always intrigued by the big question: what makes someone become, not just a murderer with a
clear motive, but a serial killer, who strikes again and again, seemingly randomly? Where does that urge to kill come from?
    I did well at school, working hard for my O levels, putting up with the bullies who dubbed me ‘Half Mast’ because my trousers were always too short: my parents didn’t have
enough money to buy me new ones each year. I was in the O-level class with the posh kids, but I was on free school dinners: I didn’t really fit in. I did my revision at my grandmother’s
house, my favourite refuge. It was then that I realized nobody would ever fight my battles for me, and I developed a strong sense of having to look after myself.
    I wasn’t encouraged at home, where schoolwork wasn’t particularly valued. I started doing A levels in Chemistry, Biology and Music, but a spectacular row with my mother and
stepfather sent me running to North Wales to live with my dad at the guest house he ran in Rhyl, North Wales. I was even unhappier living with my stepmother, so I went back to Birkenhead and went
to college to carry on studying. Mymother and stepfather had moved from the council house into a shop in Wallasey, and then when I was eighteen they