A former police volunteer claims to have uncovered the identity of the figure behind some of the most shocking crimes in British history, unmasking the 19th century murderer who terrorized the nation as Jack the Ripper.
Sarah Bax Horton – whose great-great-grandfather was a police officer at the heart of the Ripper investigation – unearthed compelling evidence that matches witness descriptions of the man seen with female victims shortly before they were stabbed to death in 1888 in the East End of London.
Her detective work brought her to Hyam Hyams, who lived in an area at the center of the murders and who, as a cigar maker, knew how to use a knife. He was an epileptic and an alcoholic who was in and out of mental asylums, his condition worsened after being injured in an accident and unable to work. He repeatedly assaulted his wife, paranoid that she was cheating on him, and was eventually arrested after attacking her and her mother with “a chopper”.
Significantly, Ms Bax Horton gained access to her medical records and uncovered dramatic details. She told the Telegraph: “For the first time in history, Jack the Ripper can be identified as Hyam Hyams using distinctive physical characteristics.”
Witnesses described a man in his 30s with a stiff arm and an erratic gait with bent knees, and Ms Bax Horton found medical notes for Hyams – who was 35 in 1888 – recorded an injury that prevented him from walking. “bending or extending” his left arm as well as an irregular gait and inability to straighten the knees, with asymmetrical dragging of the foot. He also suffered from the most severe form of epilepsy, with regular seizures.
The victims were prostitutes or indigents. Their throats were slit and their bodies slaughtered in frenzied attacks. Authorities received provocative anonymous notes from someone calling himself Jack the Ripper. They are among the most infamous unsolved crimes.
At least six women – Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – were killed at or near Whitechapel between August and November 1888.
Hyams’ medical notes, taken from various infirmaries and asylums, reveal that his mental and physical decline coincided with the period of the Ripper murder, worsening between his fractured left arm in February 1888 and his permanent incarceration in September. 1889.
“This escalation route corresponded with the increasing violence of the killings,” Ms Bax Horton said. “He was particularly violent after his severe epileptic seizures, which explains the periodicity of the murders.”
She added: “The records said what the eyewitnesses had said – that he had a peculiar gait. He was weak at the knees and did not fully extend his legs. When he walked he had a kind of shuffling gait, which was probably a side effect of brain damage from his epilepsy.
Testimony about the man’s height and weight were similar to details in Hyams’ medical records, Ms Bax Horton found.
“They saw a man of average height and build, between 5ft 5in. and 5 feet 8 inches. Tall, strong and broad-shouldered. Hyams was 5ft 7½ and weighed 10 stone 7lbs…His photograph shows he was visibly broad-shouldered,” she said.
She concluded that Hyams’ physical and mental decline – exacerbated by his alcoholism – drove him to kill. The killings ceased in late 1888, around the time Hyams was arrested by police as “a wandering lunatic”. In 1889 he was incarcerated in the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, north London, until his death in 1913. Jack the Ripper never struck again.
Various suspects have already been suggested as the man behind the murders, including artist Walter Sickert, who painted gruesome images of a murdered prostitute.
Hyams was on a ‘long list’ of around 100 culprits, but Ms Bax Horton said he was ruled out because he was misidentified. “When I was trying to identify the correct Hyam Hyam, I found about five of them. It took a lot of work to identify his correct biographical data. Hyam Hyams was never fully explored as a Ripper suspect. For to protect the privacy of living persons, two of Colney Hatch Asylum’s patient files, including Hyams, were closed from public view until 2013 and 2015.”
What makes his research particularly extraordinary is that it was prompted by his chance discovery in 2017 that his own great-great-grandfather, Harry Garrett, had served as a Metropolitan Police Sergeant at Leman Police Station. Street, headquarters of the Ripper Inquiry. He was assigned there from January 1888 – the fateful year of the murders – until 1896.
Ms Bax Horton, who read English and Modern Languages at Oxford University, is a retired civil servant who volunteered with the City of London Police for almost two decades until 2020. She had no idea of her ancestor’s story until she started researching her family and found herself investigating the Ripper case.
She will now present her extensive evidence in a forthcoming book, titled One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper, to be published by Michael O’Mara Books next month.
It is written as a tribute to his ancestor and to his police colleagues.
Paul Begg, a leading authority on the Ripper, endorsed it. “This is a well-researched, well-written, and long-needed book-length examination of a likely suspect. If you have any idea what kind of man Jack the Ripper might have been, Hyam Hyams could be,” he said.
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