London Police Department - Scotland Yard is in an extraordinary legal battle over keeping all documents in the 123-year-old Jack the Ripper case secret
Four thick volumes on the murders in 1888 are kept under lock and key. Trevor Marriott, a homicide investigator trying to solve the Ripper mystery, spent 3 years seeking access to this material to study it. But each time he was refused on the pretext that the information, if disclosed, could harm the methods of obtaining data from civilian informants and the informants themselves.
Marriott attended a meeting at Scotland Yard last week in a final attempt to convince the court that a new investigation of the Ripper case could uncover the mystery of this most famous serial killer in the world.
According to Marriott, those forty pages of testimony from the volumes of the investigation, copies of which he managed to obtain through his man, contained at least the names of four new suspects, as well as other evidence.
“I believe this is our last chance to finally uncover the mystery of Jack the Ripper,” says Marriott. “And we need to get the data from these readings to have a complete picture. It is possible that they contain the very piece of the puzzle that we still lack for a complete picture and perhaps we will know the name of the killer, at least 123 years later."
Jack the Ripper killed at least 5 women between August and November 1888 years in London's Whitechapel slum quarter, but some testimony indicates that he killed more people after 1888.
From the very beginning, the police made several gross mistakes in trying to investigate the case, which, however, is not surprising. In those days, they could not distinguish human blood from animal blood and did not collect fingerprints at the crime scene. As a result, they did not have any evidence to investigate these murders and the case of Jack the Ripper is considered the loudest unsolved serial killer case in the world. The long list of suspects included the grandson of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Clarence, who died in a mental hospital, and the artist Walter Sickers.
Marriott joined the Beltfordshire Police Department in 1970 and worked as a detective until 1980. In 2003, he began his research on the Jack the Ripper case and even published a book. in which he named the name of a possible killer as Karl Feigenbaum, a German merchant who was executed for the brutal murder of a woman in New York.
In 2008, Marriott stumbled upon a freedom of information law and went to the police for documents about the Ripper, where he received his first refusal.
Now, at a three-day hearing on this unusual case, the fate of the volumes in the Jack the Ripper case will be finally decided. The police are opposed, because the volumes contain the names of hundreds of police informants and their release can cause uncontrollable consequences even though they are years old.
“Take the most famous informer in history, Judas Iscariot, for example,” says a Scotland Yard officer. “What if a person finds out that he is descended from him? This is of course an extreme example."
Another officer also agrees with these arguments:
“Informants come to us because they are confident that their identities will never be revealed. Regardless of the age."
Marriott assures that there is no danger in the documents for the descendants of those informants.
The final judgment in the Marriott case is expected to be delivered only by the end of 2011.