Spreitzer's bid for mercy failed to work.   He was convicted on March 4 of aggravated kidnapping and murder.  Two weeks later on March 20, a jury deliberated for an hour before giving him the death penalty for this crime.  He wound up on Death Row in Pontiac State Correctional facility in Joliet, Illinois.

He exhausted all of his appeals, despite claims by his attorney Gary Prichard that he had been denied due process and that an examination after the trial indicated that he had brain damage.   Prichard argued that the jury had not been correctly instructed.  Yet, despite the appearance that this case was now at an end, there was one more unexpected development.

Robin Gecht

While clemency was not granted to Spreitzer at that time, the Chicago Tribune noted that as Governor Ryan was leaving office in January 2003, he pardoned four of the 164 Death Row inmates and offered blanket clemency to the rest, including Edward Spreitzer.  The families were outraged and vowed to fight for restoring justice.   But Spreitzer had at last won his hard-earned reprieve.

The first notion that he was a suspect in the Ripper murders appeared in 1962 in Phillippe Jullien's book, Edouard VII. Dr. Thomas Stowell published an article in 1970 accusing Eddy of being Jack the Ripper, basing his theory upon some papers of Sir William Gull. Stowell claimed that Gull was Eddy's doctor and was treating the prince for syphilis. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The disease supposedly caused Eddy to go insane and commit the Whitechapel murders.

None of this can be proven however, since Stowell burned his papers and then died shortly after publishing his theories. Gull's papers have not been found.

Scholars have pounced upon this theory and discredited it. One key factor is that royal records show that Eddy was not anywhere close to London for the most important murder dates, and was in fact as far away as Scotland at the time of the murders of Stride and Eddowes.

Also, Eddy, who was not known for his sparkling intelligence, did not possess the medical knowledge to be a credible Ripper suspect. But that has not stopped the presses from printing up yet another book, Prince Jack by Frank Spiering, naming Eddy as the Ripper.

FRANCIS TUMBLETY
(1833-1903)

A more recent suspect emerged in Evans and Gainey's 1995 book, Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer. He was born either in Canada or Ireland in 1833. The family found its way to Rochester, NY, by 1849.

The portrait of Tumblety which
appeared on the front cover of
his second booklet, 1889

First reports of Francis are not promising. In 1848, he was described by neighbors as "a dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared-for, good-for-nothing boy...utterly devoid of education." In 1850, he moved to Detroit and set up a practice as a physician sometime later. There is no indication that he ever finished school or even attended medical school. Despite that detail, he became quite a prosperous doctor.

He moved all across North America, setting up various medical practices and living in flamboyant splendor. Occasionally he would run afoul of the law and would set up his practice somewhere else.

At one point he went to Liverpool, in 1874, and carried on a homosexual affair with Sir Henry Hall Caine. When he returned to New York, he became known for his "mania for the company of young men and grown-up youths." He was also known as despising women, particularly "fallen women."

Tumbley arrested

Eventually, he moved back to Rochester and lived with his sister. He died in 1903 in St. Louis, after earning considerable wealth as a medical quack.

Chief Inspector John
Littlechild

All in all, he is an interesting suspect and proof that there is still information that can be unearthed after all these years about Ripper suspects. However, there is no direct proof linking Tumblety to the Whitechapel murders. There are a few factors that appear to disqualify him as a credible subject: (1) born in 1833, he would have been 55 years of age in 1888, far too old to be the man spotted by eyewitnesses, (2) he had no medical training, despite his income as a quack, and (3) while his sexual proclivities may have in 1888 been criminal, they are not today, (4) there is nothing to suggest that he was violent to women, even though he disliked them, (5) homosexual serial killers usually prey upon their own sex, not the opposite sex.

This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city...a shocking place...an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on...gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.

-Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets

The East End of London was, in Victorian England, a place outcast from the city, both economically and socially. Some nine hundred thousand people lived in this teeming slum. Here, the cattle and sheep would be herded through the streets of Whitechapel to the slaughterhouses nearby where they were bludgeoned, bleating with fear and pain. The streets were stained with blood and excrement. Rubbish and liquid sewage gave the area a horrible smell.

Police constables conducting a sanitary
inspection

Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! In another room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who has been dead thirteen days.

-Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London

For the most part, the people who lived in this East End were the working poor, those who worked occasionally, those who did not work at all, and criminals. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Most people lived on a day-to-day basis. More than half of the children born in the East End died before the age of five. Of those who survived, many were mentally and physically handicapped.

Prostitution was one of the only reliable means through which a single woman or widow could maintain herself. The police estimated that in 1888 there were some 1,200 prostitutes in Whitechapel, not including the women who supplemented their meager earnings by occasional prostitution.

There were over 200 common lodging houses in Whitechapel, accommodating almost 9,000 people. The sleeping rooms were long rooms with rows of beds, often infested with vermin and insects. If a woman had not earned enough money that day to pay for a bed for Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire   the night, she would have to find someone who would let her sleep with him in return for sexual favors. Otherwise she slept on the street.

A common scene, outside a Spitalfields
boarding house