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''Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution'' is a book written by Stephen Knight first published in 1976. It proposed a solution to five murders in Victorian London that were blamed on an unidentified serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper". In an attempt to solve the mystery, Knight presented an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the British royal family, freemasonry and the painter Walter Sickert. He concluded that the victims were murdered to cover up a secret marriage between the second-in-line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and Annie Elizabeth Crook, a working class girl. There are many facts that contradict Knight's theory, and his main source, Joseph Gorman (also known as Joseph Sickert), later retracted the story and admitted to the press that it was a hoax. Most scholars dismiss the theory as a fantasy, and the book's conclusion is now widely discredited. Nevertheless, the book was popular and commercially successful, going through 20 editions.〔Knight's literary agent, Andrew Hewson, quoted in Rice, Karen (16 December 2001) "Jack the Ripper 'revlations' exposed as same old story." ''Scotland on Sunday'' p. 3〕 It was the basis for the graphic novel and film ''From Hell'', as well as other dramatisations, and has influenced crime fiction writers, such as Patricia Cornwell and Anne Perry. ==Origins== Between August and November 1888, at least five brutal murders were committed in the Whitechapel district of London. Although Whitechapel was an impoverished area and violence there was common, these murders can be linked to the same killer through a distinctive ''modus operandi''. All the murders took place within the distance of a few streets, late at night or in the early morning, and the victims were all women whose throats were cut. In four of the cases, their bodies were mutilated, or even eviscerated.〔Evans and Skinner, pp. 399–402 and Knight, p. 168〕 The removal of internal organs from three of the victims led to contemporary proposals that "considerable anatomical knowledge was displayed by the murderer, which would seem to indicate that his occupation was that of a butcher or a surgeon."〔Dr. Winslow, the examining pathologist, quoted in Haggard, Robert F. (1993). ("Jack the Ripper As the Threat of Outcast London" ). ''Essays in History''. Volume 35. Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Accessed 17 July 2009.〕 Media organisations and the police received many letters and postcards purportedly written by the killer, who was dubbed "Jack the Ripper" after one of the signatories. Most of the anonymous confessional letters were dismissed by the police as hoaxes but one, known as the "From Hell" letter after a phrase used by the writer, was treated more seriously; it was sent with a small box containing half of a preserved human kidney. It is not clear, however, whether the kidney truly came from one of the victims or was a medical specimen sent as part of a macabre joke.〔DiGrazia, Christopher-Michael (March 2000). ("Another Look at the Lusk Kidney" ). ''Ripper Notes''. Published online by Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Accessed 17 July 2009.〕〔Wolf, Gunter (2008). ("A kidney from hell? A nephrological view of the Whitechapel murders in 1888" ). ''Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation'' vol. 23 pp. 3343–3349 (Subscription required)〕〔Knight, p. 222; Marriott, pp. 166, 225〕 Despite an extensive police investigation, the killer was never found and his identity is still a mystery. Both at the time and subsequently, many amateur and professional investigators have proposed solutions but no single theory is widely accepted. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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