Bounty Hunter

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the City of San Francisco and its police department for their valuable insights into the life and times of Sergeant Thomas Langford and his role in policing the crime- and violence-ridden Barbary Coast in the 1880s.

I’m indebted to Thomas Asbury for his wonderful book The Barbary Coast, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1937. Also to Colonel Albert S. Evans’ Sketch of Life in the Golden State (1871) and to Frank Soule and Dr. John H. Gihon for The Annals of San Francisco (1855).

According to a 2005 article in Britain’s Manchester Guardian newspaper, Jack the Ripper may have been a merchant seaman who arrived in England aboard the cargo vessel Sylph in July 1888, just before the murder of his first victim, Mary Ann Nichols. The Sylph returned to the Caribbean on September 22, two weeks after the gruesome killing of prostitute Mary Kelly. In January 1889, six prostitutes were murdered in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Police later said the victims “were mutilated beyond all recognition, their faces horribly slashed.”

Jack may have returned to England and murdered Whitechapel prostitute Alice McKenzie on July 17, 1889. Although never officially listed as a Ripper victim, the woman was strangled, her throat slashed and her body mutilated.

Jack may have then left England and murdered and mutilated a woman in Hamburg, Germany, on October 18, 1889, before vanishing into the fog for the last time.

Was Jolly Jack a seaman or a paying passenger, say a rich lawyer? In the Ripper saga, all things are possible.