Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
23 November 1888
IT WAS A CANARD
The Alleged Attempt of the Whitechapel Fiend at a Tenth Murder Was Merely a Drunken Brawl
London, Nov. 23.
The excitement over the alleged tenth attempt of the Whitechapel fiend has subsided. The sensational London evening papers
and the police themselves are responsible for the reports sent out from London to all parts of the world by special
correspondents and the press associations.
A row between a degraded Whitechapel woman and her lover was the basis of it all. The fellow, it appears, carried a knife,
and there were some ugly looking marks upon the woman's throat. In her drunken rage she denounced him as the Whitechapel
murderer, and he fled, fearing arrest.
These facts, reported at Scotland Yard were at first accepted as an attempted outrage by the fiend, and the police in their
eagerness to get what seemed a good clew to the murderer lent color to the story. So all London was shocked by extra after
extra, giving the sensational interpretation to the facts. In the horror of these Whitechapel atrocities the London evening
press seems to have lost all sense of responsibility.
Later investigations proved the affair to have been a common brawl. But it took a long time to convince the London public
that Jack the Ripper had not been at work again.
