A Ripperologist Article

This article originally appeared in Ripperologist No. 25, October 1999. Ripperologist is the most respected Ripper periodical on the market and has garnered our highest recommendation for serious students of the case. For more information, view our Ripperologist page. Our thanks to the editor of Ripperologist for permission to reprint this article.

A mong the many interesting comments in Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund's Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper are those made in the section devoted to Alois Szemeredy and Alonzo Maduro. They conclude that these two suspects were one and the same, mainly due to the similarity of their stories and names. The same conclusion was reached by Eduardo Zinna before the publication of the Mammoth Book, and he gives more detail on the closeness between the two names, which...

"Believe it or not, sound alike: A-LON-soh-mah-DOO-ro, A-LOI-seh-meh-REH-dee. The 'z' of Alonzo would actually be pronounced as an 's' in South American Spanish; the same applies to the Hungarian combination 'sz'. Moreover, Alois is a common Austrian/Hungarian name and Szemeredy a very common Hungarian surname. Alonzo is a surname in Spanish and not a first name; it is a given name in America, though. Maduro could be a surname. It means 'mature' or 'ripe'. An English person with little knowledge of either language who heard the name Alois Szemeredy, and knew the person came from South America, might well interpret the name as Spanish. Alonzo Maduro would then be a possibility."

The information on both men given in The Mammoth Book is the same as that in The Jack The Ripper A-Z, even repeating the misspelling of Szemeredy's forename as Alios. The basic facts are stated thus: