Thursday, 22 November 1888
Yesterday's London Sensation Gotten Up by a Drunked Woman.
The story of the woman who claimed to have been attacked by "Jack, the Ripper," in London, yesterday morning, was, on further investigation by the police, entirely discredited. The woman was a prostitute of the lowest order. She suffered only a slight abrasion of the skin on her throat, and the police finally concluded that she inflicted the injury herself while she was drunk.
The principal reason given by the police for their belief that the alleged attempted murder was not the work of the real Whitechapel fiend is the fact that both the would-be murderer and his intended victim drank themselves into a state of gross inebriety, a condition that the perpetrator of the previous crimes was obviously free from, and then went to an ordinary lodging house, at the door of which a government inspector is always in attendance. This circumstance, together with the fact that the time of attempting to kill the woman was as ill-judged with reference to the escape of the murderer as the place, induces the belief that the whole business was simply to create a sensation.