Philadelphia Record (U.S.A.)
24 November 1888
'A Mysterious Prisoner'
Arrest of a Steerage Passenger for Wife Murder.
[New York, Nov.23]--A mysterious individual was arrested as he alighted
from the steamer Wyoming yesterday. He was a steerage passenger, and
registered the name "James Shaw." He was arrested on a cable message from
England to the British Consul-General, Mr. Hoare. The dispatch asked that
steerate passenger James Shaw be detained, as he was really James Pennock,
of Pickering, North Riding, Yorkshire, England, and that he had murdered
his wife on November 7. He was described as 47 years of age, 5 feet 7
inches in height, with "ginger" whiskers and hair, and having a
proturbance on his head the size of a walnut.
Deputy Marshal Fed. Bernhardt took charge of James Shaw, who protested his
innocence and declared that he had kissed his wife good-bye on November 9
at Leeds, near which town he lived. He was going west, and had $5. He was
locked up in Ludlow Street Jail, pending further instructions from
England.
Shaw somewhat answered the description of "Jack the Ripper," and there was
in his pocket an illustrated account of the Whitechapel horror, but
Marshal Bernhardt pumped his prisoner in his own peculiar way and
satisfied himself that Shaw was not the "Ripper."
Shaw admits that that is an assumed name, his real name being Heddington,
but he declines to say why he is travelling incognito.
There is no "walnut" on his head, and no scar where it might have been,
and he is two inches shorter than the Yorkshire man. He cannot read nor
write, and is rather confused in his accounting for the presence in his
pocket of the newspaper containing the Whitechapel story.