| Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide |
This text is from the E-book Jack the Ripper: A Suspect Guide by Christopher J. Morley (2005). Click here to return to the table of contents. The text is unedited, and any errors or omissions rest with the author. Our thanks go out to Christopher J. Morley for his permission to publish his E-book.
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According to which ever variation of the story is told, Dr Alexander Pedachenko, alias Vassily Konovalov, alias Count Andrey Luiskovo, was sent by the Russian secret police or the Ochrana, to England to commit the Whitechapel murders, in an attempt to discredit the Metropolitan police, whom they believed were been too soft on anarchists, socialists and dissidents. His accomplices in this were Levitski, who would be the lookout, and Miss Winberg, who would engage the prostitutes in conversation, before Pedachenko (Jack the Ripper) struck. With their mission accomplished, Levitski and Winberg were exiled to Yakutsk, Siberia. Pedachenko was smuggled back to Russia, but could not stop killing, and murdered a woman in Petrograd before he was committed to an asylum. He was born in Tver, Russia, in 1857 and worked in the local hospital. He was said to be a barber/surgeon, who in 1888 was living in Walworth, South London. He was described as having a curly waxed moustache and occasionally wore women's clothes.
The original source of this story was William Le Quex, who claimed to have seen a copy of the January 1909 Ochrana Gazette, the bulletin of Czarist secret police, which advised all officers that Konovalov, alias Pedachenko, had now died in an asylum.
There is no evidence that Pedachenko ever existed, nor that Konovalov and Pedachenko were the same person. The murder he supposedly committed in Petrograd in 1888 is unlikely, as it was not named Petrograd until 1914, prior to that it was called St Petersburg.
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