Dr. John Hewitt
Suggested as a Ripper suspect by the researcher Steward Hicks. Hewitt was born in 1850 and was a Manchester G.P, who had become mentally ill and in 1888 was confined to Coton Hill asylum. The Coton Hill institution for the insane at Stafford was built in 1864 at a cost of £42,000 and housed 140 private patients from the upper and middle classes.
Despite Hewitt being released several times that year, he was safely incarcerated at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Hewitt married a nurse from the asylum and later moved to the seaside town of Bournemouth, Dorset. He died in 1892 at Kings Norton from paralysis of the insane. Defined in the 1844 lunacy act, the condition paralysis of the insane is the result, almost uniformly, of a debauched and intemperate life. It's duration is scarcely ever longer than two or three years, after which it generally takes it's sufferer to the grave.
