This week, I published my long awaited true crime book on the most famous serial killer of all time: Jack the Ripper and Abraham Lincoln – published by Troubador. You can buy it on Amazon as an ebook or paperback, as well as other sites. I’ve done two BBC interviews this week with links below. Tell me what you think!
If you haven’t bought the book yet – please do and give me an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads.
This was my interview on the Arun Verma show on BBC Midlands:
And I also appeared on BBC Leicester’s Summaya Mughal show:
Jack the Ripper and Abraham Lincoln is the result of two years of research and throws incredible new light on to this case.
This book reveals an astonishing connection between two of the 19th century’s greatest crimes. One man, Francis Tumblety, was implicated in both the 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the 1888 Jack the Ripper killings. Yet convicted for neither. His story is the thread that runs through this book giving us a gripping perspective on these crimes through the eyes of a 19th century Irish American gay man who mixed with the rich and famous but also was familiar with the inside of a police cell and a prison.
- A journey into the gay underworld of Civil War Washington DC and Victorian London revealing the secret networks that allowed members of the political and military elite to realise their illegal sexual desires. Time and again these networks got Tumblety out of trouble with the law.
- Why Francis Tumblety should be considered as the most plausible suspect in the Jack the Ripper case and the overwhelming evidence that points to his guilt plus a new theory, based on contemporary police and private detective records, that he may have directed a servant to commit the grotesque murders.
- An entirely overlooked eye-witness account proving that Tumblety was on “intimate” terms with Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth, introduced him to co-plotter Mary Surratt, and employed yet another of Booth’s gang, David Herold. Surratt and Herold would hang for their part in Lincoln’s death. Tumblety would be jailed then inexplicably freed.
- The sexuality of President Abraham Lincoln has been hushed up for decades but a century ago was an open secret. The book brings to light the evidence that he slept with his own head of security while President – and other men – then possibly Tumblety.
- The coded messages up until now ignored in the so-called 1913 Littlechild Letter that show Scotland Yard fully grasped Tumblety’s sexuality and that he was part of an elite gay underground scene in London, New York, and San Francisco.
- The link between Tumblety and Bram Stoker, creator of Dracula. How the two men shared the same male lover, writer Hall Caine – and why he left Tumblety and Stoker for the pre-Raphaelite genius, Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
- How Tumblety came to rub shoulders with not one but two presidential assassins: the killer of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth – and the killer of President James Garfield, Charles Giteau.
- The mystery of Tumblety’s money: could he really have made his vast repeat fortunes from selling herbal medicines?
- Evidence that Tumblety, Lincoln, and possibly Booth had all contracted syphilis. Who gave it to whom? And was this a factor in both crimes?
- On Tumblety’s deathbed, two cheap rings are found on his person resembling those ripped from the hand of Ripper victim, Annie Chapman. The pathologist in 1888 had coldly observed that two things were missing from Chapman – her rings and her uterus. Tumblety had the rings, but he also possessed a grisly collection of uteruses in a cabinet of curiosities.
DISCOVER: Jack the Ripper unmasked – new evidence
