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June 12, 2021 18 mins

Ian Punnett and Dr. Dan Friedman discuss the possibility that the identity of Jack The Ripper is Conan Doyle.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeart Radio. It's a journey into madness and mayhem. I'm
going to digress for one second because I thought, well,
why did I get wrong in that previous conversation. So Daniel,
let me clear this up. When you were talking about
Charles Waterton and that he had been the dauntless one

(00:24):
at the school where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had attended,
that one of the reasons why this kid had become
so famous. He was a legendary student, kind of the
best boy of all time in Yeah. Actually he actually
discovered jury in his effects. It made actually the first
artificial respirator. Yeah, and so that was interesting that this guy,

(00:45):
Charles Waterton was also kind of a hoaxter and that
he Yeah, and I wondered, so that's what I was
when I had said, well, he was kind of an
idol of him. See I got Oh, now I understand
where the references coming from shore the red Haler Monkey. Yeah,
where he basically he was choices exorbitant amount of money

(01:06):
for bringing stuff back in from from South America back
to Europe. Uh so he actually made a mockery of
the of the of the guy who charged him and
basically configured this red Howler monkey to look like the
missing link type of thing, right, And of course Doyle
would later with the Toetown man who says you as

(01:28):
you're alluding to do one debtor and make the real
mixing link. And I think that was what so I
thought that was why it was so interesting, was that
I thought you had made that connection in the book.
Is that here he was, you know, as a young
as a boy. He saw how everybody was enamored with
this guy who was kind of also living sort of

(01:49):
this dual life. He was making all these amazing medical achievements,
as you mentioned, the Karri and the U and the
artificial respirator and the artificial respirator, but at the same
time he had this devilish streak where he liked to
sort of tweak the nose of the establishment, and he
had created the first missing link hoax and that led

(02:11):
that led to the piltdown Man. And I thought, wow,
that that that connection twenty five exactly. You ever right
on the money. Yeah, But that's really because I think
that speaks directly to this fracture inside of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle that if you're right. He even had a
model for this, where you could be very respectable and

(02:33):
everybody loves you, but you know, behind the scenes, you
could be your very own Moriarty. You could be that
person who's pulling the strings and making other people believe
things that you want them to believe. Yes, And he
actually did it with a lot of his friends actually
in the murder club he was in it called Atlur Society.
He brought people to seances with him to show then

(02:56):
how they were actually real. And the people the club
was saying, you're you're like a You're like a four
year old. This is obviously it's fake, don't you. Don't
you see it? You know they're using phosphorus to make
his chin line up, just like you wrote about ten
years ago in The Hound of the Basketball. How are
you being taken by this um? But he was so interesting,
the real deal. So he actually lost a lot of

(03:18):
friends that way, and he's one of his closest friends.
James Barry, who wrote Peter Pan told him, listen, you
and I are great friends. We play in the cricket
field together, but do not tell me to believe in spiritualism.
If you do, you and I, our friendship is over.
So he had to like find a balance between what
he believed or who he was going to bring into

(03:39):
these his ideas, and he walked the fine line all
the time. Yeah, and I just spirituals, I mean the
fairies and all of that other stuff. He sended the
two teenage girls with the Fairies, yeah, coloring book and
took pictures of the fairies. And the thing about that
is Arthur Conan Doyle before he was no as the

(04:00):
writer of Sherlock Holmes. He had his own column in
the British Journal of Photography in the in the early
eighteen eighties, so you took him aout like eight years
before Sherlock Holmes came out. So when this, when the
fairies were being you know, shown to the world in
the eighteen twenties, he was he was an expert photographer.
He knew how to fake a photograph, so he should
have known or he did know that these were fake.

(04:22):
And he was just trying to tell the world, No,
this world that he lives in, this magical thinking world,
is real. Is a matter of fact. His father guard
the cart and Doyle's father and a lot of believed
in fairies and that he could talk to birds and
he could see them, and it's something that his son
actually believes in two And it's this this farther some

(04:45):
relationship that really was what got me going on the
origin of Jack the Ripper actually, because what happened was
when I came across his medical school's thesis and we
were talking about you, you had to write a thesis
to become a doctor at age twenty five. So when
he when he was approaching that age, he wrote a
thesis for med school on the final phases and stages

(05:10):
of syphilis. And you know, and I read about this
in the jama I. You know, I called Edinburgh Medical School.
I said, can I get a copy of his of
his thesis? They sent it over. It's one hundred and
thirty pages. The first thing I noticed were some of
the dates that he quotes in the beginning of the thesis,
or only two weeks later he's submitting it, so he's

(05:31):
quoting articles that were only two weeks old. So he
wrote this thing about two to three weeks. He took
him at a pH d thesis pace. It's like it's
almost unheard of him. It's I couldn't do it, which
is why I was so impressed. But some of the
information contained inside was what really got me going what
was going on with his mind? Because the first thing

(05:52):
was he writes very anecdotally, like you're sitting at a
table with a man who's squinting reading the newspaper, and
I'm going, what is he talking? Like he does he
know someone with syphilis that he wouldn't be sitting at
the tape at the table with the guy. And then
he starts really describing this one obscure sign of syphilis,
which is the loss of a knee jerk reflects called

(06:13):
the Westfield sign, and he goes on and on about this,
and then at the end of this thesis he writes
about the treatments, because you know, that's how you have
to do, like this breakdown of how you treat and
how you how you diagnose, And at the end he
actually says, you know, the treatment of syphilis is anmial
nitrate up to you take. He start with one like

(06:33):
millim and he says, I myself, he says, I myself
have taken up to forty without any ill effect. So
the first thing that caught me was why is a
guy without syphilis taking toxic doses of that only is
known to treat syphilis. I mean, did he think he
had it when he was twenty five years old? Which
is what got me going into doing all this research

(06:55):
about what was going on in his life and who
is this Anne going to bat? Like? Why is he
sitting at a table with someone? Okay, wait, so let
me back and so amal nitrate isn't that today we
call poppers and that isn't like connected to the sex drug?
Yeah exactly, blood vessels, right, yeah, but I mean it

(07:16):
makes you frenetic, and people take poppers and then they
go dancing and then have you know, the theory is
is that you have this uninhibited, wild animal like sex
on amal nitrate. I mean that sounds like what was
happening with some of the victims later on with Jack
the Ripper. I mean that well, I mean maybe none
of the Ripper victims were raped. No, I don't mean that,

(07:39):
but I mean in terms of the frenzy of the oh,
the cutting and the whatever. I mean, that's just that
that's so interesting to me that you brought up. I
would never I didn't make that connection with with amal
nitrate until just now, but taking very high doses. And
he actually says the first thing you get at the headache,
So we actually knew, Yeah, profile this guy was really

(08:00):
you know, you're talking this is a medicine he's taking.
He's hopped up on paupers and and and of course,
and why would you want to do this if you're
running about it in your thesis and you're confessing to
your professors that you're taking such a medicine for condition,
which kind of was like, you know, what is he
what is he doing here? Yeah? Is that? What happened

(08:21):
next was I actually ordered this book called The Doyle Diary,
which I thought was going to be that the Colone
and Doyle, because why would you who else would be
the Doyle Diary? It actually happened to be about his father,
who was in artists but they published actors. Yeah, And
and all of a sudden you find that that his
father was encorcerated in a mental hospital for presumptive alcoholism
at age forty two. And it's like and he died

(08:43):
there years later. He never escaped, he never who was
made a prisoner actually, and I actually contacted the mental
hospitals that he was an inmate at and I asked
for his medical records. They sent them to me and
I went over them, and the thing that really shot
out at me and said, Wow, this is something of
importance is that the only physical finding that they had
on him on admission to Mantro's hospital was that he

(09:05):
had this absence knee dric reflex. In Doyle's thesis, he
actually spends an awful amount of time talking about it,
saying if you have an absent that if you have
Westwall sign, you are you you have simphilis until proven otherwise.
And I made that question like he is thinking that

(09:25):
his father, that that anecdotal pation of his that's sitting
at the at the table of him reading the paper
and squinting, is his father. Yeah. And then of course
I've read another article that happened right after this thesis paper,
which is on the Contagious Diseases Act, and it's written
by Arthocon and Doyle, and he says that women of
the night are ruining the taverns of the area. They

(09:45):
should be locked up and incarce right into lock hospitals,
and invasive gynecological examinations should be performing on them until
they had deemed to be clear of infectious disease, and
he makes this long article in the Portsmouth News, and
the week later another physician rights back and says, Arthur
Cronan Doyle is a liar. His information is completely all

(10:07):
all lies, and he has to retract his statement, and
he did so. I knew there was a connection that
hit syphilis and prostitutes and getting them off the streets,
and this connection to his father is now here. But
what I also knew that he also was taking the
medicine on himself, and I went back and read about

(10:28):
what he had as a child. That's when I started
doing all this research on his early life, and I
realized that he had at a very young age, at
age ten, he had neuralgia like this pain in his jaw,
and he actually was getting electric shock therapy when he
was a teenager for it. And later when he was
doing that what we were talking about the assistant clerkships
to get your your degree in medicine, and when one

(10:51):
of his clerkshires was in Birmingham and he was taking
jell simium and he was actually overdosed on it, and
two of the assistants that he was working with actually
had to save his life because he almost died. Later on,
he's using he's using chemicals from the dark room the
treat a rest that looks like a psoriasis. And of course,

(11:12):
as a physician, and even he sounds like you would
know too, you know everything that rash of syphilis is
actually it mimics the rash of psoriasis. And there were
a lot of these interconnections were did he think at
this point in time, when he was twenty five years
old that he really had syphilis and he had it

(11:32):
from hereditary factors from his father? And of course there's
a story that he wrote called the Third Generation. Arthur
Conan Doora wrote this well, I think in the early
eighteen nineties, maybe even the eighteen eighties, where he talks
about a grandfather passing it down to his son who
Syphilisnes says, who passes it down genetically to his grandson

(11:53):
and the grandson kills himself because he knows he has it.
And I said, oh, this, this could be this, this,
this could be with upsetting this kid. At this point,
he's twenty five, he's a minute. He just became a doctor,
and all doctors think whatever disease, you know, you read
about you have, and I thought maybe he thought he
had it too all right. But there's another explanation, though,

(12:15):
two right, which is that here he was. His childhood
had been ruined, he'd been abused, he had been left
at um at boarding schools for as you point out,
six weeks over Christmas, even though he wasn't a foreign student.
He was like him and all of these other foreign students.

(12:37):
He's left at these boarding schools because his mother is
having and she's having a robust sexual life with a
younger lover, because the marriage broke down because his father
had become a self medicating alcoholic and had very likely
then syphilis. And so if they got syphilis from prostitutes,

(13:02):
which then ruined his life and broke up his family,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could easily be associating the fact
that he was he had a miserable life up until
this point. And it all goes back to the fault
of the prostitutes for passing along ciphilis. If they hadn't
given his father syphilis, then his parents would have stayed

(13:23):
together and he wouldn't have had such a miserable upbringing.
His father wouldn't have been so abusive, it all would
have been better. And that makes sense why those prostitutes
that were killed by Jack the Ripper were not the
young girls of like sixteen to twenty five that you
would probably think of would be the victims. They were
all in their forties, you know, forty two to forty
seven years old. They would have been the ones that

(13:44):
would have been attracted to Charles Doyle back in his
younger days. So but they were also but the age
of his mother, so they were actually they were the
of his mother. None you are correctly took the money.
He gets a two fer, he's killed the prostitutes, and
he's acting out against his mother who kept abandoning him

(14:05):
at these schools where she could have brought him home
for the holidays, but she was too busy with her
robust sex life. It kind of all comes together. I mean,
it's really kind of if you were ever looking for
a motivation for Jack the Ripper, that's pretty boiler plate
exactly right there. So all right, so but let's let's
get into some of the where and you're the and

(14:27):
I don't mean to treat it like it's esoterica, it's not.
You have you have uncovered some missing details in both
the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack the Ripper.
Whether or not these are two and the same, let's
get to the let's get down to it. Let's talk
about some of the really obvious clues that most people

(14:50):
know who follow Jack the Ripper. That um, like the
from Hell letter or Dear Boss, or some of the
other ways in which he had, you know, contacted the
authorities and seemed to be tweaking their nose much in
the same way that they're Pilt Down Man or the
Howler Monkey hoax. That these were all ways of sort
of saying, you guys think you're so smart, but you're

(15:11):
not right exactly. He was playing with them. I mean,
he was playing with the with the Central News Agency
and the police, some of it with the establishment, with
the whole establishment, right, and you know, and we know,
you know, some people say these weren't letters written by
Jack the Ripper, but obviously some were. One of them
had a piece of the victim's kidney that was nailed
back to the pathologist, you know, the jaw, So we

(15:32):
know that letter was written by Jack the Ripper. So
it can't be said that he didn't. It actually was
a perfect match, you know, he said, I ate the
victim's kidney, and here it is in a box, right yeah, which,
so all right, So give me some of the clues
that you think indicate Jack the ripper is, Sir car
you know, Sir Arthur Corner and Doyle. Sure, I mean,

(15:53):
before I get to the I guess to the letters
that I would probably go more to like what was
left behind it at the crime scene. But and I'm
just going to do a little bit of just so
your audience knows. Arthur Conan Doyle in eighteen eighty seven
became a Freemason. This is a very prestigious organization. They
actually about three million members now and they are a

(16:15):
brotherhood that does charity and good deeds. Obviously, even though
in my profession I'm a physician and it's Arthur Conan Doyle.
Sherlock Holme says, when a doctor does go wrong, he's
the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
It doesn't mean that old doctors are bad. It's the
same thing here. So he's a Freemason. Doyle is a Freemason.

(16:37):
The majority of ninety nine of Freemasons are great and
they do charitable deeds. In fact, Doyle's lodge, Phoenix Fludge
to fifty seven was in the midst of raising funds
for the local hospital. So in eighteen eighties have been
Doyle became a Freemason and he became a third degree.
Within about two months when he got his third degree
apron he actually resigned. He said he didn't show up

(17:00):
to any of the lodge meetings, he didn't participate anymore,
he didn't raise money for the hospital, and then he
actually demitted from the organization, which is almost unheard of.
Two years later had many Masons say there's no way,
no one ever dimits from the Masons, and they looked
it up and his records showed that he did in
eighteen eighty nine. So we're gonna need this for the

(17:22):
clue basis. So when you become a third degree, they
do a play back in the day. I don't know
if they do this now, they probably don't, But back
in the eighteen eighties they do a play where they
reenact the death of King Solomon's master architect Hyra Mabeth,
and the first guy, Jubila, basically hits the master Mason
across the neck, so we call that in the basis,

(17:45):
they had a penal sign that's called the punishment signs,
and it was your hand basically across your neck. And
then penal signed number two is your left hand on
your left breast. And in the play they say that
my intestines are placed over my shoulder and the valley
of Jehosaphat. And the third act that was committed against
the Master Mason was he was hit in the head

(18:06):
with a gavel. So there's the blow to the head.
So we'd have to go back to now to the
ripper cluse and murder number one that of Marion Nichols.
She was she was basically got at, you know, her
guts were, her intesters were ripped open, her intesters were exposed,
and that she had a deep neck wound. Listen to

(18:28):
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