The most outrageous suspect in the ongoing case of the
Ripper murders is probably Lewis Carroll, a. k. a. Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson.
In 1996, Richard Wallace published a book entitled Jack the
Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend, claiming that Carroll and his
Oxford collague Thomas Vere Bayne were responsible for the
Whitechapel killings. His arguments were based on anagrams
constructed out of passages in Carroll's work. However, Wallace's
concotions are often awkward and messy, missing letters and
full of grammatical errors.
It seems unlikely that a proto-geek
like Carroll, obsessed with mathematical games and wordplay,
would have allowed such mistakes to mar his handiwork. Others have
pointed out that arbitrary rearranging of words makes it possible
to find hidden meanings in just about everything: for example,
the opening line from Winnie the Pooh -
'Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now'
easily becomes
'Stab red red women! CR is downing whores -AA'
Here, CR is no other than Christopher Robin, everybody's
favorite infant psychopath.
There isn't a shred of real evidence to implicate Carroll, of
course - Ripper hunters are better off hunting the Snark than the creator of Alice.
www.casebook.org, a Ripperologist's wet dream,
has a more detailed account of the Alice-Ripper -connection.