The Ripper Fever Spreads: The Gateshead Mutilation Murder of 1888

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The Ripper Fever Spreads: The Gateshead Mutilation Murder of 1888
News of the Times | Episode 506 |1888
In the swirling fear of 1888, with the shadow of Jack the Ripper stretching far beyond Whitechapel, terror came to Birtley.
This episode brings us to the unsettling murder of 28-year-old Jane Beatmoor—a quiet woman in delicate health, found savagely mutilated at the foot of a railway embankment in the North East of England. It was the same day the inquest closed on Mary Ann Nichols, one of the Ripper's canonical victims. And with that eerie timing and grotesque wounds, panic erupted. Had the Ripper moved north?
As headlines screamed and Scotland Yard dispatched men northwards—including the very doctor who examined Annie Chapman—the mystery thickened. But what emerged was something different: a tale of passion, betrayal, flight, and a chillingly personal crime that stoked the fires of a Ripper-frenzied public.
And in our Further Particulars:
A husband returns from America to find his home sold, furniture gone, and his family shattered—manipulated by a predatory opportunist living with his teenage daughter. It's Victorian life seen through a darker, more domestic lens: seduction, starvation, and a family's ruination at the hands of one man with sinister motives.
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