CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 3 (UPI) -- South African historian Charles van Onselen claims to have solved the 119-year-old mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Van Onselen has reportedly linked Joseph Silver, a Polish-born white slaver, pimp, gang leader and police informant, who among his accomplishments was a seven-year crime spree from Cape Town to Johannesburg, to the killings of five prostitutes in London's Whitechapel district in 1888, South Africa's Cape Argus reported.
After 25 years of research Van Onselen has written "The Fox & the Flies -- the World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer & Psychopath," which reportedly produces evidence that Silver was the man known as Jack the Ripper. Van Onselen says Silver's life was filled with psychopathic, misogynistic violence against prostitutes probably because of the syphilis he contracted from a prostitute. The key to the link with Jack the Ripper comes in the Bible, in the Book of Ezekiel, the historian claims.
Silver, he said, traveled also to New York from London, as well South America before arriving in South Africa around 1898. He was expelled from South Africa in 1905 and wound up in his native Poland in the closing days of World War I where he was arrested for theft and executed.
