Jacob Levy (1856 – 29 July 1891) was born in Aldgate in 1856. He was one of the suspected of being Jack the Ripper.
Biography
He followed in his father's trade as a butcher, and by 1888 he was living in Middlesex Street with his wife and children, which was right in the heart of Ripper territory (and close to where Catherine Eddowes was murdered). Levy was a butcher with the necessary skills to remove certain organs from the victims, and was recorded as suffering from general paralysis of the insane. His 1890 asylum records report that he “feels that if he is not restrained he will do some violence to some one”.
The 2009 video game Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper uses a combination of historically attested and embellished evidence to propose his candidacy. Levy's life is featured on an episode of the podcast Bad Women: The Ripper Retold where Jennifer Wallis, a historian of medicine and psychiatry, comments that it is unlikely a person in Levy's condition would have been able to carry out serial murders and persistently conceal having done so.
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