Jack the Ripper and Black Magic

5 Vittoria Cremers and the Lodger Baroness Vittoria Cremers did not go to the police with suspicions that her lodger, known as Dr. Roslyn D’Onston, was Jack the Ripper. Nor did her close friend Mabel Collins, pseudonym of popular Victorian novelist and fashion reporter Mrs. Kenningale Cook, his lover.

By August 1890, according to the unpublished O’Donnell manuscript, the two sophisticated women were afraid of meeting the fate of East End prostitutes. They were also exposed in a love-triangle dalliance set amid an untidy and widely broadcast Theosophical Society press scandal. They did not want to disavow their beliefs. They shared a house for “over eighteen months” with D’Onston (Robert Donston Stephenson). They recanted their suspicions. Vittoria Cremers was to remain silent for over forty years.

The explanation in the O’Donnell manuscript, which outlines events “twenty-one months” after the Dorset Street murder, includes belief in reincarnation, enchantments and the alleged use of incriminating letters. These beliefs had persuaded Cremers and Collins to accept their suspect’s assurances that the gruesome work of Jack the Ripper had ended with Mary Jane Kelly. The story is supposedly based on a memoir by Cremers that does not seem to exist.

Rather than go to Scotland Yard with their information and the blood-encrusted neckties Cremers is believed to have found locked in Stephenson’s trunk, along with whatever material evidence Mabel Collins is reported to have held, they remained mute. This was evidence that author Melvin Harris regarded as “high priority.” He based this opinion on the work of author and psychologist Joel Norris with the cited support of FBI profiler Robert Ressler and crime writer Patricia Cornwell.1 The unpublished O’Donnell manuscript has been viewed as proof of D’Onston’s guilt, so it is useful to verify the chronology of events.

Cremers and Collins never went to the police. However, official files released during the 1970s contained statements from D’Onston’s visit to Scotland Yard in late December 1888. Cremers and Collins justified their inaction by submission to a resolute faith in the laws of karmic retribution — unlike George Marsh, who declared his suspicions to police on December 24, 1888.

Though Scotland Yard did not regard Roslyn D’Onston as Jack the Ripper, the 98