In July 1891, an English gas fitter known as Frederick Bailey Deeming slaughtered his wife and children and left them buried beneath the kitchen floor. Within days of the murder he was on a boat to Australia, already wooing the woman who would become his next victim. Five months later, he dispatched her in Melbourne and drifted off into the Australian wilderness, looking for another victim. Luckily, he was caught and quickly hanged.
With a series of such gruesome murders, it’s perhaps not surprising that Deeming’s memory would attract some urban legends. But perhaps more surprising is the content of one of them: that Deeming was secretly Jack the Ripper.
The theory largely stems from the brutality of Deeming’s crimes. His victims’ throats were slashed and their bodies badly damaged, uncannily like the Whitechapel murders. There’s also the fact that the Ripper killings abruptly stopped not long before Deeming fled Britain. Did history’s most-notorious serial killer live out his final days in Melbourne? We may never know.
