Ich glaube, nicht nur ich selbst, sondern fast alle hier verdanken dem Buch von Tom Cullen den ersten Einblick um die Geschehnisse in Whitechapel 1888. Leider findet man wirklich nicht viele Informationen über den Autor.
www.drCrippen.co.uk :
Tom Cullen (1913-2001)
Tom Alden Cullen was born on 16 May 1913 in Oklahoma City. His family then moved to Long Beach, California (about 1920) and he went to school in San Pedro before studying economics and political science at the University of California. His first job was as a journalist on the United Progressive News and, fatefully, he also joined the Communist Party which was then a very fashionable thing to do.
He joined the US Army in 1942 and served during the Second World War in Europe and Africa as a military journalist. After his discharge in 1946, he worked for a while on trade magazines and then used the GI Bill to attend the Sorbonne in Paris.
During the 1950s, Cullen freelanced in France, Germany and India, before arriving in Britain. When the American government confiscated his passport because of his Communist connections, Cullen stayed on in Britain on a visitor's passport, on the condition that 'he stayed out of trouble'.
His first book: Autumn of Terror: Jack the Ripper, His Crimes and Times was published in 1965. Several others followed including his investigation into the Honours Racket: Maundy Gregory: Purveyor of Honours (1974).
Crippen: The Mild Murderer appeared in 1977. It is important because, although, necessarily, he had to rely heavily on Filson Young's The Trial of H. H. Crippen (1920), Cullen had also researched newspaper articles on both sides of the Atlantic and he investigated the personalities of the main characters.
In the case of Ethel Le Neve, he was helped by Ursula Bloom (1892-1984), who had become friendly with Ethel as a consequence of having featured her in a novel: The Girl Who Loved Crippen (1955). Ethel died age 84 in 1963.
Curiously, Ursula Bloom's middle name was Harvey, like Dr Crippen, and this was also the name that Ethel had adopted as her surname, sometime before her marriage in 1915.
Tom Cullen died age 88 in Camden (of all places!) in June 2001 and the Daily Telegraph ran his Obituary.
www.telegraph.co.uk The Telegraph
12:00AM BST 03 Aug 2001
TOM CULLEN, who has died aged 88, was an engaging writer specialising in biographies of murderers, con-men and other reprobates; his most amusing and rewarding subject was Maundy Gregory (1877-1941), who was convicted in 1933 of trafficking in titles.
In Maundy Gregory: Purveyor of Honours (1974), Cullen told how Gregory, the son of an impoverished clergyman, had gone down from Oxford without a degree, failed disastrously as a theatrical producer but developed a talent for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful.
After the First World War, Gregory passed himself off as an ostentatiously wealthy publisher, producing the Whitehall Gazette from a splendid office in Parliament Street, Westminster. He cultivated cordial relations with Scotland Yard and gained access to government ministers, chief among them the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.
By the early 1920s, Gregory had been taken on by the liberal Chief Whip, Freddy Guest, as a freelance "honours broker", selling titles in exchange for donations to party funds, while creaming off substantial commissions for himself. Scandalous though it was, there was nothing illegal about such activities until 1925, when an Act was passed making it an offence to trade titles.
To some extent the Act benefited Gregory since he could now keep the whole of any fee he might extract. He continued in his trade until he tried to sell a title to a war hero, Lt- Commander Billyard Leake DSO, who denounced him to the authorities. Gregory was prosecuted in 1933 and served two months in prison. Eventually, suspected of poisoning his flat-mate, he decamped to Brittany where he was arrested by the Gestapo and died in a prison camp.
While researching Gregory's career, Cullen discovered that one of Gregory's classmates at the small Banister Court school in Southampton had been Harold Davidson, the Rector of Stiffkey who was defrocked in 1932 for immoral conduct with women. Before the rector was mauled to death by a lion at Skegness, he and Gregory were involved in a disastrous revival of the musical Dorothy, which bombed in the West End in 1909.
Cullen went on to write a book about Davidson, The Prostitutes' Padre (1975). He suggested that the rector had three distinct personalities, none of them on speaking terms with the others. These were "Uncle Harold", the do-gooding zealot, "Little Jimmy" who went in for sexual "hanky panky", and "the Bunco Kid", an ecclesiastical con-man who wrote clever begging letters to susceptible millionaires.
Tom Alden Cullen was born on May 16 1913 in Oklahoma City, the son of a hotelier. When he was seven, the family moved to Long Beach, California. Tom went to school in San Pedro and studied economics and political science at the University of California before starting work as a journalist on the United Progressive News. He also joined the Communist Party. During the 1930s, Cullen campaigned on behalf of Upton Sinclair, who ran unsuccessfully for Governor of California as the Democratic party candidate.
Cullen joined the US Army in 1942, and served during the Second World War in Europe and Africa as a military journalist. Discharged as a technical sergeant in 1946, he worked for a while on trade magazines, then used the GI Bill to attend the Sorbonne in Paris.
During the 1950s, Cullen freelanced in France, Germany and India, before arriving in Britain. When the American government confiscated his passport because of his Communist connections, Cullen was given leave to stay on in Britain on a visitor's passport on the condition that he stay out of trouble.
He then began research on his first book, Autumn of Terror: Jack the Ripper, His Crimes and Times (1965). Cullen identified the Ripper as a Wykehamist barrister, Montague John Druitt, who committed suicide in December 1888, a month after the last Ripper murder. Druitt's motive, Cullen speculated, was to draw attention to the prostitutes and slums of London's East End. Though the evidence for this theory was far from conclusive, Cullen convincingly described the atmosphere of the dosshouses and hovels of Spitalfields, where most of the murders took place.
In researching his next book The Empress Brown (1969), a lively account of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her favourite gillie, John Brown, Cullen unearthed a letter from the dowager Queen in which she addressed Brown as "darling one". As one reviewer noted at the time: "No more intimate term of endearment, used by her in this connection, has ever before come to light." Cullen's other important discovery resurrected part of the Queen's Journal - one of the many destroyed by Princess Beatrice. The Queen had copied it into a letter of condolence to Brown's brother: "I told him no one loved him more than I did . . . and he answered 'Nor you - than me . . . No one loves you more."'
After his books about Maundy Gregory and the Vicar of Stiffkey, Cullen wrote Crippen: The Mild Murderer (1977). Though he had hitherto shown great skill in presenting murder cases in readable form, he was defeated by Dr Crippen. He portrayed Crippen as a decent chap with a dreadful wife, but offered no new theories to prove him innocent of her murder.
Tom Cullen was a genial, outgoing man who loved the theatre, classical music and long walks.
Thema: Tom Alden Cullen (Gelesen 6005 mal)