JACK THE RIPPER IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS (1889)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** The residents of Brooklyn Heights had always seemed to have much more to fear from one another than from the butcheresque stylings of London’s Jack The Ripper. His fiendish work had been performed with the great learnedness of a doctor, but, comfortingly, it had been executed all the way across the Atlantic in the East End of London. It was likely because of this distance that Brooklynites felt free to regale in the stories of the Ripper’s murders and to wonder at the identity of the modern-day butcher. On 18 January in 1889, however, all of that may have changed, when a man using the “common, every day” name Smith stepped up to a Brooklyn Heights boarding house – with his bag and great trunks en tow – and quietly checked himself in for a long stay. TWOMBLEY, THE INDIAN HERB DOCTOR The former “Indian herb doctor,” who had, through “judicious and extensive advertising, managed to make a handsome income,” engaged Mrs. Lamb’s rooms, where he also took his meals. Dr. Francis Twombley, also known as Tumblety, in his former life in the U.S. – for he was born and raised in the States – had, in the early 1860s, had an office and laboratory on Fulton Street, near Nassau. (According […]
