Searching The Silver Trial Summary

The Ripper
In “Searching the Silver Trial: Charles Van Onselen, Joe Silver, and Jack the Ripper” an article published in 2007 in Australasian Psychiatry, Robert Kaplan discusses the possibility of Joe Silver being Jack the Ripper with supporting evidence. Onselen’s investigation of the numerous brutal murders in Whitechapel, London, and Johannesburg supports that committed by the same murderer. Focused to Silver’s behaviors, suspicious profile of Silver, and evidence from criminal records. On the 31st of August 1888, over the course of ten weeks, five women, their families and the people of Whitechapel, London were terrified of the brutal act of those five women’s bodies being mutilated and slaughtered(217, Pars. 1). The criminal history of

Silver relocated frequently across the “Atlantic Ocean with no problem because it was opened up by the telegraph and speedy steamships, as his backyard, moving with casual abandon to whatever zone had something to offer him” (218, Quo. 12). “Silver kept moving, frustrating and infuriating legal authorities on four continents, driven by a deep urge that made sense to him but nobody else” (219, Quo. 18). Silver was arrested by the Austrians after returning back to Poland in the middle of World War I. Silver’s brain crumbled from neurosyphilis six weeks before the war ended, which he was released (219, Par.

24). Silver’s behaviors became more apparent that he was favoring the killer, Jack the Ripper. Silver working as a barber-surgeon indicated he was skilled with a knife, the slashing on the victims indicated the killer had knife skills such as a tailor, barber, or butcher (219, Par. 25). Kaplan explains that not only in Whitechapel at the time of the murderers that Joe Silver was there, but also traced to the area where the killings had occurred (219, Pars. 24-29). Silver’s profile, built by Van Onselen, matched closely to the profile of Jack the Ripper, built by the London police. Silver was poised on the edge of a catathymic crisis, by the age of twenty he was viewed as a psychopath (220, Par.30-37). Joseph Isaacs was a suspect of the murders as well as Silver was, but the time of the investigation of the murders was taking place during the time they were in custody. Three days after the murder Isaac and Silver were both released from jail (220, Pars.