THE REDJAC CHRONICLES: "20TH CENTURY, HERE WE COME!"

Madam Li Yu:

"Jack! You're back!"

Dr. John "Jack" York:

"I always come back."

'The Outer Limits'

Not long after returning to the early months of 1891 from the future of 1999, Redjac left England for America to ply its trade in the land of opportunity. And by April of that year it struck again, killing a sixty year old prostitute named Carrie Brown. Often called "Old Shakespeare" because she liked to recite the works of the Bard, Carrie Brown was found strangled and disemboweled in a seedy Bowery hotel.

It is unknown who was possessed by Redjac to be its host for the killing, but it most likely was the same host it inhabited for the ocean voyage to America. (I couldn't find a fictional ocean liner from any TV productions to serve as the vessel, so I'm leaning toward the Majestic of the White Star line, which was launched just the year before.) Since the crossing of the Atlantic took about twelve days, Redjac must have left England around April 10th or so.

If Redjac needed to feed during that voyage, it probably disposed of the body overboard and let the victim be chalked up as "lost at sea", rather than risk exposure in so confined a space.

The actual murderer was never caught and Ripper talk did find its way into the media. But the police framed an Algerian resident of the East River Hotel based only on dubious circumstantial evidence. It would be eleven years before he would be exonerated and by that time, Redjac had already moved on to several other cities.

I don't know if Redjac killed again in New York City at that time, but according to statistics compiled by a "Ripperologist" named Sir Guy, "Jack the Ripper" focused his attentions on Jersey City from 1891 to 1892. (A known Ripper suspect in the real world, George Chapman, was living in Jersey City at that time, which was why Carrie Brown's death was believed to be the work of Jack - she knew Chapman. So for Toobworld purposes, the televersion of George Chapman was Redjac's next host.)

Redjac/Chapman may have thought that city in New Jersey would not be as well-guarded as would be New York City, which could boast not only a strong police force, but also heroic individuals like private eye Nick Carter.

By 1961, Sir Guy had spent thirty years in the studies of Jack the Ripper and not only tracked him across the 20th Century, but he also believed that the Ripper was immortal. The only thing was, Sir Guy believed the Ripper to be one individual, rather than a series of hosts for an alien life force.

Sir Guy's theory was that Jack the Ripper only struck every three years and eight months. And that each series of murders was designed to extend the killer's life span. Also, Sir Guy believed that each series of murders was plotted out to form some kind of religious symbol when viewed on a map.

Here's what I think was actually going on - at some point in Sir Guy's thirty years of research, , Redjac became aware that it had a "hunter". Those religious symbol patterns noticed by Sir Guy were just Redjac's way of toying with him, as a cat would with a mouse. As for length of time between each series of murders as pointed out by Sir Guy - three years and eight months? Perhaps it just happened that way in the beginning by coincidence, but then Redjac was O'Bviously toying with Sir Guy again by continuing that pattern.

However, in the Toobworld Dynamic, Sir Guy's timetable was flawed from the beginning because we saw Jack The Ripper continue to kill after the "Canonical Five", starting with Lady Ellen and continuing with those other women from the real world. And Redjac would have needed to feed again long before that three year, eight month "down-time' had passed.

So it's likely that Redjac simply switched the style of how it dispatched its victims in order to avoid notice by Sir Guy during each hiatus.

Here is a list of those cities in which Sir Guy believed Jack the Ripper to have operated after leaving London:

First up would be Jersey City, New Jersey,
then Shanghai,
Vladivostock,
Dusseldorf,
Cleveland,
Bordeaux,
Calcutta,
and Milan.

By my rather poor calculations, that probably brought Jack's trail of victims up to 1921-1922. According to the shipboard computer on the starship Enterprise, by there would also have been eight more women murdered by Redjac in Shanghai in 1932, so it returned to the scene of the 1896 crime. Therefore, there are plenty of other cities plagued by the presence of Jack the Ripper until April of 1961, when Sir Guy postulated his theories to the police in the current city of Ripper-like murders.

(I'm not sure where the original short story by Robert Bloch places "Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper", but I'm thinking it was San Francisco and not New York for the TV version. There was a reference to a newspaper from New York which covered their town's spate of mutilation killings and there seemed to be plenty of more open spaces for city streets - as well as for a cemetary scene that felt like California just in the way it looked - but there was also mention of a subway from which Jack followed one of his victims. And in the night scenes there was a foggy atmosphere which could be found down by the docks in Frisco.)

In between those Ripper-styled killings which Redjac used to taunt Sir Guy, the alien may have simply strangled the women to get the fear produced upon which it fed.

Why there was one woman in New York City during the sweltering summer of 1956, Ellen Grant, who was so frightened of this "new" serial killer dubbed "the Creeper", that her fear must have been palpable to Redjac from blocks away. She drew him to her like a moth to a flame. (Her attack was depicted in the 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' episode entitled "The Creeper".)

But by April of 1961, as Redjac was dispatching women in San Francisco, once again in the Ripper style, it had grown tired of the decades-long game it had been playing with Sir Guy. The British criminologist, despite the flaws in his theories, had been the only one to have come closest to the truth since Dr. John York in 1888. And so Sir Guy became the latest victim of the Ripper, just outside a strip club (which featured the televersion of real world stripper Beverly Hills.)

No longer needing to play any games with how it killed its victims, Redjac's next recorded sprees in Toobworld both took place in 1974.......

"If by chance you happened to be in the Windy City

between May 28th and June 2nd of this year,

you would have had very good reason to be terrified.

During this period, Chicago was being stalked by a horror

so frightening, so fascinating,

that it ranks with the great mysteries of all times.

It’s been the fictional subject of novels, plays, films, even an opera.

Now, here, are the true facts….."

Carl Kolchak

'The Night Stalker'

In a nutshell: The INS reporter was able to electrocute this new host for Jack The Ripper.

But that was only the human body. Redjac easily escaped death by electrocution, and would later turn up in Kiev, USSR. There it killed five more women.

Apparently it was believed that Jack the Ripper again returned to Chicago during the 1990's, where 'Special Unit 2" engaged 'The Beast' in combat. The team erroneously believed that it was an ogre which was a missing link between mankind and the apes.

However, keeping this all in line with an overall Toobworld cohesiveness, I'm going to suggest that particular ogre was a child of rape between some poor unfortunate Victorian woman and Dr. Henry Jekyll (even though it was claimed to be over 300 years old). Iit was conceived during that phase when Jekyll was the brutish monster Edward Hyde and that altered DNA of his created this new horror.

And so Redjac must have possessed the ogre to carry out more murders in the Ripper style, but it was not the original Jack the Ripper host. And taking a cue from a previous host, Dr. Sir William Gull, Redjac/Ogre was hiding in plain sight of the 'Special Unit 2' team.

Combining Jack the Ripper with Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...... Apparently even Redjac enjoyed the idea of a Wold Newton-like crossover.....

BCnU!