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On Dec. 30 I posted a blog about British historian M. J. “Mei” Trow and his candidate for the Whitechapel murderer who terrorized London in 1888: the maniac better known as Jack the Ripper. Trow’s findings are largely founded on the relatively new criminal investigative concept of “geographic profiling” – by which the area where a serial killer resides or works may be plotted with great accuracy using the locations of his crime scenes – as well as on the older and more familiar method of criminal profiling, in which the evidence of the crimes themselves offer clues to the perpetrator’s identity.

Trow is featured on the Discovery Channel program “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed,” which I saw in December; the show is based on Trow’s book “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009; distributed in the U.S. by Casemate Publishing), which I have just finished and also recommend. Here’s why …

Students of philosophy know the concept of “Occam’s razor”: Named for the medieval English Franciscan friar William of Occam, the “razor” – designed to cut through baloney in any era – is defined by our friends at Merriam-Webster as “a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.” Put more simply: Don’t reach for a complicated answer to a problem when there’s a simpler explanation available; or, as medical school students have been taught for generations: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

In “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer,” Mei Trow has done just that: waded into the morass of Ripper lore – rife with and blind alleys and “red herrings” (a favorite term among the Ripperologists, I note) – and come up with a logical suspect for the murders who was, unfortunately, written off as a mental incompetent and subsequently ignored at the outset of the original investigation.

That man was Robert Mann, a workhouse inmate who not only lived in the very part of London where most of the murders occurred but was employed as an attendant in the mortuary that served that area of the metropolis: Therefore, as a matter of procedure, Ripper’s gruesome handiwork would be brought to Mann’s workplace for forensic medical examination. Mann was not a doctor – far from it: His job was to unlock the morgue and take receipt of the bodies that the police brought in at all hours of the day and night. Like the eponymous Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz, in the original 1931 film, he would have done the heavy lifting for the investigating physician: washed the corpses, helped hoist them onto and off the slab, held the specimen jars waiting to be filled, cleaned up the mess afterward … In that capacity, he would also have observed trained surgeons at work, incidentally gaining some anatomical knowledge. And he would have had ready access to sharp instruments.

Mann would also have been called to the stand at inquests. This struck me as odd, and I asked Trow about it in my original interview last year on AmeriCollector.com (“The Ripper reexamined,” Dec. 30, 2009): Would his responsibilities in a mortuary gone beyond moving corpses around and cleaning up? Trow replied: “We know … that he was trusted to go out of the workhouse to collect corpses, so he is not merely ‘moving bodies around’ in the confines of his own mortuary. Anyone connected with the deceased, from relatives and friends to any eyewitnesses, the police and auxiliary staff (e.g., Mann), would be called to an inquest as a matter of routine.” In fact, Mann was called to testify at the first two Ripper inquests but was written off as disoriented and incoherent and therefore an unreliable witness.

In other words, while Londoners lived in fear of – and London’s finest frantically searched for – a babbling maniac (the “disorganized killer” of modern police parlance), the authorities actually dismissed the very first babbling maniac they encountered: one who could look forward to being physically close to his victims again and again and again.

Certainly, with over a century of criminological advances to draw on – including the relatively recent observation that serial murderers operate close to where they live and/or work – Trow can take the long view of the Whitechapel murders in identifying Mann as the killer, which he admits may never be proven conclusively. Nonetheless, the Ripperological community is a meticulous one: While police blunders are often cited, it’s interesting to note not only that no one has proposed Mann as a possible perp till now – I mean, why not check out EVERYONE with a tangible connection to the crimes, instead of Freemasons and Queen Victoria’s nephew? – but that Ripper investigators through the years have suffered from the same nearsightedness as Jack’s contemporary pursuers. It took Trow, wielding Occam’s discerning blade, to finger Mann as a geographically logical choice; as someone who would know bureaucratic procedure well enough to anticipate reunions with his victims in his morgue; and who would benefit, intentionally or not, by acting naturally when investigators shined their light on him, earning him his “REJECTED” stamp early on and enabling him to “hide in plain sight” from then on.

It’s not a novel concept, only one that’s newly and elegantly applied to the world’s most enduring murder mystery. Trow himself noted in our December interview that “the idea of a disturbed mortuary attendant first surfaced in the profiling carried on in 1988 by John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.” He also recounts in “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” how David Canter, author of “Mapping Murder: The Secrets of Geographical Profiling” (Virgin Books), once submitted a screenplay to a film company “in which the offender was as banal as his motive”: “It was turned down, said the company, because ‘the audience would feel cheated by such a denouement. They would want to learn that it was all even more complicated than they could have imagined, not less so.’ And so it is with Jack. This does an appalling disservice to the truth. Murder is very rarely exotic and conspiratorial; the only thing that is bizarre about serial killers is the crimes they commit. Everything else IS ordinary” (emphasis in the original).

Historians – and, I think, collectors as hobbyists and as “history detectives” – can greatly benefit from the levelheadedness of Trow’s work. You may not agree with his conclusion that Robert Mann was responsible for the “ ’orrible murders” in London in 1888 and possibly a couple more in 1889, but you’ll learn a thing or two from his mind-set and methodology, such as trying to get into another person’s frame of mind, accepting that people are usually guided by commonplace motives and, certainly, that they often make simple yet enduring mistakes. Fiddle with the key words in an eBay search, or type in common misspellings for a personal name, and you may well be rewarded with an item that other people miss; imagine where a folder may “logically” be misfiled and you may unearth information that has been long lost to other researchers.

This is a good, fast read that, thankfully, forgoes the usual lurid police photographs of the victims, which are on any number of Web sites anyway. Give “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” a try, and mind those hoofbeats …

Photos from “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” courtesy of M. J. Trow

Have you read "Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer"? We welcome your impressions of Mei Trow's book. Please post here or send them, along with a line or two about yourself, to LetsCollect@AmeriCollector.com.

I just got word that the 1,421 lots that the Alexander Autographs auction of Jan. 20 and 21, blogged on AmeriCollector.com on Jan. 19, realized more than a million bucks.

“Once again we saw very spirited bidding for fresh, high-quality material,” says Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Autographs, located in Stamford, Conn. “Collectors and investors never really left the autograph market – on the contrary, they see better material as a good investment and a potential hedge against inflation, and as a result, we’re seeing prices that at times exceeded our estimates be a factor of five or ten times.”

I’m not one to recommend collecting as an investment: As Elyse Luray of “History Detectives” says (AmeriCollector.com, Jan. 27), “BUY WHAT YOU LOVE – hands down, buy what you love.” But there is buying dumb and buying smart, for as Elyse also points out: “BUY GOOD … I hate to tell to buy things for value, but if you do ever need to sell your collection or want to sell your collection, you want to have things in it that are actually the best of the best. If you can’t afford to do that in the beginning, then ‘buy up’: Buy what you can afford and then trade it when you can get to the next better piece.”

I myself have won several lots in Alexander Autographs’ past few auctions, including two in the last one, and each time I felt I got great value – which is why I recommended checking them out. While I encountered a couple of glitches with the live bidding part of the recent auction – for example, it wasn’t clear to me that live bidding, which was handled by Artnet, required separate registration (on the other hand, I was approved in less than an hour while the auction was already in progress); and one of my live bids was inexplicably “withdrawn” and I had to reenter it (I won the item in the end) – others apparently were apparently as eager to bid as I was and hopefully got similar happy results.

Here are some of them:

• A letter by Abraham Lincoln to the secretary of the Navy confirming an appointment to the Naval Academy sold for $28,000.
• A large autographed photo of General George Patton took in $6,000.
• A signed photo in silver presentation frame from Adolf Hitler to General Gerd von Rundstedt went for $55,000.
• A written wartime bet between Dwight Eisenhower and British general Bernard Montgomery (signed by both) over the date Germany would surrender fetched $26,000.
• The signed contract I described on Jan. 19 in which Michael Jackson transferred his rights to “We Are the World” sold for $14,000.
• A biography of Albert Einstein signed by him got $4,750.
• A George Gershwin letter with a quote from “Rhapsody in Blue” made $8,000.
• A menu signed by Walt Disney hammered at $1,900.

Watch AmeriCollector.com for news of Alexander Autographs’ next auction, or visit their Web site: (www.AlexAutographs.com).

Part I of Alexander Autographs Auction: www.americollector.com/alexander-autographs/

Image courtesy of Alexander Autographs.

Your comments are always welcome and appreciated.

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, I recall my English teacher talking about how she was reading William Peter Blatty’s novel “The Exorcist” on a long car trip home: While her husband drove, she sat in the front passenger’s seat with a flashlight, so completely caught up in the book that she couldn’t put it down – despite carsickness, the bad lighting and general fatigue – until she’d finished.

“The Exorcist” scared the bejesus out of me as well, but forget the demonic possession – forget, even, the fashionable Northwest vampires: “Victim Six” (Pinnacle), a novel about serial murder by Gregg Olsen, is one book that will remind you just how much fun a great read really is. A New York Times best-selling true-crime writer based in Olalla, Wash., Olsen knows enough about the evil that men (and women, too, dearies) do in real life not to have to resort to the supernatural to know exactly how to creep you out. After all, he IS originally from Seattle …

Full disclosure: I have the honor of knowing Olsen and read “Victim Six” in manuscript; in fact, I did the initial copyedit on his request (for which I got paid seven big ones), since I copyedit manuscripts for New York trade book publishers for a living. In fact, I read the manuscript TWICE and I can tell you: There are short books that are almost torture to work on, and longer books that pull you right into the story. “Victim Six” was the latter: a compelling mystery with solid, three-dimensional characters, both likable and hateful; dialog that rings true; and a credible storyline … In other words, EXACTLY the kind of novel that made me want to get a job in book publishing in the first place.

As Roald Dahl once said of good children’s books and good ghost stories, good murder novels are “damnably difficult to write.” I know because I’m paid to work on quite a few of them, and even some of the really good ones are good only up until the point where the plot falls apart – the psychopathic sex murderer turns out to be a federal judge, or the ambassador to Liechtenstein, or a nuclear scientist working on the government’s biggest secret weapon, so the Pentagon is covering up his crimes; or else he (or increasingly she: THERE’S politically correctness running amuck!) has some incredibly goofy motive for killing – leaving the reader feeling thoroughly ripped off.

Well, with “Victim Six,” you’ll feel anything but. I won’t go beyond that, except to say that if you live in the Puget Sound area or are from this neck of the woods, “Victim Six” will impress you as a very “Northwest” thriller; if you have no connection with Washington State and don’t yet know Olsen’s work, you’ll soon discover why he is so popular. He knows how to tell a real good story.

WARNING: AmeriCollector.com does not encourage reading “Victim Six” on a Kindle wireless reading device or in book form while driving or as a passenger if you are given to sudden frightened outbursts that can startle or distract the driver. Do not read “Victim Six” aloud to small children, raging-hormone-charged teens or your wimpy significant other as a bedtime story. Read responsibly.

“Victim Six” shipped to bookstores on Jan. 26 and goes on sale in February. Learn more about Gregg Olsen by visiting his Web site: www.GreggOlsen.com. Meet the author himself at one of his upcoming bookstore appearances:

• Sat., Jan. 30, at 3 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Silverdale, Wash.
• Tues., Feb. 2, at 6 p.m.: Bethel Avenue Books, Port Orchard, Wash.
• Sat., Feb. 6, at noon: Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Seattle, Wash.
• Sat., Feb. 6, at 3:30 p.m.: Borders, Gig Harbor, Wash.
• Thurs., Feb. 11, at 10 a.m.: Mystery Book Club Read, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo, Wash.
• Thurs., Feb. 11, “drive-by” signing: Powell’s, Beaverton, Ore.
• Thurs., Feb. 11, at 7 p.m.: Murder by the Book, Portland, Ore.
• Fri., Feb. 12, at 6:30 p.m.: Tea Party Bookshop, Salem, Ore.
• Sat., Feb. 13, at noon: North by Northwest, Lincoln City, Ore.

Charismatic, inquisitive, intelligent, enthusiastic – did I neglect to say telegenic? – Elyse Luray, like her three fellow investigators on the PBS series “History Detectives", brings to the field of history all the energy, relevance and wonder that somehow got bled out of it in too many junior high and high school classrooms.

You can tell I’m very big on “History Detectives,” as a history buff and as a collector – although the folks who submit mysteries aren’t necessarily either: Someone in Oregon opens a trunk and finds a Revolutionary War–era poem apparently written by an American prisoner of war in Mother England; a guy in Seattle receives from his father a baseball signed and dated July 12, 1944 by former Major League pitcher Dizzy Dean, along his dad’s account of playing in an uncharacteristically integrated wartime Air Force ball game with Dean and Negro Leagues legend Satchel Paige … These are human-interest stories more than anything, but they demonstrate the kind of investigatory skills – the adventure of real research – that is part and parcel of world-class collecting.

What’s more, I note that “History Detectives” investigations often have a genealogical element. While many people think of genealogists as spidery and schoolmarmish, good ones know their beans about history and are as tenacious about pursuing a lead as Arnold Schwarzenegger was about tracking down Linda Hamilton in “The Terminator.” That’s an inspiration for collectors seeking as much knowledge about their treasures as they possibly can.

But I digress: Back to Elyse …

Originally from Baltimore, Elyse Luray graduated with a degree in art history from Newcomb College Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her creds in the auction and collectibles world – what you won’t know just from seeing her on PBS – is extensive. For example, she was animation art specialist, managed the Popular Culture department and set up the Arms & Armor and American Indian Art departments at Christie’s, where she worked as a licensed auctioneer and appraiser for 11 years (in 2000 she auctioned one of the pairs of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in “The Wizard of Oz” for $666,000). She has captained the block for a host of other auction houses (Steiner Sports, Grey Flannel Auctions, Bertoia Auctions, etc.) and charitable causes as well. Elyse has appeared and appraised on the Home & Garden Television show “If Walls Could Talk,” HGTV’s “Endless Yard Sale,” “The Early Show” on CBS and “Antiques Roadshow” on PBS; and she has evaluated the personal collection of cartoonist/animator/producer/all-around creative genius Chuck Jones and the archives and collections of such little-known startups as Warner Bros., DreamWorks, Lucasfilm and Hanna-Barbera Productions. The list goes on …

So imagine MY elation when Elyse agreed to talk about her personal collections with AmeriCollector.com! Here’s our interview from earlier in this month. Visit Elyse’s Web site: www.ElyseLuray.com.

AmeriCollector: You must collect a lot of things. What’s your main collecting interest?

Elyse: My main collection is actually Marx Brothers posters: one-sheets and inserts, not reproductions. My children’s last name is Marx and I have two boys, so they’re “the Marx brothers.” (Laughs.) All over my house are Marx Brothers posters. I got my first one maybe 25 years ago, before my children where born; but then I actually had boys, whose last name is Marx, and I started collecting more and more and more. The prices got really high, but then they kind went down again. So that’s probably my biggest collection.

It’s also hard, because you need to have the space for posters, and I don’t really have that much space anymore, so that kind of limits my buying.

I went through a very big stage of collecting bulldogs, since I had one – anything with a bulldog – and I probably ended up with a couple of hundred pieces of bulldog paraphernalia, things with an image of a bulldog and mainly old advertising pieces.

AC: So you don’t necessarily collect antiques.

Elyse: Well, you know, it’s funny you say that. I mean, I don’t consider my bulldog collection or Marx Brothers posters antiques, but nothing is later then 1950; in fact, some pieces are from the turn of the 20th century. Each is one-of-a-kind, and I stay away from limited editions. So I guess they are antiques. I also collect sterling silver serving pieces and trays, both American and European, and I don’t buy anything new. I don’t buy contemporary.

I don’t feel I collect that much because, with my show and with my work, I’m constantly around collections. It’s really weird for me, but when I work on an appraisal or a story, I kind of feel like I’m sharing the collection with the owner for a while. Because of what I do and the nature of my business, I feel like I’m around collections all the time … Actually, I AM around collections all the time! (Laughs.)

AC: I know you were at Christie’s for a long time, and I think you were working in the areas of pop culture and art, so I assumed you collected art.

Elyse: Well, I have a lot of Western art in my house, which came from my parents, and I did help help set up the American Indian Art department at Christie’s. One area of art that I actually bought and collected recently with my mother: the “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche” series; they’re prints and posters from the turn of the century. Lautrec, Mucha and Cheret were some of the more known illustrators. And it’s a series of prints produced in the early 1900s. The whole series is about …I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head: Let’s say 350, 400. My mom has them, each framed on one entire wall in her dining room and I have a couple scattered through out my house. And that’s definitely artwork, but it’s more of what we call a “multiple” market, because prints are multiples, meaning they are produced in a series and there is more then one. Prints, posters, photography – they fall into the multiple category.

AC: How do you build your collections?

Elyse: If you want me to give advice on how to collect, these are my key points:

BUY WHAT YOU LOVE – hands down, buy what you love. If you find a passion, follow it. Anything that you want to collect is OK. If you want to collect Hawaiian shirts, ashtrays, bells – anything that what you find interesting – then that’s what you should collect. There’s nothing you can’t collect, because that’s the beauty of it. Follow your passion, follow your dreams …

When you do find that one thing that gives you some type of emotional satisfaction that you want to start collecting it, my biggest piece of advice, besides buy what you like, is BUY GOOD: Buy things that are in good condition, buy things that are not going to fall apart or have a lot of damage or have a lot of restoration on them, because I find that those are the things that sustain themselves the longest. And I hate to tell to buy things for value, but if you do ever need to sell your collection or want to sell your collection, you want to have things in it that are actually the best of the best. If you can’t afford to do that in the beginning, then “buy up”: Buy what you can afford and then trade it when you can get to the next better piece.

AC: Is there any particular “holy grail” that you’re looking for, in terms of posters or even bulldogs?

Elyse: No, I haven’t really found my “holy grail” yet.

I wish I DID have a “holy grail”: I always want more. I’d like to collect other things, actually, at this point.

I’m not sure that anyone should have a “holy grail,” because after you get it, then you’re kind of, like, what do I do now? You know what I mean? (Laughs.) I would hate for someone to stop collecting.

AC: What would you collect?

Elyse: Too many things to really answer. I love antique advertising. I love old jars: I kind of started to collect them; they’re not expensive, they look really good and they’re very decorative in your house.

I don’t have the room for it, but if I had room, I’d collect a million other things. I’d love to collect old photography – black-and-white – and when I say “old,” I mean early-20th-century photography, not contemporary.

The problem – and you would probably be the same way, because you’re a collector – is that you don’t think of some things, and then you walk into somebody’s house and you see what they collect, and you think: “That’s the greatest idea! That’s brilliant! I love it!”

I was just in Sun Valley, Idaho, on vacation over Christmas, and I walked into somebody’s house, and they collect nutcrackers. They were exceptional cast-iron nutcrackers, and they must have had 200 of them, and you know, the characters that were used and the mechanics of the nutcrackers – it was just a brilliant thing to collect! I would never have thought of that before.

The beauty is that there is always something to collect!

Visit the History Detectives on PBS online at:  www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives

At 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 3, 1885, a mob of several hundred men marched through Tacoma’s Chinese community, rousting its last 200 residents and herding them nine miles south to the Lake View train station, in what is now Lakewood, as policemen and sheriff’s deputies looked on. After spending a cold, rainy night, many in partly open outbuildings, the Chinese were forced onto trains bound for Portland.

Chinese workers were instrumental in the construction of the nation’s transcontinental railroads in the 1860s and ’70s. By the early 1880s, however, the major railroad lines were nearing completion, and Chinese laborers were moving to the cities of the West to find other work, according to Ed Echtle, a Pacific Northwest historian specializing in Asian immigration. As other immigrant groups arrived from Europe, the competition for labor intensified. Unions began to organize unskilled workers and tapped into their aversion to the Chinese.

Anti-Chinese discrimination became federal policy in 1882 when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. immigration law designed to bar a specific nationality.

The Chinese became kind of a scapegoat for low wages because they were charged with working for less, undercutting white labor,” Echtle said. “And then in the 1880s there was an economic downturn, which sort of exacerbated things, so that the Exclusion Act was a political response to the pressure from constituents to ban unskilled Chinese labor from coming in to compete with white labor.

Yet, it was not all about labor and wages: Newspapers at the time alluded to foreign heathenism, to rats and squalor in the Chinese sections of towns, to foul smells that nauseated patrons at neighboring white businesses, to opium use and prostitution. A spark was being struck, and many Tacomans – from underemployed railroad and mill workers to smug storekeepers and social-climbing politicos – were eager to grab torches.

On Sept. 28, at an anti-Chinese rally in Seattle, it was resolved that the Chinese had to get out of Washington Territory by Nov. 1, and white-owned businesses were called upon to dismiss their Chinese employees. In Tacoma, where only a few people (Washington pioneer Ezra Meeker was one) spoke out against the agitators or defied their demands to fire their Chinese workers, about 450 Chinese boarded trains or ships or left by other means; the remaining 200 were marched out to Lake View on Nov 4. Historian Murray Morgan in his book “Puget’s Sound” described the procession: “Teamsters cracked their whips, the wagons lurched forward. The elderly and the sick Chinese were permitted to ride. The rest trudged after the wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold rain, duffle slung on poles over their shoulders or in laundry bags on their backs. Their sandals sucked mud; some took them off and went barefoot. Many were crying. Armed whites on horseback rode beside the refugees, herding them like cattle, and a guard of club-carrying whites brought up the rear, urging on the stragglers.”

They spent a miserable night, some in the station waiting room, where there was a single stove, others in freight sheds. According to Jules Alexander Karlin in a 1954 article in Pacific Historical Review the Chinese would maintain that the ordeal drove one woman, a merchant’s wife, insane, and that two of their number later died from their prolonged exposure to the weather.

Two days later, arsonists set fire to the vacated Chinese shops and dwellings of Little Canton. Tacoma’s Chinese community was effectively erased.

* * * * *

Tacoma was by no means the only American city to evict its Chinese residents; in fact, as University of Delaware professor Jean Pfaelzer reveals in her book “Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans” (hardcover published by Random House in 2007; paperback published by University of California Press in 2008), there were nearly 200 expulsions of Chinese populations from American communities in the American West and Northwest from the early 1850s to 1906.

White Protestant nativists – as well as immigrants whom the nativists vilified – were vocal in their objections to Chinese living in their midst, even as the latter were helping to build the railroads, working as launderers and domestics and laboring in mines, in canneries, in logging camps and on ranches. Notes Pfaelzer, “The white man’s racial rhetoric was, in fact, about himself: the Chinese worked too many hours; the Chinese worker was drugged on opium; the Chinese worker was slovenly; the Chinese debased the town and created the need for civic jobs; the Chinese ate rats; the Chinese were renters; the Chinese lived in overcrowded housing; the Chinese demanded the right to own property; the Chinese were expected to send scarce money back to their homeland. The Chinese were also derided as “sojourners,” people with unbreakable ties with their empire across the ocean and incapable of assimilating and becoming good, loyal American citizens – even if white Americans would have them. The assaults on life, liberty and property that resulted from this mind-set ranged from the spontaneous to the systematic: from armed gangs of resentful white prospectors evicting their Chinese counterparts from the California gold fields, to average citizens joining in boycotts to deprive their resident “celestials” of their livelihoods.

For example, in Eureka, Calif., in early 1885, an unfortunate incident in which a city councilman was shot to death during a dispute between two Chinese turned into an excuse for vigilantes to round up more than 300 Chinese residents, imprison them in warehouses, then force them onto ships bound for San Francisco. The eviction conducted in Washington Territory in November of that year would follow Eureka’s model.

By contrast, in late 1885 and early 1886, the white citizens of Truckee, Calif., sought a more peaceful means of expulsion by boycotting Chinese businesses and those that employed Chinese workers. Never mind the fact that Truckee’s Chinese were “renters, shoppers, and low-paid laborers, and white agents made money from their legal, real estate, and commercial transactions,” and that “seemingly, this interracial relationship benefited everyone,” writes Pfaelzer: The so-called Truckee Method, while slower than the Eureka Method, achieved the same goal.

Pfaelzer’s scholarship is exemplary, not just because it reveals that expulsions of Chinese were common exercises in ethnic cleansing – rather than just a few isolated incidents – in small towns and large over a period of more than 50 years, but because most of this information was there all along for the sifting, in newspaper accounts and public documents. No newly uncovered treasure trove of documents, no long-buried diaries suddenly brought to light: Rather, Pfaelzer took what others missed and added an essential and long-overdue chapter to our nation’s past.

But Pfaelzer gives us much more than a litany of shameful events: She shows that beleaguered Chinese were willing to stand up for themselves by using the legal system to sue for reparations, by testifying to the injustices that they were subjected to, by striking for fair wages and refusing to supply goods to hostile businesses – even purchasing arms to defend their homes and their lives. Certainly, the Chinese understood the rights and duties that American citizenship entailed; what they were denied was the paperwork that would give them that legal status.

Purchase Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans

Thanks to you, AmeriCollector.com now has a loyal readership, and it's growing daily: We had over 18,000 visitors last week, which is hugely gratifying.

At a juncture like this, I can’t help but think it’s the ideal time to reaffirm our mission: to provide a fun, interesting, informative venue of interest to collectors in a wide range of fields. We will endeavor to do so by offering features, news and a calendar of events that will hopefully become a valuable resource in your collecting adventures.

Whereas most collector Web sites are narrow in their subject matter – focusing on toys, say, or photographs, or music boxes – we at AmeriCollector want to be more diverse: In fact, we welcome reader submissions on any collectibles subject in the form of leads, advice, comments and questions, as well as reviews of shows, exhibits and other events you have recently attended. (As we’ve indicated before, we just request that you be honest, sincere and nice; check your facts; and try to include supporting and even contrary opinions from others. Needless to say, avoid using offensive language or innuendo: We’ll only have to cut it.)

Also, unlike dealer sites, we are not selling anything except space: While we welcome collectibles-related advertising, we will not run glowing accounts of people, businesses, auctions or events that we don’t feel comfortable with, don’t believe in or wouldn’t recommend to our own friends or family members. Of course, it’s not always possible to know in advance what an upcoming antique fair or museum exhibit is going to be like: In those cases we’ll attempt to give you a taste of what to expect through interviews with the exhibitors, organizers and others involved, then follow them up whenever possible. (Again, we also look forward to hearing about them from YOU.)

That said, let me urge my fellow autograph and memorabilia collectors to check out the Alexander Autographs 2010 Winter Historical Autograph & Manuscript Auction (viewable online at www.alexautographs.com), which will be held in two parts on Wed, Jan. 20, and Thurs., Jan. 21.

I don’t know how many people view the various collectibles auctions held by the many auction houses around the country, but I suspect that Alexander Autographs, located in Stamford, Conn., falls beneath the radar. In other words, I believe they have A LOT of interesting stuff, yet I don’t think many collectors know about them, which means less competition and more opportunities to win great items at great prices.

In fact, I suspect Alexander Autographs auctions are a magnet for other dealers, who can pick up some real bargains and then resell them to their regular clients.

(I myself have participated in two Alexander Autographs auctions, winning one lot each time, and bought about three items from their online store. In each case, even with the buyer’s premiums for the winning auction lots, I felt I got well below the going retail prices for those items.)

Some things you need to know:

• As always, you must be registered to bid, so if you aren’t already – or aren’t sure if you are – get right on it! You’re supposed to register 24 hours before the auction begins.

• Alexander Autographs has absentee bidding (where you bid in advance and hope for the best), live in-person bidding, live telephone bidding and live online bidding, if you can be at your computer when your lot numbers come up. Live bidding goes fast. My advice: Watch the bids, and if you want something bad enough, don’t balk – KEEP CLICKING: Electronics are not as instantaneous as you may think! Two auctions ago, I lost a cache of letters penned by wild-animal collector Frank “Bring ’Em Back Alive” Buck – written while on expedition in China, no less – because I hesitated five seconds.

• The minimum bid for an item is half the low estimate given in the lot description or $20, whichever is greater.

• Alexander Autographs’ live bidding is handled by an outside company (not eBay), which takes its cut: 3 percent of the hammer price. The buyer’s premium for absentee, in-person and live phone bidding is 19.5 percent; the buyer’s premium for live online bidding is 22.5 percent.

• It’s a two-part auction. Part I (lots 1 to 538) begins Wed. Jan. 20, at 10 a.m. EST; Part II (lots 539 to 1421) begins Thurs., Jan. 21, at 2 p.m. EST.

There are LOADS of treasures in this auction, at ALL PRICE POINTS. I wish I could afford to bid on any number of them, but, well, my family likes to eat sometimes. Here is a brief selection, with some few highlights …

• A great typed letter dated 1914 and signed by legendary Western lawman William “Bat” Masterson (1853–1921), written to Robert Marr Wright (1840–1915), Dodge City, Kansas. Like his compadre Masterson, Wright was a former frontiersman, Indian fighter and Dodge City pioneer; he also served a term as mayor of the town and authored the 1913 book “Dodge City: The Cowboy Capital.” The letter reads in part: “Mr. Taub was in to see me the other day and told me he has received six books from you all in good shape. Mr. Taub reads your book with much enthusiasm. He is the sort of a young man who likes that western stuff.” As any serious boxing collector knows, “Mr. Taub” was sportswriter/radio fight announcer Sam Taub (1886–1979), Masterson’s assistant at the New York Morning Telegraph. Est. $12,000 to $15,000 (no bids yet).

• A .32 caliber bullet seized from the Barrow Gang (a.k.a. Bonnie and Clyde and Associates) in a 1933 raid in Dallas County, Texas. The description doesn’t indicate the exact circumstances under which the ammo was taken, i.e., if it was left behind or dropped or taken off one of the gang members. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, of course, were killed by police machine-gun fire in Louisiana in 1934. The slug was lost for 30 years before being found in the attic of a Dallas County deputy whose father – who had been a Dallas County deputy as well – helped Sheriff R. A. Schmid chase the gang. According to the description, “the round is ‘live’ and should be handled accordingly.” Est. $400 to $600 (now at $200).

• A signed portrait photo of Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), 5 x 7, black-and-white. A pencil notation from the original owner on the back reads: "I received this picture on August 23, 1919.” Small fold to top left corner, a little smearing to signature. Est. $400 to $600 (now at $400).

• Various African-American historical items. More on this subject as we move into Black History Month, but there are a number of items of African-American interest in this sale, including slave bills of sale, est. $150 to $300.

• Typed, signed document in which Michael Jackson (1958–2009) transferred the rights to “We Are the World” to United Support of Artists for Africa in 1985. The actual recording featured a veritable pantheon of pop/rock superstars: Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Billy Joel, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson and loads of other, lesser deities. It raised over $63 million in aid for famine-stricken Africa, was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks and won three Grammys (Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group), an American Music Award and a People's Choice Award. The biggest-selling single of all time, it has sold 20 million copies as of last year. Est. $15,000 to $20,000.

• An original doodle of a dog with a tin can tied to its tail by Norman Rockwell (1894–1978). It’s on the first free endpaper of a first edition of “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator” by Arthur L. Guptill (1946), above an inscription that reads: "My very best wishes to The Lenox Library, Sincerely, Norman Rockwell.” The description indicates that the artist’s wife, Molly, taught at the library, located only five miles from The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. Est. $2,000 to $3,000 (no bids yet).

• Two documents (separate lots) signed by the Sun King, Louis XIV (1638–1715). Yeah, THAT Louis, of the trendsetting duds and the wild parties. These are untranslated: Maybe Louis was just cancelling his newspaper subscriptions, but try out your high school French on them and see. Both are small folio (about legal-size). One, signed in Versailles in 1687, has a damp stain on Louis’ signature, but it still looks good and is estimated to sell for $400 to $600 and is at $260 at this writing; the other, signed in St. Germain-en-Laye in 1670, has just a little bit of foxing on the edges and is estimated to go for $500 to $600 and is now at $320.

• An official 1930 New York Yankees Major League baseball autographed on the sweet spot by Babe Ruth (1895–1948) and by Lou Gehrig (1903–1941) on the opposite side. In addition to the Bambino and the Iron Horse, the ball’s signed by Lefty Gomez, Bill Dickey, Tony Lazzeri and twenty other players. The Babe’s signature is rated 4/10, and the ball comes with a certificate of authenticity from PSA/DNA, authenticator to major auction houses. Est. $4,000 to $5,000 (now at $3,750). This is one of three Ruth-signed balls in this auction.

All images courtesy of Alexander Autographs, www.AlexAutographs.com

What is it that makes the Pacific Northwest a little wild, a little woolly – and sometimes downright creepy?

The first time I ever visited Seattle, in 1992, I went into a T-shirt shop to buy souvenirs and struck up a conversation with the salesgirl and another customer, both Puget Sound natives. Being from out of the area, I asked what Washington State was like, and for some reason the conversation drifted to serial killers: The salesgirl, I think, remarked that (at that time) Washington had an estimated higher percentage of them than any of the other 49 states. When I asked why, the other customer cited factors that seemed to conducive to multiple murderers: the rain, the many heavily wooded, unpopulated areas … and the belief that it’s more “socially acceptable” to be a loner in the Northwest than elsewhere.

But I didn’t mean to cast a pall on your day: This blog is not about crime. However, I can’t help but think the above observation helps explain another scary (sort of) Northwest phenomenon: that large, hairy walking cliché we know as Bigfoot, Sasquatch (from a Salishan term for “wild man”) and Skookum (another Salishan term, translated as “mountain giant” or “mountain devil” – although in the Chinook language it can be an adjective with such nice connotations as “big,” “strong,” “dependable” and “hardworking,” like Mr. Clean or Fess Parker, star of the TV series “Davy Crockett”).

It’s easy for us world-weary twenty-first-century Internet travelers to call the Sasquatch stories a lot of bunkum (NOT a Salishan word), although the Indian legends may go back millennia, and reported sightings by white people – starting with fur traders in British Columbia in the 1880s – are certainly reliable if it could ever be proven that the eyewitnesses weren’t drunk and/or lonesome and in need of companionship, if you know what I mean.

Or maybe that’s the key: I note that two of the more prominent Sasquatch Web sites – the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, or BFRO (www.bfro.net), and the Seattle-based Sasquatch Information Society (www.bigfootinfo.org) – both report a preponderance of the nation’s “sightings" having been made in Washington State (most of which involve just footprints, says the Sasquatch Information Society, with the notation “Record has not been validated or is being studied”), and a plurality of those occurring (in descending order) in Skamania, Pierce, King, Snohomish and Lewis counties. In fact, only last August, according to the BFRO, a King County man reported seeing a “large, hair-covered figure while riding on train near the Cascade Tunnel.”

August, of course, was the month that the Washington State Liquor Control Board hiked the price of booze 6.5 percent, so clearly someone got a few shots in before last call. Expect a hell of a lot more sightings once the state legalizes pot.

And yet, goofiness aside, look what happened with Roswell and so many other cockamamie UFO sightings: Those people all insisted they KNEW what they had witnessed, with the conspiracy theorists among them asserting that the government was covering up close encounters of the third kind (not just Jack Kennedy’s and Bill Clinton’s). Meanwhile, the more cynical among us – including myself, standing uncomfortably alongside conspiracy theorists on the other end of the spectrum – were convinced that there was nothing extraterrestrial about flying saucers. We WERE still fighting the Cold War, weren’t we? No doubt, the Pentagon was up to something – and covering it up, for obvious reasons...

We were ALL right, to a greater or lesser degree: Most of the documented sightings of flying saucers WERE real – they just weren’t alien craft – and the military DID have something under wraps all those years. Turns out, the Nazis had been experimenting with the aeronautical possibilities of flying discs and flying wings for some time. In the spring of 1945, as the Third Reich crashed and burned, U.S. forces captured as many eager German weapons scientists and as much of their research as possible before the Soviets could; then OUR scientists picked up the ball – or the Frisbee, in this case – and ran with it for a few decades. (Behold: the Stealth bomber.)

Getting back to Bigfoot: Did the hunters and trappers and trekkers and picnickers really stumble across the spirits of Native American lore in those dripping Northwest forests – or were they the spirits in a bottle of backwoods hooch, the bugbears of white people with overactive imaginations and too much free time? Were they sightings of true biological missing links – a human subspecies that refused to go extinct – or of some ageing hippies who missed the exit to Olympia and decided to homestead in the woods? And is the correct plural “Bigfeet”?

We may never know for sure, but anyone with a passing interest in huge unidentified bipeds will surely find the new exhibit “Giants in the Mountains: The Search for Sasquatch” at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma (Jan. 23 to June 27) intriguing, entertaining and educational. Taking a broad look at “the Sasquatch phenomenon” (per the museum press release), “Giants in the Mountains” draws on all the various aspects of the subject – the legends, the sightings, the hoaxes and the legitimate scientific research – and includes visuals ranging from Native American artifacts to contemporary artistic depictions to physical evidence collected by the late anthropologist Dr. Grover Krantz and Idaho State University professor/Discovery Channel expert Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum.

I asked “Giants of the Mountains” curator Gwen Perkins, specialist for school and online programs at the Washington State History Museum, about the exhibit:

AmeriCollector: There was a Sasquatch exhibit at the State Capital Museum in Olympia a couple of years ago. Is this different?

Gwen Perkins: “Giants in the Mountains” is the same exhibit that was at the State Capital Museum. However, we have added new artifacts for the show, due to the increased space in Tacoma. Among some of the new things visitors will see will be more casts from Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, a “tree twist-off” and native masks from the collections of the Washington State Historical Society and the Burke Museum. We were also fortunate to be able to include illustrations by artist Rick Spears, illustrator for “Tales of the Cryptids.”

AC: Do you have a personal historical or anthropological interest in the Sasquatch legends and sightings? Did you volunteer to curate this exhibit?

Gwen: The exhibit itself was actually organized by the Washington State Historical Society, with myself as lead curator.

The idea of doing a Sasquatch exhibit was birthed after I had done a significant amount of research for one of our school programs here, in which a professional actor portrayed Dr. Grover Krantz and allowed students to ask him questions. Not long after that, the State Capital Museum in Olympia was trying to decide on a major exhibit for their museum. Sasquatch was suggested, due to the popularity of that presentation and staff members’ interest in the subject.

The exhibit premiered in Olympia in 2007. It did very well at that museum and so we wanted to bring it to Tacoma in order to give more people a chance to see it, examine what’s on display and draw their own conclusions. We’re all excited to see it back, particularly those of us who were involved in the original exhibit curation and programming. The Sasquatch community is a great group of people: One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this subject is the opportunity to connect with visitors from across the nation.

The exhibit also coincides with another on display called “Icons of Washington History.” After all, what better icon of the Pacific Northwest can you think of than Sasquatch? (That’s my opinion, of course.) But one of the other points of the exhibit that I wanted visitors to understand is how far-reaching stories of Sasquatch really are, not only in terms of place but time as well. So while it’s seen as a regional story to many Washingtonians, the exhibit itself also explains that there have been stories and reported sightings of this being that go back hundreds of years.

AC: Does the exhibit lean toward belief or skepticism, or does it intend to present both sides of the subject and let the visitor decide?

Gwen: The exhibit does not take one point of view or another. We present the story of this being and leave it up to the visitor to draw their own conclusions.

AC: Have there been any recent sightings, and what individuals or agencies keep tabs on these?

Gwen: Sightings of Sasquatch are reported constantly and across the nation. One of the organizations most diligent in tracking these sightings is the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. They have a web site where they track sightings across the nation: As I type this, Washington has had 479 reported incidences since September of 2007. BFRO is just one of a number of groups that shares information. There are several websites and blogs devoted to Sasquatch: Cryptomundo (www.Cryptomundo.com), Bigfoot Times (www.BigfootTimes.net), Oregon Bigfoot (www.OregonBigfoot.com) and North American Bigfoot (www.NorthAmericanBigfoot.blogspot.com), just to name a couple. These groups aren’t all in the Northwest, either: One of the most active is located in Texas – the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservatory (www.TexasBigfoot.org).

AC: What do Native Americans of the Western Washington tribes think of the interest in Sasquatch? Are there any investigators/proponents among them?

Gwen: I think that you will find there is just as much diversity of opinion among the tribes as in any community as to whether or not Sasquatch exists but also as to which form this being takes. I have met some who are out there actively investigating Sasquatch but many more who perceive this being as part of the environment and the natural cycle of life. I have also met Native Americans who were not believers as well.

Decide for yourself. The Washington State History Museum is located at 1911 Pacific Ave., in downtown Tacoma, right off 1-5. Hours are Wed. to Fri. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with extended hours and free admission every third Thursday from 2 to 8 p.m.); Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults; $7 for seniors (age 60 and above); and $6 for students and military with valid ID. Children (age 5 and below) and members are FREE. For more information, call (888) BE-THERE or visit www.WashingtonHistory.org.

Drawing by Rick Spears/Darby Creek Publishing and are from "Tales of the Cryptids" by Kelly Milner Halls. (Rick Spears)

Images courtesy of Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science

Washington State History Museum: Sasquatch Press Release

Purchase Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, by Dr. Jeffery Medlrum

If eBay is any indicator, the collectibles market is heating up again: I’ve noted a lot of interesting stuff and some vigorous bidding of late, a sure sign that the economy is improving. And while a lot of folks aren’t out of the woods yet, financially – many are downsizing their collections because they were downsized themselves at work – at least we’re not reliving the Great Depression, with soup lines and dust bowls and old ladies selling pencils on street corners (although I was hoping certain culpable Wall Street speculators would oblige us by taking swan dives out of high windows).

All of this is good news for sellers, the needy and the greedy alike. For buyers, it means that great deals are going to get harder to find: If you’re actively building your collection – and who isn’t, at least in spirit? – this is the time to be vigilant.

In the coming months here on AmeriCollector.com, you can look forward to notices of auctions worth checking out both for the uniqueness of the lots and the chance to nab a fine item at a good price.

This week, have a look at the R & R Auction (www.rrauction.com) January autograph auction, which closes Wed., Jan. 13 (the 10-minute rule starts at 10 p.m. EST). The buyer’s premium is 20 percent, and there are both high- and low-end items and, as of this writing, plenty that have no opening bids (which usually start at $100). Here’s a sampling across the price range:

• A pretty unbelievable album of autographs collected by the wife of a major general in the Civil War, containing more than 200 signatures of 19th-century notables. The collection includes three presidents, officers on both Union and Confederate sides, statesmen, authors and other. Among them: Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, James A. Garfield, John C. Fremont, William T. Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, William S. Rosencrans, Carl Schurz, Daniel E. Sickles, Henry W. Slocum, Lew Wallace, P. G. T. Beauregard, Nathaniel P. Banks, Henry Ward Beecher, Salmon P. Chase, Schuyler Colfax, Horace Greeley, Edward Stanton, William H. Seward, “Billy” Sunday, Gideon Welles and Thaddeus Stevens. Now at $1,612; next bid $1,774.

• A copy of mobster Mickey Cohen’s autobiography “In My Own Words” with an autograph note to a collector tipped in. Cohen had been a prizefighter in an earlier life, and I think it ironic that his handwriting – like that of some other pugs, like Jack Dempsey in his younger years – has a loopy, schoolgirlish look. Who woulda thought it? Now at $100; next bid $110.

• A great Walt Disney signed typed letter, on his personal letterhead and dated Dec. 1, 1941, to Louis Desser, managing editor of the Hollywood Star-News. It talks about the newspaper’s good review of “Dumbo,” and Disney encloses payment for a three-year subscription for Spencer Tracy’s son, a private-school student. Now at $2,716; next bid $2,988.

• Various Charles Schulz signed items, from inscribed “Peanuts” books (bidding unopened at $100) to a hand-inked comic strip panel from 1971 featuring Snoopy at his typewriter (now $15,700; next bid $17,270).

• Seven pages of diagrams annotated by former Major League catcher/OSS agent Moe Berg and Swiss physicist Paul Scherrer detailing atomic chain reactions. Dated Dec. 26, 1944, this precedes the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan by eight months. An amazing piece of World War II and science history (now $888; next bid $977).

• Beautiful satin-finish 8x10 color photo Yankees sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, signed in blue felt-tip (now $862; next bid $949).

• Two signed 8x10 photos of Michael Jackson, one with him posing with a whole bunch of cops (both now at $267; next bid $294).

• A 1955 songbook titled “The Elvis Presley Album of Juke Box Favorites,” signed “Yours, Elvis Presley.” Some condition issues, but on the 75th anniversary of the King’s birth, it already has 19 bidders (now $1,952; next bid $2,148).

• A George Gershwin cancelled personal check for $25, dated Oct. 26, 1935 ($294; next bid $324).

• A black-and-white 11x14 portrait of star-crossed Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, inscribed in fountain pen “To Fred, with all love and gratitude, Frances” (now $900; next bid $990).

A framed autograph, especially a photo, makes a great Valentine’s Day gift. Remember, you have to register to bid.

Photos courtesy of R&R Auctions, www.rrauction.com.

If you’re not already on the “Antiques Roadshow” e-mail list – or have never checked out Antiques Roadshow Online on the PBS Web site (www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow) – you’re missing out on lots of great information: profiles of the appraisers and their past appraisals; recommended reading by subject; even a teacher’s guide with featured objects to get kids interested in history (one of our missions, too, here at AmeriCollector.com).

Meanwhile, the “Roadshow” has just announced their 2010 tour stops:

San Diego, California	June 12
Billings, Montana	June 26
Miami Beach, Florida	July 10
Biloxi, Mississippi	July 24
Des Moines, Iowa	August 7
Washington, D.C.	August 21

Tickets to the “Roadshow” are given out by random drawing, and you have to apply by April 19. Visit the Web site to learn more.

And by the way, just last month, “Antiques Roadshow” executive producer Marsha Bemko published a book about the show: “Antiques Roadshow Behind the Scenes” (Touchstone/Stonesong Press, $16.99). Watch for a review of it in this blog.

Order book online:  Antiques Roadshow Behind the Scenes: An Insider's Guide to PBS's #1 Weekly Show

Visit AmeriCollector.com Calendar of Events

Serial murderers, including serial murderers with sexual motivation, have terrorized humanity since time immemorial; we just don’t know to what extent. The vampire and werewolf legends of lore no doubt account for many of these, and I think it’s interesting that a recent medical theory attributes some historical cases of vampirism to rabies infection: It seems that humans who contract the virus have been known not merely to bite a lot but to have supercharged, insatiable sex drives. Think what you like, it had to have been a lousy way to go, for everyone involved.

But I don’t mean to be flip. In this age of advanced communications, we are used to knowing – or being able to access – the news any time we want it and, with simulcasts, even as it happens. The same goes for crime forensics: Who knew even 25 years ago that DNA analysis would be so widely and routinely used to identify perpetrators and discount innocent suspects? Yet, 1,200 or even 120 years ago, what reasonable explanation or law-enforcement measures could be offered when, one by one, people suddenly went missing or turned up mutilated in a remote area of China or Peru or France or Russia?

Or Victorian England … That’s where the most notorious, the most enduring series of murders (in terms of the public consciousness) took place within a few short months in 1888, in an area of London called Whitechapel, by a butcher who fearful Britons would nickname and the world would come to know as Jack the Ripper. At least, in the teeming capital of the British Empire, news traveled fast, and any supernatural theories – if any were offered – fell before modern psychology. And while I would point out that Bram Stoker knew his audience when he published “Dracula” nine years later (in 1897), in the waning years of the 19th century, modern, enlightened Londoners knew Jack was no vampire but a very human and very dangerous nutcase. The fact that the murderer was never caught or his identity conclusively confirmed ensured that “Ripperology” would be a rich subject for writers and filmmakers to mine for the next century; I’m certain it will remain so for at least one more.

I won’t recount the five horrific murders of prostitutes that have been “canonically” (according to the Wikipedia entry) attributed to this particular deviant: All the gruesome details, including a number of hideous police photos, can readily be found online, along with some theories linking subsequent murders to the Ripper and others, ranging from the cockeyed to the credible, suggesting any number of contemporary and new suspects as the killer. There have also been a couple of pretty fascinating programs about the case on the Discovery Channel, one of which submits that Jack booked passage to the United States and resumed his killing spree in New York City. Another, “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed,” which I find even more compelling, is based on the book “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, Nov. 2009) by British historian and former high school teacher M. J. (“Mei”) Trow, who has written a slew of mystery novels as well as historical studies of Spartacus, the 11th-century Spanish nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (“El Cid”) and Vlad III (a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century Wallachian prince on whom the character Dracula was based).

In a nutshell, Trow has gone through the published records of the Ripper murders and identified an overlooked individual, Robert Mann, as a very likely possibility for Jack. A workhouse inmate employed as a mortuary attendant, Mann was called to testify at the first two inquests (in the slayings of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman) but was disoriented and incoherent – which not discounted him as a credible witness but also failed to raise a red flag, so to speak, that Mann might have had something to do with the crimes. What’s more, using the modern investigative procedure of geographic profiling pioneered by Canadian police investigator Kim Rossmo – whose amazing mathematical system can show on a map where a serial killer likely lives and/or works, based on the locations of the crime scenes, with a success rate as high as 85 percent – Trow demonstrates that (1) both Mann’s living quarters and the mortuary where he worked fell well within the high-probability area for the Ripper’s home turf, and (2) based on where the victims were discovered, Mann would have been well aware that at least two of the bodies would be brought to the very same mortuary where he worked, giving him more opportunity to gloat over his handiwork (in his 1999 book “Geographical Profiling,” Rossmo has written that 22 percent of serial killers return to their victims’ dump sites).

Why do I blog on a Jack the Ripper investigation? Because I believe that collecting – of objects or information – should be an intellectual adventure, a quest to discover something new and interesting or even momentous. We are always hearing of “cold” cases that are not just revisited but solved, and the perpetrators brought to justice decades after committing their crimes; of recent archaeological discoveries that force us to revise conventional views of people and events in the distant past; of newly found books and letters and photographs long buried in library stacks and archives that add something surprising to subjects we thought we knew all about. I think Mei Trow’s research, based as it is on new methodology, can broaden any collector’s or armchair historian’s or even criminal investigator’s vistas.

Here’s my recent interview with the author. If you have any specific questions or original research on Jack the Ripper, you can contact Trow at isjack@live.co.uk.

AmeriCollector: Is there still a lot of interest in Jack the Ripper among Britons and Londoners in particular?

Mei Trow: The Ripper crimes form the basis of an ongoing industry, especially in London itself, where there are nightly tours of the murder sites and other related areas. Although Ripperology now has an international dimension – Jack is famous throughout the world – it is inevitable that the real focus of interest should be in the place where the crimes were carried out. Bookshops throughout Britain that contain true, crime sections invariably have books on Jack, and The Whitechapel Society with its regular periodical sends out to a wide fan base.

AC: Is this still considered an open case by the police? Are there officers assigned to the case to assist researchers, or do some do it purely out of personal interest?

Mei: There is a general belief that no unsolved case is ever closed, but that is simply not true. The Ripper case was officially closed in 1892, although documentation relating to it has survived to the present day. There is therefore no dedicated team of serving police officers working on the case, although several retired policemen have gone into print with various suspects.

AC: The online edition of the Daily Mail (Oct. 2009) indicates you have been actively focusing on Robert Mann as a suspect for the past two years. When and how did you have an “Ah ha!” moment when Mann appeared to you as a viable perpetrator of the crime? Did anyone at all suspect him at the time?

Mei: The “Ah ha!” moment probably came when I realized that Mann had been abandoned in the workhouse as a child by his mother, who would have been in her forties at the time. This corresponds not only to the ages of all his victims (except Mary Kelly) but is also consonant with behavioral psychologists’ ideas of serial killer motive. The fact that Robert Mann was dismissed as being liable to fits and therefore unreliable as a witness at the inquest into Annie Chapman means that he was never seriously considered as a suspect. Four of his seven victims were brought to his mortuary, and the idea of a disturbed mortuary attendant first surfaced in the profiling carried in 1988 by John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.

AC: In “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed” on the Discovery Channel, it was pointed out that Mann was called to testify in the Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman inquests. Yet, was he not merely a workhouse inmate assisting in a mortuary and, one would assume, assisting a doctor performing autopsies? Why would he have been called as a witness? Would his responsibilities in a mortuary gone beyond moving corpses around and cleaning up? Could he have gotten actual training in opening up bodies?

Mei: I think it unlikely that Mann would have received any formal training but he would have been on hand to observe autopsies at close hand. We know from other sources that he was trusted to go out of the workhouse to collect corpses, so he is not merely “moving bodies around” in the confines of his own mortuary. Anyone connected with the deceased, from relatives and friends to any eyewitnesses, the police and auxiliary staff (e.g., Mann), would be called to an inquest as a matter of routine.

AC: At the time of the murders, Whitechapel was an impoverished area where many immigrants lived, and in fact there were some immigrants on the list of suspects. Mann was supposedly born in Mile End New Town around 1835, yet Mann is a German name, and he was called Mansel in one account. Is it possible that he was in fact an immigrant? Would that be relevant to the investigation?

Mei: I do not believe that Mann was an immigrant but the fact that his father was a weaver may imply that the family were among the religiously persecuted Huguenots who emigrated to England for safety in the 17th century. Although largely French, some of these Huguenots would have lived along the Rhineland border with Germany. The name Mansel and Marne, which is also ascribed to him, are simply careless work by British journalists.

AC: Your belief in the authenticity of the “From Hell” Ripper letter (sent to Scotland Yard with part of a victim’s kidney) was pretty compelling: The handwriting, spelling and other characteristics seemed uncontrived. Are there no confirmed writing samples belonging to Robert Mann that might be compared to the letter to prove Mann had written it? (Mann would have been about 54 at the time of the murders.)

Mei: Nothing has come to light yet. My belief is that he probably received a rudimentary education at what in England were called National Schools (for ages five to 10) and thereafter as a child in the workhouse might have received continuing educational basics after that. It is unlikely he would be required to write anything, even in the context of his job as mortuary attendant. Since he never married, we do not even have a signature on marriage records.

AC: Is there any Ripper material that, in your opinion, has not been adequately examined and that may conceivably yield more leads?

Mei: There has been so much research into this case especially over the last 50 years that I doubt whether anything has yet to surface. Having said that, to give you one example, the autopsy notes on Mary Kelly compiled by Dr. Thomas Bond had gone missing and were posted anonymously to Scotland Yard in 1987. A number of items from the original police investigation have gone missing and have not been returned. It was not the custom of any British police force to keep artifacts from cases after they were closed. The exhibits in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum are there almost by accident.

AC: Are there other avenues that you are pursuing that may help confirm or discount Robert Mann as a suspect?

Mei: It would be great to learn more about Mann’s childhood and how other people (e.g., workhouse inmates) regarded him. Unfortunately, people of this class were usually illiterate and so left nothing in the way of letters, diaries, etc.

AC: You have said that we will probably never know conclusively who Jack the Ripper really was. Have you ever brainstormed with other Ripper investigators, either privately or in a panel discussion, on your respective preferred suspects? Are Ripper investigators very competitive about their findings, or do you ever collaborate?

Mei: I would love to take part in a television debate of this kind. However, I suspect we would all end up shouting at each other and achieving no consensus!

AC: Certainly, modern forensic technology (like plotting on a map the likely area where a killer lives or works, based on the murder locations) has helped your investigation. Are there other aspects of the “Internet Age” that have been of special value to you in your research?

Mei: Many records, such as census information and workhouse details, are now available online. Although all these exist in various libraries and institutions around the country, to be able to work on them at the press of a button is obviously a huge advantage. I must mention the excellent Casebook: Jack the Ripper site (www.Casebook.org), which contains a mass of material collated by Ripperologists and forms a basis for ongoing research.

AC: Do you ever receive viable ideas or leads from amateur investigators? Are there many collectors of Ripper lore, and what do their collections comprise? Have you encountered many people with a strictly sordid fixation on the case?

Mei: There is a body of Ripper-related material – the first full book on the murders was written in 1908 – and there are people who collect anything to do with the case. I myself have 20-plus books written from a number of different angles. Undoubtedly, there are people obsessed with the murders purely because of their grisly nature. The same people probably collect details from the lives of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, etc.

AC: There have been some very graphic crime photos of Ripper victims in books and even on TV: The Mary Kelly murder scene is a case in point. Yet, “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed” showed only the faces of some of the dead victims. Was this intended to de-sensationalize the subject and focus more on the investigatory aspects of the story?

Mei: Yes, this decision was taken by the program’s director because we wanted to focus on the new suspect and the mechanics of finding him. Having said that, I think the dramatic reconstructions were very vivid and caught something of the horror of the original.

AC: Many people nowadays – adults as well as younger people – express no interest in history; many have negative memories of history class from their schooldays. Are you still a high school history teacher, and does your writing inspire your students to pursue historical subjects?

Mei: I gave up teaching last year to pursue writing, TV appearances, etc., and I like to think that a lot of students remember my lessons with interest and affection. It is all too common an experience that a fascinating subject is killed stone dead by a boring teacher; I hope I was never one of those. Yesterday, I received a phone call from a student of mine of over 30 years ago asking me to contribute to a forthcoming TV history program. This has nothing to do with Jack, but he told me that the first lesson he had with me, which was an introduction to the problems of historical research, was about the Ripper.

AC: What’s your next project?

Mei: At the moment I am updating my biography of Vlad the Impaler to take into account the new wave of interest in vampires.

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Book by Mei Trow:
JACK THE RIPPER: QUEST FOR A KILLER

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