An explosive new book on the serial killer concludes the murderer was Fred Deeming.
After fleeing the capital he laid low in Hull where he charmed society by posing as a millionaire rancher.
But while there he was secretly planning more murders and went on to claim seven more victims, including a teenage girl he met by chance after being released from Hull Prison.
The bankrupt plumber had fooled Yorkshire’s well-to-do with his dandy clothes and tall tales of owning a 3,000-acre Australian sheep farm and South African gold mines.
Deeming, who also masqueraded as a colonel in the Bengal Lancers, persuaded a local girl to marry him even though he already had a wife and four children.
He would later butcher his entire first family in cold blood by slitting their throats before fleeing to Australia where he was hanged for murdering a third woman he had also bigamously married.
The astonishing story of Jack the Ripper’s Hull connection has been pieced together by local historian Mike Covell.
He spent years trawling archives in the UK and Australia, including long-lost files at the Home Office and Scotland Yard.
Derbyshire born Deeming was 27 when he married Marie James, 26, from Wales, in 1881.
The couple, who had four kids, tried to start a new life in Cape Town and Australia.
But Deeming was constantly in trouble with the law for fraud.
They were forced to return to England where they split up.
And in 1888, he was living a bachelor life in Whitechapel when the Ripper murders began.
According to research by Hull historian Mike Covell, Deeming’s name appeared in a number of Scotland Yard reports on the Whitechapel murders.
In 1889, he showed up in Beverley, East Yorkshire, having left his first family in Birkenhead.
He was by then calling himself Frederick Lawson, a millionaire Australian rancher who had returned to England to claim his inheritance.
Mr Covell said: “He was a well-dressed man who appreciated fine clothes, and the best hotels.
“He mixed in the same circles as Hull and Beverley traders and because of his fancy clothes stood out among the fisherman.”
After months courting women around Hull, he married a young girl from Beverley called Nellie Matheson in the town's St Mary's Church in 1890.
Ditching his new bride in their honeymoon suite at the Royal Station Hotel in Hull, he visited photographer William Barry where he posed in his wedding suit and a stolen Masonic outfit.
He bought a new travel suit, and paid cash.
Then he bounced a cheque for £285 worth of jewellery, and left for South Africa the next day on the steamer SS Coleridge.
A tearful Nellie arrived back in Beverley to find the real Mrs Deeming waiting and both women went to police, who chartered a steamer to intercept the SS Coleridge off South America.
Deeming was brought back to serve nine months in Hull jail.
Shortly after he was released in July 1891, a farmer found his 18-year-old daughter Mary Jane Langley dead in a ditch near the jail with her throat cut and jewellery missing.
Deeming returned to his first wife, who had been trying to blackmail him while in jail.
He slaughtered her and the four children with a knife and Aborigine battle axe, and buried them in cement under the kitchen floor.
He had already met wife number three, Emily Mather, 25, and announced their engagement the same night at a party where guests danced over the spot where his first family were buried under new floorboards.
The couple emigrated to Melbourne where Deeming strangled Emily during a row on Christmas Day 1891.
Her rotting remains were found under the fireplace.
The cottage had been empty for weeks before a woman interested in renting the place opened the door and was overwhelmed by a dreadful stench.
While on the run, Deeming joined a matrimonial agency and proposed to two more women – but was arrested for murdering Emily by police who also recovered a blood-curdling collection of knives, swords and axes.
London dressmaker Deeming had been courting in 1888 came forward at the trial to claim the serial bigamist was The Ripper.
Records of the trial stated: "Deeming was in London during the autumn of 1888, when several of the murders occurred.
"The dressmaker says that the time Deeming left her company on the evening of Sept. 7th, was an hour before the time at which the medical testimony at the inquest indicated that the Chapman woman was probably murdered.
"A few days after the crime the man she believed was Deeming disappeared and she never saw him again.
"The opinion that Deeming committed several of the Ripper murders is strengthened in public opinion by the dressmaker's statement."
Scotland Yard, who had ignored Deeming as a suspect in 1888, took a belated interest when the bodies of his first family were found.
London detectives rushed to the trial in Melbourne, as it also emerged Deeming had written love letters to Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes.
According to the Mr Covell’s book, Catherine may have planned to turn Deeming in when she became the fourth woman brutally slain by Jack.
The book says she told police: "I have come back to earn the reward offered for the apprehension of the Whitechapel murderer. I think I know him."
"Mind he doesn't murder you too," replied the superintendent jocularly. "Oh, no fear of that," said Eddowes, who 24 hours later was a mutilated corpse."
Mr Covell, 37, who is now offering visitors tours of places linked to the Ripper story, said: "Previously, Deeming was thought to be in prison at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
"But I have found out this was not the case.
"A newspaper stand vendor described how Deeming always bought loads of newspapers after the murders and seemed very excited to read about them.
"The second Mrs Deeming later became a spinster teacher and had a lucky escape. Deeming's bigamy destroyed her dreams of marriage but saved her life.
"If Scotland Yard had got involved sooner he might never have left Hull Prison and lives would have been saved including those of his original family, third wife, and poor Mary Langley."
