South African historian Charles van Onselen claims to have made a circumstantial stance for the identity of Jack the Ripper in his book The Fox and The Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath (published in April by Random House). van Onselen has come to believe that Joseph Silver, a notorious Johannesburg pimp who was in London at the time of the Ripper killings, may be the long-sought culprit.
"Ripperologists" call the identification far too tenuous, to which van Onselen replies "How many coincidences do you want to mount up in your mind simultaneously until you start saying this is a real possibility?"
