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The Bell Tower: The Case of Jack the Ripper Finally Solved... in San Francisco
The year is 1896: The Jack the Ripper murders stop as mysteriously as they started. Five years later, in a San Francisco church, brutally murdered priests, choirboys, and parishioners begin to appear. The pastor, an English priest, bears an uncanny resemblance to the one eyewitness report of the sole survivor of a Jack the Ripper attack in London years earlier. But another man has already been arrested, tried, and convicted for the San Francisco slayings....
552 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1999
1 person is currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Robert Graysmith
22 books323 followersROBERT GRAYSMITH is the New York Times Bestselling author and illustrator of
Zodiac
,
Auto Focus
, and
Black Fire
. He was the political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle when the letters and cryptograms from the infamous Zodiac killer were opened in the morning editorial meetings. He lives in San Francisco where he continues to write and illustrate.
Graysmith's latest book Shooting Zodiac is now available in paperback!
As well as the beautiful new edition of The Sleeping Lady: The Trailside Murders Above the Golden Gate in paperback and Kindle!
Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Books-A-Million | Kobo | Apple Books | Google Play Books
Two films have been based on his books: Auto Focus and Zodiac. Graysmith is portrayed in the film Zodiac by Jake Gyllenhaal.
Also narrated by the author are the audiobooks Black Fire and Zodiac Unmasked .
Graysmith's latest book Shooting Zodiac is now available in paperback!
As well as the beautiful new edition of The Sleeping Lady: The Trailside Murders Above the Golden Gate in paperback and Kindle!
Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Books-A-Million | Kobo | Apple Books | Google Play Books
Two films have been based on his books: Auto Focus and Zodiac. Graysmith is portrayed in the film Zodiac by Jake Gyllenhaal.
Also narrated by the author are the audiobooks Black Fire and Zodiac Unmasked .
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 24, 2011
Sounded interesting, as I love Jack the Ripper, but Graysmith's theory is very weak and while the stories of the murders in question should have been interesting, he took so long to get to the point that they were an afterthought. As a journalist, I also thought I would enjoy the part of the book about the newspaper wars in San Francisco at the turn of the century, but that wound up just being cumbersome. Both my boyfriend, also a journalist, and I read the book and although we are both fast readers, neither of us could get through this easily. By the end, we were cursing the book and our stubborn refusal to read to the very end.
June 8, 2008
As true crime goes, I had high hopes. After all, Graysmith's Zodiac books were good. Plus I am fascinated by Ripperology. IF this had been a serial killer book that did NOT propose to be Jack the Ripper goes to America, I MIGHT have enjoyed it. But as it, the crimes had no similarity to those of the Ripper, so the book was flawed right away. Killers just don't change their MO that much. So I could not accept any of this as anything but sensationalism.
January 17, 2016
This was a good read -- a thoroughly novelistic treatment of both Theo Durrant and Jack the Ripper. The author does a good job of raising questions about Theo's case and how it was handled. The glimpse into turn-of-the-century San Francisco was very entertaining. Well worth a read.
August 10, 2008
One of the worst pieces of historical analysis I've ever read. Seriously terrible book.
June 10, 2017
I bought The Bell Tower for $2 at my local Friends of the Library's book sale. It was a good read--better written than either Zodiac or Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed--and Graysmith clearly knows and loves San Francisco very deeply. So on those counts, this was a pretty good book--although I deplore his decision to write from the PoVs of Durrant (suspect), Gibson (suspect), Lamont (victim), Williams (victim), a composite Chronicle journalist, William Randolph Hearst, M. H. de Young, etc. etc. (down to the nested matryoshka dolls of the chapters that are a fictional "journal" of Theo Durrant that Graysmith's fictional Chronicle reporter writes in order to solve--or "solve"--the murders), and all without citations so that it's impossible to tell how much he researched and how much is just shit he's making up. He says he didn't come to a realization of Jack Gibson's alter ego of Jack the Ripper until he was almost finished with the first draft of the book, and I--unworthily--wonder if his enlightenment wasn't more "this is a crazy stunt that will sell more copies," in much the vein of Hearst's approach to journalism, and less "I really believe this man was Jack the Ripper."
I know nothing about the murders of Blanche Lamont and Minnie Williams, so I can't speak to the reliability of Graysmith's version (although his almost complete failure to cite his sources makes me dubious), but I have done a fair amount of reading about Jack the Ripper, and I can tell you that Graysmith's theory is based on a version of events that--since he lists Philip Sugden's The Complete History of Jack the Ripper in his bibliography--he must know is incorrect. He cherry-picks for the evidence he wants, ignores the evidence he doesn't want, and insists throughout, bizarrely, that the vague, frequently contradictory, eyewitness descriptions of a man who might or might not have been Jack the Ripper are uncannily similar to descriptions of his chosen villain, Pastor John George "Jack" Gibson, and--I can't even believe I'm typing this--that "as I compared newspaper drawings of Pastor Gibson I found in the old map drawer, I noted the similarity to an eyewitness sketch of a wanted man [i.e., Jack the Ripper] I had seen in books" (510).
(1) What the actual fuck.
(2) I have never seen this "eyewitness sketch" before (that Graysmith has seen "in books"? come on), and like I said, I have done a fair amount of reading about Jack the Ripper.
(3) Looking at his reproductions of the drawings of Gibson and Jack, I don't see any resemblance any greater than you might see between any two sketches of Victorian men with small mustaches.
(4) He's hingeing a theory on the resemblance between newspaper drawings done in 1895 and a "police artist's sketch" (as it's captioned, rather different from the "eyewitness sketch" he claims in the main body of the text) which he says was published on October 6, 1888, and infers by juxtaposition was based on Lawende's description of the man he saw with Kate Eddowes on September 30. He's comparing drawings from life (although we have no way of knowing how accurate they are) with a--not very good--drawing from a description given (if it was based on Lawende's description) by a witness who looked at the man for less than five seconds at 1:30 A.M. on a drizzly night and who freely admitted he wouldn't recognize the man if he saw him again. Even if you grant there's a similarity, this still isn't even isn't circumstantial evidence. This isn't even hearsay evidence.
Okay. Even if we file the drawings under "every Ripperologist is allowed one crazy thing they can't let go of," his theory of Jack the Ripper's murders--that the Ripper was "motivated by religious mania, a hatred of prostitutes, and anti-Semitism" (462) and laid out his murders in the shape of a patriarchal cross--relies too heavily on his determination to prove that the Ripper was a clergyman and very little, if at all, on the actual evidence. The map of his patriarchal cross theory is beautiful, but it's beautiful nonsense, especially as one crucial point on the cross is actually not represented by any of the seven victims he's decided are his murderer's work (this includes Annie Millwood, who survived the attack of a man who stabbed her repeatedly in the legs and lower body on February 25, 1888). In fact, since the label for that particular X is down in the binding, I can't make out what it's supposed to be (UNREA . . . ZED ATTACK is all I can get), but Rupert Street is not familiar to me as a location either associated with the Ripper or with, say, the Thames Torso Murders. But he's numbered his seven victims (and, for some reason, Alice McKenzie, though not Rose Mylett or Frances Coles), and I found numbers 1 through 7, plus Alice McKenzie's 8. So this X is necessary to his theory (or he can't complete the upper bar of his patriarchal cross) but somewhat superfluous to reality.
And while anti-Semitism may or may not have played a direct role in the Ripper murders (it depends to a large extent on whether you count Elizabeth Stride in or out, and on whether you believe the two men encountered by Israel Schwartz were actually working together), if you leave out all of the Ripper letters, religious mania is an unsupported conclusion (very popular in the press and among the police, but utterly unsupported by the actual crimes). And there is no reason to think that any of the letters sent to anyone purporting to be from the Whitechapel murderer were genuine--except, just barely maybe, the "from Hell" letter (with accompanying half a kidney) received by the unfortunate George Akin Lusk. This is a snare that people keep falling into, and every time they do, I start to distrust their theories.
I wouldn't argue that Jack the Ripper necessarily hated prostitutes, although he might have. I would argue that he hated women, and that his victims, women who resorted to prostitution because they literally did not have the money (4d) for a bed, were women that were accessible to him. He chose them because they were the easiest possible pickings.
On the other hand, the young women murdered in San Francisco were not involved in prostitution, nor were they destitute. Blanche Lamont had been a schoolteacher in Montana before she came to San Francisco; Minnie Williams was a housemaid, greatly valued by her employers--so greatly that they endeavored to adopt her (they couldn't, because she was already 18)--and with a circle of friends. Both of them were young women who were immediately missed by family, employers, and friends. Blanche and Minnie weren't readily available on the street, and did not do their killer the ironic favor of finding a secluded spot in which he could murder them. (I am not here blaming the Ripper's victims for their deaths, any more than I blame Gary Ridgway's victims. By the nature of the only work they had, they had to go to isolated places with strange men. If you want to blame anything other than their murderers, blame the failure of Victorian London and late 20th century Washington State to legalize and regulate prostitution.) They had to be lured to the Emmanuel Baptist Church. And they weren't left on the street for the next passerby or patrolling constable to find. They were hidden (granted, Minnie wasn't well hidden, but she was hidden; Blanche and her clothing were very carefully hidden, and she probably wouldn't have been found, or at least not for a much longer span, if Minnie hadn't been). And while they were both strangled and stabbed, as general consensus is the Ripper's victims were, neither of them had her throat cut back to the bone in the Ripper's signature gesture. Also, Minnie was raped. (Blanche's body had decomposed too far for the forensic pathology of 1895 to make a determination.) And it seems fairly evident (as far as the forensic pathology of 1888 could determine) that the Ripper only had sex with his victims with his knife.
Tl;dr, I don't think Jack Gibson was Jack the Ripper.
He might have been the Devil in the Belfry (as Theo Durrant was called), but I don't know enough about the case, and I don't trust Graysmith's research enough, to make any kind of judgment.
I know nothing about the murders of Blanche Lamont and Minnie Williams, so I can't speak to the reliability of Graysmith's version (although his almost complete failure to cite his sources makes me dubious), but I have done a fair amount of reading about Jack the Ripper, and I can tell you that Graysmith's theory is based on a version of events that--since he lists Philip Sugden's The Complete History of Jack the Ripper in his bibliography--he must know is incorrect. He cherry-picks for the evidence he wants, ignores the evidence he doesn't want, and insists throughout, bizarrely, that the vague, frequently contradictory, eyewitness descriptions of a man who might or might not have been Jack the Ripper are uncannily similar to descriptions of his chosen villain, Pastor John George "Jack" Gibson, and--I can't even believe I'm typing this--that "as I compared newspaper drawings of Pastor Gibson I found in the old map drawer, I noted the similarity to an eyewitness sketch of a wanted man [i.e., Jack the Ripper] I had seen in books" (510).
(1) What the actual fuck.
(2) I have never seen this "eyewitness sketch" before (that Graysmith has seen "in books"? come on), and like I said, I have done a fair amount of reading about Jack the Ripper.
(3) Looking at his reproductions of the drawings of Gibson and Jack, I don't see any resemblance any greater than you might see between any two sketches of Victorian men with small mustaches.
(4) He's hingeing a theory on the resemblance between newspaper drawings done in 1895 and a "police artist's sketch" (as it's captioned, rather different from the "eyewitness sketch" he claims in the main body of the text) which he says was published on October 6, 1888, and infers by juxtaposition was based on Lawende's description of the man he saw with Kate Eddowes on September 30. He's comparing drawings from life (although we have no way of knowing how accurate they are) with a--not very good--drawing from a description given (if it was based on Lawende's description) by a witness who looked at the man for less than five seconds at 1:30 A.M. on a drizzly night and who freely admitted he wouldn't recognize the man if he saw him again. Even if you grant there's a similarity, this still isn't even isn't circumstantial evidence. This isn't even hearsay evidence.
Okay. Even if we file the drawings under "every Ripperologist is allowed one crazy thing they can't let go of," his theory of Jack the Ripper's murders--that the Ripper was "motivated by religious mania, a hatred of prostitutes, and anti-Semitism" (462) and laid out his murders in the shape of a patriarchal cross--relies too heavily on his determination to prove that the Ripper was a clergyman and very little, if at all, on the actual evidence. The map of his patriarchal cross theory is beautiful, but it's beautiful nonsense, especially as one crucial point on the cross is actually not represented by any of the seven victims he's decided are his murderer's work (this includes Annie Millwood, who survived the attack of a man who stabbed her repeatedly in the legs and lower body on February 25, 1888). In fact, since the label for that particular X is down in the binding, I can't make out what it's supposed to be (UNREA . . . ZED ATTACK is all I can get), but Rupert Street is not familiar to me as a location either associated with the Ripper or with, say, the Thames Torso Murders. But he's numbered his seven victims (and, for some reason, Alice McKenzie, though not Rose Mylett or Frances Coles), and I found numbers 1 through 7, plus Alice McKenzie's 8. So this X is necessary to his theory (or he can't complete the upper bar of his patriarchal cross) but somewhat superfluous to reality.
And while anti-Semitism may or may not have played a direct role in the Ripper murders (it depends to a large extent on whether you count Elizabeth Stride in or out, and on whether you believe the two men encountered by Israel Schwartz were actually working together), if you leave out all of the Ripper letters, religious mania is an unsupported conclusion (very popular in the press and among the police, but utterly unsupported by the actual crimes). And there is no reason to think that any of the letters sent to anyone purporting to be from the Whitechapel murderer were genuine--except, just barely maybe, the "from Hell" letter (with accompanying half a kidney) received by the unfortunate George Akin Lusk. This is a snare that people keep falling into, and every time they do, I start to distrust their theories.
I wouldn't argue that Jack the Ripper necessarily hated prostitutes, although he might have. I would argue that he hated women, and that his victims, women who resorted to prostitution because they literally did not have the money (4d) for a bed, were women that were accessible to him. He chose them because they were the easiest possible pickings.
On the other hand, the young women murdered in San Francisco were not involved in prostitution, nor were they destitute. Blanche Lamont had been a schoolteacher in Montana before she came to San Francisco; Minnie Williams was a housemaid, greatly valued by her employers--so greatly that they endeavored to adopt her (they couldn't, because she was already 18)--and with a circle of friends. Both of them were young women who were immediately missed by family, employers, and friends. Blanche and Minnie weren't readily available on the street, and did not do their killer the ironic favor of finding a secluded spot in which he could murder them. (I am not here blaming the Ripper's victims for their deaths, any more than I blame Gary Ridgway's victims. By the nature of the only work they had, they had to go to isolated places with strange men. If you want to blame anything other than their murderers, blame the failure of Victorian London and late 20th century Washington State to legalize and regulate prostitution.) They had to be lured to the Emmanuel Baptist Church. And they weren't left on the street for the next passerby or patrolling constable to find. They were hidden (granted, Minnie wasn't well hidden, but she was hidden; Blanche and her clothing were very carefully hidden, and she probably wouldn't have been found, or at least not for a much longer span, if Minnie hadn't been). And while they were both strangled and stabbed, as general consensus is the Ripper's victims were, neither of them had her throat cut back to the bone in the Ripper's signature gesture. Also, Minnie was raped. (Blanche's body had decomposed too far for the forensic pathology of 1895 to make a determination.) And it seems fairly evident (as far as the forensic pathology of 1888 could determine) that the Ripper only had sex with his victims with his knife.
Tl;dr, I don't think Jack Gibson was Jack the Ripper.
He might have been the Devil in the Belfry (as Theo Durrant was called), but I don't know enough about the case, and I don't trust Graysmith's research enough, to make any kind of judgment.
May 10, 2014
This book would have been improved if the author had just left out his vague, circumstantial, nearly laughable "evidence" for Pastor Gibson having been Jack the Ripper. Ignoring those parts, I very much enjoyed this book. Lots of great atmosphere about early San Francisco, and he makes a very compelling case for Pastor Gibson's guilt in the bell tower murders.
September 28, 2011
Graysmith presents an interesting theory, linking Jack the Ripper to the 2 murders for which Theo Durrant was convicted. Not sure I buy his theory.
March 7, 2011
This book sucks, don't read it. If you want to learn about Jack the Ripper, find another book.
August 17, 2024
More half baked rubbish from the writer who became obsessed with his own delusional theories about the Zodiac killer.
In this rambling epic of nonsense he turns his attention to Jack the Ripper.
His writings on the Zodiac case have been shown to contain multiple inaccuracies. This book takes us into the realms of fantasy. Awful and ridiculous.
In this rambling epic of nonsense he turns his attention to Jack the Ripper.
His writings on the Zodiac case have been shown to contain multiple inaccuracies. This book takes us into the realms of fantasy. Awful and ridiculous.
April 5, 2007
OK, so some of my reading the past month has been a bit dark, but this did end up being a pretty interesting read. Graysmith recaps some of the history and details of the Jack the Ripper killings in London and connects them to two murders that took place in a church in San Francisco in the late 1800's. I don't know if I buy his theory that Jack the Ripper may have come to the US, but the history of the ill-fated church and community in SF is really intruiging.
September 30, 2013
This is a long, heavy (literally), dense book. I completely enjoyed this alternative take on what happened to Jack the Ripper. While I feel like the author does not with certainty close the books on this still-fascinating case, he does provide a very in-depth look at the lives of key players during this period of San Francisco's history.
I recommend this to anyone who enjoys history, especially when it reads like fiction.
I recommend this to anyone who enjoys history, especially when it reads like fiction.
July 2, 2011
Another excellent Graysmith true cime analysis. Of all the Jack the Ripper theories I have heard of, this one is my new favorite - Jack puts up shop in San Fran'. Graysmith weaves in the tale of Hearst, the city, and Pastor Gibson's building in an entertaining way. Plenty of great Graysmith drawings in here, too.
July 12, 2009
this was so damn cool, Jack leaves Britian to become a priest in San Fran. either Graysmith is brilliant (a real possibility) or he spent waaaaay to much time inhaling at Day on the Greens and Grateful Dead concerts.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews