Northwest Collector

Scripophily.com: Stock certificates and more . . .

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From time to time I check out Scripophily.com, a major dealer in collectible stock certificates—not just for those but for other assorted ephemera as well: letters, autographs, etc. Here’s a current selection (by no means complete!) related to the Old West.

Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles check signed by Isaias W. Hellman and Nelson Story in 1871. The oldest bank in Southern California, the Farmers and Merchants Bank was founded in 1871 by John D. Downey and Isaias W. Hellman, a successful German Jewish merchant and real estate speculator. Nelson Story had a colorful career that included freighting between Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, driving cattle and a wagon train from Texas to Montana through hostile Indian territory, as well as mining, milling, ranching, and banking. He is a major figure in the history of Bozeman, Montana. $295. https://scripophily.net/farmers-and-merchants-bank-of-los-angeles-1871-signed-by-isaias-w-hellman-and-nelson-story/

Pawnee Bill signed check for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East Show, dated 1912. Pawnee Bill (Gordon William Lillie, 1860-1942) was a trapper, cowboy, and waiter before finding employment as a teacher at the Pawnee Agency in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). In 1883 he was hired as a Pawnee interpreter in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He later started his own show,  Pawnee Bill’s Historical Wild West, Indian Museum and Encampment. Pawnee Bill and Buffalo Bill Cody merged their shows in 1908. I’ve seen a number of Pawnee Bill checks, and this is an early one. $395.00. https://scripophily.net/buffalo-bills-wild-west-and-pawnee-bills-great-far-east-show-check-signed-by-pawnee-bill-annie-get-your-gun-musical-is-based-on-this-company-1912

Total Wreck Mining and Milling Co. Stock Certificate, Arizona Territory, 1882. What a great name! This certificate is signed by the company president, J. M. Requa, and secretary, John McMillan. Issued to Nathan R. Vail. Mint condition. The mine was established in southwest Arizona in 1879 and incorporated in New York. It was the top silver producer in it’s time. $795. https://scripophily.net/total-wreck-mining-and-milling-co-stock-certificate-arizona-territory-1882/

Rosebud Indian Mission stock certificate, Dakota Territory, 1888. Signed by the mission’s financial secretary, Charles W. Shelton. Biblical references in upper left and upper right corners. Uneven toning otherwise very fine. According to the September 1885 issue of The American Missionary, shares in the mission—i.e., donations—were sold at a dime apiece as a way to raise the $8,000 needed to build the mission, which would serve 8,000 Native kids. If a religious school could get its students to buy 300 shares, they’d receive a large certificate, suitable for framing, to put up on their wall—and they could nominate a life member of the American Missionary Association for every additional 300 shares they bought. This share was issued to a William Taylor. $495. https://scripophily.net/rosebud-indian-mission-dakota-1888/

Remington typewriter vignette.

Remington Standard Typewriter letter from the Chicago office to the cashier of the First National Bank of Helena, Montana, 1887. The Remington firearms company started producing typewriters in 1873. This letter will be of interest to typewriter collectors (like actor Tom Hanks, who has more than 300 of them), letterhead collectors, as well as Montana buffs. Great vignette of an old-timey typewriter—presumably state-of-the-art in the late 1880s. $139.95. https://scripophily.net/remington-standard-typewriter-montana-1887/

Oregon and Transcontinental Company signed by George Pullman of the Pullman Palace Car Company,  1881. Printed by the American Banknote Company, with a vignette of Indians overlooking the unchanging and changing landscape: “oceans, rivers, mountains, farms, towns, miners and trains.”

Oregon and Transcontinental Company vignette.

(No doubt intended to illustrate progress but a sad representation of the vanishing frontier.) Issued to George Pullman and signed by him on the verso. $295. https://scripophily.net/oregon-and-transcontinental-company-signed-by-george-pullman-pullman-palace-car-company-1881/

All images courtesy of Scripophily.com.

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Why I bid by phone

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This article appeared in slightly different form on WorthPoint in 2019.

Art auction at Christie’s, New York, by Bernard Gotfryd, November 18, 1981. The painting is Primeval Landscape by William Baziotes, which was used as the cover illustration for the auction catalog. Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

I’m always surprised when an item comes up for auction and the bidding goes through the roof two weeks before the closing date. Maybe it’s a contest of egos, like T. rexes (their brains the size of walnuts) fighting over a piece of carrion, with the winner roaring in triumph as the losers stomp away.

Rational bidders, however, want to commit the least amount of money to winning an auction, and that means exercising self-restraint. So it makes sense not to start a bidding war. Mindless counterbidding only amps up the competition, like throwing chum to sharks. Better to let someone else have the high bid for as long as possible: they may become complacent or forget about the auction altogether, giving you the chance to win with a last-minute “stealth” bid. Or you yourself may have second thoughts about how high to go—or even whether to bid. By waiting, you keep your options open.

My advice is: Apart from eBay—where an early bid (again, keep it low) should prevent a seller from considering “Buy It Now” offers—don’t bid in an online auction until the last possible moment.

But not all auctions are online only: Many auction houses, large and small—even those that use online bidding platforms like LiveAuctioneers and Invaluable—still hold traditional in-person auctions with live telephone bidding on their premises in tandem with live online bidding. Or the online bidding portions of their auctions may close before the live “cattle rattle” begins.

That’s why phone bidding is well worth the effort: If you can’t fly out to, say, Hooterville (or the nearest county with an airport) and bid with the locals in someone’s barn, then phone bidding is the next best thing. There’s even the bonus of a lower buyer’s premium than the bidding platforms charge—what Mr. Ziffel and his clever pig, Arnold, would pay by bidding from the floor. (Bear in mind, though, that you may have to arrange for third-party shipping if the auctioneer doesn’t handle it in-house.)

It makes sense not to start a bidding war. Mindless counterbidding only amps up the competition, like throwing chum to sharks. Better to let someone else have the high bid for as long as possible: they may become complacent or forget about the auction altogether . . .

With phone bidding, someone on-site will call you several lots before your item comes up and serve as your eyes and ears in the auction room, asking you if you want to continue if you are outbid by someone in the room, a previously placed absentee bid, or another phone bidder. In my experience, the smaller the auction house and the more out-of-the-way it is, the less competition you can expect from the people actually attending.

But there are other reasons why I prefer to bid by phone, even if an auctioneer has simultaneous live online bidding along with on-site, in-person bidding:

  • You may experience a computer glitch. Just as on eBay, a server problem or a lost Internet connection can mean you’re out of the running. In one case, even with my Internet connection fully functioning, my bid on one of the big auction platforms didn’t register in the final moments, and I lost an item I probably would have won.
  • Some auctioneers give preference to in-person bidders. Suppose you leave an absentee bid on an online bidding platform: Surely the auctioneer will give it priority over an equal bid by someone in the auction room—a bid made hours or days after you placed yours—right? Not necessarily. I actually thought I had won an item—the winning bid was the same as the absentee bid I’d left earlier—only to learn that the auctioneer had awarded it to somebody sitting ten feet away. (House policy, he said.)
  • An auctioneer may fail to check the highest bids on the online auction platform they use. Maybe they’re new to online bidding, or maybe they’re just distracted, but an auctioneer may award a lot to a lower in-person bid just because they neglect to confirm what the highest absentee bid was. In one case it was mine.
  • You may think you won an item during live online bidding, only to see the bidding reopened. That happened to me once as well: One of my favorite auction houses started using a live online bidding system that still had some kinks in it and I won an item at a low price—even saw a message saying I had won the lot—then stepped away from my computer, only to return to find that the bidding had resumed in my absence and I had lost the item. When I complained, the auctioneer claimed that reopening an auction for delayed bids is common industry practice. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t think it would have played out the same way if I had been bidding by phone.

But beware: Even phone bidding is not error-free. In one case, I and my proxy bidder on the other end of the line were waiting for my lot to come up—and the bid caller skipped it. Apparently, he decided to award it to an absentee bidder without realizing that a phone bidder was waiting to join the auction. Needless to say, my proxy bidder and I were both stunned. There was a happy ending, though: I immediately raised the issue with the auction house—with the very person who had arranged for me to bid by phone (always get their name!)—and she notified the auctioneer, who awarded me the item for the next bid increment.

The upshot: Before bidding in an auction, read the terms carefully, including the ways you can bid. If phone bidding is available, and you have reliable telephone service, you might consider it. It takes a little planning—you must register ahead of time and be available to speak with the proxy when your lot comes up, even if it’s at an odd hour—but it’s well worth the effort.

James Mooney and Temple Lea Houston

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This marks the start of a new feature on Northwest Collector: cool finds that other collectors missed.

I love getting interesting stuff cheap—especially when there are no competing bids at auction. It means I spotted something others didn’t. How much fun is that?

My fellow Old West collectors may appreciate this recent purchase. . .

Envelope addressed to James Mooney

James Mooney (1861–1921) was a self-taught ethnographer and authority on the American Indian; he wrote important works on the Cherokee, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. In the 1880s he joined the Bureau of Ethnology (which would be absorbed by the Smithsonian) and investigated the Wounded Knee “Outbreak of 1890” at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He published his research on the Ghost Dance (U.S. Army suppression of which led to the assassination of Sitting Bull, conflict with the Lakota, and the subsequent massacre) in bureau’s 14th annual report in 1896 (a popular issue and somewhat pricy volume, presumably in large part because of extensive Mooney article, but you can download a pdf from the Smithsonian website). Mooney was also an accomplished photographer, and original prints of his Indian images are rare and expensive. Almost all of his letters seem to be at the Smithsonian and therefore are virtually unobtainable.

James Mooney. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian.

No surprise, then, that this cover, sent in 1904, contained no letter, but it’s still an item with a story or two. 

For one thing, it’s written to Mooney in Mount Scott, Oklahoma (i.e., Oklahoma Territory, which, with Indian Territory, would become the state of Oklahoma in 1907). Mount Scott, named for General Winfield Scott, is a peak in the Wichita range and located in the what was then the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation. Mooney was obviously doing fieldwork.

There are also a few barely legible notations, one of which says “Also has Lance Heads, Hair Plates . . . Medicine Masks . . .” Apparently the writer had artifacts to show Mooney or sell to him.

So who was the writer? Here’s where it gets really interesting.

The return address is for Appelget & Houston, Attorneys at Law, of Woodward, Oklahoma, I was unable to find out much about law office partner Anthony Appelget apart from the fact that he and his family arrived in Woodward from Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1900.

Houston is another story. It turns out that the other partner in the firm was Temple Lea Houston (1860–1905), youngest child of Texas legend Sam Houston. A born adventurer with an intellectual bent and a bit of an iconoclast with an affinity for the Indians, Temple Lea Houston served in the Texas senate from 1885 to 1889. According to Texas Tech University archivist Hugh Allen Anderson, “although flamboyant and sometimes eccentric in dress and appearance, Houston won a reputation as a brilliant trial lawyer and a gifted speaker, whose oratory was laced with allusions to the Bible and classical literature. He was a dead shot and often carried a pearl-handled pistol . . .”[1] On one notable occasion, writes True West magazine features editor Mark Boardman, Houston “insulted opposing counsel Ed Jennings during an 1895 trial in Woodward . . . Jennings responded in kind. And then the fight moved to a different kind of bar.” At Jack Garvey’s saloon, the animosity boiled over. Ed Jennings and his brother John got into a shoot-out with Houston. Ed was killed. John was hit but survived.

Temple Lea Houston. Image number 1980_088_001_Temple_Houston from the Jake Johnson Collection, courtesy of Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

“John Jennings and his other brothers Al and Frank then took the outlaw trail in a six month misadventure,” Boardman adds, concluding: “Bad lawyers. Bad gunfighters. Bad criminals.”[2]

“Houston was acquitted after acting as his own counsel and pleading self-defense. Twenty witnesses testified that Ed Jennings had drawn first,” writes “hometown” on the website Hometown by Handlebar, in an article that features the best “primary source” documents on Temple Houston that I’ve seen online.[3]

But the bad blood between Houston and the Jenning family didn’t end there. The following year Ed Jennings’s father, a judge, ran into Temple Houston’s young son on the street when the boy was returning home from school. The judge spat in the younger Houston’s face in response to something the kid said. “[Temple] Houston killed father Judge Jennings in the same saloon where Houston had killed son Ed Jennings . . .” notes hometown. “In 1897 ‘the son of Sam Houston’ pleaded guilty and was fined $300 for killing Judge Jennings in 1896.”[4]

Badassness aside, Houston was an inspired courtroom performer and legal advocate. In 1899, Woodward prostitute Minnie Stacey was put on trial for, um, prostitution, but lacked legal representation; the judge asked Houston to take on the case. “He had all of ten minutes to prepare a defense,” writes John Troesser of TexasEscapes.com, a really excellent online magazine devoted to the history of the Lone Star State. “Since everyone in town knew her—or perhaps we should say everyone in town was aware of her reputation—Temple knew that a defense was hopeless. So he attacked men in general for creating women like her and was so forceful in his condemnation that there wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom—excepting the lawyers.”[5]

Houston’s defense of Stacey is now known as the “Soiled Dove Plea” or “Plea for a Fallen Woman.”

Obviously, Houston—the subject of the 1980 biography Temple Houston: Lawyer with a Gun by Glen Shirley (University of Oklahoma Press)—was the kind of character that fascinates students of the Old West like your humble correspondent.

Which adds that more spice to this cover: I was able to find a letter by Temple Houston online (priced at $1,500) and—cowabunga!—the handwriting matched perfectly. Purchase price: $19.99 plus tax and shipping. Satisfaction value: priceless.

[1] Hugh Allen Anderson, “Temple Lea Houston: A Legacy of Law and Oratory in Texas,” Texas State Historical Association, 1952, updated October 26, 2019, accessed July 13, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/houston-temple-lea.

[2] Mark Boardman, “Temple Houston,” True West, June 18, 2015, accessed July 13, 2025, https://truewestmagazine.com/article/temple-houston/.

[3] hometown, “Temple Houston: Standing in the Shadow of Sam,” Hometown by Handlebar, August 15, 2019, accessed July 16, 2025, https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/p-7219/.

[4] hometown, “Temple Houston.”

[5] John Troesser, “Temple Lea Houston: Son of Sam,” TexasEscapes.com, October 2002, accessed July 14, 2025, http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasPersonalities/TempleLeaHouston/TempleLeaHouston.htm#google_vignette.

Barn sale purchase is major find for savvy buyer . . . and what we can learn from it

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Everyone loves a success story, and I believe that’s the biggest reason for the popularity of Antiques Road Show: the idea that a funny ceramic figurine that was the family joke for years is actually a museum piece; that a map rescued from a dumpster is a rare piece of Americana; that a print purchased at a thrift shop for a few bucks is an original Dürer engraving worth many thousands—all of these are retellings of “Cinderella” that few can resist imagining happening to themselves.

Needless to say, there are way fewer Antiques Roadshow segments—and many more Roadshow tour appraisals that are not filmed—in which the hopes of an item’s owner are crushed: the item is not rare or valuable; the condition is so bad as to make it almost worthless; the amount the owner paid is pretty much the market price, or even more; or—worst of all—the damn thing is a fake!

Unfortunately, a litany of bad news makes for lousy TV programming. Still, that’s what happens in most cases. Not everyone is a winner.

Which is why I offer a doff of the hat to Allen Treibitz of Heritage Gallery Auctions in Patchogue, Long Island (HeritageGalleryAuctions.com)—by coincidence, less than 15 minutes from where I grew up. Allen went to a barn sale in the Hamptons and had the good sense to shell out all of $50 for a painting by an artist named Emily Carr titled Masset Q.C.I. 1912, seen here:

Emily Carr, Masset, Q.C.I. Image used by permission of Heffel Fine Art Auction House, www.Heffel.com.

Now, if this raises lots of questions in your mind, you’re not alone. Who was Emily Carr? What is that object in the painting? What does Massett Q.C.I. mean? And are there really still barns in the Hamptons with things you can buy for $50? (I didn’t think you could get a Caffè Americano at a Starbucks in the Hamptons for fifty bucks!)

If I can pat myself on the back, when I read about Allen’s find, I recognized Emily Carr’s name, but it took me a moment to place her: when I was about to move to the Pacific Northwest twenty-five years ago, I briefly considered applying to the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Then everything fell into place: Emily Carr (1871–1945) was an eminent Canadian artist who was much influenced by the Northwest First Nations peoples. The object in the painting is actually a mortuary totem pole (the coloring threw me off), and Massett Q.C.I. refers to the Haida village of Massett, Graham Island, in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia—something I learned through a simple Google search, which also turned up this oddly familiar image:

Mortuary totem pole at Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, BC, October 1913. Photo by Archdeacon W. H. Collison (1847–1922). Postcard by J. D. Allen Photo Co. Image used by permission of University of Northern British Columbia Archives & Special Collections, UNBC Accession No. 2009.7.1.080, https://search.nbca.unbc.ca/index.php/mortuary-totem-pole-at-masset-queen-charlotte-islands-bc.

For a bear on a pole, he gets around. But I digress . . .

Allen Treibitz made international headlines not just for his smart purchase (there’s gold in them thar barns) but for consigning the piece to Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House (www.Heffel.com), whose savvy publicity people knew exactly what to do with it. The auction—which was held in November of last year, was a Major Event, not just for the Emily Carr painting but also for others by Canadian artists James Hart, Frederick Varley, Marcelle Ferron, and Kenojuak Ashevak—and Massett Q.C.I., which was estimated to fetch roughly US$70,000 to $140,000, fetched just over US$242,000, including the buyer’s premium. (Some of the work by the above-mentioned artists realized much, much more—but they didn’t come with the cachet of being found in a barn on Long Island.)

I couldn’t help asking Allen some questions about his decision to purchase the piece and his buying process in general:

Me: What attracted you to the painting?

Allen Treibitz: The painting had a look that stood out from most of the works that I see.

Me: Did you recognize the image as a totem pole before you researched the artist?

AT: I recognized that it was an animal on a pole in a rural setting. Having the title as Masset, Q.C.I. helped pinpoint the site and that it was an Indigenous work. 

Me: Have you made other great finds like this in the past?

AT: I have had many great finds, but this one is the most significant and valuable in my career as a dealer/lover of art. 

Me: Do you always research items before you buy or bid?

AT: Research always depends on the situation at hand. Sometimes it’s research on the fly or could be that it’s a feeling I have from doing this most of my life. 

Me: Any advice for other “treasure hunters”?

AT: These great works are out there to be discovered, but it’s very rare to find something this important. 

So what’s the takeaway here?

(1) Great finds are out there, although you may not be able to buy a second home with one. Allen Treibitz is an art expert and dealer who presumably sees a lot of artwork for sale, in barns and elsewhere, and even he hasn’t scored this big before. But it does happen.

(2) Do your homework! It amazes me whenever I see overpriced stuff on eBay (it’s always “extremely rare!” when it actually isn’t) or with a high starting bid in another auction. You just have to check the prices. If you are registered with LiveAuctioneers.com or Invaluable.com, you can see what an item sold for on their platform if it ever came up there. Or you can subscribe to WorthPoint or one of the other websites that tell you past auction prices over many platforms. Some auction houses also allow you to see past auction prices. If you are flea market frequenter or estate sale enthusiast, use your cell phone to do your due diligence “in the field” and download any apps you need beforehand. A little solid research can save you a lot of money—as well as expose sellers who wildly exaggerate the rarity and value of their stuff.

(3) Know your collecting area! The more expert you are, the better your instincts will be, and the more likely you’ll make a smart purchase if you can’t adequately research a super-rare or one-of-a-kind item beforehand.

(4) Don’t turn up your nose at barn sales . . . or library sales or garage/yard/rummage sales or church bazaars or thrift shops. Some of the best finds come from those venues.

Happy hunting!

You don’t know Jack . . . but crime historian M. J. Trow does

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I just saw a recent (2023) documentary TV series called Becoming Evil: Serial Killers Among Us; Unsolved Cases. Episode 1 largely dealt with one of the earliest and most famous cases, the 1888 butchery of five prostitutes (some contend there were others) in the Whitechapel section of London. The murderer was never caught and his identity—he was presumably a man, and suspicious males had been sighted—is hotly contested to this day. Yet we all know him as Jack the Ripper.

Illustrations relating to the Whitechapel or “Jack the Ripper” murders. The Illustrated Police News, London, Nov. 24, 1888. Courtesy of the British Library.

The first couple of episodes of Becoming Evil: Serial Killers Among Us; Unsolved Cases were worthwhile to me because they explored other early serial murder cases as well—and not just in England but in the United States. (Yes, Virginia, there are documented cases of psychopathic serial killers in America going back at least until the mid-19th century.) But what made me sit up and notice was the fact that the Jack the Ripper segment featured commentary by a British historian and true-crime writer named M. J. Trow, who has theorized on the identity of Jack, and also the fact that the filmmakers kept showing an image of a 30-something dark-haired man with a mustache and wearing a cap—implying that this was an image of the person whom Trow has figured for the killer.

Now, I interviewed M. J. Trow by email in 2009 after seeing him on another show about Jack the Ripper. He had just published a book called Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009), in which he suggested that Jack may have been a morgue attendant and workhouse resident named Robert Mann. If the photo that Becoming Evil was implying was the Ripper was actually Robert Mann, that seemed to me to be BIG NEWS: an actual photograph of a suspect who wasn’t a wacky guess, like Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, or the American known mass murderer Francis Tumblety, a more likely but still a much-debated candidate for the crimes. (Incidentally, M. J. Trow’s suggestion that Robert Mann was the Ripper has also been pooh-poohed by many “Ripperologists”—Jack the Ripper buffs, for lack of a better word, an opinionated bunch whose interest is nevertheless serious rather than prurient and whose knowledge of the murders is encyclopedic.)

So I contacted Trow about it. Surprisingly, he didn’t even know about the release of Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer—let alone got paid for the interview—and informed me that the photo of Robert Mann was “totally spurious, just a generic picture of some guy in the street.” Damn!

Well, my recent exchange with Trow inspired me to rerun our original 2009 interview, which is still a favorite of mine.

Here goes . . .

“Jack the Ripper: Who Is He? What Is He? Where Is He???” Image taken from Puck, London, Sept. 21, 1889. Courtesy of the British Library.

The Ripper reexamined: Historian M. J. Trow reveals a new, viable suspect

By David Chesanow (December 2009)


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 somewhere in 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 whom 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 there were any 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 “canonical” five horrific murders of prostitutes 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, 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 only 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 was employed, 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.)

“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.”—M. J. Trow

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 M. J. 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:

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

M. J. 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 (www.WhitechapelSociety.com) with its regular periodical sends out to a wide fan base.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Q: 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 “Aha!” moment when Mann appeared to you as a viable perpetrator of the crime? Did anyone at all suspect him at the time?

MJT: The “Aha!” 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.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Q: 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.)

MJT: 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.

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

MJT: 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.

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

MJT: 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.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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!

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Q: 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?

MJT: 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.

Study your auction catalog!

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I love auction catalogs: Even if I can’t afford to bid on what I really want—and how many collectors can?—the catalogs make for fun reading.

Catalogs are also a great resource for collectors. Over time, they can give an idea of what’s out there on the market and—if you bother to check the hammer prices afterwards, which I strongly advise—what certain items may fetch. The operative word is “may,” of course; more on that in a moment.

The catalog for the 2023 Western Art and Wine Auction at the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, WY. The cover art by Tucker Smith (TuckerSmithArt.com), Morning on Ditch Creek, is a signed artist’s proof giclée print on canvas made from one of Smith’s spectacular oil paintings. “All art is donated specifically for the auction, mostly directly by the artists, to be auctioned to benefit the museum collection, and all proceeds go to the museum,” according to Clint Gilchrist, the museum’s executive director. “The cover art is always one of the pieces donated for the auction.” See all the catalogs at https://museumofthemountainman.com/artauction/. The next auction will be on July 11; the catalog will be online on June 1. Catalog cover image used by permission of the Museum of the Mountain Man.

If you collect within a narrow field, you may even see an item come up for auction more than once over a period of a few years. If it’s a rare or one-of-a-kind piece, it can help you to know what it sold for the last time it went on the block.

Lot descriptions are also informative, both for what they contain and what they don’t. A really good auction house with knowledgeable experts—Heritage Auctions in Dallas, say—will publish beautiful catalogs with insightful descriptions that contain valuable details about an item’s uniqueness, provenance, condition, etc. But don’t let that stop you from doing your own research: If you collect Theodore Roosevelt memorabilia, for example, and a letter from Teddy to a Mr. Joe Blow comes up for auction, do your homework and try to find out who Joe Blow actually was, if the auctioneer hasn’t done so already. Special associations often go unnoticed and only add to an item’s worth.

Hard-copy catalogs are relatively inexpensive collectibles in their own right—and well-illustrated ones are as good as any coffee-table book . . .

Here’s an example: Some years ago, a short 1909 Christmas greeting written by legendary 19th-century boxer/Civil War veteran Mike Donovan to a Captain Jack Crawford came up for auction. Donovan’s handwriting wasn’t so legible, and the lot description querulously noted that Donovan referred to Crawford as “the Poet Scant.” “Scant”? I was confused too.

So I Googled “Captain Jack Crawford, Poet Scant.” It turned out he was Captain Jack Crawford, known as the “Poet Scout,” who was a lot more famous than Donovan (at least, outside of pugilistic circles). Both men had been born in Ireland and served in the Union Army, so they obviously had some common bonds. Crawford became a cavalry scout in the Indian Wars and was among the first to arrive at the site of the Little Bighorn fight after Custer’s 7th Cavalry were killed. Crawford was also famous as a frontier poet, hence the moniker: He used to pen his verse at campfires—while his compatriots were drinking, eating beans and farting, one imagines—published several books (pretty avidly collected today) and was active on the public reading circuit. And he was a pal of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he later worked the Wild West show circuit.

All of this evaded the writer of the lot description, but it greatly enhanced the note’s value—both to your humble correspondent and the guy who outbid me!

Hard-copy catalogs are also relatively inexpensive collectibles in their own right—and well-illustrated ones are as good as any coffee-table book—in addition to being great reference material and useful as “provenance” if you acquire something that has been auctioned off in the past. Here’s a great 2020 movie poster auction catalog from Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions (HA.com).

Anyway . . . bear in mind that while hammer prices may provide an indicator of an item’s fair-market value, nothing’s written in stone. Just as on eBay when two goons get in a bidding war and drive an item’s price ski-high up five days before the end of the auction, people in an online or live auction can get crazy and bid far beyond what they reasonably should. (Figure in the buyer’s premium as well.) So take hammer prices with a few grains of salt.    

Conversely, you may get lucky—as I have more than once—and find a great item BURIED in an auction catalog among unrelated items: for example, an uncommon film star autograph hidden among sports memorabilia. Not only will other collectors of that film star miss the autograph (unless they collect sports memorabilia too) but the sports people will probably ignore the film star as well. Then you have the opportunity to nab a great item far below what it would ordinarily sell for.

In a nutshell: Look hard for those hidden gems among the other lots!

A final word . . . I originally wrote a version of this story about 15 years ago. Catalogs, for the obvious reasons of lower cost, speed, and convenience, are nowadays often sent out only as pdfs or links to web pages. Occasionally you can find them online on Google Books. If you don’t want to download and keep the pdfs on file, you may be able to view past sales on an auctioneer’s website.