George Hutchinson was an English worker who made a formal statement to police after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November 1888.
Modern crime writers have since questioned the veracity of Hutchinson's testimony, which has been characterised as antisemitic and suspiciously detailed, especially when considering that the scene supposedly took place in an unlit street at night.
Hutchinson has been variously deemed an inaccurate or even false witness, with some true crime authors regarding him as a possible Jack the Ripper suspect.
Almost immediately, a man coming from the opposite direction to Mary tapped her shoulder and whispered something in her ear; possibly a joke, since they both laughed.
As the couple passed in front of him, Kelly's client – noticing that he was being observed – scrutinized the witness with a sullen attitude and immediately lowered his head.
The principal investigator of the case, Inspector Frederick Abberline, interrogated him in person, and days later told a newspaper that he estimated that Hutchinson's deposition was truthful, and that he seemed sincere.
[6][7] Critics of this criminal case ponder whether Hutchinson was a false witness who exaggerated what little he could have known, as it was imbued with a media eagerness and the desire to gain notoriety.
Alan Moore pointed out: "There is something unconvincing in the large amount of details he provides, and I tend to suspect that much of them were invented after the event, a man eager to become the center of attention".
[8] Not only did Hutchinson provide a disconcertingly specific amount of detail, he also claimed to have waited outside Kelly's residence for approximately 45 minutes, at 2am in November, when it would have been extremely cold and likely prohibitively unpleasant to do so.
Other authors were even more severe with this problematic witness, and they glimpsed that under his exaggerated statements, a much more sordid intention was hidden than a mere desire for notoriety.
The theory was further developed by Stephen Senise in his book "Jewbaiter Jack the Ripper: New evidence & theory" (subsequently republished in 2018 as "Jack the Ripper False Flag") which places Hutchinson's behavior in the context of anti-semitic attitudes in the East End at the time, and traces the departure of a George Hutchinson from Tilbury to a penal colony in Australia following his conviction for child molestation on the RMS Ormuz a few weeks after the murder of Alice McKenzie in July 1889.
[11] Since contemporary records prove that Prince Albert Victor was not in London at the time of the killings,[12] the theory and Reginald's claims have been dismissed as false by researchers.