Leonard Matters

Leonard Warburton Matters (26 June 1881 – 31 October 1951)[1] was an Australian journalist who became a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom.

He was born a British subject in Adelaide, Australia, and fought in the Second Boer War in South Africa.

In 1926, Matters proposed in a magazine article that the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper was an eminent doctor, whose son had died from syphilis caught from a prostitute.

The book was marketed as a serious study, but it contains obvious factual errors and the documents it supposedly uses as references have never been found.

[2] True crime writer Edmund Pearson, who was Matters' contemporary, said scathingly, "The deathbed confession bears about the same relation to the facts of criminology as the exploits of Peter Rabbit and Jerry Muskrat do to zoology.