of a macabre joke. Despite an extensive police investigation, the killer was never found and his identity is still a mystery. Both at the time and subsequently, many amateur and professional investigators have proposed solutions but no single theory is widely accepted. Claims of Thomas Stowell In 1970, British surgeon Thomas E. A. Stowell published an article entitled "Jack the Ripper – A Solution?" in the November issue of The Criminologist. In the article, Stowell proposed that the Ripper was an aristocrat who had contracted syphilis during a visit to the West Indies, that it had driven him insane, and that in this state of mind he had perpetrated the five canonical Jack the Ripper murders. Although Stowell did not directly name his suspect in the article, he described in detail the suspect's family and his physical appearance and nicknames, all of which pointed to Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Stowell wrote that following a double murder on 30 September 1888, his suspect was restrained by his own family in an institution in the south of England, but later escaped to commit a final murder on 9 November before ultimately dying of syphilis. To back up his theory, Stowell drew comparisons between the evisceration of the women and the disembowelment of deer shot by the aristocracy on their estates. Stowell said his information came from the private notes of Sir William Gull, a reputable physician who had treated members of the royal family. Stowell knew Gull's son-in-law, Theodore Dyke Acland, and was an executor of Acland's estate. Stowell's article attracted intense attention, and placed Albert Victor among the most notable Ripper suspects, but his innocence was soon proven. Gull died before Albert Victor, and so could not have known about Albert Victor's death. All three doctors who were attending Albert Victor at his death in 1892 concurred that he had died of pneumonia, and given the timescale of syphilitic disease progression, it is highly improbable that Albert Victor had syphilis. The first symptoms of mental illness that arise from syphilitic infection tend to occur about 15 years from first exposure. While the timescale of disease progression is never absolute, for Albert Victor to have suffered from syphilitic insanity in 1888, he would probably have to have been infected at the age of nine in about 1873, six years before he visited the West Indies.