the Whitechapel murders. She conveyed her suspicions to some of her husband's medical colleagues who, after interviewing him and searching the house, "found ample proofs of murder" and committed him to an asylum. Variations of the second article appeared in the Williamsport Sunday Grit (12 May 1895); the Hayward Review, California (17 May 1895); and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (28 December 1897). This article comments: "the identity of that incarnate fiend was settled some time ago" and that the murderer was "a demented physician afflicted with wildly uncontrollable erotic mania." It repeats some of the details in the earlier report, adding that Dr Howard "was one of a dozen London physicians who sat as a commission in lunacy upon their brother physician, for at last it was definitely proved that the dread Jack the Ripper was a physician in high standing and enjoying the patronage of the best society in the West End of London." The article goes on to allege that the preacher and spiritualist Robert James Lees played a leading role in the physician's arrest by using his clairvoyant powers to divine that the Whitechapel murderer lived in a house in Mayfair. He persuaded police to enter the house, the home of a distinguished physician, who was allegedly removed to a private insane asylum in Islington under the name of Thomas Mason. Meanwhile the disappearance of the physician was explained by announcing his death and faking a funeral – "an empty coffin, which now reposes in the family vaults in Kensal Green, is supposed to contain the mortal remains of a great West End physician, whose untimely death all London mourned." (This detail does not correspond with Sir William Gull, who was buried in the churchyard at Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex.) The identity of the Dr Howard who is alleged to have provided the information for the first article was never established. On 2 May 1895, the Fort Wayne Weekly Gazette published a follow-up quoting William Greer as reaffirming the accuracy of the story, and describing Dr. Howard as a "well-known London physician who passed through San Francisco on a tour of the world several months ago". A further follow-up article in the London People on 19 May 1895, written by Joseph Hatton, identified him as Dr. Benjamin Howard, an American doctor who had practised in London during the late 1880s. The article was shown to Dr. Benjamin Howard