throne sired by Prince Albert Victor. According to this theory, the murders were carried out by Sir William Gull with the assistance of a coachman, John Netley. Sickert himself later retracted the story, in an interview with the Sunday Times on 18 June 1978. He is quoted as saying, "It was a hoax; I made it all up" and, it was "a whopping fib." 1976 – "Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution" (Stephen Knight) Stephen Knight was a reporter for the East London Advertiser who interviewed Joseph Sickert following the BBC series. He was sufficiently convinced by the story to write a book – Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution – which proposes the Sickert story as its central conclusion. The book provides the inspiration for a number of fictional works related to the Whitechapel murderers. Knight undertook his own research, which established that there really was a coachman named John Netley; that an unnamed child was knocked down in the Strand in October 1888 and that a man named "Nickley" attempted suicide by drowning from Westminster Bridge in 1892. He was also provided with access to Home Office files, from which a number of contemporary police reports were made public for the first time. Knight's claim that Sir William Gull, along with various others, was a high-ranking Freemason, is disputed. Knight writes: This claim is refuted by John Hamill, former Librarian for the Freemasons' United Grand Lodge of England (subsequently the Director of Communications). Hamill writes: Popular culture since 1976 In 1979, the fictional character Sir Thomas Spivey, portrayed by actor Roy Lansford, appears in Murder by Decree, starring Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes and James Mason as Doctor Watson. Sir Thomas Spivey, a Royal physician whose character is based on Sir William Gull, is revealed as the murderer in a plotline based on Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Spivey is depicted as assisted by a character named William Slade, himself based on John Netley. A fictionalised Sir William Gull appears in Iain Sinclair's 1987 novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings in a plotline based on Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Sir William Gull is portrayed by Ray McAnally in 1988 in a TV dramatisation of the murders, starring Michael Caine and Jane Seymour. The plotline reveals Sir William Gull as the murderer, assisted by coachman John Netley, but otherwise excludes the main elements