Leonard Matters

Who was Leonard Matters?

Leonard Warburton Matters 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. He worked as a journalist in Argentina, and was managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald.

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. According to Matters, the doctor, given the pseudonym "Dr Stanley", committed the murders in revenge and then fled to Argentina. Matters claimed he had discovered an account of Stanley's deathbed confession in a South American newspaper. He expanded his ideas into a book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, in 1929. 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. 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."