Jack the Ripper Suspect – Nicholas Vassily

a.k.a. Nicholai Vassily, Nicolai Wassili or Nicolai Vasiliev, was allegedly born in the Ukraine in 1847, and was educated in Tiraspol and at Odessa university. He inherited sufficient income for him to support himself without the need to work.

Wassili was described as tall, lean with a brawny form, burning black eyes and a pale waxy complexion. As a young man he joined the Skoptsy, a fanatical sect which lay outside the Russian Orthodox Church. The Skoptsy were referred to as the Shorn, in English language newspapers.

The Shorn condemned all sexual relations, even within marriage, as impure.

It is alleged that, the Russian church’s attempts to suppress the sect resulted in Wassili going into exile in Paris, where in the daytime he would toil away amongst piles of religious books, and at night would wander the streets calling on prostitutes to repent and join the Skoptsy.

(But the Skoptsy had no books. They rejected the authority of the Bible, believing in the revelations of the Holy Spirit which were set forth in their raspevetses, spiritual verses, which were sung at their prayer meetings.)

It was in 1872 that he met and fell in love with a young prostitute called Madeleine, whom he tried to reform. It was her rejection of him which contributed to his mental breakdown, and the start of a killing spree which left Madeleine and four other prostitutes dead within two weeks. All of them were stabbed in the back, although none were mutilated.

Wassily was arrested after a streetwalker he had attempted to kill cried out for help. He was committed to an asylum in Bayonne, and was released as cured on 1 January 1888, and it was then that he decided to go to London.

The press theorised that Wassili may have been Jack the Ripper, because of the similarities with the Whitechapel murders.

However, there is no evidence that Wassili, or any other spellings of his name, ever existed. There are no records of his arrest or committal to an asylum. There is also no evidence to confirm that a series of murders actually occurred in Paris. In addition, there is no record of him at the University of Odessa.

The only crimes in Paris which bore any similarity to the Whitechapel murders happened in 1875 in the district of Rochechouart, when five or six women were assaulted, though none were murdered.

The reports of his supposed murders in Paris are from European newspapers who often garbled their account of events, and very often resorted to copying each other without accurately checking their facts.

Conclusion: It is highly unlikely that Nicholai Vassily was Jack the Ripper.