Yet while she fits into the pattern of the poison panics of mid-century, no panic ensued. And while she was accepted as being the most prolific murderer since Burke and Hare, hers was not the name that people remembered when the most notorious murderer of the century appeared on the scene in 1888. Jack the Ripper brought with him a new kind of crime, and a new kind of fear. Mary Ann Cotton looked backward. The murderer who was popularly described as being the precursor to Jack the Ripper had only one victim. Israel Lipski was convicted of murdering Miriam Angel in their lodgings off Commercial Street, in London’s East End, just twelve months before Martha Tabram, the woman some named as Jack the Ripper’s first victim, was found dead a few hundred yards away. A Polish-Jewish immigrant, Lipski had fled conscription into the Russian army and found his way to London in about 1885. Ambitious and industrious, he worked for an umbrella manufacturer until, in 1887, he took his savings, borrowed £2.5s.
