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Robert James Lees

Robert James Lees (12 August 1849-11 January 1931) was a British spiritualist who claimed to have known Jack the Ripper during the Whitechapel murders.

Biography[]

Robert James Lees was born in Hinckley, Leicestershire in 1849, and he was raised in Birmingham. In 1861, the 13-year-old Lees claimed to have communicated message from the dead Prince Albert to Queen Victoria, and it was said that Victoria had invited him to live in Buckingham Palace for a period so she could regularly talk to her late husband through Lees. In 1876, he moved to Manchester and became a journalist, and he relocated to London in 1878. He wrote a series of spiritualist books, and, in 1888, he offered his assistance in catching Jack the Ripper, claiming to have seen him in a vision. He later claimed that he had followed a man - whom he was certain was Jack the Ripper - from an omnibus at Notting Hill to a fashionable house in London, determining that the resident, the royal surgeon William Gull, must have been Jack the Ripper. He moved to Devon in 1902 and to Leicester in 1928, and he died in 1931.

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