TRUE CONFESSIONS

Dear Cecil:

I'm glad to see your discussion of Richard Wallace's anagram
"research" in your March 7 column.  [Wallace purported to prove
that Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper by finding sexual anagrams
in Jabberwocky, etc. --C. A.]  Wallace's book was excerpted in
the November Harper's.  For a startling depiction of its true
significance, you should see the response from Guy Jacobson and
Francis Heaney, which appeared in the February Harper's letters
column.  --Dan Hoey, via the Internet

Goodness.  Jacobson and Heaney write:  "The first paragraph of
[Wallace's] article contains a grisly confession."  They rearrange
the letters of:

This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst
unsolved murders.  It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of
suspects: a man who wrote children's stories.  That man is Charles
Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved
books as Alice in Wonderland.

and arrive at:

The truth is this:  I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted
Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty
shiv's strokes.  I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly
innocent of this murder.  P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets,
and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too.

I'm dying, I really am.  Guy, Francis, you rock.

--CECIL ADAMS

This page last modified Wed, Jun 4, 1997.