History of Sorts

Wartime is the perfect opportunity for killers to apply their ‘trade’, when a body is found the authorities will automatically assume that it is just another victim of war, at least that is what John Cummins must have thought when he copied Jack the ripper in February 1942. But unlike Jack the Ripper Cummins just wasn’t that clever.

Gordon Frederick Cummins (1914 – 25 June 1942), known as the Blackout Killer and the Blackout Ripper, was an English serial killer who murdered four women in London in 1942. The Ripper tag came from similarities with the Jack the Ripper murders, as both killers mutilated their victims.

Gordon Frederick Cummins was allegedly the ilegimate son of a titled member of the peerage. His claims of noble birth led others to call him “The Count”. He married a theatre producer’s secretary in 1936. When World War II began in September 1939, he enlisted in the…