An investigator fighting a last-ditch battle for the release of 123-year-old files about police informants believes the secret documents could finally solve the mystery of savage serial killer Jack the Ripper.

Trevor Marriott, who has published his own theories about the Victorian-era prostitute murders, has spent three years and thousands of dollars trying to win the release of four dusty ledgers held by London’s Metropolitan Police Service.

If a tribunal that heard his case last week decides against him, Marriott told the Star on Monday, he knows those historic ledgers will be destroyed and the mystery never solved.

“Some of the material is going to impact the Ripper investigation,” Marriott, a former police detective, said. “It will allow me to fully document the whole Ripper mystery.”

Since Jack the Ripper slaughtered and, in most cases, disembowelled five women in London’s east end in 1888, libraries of books, articles, movies and television specials have attempted to identify the killer conclusively.

Theories have ranged from Dr. Francis Tumuelty, a quack doctor who practised in Toronto in the 1850s and one police inspector’s prime suspect, to Queen Victoria’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence, to the artist Walter Sickert to Scottish abortion doctor T. Neill Cream.

“If I should lose this case, I firmly believe the police will destroy all of these records as soon as the ink is dried on the decision. They have the power to do this,” said Marriott. “That would be a crime in itself.”

Det. Supt. Julian McKinney told the three-judge tribunal that police policy requires informants’ names to stay confidential forever. To change that policy would dry up future sources of informants, he said.

“Regardless of the time, regardless of whether they are dead, they should never be disclosed. They come to us only when they have the confidence in our system that their identity will not be disclosed.”

Marriott argued a 100-year rule should apply and pointed out the names on the ledgers are surnames and pseudonyms not easily traceable to contemporary descendants.

“It could well be” something other than just informants’ names they’re hiding, Marriott said. “In 1888, they had major problems with the Irish terror group, the Fenians. Two high ranking British officials had been killed in 1883 by a splinter group.”

A number of high-profile people became informants and two accused were hanged. Emotions still run high more than a century later on both sides, Marriott said.

Marriott’s own book, Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation, contended that the killer of one, or some, or all five women — and a number of other murders in other countries — was Carl Feigenbaum, a German-born merchant seaman executed in Sing Sing Prison in the United States in 1896 for the murder of his landlady.

“I don’t feel I’ve really proved anything conclusively, to be fair,” Marriott said. The most anyone can do is to “cast major doubt” on some suspects and present new evidence for others.

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“These documents will go a long way to change the whole concept of the Jack the Ripper mystery.”

The tribunal should deliver its decision in about three or four weeks, Marriott said. He had previously been refused access under the Freedom of Information Act and by the Information Commissioner.