Alayna Urquhart

His trial began in October with investigators enthusiastically claiming they had caught the Ripper and they were certain he was going to be convicted.

But just as in the cases of Huff, Henderson, and the others who were accused of being the Ripper, the jury saw Brown for what he was, a mentally ill man whose claims and confessions were clearly unreliable.

Right.

Also, the defense offered at least one witness who quote testified that Brown had been forced into a partial confession by police and that he was prone to hallucinations and would confess to almost anything out of pressure.

Yeah.

After a lengthy trial, the jury deliberated a pretty short amount of time and acquitted Lawton Brown of the murder charges.

Wow.

I did not see that going that way.

And the murders continued into the following year and would go on for nearly a decade.

A decade?

Before they slowly petered out by the 1920s.

The problem was, though, was that the press, and to a lesser extent the police, labeled, like, whatever they were labeling as a Ripper murder, it had become so vague and non-specific, I don't know why I couldn't say that, that by the mid-teens, it was impossible to know whether the murders were committed by the same man who terrorized Atlanta between 1911 and 1913, or whether...

maybe it was a few different people and these were not all connected.

Like which ones were part of, like Jack the Ripper has the canonical, you know, series of murder, of murders and that we can kind of rely on as being like for sure.

And there's so much evidence linking all of those murders to each other.

Yeah, there's a lot of evidence linking.

And some people even question a couple of those, you know what I mean?

Like it happens.

But this one didn't even, they had like a very loose, confusing set of canonical ones that they could attribute to him.

Yeah.