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Martin Fido

Martin Austin Fido (18 October 1939 – 2 April 2019) was a university professor, true crime writer and broadcaster. His many books include ''The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper'', ''The Krays: Unfinished Business'', ''The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard'', ''Serial Killers'', and ''The Murder Guide to London''. He is also one of the authors of ''The Complete Jack the Ripper A to Z''.

Martin Fido was born in Penzance, Cornwall on 18 October 1939, to Austin Harry and Enid Mary (Hobrough) Fido. He attended Truro School and later Lincoln College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1961. He pursued a Master’s degree on the novels of Benjamin Disraeli at Balliol College, Oxford.

On 21 June 1961, Fido married Judith Mary Spicer, and the couple had two daughters, Rebecca and Abigail. After leaving college in 1966, where he had been a junior research fellow in English, he went to the University of Leeds where he lectured in English until 1973. In 1971, he spent a year as a visiting associate professor a Michigan State University in the USA. Following his divorce from Judith in 1972, he married his second wife Norma Elaine Wilson on 16 December 1972.

In 1973, he became a reader in English Literature and head of the English department at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. In the West Indies he was active in theatre and educational broadcasting, and during this time he had a son, Austin. After he separated from his wife (they would divorce in 1984), he resigned from his job to write a book about science, philosophy and 19th-century literature, but he lost seven years of work in a fire.

In 1983 he returned to England and moved into a block of flats previously occupied by the Kray twins, and became a freelance writer and broadcaster, specialising in true crime. He broadcast a weekly segment on London's LBC Radio series ''Leading Britain's Conversation'' called ''Murder After Midnight'' from 1987 to 2001, in which he detailed a famous true crime case in each episode. Several of these segments were produced and released commercially on cassette and CD by his friend (and fellow LBC broadcaster) Paul Savory. Edited versions of the scripts were also released in book form. Aside from his many true crime books he has also written illustrated biographies of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde, and books on Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes. He translated Louis Cazamian's ''Le Roman Social en Angleterre'', and his play ''Let's Go Bajan!'' was performed successfully in Barbados and London.

His most acclaimed work is ''The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper'' (1987). In this book, Fido identified the infamous Jack the Ripper as the Russian-Jewish butcher Aaron Kosminski. His hypothesis was endorsed by former criminal profiler for the FBI John E. Douglas after conducting a thorough two-decade personal investigation into the Whitechapel murders, who agreed that Kosminki’s profile fit the killer. Over time, Fido’s theory has gained recognition as one of the most probable explanations, and gained further credibility when DNA found on the blood-stained shawl belonging to Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper's victims, was alleged to be Kosminki’s.

On 17 December 1994, Fido married Karen Lynn Sandel, and in 2000, with his three children all adults, he settled in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, to help Karen (who died on 29 October 2013) nurse her parents through their terminal illnesses. From 2001 until his death he taught writing and research at Boston University, including a course called “Sympathy For The Devil”. He was himself a practicing Quaker.

Martin Fido, who was suffering from cancer in his later years, died on 2 April 2019 of complications resulting from a fall. Provided by Wikipedia