WITH the Swan Youth Theatre set to present "I Am Jack", a new play about Jack the Ripper, perhaps it timely to recall that a man with strong Worcestershire connections may well have been the notorious serial killer.

After all, here was a man who slept with a sharp knife under his pillow, and he was someone who was actually convicted and hanged for murder.

Insanity may have run in his family. The candidate's mother, Mary, was confined to Worcester County and City lunatic asylum in 1860, and she died there, aged just 33.

The suspect is also known to have caught syphilis from prostitutes and he displayed a pathological hatred of women and a willingness to use sickening violence against them, to the point that he knifed and dismembered his own wife.

In recent years, the author William Beadle has been the chief "Ripper" expert, in books that include "Jack the Ripper Unmasked" and "Jack the Ripper: Anatomy of a Myth", to suggest that Worcestershire's own William Henry Bury was the killer. It is a strong case.

The Swan Youth Theatre show, at the Vesta Tilley Studio, Swan Theatre, on Friday November 6 and the following evening, will ask audiences to imagine the foggy London streets of autumn, 1888, when the elusive killer was at large.

Audiences will be asked to reflect that, "it is all too easy to forget that behind the monster was a man".

Could it be that William Bury, the convicted killer who died by the hangman's rope, was indeed that man?

His last reported words to the hangman were chilling. "I suppose you think you are clever to hang me?"

This suggests monstrous pride and ego, and it just stops short of being a confession, perhaps.

Certainly, when Bury was arrested for the killing of his wife, Ellen, he was fearful of being linked to the Ripper murders. But apparent confessions to police officers that he was indeed the Ripper are little more that anecdotes, it seems.

However, telling anecdotes do seem to surround the figure of William Bury, who was born in Hill Street, Stourbridge, then part of Worcestershire, in 1859.

By 1887, just before the Ripper killings started, he was living in London's East End.

When there was a lull in the Whitechapel murders, his wife Ellen is reported to have told a neighbour, "Jack the Ripper is taking a rest".

Ellen knew how dangerous Bury could be. He attacked her when she found a knife under his pillow. That was in 1888, the year of the Ripper spree.

Bury was kneeling on Ellen, knife in hand, when the landlord walked in and stopped him from cutting her throat.

Not surprisingly, the landlord evicted the couple.

In 1889, when the couple had moved from London's East End to Dundee, Ellen would not be so fortunate.

Bury had lived in Bow, near Whitechapel, from October 1887 to January 1889, and it is worth noting that the Ripper killings appear to have ceased when he moved away.

But perhaps Jack the Ripper was not done with killing. In 1889, Bury repeatedly stabbed Ellen with a penknife, dismembered her body and packed her remains into a box.

Bury was convicted for this murder, and there may have been more. Certainly, he had already revealed his penchant for violence towards women. In February 1888, for instance, Bury had attacked a 38 year old woman called Annie Millwood. He used a knife to slash the woman's legs and private parts; but she survived.

The telling anecdotes emerge again, when Bury's execution in Dundee is considered.

Certainly, in newspapers of the day his name was suggested as a likely candidate for Jack the Ripper, and so the suspicions about Bury are nothing new.

We know Bury's chilling last words on the gallows, but did the hangman, James Berry, have another interesting tale to tell?

Berry published his memoirs, "My Experiences as an Executioner", but oddly, he did not mention Bury.

However, a Suffolk journalist, Ernest A. Parr, in a letter to the Secretary of State for Scotland in 1908, stated that Berry had told him "explicitly that Bury was known to have been Jack the Ripper".

Here, yet again, is strong anecdotal evidence; but it is only that.

However, perhaps it is worth asking how many men, then and now, would be capable of such pathological violence?

Murders are rare and frenzied, apparently senseless murders are rarer still.

Bury is a good candidate for Jack the Ripper simply because he was in the right place at the right time and proved himself capable of killing with a knife.

It is possible, then, that there is no real mystery here, after all.

Justice was done and the police got their man.