Martin Fido

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. 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. After he separated from his wife (they divorced 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, moved into a block of flats previously occupied by the Kray twins, and became a freelance writer and broadcaster, specialising in true crime. While researching for his book Murder Guide to London (1986), Fido examined the memoirs of several senior Scotland Yard officials. One official, Sir Robert Anderson, claimed that Jack the Ripper's identity was known to police and described the killer as a "poor Polish Jew." Fido initially identified the suspect as a man named "Kosminski." However, further investigation revealed inconsistencies in the records relating to Aaron Kosminski, leading Fido to conclude that the details aligned more closely with another individual: an inmate known as "David Cohen." Fido theorized that Cohen, a violently disturbed man institutionalized around the time the murders stopped, may have been the person actually referred to in police documents, with "Kosminski" possibly resulting from clerical confusion or misidentification. Former FBI criminal profiler John E. Douglas later supported this theory in his book The Cases That Haunt Us (2000), stating that behavioural evidence pointed to "a person known to the police as David Cohen.. Or someone very much like him." From 1987 to 2001, Fido broadcast a weekly segment called Murder After Midnight on Clive Bull's LBC Radio series Through The Night, 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, and edited versions of many of the scripts were released in book form. During this time, Fido also regularly led tours of the Jack the Ripper murder locations around London, and was caricatured as the tour guide Rowan Rover in Sharyn McCrumb's 1991 novel Missing Susan. Beyond true crime, he has written illustrated biographies of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde, and books on Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes. He also translated Louis Cazamian's Le Roman Social en Angleterre, and his play Let's Go Bajan! Was performed successfully in Barbados and London. 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. He was himself a practicing Quaker.

• Name — Martin Fido • Born — 18 October 1939 • Died — 2 April 2019 • Birthplace — Penzance, United Kingdom • Place of death — North Falmouth, Massachusetts, United States • Occupation — University lecturer, writer and broadcaster • Known for — True crime writing and broadcasting • Notable Works — Murder After Midnight, LBC

• Let's Go Bajan! (1983)