The Ripper was a Mason: I learned it on the Internet!

Masons and Freemasonry have been accused of everything from starting World War I to collaborating with space aliens. Proof for those who make such claims is, of course, something that's unnecessary since they KNOW this to be the case. Bizarre claims have been part and parcel of anti-Masonic rhetoric for three centuries and those for whom the world is a very unmanageable place seem to find great solace in these fantasies. There are a number of persons discussed on this site for whom the fear of Freemasons and their organization is a driving force in their lives, sometimes leading to anti-social behavior including but not limited to murder.

For one Canadian (former?) home care worker, it's the Freemasons who are impeding the explosive sales of her books!

That's right - and all you Masons out there KNOW that you're doing it so you'd just darn well better admit it!

Karen Trenouth has authored and 'vanity-published' two books: Epiphany of the Whitechapel Murders and Jack the Ripper: The Satanic Team. Between the two of them, she claims to have solved the 'Jack the Ripper' murders which have remained unsolved for over a century stating:

You are exactly right, Diana. I have solved the whole case. I know everything.  (Link)

She amplified this by writing:

To solve this case, it took someone:

 

Open-minded

Highly intelligent

Good researcher

Hard worker

Great detective skills

Very determined

Willing to walk down paths untrodden  <sic>

 

I solved it with my brain, my heart and my laptop.

And later in that same public posting she adds,

Wait until you read my medical data in the book!! I've been holding out on you people big time!! Calling me a psycho is very immature and a total cop-out. I am the exact opposite of that, actually. I was always a precocious child. My parents were impressed that I could read at 3 years old.

You can read the entire post here (if you're not already choking!). The statements above should allow you to draw some conclusions about Ms. Trenouth, to wit: she does not suffer from even the vaguest hint of insecurity or self-doubt, she seems to revel in self-righteous indignation (more proof of that to come). She can't structure a thought on paper with any degree of consistency whatsoever. Of course, one must consider the inspiration for her work. As she states:

Now, you know why I was getting upset. I did this all by myself and working at the same time. Maybe, I was hit by an Epiphany or maybe someone from the other side channeled me - I DON'T KNOW!! It is one of life's mysteries!!   (Link)

She added the next morning:

I don't plan on fame and fortune changing me one bit. I like me. I will remain kind, nice, caring, considerate and generous, even though I will be

in

That statement was made back on 11 March 2006 but based on her book sale numbers found online, it can only be because of - as she herself has written and stated - a concerted effort by Freemasons that her books haven't achieved the international acclaim to which she is entitled.

Damn Masons!

But we're getting ahead of ourselves and her conclusion that the Masons and the Illuminati (they're always needed for a good conspiracy, right?) are out to get her book squashed have a basis, albeit one which is SO ridiculous and bizarre that before you're done with this page, you may be laughing so hard that you'll do severe damage to your computer screen if you have any liquid nearby. Karen would never have been able to resolve this century-old mystery were it not for the harassment and needling of one 'Ripperologist', Mr. Robert Hinton of Wales - and therein lies the Karen-imagined connection to Freemasonry.

A short history

First, some background: the 'Jack the Ripper' murders along with the mention of several others who, like Ms. Trenouth, boldly proclaimed that they had also solved this case are detailed here on our website. For those who've not studied the Ripper in detail but are now tempted to do so on the web, even the most cursory use of search engines will quickly lead you to the Casebook site, probably the largest and best known of locations where 'Ripperologists' - those with an abiding and sometimes fanatical interest in these crimes - will congregate. Like their much more popular (and more easily mocked due to space-ship costuming) counterparts, the 'Trekkies', Ripperologists can be somewhat beyond the pale when it comes to obsession. They don't take kindly to specious arguments and ill-formed conclusions. Their skills at insults towards those who make bizarre claims are well-honed and their disdain for 'know-it-alls' seems to be limitless. Nevertheless, the brightest and most diligent researchers on this topic congregate there to exchange pearls of wisdom and float theories. It is probably the 'center of the universe' regarding all matters Ripper but when someone new arrives and within a couple of weeks has all the answers, seemingly out of thin air, it brings out a response that is nothing short of a 'perfect storm'.

Into this maw wandered Ms. Trenouth - and the sparks began to fly almost immediately. The chronology, albeit a bit conjectured, seems to have occurred as follows: 

In 2005, Karen apparently stumbles on this thing called the Internet and, simultaneously, decides that she can be a world-renown author. She arrives at the Casebook website where she begins asking questions based on her preconceived notion of 'who dun it' in the Ripper case. She is immediately set upon by the 'regulars' who note the absurdity of both her questions and her approach. Karen becomes incensed (and that's putting it mildly, believe me!) and lashes out at everyone including those who are attempting to smooth the waters and show her the error of both her ideas and her approach. Her behavior is immature and for some of her protagonists, it's like blood in the water at shark feeding time. One person who gives 'murder mystery' tours in his town in Wales and is a published Ripper author, Bob Hinton, decides to prove to Karen, once and for all, how really foolish she's being. He e-mails her and provides a number of 'slightly off' hints: things which any true Ripper researcher would immediately spot as being a 'wind-up'. Meanwhile, Karen is bragging about how she has now (already!!!) written a book with her findings. She brags about her expectations that publishers will be fawning over her in a matter of moments. Needless to say, the regulars on the Casebook Forum have a field day with this self-anointed expert who doesn't seem to know the first thing about the basics of the case, of publishing, or of life for that matter, but has no problem whatsoever with self-praise and abject denial of anything contrary to her world-view.

There are many twists and turns along the way. Karen seeks solace in the company of a woman who was then under investigation for stalking (and who has since been arrested and is in a psychiatric prison! No kidding!) but fails to heed the warnings of those around her thinking that everyone is out to get the both of them....  She does, however, accept Mr. Hinton's conjectured/misleading  information and uses it to formulate even more bizarre theories. As a researcher, Ms. Trenouth seems utterly incapable of getting 1 and 1 to equal 2 - and this, plus her boorish online behavior including her braggadocio about becoming rich from her publishing, grates badly on everyone around her.

And so it comes to pass that on 17 February 2006, Karen announces:

The Book Is Done!!!

Hi everyone:

My book is finally complete. It is wonderful and everyone will love it, I guarantee. Watch for it soon.......................................

My husband is so impressed, he told me that I always had it in me to be a brilliant writer. This book proves that, I promise you

Uh-huh.... And as if that weren't enough, she writes on 25 February 2006:

When the publishers read the book, they will be flabbergasted at my facts and findings. Even they will freak!! My book has research material, pictures, story. It is not in the form of a diarrhea/diary.

The howls of laughter would make your computer shake and we suspect many a computer monitor was nearly ruined by people reading Karen's posts. They said so too - and on March 10, 2006 Karen struck back:

 

GO WRITE YOUR OWN BOOK!!!

 

LEAVE ME ALONE!!!

 

I CAME ON HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS!!!

 

THERE AREN'T ANY!!!

 

GOODBYE!!!!!!

 

I WILL NEVER, EVER IN MY LIFE, ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE WITH ANOTHER HUMAN BEING AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

THIS WAS MY LAST AND FINAL ATTEMPT!

 

I prefer to be alone anyway - reading, surfing the net, and increasing my Intelligence Quotient even more. At this rate, it should hit 200 by next year.

Reading things is certainly good, surfing the net can be fun at times, but we're not really sure what she's going to do to increase her IQ since - as with most of her writing - it isn't done properly! (Did she mean that reading and net surfing will do it? If so, why not use "to" rather than listing them as three separate items?)

When Karen was questioned about the impossible syntax of her title (i.e., how could the non-human 'Whitechapel Murders' have had an epiphany?), she tried to explain but quickly became enraged because no one could understand her 'logical thinking'. Further, it doesn't seem that anyone was able to pin her down on how long it took to write this work which - according to her - solved a murder mystery over a century old. From all appearances, it was about a week or 10 days - including the book writing! We'll await correction though....

It was about this time that the Hinton hammer fell: Mr. Hinton began a series of forum messages in which he dissected Ms. Trenouth's assumptions. He pointed out numerous contradictory statements she had made and noted how, based on his false information, she had proceeded along with compound assumptions. Explosively, Karen's rage erupted and a series of threatening and tearful messages followed, several promising to be the last message that she would post on the Casebook forum. As is usual with threats of this type, that's not the way things play out.

So where's the Masonic hook in all this?

One of Mr. Hinton's false clues dealt with Masonic membership and Ms. Trenouth immediately became convinced that it was the FREEMASONS who were hell-bent on ruining her astonishingly successful (well, PLANNED successful, perhaps) publishing career. Like a laser beam, Karen's anger focused on Bob and she proceeded to make herself look continually more foolish by assigning him to a particular lodge membership simply because she found one single lodge in Wales on the internet. There are MANY more details which we'll omit for the time being. Mr. Hinton's baited trap was not particularly well appreciated by other forum members, they feeling that it went WAY over the top in provoking someone who was - in their words - barely clinging to reality.

Mr. Hinton and Ms. Trenouth became protagonists in what looked to outsiders as a battle to the death. Ms. Trenouth felt that Mr. Hinton's actions were some masterminded plot to keep the secrets of the Jack the Ripper murders quiet because they were done by the Freemasons and SHE was the sole person to have "proven" this. She announced that Hinton comes "...from a long line of Satanists...." and used absurd hyperbole to (she apparently thought) discredit him. By August, 2006, she had even convinced her local newspaper to run an article which stated:

Some Freemasons are upset? Could she name a single one? No? OH! This statement arises, obviously, because she's still under the impression that Bob Hinton is a Freemason.... Got it! And yes, there's the announcement: she's working on her second book because - ooops - she didn't quite get all of that Freemason stuff into the first one 'cause Mr. Hinton didn't pull his stunt until her book was already at her vanity publisher. So the solution was to add to her publishing wealth by paying for yet another self-published book.

But surely you're wondering how Karen solved this crime which had eluded thousands upon thousands of others over more than a century. It really was SO easy, you'll kick yourself that you didn't figure it out and could be on your way to a life of fame and fortune like Karen. She used a photograph taken in 1888 that she found on the web - and viewed in the standard (poor!) 72 dpi web photo resolution after having been reproduced again and again in various sizes hundreds of times. In it, she says she saw something on the dressing table of one of the victims - something that all of the police detectives there at the time and everyone who's looked at that picture (or its thousands of copies) somehow managed to overlook. Amazing, isn't it? In her own words:

First, I read all of the post mortem reports of the murder victims, then approximately two months later I was looking over the crime scene photos and made a most interesting discovery. I saw that on the bedside table next to the last murder victim, a goat-headed bronze idol was left by the murderer. I then realized that this idol was Baphomet, which is the God of the Witches and the God of Masonry. This idol was not mentioned in any of the police reports or in the post mortem reports, so I then came to the conclusion that a very important person was being protected. That person was none other than, Prince Albert Victor. He also left many other clues at the last murder scene, which included his Order of the Garter insignia and his murder weapons.

So amazingly, Karen was able to see what thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of trained professionals and obsessed amateurs missed looking at those pictures for over a century. Not only that, from a black and white picture, she could tell it was a BRONZE statue. (This in a dirt-poor part of London where anyone could have sold such an item and lived luxuriously for years probably!)  Isn't this just fascinating? And, can you believe it: they ALSO missed finding a Prince's Order of the Garter medal. Karen doesn't tell us where she happened to see this in the photograph but it's really amazing how many people who would have been in that room simply didn't see what Karen found in a photograph - or how so many people who've viewed the photos since missed it as well. The woman clearly has an amazing set of eyeballs!

What's also pretty amazing is that someone going off to commit a murder would wander around the streets of a grimy neighborhood with a "bronze statue of Baphomet". Truth be told, we thought that this had been merely a picture drawn for the book by Eliphas Levy but if Karen says somebody was wandering the street with a bronze statue which - along with their Knightly Order of the Garter insignia, both of which were overlooked by dozens of people at the time and likely millions since, who are we to argue?

And the lady with the 200+++++ IQ now shows us a new skill: cut and paste!

By 2007, Karen assured us that her IQ would be over 200 so with a couple of more years beyond that, there's no telling what it is today. To exhibit her stupendous intelligence to the world, she not only continues to state that Freemasonry Watch is a "group" but she also spends seeming inordinate amounts of time pouring through old online texts from the anti-Masonic period of the early 1800s citing the supposed ills of Freemasonry. Should you happen to come across them, you'll find yet more examples of Karen's fine discernment including this one with the tale of an ostensible Masonic candidate named "Korn Kobb". That ANYONE could read even a few sentences and not realize the ribald wind-up involved is truly amazing but not, really, when it involves Ms. Trenouth. It is, rather, 'par for the course'. You can read her post here along with her comments at the bottom taking exception to those who didn't acknowledge her achievements when she did a podcast. (Maybe if we'd listened to her, it'd would have convinced us that she's FAR more than we've seen so far - but the odds are about the same as the earth bumping into Saturn tomorrow....)

WHOOPS!  (A January 2009 update)

Karen's writing skills led us to believe that she saw a "bronze idol" (after all, that's what she wrote - as shown above) but what she (thinks she) saw was really a representation of Mr. Baphomet. In the midst of senseless blog posts of material cut and pasted from websites with no explanation as to why they might be relevant to the Ripper case and leading one to think everyone in the world had a hand in this, on January 6, 2009 Ms. Trenouth FINALLY provided us with the graphics which "prove" what she saw. The ominous words attached to these pictures were, simply, "Try to deny its existence now!" With trepidation (amidst our nearly immobilizing laughter), we've put them here:

OK, we surrender. Don't you just see it? This are SUCH obvious renditions - taken from a grainy, century-old photograph - it's hard to imagine how all of those present in that murder room would have missed this connection. Well, obviously, though, when it's a Masonic plot, they just had to ignore it, right? Good thing Karen had such sharp eyes. Now the problem's solved and we can all go home.

Oh, we hope you don't mind if we continue to ask, though, about the Masonic-Baphomet connection below.

So Karen's 'research' has produced 'authorities' which, in a list of 8 including herself first in place of primacy, has only two ex-Masons, both of which have been completely and thoroughly debunked by not only this site but many others. Seven people making these claims out of tens of millions of Freemasons over the past three hundred years. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. Oh, and we'd DEFY you, Karen, to produce evidence that the Gormogons (the name given to rag-tag groups who would show up for mocking parades in London in the early 1700s) ever "exposed" anything. Come on, Karen: an adept researcher such as yourself with such a huge IQ should have no problems whatsoever providing proof to your assertion of what the Gormogons did. Maybe you can even name a couple?

Did Karen read our page about the joke which is Bill Schnoebelen?  Likely she feels she shouldn't have to since she already knows the answers that make her happy. However, she could have easily found it in a Google search and can just click here to get to it without using her super sleuthing skills. Don't even get us started on Arizona Wilder but we have done some stuff on Mr. Icke. Again, it's not too very hard to find. Just click here.

Ah, but the one we REALLY loved was about Jim Shaw who, according to researcher Karen Trenouth, "admitted to performing Black Masses for the Scottish Rite." Perhaps Karen would be good enough to cite the page in Mr. Shaw's SOLE BOOK where he says this happened? (And you can also see that Jim Shaw is a proven liar here - though to his credit, he never made such an absurd claim!) Ms. Trenouth wants to "prove" the Baphomet-Freemasonry connection but curiously, ignores things like this!

She's also been bragging quite a bit about becoming rich on the sale of her books and making absurd claims that they're being sold as texts for college courses in crime. Needless to say, neither of these are true and at some point, we'll debunk some more of her idiotic comments. Suffice it to say that as an anti-Mason, Karen is a joke!

Oh, and since Karen hasn't published her promised 3rd work of miraculous revelations now three years later (likely too busy spending all of her cash and finding websites that bring up her name), we thought that she might find this book helpful although since her IQ must be around 400 by now, she surely has all of the world's knowledge already.

All, except, how to properly configure a blog or tell the truth!

SAD!

Regular regurgitation

Karen's blog through 2009 now consists of numerous lengthy cut and past items from various newspaper sources. She adds nothing whatsoever to them, leaving the reader to puzzle why this or that article has any interest whatsoever. Very rarely, she'll toss in an irrelevant comment - and always in a way that it's hard (impossible, in most cases) to differentiate her writing from that of the quoted article. She never provides links from which REAL researchers could follow-on and determine if she's simply been selective in her quotes, overlooking perhaps more relevant material. This activity takes place in bursts and it's obvious when Karen has spent several hours online as there will be 6-8 of these posts at once.

In the coming eons, it will be interesting to see if any 'real' book on JTR ever quotes Karen. They will if they want their audience to have a laugh....

And during 2013, Karen apparently decided she needed more self-publicity and so created her own bulletin board and has made in excess of 4,300 posts to it as of this writing (January 5, 2014). Busy little girl - and curiously, most of the topics prohibit replies. As is typical, Karen doesn't ever want anyone to say she's wrong or have to refute reality!

Updated January 31, 2009 with the Baphomet pictures and in June, 2009 to mention her fascination with the cut and paste feature of her computer. Added the picture of her and the toilet in September, 2009: we think the synchronicity is SO appropriate! Updated again in December, 2009 with comments on the ludicrous foolishness of her research 'comments'. Updated January 5, 2014 with news of Karen's "discussion board" which, in reality, is only a podium for more of her blathering.

Just click on "Prince, the Search Dog" to find things on our site. He's on every page and he'll take you directly to our search form where you can see if we've written about whatever it is you're interested in. Prince has a great memory; he always remembers where things are!

This site and its contents are © (copyright) 1998-2014 by Edward L. King (Ed King). All rights reserved. All comments and opinions are mine personally.

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