They agreed to move to Cardiff, in Wales, where they would be away from the public eye. Cardiff was a big enough city where many of the luxuries of London existed, plus the population would allow Phillips to blend in where he could live out a normal life. They changed their last name to Williams.
The newspapers were told that Phillips died from bleeding caused by a stroke on October 27, 1897. Scotland Yard was involved in the cover up as a plot to draw out Jack the Ripper. “With me out of the way as far as the public is concerned, Jack the Ripper may gain more confidence and hopefully that will be his undoing,” Phillips explained to his former partner Dr. Percy John Clark. “His arrogance will allow us to get closer to him. With my death, I can move in circles that are difficult for me to move among now. Once I catch him, I can truly retire quietly in anonymity.”
Scotland Yard was skeptical that Jack the Ripper was still alive – the case was officially closed; but Phillips, even though he was now retired had been an integral part of the force for many years and so, it was agreed upon and set forth.
It would have been easy for Phillips to go back and wait for Jack to show up at the crime scenes and stop him there, but he was nervous about being seen. It was true he was much older than he had been when the murders first started occurring but he would still be recognized if someone saw him. He didn’t want the Bagster Phillips who still lived in the past to become the primary suspect.
The reaction of Jack the Ripper himself was also an unknown. Jack’s senses and survival instincts would be heightened during the murders. He certainly didn’t want to be killed by the Ripper.
Phillips was curious about Jack. The horror he had felt at the Ripper murders had given away to fascination now that the possibility existed that Jack possessed a similar item to Phillips allowing Jack to move through time as well. How else could Jack have disappeared right before my eyes?
Phillips was sixty four years old. He was not a young as he once was but he had kept himself in fairly good shape. He believed that as an officer of the law he had an obligation to keep himself not only morally fit but physically fit as well. He was thankful that he had taken such an approach to life as he would need all the energy he could muster to carry out the task that he had now set before himself.
Over the next two years, Phillips followed the trail of murders throughout history, looking for signs that those murders might have been committed by Jack. He knew what Jack looked like and wanted to confront him if he could determine an area in which he might live. His plan was to catch Jack by surprise.
During those years, Phillips traveled throughout the future and past. He saw Jack many times but was never able to get close to him. He knew that Jack had continued to murder at will; but during that time, Phillips had never been able to stop Jack. He had always gotten there too late.
As the years passed, Phillips noticed that Jack’s appetite for killing public figures increased also. It was Jack who started World War I when he murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. It was true that there had been a bombing attempt on the Archduke and it was also true that he had been shot. But the Archduke didn’t die from the gun wound. As he was recovering in his bed in the Governor’s residence, Jack showed up and slaughtered the injured man. When the Archduke’s body was discovered, because of the insistence of the privacy of the Archduke by his remaining family, the death was pronounced murder by gun wound due to being shot by Gavrilo Princip.
Phillips knew this but that knowledge alone couldn’t change history.
Later, Phillips, sickened that he couldn’t stop Jack from killing Ferdinand (he did try by going back in time and giving several warnings to the men who protected the Archduke but the warnings fell on deaf ears), decided that he wouldn’t let something like that happen again. Not long after, Phillips learned Jack was planning another assassination and Phillips decided that he had seen enough death.
During his years of traveling through time, he had done quite a bit of research on the actual subject of time travel. In the far future, where time travel had become legal again due to fail-safe mechanisms in the devices that would not allow anyone to change the past, he met some rogue scientists who were looking for a way to override the fail-safe mechanism. Their plan was to create a separate device that when used in coordination with the time travel device, would generate a time slip or a temporary blending of the last location in time of the time-traveler and the new location in time. Thus, the time-traveler would effectively be in two places at the same time. Their theory was that this would confuse the device allowing the user to do whatever he wished to affect history without the device triggering a return to the user’s original time.
Phillips purchased the technology from one of the rogue scientists for a hefty sum and then went back in time to stop Jack for good.
His original plan was to use the device to confuse Jack long enough for Phillips to shoot him. With the discovery that Jack was also planning to kill American President Elizabeth Williams, Phillips saw this as an opportunity.
Jack’s plan was to incite indirect death on an extremely large scale
