Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper
"A Suspicious Character," from the Illustrated London News for October 13, 1888 carrying the overall caption, "With the Vigilance Committee in the East End".
Born	Unknown
Cause of death	Unknown
Other names	Saucy Jack
Details
Victims	5 or more?
Country	UK
Date apprehended	Not apprehended

Jack the Ripper is an alias given to an unidentified serial killer (or killers) active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of London, England in the late 19th century. The name is taken from a letter sent to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer.

The victims were women allegedly earning income as prostitutes. The murders were perpetrated in public or semi-public places at night or towards the early morning. The victim's throat was cut, after which the body was mutilated. Theories suggest the victims were first strangled in order to silence them and to explain the lack of reported blood at the crime scenes. The removal of internal organs from three of the victims led some officials at the time of the murders to propose that the killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge.

Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer owing to the savagery of the attacks and the failure of the police in their attempts to capture the murderer, sometimes missing him at the crime scenes by mere minutes.

Due to the lack of a confirmed identity for the killer, the legends surrounding the murders have become a combination of genuine historical research, folklore and exploitation. Over the years, many authors, historians, and amateur detectives have proposed theories regarding the identity (or identities) of the killer and his victims.

Background

Murder sites - Osborn Street (Emma Elizabeth Smith), George Yard (Martha Tabram), Durward Street (Mary Ann Nichols), Hanbury Street (Annie Chapman), Berner Street (Elizabeth Stride), Mitre Square (Catherine Eddowes), Dorset Street (Mary Jane Kelly).

During the mid-1800s, England experienced a rapid influx of primarily Irish immigrants, swelling the populations of both the largely poor English countryside and England's major cities. From 1882 onwards, Jewish refugees escaping the pogroms in tsarist Russia and eastern Europe added to the overcrowding and the already worsening work and housing conditions. London, and in particular the East End and the civil parish of Whitechapel, became increasingly overcrowded resulting in the development of a massive economic underclass. This endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution. And in October 1888 the London Metropolitan Police estimated that there were twelve hundred prostitutes "of very low class" resident in Whitechapel and about sixty-two brothels. The economic problems were accompanied by a steady rise in social tensions. Between 1886 and 1889 demonstrations by the hungry and unemployed were a permanent feature of London policing.

The majority of murders, and those most often attributed to "Jack the Ripper", all occurred in the latter half of 1888, though the series of brutal killings in Whitechapel persisted at least until 1891. A number of the murders entailed extremely gruesome acts, such as mutilation and evisceration, which were widely reported in the media. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October, when a series of extremely disturbing letters were received by various media outlets and Scotland Yard, purporting to take responsibility for some or all of the murders. One letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included a preserved human kidney. Due in large part to the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and to media treatment of the events, the public increasingly came to believe in a single serial killer and rapist terrorizing the residents of Whitechapel, nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" after the signature on a postcard received by the Central News Agency. Although the investigation was unable to conclusively connect the later killings to the murders of 1888, the legend of Jack the Ripper solidified.

Victims

The files kept by the Metropolitan police show that the investigation begun in 1888 eventually came to encompass eleven separate murders stretching from April 3, 1888, until February 13, 1891, known in the police docket as "the Whitechapel Murders." In addition, at least seven other murders and violent attacks have been connected with Jack the Ripper by various authors and historians. Among the eleven murders actively investigated by the police, five are almost universally agreed upon as having been the work of a single serial killer. These are known collectively as the canonical five victims:

• Mary Ann Nichols (maiden name Mary Ann Walker, nicknamed "Polly"), born c. August 26, 1845, and killed on Friday, August 31, 1888. She was 43 at the time of her death. Nichols' body was discovered at about 3:40 in the morning on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck's Row (since renamed Durward Street), a back street in Whitechapel two hundred yards from the London Hospital.

• Annie Chapman (maiden name Eliza Ann Smith, nicknamed "Dark Annie"), born c. September 1841 and killed on Saturday, September 8, 1888. Chapman's body was discovered about 6:00 in the morning lying on the ground near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. She was forty-seven years old, in poor health and destitute at the time of her death.

• Elizabeth Stride (maiden name Elizabeth Gustafsdotter, nicknamed "Long Liz"), born c. November 27, 1843 in Sweden, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888. Stride's body was discovered close to 1:00 in the morning, lying on the ground in Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street (since renamed Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. She was forty-four years old when she died.

• Catherine Eddowes (used the aliases "Kate Conway" and "Mary Ann Kelly," from the surnames of her two common-law husbands Thomas Conway and John Kelly), born c. April 14, 1842, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888, on the same day as the previous victim, Elizabeth Stride. She was forty-six years old when she died. Ripperologists refer to this circumstance as the "double event." Her body was found in Mitre Square, in the City of London. Mutilation of Eddowes' body and the abstraction of her left kidney and part of her womb by her murderer bore the signature of a 'Jack the Ripper' killing.

• Mary Jane Kelly (called herself "Marie Jeanette Kelly" after a trip to Paris, nicknamed "Ginger"), reportedly born c. 1863 either the city of Limerick or County Limerick, Munster, Ireland and killed on Friday, November 9, 1888. She was about twenty-five years old when she was killed. Kelly's gruesomely mutilated body was discovered shortly after 10:45 a.m. lying on the bed in the single room where she lived at 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields.
  
  

Wanted poster - issued by the police during the 'autumn of terror' 1888.

The authority of this list rests on a number of authors' opinions but, historically, these have mainly been based on the report from Dr.Thomas Bond to Assistant Commissioner Sir Dr. Robert Anderson, and the private notes from 1894, of Sir Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Department. Macnaghten did not join the force until the year after the murders, and his memorandum, that came to light in 1959, has been found to contain serious errors of fact about possible suspects. There is considerable disagreement as to the value of Bond's and Macnaghten's assessment of the number of victims. Some researchers have even posited that the series may not have been the work of a single murderer, but of an unknown number of killers acting independently. Authors Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow argue that the 'canonical five' is a "Ripper myth" and that the probable number of victims could range between three (Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes) and six (the previous three plus Stride, Kelly and Tabram) or even more. Bond's and Macnaghten's view of the case was not necessarily shared by the investigating officers (such as Inspector Frederick Abberline).

Except for Stride (whose attack may have been interrupted), mutilations of the canonical five victims became continuously more severe as the series of murders proceeded. Nichols and Stride were not missing any organs, but Chapman's uterus was taken, and Eddowes had her uterus and a kidney carried away and her face mutilated. While only Kelly's heart was missing from her crime scene, many of her internal organs were removed and left in her room.

The 'canonical five' murders were generally perpetrated in the dark of night, on or close to a weekend, in a secluded site to which the public could gain access, and on a pattern of dates either at the end of a month or a week or so after. Yet every case differed from this pattern in some manner. Besides the differences already mentioned, Eddowes was the only victim killed within the City of London, though close to the boundary between the City and the metropolis. Nichols was the only victim to be found on an open street, albeit a dark and deserted one. Many sources state that Chapman was killed after the sun had started to rise, though that was not the opinion of the police or the doctors who examined the body. Kelly's murder ended a six-week period of inactivity for the murderer. (A week elapsed between the Nichols and Chapman murders, and three between Chapman and the "double event.")

The large number of horrific attacks against women during this era adds some uncertainty as to exactly how many victims were killed by the same man. Most experts point to deep throat slashes, mutilations to the victim's abdomen and genital area, removal of internal organs and progressive facial mutilations as the distinctive features of Jack the Ripper's modus operandi.

Other victims in the Whitechapel murder file

Six other Whitechapel murders were investigated by the London police at the time, two of which occurred before the 'canonical' five and four after. Some of these have been ascribed, by certain figures involved in the investigation, or by later authors, to have been victims of Jack the Ripper.

These two murders occured before the canonical five:

• Emma Elizabeth Smith, born c. 1843, was attacked on Osborn Street, Whitechapel April 3, 1888, and a blunt object was inserted into her vagina, rupturing her perineum. She survived the attack and managed to walk back to her lodging house with the injuries. Friends brought her to a hospital where she told police that she was attacked by two or three men, one of whom was a teenager. She fell into a coma and died on April 5, 1888. This was the first "Whitechapel Murder," according to the book Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates by Stewart Evans and Donald Rumbelow.

• Martha Tabram (name sometimes misspelled as Tabran; used the alias Emma Turner; maiden name Martha White), born c. May 10, 1849, and killed on August 7, 1888. She had a total of 39 stab wounds. Of the non-canonical Whitechapel murders, Tabram is named most often as another possible Ripper victim, owing to the evident lack of obvious motive, the geographical and periodic proximity to the canonical attacks, and the remarkable savagery of the attack. The main difficulty with including Tabram is that the killer used a somewhat different modus operandi (stabbing, rather than slashing the throat and then cutting), but it is now accepted that a killer's modus operandi can change, sometimes quite dramatically. Her body was found at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel.

These four murders happened after the canonical five:

• Rose Mylett (true name probably Catherine Mylett, but was also known as Catherine Millett, Elizabeth "Drunken Lizzie" Davis, "Fair" Alice Downey, or simply "Fair Clara"), born c. 1862 and died on December 20, 1888. She was reportedly strangled "by a cord drawn tightly round the neck," though some investigators believed that she had accidentally suffocated herself on the collar of her dress while in a drunken stupor. Her body was found in Clarke's Yard, High Street, Poplar.

  

  The discovery of the Pinchin Street torso on September 10 1889 prompted renewed speculation as to the identity of Jack the Ripper: cover of the September 21, 1889, issue of Puck magazine, by cartoonist Tom Merry.

• Alice McKenzie (nicknamed "Clay Pipe" Alice and sometimes used the alias Alice Bryant), a prostitute, born c. 1849 and killed on July 17, 1889. She reportedly died from "severance of the left carotid artery," but several minor bruises and cuts were found on the body. Her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. Police Commissioner James Monro initially believed this to be a Ripper murder and one of the pathologists examining the body, Dr Bond, agreed, though later writers have been more circumspect. Evans and Rumbelow suggest that the unknown murderer tried to make it look like a Ripper killing to deflect suspicion from himself.

• "The Pinchin Street Torso" - a headless and legless torso of a woman found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel on September 10, 1889. The mutilations were similar to the body which was the subject of the "The Whitehall Mystery," though in this case the hands were not severed. It seems probable that the murder had been committed elsewhere and that parts of the dismembered body were dumped at the crime scene.An unconfirmed speculation of the time was that the remains were of Lydia Hart, a prostitute who had recently disappeared. However she was soon located in a local infirmary where she was receiving medical treatment to cure the after effects of a "bit of a spree". "The Whitehall Mystery" and "The Pinchin Street Murder" have often been suggested to be the work of a serial killer, for which the nicknames "Torso Killer" or "Torso Murderer" have been suggested. Whether Jack the Ripper and the "Torso Killer" were the same person or separate serial killers of uncertain connection to each other (but active in the same area) has long been debated. The Pinchin Street murder prompted a revival of interest in the Ripper - manifested in an illustration from "Puck" showing the Ripper, from behind, looking in a mirror at alternate reflections embodying current speculation as to whom he might be - a doctor, a cleric, a woman, a Jew, a bandit or a policeman?

• Frances Coles (also known as Frances Coleman, Frances Hawkins and nicknamed "Carrotty Nell"), born c. 1865 and killed on February 13, 1891. Minor wounds on the back of the head suggest that she was thrown violently to the ground before her throat was cut. Otherwise there were no mutilations to the body. Her body was found under a railway arch at Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. A man named James Sadler, seen earlier with her, was arrested by the police and charged with her murder, and was briefly thought to be the Ripper himself. However he was discharged from court due to lack of evidence on 3 March 1891. After this eleventh and last "Whitechapel Murder" the case was closed.

Other murders

In addition to the eleven murders officially investigated by the Metropolitan police as part of the Ripper investigation, various Ripper historians have at times suggested a number of other contemporary murders as possibly being connected to the same serial killer. In some cases, the records are not clear if the murders had even occurred, or if the stories were fabricated later as a part of Ripper lore.

"Fairy Fay," a nickname for an unknown murder victim reportedly found on December 26, 1887 with "a stake thrust through her abdomen." It has been suggested that "Fairy Fay" was a creation of the press based upon confusion of the details of the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith with a separate non-fatal attack the previous Christmas. The name of "Fairy Fay" does not appear for this alleged victim until many years after the murders, and it seems to have been taken from a verse of a popular song called Polly Wolly Doodle that starts "Fare thee well my fairy fay." There were no recorded murders in Whitechapel at or around Christmas 1886 or 1887, and later newspaper reports that included a Christmas 1887 killing conspicuously did not list the Smith murder. Most authors agree that "Fairy Fay" never existed.

Annie Millwood, born c. 1850, reportedly the victim of an attack on February 25, 1888. She was admitted to hospital with "numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body." She was discharged from hospital but died from apparently natural causes on March 31, 1888.

Ada Wilson, reportedly the victim of an attack on March 28, 1888, resulting in two stabs in the neck. She survived the attack.

Whitehall mystery of October 1888

"The Whitehall Mystery," a term coined for the headless torso of a woman found in the basement of the new Metropolitan Police headquarters being built in Whitehall on October 2, 1888. An arm belonging to the body had previously been discovered floating in the Thames near Pimlico, and one of the legs was subsequently discovered buried near where the torso was found. The other limbs and head were never recovered and the body never identified.

Annie Farmer, born c. 1848, reportedly was the victim of an attack on November 21, 1888. She survived with only a superficial cut on her throat, apparently caused by a blunt knife. Police suspected that the wound was self-inflicted and did not investigate the case further.

Elizabeth Jackson, a prostitute whose various body parts were collected from the River Thames between May 31 and June 25 1889. She was reportedly identified by scars she had had prior to her disappearance and apparent murder.

Carrie Brown (nicknamed "Shakespeare", reportedly for quoting William Shakespeare's sonnets), born c. 1835 and killed April 24, 1891, in Manhattan, New York City. She was strangled with clothing and then mutilated with a knife. Her body was found with a large tear through her groin area and superficial cuts on her legs and back. No organs were removed from the scene, though an ovary was found upon the bed. Whether it was purposely removed or unintentionally dislodged during the mutilation is unknown. At the time, the murder was compared to those in Whitechapel though London police eventually ruled out any connection.

Investigation

An illustration of Abberline from an 1888 newspaper

The surviving Whitechapel Murders police files allow a quite detailed view of investigative procedure in Victorian times. A large team of policemen were conducting house-to-house inquiries, lists of suspects were drawn up and many were interviewed, forensic material was collected and examined. A close reading of the investigation shows a basic process of identifying suspects, tracing them and deciding whether to examine them more closely or to cross them off the list. This is still the pattern of a major inquiry today. The investigation was initially conducted by Whitechapel (H) Division C.I.D. headed by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid. After the Nichols murder, Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore, and Walter Andrews were sent from Central Office at Scotland Yard to assist. After the Eddowes murder, which occurred within the City of London, the City Police under Detective Inspector James McWilliam were also engaged. However overall direction of the murder enquiries was confused and hampered by the fact that the newly appointed head of the CID, Sir Robert Anderson, was on leave in Switzerland between September 7 and October 15, during which time Chapman, Stride and Eddowes were killed. This prompted the Chief Commissioner of the Met, Sir Charles Warren, to appoint Superintendent Donald Swanson to co-ordinate the enquiry from Scotland Yard. Swanson's notes on the case survive and are a valuable record of the investigation

Due, in part, to dissatisfaction with the police effort a group of volunteer citizens in London's East End called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee also patrolled the streets of London looking for suspicious characters, petitioned the government to raise a reward for information about the killer, and hired private detectives to question witnesses separate from the police. The committee was led by George Lusk in 1888. Albert Bachert, in 1889, claimed to be in charge of that group or a similar group.

Writing on the Wall

After the "double event" of the early morning of September 30, police searched the area near the crime scenes in an effort to locate a suspect, witnesses or evidence. At about 3:00 a.m., Constable Alfred Long discovered a bloodstained piece of an apron in the stairwell of a tenement on Goulston Street. The cloth was later confirmed as being a part of the apron worn by Catherine Eddowes. There was writing in white chalk on the wall above where the apron was found. Long reported that it read:

"The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing."

Detective Daniel Halse (City of London Police), arriving in Goulston Street a short time later, took down the following version: "The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing." A 'copy' (according with Long's version) of the message was taken down and attached to a report from chief Commissioner Sir Charles Warren to the Home Office. Police Superintendent Thomas Arnold visited the scene and saw the graffiti. Later, in his report of 6 November to the Home Office, he claimed, that with the strong feeling against the Jews already existing, the message might have become the means of causing a riot:

"I beg to report that on the morning of 30th Sept. last my attention was called to some writing on the wall of the entrance to some dwellings No. 108 Goulston Street Whitechapel which consisted of the following words: "The Juews are not [the word 'not' being deleted] the men that will not be blamed for nothing", and knowing in consequence of suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named John Pizer alias 'Leather Apron', having committed a murder in Hanbury Street a short time previously, a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally, and as the building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited principally by that sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed having in view the fact that it was in such a position that it would have been rubbed by persons passing in & out of the building."

Since the Nichols murder, rumours had been circulating in the East End that the killings were the work of a Jew dubbed "Leather Apron." Religious tensions were already high, and there had already been many near-riots. Arnold ordered a man to be standing by with a sponge to erase the graffiti, while he consulted Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren. Covering the graffiti in order to allow time for a photographer to arrive was considered, but Arnold and Warren (who personally attended the scene) considered this to be too dangerous, and Warren later stated he "considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once."

While the writing was found in Metropolitan Police territory, the apron piece was from a victim killed in the City of London, which has a separate police service. Some officers disagreed with Arnold and Warren's decision, especially those representing the City of London Police, who thought the graffiti constituted part of a crime scene and should at least be photographed before being erased, but the message was wiped from the wall at approximately 5:30 a.m. Most contemporary police concluded that the writing of the graffiti was a semi-literate attack on the area's Jewish population. There is however disagreement as to the importance of the graffiti in the Ripper case. Several possible explanations have been suggested:

• Author Martin Fido notes that the graffiti included double negatives, a common feature of Cockney speech. He suggests that the graffiti might be translated into standard English as "The Jews are men who will not take responsibility for anything" and that the message was written by someone who believed he or she had been wronged by one of the many Jewish merchants or tradesmen in the area.

  

  Police 'copy' of the writing in Goulston Street, attached to Chief Commissioner Sir Charles Warren's report on 'the circumstances of the Mitre square murder.'.

• According to Historian Philip Sugden there are at least three permissible interpretations of this particular clue. "All three are feasible, not one capable of proof." The first is that the writing was not the work of the murderer at all. The apron piece was dropped by the writing, either by accident or design. The second would be to "take the murderer at his word" - A Jew incriminating himself and his people. The third interpretation was the one most favoured by Scotland Yard and Old Jewry: The chalk message was a deliberate subterfuge, designed to incriminate the Jews.

"But suppose the killer happened to throw the apron, quite fortuitously, down by the existing piece of graffiti ? In such a case we would be utterly wrong in according to the writing any significance whatsoever. Walter Dew was inclined to endorse this approach to the problem. (...) Constable Halse, on the other hand, saw it and thought it looked recent. And Chief Inspector Henry Moore and Sir Robert Anderson are both on record as having explicitly stated their belief that the message was written by the murderer"

• A contemporaneous explanation of the writing in Goulston Street was offered by Robert Donston Stephenson (20 April 1841–9 October 1916), a journalist and writer known to be interested in the occult and black magic. In an article (signed 'One Who Thinks He Knows') in the Pall Mall Gazette December 1st 1888, Stephenson concluded from the overall sentence construction, the double negative, the double designation "the juwes are the men", and the highly unusual "misspelling", that the Ripper most probably was of French-speaking origin.

"Why did the murderer spell the word Jews 'Juwes'? Was it that he was an uneducated Englishman who did not know how to spell the word; was he in reality an ignorant Jew, reckless of consequences and glorying in his deeds; or was he a foreigner, well accustomed to the English language, but who in the tremendous hurry of the moment unconsciously wrote the fatal word in his native tongue? (...) Juwes is a much too difficult word for an uneducated man to evolve on the spur of the moment, as any philologist will allow. Any ignorant Jew capable of spelling the rest of the sentence as correctly as he did, would know, certainly, how to spell the name of his own people. Therefore, only the last proposition remains, which we shall now show, in the most conclusive manner, to be the truth."

• Author Stephen Knight suggested that 'Juwes' referred not to "Jews", but to Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the three killers of Hiram Abiff, a semi-legendary figure in Freemasonry, and furthermore, that the message was written by the killer (or killers) as part of a Masonic plot. There is, however, no evidence that anyone prior to Knight had ever referred to those three figures by the term 'Juwes'.

An Early Instance of "Profiling"

After the acquittal of Daniel M'Naghten in 1843, and the establishment of the M'Naghten rules, physicians became increasingly involved in determining whether defendants in murder cases were suffering from 'mental illness'. And the growing importance of the medical sciences during the same period also led to an increasing involvement by pathologists in the investigative process. After the murder of Catherine Eddowes, Assistant Commissioner Sir (Dr.) Robert Anderson requested police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond to give his opinion, as significant uncertainty had arisen about the amount of surgical skill and knowledge possessed by the murderer (or murderers). Dr. Bond's report to Sir Robert Anderson is the earliest known copy of an offender profile. According to investigative psychologist David Canter, Dr. Bond's proposals would probably be accepted as thoughtful and intelligent by police forces today. Bond based his assessment on his own examination of the most extensively mutilated victim and the post mortem notes from the four previous murders.

Official police photograph of the murder scene in Miller's Court No.13.

"All five murders no doubt were committed by the same hand. In the first four the throats appear to have been cut from left to right. In the last case, owing to the extensive mutilation it is impossible to say in what direction the fatal cut was made, but arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman's head must have been lying. All the circumstances surrounding the murders lead me to form the opinion that the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was first cut.".

Dr. Bond was strongly opposed to the idea that the murderer would possess any kind of scientific or anatomical knowledge, or even the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer. In Bond's opinion he must have been a man of solitary habits, subject to "periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania"; the character of the mutilations possibly indicating 'satyriasis'. Dr. Bond also stated that "the homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that Religious mania may have been the original disease".

Letters to the police

Over the course of the Ripper murders, the police and newspapers received many thousands of letters regarding the case. Some were from well-intentioned persons offering advice for catching the killer. The vast majority of these were deemed useless and subsequently ignored.

Perhaps more interesting were hundreds of letters which claimed to have been written by the killer himself. The vast majority of such letters are considered hoaxes. Many experts contend that none of them are genuine, but of the ones cited as perhaps genuine, either by period or modern authorities, three in particular are prominent:

• The "Dear Boss" letter, dated September 25, postmarked and received September 27, 1888, by the Central News Agency, was forwarded to Scotland Yard on September 29. Initially it was considered a hoax, but when Eddowes was found three days after the letter's postmark with one ear partially cut off, the letter's promise to "clip the ladys [sic] ears off" gained attention. Police published the letter on October 1, hoping someone would recognise the handwriting, but nothing came of this effort. The name "Jack the Ripper" was first used in this letter and gained worldwide notoriety after its publication. Most of the letters that followed copied the tone of this one. After the murders, police officials contended the letter had been a hoax by a local journalist.

  

  George Lusk, President of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.

  

The "Saucy Jacky" postcard, postmarked and received October 1, 1888, by the Central News Agency, had handwriting similar to the "Dear Boss" letter. It mentions that two victims — Stride and Eddowes — were killed very close to one another: "double event this time." It has been argued that the letter was mailed before the murders were publicised, making it unlikely that a crank would have such knowledge of the crime, though it was postmarked more than 24 hours after the killings took place, long after details were known by journalists and residents of the area. Police officials later claimed to have identified a specific journalist as the author of both this message and the earlier "Dear Boss" letter.

The "From Hell" letter, also known as the "Lusk letter," postmarked October 15 and received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on October 16, 1888. Lusk opened a small box to discover half a human kidney, later said by a doctor to have been preserved in "spirits of wine" (ethanol). One of Eddowes' kidneys had been removed by the killer. The writer claimed that he had "fried and ate" the missing kidney half. There is some disagreement over the kidney: some contend it had belonged to Eddowes, while others argue it was "a macabre practical joke, and no more."

Some sources list another letter, dated September 17, 1888, as the first message to use the Jack the Ripper name. Most experts believe this was a modern fake inserted into police records in the 20th century, long after the killings took place. They note that the letter has neither an official police stamp verifying the date it was received nor the initials of the investigator who would have examined it if it were ever considered as potential evidence. It is also not mentioned in any surviving police document of the time.

Ongoing DNA tests on the still existing letters have yet to yield conclusive results.

Modern perspectives

Investigative techniques and awareness have progressed greatly since 1888. Many valuable forensic science techniques taken for granted today were unknown to the Victorian-era Metropolitan Police. The value of interpreting motives of serial killers, the concept of criminal profiling, fingerprinting, and other such knowledge and intelligence that have developed were poorly understood if not altogether unknown. Whilst the investigation was not nearly as sophisticated as police work is today, the detectives' inquiry included interviewing witnesses and residents of the area, following up tips from the public, and other standard police procedures. Common modern forensic investigation methods such as fingerprinting, DNA analysis and blood typing had not yet been developed.

Media

Punch cartoon by John Tenniel (22 September 1888) criticising the police's alleged incompetence.

The Ripper murders mark an important watershed in modern British life. Whilst not the first serial killer, Jack the Ripper's case was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy. Reforms to the Stamp Act in 1855 had enabled the publication of inexpensive newspapers with wider circulation. These mushroomed later in the Victorian era to include mass-circulation newspapers as cheap as a halfpenny, along with popular magazines such as the Illustrated Police News, making the Ripper the beneficiary of previously unparalleled publicity. This, combined with the fact that no one was ever convicted of the murders, created a legend that cast a shadow over later serial killers.

Some believe that the killer's nickname was invented by newspapermen to make for a more interesting story that could sell more papers. This became standard media practice with examples such as the Boston Strangler, the Green River Killer, the Axeman of New Orleans, the Beltway Sniper, and the Hillside Strangler, besides the derivative Yorkshire Ripper almost a hundred years later and the unnamed perpetrator of the "Thames Nude Murders" of the 1960s, whom the press dubbed Jack the Stripper.

The poor of the East End had long been ignored by affluent society, but the nature of the murders and of the victims forcibly drew attention to their living conditions. This attention enabled social reformers of the time to finally gain the support of the "respectable classes." A letter from George Bernard Shaw to the Star newspaper commented sarcastically on these sudden concerns of the press:

Whilst we Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation and organization, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism.

Suspects

Main article: Jack the Ripper suspects

theories about the identity and profession of Jack the Ripper have been advanced. None have been entirely persuasive.

Jack the Ripper in popular culture

Further information: [[:Jack the Ripper fiction]]

Jack the Ripper has been featured in a number of works of fiction and in popular culture, either as the central character or in a more peripheral role.

At the time of the murders, a theatrical version of Robert Louis Stevenson's book Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was being performed. The subject matter of horrific murder in the London streets drew much attention, even leading the star of the show to be accused by some members of the public of being the Ripper himself, although this theory was never taken seriously by the police.

The 1976 Judas Priest album, Sad Wings of Destiny features a song about Jack the Ripper entitled "The Ripper."

In 2001, Jack the Ripper was the subject of the Hughes' Brothers movie From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, Ian Holm, and Heather Graham. It was based upon the graphic novel of the same title by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.

In 2006, Jack the Ripper was selected by the BBC History Magazine and its readers as the worst Briton in history.

The legend of the Ripper is still promoted in the East End of London with many guided tours of the murder sites. The Ten Bells, a Victorian pub in Commercial Street that had been frequented by Jack the Ripper's victims, was the focus of such tours for many years. To capitalise on this business, the owners changed its name to the "Jack the Ripper" in the 1960s, but following protests by feminists and others, the pub returned to its old name.

To date more than 200 works of non-fiction have been published which deal exclusively with the Jack the Ripper murders, making it one of the most written-about true-crime subjects of the past century. Six periodicals about Jack the Ripper have been introduced since the early 1990s: Ripperana (1992-present), Ripperologist (1994-present, electronic format only since 2005), the Whitechapel Journal (1997–2000), Ripper Notes (1999-present), Ripperoo (2000–2003), and the The Whitechapel Society (2005-present).

See also

• Serial killer
• Jack the Stripper
• Joseph Vacher (aka the French Ripper)
• Yorkshire Ripper
• The Blackout Ripper
• Servant Girl Annihilator
• List of serial killers by number of victims

Additional reading

• The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, (2002) ISBN 0-7867-0276-1
• The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner, (2002) ISBN 0-7867-0768-2
• Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates by Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow, (2006) ISBN 0-7509-4228-2
• Jack The Ripper & The London Press by L. Perry Curtis, Jr. (2001) ISBN 0-300-08872-8
• Jack the Ripper: The Facts by Paul Begg, (2004) ISBN 1-86105-687-7
• The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow, (Revised edition 2005) ISBN 0-425-11869-X
• Ripperology by Robin Odell, (2006) ISBN 0-87338-861-5
• The Jack the Ripper A-Z by Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, (1996) ISBN 0-7472-5522-9
• The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (1999) edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, ISBN 0-7867-0626-0
• Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (2001) by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner. Sutton: Stroud. ISBN 0-7509-2549-3

External links

• Casebook: Jack the Ripper has an extensive collection of contemporary newspaper reports related to the murders as well as articles by modern authors.
• The Metropolitan Police history of Jack the Ripper discusses the investigation into the killings.
• Information on the "Jack the Ripper and the East End" exhibit at London's Museum in Docklands that runs 15 May - 2 November, 2008.
• The National Archives - Jack the Ripper holds images and transcripts of letters claiming to be from Jack the Ripper.
• Whitechapel Society 1888 is a social organization dedicated to the Ripper case. It holds bimonthly meetings in London and has its own newsletter.
• Jack the Ripper History A site that looks at the history of the murders and puts them into the social context of the era in which they occurred.