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The cover of the September 21, 1889, issue of Puck magazine, featuring cartoonist Tom Merry's depiction of the unidentified Whitechapel murderer Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper is the pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer (or killers) active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area of London in the second half of 1888. The name is taken from a letter to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer, published at the time of the killings. Although many theories have been advanced, Jack the Ripper's identity may never be determined.

The legends surrounding the Ripper murders have become a complex muddle of genuine historical research, freewheeling conspiracy theory and dubious folklore. The lack of a confirmed identity for the killer has allowed subsequent authors, historians and mostly amateur sleuths — dubbed Ripperologists — to point their fingers at a wide variety of candidates. Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer due to the savagery of the murders and the failure of police to effect a capture, with the Ripper sometimes escaping discovery by mere minutes.

Victims were women earning income as casual prostitutes. Typical Ripper murders were perpetrated in a public or semi-public place; the victim's throat was cut, after which the cadaver was subjected to abdominal and sometimes other mutilations. Many now believe that the victims were first strangled in order to silence them. Due to the nature of the wounds on some presumed Ripper victims, several of whom had internal organs removed, it has been proposed that the killer had a degree of surgical or medical skill, or was perhaps a butcher, although this point, like most of the beliefs about the killer and facts in the case, is in dispute.

Victims

Template:Ripper victims The number and names of the Ripper's victims are the subject of much debate, but the most accepted list is referred to as the "canonical five." It includes the following five prostitutes (or presumed prostitute in Eddowes' case) in the East End of London:

This list should be treated with caution. Its authority rests on a number of authors' opinions, but the initial basis for these opinions mainly came from notes made privately in 1894 by Sir Melville Macnaghten as Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Department, papers which came to light in 1959. Macnaghten's papers reflected his own opinion and were not necessarily shared by the investigating officers (such as Inspector Frederick Abberline). Macnaghten did not join the force until the year after the murders, and his memorandum contained serious errors of fact about possible suspects. For this and other reasons, some Ripperologists prefer to remove one or more names from this list of canonical victims: typically Stride (who had no mutilations beyond a cut throat and, if one witness can be believed, was attacked in public), and/or Kelly (who was younger than other victims, murdered indoors, and whose mutilations were far more extensive than the others). Others prefer to expand the list by citing Martha Tabram and others as probable Ripper victims.

Except for Stride (whose attack may have been interrupted), mutilations 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 was left with facial mutilations. While only Kelly's heart was missing from the crime scene, many of her internal organs were removed and left in her room.

The five canonical murders were generally perpetrated in the darkness 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 believe Chapman was killed after the sun had started to rise, though that apparently was not the belief of the police at the time.

A major difficulty in identifying who was and was not a Ripper victim is the large number of horrific attacks against women during this era. 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.

Possible victims

Victims of other contemporary and somewhat similar attacks and/or murders have also been suggested as additions to the list. Those victims are generally poorly documented. They include:

  • "Fairy Fay", reportedly a nickname for an unnamed murder victim found on December 26, 1887. The cause of death was given as "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 Smith (see below) with the claims of a friend of Emma Elizabeth Smith (see below), interviewed after that murder, that she had been attacked the prior Christmas. The term "Fairy Fay" does not appear 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". At this time there is no real evidence for her existence; St. Catherine's House has no record of her or any woman named "Fay" during the time period.
  • Annie Millwood, born ca. 1850 (approximate date), reportedly the victim of an attack on February 25, 1888, resulting in her hospitalisation for "numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body." She was released 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.
  • Emma Elizabeth Smith, born ca. 1843 (approximate year). She was attacked on 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 a gang of two or three, one of whom was a teenager. She fell into a coma and died on April 5, 1888.
  • Martha Tabram, (maiden name Martha White, name sometimes misspelled as Martha Tabran, used the alias Emma Turner), born on 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, due 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 lies in the fact that the killer used a 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.
  • "The Whitehall Mystery", 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 the spot where the torso was found. The other limbs and head were never recovered and the body never identified.
  • Annie Farmer, born in 1848, reportedly was the victim of an attack on November 21, 1888. She survived with only a light, though bleeding, cut on her throat. The wound was superficial and apparently caused by a blunt knife. Police suspected that the wound was self-inflicted and ceased to investigate her case.
  • 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 in 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.
  • Elizabeth Jackson, a prostitute whose various body parts were collected from the River Thames between May 31 and June 25 of 1889. She was reportedly identified by scars she had had previous to her disappearance and apparent murder.
  • Alice McKenzie (nick-named "Clay Pipe" Alice and used the alias Alice Bryant), born ca. 1849 and killed on July 17, 1889. The reason of death was reportedly the "severance of the left carotid artery" but several minor bruises and cuts were found on the body.
  • "The Pinchin Street Murder", a term coined after the finding of a torso similar in condition to "The Whitehall Mystery", though the hands were not severed, on September 10, 1889. An unconfirmed speculation of the time was that the body belonged to Lydia Hart, a prostitute who had disappeared. "The Whitehall Mystery" and "The Pinchin Street Murder" have often been suggested to be the works of a serial killer, for which the nick-names "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 by Ripperologists. Elizabeth Jackson has also been suggested as another victim of the "Torso Killer".
  • Frances Coles, (also known as Frances Coleman, Frances Hawkins and nicknamed "Carrotty Nell"), born in 1865 and killed on February 13, 1891. Minor wounds on the back of the head suggest that she was thrown violently to the ground, and then her throat was cut. Otherwise there were no mutilations to the body.
  • Carrie Brown, (nicknamed "Shakespeare," allegedly because of her habit of reciting sonnets by William Shakespeare while drunk), born ca. 1835 and killed on April 24, 1891, in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. 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 taken, though an ovary was found upon the bed. Whether it was purposefully removed or fell out of the gap is unknown. At the time, the murder was compared to those that happened in Whitechapel though, apparently, London police eventually ruled out any connection.

Some Ripperologists also cite cases involving mutilated boys as being similar enough to other Ripper murders to merit close attention. A few of the letters sent to police at the time that claimed to have come from the killer contained threats about killing children.

Goulston Street graffiti

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 scrap of cloth near a tenement on Goulston Street. The cloth was later confirmed as part of Eddowes' apron.

There was graffiti in white chalk on the wall above where the apron was found. Long reported the message as "The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing." Other police officers recalled a slightly different message: "The Juwes are not The men That Will be Blamed for nothing."

Police Superintendent Thomas Arnold visited the scene and saw the graffiti. He feared that with daybreak and the beginning of the day's business, the message would be widely seen and might worsen the general Anti-Semitic sentiments of the populace. 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 the graffiti erased from the wall.

While the graffiti was found in Metropolitan Police territory, the apron was from a victim killed in the City of London, which had a separate police force.

Some officers disagreed with Arnold's order, especially those representing the City of London Police, who thought the graffiti was part of a crime scene and should at least be photographed before being erased, but Arnold's order was upheld by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren. The graffiti was wiped from the wall at about 5:30 a.m.

Most contemporary police concluded that the graffiti was a semi-literate attack on the area's Jewish population. Author Stephen Knight suggested that Juwes referred not to "Jews," but to Jubelo, Jebula and Jebulum, 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 Freemasonic plot. This idea has been rejected by most experts, and there is no evidence that anyone prior to Knight had ever referred to those three figures by the term "Juwes".

Author Martin Fido notes that graffiti makes use of 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.

A minority of authors contend that the graffiti is merely coincidental. There is no definitive proof linking it to the murder, other than the placement of the bloodstained apron scrap. There are several possible scenarios:

  • The murderer wrote the graffiti and then dropped the apron scrap to indicate a link, which most Ripperologists contend is the case.
  • The graffiti was pre-existant and the murderer wanted to indicate a link in support of the graffiti's message
  • The graffiti was pre-existant and the murderer dropped the scrap coincidentally, without interest in making a link (perhaps failing to notice the graffiti)
  • The graffiti was added after the scrap was dropped. Given the time between the discovery of Eddowes' body (1:44am) and the discovery of the scrap at 3am, there is ample time for this to occur.

The Ripper letters

Jack the Ripper letters

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 contemporary 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 with one ear partially cut off, the letter's promise to "clip the ladys 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.
  • The "Saucy Jack" 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" (ethyl alcohol). One of Eddowes' kidneys had been removed by the killer, and a doctor determined the kidney sent to Lusk was "very similar to the one removed from Catherine Eddowes," though his findings were inconclusive [1]. The writer claimed to have "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." [2]

Some sources list another letter, dated September 17, 1888, as the first message to use the Jack the Ripper name. 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. Neither is it mentioned in any police document of the time, and some who have seen it claim that it was written with a ballpoint pen, which was not invented until some fifty years after the Ripper crimes.

Investigation

It is important to note that investigative techniques and awareness have progressed greatly since the crimes. Many valuable forensic science techniques taken for granted today were unknown to the Victorian-era Metropolitan Police. The concept and motives of serial killers were poorly understood. Police recognized a sexual motive or element to the attacks, but were otherwise thoroughly unfamiliar with such crimes.

Media

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

The Ripper murders mark an important watershed in modern British life. While not the first serial killer, Jack the Ripper was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy around his killings. 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 haunting legend that cast a shadow over later serial killers.

Some believe the killer's nickname was invented by newspapermen to make for a more interesting story that could sell more papers. This practice then became a standard all over the world with examples such as the Boston Strangler, the Green River Killer, the Axeman of New Orleans, the Beltway Sniper, the Hillside Strangler, and the Zodiac Killer, besides the derivative British 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.

Punch, September 29th 1888:- "The Nemesis of Neglect"

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 meant that social reformers of the time were finally able to get the respectable classes to listen and believe that something needed to be done to help the poor. A letter from George Bernard Shaw to the Star 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

Many theories about the identity of Jack the Ripper have been advanced. None is entirely persuasive, and some can hardly be taken seriously at all.

See list of proposed Jack the Ripper suspects for further information.

Jack the Ripper in popular culture

Jack the Ripper has been featured in a number of works of fiction, either as the central character or in a more peripheral role. See Jack the Ripper fiction for details.

The Ripper has also been referenced in other ways in popular culture.

Artists as varied as Motörhead, Macabre, Roland Kirk, Morrissey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, LL Cool J, The White Stripes, Judas Priest, Grim Reaper, Queensrÿche, Falconer, My Chemical Romance, Link Wray, The Legendary Pink Dots, Iced Earth, Bob Dylan, Benediction, Screaming Lord Sutch, Leslie Fish and Nationalteatern have recorded songs titled or about Jack the Ripper. Chicago-based pop-rock band Spitalfield took its name from what members describe as a village where Jack the Ripper came from. The name for this location is actually Spitalfields, and it is not a village but a section of London's East End.

A number of companies also produce Jack the Ripper figurines or toys (including Mezco and McFarlane Toys), sometimes leading to public protest, as when the family of victims of serial killer Robert William Pickton objected to the sale of Ripper dolls at the Vancouver Virgin Megastore. [3]

In 2005, Jack the Ripper was selected by the BBC's History magazine as the 19th century's worst Briton. (BBC)

References

  • The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, ISBN 0786702761
  • The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner, ISBN 0786707682
  • Jack the Ripper: The Facts by Paul Begg, ISBN 1861056877
  • The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, ISBN 0-671-01706-3

See also

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jack the Ripper.

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