JACK THE RIPPER

The Story of the Whitechapel Murderer

Copyright © 2018 by Hourly History.

All rights reserved.

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 Table of Contents
Introduction
The Whitechapel Murderer’s Hunting Ground
The Streets of Whitechapel
Mary Ann Nichols
Leather Apron
Annie Chapman
The Double Murder
The Investigation
Letters from Jack the Ripper
Mary Jane Kelly
Who was Jack the Ripper?
Conclusion
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 Introduction
The Whitechapel murders took place between August and November 1888
over a period of ten weeks. The killer struck between midnight and dawn
and killed, as far as we know, within the confines of a few square miles of
East End London. Framed like this, the Whitechapel murders appear as an
isolated occurrence, a murder spree by a serial killer who struck five times
and then disappeared forever. But can a man compelled to murder women
in the most vicious ways imaginable simply stop and move on?
Jack the Ripper’s crimes captured the imagination of the Victorian
public, and fascination with London’s most notorious serial killer has
endured to this day. New suspects emerge every few years and revelations
concerning famous figures, including the British royal family, never fail to
find an audience. Academics, historians, and amateur sleuths pore over old
evidence, hoping to find a sliver of a clue that will prove who committed
the notorious Whitechapel murders, yet the fact remains that we do not
know the identity of Jack the Ripper and in all likelihood never will.
What we do know is the specifics of the particular social and political
setting in which the Whitechapel murders took place. We also know how
the police handled the investigation and how the press reacted. Most
importantly, we know the names and backgrounds of the victims and details
of how their lives came to their brutal ends.
While the Whitechapel murders were especially savage, happened in
quick succession, baffled police, and were aggressively covered by the
media, they weren’t exactly isolated crimes. The victims of the Whitechapel
murderer were of the lowest class, women living in poverty and surviving
through casual prostitution on the streets of London’s East End. That the
murderer targeted these women is not surprising. At the time of the crimes,
these women were invisible to the world outside the few crowded streets
they existed on. As far as upper-class society was concerned, such women
did not exist. It is a brutal irony that the Whitechapel murderer forced the
British people to acknowledge the plight of poverty-stricken inner-city
women for the first time.
 Why Jack the Ripper killed remains a mystery but how, where, when,
and who he killed is a matter of record begging to be explored.

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 Chapter One

The Whitechapel Murderer’s

Hunting Ground

“We do not say the conditions of their

homes, for how can those places be
called homes, compared with the lair
of a wild beast would be a
comfortable and healthy spot?”

—Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of

Outcast London, 1883

In the Middle Ages, East London was a rural idyll, a place where city
dwellers could escape the masses and enjoy the simple pleasures of the
countryside. For generation upon generation, life was much the same. Then
the Industrial Revolution hit. Suddenly, London expanded at breakneck
speed, attracting people from all over the country and the world to reap the
promised rewards of a new industrial age.
London split in two. As the Thames River flowed from the west to the
east and out to sea, it took with it the city’s waste. Until 1870, all of the
waste created by the city of London was disposed of directly into the river
and even after a basic sewerage system was constructed in the 1860s
sanitary conditions were extremely poor. Devastating outbreaks of diseases
like cholera were commonplace, and child mortality rates were high. As a
result, those Londoners who could afford it lived in the west and those who
could not lived in the east.
East Londoners not only endured the worst stretch of the River Thames,
but they also lived amongst the worst of London’s pollution. Easterly winds
blew smoke from houses and businesses in the west directly through the
streets of East London while the streets themselves—home to tanning
shops, glue-making factories, breweries, dye-houses, and metal-works—
created their own heavy cloud of noxious pollution.
Homelessness and poverty in East London increased dramatically in the
1860s, thanks in part to the collapse of London’s silk industry, and by the
late nineteenth century, East London was one of the most undesirable places
to live in the whole of Great Britain. Many large Edwardian houses built by
factory and mill owners passed into the hands of younger generations who
had no desire to live in them. Hoping to turn a decent profit, the new
owners of these decaying houses transformed them into common lodging
houses. East London became a slum.
When the risk of slum-generated illnesses, like cholera, spilled into so-
called respectable society, the government attempted a process of slum-
clearing. The local authorities believed that if the slums were destroyed,
people would move out of the area and become another district’s problem.
This was not the case, and as a result, the government displaced tens of
thousands of people in East London between 1830 and 1880.
Flower and Dean Street, located in what was then the Spitalfields
rookery, was one of the worst districts. Around 1860, a concentration of
disreputable lodging houses in Flower and Dean registered over 120 rooms
to let with a capacity of over 750 occupants. Buildings on the verge of
collapse were crammed with lodgers, and some families lived in
underground cellars with no running water, sanitary facilities, or even fresh
air. The death rate here was four times higher than that of the rest of
London. Known as a “haunt of vice,” the Flower and Dean area was home
to a large concentration of brothels; prostitution was a common way for
destitute women to find their few pennies of rent each night. All but one of
the Whitechapel murderer’s known victims lived in or around Flower and
Dean Street.

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 Chapter Two

The Streets of Whitechapel

“As in every case of murder in this

country, however poor and friendless
the victims might be, the police made
every effort to track down Emma
Smith’s assailant.”

—Walter Dew on the investigation

into Emma Smith’s murderer

As all the great men of London debated what to do with the East End slums
and the unfortunate men, women, and children who existed there, Emma
Elizabeth Smith was doing what she could to survive. Emma was a 45-year-
old widowed mother of two who had been living in a lodging house on
George Street, one of the most notorious streets in East London, for 18
months. Emma was a heavy drinker and a casual prostitute and it wasn’t
unusual to find her walking the streets of London late at night.
At some point during the early hours of April 4, 1888, Emma was
walking down Whitechapel Road when she became aware that she was
being followed. Two, three, or four men—Emma wasn’t sure—were
following her. Emma tried to lose the men down side streets, but they
caught up with her, robbed her, and assaulted her with extreme viciousness.
As well as beating her, the men stabbed Emma repeatedly in her vagina
with a blunt object.
Emma was able to escape the men and slowly made her way back to her
lodgings. Emma’s wounds were serious and her fellow lodgers insisted that
she walk the half mile with them to the hospital for treatment. At first,
Emma refused to go. In the late nineteenth century, London’s hospitals were
little more than a place to die; the poor folks of the East End feared the
hospital as much as the workhouse. As it was, the hospital could do nothing
for Emma who had developed peritonitis, a dangerous infection of the
peritoneum, the membrane that lines the abdominal wall. Emma died in
London Hospital at 9 am on April 4, 1888.
While Emma had described the attack to a number of the women she
lodged with and the doctor who treated her at London Hospital, she never
revealed any details about her attackers. Emma had walked past a number
of on-duty policemen both on her way back to her lodgings after the attack
and while walking to the hospital and said nothing. Emma was in incredible
pain that would explain her reluctance to report her crime, but it’s also
possible that she knew talking to the police would achieve nothing and
might even put her in further danger. The police weren’t even aware of the
attack on Emma Smith until the day before the inquest, which ruled
Emma’s death as “wilful murder.”
A few months later on August 6, 1888, Bank Holiday Monday, Martha
Tabram, who also went by the name “Emma Turner,” was drinking at the
White Swan on Whitechapel Road. Martha was with her friend Peary Poll
and two officers from the Coldstream Guards. The foursome drank together
until around midnight when two couples formed and split off. What
happened over the next few hours is not at all clear. At some point before
3.30 am, Martha returned to her lodgings in a tenement block in George
Yard on George Street, one of the most notorious and dangerous streets in
the area. We know Martha arrived home before 3.30 am because that is the
time her body was first spotted, lying in a pool of blood on the building’s
first-floor landing.
The first resident of George Yard to spot Martha assumed she was
sleeping, it was not uncommon for people to sleep on the landing or stairs,
but the second resident, who had the benefit of the early dawn light, ran
immediately for a policeman. The policeman called for Dr. Timothy
Killeen, who examined Martha’s body and found that she had been stabbed
to death. Killeen noted 39 individual stab wounds on Martha’s breasts,
stomach, and vagina and offered his opinion that this frenzied and sustained
attack had been carried out with an ordinary penknife. The doctor noted that
one wound that penetrated Martha’s sternum and in all likelihood caused
the haemorrhage that killed her was made by a dagger or sword. The
superintendent of the building and his wife were sleeping just 12 feet from
the scene of the crime and heard nothing.
Authorities summoned Pearly Poll to a line-up of Coldstream Guards.
Poll picked out the two men she and Martha had spent the night with, but
both men had solid alibis that placed them far from George Yard at the time
of the murder. The inquest into Martha Turner’s death took place at the
Working Lads Institute on Whitechapel Road where a crowd of curious
locals gathered outside. A jury listened patiently, but no new information
was forthcoming, and at the end of the inquest the jury’s foreman
announced a verdict that Martha had been feloniously and wilfully
murdered by some person or persons unknown.
The press followed the case closely, reporting all manner of private
details about Martha Tabram’s life and pointing a finger at the police force,
who they accused of being inept. There had now been two brutal murders in
the Whitechapel area, and police officially opened a file on what they
referred to as the Whitechapel murders but had no real leads on who was
responsible for either of the murders. There has been much speculation
amongst historians as to whether or not Jack the Ripper murdered Emma
Smith and Martha Tabram and we can never know for sure. What soon
became clear to the authorities is that the streets of East London were home
to a vicious predator and the women of these streets were in extreme
danger.

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 Chapter Three

Mary Ann Nichols

“The throat was cut from ear to ear,

and the woman was quite dead.”

—Dr. Llewellyn

On August 31, 1888, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols was living at the White
House at 56 Flower and Dean Street, a street considered by many to be the
very worst in London. Mary Ann had spent the majority of the last six years
of her life in workhouses after ending her marriage and abandoning her five
children. Like many women living in East London at the time, Mary Ann
chose to make her living on the streets over enduring the conditions of a
workhouse.
On the night of the 31st, Mary Ann was trying to warm herself in front
of the communal fireplace when the deputy keeper of the building spotted
her and asked her for her board. Mary Ann owed fourpence for her bed for
the night but had nothing to offer. It was past midnight, and yet the keeper
insisted that she go out and earn her fourpence any way she could.
With no alternative, Mary Ann stepped out into the cold night. Just 5
feet 2 inches tall with a youthful appearance and high cheekbones, Mary
Ann looked 10 or 15 years younger than her actual age, which was 44.
According to a friend of Mary Ann’s who spotted her resting close to the
Whitechapel Church around 2.30 am on the 31st, Mary Ann was drunk that
night.
Shortly after 3 am, a local man named Charles Cross was walking down
Buck’s Road, a short thoroughfare behind Whitechapel Station, when he
spotted what he thought was a pile of tarpaulin lying against a gate. Despite
it being completely dark, Charles sensed there was something wrong with
the scene and moved in for a closer look. It was not a pile of tarp he was
looking at, but the body of Mary Ann Nichols.
A doctor was sent for whom pronounced Mary Ann dead and had her
body transported to the mortuary. The local coroner, Dr. Llewellyn,
performed an autopsy and offered a detailed and disturbing post-mortem.
Mary Ann had been dead for around 30 minutes before she was found.
Bruising on Mary Ann’s face and neck suggested that she had been held by
the throat and punched in the face. Mary Ann also had two large cuts to her
throat, both of which reached deep enough to slice her vertebrae, and a
number of gashes to her abdomen. Llewellyn estimated that the injuries
would have taken around four minutes to inflict and that Mary Ann would
have bled out from her throat wounds instantaneously. Importantly,
Llewellyn noted that whoever murdered Mary Ann had knowledge of
human anatomy, attacked with their left hand, and used a strong, sharp
knife, like those used by shoemakers, cork-cutters, or butchers.
A few days after the murder, Llewellyn gave a statement to the press.
Describing his first examination of Mary Ann’s body, he said: “I went to the
place at once, and found deceased lying on the ground in front of the stable
yard door. She was lying on her back with her legs out straight, as though
she had been laid down. Police-constable Neil told me that the body had not
been touched. The throat was cut from ear to ear, and the woman was quite
dead. On feeling the extremities of the body I found that they were still
warm, showing that death had not long ensued.”
At this point, the authorities had no idea who Mary Ann was. The only
identifying item found on Mary Ann’s body was her petticoat, which bore
the stamp of Lambeth Workhouse. A superintendent from the workhouse
viewed Mary Ann’s body but was unable to make a positive identification.
The press caught onto the story quickly, and that very day two newspapers
published stories on the murder that described reporters’ first-hand accounts
of viewing Mary Ann’s body.
 On hearing news of the murder, a number of women arrived at the
morgue and tried to identify the body. One of those women was Emily
Holland, a friend of Mary Ann’s, who identified the body as being that of
her friend. Authorities held an inquest into Mary Ann’s murder that same
afternoon, and on September 6, 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was buried.
From the outset, the police investigation into Mary Ann’s death was
fruitless. Even today, it is incredibly difficult to investigate a stranger-on-
stranger murder, and there were few clues and no witnesses to point the
police in the right direction. Almost immediately after Mary Ann Nichols’
death, the police opened the famous Whitechapel murders investigation file.
Police believed that the murder of Mary Ann Nichols and the murders of
Emma Smith and Martha Tabram a few months before may have been
committed by the same man.

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 Chapter Four

Leather Apron

“In one street are 35 houses, 32 of

which are known to be brothels. In
another district are 43 of these
houses, and 428 fallen women and
girls, many of them not more than 12
years of age.”

—W. T. Stead

In the days and weeks following the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, the
public speculated on the identity of her killer. Spurred on by detailed reports
in the press, many came to believe the killer was a familiar East End
character named Leather Apron. An account in the Manchester Guardian
described Leather Apron as being around 5 feet 4 inches in height, 38 to 40
years of age with black hair and a small black mustache.
 Leather Apron’s chosen profession was not in some kind of
manufacturing, as some might presume given his outfit, but that of a
blackmailer. Leather Apron took to the streets of East London at night and
terrorized the women who made their money there, threatening them with a
large, glinting leather knife. On September 5, 1888, The Star newspaper
published a feature article on Leather Apron, speculating on his identity and
role in the murders of women in Whitechapel. One paragraph reads, “His
expression is sinister, and seems to be full of terror for the women who
describe it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a
grin which is not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent.”
The identity of the man described was John Pizer, also known as “Jack.”
Pizer was known to the police long before the Whitechapel murders began,
but despite Pizer’s habit of harassing and assaulting women all over
London, he had been prosecuted for assault only once. An article in the
Manchester Guardian reads, “One woman who he assailed some time ago
boldly prosecuted him for it and he was sent up for seven days.” This bold
woman is the only person who seems to have prosecuted Leather Apron for
his attack on her.
Police arrested John Pizer on Monday, September 10, 1888. At Leman
Street Police Station, Pizer appeared at an inquest where he both exonerated
and incriminated himself. Pizer had a solid alibi for the night of the murder
of Annie Chapman and claimed that he was not the notorious Leather
Apron. Yet Pizer left a question mark over his involvement in the murders
by stating that he had not left his house between the time The Star article
was published and the police picked him up on September 10, fearing he
would have been “torn to pieces.”
If Pizer was not Leather Apron, then why was he afraid? Perhaps Pizer’s
fear was not that he would be held accountable for the Whitechapel
murders, but that he would have to answer for the other despicable assaults
he had committed, the assaults that earned him infamy in the first place.
The women Leather Apron targeted were some of the poorest and most
desperate in London. In the late nineteenth century, sex workers were
considered the lowest form of degenerate, women who had chosen vice and
poverty over hard work and self-improvement. It was near impossible to
have a man arrested for the rape or sexual assault of a woman working as a
prostitute. As sex workers were invisible to those who wished to deny their
existence, they were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
 In reality, prostitution had existed in the East End of London at least as
early as the fourteenth century where there is evidence of the existence of
brothels within the St. Mary Spital precinct. Those moving in upper-class
and religious circles may have chosen to act as though prostitution didn’t
exist, but for the working-class masses, prostitution was a part of life. It
wasn’t until the press began reporting on the ills of prostitution, namely an
epidemic in venereal disease amongst the British military and the
prevalence of child prostitution, that the existence of sex workers became a
politically-charged issue and entered the public domain.
A series of articles known as the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”
appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885, just three years before the
Whitechapel murderer was terrorizing the streets of East London. In these
articles, the prominent editor W. T. Stead described child prostitution and
sex slavery in London, shocking and titillating Victorian readers into a
moral panic. Despite Stead later being jailed for his unlawful investigative
methods, the “Maiden Tribute” articles directly influenced the
implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885.
This act increased the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, re-
criminalized homosexual acts and impelled private citizens to report houses
operating as brothels to police. Rather than offering any protection to
women working as prostitutes, this last part of the act made them even more
vulnerable. In the years following the 1885 Act, police closed down
hundreds of brothels in the East End of London, forcing women to work on
the streets without protection of any kind. One of these women was Annie
Chapman.

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 Chapter Five

Annie Chapman

“The London police and detective

force is probably the stupidest in the
world.”

—New York Times

Like Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman had divorced her husband only a
few years before she was murdered. Married in May 1869, John and Annie
Chapman were relatively prosperous and had three children together
between 1870 and 1880, two daughters and a son. Tragedy struck the
Chapman household in 1882 when the Chapmans’ eldest daughter died aged
12. The Chapmans’ son, born just two years before this, was disabled and
sent to an institution, so the pair raised only one of their children to
adulthood together.
According to the Windsor Police, Annie Chapman was known for her
“drunken and immoral ways.” Police had arrested Annie on occasion, and
her behavior had led to her husband losing his job a number of times.
Around 1884, the Chapmans’ marriage disintegrated completely, and the
pair were formally separated. As part of the separation, John paid Annie 10
shillings per week, and she survived on this income by supplementing it
with small amounts of money she made selling flowers and crocheted
blankets.
When John died on Christmas Day, 1886, Annie’s income stopped. With
her only other choice being to enter the workhouse, Annie moved into the
lodging houses of the East End slums and began to pay for her nightly
board through casual prostitution. By around May 1888, Annie had taken up
residence at Crossingham’s Lodging House, located at 35 Dorset Street,
Spitalfields. This particular boarding house was home to approximately 300
people per night and was presided over by a deputy named Timothy
Donovan.
In the early morning of September 8, 1888, around 1.30 am, Annie was
eating a baked potato in the kitchen of Crossingham’s Lodging House when
the night watchman appeared and demanded that she pay her board money.
Annie had nothing and went to see Donovan in his office to explain why
she didn’t have enough money for her bed. Annie had been feeling unwell
throughout the first week of September and may have even spent a day or
two in hospital. We know that Annie sought medical help this week because
police found a bottle of medicine from the local hospital amongst her
belongings.
Despite being ill—whether she knew it or not she was already dying
from advanced lung and brain disease—Annie had no choice but to take to
the streets. Asking the night watchman to keep a bed for her as she left,
Annie left the lodging house and walked towards Spitalfields Market.
We have only the vaguest idea of what happened to Annie Chapman
between the time she left her boarding house and 6 am that morning, the
time her body was found. A woman named Elizabeth Long reported to
police that she had seen Annie Chapman at 5.30 am on Hanbury Street.
Elizabeth was taking an early walk to Spitalfields Market that morning and
was sure of the time because she heard the strike of the brewer’s clock.
According to Elizabeth, she saw Annie standing against the shutters of the
yard of 29 Hanbury Street with a man. The man was leaning in close to
Annie and said the words, “will you?” Annie replied, “yes.”
In the early morning light, Elizabeth got a good look at Annie, but the
man’s face was turned away from her. Elizabeth reported that the man was
only a few inches taller than Annie, making him somewhere between 5 feet
and 5 feet 5 inches in height. The man was around 40, wearing a deerstalker
hat, a long dark coat and had a “shabby genteel appearance.” Elizabeth also
noted that the man looked like a “foreigner,” shorthand in the East End of
London at the time for a Jewish immigrant.
Just moments after Elizabeth had seen Annie, Albert Cadosch, a
carpenter who lived at 27 Hanbury Street, heard Annie from the backyard of
his house. Albert couldn’t see anything but distinctly heard a woman’s voice
say, “no!” Annie’s body was found less than 30 minutes later, in the same
spot Elizabeth had seen her and Albert had heard her. It’s quite possible that
Albert heard Annie being murdered. The man who discovered the body,
John Davis, who lived at 29 Hanbury Street, alerted a few other men living
in the street before walking to Commercial Street Police Station to report
foul play.
Annie’s body was taken to a mortuary located on Old Montague Street,
the same mortuary Mary Ann Nichols had been taken to. Annie was 47
years old at the time of her death, 5 feet in height with blue eyes and dark
brown, wavy hair. Annie’s teeth were described as “excellent” and her
figure as “stout.” In fact, authorities used the same shell they had used to
transport Mary Ann’s body to the morgue to transport Annie.
A surgeon named Dr. George Phillips performed Annie’s autopsy and
provided a report that described extreme savagery. The man that killed
Annie had used a six to eight-inch-long blade. The man strangled Annie
first, probably until she became unconscious, and then used his knife to
make a long incision in her neck. A large part of the blood in Annie’s body
had drained out from this wound, making the time of her death difficult to
establish. The man had then cut Annie’s throat in a deep gash from left to
right in an attempt, it seemed, to cut off her head.
The man had also sliced open Annie’s abdomen and removed a portion
of her small intestines, placing them, still attached, over Annie’s right
shoulder. Over Annie’s left shoulder lay her stomach. In a stomach-
churning twist, parts of Annie’s anatomy were missing from the scene,
including part of her abdominal wall, the majority of her bladder, her entire
uterus, and parts of her vagina. Dr. Phillips noted that to perform these
mutilations would have taken him around an hour but that the killer may
have performed the deed in around fifteen minutes.
The press handled the details of Annie’s murder as you would expect,
with florid prose, sickening descriptions, and sensational accusations. The
public’s appetite for information on the murders was such that, according to
newspapers, thousands of people visited the murder scene at 29 Hanbury
Street in the days after Annie’s body was found. The enterprising folks
living at 29 Hanbury and houses nearby began charging people a small fee
to see the scene and locals set up refreshment stands.
The police investigation originally focused on Leather Apron, but as
stated earlier, he had an alibi, so they turned their attention to other
suspects. An inquest into Annie’s death was opened on September 10, again
at the Working Lads Institute. Having had only a few days to investigate,
police had little to share. The press backlash against the authorities—
including the police, the home secretary, and even the coroner—was swift
and brutal. The New York Times wrote, “The London police and detective
force is probably the stupidest in the world.”
The Whitechapel murders had pulled back the curtain on what day to
day life was like for many women living in the slums and the risk they were
forced to take to find a bed for the night. With no reward forthcoming for
information about the murders, some newspapers remarked that had the
crimes taken place in West London the killer would have already been
caught. A number of vigilante organizations were formed with the intention
of raising funds themselves but struggled to do so, with wealthy potential
donors complaining that the funds should be provided by the government.
While the government, the press, and the people fought it out, two more
murders took place on the streets of Whitechapel.

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 Chapter Six

The Double Murder

“I shall get a damned fine hiding

when I get home.”

—Catharine Eddowes’ last known

words

Elizabeth Stride’s journey from being a young girl living in a small Swedish
village to a prostitute working the streets of London’s East End is a
surprisingly ordinary one. Elizabeth was born in a small village close to
Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden in 1843. Once old enough, she
went into service as a maid, but by the age of 21 she was registered with the
Gothenburg police service as a professional prostitute. In 1865, Elizabeth
was briefly hospitalized following the birth of a stillborn child and given
treatment for venereal disease. By 1866, Elizabeth knew she had to get out
of Gothenburg and used the inheritance from her mother’s death to pay her
way.
Elizabeth found work as a maid in London, and in 1869, she married
John Thomas Stride. The Strides’ marriage lasted 12 years before it broke
down, reportedly due to Elizabeth’s alcoholism, and in 1881, Elizabeth and
John were separated. Elizabeth initially went to live on Brick Lane, but by
1884, she was living in the slums of Flower and Dean Street and again
working as a prostitute. Despite the harsh conditions of her life, Elizabeth
found love again in 1885 when she met Michael Kidney, a waterside
laborer, and moved into a home on Dorset Street with him. However,
Elizabeth and Michael’s home was not a tranquil one, and over the course
of their three-year relationship, the pair rowed often. Elizabeth left Michael
for weeks at a time, and she was frequently arrested for drunk and
disorderly behavior.
On the evening of Saturday, September 29, 1888, Elizabeth was living
at her regular lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. After spending a
few hours drinking with the house’s keeper, Elizabeth Tanner, Elizabeth set
out onto the streets alone. Her movements between around 7 pm on
Saturday, when she left the company of Elizabeth Tanner, and 1.30 am on
Sunday are unknown. It was raining heavily that night and Elizabeth may
have taken shelter in any one of the area’s many public houses.
At some point, Elizabeth found herself on Berner Street, a short street
that runs north to south from Commercial Road. The building at 40 Berner
Street was home to the International Workingmen’s Educational
Association, or Berner Street Club. The club had an international reputation
for its radical socialist politics and was the headquarters of the Arbeter
Fraint, a weekly circular founded by Morris Winchevsky, also known as the
godfather of Yiddish socialism.
On Saturday the 29th, the Berner Street Club had hosted an evening of
entertainment and politics with most people leaving before midnight. Louis
Diemschutz was leaving the club via the backyard at around 1.30 am when
he spotted an unusual pile of something on the ground. Diemschutz struck a
match and saw to his horror that the pile was actually the body of a
murdered woman. Elizabeth’s throat had been cut in a deep, clean slit that
severed her left carotid artery and killed her in seconds.
That very same evening in another part of London’s East End, a City of
London police officer picked up Catharine Eddowes on Aldgate High
Street, “incapably drunk.” The police officer took Catharine to the
Bishopsgate Police Station and placed her in a cell to sleep it off, but by 1
am Catharine was deemed sober enough to be released. As Catharine
stepped out onto the street, at almost the same moment that the body of
Elizabeth Stride was discovered, she remarked to the police officer, “I shall
get a damned fine hiding when I get home.” “And serve you right,” the
police officer replied.
Catharine was a heavy drinker. Born in 1842, Catharine was one of 11
children who all became orphans in 1857 when their father died. Catharine
was sent to Bermondsey Workhouse and in later years moved between
Wolverhampton, where she was born, Birmingham, and London. Catharine
never married but had three children with a man named Thomas Conway
who eventually left her when her alcoholism became too difficult to handle.
In 1881, Catharine moved to Cooney’s Lodging House at 55 Flower and
Dean Street. Here Catharine met John Kelly and quickly formed a close
relationship with him.
Catharine continued to drink but, according to John, did not solicit on
the streets and the pair managed to scrape by any way they could. In
September 1888, Catharine and John made their annual pilgrimage to Kent
to pick hops. The trip had not been a success, and they returned to London
on Thursday, September 27 out of cash and spent the night in the casual
ward. The next day, John made some money by pawning his boots, which
the couple promptly spent on food and alcohol, John making his way
around the streets of East London barefoot. On Saturday afternoon,
Catharine told John she was going to find her daughter to borrow some
money, but by that evening, she was extremely intoxicated and in a police
cell.
On Catherine’s release from Bishopsgate Police Station at around 1 am,
she reportedly walked left towards Houndsditch, instead of right towards
Flower and Dean Street. No more than ten minutes’ walk from the police
station in an area called Mitre Square, Catharine was murdered. Her body
was found at 1.45 am by a local policeman, her throat cut through to her
spine. Like Elizabeth, Catharine died from extreme blood loss caused by a
severed left carotid artery.
Unlike Elizabeth, however, Catharine’s body was horribly mutilated
post-mortem. The killer had slashed Catharine’s face repeatedly, slicing off
part of her ear and the end of her nose, and had opened her abdomen and
pulled out her intestines, placing them above her shoulder. Part of
Catharine’s womb and her left kidney were missing from the scene. Again,
the coroner and chief investigating officers agreed that the killer had
anatomical knowledge consistent with a butcher, slaughterman, medical
student, or surgeon.
After this terrible night of murder and mayhem, two different witnesses
came forward offering descriptions of men thought to be the Whitechapel
murderer. A man named Israel Schwartz was walking down Berner Street at
the same time Elizabeth Stride was murdered and observed a man and
woman standing in a gateway. The man attacked the woman and threw her
to the ground then called out to another man standing across the road just
one word, “Lipski.” The second man then began to follow Israel, who was
so frightened that he ran away.
Police took Israel to the mortuary and there he confirmed that the
woman he had observed was Elizabeth. Israel described the man who had
attacked Elizabeth as being around 30 years old, 5 feet 5 inches, with a fair
complexion, dark hair, a small dark moustache, a full face, broad shoulders
and dressed in a dark jacket and trousers with a black cap with a peak.
Police reports speculate that the word “Lipski” was uttered as a racial slur,
encouraging the man with the pipe to pursue Israel and allow him the
privacy he needed to murder Elizabeth.
Similarly, a witness emerged in Catharine’s case to describe a man
talking with her a short time before she was murdered. The witness was
Joseph Lawende, who claimed he saw Catharine and the man at the corner
of Mitre Square around 1.35 am. Joseph could only see the woman from
behind, but he could see the man clearly and described him as being around
30 years old, 5 feet 7 inches in height with a fair complexion and a fair
moustache. The man had the appearance of a sailor, Joseph said, and wore a
pepper-and-salt loose jacket, red neckerchief, and grey cloth cap with a
peak.
If only a description was enough. Now the Whitechapel murderer had
murdered a total of four, possibly six women, two of them on the same
night, and the police were no closer to apprehending him.

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 Chapter Seven

The Investigation

“The babel of tongues as each

enquired of the other the latest
particulars . . . was simply
deafening.”

—East London Observer

The London Metropolitan Police had been the subject of intense public
scrutiny long before the Whitechapel murderer began slaying people in the
streets. The liberal and socialist press, in particular, were vehemently
critical of the police, who they accused of being incompetent, inefficient
and corrupt. When the murders began, the press in London and beyond paid
close attention to the investigation, or what they viewed as a lack of, and
made personal attacks on the authorities involved.
Initially, the Whitechapel Division of the Metropolitan Police was in
charge of the investigation, with Detective Inspector Edmund Reid at the
helm. When Mary Ann Nichols was killed, three detective inspectors were
sent from Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation, and when Catharine
Eddowes was murdered, the City of London Police became involved too.
Just hours after police discovered Elizabeth Stride and Catharine
Eddowes' bodies in the early hours of Sunday, September 30, thousands of
people gathered in the streets. In one sense, the crowds had gathered in
protest. A public meeting was to be held at 3 pm that day in Victoria Park
during which a number of speakers slammed Home Secretary Matthews
and Sir Charles Warren, Metropolitan Police Commissioner. In another
sense, the crowds were there to get a good look at the site of an
indescribably grisly murder. It seems the area had a festive atmosphere with
vendors selling food and drink and tenants in nearby houses renting out
seats offering a window view of the scene.
The East London Observer reported, “The babel of tongues as each
enquired of the other the latest particulars, or the exact locality of the
Aldgate murder, or speculated on the character of whereabouts of the
murder, was simply deafening.”
The main criticism leveled at Home Secretary Matthews was his refusal
to offer a reward for information leading to the discovery of the
Whitechapel murderer. When the City of London offered their own reward,
the public’s opinion of Matthews reached a new low and the press berated
him constantly, demanding his resignation. The press also attacked Met
Police Commissioner Warren, accusing him of being incompetent and more
concerned with enforcing military discipline than effective policing.
The newly appointed head of the CID, Robert Anderson, did nothing to
improve the reputation of the police by being on holiday during the period
that Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were killed.
Anderson was in Switzerland between September 7 and October 6, 1888,
and did not return to his post until his holiday was over. This prompted
Commissioner Warren to appoint Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Donald
Swanson to coordinate the various agencies involved in finding the killer.
According to Anderson’s account of the investigation, the first thing he
did when he returned to London was to issue an instruction that sex workers
working on the streets were no longer subject to police protection. It was
Anderson’s logic that he had two options, “either arrest every known ‘street
woman’ found on the prowl after midnight, or else let us warn them that the
Police will not protect them.”
 Despite the perceived inadequacies of the police, they carried out a
detailed investigation on a massive scale in an attempt to find the murderer.
In fact, the procedures followed by police in their pursuit of the
Whitechapel murderer formed the basis of modern police work and set a
precedent for how to deal with serial killers long before that term came into
use. Police interviewed more than 2,000 people during the course of the
investigation with more than 300 people considered suspects and 80 people
detained. Police performed house-to-house checks looking for leads and
collected a large amount of forensic material from each crime scene.
The Whitechapel murderer’s habit of mutilating the corpses of the
women he murdered and removing certain organs, either whole or in part,
convinced the investigators that he was a butcher, slaughterman, or surgeon.
Police investigated all local butchers and slaughtermen and was able to
eliminate them all from the inquiry. Police also targeted men working on
the cattle boats that moved up the Thames to and from mainland Europe,
often landing on London docks at weekends. Queen Victoria even weighed
in on the investigation with her opinion that the killer had to be from a
cattle boat, but this line of investigation went nowhere.
A noted psychiatrist, L. Forbes Winslow, first posited the idea that the
Whitechapel murderer was a member of the upper classes. Responding to
the press’s focus on Leather Apron, Winslow offered his opinion that the
murderer was not of the same class as the women he murdered. Rather,
the psychiatrist suggested that the murderer was upper class and, in all
likelihood, the crimes were committed by a “lunatic lately discharged from
some asylum, or by one who has escaped.” Police took Winslow’s opinion
seriously and focused their attention on a number of suspects recently held
in lunatic asylums, but none of the leads took them anywhere of note. The
Whitechapel murderer remained at large.

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 Chapter Eight

Letters from Jack the Ripper

“My knife’s so nice and sharp I want

to get to work right away if I get a
chance. Good Luck. Yours truly, Jack
the Ripper.”

—Unknown

In the 1880s, life for most was insular and monotonous. Traveling for
pleasure was unheard of within the lower classes and most people, even in
those living in inner cities, spent the majority of their days within the same
few streets. The 1870 Education Act improved children’s right to education
as locally elected school boards had power to set up schools in their
districts. One of the most powerful effects of the 1870 Act was to improve
literacy across the population; by 1885, only around 4% of the population
was illiterate. A new generation of reading public was hungry for
information about the world around them and the country’s newspapers
happily fed that hunger. Aware that their ability to reach a huge audience
came with great responsibility, newspaper editors took on a Reithian
approach to their work, promising to educate as well as entertain. But, a
culture war was brewing.
The established Victorian broadsheets were intimidating. With columns
of densely blocked text written with a verbosity that now seems comical,
newspapers such as The Times catered to upper-class and politically-aware
Londoners. However, in the late 1800s, this type of journalism came up
against sudden and major competition in the form of the so-called new
journalism. New journalism was a commercial endeavor that catered to the
masses, creating what the established newspapers deemed irresponsible,
dumbed down news. But editors of newspapers like The Times couldn’t
fight the tide; the tabloids had arrived.
The Whitechapel murders could not have happened at a better time for
those experimenting with new journalism. Fledgling newspapers The Star,
The Evening News, and the Echo all ran stories on the Whitechapel
murderer around the clock during September 1888. Often, the police were
not forthcoming with information about their investigation; journalists had
to get their hands dirty looking for clues themselves, all while making their
findings seem as sensational as possible. News distribution services, the
Press Association and Central News, who were in direct and furious
competition with each other, were also clamoring for stories and desperate
to sell those stories to the highest bidder.
On September 25, 1888, a golden egg dropped into the lap of Central
News in the form of a letter from the Whitechapel murderer. The letter was
addressed to “The Boss” at Central News Office, London City. It read:
“25 September 1888
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just
yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the
right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on
whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the
last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now.
I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my
funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer
bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant
use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the
ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you.
Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My
knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.
Good Luck. Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Dont mind me giving the trade name
PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my
hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha.”
This was the very first time the name “Jack the Ripper” was used. The
killer had given himself a name.
The Central News Agency forwarded this letter to Scotland Yard on
September 29. The staff at Central News thought the letter was a hoax and
said as much in their brief covering note to Scotland Yard, but on October 1,
Central News received another communication from Jack the Ripper. This
time it was a postcard:
“I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear
about saucy Jackys tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a
bit couldn’t finish straight off. Had not time to get ears for police thanks for
keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper”
The press reported on the letter and postcard as hoaxes but both
included information pertinent to the police investigation, so whoever wrote
them had access to information on the murders at an early stage. Hoax or
not, the police needed to find out who had written these communications,
and on October 3, they published facsimiles of them in a newspaper in an
attempt to drum up leads.
It’s worth noting that police had by this time already received hundreds
of letters from all over the United Kingdom regarding the Whitechapel
murders. Letter writers offered their suggestions on how to capture the
Whitechapel murderer, speculated on suspects, and, in a few letters, claimed
to be the murderer themselves. None of these letters led to any real line of
investigation. Police officials later claimed to know who had written the
Dear Boss letter and postcard, and it wasn’t the murderer.
A small-time journalist named Thomas John Bulling was pointed out as
the author of the letter and the postcard, but his motive for doing so seems
vague. Obviously, it is in any journalist’s interests to stir up new interest in
a story they have reported on, but Thomas would not have personally
benefitted from a surge of new readers.
 Just as the excitement generated from the first two correspondences
from Jack the Ripper died down, a third letter arrived. On October 16, 1888,
George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee,
received a letter and a cardboard box at his home. The letter read:
“From Hell
Mr. Lusk.
Sor,
I send you half the kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you,
tother piece I fried and ate; it was very nice. I may send you a bloody knif
that I took it out if you only wate a while longer.
Catch me when you can
Mishter Lusk”
Inside the box, Mr. Lusk found half of a human kidney preserved in
ethanol. Lusk passed the box on to the police who presented it to Dr.
Gordon Brown. Brown reported to the press that he was unable to establish
which side of the body the kidney was taken from (Catharine Eddowes' left
kidney was removed after she was murdered) and that it had not been in
spirit more than a week. Dr. Openshaw, working with the Metropolitan
Police, offered his opinion that it was from the left side. The public took in
these grisly details and wondered, along with the police and the press, what
Jack the Ripper would do next.

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 Chapter Nine

Mary Jane Kelly

“It looked more like the work of a

devil than of a man.”

—John McCarthy

Even today, experts cannot agree on the number of victims killed by Jack
the Ripper. The police investigation file on the Whitechapel murders
includes 11 possible victims, and as the murderer was never caught, it’s
impossible to know whether he went on to commit more murders outside of
London. That said, most historians stick to the theory of the “canonical
five,” including the four murders already covered and a fifth and last, that
of Mary Jane Kelly.
Of Jack the Ripper’s five victims, Mary is the one we know least about.
It is thought that Mary was 25 years old when she was murdered, was 5 feet
7 inches in height and had blonde hair and blue eyes. Originally from
Limerick City or Limerick County in Ireland, Mary moved to Wales as a
child where she later met her husband, a collier named Davies. When
Davies died just a few years into their marriage, Mary moved to Cardiff to
live with a cousin. In Cardiff, Mary began working as a prostitute and soon
after went to London.
 Mary told people that she had worked in a high-class bordello in the
West End of London and that she had a special relationship with a certain
gentleman who took her to Paris. However, Mary returned to London after
just two weeks, disliking Paris or the particular arrangements of her being
there. As the Pall Mall’s “Maiden Tribute” series of articles had outlined, it
was common at this time for girls and young women to cross the channel to
work in brothels.
Back in London and using the name “Marie,” Mary set out to work for
herself in London’s dangerous East End. She moved in with a fish porter
and fruit hawker named Joseph Barnett in April 1887. The pair moved
around frequently, and by the autumn of 1888, they were living in a single
room of a property at 26 Dorset Street. Dorset Street was one of the most
dangerous streets in the entire East End and colloquially known as
“Dosser’s Street.”
For a time, Mary and Joseph lived off his wages, but when Joseph was
laid off, Mary went back to working on the streets. Joseph later stated that
he objected to Mary allowing fellow prostitutes to sleep in their room. This
fact led to speculation in the days and weeks after the murder that the last
woman murdered by Jack the Ripper was not Mary Jane Kelly at all but an
unidentified friend. How this misidentification could possibly have
occurred will soon become clear.
Mary’s movements on the night of her murder are well documented. It
was the night of Thursday, November 8, 1888, and Mary was in her room at
26 Dorset Street with Joseph between 7.30 and 7.45 pm. After Joseph left,
Mary went out drinking in the local public houses. Mary was not a big
drinker, but on this particular night, she drank to excess.
Mary was seen returning to her room with a stout man, aged around 35
or 36 and wearing a long, shabby overcoat, billycock hat, and red mustache,
at around midnight. Drunk, Mary began to sing, and according to neighbors,
her singing went on until past 1 am. Next, a neighbor and friend, George
Hutchinson, bumped into Mary on Commercial Street close to Flower and
Dean Street at 2 am. Mary asked to borrow money, to which Hutchinson
replied that he had none, so Mary approached a man standing nearby.
Hutchinson got a good look at the man and later described him as
having a dark complexion, Jewish in appearance, with a heavy mustache
turned up at the ends, dark eyes, and bushy eyebrows. The man was
wearing a soft felt hat, a long dark overcoat with a white collar, and black
neck-tie. He also wore a gold chain in his waistcoat with a large seal and
red stone hanging from it. He was around 5 feet 6 inches and looked to be
35 or 36 years old. Mary and the man wandered off towards her room.
The next witness of the evening was Elizabeth Prater, a neighbor of
Mary’s. Elizabeth described being woken up between 3.30 am and 4.00 am
by a cry of “oh! Murder!” Elizabeth explained that it was not unusual to
hear cries in the middle of the night in the neighborhood she lived in and so
thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until 10.45 am on the morning of Friday,
November 9, that Henry Bowyer, the assistant of the building’s landlord, let
himself into Mary’s room and discovered a horrifying scene. Henry ran for
the landlord, John McCarthy who described what he saw:
“It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man. I had heard a
great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never
expected to see such a sight as this. This whole scene is more than I can
describe. I hope I may never see such a sight as this again.”
According to the post-mortem report, Mary Jane Kelly’s body was lying
naked in the bed with the head turned onto the left cheek. Her legs were
placed wide apart, and the entire surface of the abdomen and thighs had
been removed. The killer had emptied Mary’s abdominal cavity of its
organs and removed her breasts and the flesh of the neck down to the bone.
The killer had also mutilated Mary’s face, partly removing the nose, cheeks,
eyebrows, and ears.
Police found various body parts scattered around the room. Mary’s
uterus, kidneys, and one of her breasts were found under her head. Her
other breast was found by her right foot, her liver was found between her
feet, her intestines on the right side of her body, and her spleen on the left.
The skin and flesh taken from her abdomen and thighs were piled up on the
bedside table.
Walter Dew was the first police officer on the scene and recalled that
there were pieces of flesh everywhere and that he had “slipped and fallen on
the awfulness of that floor.” Dew also offered the opinion that Mary was in
fear of her safety in the weeks leading up to her murder, remarking, “There
was no woman in the whole of Whitechapel more frightened of Jack the
Ripper than Marie Kelly.”
Police tried to keep information on Mary Jane Kelly’s murder a secret,
and the press struggled to find reliable accounts. Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, a
neighbor of Mary’s who had known her for around four months, testified
that she spoke to Mary on Friday morning between the hours of 8 and 8.30
am. It was unusual to see Mary out on the street so early, and Caroline had a
brief conversation with her where Mary explained that she was unwell due
to the alcohol she had consumed the night before. Police investigated
Caroline’s account but could not corroborate it, and so the body was buried
as Mary Jane Kelly on Monday, November 19, 1888, at Leytonstone
Cemetery.

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 Chapter Ten

Who was Jack the Ripper?

“One day men will look back and say

that I gave birth to the twentieth
century.”

—From Hell (2001)

The police’s new policy of keeping the press in the dark on their
investigation effectively killed public interest in the Whitechapel murder
case. The murder of Mary Jane Kelly was the most shocking and gruesome
so far, but without sensationalized details to report on, the press turned to
other matters, and the people of the East End returned to life as normal. The
police investigation continued for many years after Mary’s murder, never
reaching a satisfying conclusion. Who was Jack the Ripper?
The police in the course of their investigation named over 100 suspects,
and historians and armchair detectives have added many more to the list in
subsequent years. Theories that are ever more outlandish continue to find
their way into the mythology surrounding “The Great Victorian Mystery.”
However, the most likely suspect remains one of the five main suspects
shortlisted by police officers working the case at the time the murders
occurred.
Three of these five suspects emerged in a document known as the
Macnaghten Memorandum. Sir Melville Macnaghten became assistant
chief constable of the Metropolitan Police in June 1889 and was actively
involved in the Whitechapel murder investigation between 1889 and 1891.
At some point in the 1890s, Macnaghten wrote a report naming three
possible suspects. The report was filed with Scotland Yard but not before
massive changes had been made to Macnaghten’s original copy. In 1959, a
TV journalist named Daniel Farson was interviewing Lady Christabel
Aberconway, Macnaghten’s daughter, on an unrelated subject when he
discovered that she held a copy of Macnaghten’s original, unedited report.
The difference between the private and official reports is huge. Most
interestingly, the official report removes Macnaghten’s strong conviction
that Montague J. Druitt was the killer.
Montague J. Druitt was born in 1857 in Wimborne, Dorset and
graduated from New College, Oxford before taking on a teaching job at a
Blackheath boarding school. After Druitt’s father died in September 1885,
his mother became suicidal and was admitted to an asylum. Macnaghten
alleged in his report that Druitt was a doctor, was “sexually insane,” and
that his own family believed that he was the Whitechapel murderer.
However, Druitt was not a doctor, and Macnaghten offered no proof of his
other allegations. Druitt committed suicide on December 1, 1888, and his
body was pulled from the Thames on the 31st of that month.
The second man described in Macnaghten’s report is a Mr. Aaron
Kosminski. Kosminski was a Polish-Jewish man who lived in the East End
of London. According to Macnaghten, Kosminski had “become insane
owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices,” had a great hatred of
women, and strong homicidal tendencies. Kosminski was also Sir Robert
Anderson’s favorite suspect. Little is known about Kosminski apart from
that he was born around 1864 and emigrated to England in 1882. Kosminski
was certified insane and sent to Mile End Town Workhouse in 1890, then
Colney Hatch Workhouse, before being admitted to Leavesden Asylum in
1894 where he died in 1919. Anderson stated in 1901 that Jack the Ripper
was “safely caged in an asylum,” referring to Kosminski but never provided
adequate evidence to prove that this was so.
 The third suspect in Macnaghten’s report is Michael Ostrog, a man
Macnaghten refers to as a “mad Russian doctor & convict & unquestionably
a homicidal maniac.” Ostrog was a low-level con man and petty thief who,
like the infamous Leather Apron, was violent towards women. However, we
can rule Ostrog out immediately; a scholar of the Jack the Ripper case later
discovered that Ostrog was arrested in Paris in July 1888 and held by them
until November 1888 when he was sentenced to two years in a French jail.
The fourth man seriously suspected of being Jack the Ripper is Francis
Tumblety. The reason the Tumblety theory was given so much credence is
that it is referred to in a letter from ex-Chief Inspector John Littlechild to
author George R. Sims, dated September 1913. In this letter, Littlechild
describes a “Dr. T.” as a very likely suspect. Tumblety was an American and
a regular visitor to England. He arrived in Liverpool in June 1888, and
between June and November of that year, he was arrested and charged for
homosexual activities with four men.
Tumblety was also charged on November 12, 1888, in connection with
the Whitechapel murders, but what charges were brought against him and
on what evidence is lost to history. It is a matter of record that Tumblety
hated women, especially prostitutes, had good knowledge of anatomy, and
had a curious personal collection of anatomical parts, including uteri. Police
allowed Tumblety to be released on bail on November 16, and he fled
England for France, later returning to New York City. While Scotland Yard
continued their surveillance of Tumblety once he returned to New York,
they did not have enough proof of his involvement in the Whitechapel
murders to extradite him. Tumblety lived out his days in Rochester, New
York and died a wealthy man in 1903.
The final suspect considered by senior police authorities involved is
George Chapman. Chapman was an immigrant from Poland who changed
his name from Severin Klosowski when he arrived in England in 1887.
Importantly, Klosowski had surgical skills and was living and working in
London’s East End at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Inspector
Abberline, the inspector in charge of the Whitechapel investigation,
suspected that Chapman was the killer, but his suspicions were based on
what could be described as coincidence.
Chapman had studied medicine, lived in George’s Yard where Martha
Tabram was killed, had once attacked his wife with a knife, and left London
for America at the same time the murders stopped. In 1901, 13 years after
the Whitechapel murders, Chapman killed three women by poisoning them
and was hanged for those crimes in 1903. Despite Abberline’s conviction,
Chapman is just one suspect among many possible killers.

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 Conclusion
Speculation on the identity of Jack the Ripper has not ceased from the
moment Mary Ann Nichols’ body was discovered slumped against a gate in
1888. A few of the more sensational rumors to stand the test of time are that
Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family, that he was at the center
of a conspiracy involving the Masonic Temple, and that he was the famous
artist Walter Sickert. Although fascinating in their potential, none of these
rumors have a strong evidentiary basis.
In the case of the supposed Royal Family Ripper, the individual in
question was Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, eldest son of the future
Edward VII and heir presumptive to the throne. While Prince Eddy, as he
was known, had a despicable character and was said to have lived a life of
debauched excess, he wasn’t even in London at the time the Whitechapel
murders took place.
A larger theory involving Prince Eddy having an illicit affair with a
woman named Annie Cook, a friend of Mary Kelly, gained ground in the
1970s. This theory was explored in a 1973 drama-documentary then taken
on by journalist Stephen Knight who wrote the book Jack the Ripper: The
Final Solution. The TV show and book posited a theory that Prince Eddy
was married to Annie Crook and that they had a child. When the royal
family discovered the marriage, Prince Eddy was sent to India and Annie
was committed to an asylum. Mary took the baby and conspired with other
characters in the East End to blackmail the government. As a result, she and
her friends were murdered.
With the benefit of many years of distance from the actual crimes, it is
interesting to play armchair detective. We can sift through the evidence and
imagine ourselves investigating the murders at the time they occurred.
Clicking through photographs of the dilapidated streets of East London we
can get a sense of what daily life was like before the Whitechapel murders
took place. Reading through confused witness statements, police reports,
and outraged newspaper articles we can hear the cries of those involved and
add our own voice to their chorus.
 It’s very tempting to treat the Whitechapel murders as an interactive
mystery story. Many have. Jack the Ripper is one of London and Great
Britain’s most notorious characters, instantly recognizable despite the fact
that no one really knows what he looked like. The idea of a Victorian
murderer, prowling the streets of East London with an apron around his
waist and a knife in hand, has pervaded hundreds of works of fiction,
spanning art forms as diverse as operas, comic books, and Hollywood films.
Jack the Ripper is one of the original true crime subjects, and an entire sub-
culture of amateur sleuths, known as Ripperologists, intent on unmasking
this figure once and for all continue to work towards their goal.
Whether we explore the legacy of Jack the Ripper through serious
academic study or playful cultural tropes, we tend to focus on the mystery
of the man who carried out these crimes. In London’s famous Madame
Tussaud’s Waxwork Museum, Jack the Ripper’s waxwork is a shadow
figure, cloaked in black and holding a giant butcher’s knife, an enigma still
waiting to be solved. But at the heart of this enigma, this quest, are the
women whose lives this man took in the most heinous way possible. What
matters is not who Jack the Ripper was but what he did and to who. The
story of Jack the Ripper is, simply put, the story of a man who killed
women. Those women were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catharine
Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride, Mary Jane Kelly, and possibly others whose
names we will never know.

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 Can I Ask a Favor?
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