Encyclopedia
Jack the Ripper is a pseudonym given to an unidentified
serial killer active in the largely impoverished
Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of
London in the latter 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.
The legends surrounding the Ripper murders have become a combination of genuine historical research, conspiracy theory and folklore. The lack of a confirmed identity for the killer has allowed
Ripperologists — the term used within the field for the authors, historians and amateur detectives who study the case — to accuse a wide variety of individuals of being the Ripper. Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer due to the savagery of the attacks and the failure of the police in their attempts to capture the Ripper, sometimes missing the murderer at his crime scenes 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 body was mutilated. Some believe that the victims were first strangled in order to silence them. The removal of internal organs from some victims has led to the proposal that the killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge or skill.
Victims
The number and names of the Ripper's victims are the subject of much debate.
The canonical five victims
The most accepted list, referred to as the "canonical five", includes the following five prostitutes in the
East End of London:
- Mary Ann Nichols , born on August 26, 1845, and killed on Friday, August 31, 1888.
- Annie Chapman , born in September 1841 and killed on Saturday, September 8, 1888.
- Elizabeth Stride , born in Sweden on November 27, 1843, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888.
- Catherine Eddowes , born on April 14, 1842, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888.
- Mary Jane Kelly , reportedly born in either the city of Limerick or County Limerick, Munster, Ireland ca. 1863 and killed on Friday, November 9, 1888.
The authority of this list 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 . 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 , and/or Kelly . Others prefer to expand the list by citing
Martha Tabram and others as probable Ripper 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.
Except for Stride , 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 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 other 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", a nickname for an unnamed 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" for this victim 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". There are no records of anyone having been murdered at or around the time of the alleged Fairy Fay murder, and newspaper reports listing Whitechapel atrocities that included a Christmas 1887 killing conspicuously did not list the Smith killing.
- Annie Millwood, born c. 1850, 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 c. 1843, 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 two or three men, one of whom was a teenager. She fell into a coma and died on April 5, 1888.
- Martha Tabram , 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 is that the killer used a somewhat different modus operandi , 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 , 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 1889 She was reportedly identified by scars she had had prior to her disappearance and apparent murder.
- Alice McKenzie , born c. 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 has long been debated by Ripperologists.
- Frances Coles , 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 before her throat was cut. Otherwise there were no mutilations to the body.
- Carrie Brown , born c. 1835 and killed 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 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 that happened in Whitechapel though London police eventually ruled out any connection.
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. He did not make any effort to photograph the graffiti before its erasure.
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 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.
There is disagreement as to the importance of the graffiti in the Ripper case: some contend that the graffiti is merely coincidental, and was not written by the killer; others think there might be some connection to the murders.
There is no definitive proof linking the graffiti to the murder, other than the placement of the bloodstained apron scrap nearby.
There are several possible scenarios, most of which are based solely on speculation:
...
suggested that Juwes referred not to "Jews," but to Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the three killers of Hiram Abif, a semi-legendary figure in
Freemasonry, and furthermore, that the message was written by the killer as part of a Masonic plot. However, there is no evidence that anyone prior to Knight had ever referred to those three figures by the term "Juwes".
- The murderer wrote the graffiti and then dropped the apron scrap to indicate a link, which some Ripperologists contend is the case.
- The graffiti was already there and the murderer wanted to indicate a link in support of the graffiti's message
- The graffiti was already there and the murderer dropped the scrap coincidentally, without interest in making a link
- The graffiti was added after the scrap was dropped. Given the time between the discovery of Eddowes's body and the discovery of the scrap at 3am, there was ample time for this to occur.
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" . 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. 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. 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.
Ongoing DNA tests on the still existing letters have yet to yield conclusive results.
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 recognised a sexual motive or element to the attacks, but were otherwise thoroughly unfamiliar with such crimes.
Media
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 became standard media practice 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.
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 draw attention from the respectable classes to the plight of 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.
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,
Morrissey,
Link Wray,
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,
LL Cool J,
The White Stripes,
Iced Earth,
Queensr˙che,
The Legendary Pink Dots,
Bob Dylan,
Judas Priest and
Screaming Lord Sutch have recorded songs titled "Jack the Ripper". Chicago-based pop-rock band
Spitalfield took its name from
Spitalfields, one of the sections of London's East End where the killer was active.
In the sci-fi television program
Babylon 5, Jack the Ripper is portrayed as having been abducted by an alien race and used to learn more about humanity.
A number of companies also produce Jack the Ripper figurines or toys , sometimes leading to public protest, as when the family of victims of alleged serial killer
Robert William Pickton objected to the sale of Ripper dolls at the
Vancouver Virgin Megastore.
In 2006, Jack the Ripper was selected by the BBC History Magazine and its readers as the worst Briton in history.
In 2003, '
Shanghai Knights' starring
Jackie Chan and
Owen Wilson had a scene in which Jack the Ripper was seen. He asked Fan Wong if she would 'like to go for a little walk'. Jack the Ripper has been introduced into short scenes in numerous films, but in a humourous manner.
To date more than 150 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. Philip Sugden's
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper is widely considered the best general overview of the case. Six periodicals about Jack the Ripper have hit the market since the early 1990s:
Ripperana ,
Ripperologist , the
Whitechapel Journal ,
Ripper Notes ,
Ripperoo , and the
Journal of the Whitechapel Society .
References
- The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, ISBN 0-7867-0276-1
- The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner, ISBN 0-7867-0768-2
- Jack the Ripper: The Facts by Paul Begg, ISBN 1-86105-687-7
- The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow, ISBN 0-425-11869-X
- Ripperology by Robin Odell, ISBN 0-87338-861-5
- The Jack the Ripper A-Z by Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, ISBN 0-7472-5522-9
- The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund , ISBN 0-7867-0626-0
- by Stephen P. Ryder*
See also
External links
- has an extensive collection of contemporary newspaper reports related to the murders as well as articles by modern authors.
- discusses the investigation into the killings.
- holds images and transcripts of letters claiming to be from Jack the Ripper.
- is a social organization dedicated to the Ripper case that holds bimonthly meetings in London and has its own newsletter.
