Titans of History

JACK THE RIPPER

Active 1888–1891

More murders at Whitechapel, strange and horrible. The newspapers reek with blood.

Lord Cranbrook, Cabinet minister, October 2, 1888

Jack the Ripper stalked the dingiest areas of Victorian London, preying on the most vulnerable and ostracized members of society: prostitutes. In a frenzied bout of blood lust, he murdered at least five women from August to November 1888. The Ripper, also known as the Whitechapel murderer or the leather apron, remains the most infamous murderer never to be caught and the first serial killer to achieve an international profile. “Horror ran through the land,” reads one account from the period. “Men spoke of it with bated breath, and pale-lipped women shuddered as they read the dreadful details.”

All of the Ripper’s murders took place in or around the poverty-stricken Whitechapel area of east London. His victims were street prostitutes. Although they were not raped, in nearly every case their throat was cut and lower torso mutilated in such a way as to suggest a depraved sexual motive for the murder and an obsession with wombs. Such was the precision with which the bodies were maimed that police felt the killer must have had at least some knowledge of either anatomy or butchery.

On August 7, 1888, Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times in the stairwell of a block of apartments in Whitechapel, and left with her lower body exposed. Whether the Ripper was responsible is disputed, but he was unquestionably behind the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, found in a cobbled alleyway in Whitechapel on August 31, strangled and then repeatedly stabbed in the throat, stomach and genitalia. Detective Inspectors Frederick George Abberline, Henry Moore and Walter Andrews were brought in to assist local inquiries (later supplemented by the City police under Detective Inspector James McWilliam) and separate suspects were questioned concerning both murders, but nothing came of their investigations. Then, on September 8, a pattern began to emerge, as the body of Annie Chapman was found in Spitalfields, with her throat cut and some of her organs ripped from her body.

The killer clearly thrived on the fear he was creating. On September 30, after killing his next victim, Elizabeth Stride, outside the International Working Men’s Club in Dutfield’s Yard, he boldly walked eastward to Aldgate, probably passing the police patrols that were passing every fifteen minutes, where he accosted Catherine Eddowes near a warehouse. Just discharged from a local police station for being intoxicated, she was found lying on her back with her throat cut, stomach opened and organs removed. The last victim of the Ripper was Mary Jane Kelly, another local prostitute, murdered in her room in Spitalfields and chopped into tiny pieces on November 9.

On September 27, midway through the killings, the Central News Agency received a poorly written confession, in red ink, signed “Jack the Ripper.” Although this may have been a hoax, on October 16 a local committee set up to keep vigil in the area was sent what appeared to be half a human kidney, apparently from one of the murder victims. As news of a serial killer stalking the streets appeared in the press, so fear escalated into hysteria, and the London police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was forced to resign.

Who was the Ripper? Wilder speculation has alleged political motives on his part. Was he a social reformer—perhaps even Thomas Barnardo—eager to bring the squalid conditions of areas such as Whitechapel to public attention? Could he have been a twisted Irish nationalist: perhaps their leader in the House of Commons, Charles Stewart Parnell, who, known to walk the streets of Whitechapel, was followed for a time by police before being ruled out as a suspect? The writer George Bernard Shaw seemed to give some credence to the idea when he wrote, in September 1888: “[while] we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time … some independent genius has taken the matter in hand … by simply disembowelling four women.”

The most controversial suggestion was that Prince Albert Victor, the duke of Clarence and eldest son of the prince of Wales, was involved in the killings, and that the government and royal family covered up the crimes to prevent a scandal. The idea has intrigued conspiracy theorists in particular, not least because the prince was known for his dissipated lifestyle, but the weight of evidence suggests he was elsewhere when several of the murders were committed.

Suspicion fell for a time on the sizeable Jewish community in east London, as old prejudices flared up during the killings, with rumors of ritual religious murder. The Ripper had left some body parts after the double murder of September 30, and chalked a message in a stairwell claiming that “The Juwes are men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Aaron Kosminski—a Polish Jew who worked as a hairdresser in London before being committed to a lunatic asylum in 1891—was later named chief suspect by Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten, but no charges were ever brought, despite Robert Anderson (head of CID) and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson (whom he temporarily entrusted with the case) also considering Kosminski the chief suspect. Others, though, claim the cryptic message on the wall points to a Masonic connection, the Juwes representing Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, ritually killed, according to Masonic tradition, for murdering Grand Master Hiram Abif.

Macnaghten also named three other possible suspects: Montague Druitt, a barrister and teacher with an interest in surgery, who was believed to be insane and later found dead; Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born thief and con man who was detained in asylums on several occasions; and Francis Tumblety, a physician who fled the country under suspicion for the Kelly murder. Other suggestions have included Jacob Isenschmid, an insane Swiss pork butcher, and Severin Klowoski, a Polish surgeon who poisoned three wives. According to crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, however, the most likely candidate was in fact a German-born artist named Walter Richard Sickert, whose paintings included numerous misogynistic images of violent assaults on women, though criminologists had previously dismissed Sickert as a credible suspect.

Why did the Ripper murders suddenly stop? Was the perpetrator consigned to a mental institution and thus prevented from continuing his killing spree. Did he die from syphilis or perhaps even commit suicide? Could it be that, having made his grotesque point, he was content to retire again into the shadows? Did he move elsewhere when the police presence in London became too much to handle? Or did he not stop at all but simply change his modus operandi, being guilty of not just five but eleven murders in Whitechapel between April 3, 1888 and February 13, 1891. No one can say for sure, but the slaughter ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The Ripper has been portrayed, based on a few alleged sightings, as a tall man, wearing an apron and carrying a black doctor’s bag full of surgical knives, but the Star newspaper, reporting at the time, captures far more powerfully the awfulness of his crimes and the sheer terror he provoked. “A nameless reprobate—half beast, half man—is at large,” it wrote. “Hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood—all these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more.”