Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of 31 August 1888, a carman walking to work through Buck's Row, Whitechapel, spotted what he took for a discarded tarpaulin lying against a gateway. It was the body of Mary Ann Nichols, a forty-three-year-old woman of the East End's lodging houses, her throat cut. Within ten weeks four more women would die inside roughly a square mile of London, and their unknown killer would acquire the most notorious alias in criminal history — a name he almost certainly never used himself.
The five deaths generally attributed to a single hand — the "canonical five", a grouping that owes much to an 1894 memorandum by senior policeman Sir Melville Macnaghten — were Nichols; Annie Chapman, found in a backyard off Hanbury Street on 8 September; Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, both killed in the small hours of 30 September, the so-called double event; and Mary Jane Kelly, murdered indoors at Miller's Court on 9 November, the youngest victim and the most terribly mutilated. The full Whitechapel murders file actually covers eleven killings between 1888 and 1891, and enthusiasts still argue over which of them belong. Eddowes died in Mitre Square, just inside the City of London — which meant two separate forces, the Metropolitan Police and the much smaller City of London Police, were soon running parallel investigations into the same man.
Why he was never caught
The honest answer is that Victorian policing had almost no tools for catching a stranger who murdered strangers. Fingerprinting was not adopted by Scotland Yard until 1901; blood at a scene could not even be reliably identified as human, let alone typed, since Karl Landsteiner's ABO blood groups were likewise a 1901 discovery. Crime-scene practice barely existed — of the five murder scenes, only Kelly's was photographed. Detection in 1888 meant catching a culprit red-handed, extracting a confession or producing a witness, and the Ripper obliged with none of the three. The police were far from idle: officers went door to door through the district, interviewed well over a thousand people and investigated hundreds of men, while amateur patrols such as the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee walked the streets at night. One tantalising clue destroyed itself. After Eddowes's murder, a chalked message referring to "the Juwes" was found in Goulston Street above a bloodstained scrap of her apron. Commissioner Sir Charles Warren ordered it scrubbed away before it could be photographed, fearing an anti-Jewish riot at daybreak. Warren resigned in early November, days before the final canonical murder.
The name was probably a hoax
The killer's brand was built by other hands. The "Dear Boss" letter, received by the Central News Agency in late September 1888 and signed "Jack the Ripper", was widely believed by senior police, then and since, to be the work of an enterprising journalist, as was the "Saucy Jacky" postcard that followed the double event. Only the "From Hell" letter, sent in October to George Lusk of the Vigilance Committee along with half a preserved human kidney, is treated by some researchers as possibly genuine — and even that cannot be verified. Genuine or not, the letters transformed a local horror into the first great modern media crime panic, fed daily by London's cheap mass-circulation newspapers.
A century of suspect inflation
Macnaghten's memorandum named three men he considered likelier than the rest: Montague Druitt, a barrister who drowned himself in the Thames weeks after the Kelly murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-born hairdresser later confined to an asylum; and Michael Ostrog, a Russian confidence trickster who was probably in a French prison at the relevant time. Other senior officers, Robert Anderson and Donald Swanson among them, pointed towards a poor Polish Jew usually read as Kosminski. From that modest core, the following century inflated the list beyond a hundred names, from the faintly plausible to the absurd: Queen Victoria's grandson Prince Albert Victor, the painter Walter Sickert, even Lewis Carroll. In 2014 a businessman announced that mitochondrial DNA on a shawl supposedly recovered beside Eddowes matched Kosminski's descendants; scientists criticised both the shawl's unproven provenance and an error in the analysis, and the claim convinced few historians.
No one was ever charged, and the surviving files sit in the National Archives, thinned over the decades by souvenir hunters. The Ripper endures not because the mystery is deep but because it is empty — a silhouette onto which every generation projects its own favourite villain.
Quiz nuggets
- The "canonical five" victims were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, killed between 31 August and 9 November 1888.
- Stride and Eddowes died on the same night, 30 September 1888 — known as the "double event".
- The name "Jack the Ripper" comes from the "Dear Boss" letter, widely believed to be a journalist's hoax.
- Commissioner Sir Charles Warren ordered the Goulston Street graffito erased before it could be photographed.
- Scotland Yard did not adopt fingerprinting until 1901, thirteen years after the murders.