Jack The Ripper
Perennial Thriller

Jack the Ripper! Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such
vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog,
prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent,
cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night,
armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag.

Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper


By today's standards of crime, Jack the Ripper would barely make the headlines,
murdering a mere five prostitutes in a huge slum swarming with criminals: just one more
violent creep satisfying his perverted needs on the dregs of society. No one would be
incensed as were the respectable families of the pretty college students that were Ted
Bundy's victims or the children tortured and mutilated by John Wayne Gacy. We have
become a society numbed by horrible crimes inflicted upon many victims.

Why then, over a hundred years later, are there allegedly more books written on Jack than
all of the American presidents combined? Why are there stories, songs, operas, movies and
a never-ending stream of books on this one Victorian criminal? Why is this symbol of
terror as popular a subject today as he was in Victorian London?

Because Jack the Ripper represents the classic whodunit. Not only is the case an enduring
unsolved mystery that professional and amateur sleuths have tried to solve for over a
hundred years, but the story has a terrifying, almost supernatural quality to it. He comes
from out of the fog, kills violently and quickly and disappears without a trace. Then for no
apparent reason, he satisfies his blood lust with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the
near destruction of his final victim, and then vanishes from the scene forever. The perfect
ingredients for the perennial thriller.

When Charles Cross walked through Whitechapel's Buck's Row just before four in the
morning Friday, August 31, 1888, it was dark and seemingly deserted. It was chilly and
damp, not unusual for London even in the summer, especially before dawn. He saw
something that looked like a tarpaulin lying on the ground before the entrance to a stable
yard.

As he walked closer, he saw it was a woman lying on her back, her skirts lifted almost to
her waist. He saw another man walking the same way. "Come and look over here," he
asked the man, assuming that the woman was either drunk or the victim of an assault. As
they tried to help her in the darkened street, neither of the two men saw the awful wounds
that had nearly decapitated her. They fixed her skirt for modesty's sake and went to look
for a policeman.

A few minutes later, Police Constable John Neil happened by the body while he was
walking his beat. From the light of his lantern, he could see that blood was oozing from
her throat which had been slashed from ear to ear. Her eyes were wide open and staring.
Even though her hands and wrists were cold, Neil felt warmth in her arms. He called to
another policeman who summoned a doctor and an ambulance.


Neil awakened some of the residences in the respectable neighborhood to find out if they
had heard anything suspicious, but to no avail. Soon, Dr. Rees Llewellyn arrived on the
scene and examined the woman. The wounds to her throat had been fatal, he told them.
Since parts of her body were still warm, the doctor felt that she had been dead no longer
than a half-hour, perhaps minutes after Neil had completed his earlier walk around that
area.

Her neck had been slashed twice, which had cut through her windpipe and esophagus. She
had been killed where she was found, even though there was very little blood on the
ground. Most of the lost blood had soaked into her clothing. The body was taken to the
mortuary on Old Montague Street, which was part of the workhouse there. While the
body was being stripped, Inspector Spratling discovered that her abdomen had been
wounded and mutilated. He called Dr. Llewellyn back for a more detailed examination.

The doctor determined that the woman had been bruised on the lower left jaw. The
abdomen exhibited a long, deep jagged knife wound, along with several other cuts from
the same instruments running downward. The doctor guessed that a left-handed person
could have inflicted these wounds very quickly with a long-bladed knife. Later, the doctor
was not so sure about the killer being left-handed.

There have been several theories about how the wounds were inflicted. Philip Sugden
makes a persuasive case:

If (the victim's) throat were cut while she was erect and alive, a strong jet of blood would
have spurted from the wound and probably deluged the front of her clothing. But in fact
there was no blood at all on her breast or the corresponding part of her clothes. Some of
the flow from the throat formed a small pool on the pavement beneath (her) neck and the
rest was absorbed by the backs of the dress bodice and ulster. The blood from the
abdominal wound largely collected in the loose tissues. Such a pattern proves that (her)
injuries were inflicted when she was lying on her back and suggests that she may have
already been dead.

Identification would not be easy. All she had on her was a comb, broken mirror and a
handkerchief. The Lambeth Workhouse mark was on her petticoats. There were no
identifying marks on her other inexpensive and well-worn clothes. She had a black straw
hat with black velvet trim.

The woman was approximately five feet two inches tall with brown graying hair, brown
eyes and several missing front teeth.

But later, as news of the murder spread around Whitechapel, the police learned of a
woman named "Polly," who lived in a lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street. Eventually a
woman from the Lambeth Workhouse identified her as Mary Ann Nichols, age 42. The
next day her father and her husband identified her body.

Polly had been the daughter of a locksmith and married William Nichols, a printer's
machinist. They had five children. Her drinking had caused their marriage to break up. For
the most part, Polly had been living off her meager earnings as a prostitute. She still had a
very serious drinking problem. Every once in awhile, she would try to get her life back
together, but it never worked out. She was a sad, destitute woman, but one that most
people liked and pitied.


The inspector in charge of the investigation was a police veteran named Frederick George
Abberline who had been on the force 25 years, most of which had been spent in the
Whitechapel area.

The murderer of Polly Nichols left nothing behind in the way of witnesses, weapon or any
other type of clue. None of the residents nearby heard any kind of disturbance nor did any
of the workmen in the area notice anything unusual. Even though Polly had been found
very shortly after her death, no vehicle or person was seen escaping the scene of the crime.
At one point, suspicion focused upon three horse slaughterers who worked nearby, but it
was proven that they were working while the murder occurred.

At the time of Polly Nichols' death, the inhabitants of London's Whitechapel area had
already heard about a number of attacks on women in that neighborhood. Whether or not
one or more of these attacks was perpetrated by the man who later became known as Jack
the Ripper is controversial. However, in the minds of the people of Whitechapel, most of
these crimes were linked indisputably.

On Monday, August 6, 1888, several weeks before Polly Nichols' murder, Martha
Tabram, a 39-year-old prostitute, was found murdered in George Yard. The time of death
was estimated to be 2:30 a.m. She had been stabbed 39 times on "body, neck and private
parts with a knife or dagger," according to Dr. Timothy Killeen's post-mortem
examination report. There was no indication that the throat had been slashed or her
abdomen extensively mutilated. With the exception of one wound that had been delivered
with a strong knife with a long blade, such as a dagger or bayonet, many other wounds
had been inflicted with a penknife.

According to another prostitute, Mary Ann Connelly, known as Pearly Poll, she and
Martha had been together in the company of two soldiers until a few hours before Martha
was killed. The police took Poll to check out the soldiers at the Tower garrison, but the
soldiers she identified were cleared of the crime. A constable who had been on duty in the
vicinity of George Yard also saw a soldier in that area around the time of Martha's death,
but this soldier was never properly identified.

Some months earlier, Emma Smith, a 45-year-old prostitute, was attacked on April 2,
1888 at seven o'clock in the evening within 100 yards of where Martha Tabram was
found. Her head and face were badly injured and a blunt instrument had been rammed into
her vagina. She told the woman at her lodging house that several men robbed and
assaulted her.

While these incidences of violence so close together in Whitechapel were linked so firmly
in the minds of their neighbors, the crimes themselves were very different. Tabram was
probably murdered by one individual, while several men assaulted Smith. Robbery was
clearly the motive of the Smith assault, but not the murder of Tabram. The nature of the
wounds inflicted was quite different. Thus, it is not likely that the same assailant was
responsible for both crimes. Only the Tabram murder bears any similarity to the work of
the man eventually known as Jack the Ripper.

This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East
End is a vast city...a shocking place...an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping
things; where filthy men and women live on...gin, where collars and clean shirts are
decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.

Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets

The East End of London was in Victorian England a place outcast from the city both
economically and socially. Some nine hundred thousand people lived in this teaming slum.
Here the cattle and sheep would be herded through the streets of Whitechapel to the
slaughterhouses nearby where they were bludgeoned, bleating with fear and pain. The
streets were stained with blood and excrement. Rubbish and liquid sewage gave the area a
horrible smell.

Most of the inhabitants lived in tenement houses under deplorable conditions:

Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar
a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! In
another room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from
her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt.
Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in
the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who has been
dead thirteen days.

Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London

For the most part the people who lived in this East End were the working poor, those who
worked occasionally, those who did not work at all, and criminals. Most people lived on a
day-to-day basis. More than half of the children born in the East End died before the age
of five. Of those who survived, many were mentally and physically handicapped.

Prostitution was one of the only reliable means through which a single woman or widow
could maintain herself. The police estimated that in 1888 there were some 1,200
prostitutes in Whitechapel, not including the women who supplemented their meager
earnings by occasional prostitution.

There were over 200 common lodging houses in Whitechapel, accommodating almost
9,000 people. The sleeping rooms were long rooms with rows of beds, often infested with
vermin and insects. If a woman had not earned enough money that day to pay for a bed for
the night, she would have to find someone who would let her sleep with him in return for
sexual favors. Otherwise she slept on the street.

The Russian pogroms of the early 1880's and expulsion of Poles from Prussia accounted
for a wave of immigration from Eastern Europe into London. Many of these immigrants
were Jewish and settled in large numbers in Whitechapel because of the low rents. For the
most part, this Jewish settlement had a very beneficial effect on the area, by improving the
sanitary conditions and physical safety of the area.

However, despite various urban renewal efforts and the improvement in environmental
conditions brought about by the Jewish settlers, Whitechapel was still an area known for
its poverty and crime. In the squalor of crowded tenements, narrow darkened slum streets
and alleys, the Whitechapel murderer had found a perfect place for his work.

Because the people of Whitechapel firmly believed that the deaths of Martha Tabram,
Emma Smith and Polly Nichols were connected, there was a great deal of pressure upon
the police to bring the criminal(s) to justice. Three theories were entertained: (1) a gang of
thieves was responsible, such as the men who robbed and assaulted Emma Smith, (2) a
gang extorting money from prostitutes penalized the three women for failing to pay, (3) a
maniac was on the loose.

Considering how poor the victims were, the first two theories were not very plausible, so
the final theory became popular. The East London Observer commented on the Tabram
and Nichols murders:

The two murders which have so startled London within the last month are singular for the
reason that the victims have been of the poorest of the poor, and no adequate motive in
the shape of plunder can be traced. The excess of effort that has been apparent in each
murder suggests the idea that both crimes are the work of a demented being, as the
extraordinary violence used is the peculiar feature in each instance.

A request was made of the Home Secretary for a reward to be offered for the discovery of
the criminal. Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, had no idea at this point what he was
dealing with and declined to offer a reward, laying responsibility at the feet of the
Metropolitan Police.

Today, with all the techniques of modern forensic science and psychology, a serial killer is
a major challenge for a metropolitan police force. Some serial killers will never be caught
regardless of the sophistication and skill of the authorities in that jurisdiction. London's
Metropolitan Police in Victorian times was operating almost completely in a knowledge
vacuum with no modern forensic tools available to them. Fingerprinting, blood typing and
other staples of forensic technique were not yet developed for police use. Even
photography of victims was not a usual practice. There was no crime laboratory at
Scotland Yard until the 1930's.

Police today have developed elaborate profiling techniques to identify serial killers and
have amassed a database of information with which forensic psychologists and
psychiatrists can determine the kind of individual perpetrating the crime. In 1888, the
police were ignorant of sexual psychopaths. They had seen nothing like the Ripper crimes
in England in their experience.

While police were searching for the killer of Polly Nichols, a story surfaced about a bizarre
character named "Leather Apron." This man required prostitutes to pay him money or he
would beat them. The Star claimed the man was a Jewish slipper maker of the following
description:

From all accounts he is five feet four or five inches in height and wears a dark, close-fitting
cap. He is thickset and has an unusually thick neck. His hair is black, and closely clipped,
his age being about 38 or 40. He has a small, black moustache. The distinguishing feature
of his costume is a leather apron, which he always wears...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.

With all this publicity, including the fear of mob violence, "Leather Apron" went into
hiding.

Annie Chapman, known to her friends as "Dark Annie," was a pathetic woman. She was
essentially homeless, living at common lodging houses when she had the money for a
night's lodging, otherwise roaming the streets in search of clients to earn a little money for
drink, shelter and food.

She was 47 when she died, a homeless prostitute. But her life had once been much
different in 1869 when she was married to John Chapman, a coachman. Of the three
children they had, one died of meningitis and another was crippled. The stress of illness
and the heavy drinking of both husband and wife caused the breakup of their marriage.
Things became much worse for Annie when John died and she lost the small financial
security his allowance had provided her. The emotional shock of his death was just as bad
as the financial loss and she never recovered from either.

Suffering from depression and alcoholism, she did crochet work and sold flowers.
Eventually she turned to prostitution, despite her plain features, missing teeth, and plump
figure. For the most part, she was very easy going. However, a week before her death, she
got into a fight with a woman over a piece of soap and Annie was struck on the left eye
and on her chest.

On Friday, September 7, 1888, Annie was told her friend that she was feeling sick.
Unknown to her, she was suffering from tuberculosis. "I must pull myself together and get
some money or I shall have no lodgings," she told her friend Amelia.

Just before two in the morning on Saturday, September 8, a slightly drunken Annie was
turned out of her lodging house to earn money for her bed. Later that morning, she was
found several hundred yards away in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.

29 Hanbury Street was just across from the Spitalfields market. 17 people made the
building their home, five of which had rooms overlooking the site of the murder. Of those
five or so with rooms overlooking the site of the murder, some had their windows open
that night.

Spitalfields Market opened at 5 a.m., so there were many other people gathered that
morning with businesses in the building at 29 Hanbury preparing for the opening of the
market. Residents were leaving for work as early as 3:50 a.m. The streets around the
market were filled with the commercial vehicles delivering to the marketplace.

John Davis, an elderly carman who lived with his wife and three sons at 29 Hanbury,
found Annie's body just after 6 a.m. He noticed that her skirts had been raised up to her
pelvis. He went immediately to get help and returned with two workmen. By the time a
constable was called, everybody in the house had been awakened.

Yet, amazingly enough, even though the sun rose at 5:23 that morning, and so much
traffic was present at that early hour, no one heard any suspicious disturbance or cry nor
was anyone seen with bloody clothing or weapon. There was clean tap water in the
backyard where Annie was found, but the murderer did not use the water to wash the
blood from his hands or knife. Also amazing was the risk that the murderer took in this
daylight crime.

Dr. George Bagster Phillips, veteran police surgeon, was called to the spot and described
what he saw for the inquest:

"I found the body of the deceased lying in the yard on her back...The left arm was across
the left breast, and the legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees
turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side, and the tongue
protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips; it was much swollen. The small
intestines and other portions were lying on the right side of the body on the ground above
the right shoulder, but attached. There was a large quantity of blood, with a part of the
stomach above the left shoulder...The body was cold, except that there was a certain
remaining heat, under the intestines, in the body. Stiffness of the limbs was not marked,
but it was commencing. The throat was dissevered deeply. I noticed that the incision of
the skin was jagged, and reached right round the neck."

Dr. Phillips estimated that Annie Chapman had been dead approximately two hours. The
absence of any cry heard by the residents of 29 Hanbury could be explained by the
evidence that she was strangled into unconsciousness and immediately thereafter had her
throat slashed.

She had been murdered where she was found. While there was no sign that Annie had
fought off her attacker, there was a strange occurrence that Dr. Phillips noted near the feet
of the corpse. Annie had apparently kept in her pocket a small piece of cloth, a pocket
comb and a small-tooth comb, all of which had appeared to be purposely arranged in some
order.

An envelope was found near her head containing two pills. On the back of the envelope
were the words Sussex Regiment. The letter M and lower down Sp were handwritten on
the other side. There was a postmark that said London, Aug. 23, 1888. Also, a leather
apron was found along with some other trash around the yard.

The testimony that Dr. Phillips gave at the inquest gave a more detailed view of the
ferocity of the murder. The murderer had grabbed Annie by the chin and slashed her throat
deeply from left to right with the possible failed attempt to decapitate her. This was the
cause of death. The abdominal mutilations, described in the September 29 edition of the
Lancet, were post mortem:

The abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric
attachments, had been lifted out of the body, and placed by the shoulder of the corpse;
whilst from the pelvis the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the vagina
and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these
parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the rectum, and dividing
the vagina low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri. Obviously the work was that of
an expert - of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological
examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.

At the inquest, Phillips said, "The whole inference seems to me that the operation was
performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body." This
police surgeon with 23 years of experience was very surprised that the mutilations had
been done so skillfully and in what must have been a short period of time, saying that he
could have not done such work in less than fifteen minutes and more likely an hour.

Coroner Wynne E. Baxter agreed in his summation:

"The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by someone who had
considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts (like in the
Tabram murder). It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what
difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to
abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to
find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of
animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed
to the post-mortem room."

Phillips conjectured that the murder instrument was not a bayonet or the type of knife used
by leather workers, but rather a narrow, thin knife with a blade between 6 and 8 inches
long. The kind of knife used by slaughtermen and surgeons for amputations could have
been such an instrument.

Abrasions on Annie's hands indicated that her rings had been forced off her. Later, from
conversations with Annie's friends, police were able to determine that Annie wore cheap
brass rings, which may have been mistaken for gold.

Inspector Abberline, who was in charge of the Polly Nichols murder, was instructed to
help with the Chapman murder which was in Spitalfields, a different police jurisdiction.
However, the lead inspector was Joseph Chandler of the Metropolitan Police's H Division.
There seemed common agreement among the inspectors that the same man who killed
Polly Nichols also killed Annie Chapman.

The Chapman investigation was just as frustrating as the Nichols investigation. The
physical evidence - the leather apron, a nailbox and a piece of steel - were owned by Mrs.
Richardson, one of the residents, and her son. The envelope with Sussex Regiment seal on
it was widely sold to the public at a local post office. Furthermore, a man at Annie's
lodging house saw her pick up the envelope from the kitchen floor to put her pills in when
her pillbox broke.

Extensive conversations with the associates of Annie Chapman yielded neither good
suspects nor any reasonable motive for the crime. Nor was there any suspicious person
found escaping the scene of the crime.

However, the investigation was not entirely fruitless and three important witnesses were
found, one of which almost certainly caught a glimpse of the murderer. The first witness,
John Richardson, was Mrs. Amelia Richardson's son. Between 4:45 and 4:50 on the
morning of the murder, he visited 29 Hanbury to check the locks on the cellar in which
Mrs. Richardson kept her tools and goods for her packing case enterprise.

He opened the yard door and sat down on the step to cut a piece of leather from his boot
that had been hurting his foot. As it was beginning to get light outside, he could see that
the cellar locks had not been tampered with while he sat fixing his boot. He could also see
that at that time, there was no body of Annie Chapman in the backyard. "I could not have
failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there then," he said at the inquest.

Another witness, Albert Cadosch, living next door to 29 Hanbury Street testified that he
heard voices coming from the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street just after 5:20 a.m. The only
word he overheard was No. A few minutes later, around 5:30 a.m., he heard the sound of
something falling against the fence.

The most important witness was Mrs. Elizabeth Long who was coming to the Spitalfields
market and passed through Hanbury Street when she heard the Black Eagle Brewery
clock strike 5:30. She saw a man and a woman talking "close against the shutters of No.
29." Mrs. Long identified Annie Chapman in the mortuary as the woman who had been
facing her as she passed down Hanbury Street. Unfortunately, the man Annie was
conversing with, who was almost certainly her killer, had his back to Mrs. Long. She did
her best to describe him in her testimony to Coroner Wynne E. Baxter:

BAXTER: "Did you see his face?"

MRS. LONG: "I did not and could not recognize him again. He was, however, dark
complexioned, and was wearing a brown deerstalker hat. I think he was wearing a dark
coat but cannot be sure."

BAXTER: "Was he a man or a boy?"

MRS. LONG: "Oh, he was a man over forty, as far as I could tell. He seemed to be a little
taller than the deceased. He looked to me like a foreigner, as well as I could make out."

BAXTER: "Was he a labourer or what?"

MRS. LONG: "He looked what I should call shabby genteel."

After listening to these witnesses, the police had a problem. Dr. Phillips, a man in whom
they had placed great trust, estimated that Annie Chapman had died no later than 4:30 that
Saturday morning. The evidence of these three witnesses pointed to Annie dying at 5:30.
Consequently, Inspector Chandler essentially ignored their testimony, even the very
critical testimony of Mrs. Long.

Phillip Sugden in his excellent book on the subject rejects Dr. Phillips estimate of the time
of death as did Coroner Baxter did in 1888:

In the first place the doctor's estimate of the time of death is far from conclusive. It was
not based, as such judgments are today, on the internal body temperature of the deceased,
taken rectally or from the liver, but upon an estimate from touch only of the external body
temperature coupled with impressions as to how far rigor mortis had advanced. But there
were several factors present in this case, which would have contributed to rapid heat loss.
The morning of 8 September was fairly cold. Annie's clothes had been thrown up to
expose her legs and lower abdomen to the air. Her abdomen had been entirely laid open.
And she had lost a great deal of blood. At the inquest Phillips himself qualified his estimate
by acknowledging the existence of such imponderables and he may easily have underrated
their significance. If he did, Annie was killed after, not before, 4:30.

Newspapers did much to inflame the inherent fear and anger of the people of the East End,
feeding on every rumor and story. Four savage murders left the normally busy streets of
Whitechapel quiet by early evening and virtually deserted at night.

Not unexpectedly, the people were angry with the police for their secrecy and lack of
results. The government came under further criticism because it stood fast by its policy of
not offering rewards for discovery of criminals. It was a policy that had been developed
because of very bad experiences in offering rewards in the past. The Home Office was
certainly accurate in predicting the amount of assistance volunteered by the people of
Whitechapel. Citizens inundated the police with tips on people who exhibited strange or
antisocial behavior.

In the blind fear-inspired rage of the local inhabitants, they looked for scapegoats and
seized on the growing Jewish community as a target. A few facts careened out of
proportion in the minds of a largely unsophisticated Whitechapel populace. The man called
"Leather Apron," who bullied prostitutes was Jewish. Mrs. Long's testimony in the Annie
Chapman murder pointed to a foreigner, which was the term used to describe Jewish
immigrants. These two facts and many unsubstantiated rumors whipped up a distinctly
anti-Semitic atmosphere in the area.

Some of the merchants in the area were quick to sense the growing anti-Semitic fever and
took action to contain it. They formed the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was
primarily composed of Jewish businessmen. George Lusk, a building contractor and
vestryman in his local church, was elected to head this committee of 16 prominent local
citizens. This committee, far from being the vigilante group that some had claimed, was
closer to an organized "neighborhood watch." Samuel Montagu, who was the Jewish
Member of Parliament for the Whitechapel area, offered a reward for the capture of the
Whitechapel killer, an action sanctioned by the Mile End committee.

In a week or so, the bawdy nightlife of Whitechapel surged back to its normal pitch. There
were just too many people whose daily subsistence depended upon prostitution and other
forms of evening entertainment to let the pace lapse for long.

While Whitechapel was unsatisfied with the lack of results of the police investigation, it
was hard to fault the police for the quantity of work that was produced. On Tuesday,
September 11, a few days after the death of Annie Chapman, John Pizer, the famous
"Leather Apron," was arrested.

Despite attempts by his family to portray Pizer as a victim of malicious rumors, there was
sufficient evidence to show Pizer was an unpleasant character with at least one
documented case of stabbing, for which he served six months at hard labor. The
allegations of bullying and extorting money from prostitutes were never proven. The East
London Observer described in a not altogether unbiased view, Pizer's testimony to
Coroner Baxter:

He was a man of about five feet four inches, with a dark-hued face, which was not
altogether pleasant to look upon by reason of the grizzly black strips of hair, nearly an inch
in length, which almost covered the face. The thin lips, too, had a cruel, sardonic kind of
look, which was increased, if anything, by the drooping dark moustache and side whiskers.
His hair was short, smooth, and dark, intermingled with grey, and his head was slightly
bald on the top. The head was large, and was fixed to the body by a thick heavy-looking
neck. Pizer work a dark overcoat, brown trousers, and a brown and very much battered
hat, and appeared somewhat splay-footed

When Baxter asked Pizer why he went into hiding after the deaths of Polly Nichols and
Annie Chapman, Pizer said that his brother had advised him to do so.

"I was the subject of a false suspicion," he said emphatically.

"It was not the best advice that could be given to you," Baxter returned.

Pizer shot back immediately. "I will tell you why. I should have been torn to pieces!"

Just because Pizer was an unpleasant character did not make him the Whitechapel
murderer. First of all, he had alibis for the times at which Polly Nichols and Annie
Chapman were murdered. When Polly was killed, Pizer was at a lodging house, which was
corroborated by the proprietor. When Annie was killed, he was afraid to be seen and was
staying with relatives, a story, which was corroborated by several people. Secondly, he
lacked the skill to carve up Annie Chapman and remove her uterus.

Pizer was released, but a number of others were picked up and questioned. Some were
just eccentric and drunken characters that shot off their mouths about the murders; others
were insane. Few were worthy of prolonged investigation, either because they lacked the
medical skills or because they had alibis for the time the women were murdered. Often the
alibis consisted of confinement in asylums or jails.

Insanity and medical qualifications became the key factors in sorting out suspects. Another
factor was foreign origin, recalling Mrs. Long's testimony in the Annie Chapman murder.
The focus on medical knowledge led the police well beyond the reaches of Whitechapel
into the middle and upper classes of London as the eccentric and violent behavior of some
surgeons and other physicians came into question.

Louis Diemschutz, a Russian Jew, was driving his pony cart to Dutfield Yard, off Berner
Street in Whitechapel at 1 a.m. on Sunday, September 30, 1888. Diemschutz and his wife
lived at the International Working Men's Educational Club (IWMC) and took care of the
club's premises. The IWMC was a club composed primarily of Eastern European Jewish
Socialists.

In his spare time, Diemschutz sold costume jewelry at various outdoor markets and was
returning from this commercial enterprise when he pulled into the club yard. As he did so,
he saw an object on the ground near the wall of the club building. He struck a match and
saw that it was a woman.

Diemschutz rushed into the club and got a young member to help him. When they saw that
the object was a woman with a stream of blood running from her body, the two men ran
screaming for a policeman.

A few minutes later, Police Constable Henry Lamb and his associate were on the scene.
Lamb felt warmth in the woman's face, but could detect no pulse. His associate went
immediately to look for a doctor. PC Lamb did not see any signs of a struggle, nor were
the woman's clothes unduly disturbed, like the earlier victims whose skirts had been raised
up past their knees.

Dr. Frederick Blackwell was on the scene at 1:16 a.m. with his assistant who had arrived a
few minutes earlier. He detailed his findings at the inquest:

"The deceased was lying on her left side obliquely across the passage, her face looking
towards the right wall. Her legs were drawn up, her feet close against the wall of the right
side of the passage. Her head was resting beyond the carriage-wheel rug, the neck lying
over the rut...

"The neck and chest were quite warm, as were also the legs, and the face was slightly
warm. The hands were cold. The right hand was open and on the chest, and was smeared
with blood. The left hand, lying on the ground, was partially closed, and contained a small
packet of cachous (breath sweeteners) wrapped in tissue paper.

"The appearance of the face was quite placid. The mouth was slightly opened... In the
neck there was a long incision ...(which) commenced on the left side, 2 ½ inches below the
angle of the jaw, and almost in a direct line with it, nearly severing the vessels on that side,
cutting the windpipe completely in two, and terminating on the opposite side..."

Dr. Phillips, the police surgeon had joined Blackwell at the scene of the crime. Between
the two of them, the estimate of her time of death was between 12:36 and 12:56 a.m.

The police continued to investigate the death scene, but nothing in the way of clues or
weapon was found. They did determine however that the chairman of the IWMC had
walked through the yard around 12:40 a.m., some 20 minutes before the body was found
and saw nothing suspicious nor was anyone standing around. Likewise, Diemschutz had
not seen anyone when he pulled into the yard at 1 a.m.

While the police were coping with yet another Whitechapel murder, a most extraordinary
thing happened just 1/4 of a mile away in Mitre Square. Some 24 yards square, it was
generally a respectable area surrounded by commercial buildings and warehouses, with
very few residences. At night, when the businesses were closed, Mitre Square became a
dark and somewhat secluded area.

Mitre Square was on the beat of Police Constable Edward Watkins of the City Police. He
had been through the square at 1:30 and all was quiet. He came around again at 1:44 a.m.,
some 45 minutes after the discovery of the woman in Dutfield's Yard. Again, it was quiet
and deserted. When he shined his lantern in one corner of the square, he made a horrible
discovery.

He described it to the coroner a few days later: "I saw the body of a woman lying on her
back with her feet facing the square, her clothes up above her waist. I saw her throat was
cut and her bowels protruding. The stomach was ripped up. She was lying in a pool of
blood."

He ran over to one of the businesses on the square to get George Morris, a retired
constable who worked as a night watchman. With his whistle, he got help from a couple
more policemen. The City Police then began to search the area to see if the killer could
still be found.

At 2:18, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown got to the scene of the crime and made his
examination. Her abdomen had been ripped open and she had fearful mutilations to her
face. The "body was quite warm; no death stiffening had taken place; she must have been
dead most likely within the half hour," he later said at the inquest.

There was no money found on the corpse and there was no evidence that she had
struggled with her killer.

All in all, the Mitre Square event was pretty amazing, if for nothing more than the
aggregation of police in that particular area at the time of the crime. In addition to
Watkins and Morris, another policeman, whose beat included a perimeter of Mitre Square
had reached the square at about 1:42 a.m. Like the other policemen, he heard nothing and
saw nobody. Also, there was a police constable who lived on the square who slept through
the entire thing.

As it turned out, the murderer got his victim into the square, killed her, carved her up
silently and completely escaped in the space of fifteen minutes. But the night was not over
yet.

At 2:55 a.m. Constable Alfred Long found a piece of a bloody apron lying in the entrance
to a building in Whitechapel's Goulston Street. Just above the apron, written in white
chalk on the black bricks of the archway was the wording:

The Juwes are
The men That

Will not

be Blamed

For nothing.

The piece of bloody apron came from the woman who had been murdered in Mitre Square
and the police believed that the writing was the killer's. A constable was left to guard the
writing and some preparations were made to have the writing photographed. But before
the writing could be photographed, it was ordered destroyed in a highly controversial
move by Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Warren explained
his rationale for an action which would be criticized for over a hundred years:

The writing was on the jamb of the open archway...visible to anybody in the street and
could not be covered up...I do not hesitate to say that if the writing had been left there
would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and
lives would probably have been lost.

How this murderer was able to accomplish two such murders in such a short time,
particularly with the mutilations of the second victim, without being seen by the police or
anybody and then, when the area was in a heightened state of alarm, create the chalk
writing on the archway is nothing short of amazing.

After the murder in Dutfield's Yard, the police conducted house-to-house interviews with
the people in that neighborhood. Any bystanders that had aggregated to watch the police
conduct their examination were interrogated.

The dead woman was approximately five feet two inches tall with a very light complexion
and dark brown curly hair. She was dressed predominantly in black with a red rose
decorating her jacket. Nothing to identify her nor anything of value was found in her
pocket.

After a few red herrings, she was identified as Elizabeth Stride, who was born in 1843 in
Sweden. She had most likely come to England as a domestic worker. She had made up a
story that she was a survivor of the Princess Alice boating disaster that had occurred in
1878, claiming that her husband and two children had drowned. This story was useful in
getting charity from the Swedish Church in London and in generally arousing sympathy
for her. The real story is that her husband John Stride was a survivor of the Thames River
tragedy, but he had died later in the poorhouse.

She lived with a laborer named Michael Kidney for three years before her death. She was a
well-liked woman who people nicknamed "Long Liz." While she may have occasionally
prostituted herself, for the most part she earned a living by doing sewing or cleaning work.
Once in a while, she became drunk and boisterous, an event noted more than once in the
magistrate court.

She left her lodging house in the early evening and did not tell anyone where she was
going. She had a small amount of money in her pocket that she had earned by cleaning
rooms. At the time she left the lodging house, there was no rose on her jacket.

Dr. Phillips testified that the woman died because of her throat wounds. This time there
was no indication of strangulation, although the killer may have caught Liz by her scarf
and pulled her backwards while cutting her throat. Dr. Blackwell characterized the killer
as someone "who is accustomed to use of a heavy knife."

This time, many witnesses came forward to claim that they had seen Liz just before her
death. One of them was Constable William Smith who was walking his beat around Berner
Street and saw Liz talking to a man around 12:30 in the morning, shortly before her death.
The man that Smith saw was around thirty years old with dark hair and moustache. His
complexion was also dark. He estimated that the man was about five feet seven. This man
was dressed in a dark felt deerstalker hat with a black diagonal cutaway coat, white collar
and tie. He had a good-sized parcel in his hands.

Another important witness was Israel Schwartz who gave this story to Inspector
Swanson:

At 12:45 a.m. Israel Schwartz of 22 Helen Street...saw a man stop and speak to a woman,
who was standing in the gateway. The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he
turned her round & threw her down on the footway & the woman screamed three times,
but not very loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man
standing lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out apparently to
the man on the opposite side of the road 'Lipski' & then Schwartz walked away, but
finding that he was followed by the second man he ran as far as the railway arch but the
man did not follow so far...

Schwartz identified the body as that of the woman he had seen and thus describes the first
man who threw the woman down: age about 30, height five feet 5 in., complexion fair,
hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket and
trousers, black cap with peak, had nothing in his hands.

Second man, age 35, height 5 feet 11 inches, complexion fresh, hair light brown,
moustache brown; dress, dark overcoat, old black hard felt hat wide brim, had a clay pipe
in his hand.

Police took the evidence of Constable Smith and Israel Schwartz very seriously. Two
other important witnesses surfaced. William Marshall lived at 64 Berner Street and had
been standing near the site of the murder about 11:45 p.m., approximately an hour and a
quarter before the event occurred. He identified Liz as talking to a man who he described
as middle-aged, wearing a round cap with a small peak, "like what a sailor would wear,"
about five ft. 6 inches tall, rather stout, dressed like a clerk, and speaking like an educated
man. He was not able to get a look at the man's face. While Marshall's description of the
man with Liz is similar to Smith's and Schwartz's, Liz could have been talking to someone
entirely different than her killer an hour and a quarter before the murder.

James Brown came forward with another sighting of Liz that night at 12:45 a.m., minutes
before her death. When he reached the intersection of Berner and Fairclough Streets, he
saw Liz talking to a man. He overheard her say, "Not tonight, some other night." The man
he described was about 5 feet 7 and wearing a very long dark overcoat. Brown's timing is
open to question since he was estimating rather than looking at any clock.

The descriptions of the man talking to Liz Stride given by Smith, Marshall and Schwartz
may refer to the same man. Unfortunately, it did not help the police find this suspect.

The woman murdered in Mitre Square was easier for the police to identify since she had
some pawn tickets on her that, when publicized, brought forward John Kelly, the man she
had been living with for seven years at a lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street.

Catharine Eddowes, called Kate by all that knew her, was a very friendly and happy
woman known for her good spirits and singing. She, like the other victims, had a periodic
drinking problem, which led to quarrels with her companions and family.

Kate was born in 1842. Her parents died when she was young and the household was
dispersed. When she was 16, she fell in love with Thomas Conway and went to live with
him as his common-law wife. They lived together some 20 years and produced three
children. Conway's physical abuse and Kate's drinking caused the couple to break up in
1880. The next year she met John Kelly and remained his lover for the rest of her life. Her
friends were adamant that Kate was not a prostitute, but there is some reason to believe
that she did occasionally prostitute herself, perhaps when under the influence of alcohol.

The evening before her death, Kate told Kelly she was going to visit her daughter to
borrow some money. Kelly warned her about the Whitechapel killer and told her to come
back early. "Don't you fear for me. I'll take care of myself and I shan't fall into his hands,"
she reassured him.

Kate never got to her daughter's house, but she did find some money - enough to get
stinking drunk and land in the jail at the Bishopsgate Street Police Station. She slept off
her over indulgence until 12:30 a.m., when she asked to be allowed to go. Shortly
afterwards, Constable Hutt let her go. She asked him what time it was and he told her it
was just about one o'clock.

"I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home then," she told him.

"And serve you right," Hutt told her. "You have no right to get drunk."

Mitre Square was a mere eight-minute walk away.

As in the deaths of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, Kate's throat had been deeply
slashed from left to right and the resulting wound was the cause of death. According to
Dr. Brown's testimony, "the abdomen had been laid open from the breast bone to the
pubes ...The intestines had been detached to a large extent ...(and) about two feet of the
colon was cut away...The peritoneal lining was cut through and the left kidney carefully
taken out and removed. The left renal artery was cut through. I should say that someone
who knew the position of the kidney must have done it...The womb was cut through
horizontally, leaving a stump of ¾ of an inch. The rest of the womb had been taken away
with some of the ligaments. The vagina and cervix of the womb was uninjured.

"The face was very much mutilated. There was a cut about ¼ of an inch through the lower
left eyelid dividing the structures. The right eyelid was cut through to about ½ inch. There
was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose extending from the left border of the nasal bone
down near to the angle of the jaw of the right side. The tip of the nose was quite detached
from the nose."

Several other cuts were sustained on the face, plus the right ear lobe had been completely
severed and had fallen from her clothing when she was taken to the morgue.

An important witness surfaced -- Joseph Lawende who left the Imperial Club with two
friends at about 1:35 a.m. The men saw a couple conversing at Church Passage near Mitre
Square. Lawende described the young man as dressed in a dark jacket, wearing a
deerstalker's hat. The man was young, medium height and with a small, fair-colored
moustache. He did not see the woman's face, but identified Kate's clothing. Nine minutes
after this sighting, Kate Eddowes was murdered.

What about the chalk writing found over an hour later on Goulston Street under which lay
a portion of Kate's bloody apron? "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for
nothing."

Philip Sugden discusses three feasible interpretations of this message. First is that the
message was not written by the murderer and just happened to be where the killer dropped
or placed the bloody piece of apron.

A second possible interpretation offered by Walter Dew, a Whitechapel police officer in
1888, is that the message represents "the defiant gesture of a deranged Jew, euphoric from
the bloody 'triumphs' in Dutfield's Yard and Mitre Square." One of the many problems
with this interpretation is that, according to the Acting Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, " I do
not know any dialect or language in which 'Jews' is spelled 'Juwes.'"

The third possible interpretation was that the message was "a deliberate subterfuge
designed to incriminate the Jews and throw the police off the track of the real murderer."
This third interpretation was much favored by Scotland Yard and the Jewish community.

Whoever the author of the message was, it yielded very little in the way of identifying its
writer. The belief of some authors that the word "Juwes" is a Masonic term is disputable.
"It is a mystery why anyone ever thought that 'Juwes' was a Masonic word," wrote Paul
Begg, an expert on the Ripper murders.

Hundreds of letters allegedly from the murderer were sent to the police, news agencies
and individuals associated with solving the crimes. Only three of these letters have
provided lasting food for Ripper scholars. Two, in particular, which are written by the
same individual, actually gave rise to the name "Jack the Ripper." Before that time, the
name had not been coined.

The following letter, written in red ink, gave the notorious murderer his name. It was
received by Central News on September 27, 1888 and was addressed to The Boss, Central
News Office.

25 Sept: 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 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 lady's 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

Don't mind me giving the trade name

Then on the same letter, written horizontally was the following message:

wasn't 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

The editor treated the letter as a hoax and did not send it to the police for a couple of
days. The night after the police finally received the letter, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes
were murdered. On Monday morning following the murders, the Central News Agency
received another letter postmarked October 1 in the same handwriting as the September
25 letter:

I wasn't codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. youll hear about saucy Jackys
work 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

Police circulated the letters around and placed facsimiles of them outside every police
station in case someone recognized the handwriting. Nothing came of this effort except a
number of crank letters.

The third important letter was sent October 16 to George Lusk who was the head of the
Mile End Vigilance Committee. This time the letter was sent with a portion of a human
kidney. Lusk was extremely upset. One of the other committee members felt sure that it
was an animal organ preserved in wine, so they took the kidney to Dr. Thomas Openshaw
at the London Hospital to examine. Much was published on what Dr. Openshaw allegedly
said about the kidney, which he repudiated later. All that can be certain of what Dr.
Openshaw really established was that it was a human adult kidney, which was preserved in
spirits rather than in formalin, such as what was used in hospitals for specimens.

The letter that accompanied the kidney was not written by the author of the two earlier
letters signed Jack the Ripper.

From hell

Mr Lusk
Sor
I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried
and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a
whil longer

Signed
Catch me when
You can
Mishter Lusk

Are any of these three letters from the real murderer? Philip Sugden presents the case
against the first two letters, which are signed Jack the Ripper, being genuine even though
they appear to present information that only the killer might know.

First, the claim that he will send the police the victim's ears. This was never done. While it
is true that Kate Eddowes' one ear lobe was severed, the killer had plenty of time, as
evidenced by his extensive mutilations of her body, to cut off both her ears and send them
to the police.

Secondly, the forecast of the double event has been promoted as a reason to accept the
letters as genuine. However, the letter whether it was posted from the Eastern District on
Sunday night September 31 or Monday October 1 was written when the entire Eastern
region of the city was abuzz about the double murder. It was well known on the streets all
of Sunday. So there was nothing forecast whatsoever.

Thirdly, the claim that Liz Stride squealed a bit is not proven. Only one of several
witnesses heard a woman cry out. Most witnesses heard nothing at all that night.

Sir Charles Warren who headed up the London police shared this view. So do his modern
day counterparts, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, "It's too organized, too indicative of
intelligence and rationale thought, and far too 'cutesy.' An offender of this type would
never think of his actions as 'funny little games' or say that his 'knife's so nice and sharp.'"

The Lusk letter is more difficult to assess. Dr. Openshaw indicated that the kidney
belonged to a person suffering from Bright's Disease which, according to testimony given
by Dr. Brown, the police surgeon, apparently afflicted Kate Eddowes. The possibility
remains that the letter is genuine and the kidney was the victim's, but there is no way to
prove it today.

The fear that swept the East End after the "Double Event" was much intensified over the
level of anxiety from the Chapman murder. Predictably for a week or so after the news got
out, the streets of Whitechapel were virtually deserted after dark. Many of the prostitutes
stayed off the street for as long as they could, living at various shelters and staying with
family or friends.

It wasn't just the flesh trade that suffered. Londoners were avoiding that area for any kind
of commerce and shopping. Trade had fallen off sharply as people from other areas were
afraid to set foot in Whitechapel.

Oddly enough, the streets were, in general, safer than they had been before since everyone
was in a heightened state of alert and many more forces were patrolling the streets. There
was an influx of both uniformed and plainclothes police walking the streets, particularly
during the night and early morning. Plus the Mile End Vigilance Committee paid men,
equipped with a police whistle and thick stick, to patrol the streets for several hours after
midnight.

Since there were no women on the police force during those days, at least one policeman
dressed up as a prostitute and acted as a decoy. Of course, it didn't work and the poor
man was rewarded with a lot of snide comments from the locals.

Police visited the common lodging houses, interviewing over 2,000 lodgers. Some 80,000
handbills were printed up and distributed in the neighborhood:

POLICE NOTICE

TO THE OCCUPIER

On the morning of Friday, 31st August, Saturday 8th, and Sunday, 30th September, 1888,
Women were murdered in or near Whitechapel, supposed by some one residing in the
immediate neighborhood. Should you know of any person to whom suspicion is attached,
you are earnestly requested to communicate at once with the nearest Police Station,
Metropolitan Police Office, 30th September, 1888.

Special investigative work was done for several occupations. Some 76 butchers and
slaughterers were interrogated about their operations and employees. Sailors working on
the Thames River boats were also questioned. With the blessing of Sir Charles Warren, a
group of bloodhounds were trained and deployed to the area. However, there was always
some doubt that with the large number of people living in Whitechapel that a dog would
be able to follow a single scent, particularly without an article of clothing from the killer.
At the end of October, the experiment was abandoned.

Things were starting to get back to normal in Whitechapel. There had been no murder for
a month and the streetwalkers again began to ply their trade in force. One such woman
was a good-looking young Irish girl by the name of Mary Kelly. Police officer Walter Dew
knew her by sight. "She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly
neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat."

Mary had a lot on her mind at the beginning of November. She was several weeks behind
in her rent and her lover, Joe Barnett, was unemployed. She rented a first floor room in
Miller's Court in the back of Dorset Street.

She was born in Limerick and had lived in Wales. When she was 21 years old, she came to
London and worked in a brothel. One of her clients was sufficiently taken by her to have
her accompany him to France, but the relationship did not work out and she returned a
couple of weeks later. Being an attractive woman, her various lovers supported her so that
she did not have to live solely by prostitution.

In 1887 she met Joe Barnett, a respectable market porter, and lived with him at various
locations. Every once and awhile, they would drink up the rent money and get evicted.
Finally they ended up at 13 Miller's Court. Mary did not have many relationships and the
one she had with Joe was a solid one. They lived together until they had an argument and
he moved out. Since he did not have any work, she had been forced to return to
prostitution to survive.

The cause of the argument was Mary's generosity in allowing a homeless prostitute to stay
with them at Miller's Court and Mary's returning to prostitution to earn money. But this
was more of a lover's spat than a break-up because they got together Thursday night,
November 8, and he apologized for not having any money to give her.

People described her as "tall and pretty, and as fair as a lily, a very pleasant girl who
seemed to be on good terms with everybody." One of her acquaintances said she was
abusive when drunk, but "one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet when she
was sober." Another acquaintance said Mary was "5 feet 7 inches in height, and of rather
stout build, with blue eyes and a very fine head of hair, which reached nearly to her waist."

Friday, November 9, 1888 was the day for the Lord Mayor's Show. This was a major
festive event in the city. On that day he would be sworn into office in a style befitting a
prince. Like many Londoners, Mary was planning on seeing this spectacle.

John McCarthy sent his assistant Thomas Bowyer to see if he could collect any rent from
Mary that Friday morning. When his knock went unanswered, he reached inside the
broken window and pulled aside the curtain. He wasn't quite sure what he saw, but it
caused him to run back to McCarthy. When McCarthy looked through the window, he
was so horrified that he sent Bowyer for a constable.

The constable was talking with police officer Walter Dew and they went immediately to
13 Miller Court. They did not force the door, but pushed away a coat that served as a
curtain over the broken window. The constable told Dew not to look inside, but he did
anyway. "When my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light I saw a sight which I
shall never forget to my dying day."
Soon Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon, and Inspector Abberline were there.
They opened the door to a small, cluttered room with almost no furniture. Mary's body,
unbelievably mutilated, lay sprawled on the bed. The cause of death was the severance of
the carotid artery in the throat. The horrendous mutilation of this last and most hideous
Ripper murder was done after her death.

Dr. Thomas Bond, another veteran police surgeon, had been brought into the case
specifically to determine the extent of medical knowledge the killer had. Dr. Phillips'
examination report did not survive, but Dr. Bond's did:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the
body inclined to the left side of the bed...The whole of the surface of the abdomen &
thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut
off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of
the features & the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The
viscera were found in various parts: the uterus & kidney with one breast under the head,
the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side
& the spleen by the left side. The flaps removed from the abdomen & thighs were on a
table.

The ferocity of this murder astounded the veteran police surgeons. Her throat had been
slashed with such force that the tissues had been cut all the way down to the spinal
column. Dr. Bond went on to describe the ghastly destruction of her body:

Her face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows & ears being partly
removed. The lips were blanched & cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the
chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all of the features.

The skin & tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in
three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin
including the external organs of generation & part of the right buttock. The left thigh was
stripped of skin, fascia & muscles as far as the knee.

Dr. Bond went on in his report for several paragraphs cataloging the wounds and stripping
of the skin. As they tried to reconstruct her torn body, they realized that the heart had
been cut out and taken away.

There seemed to be agreement that the same monster that killed the other four women
murdered Mary Kelly. All of the women were murdered with "a very sharp, strong knife
about an inch in width and at least six inches long."

Dr. Bond fixed the time of the murder as between one or two o'clock in the morning.
However, given the length of time between her death and the time she was examined by
Dr. Phillips, the time of death was approximate.

On the question that Dr. Bond was asked to address -- the medical skill of Jack the Ripper
- he replied: "In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific
nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical
knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead
animals." It is possible that Dr. Bond could not imagine that a doctor would be capable of
such atrocities, because his position is very different than other physicians who examined
the victims.

The murder of Mary Kelly created panic in the streets of Whitechapel, which were again
abandoned at night to the police patrols. Sporadic episodes of mob violence broke out
when for various reasons, an individual cast suspicion on himself by something he did or
said, usually under the influence of alcohol.

Police activity was frantic. Every lead was tracked down, every suspect interrogated
thoroughly. The results were disappointing and the police were heavily criticized. Queen
Victoria was furious. "This new most ghastly murder," she told the Prime Minister,
"shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit,
and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be."

The Times was a bit more understanding of the difficulties the police faced: "The murders,
so cunningly continued, are carried out with a completeness which altogether baffles
investigators. Not a trace is left of the murderer, and there is no purpose in the crime to
afford the slightest clue...All that the police can hope is that some accidental circumstance
will lead to a trace which may be followed to a successful conclusion."

There was disagreement on the estimated time of Mary's death. Dr. Bond believed that she
had died between 1 and 2 a.m. Friday morning. Dr. Phillips thought that death occurred
much later, somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m. Not having a clearer idea about time of
death complicated the eyewitness testimony regarding who was with Mary or seen in
Miller Court during Friday morning.

The most important eyewitness
was George Hutchinson, a laborer who knew Mary Kelly. He met her about 2 a.m. Friday
morning and she asked him for some money. He told her he had nothing to spare
and she walked away, but soon stopped to talk to another man. If his testimony is correct,
he probably saw Jack the Ripper:

He then placed his right hand around her shoulders. He also had a kind of a small parcel in
his left hand with a kind of strap round it. I stood against the lamp of the Queen's Head
Public House and watched him. They both then came past me and the man hung down his
head with his hat over his eyes. I stooped down and looked him in the face. He looked at
me stern. They both went into Dorset Street. I followed them. They both stood at the
corner of the court for about 3 minutes. He said something to her. She said alright my dear
come along you will be comfortable. He then placed his arm on her shoulder and gave her
a kiss. She said she had lost her handkerchief. He then pulled his handkerchief a red one
out and gave it to her. They both then went up the court together. I then went to the court
to see if I could see them but could not. I stood there for about three quarters of an hour
to see if they came out. They did not so I went away.

Description: age about 34 or 35, height 5 ft. 6, complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes,
slight moustache curled up each end and hair dark, very surly looking; dress, long dark
coat, collar and cuffs trimmed astrakhan and a dark jacket under, light waistcoat, dark
trousers, dark felt hat turned down in the middle, button boots and gaiters with white
buttons, black tie with horse shoe pin, respectable appearance, walked very sharp, Jewish
appearance. Can be identified.

He further elaborated on this description later:

His watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone, hanging from it...He had no side
whiskers, and his chin was clean shaven...I believe that he lives in the neighborhood, and I
fancied that I saw him in Petticoat Lane on Sunday morning, but I was not certain.

Several people had seen Mary on the night she died. Mary Ann Cox, another prostitute
who lived in Miller's Court, saw Mary with a man going into Miller's Court at 11:45 p.m.
Mary was very drunk and had difficulty talking. Mrs. Cox described Mary's client as
"about 36 years old, about 5 ft 6 in. high, complexion fresh and I believe he had blotches
on his face, small side whiskers, and a thick carrotty moustache, dressed in shabby dark
clothes, dark overcoat and black felt hat.

At 8 p.m. on Wednesday, November 7, laundress Sarah Lewis was walking with a
girlfriend when a man about forty years of age who was fairly short, pale-faced with a
black moustache wanted either one of the two women to follow him. He wore a short
black coat and carried a black bag about one foot long. They refused, but he persisted, and
the women ran away. At 2:30 a.m. Friday morning, just around the time that Mary Kelly
was murdered, Sarah was coming to stay with friends at 2 Miller's Court when she saw the
same man, but eluded him this time. Shaken by this second sighting, she rushed to her
friend's house. Just before 4 a.m. she heard a woman shriek "Murder!" Another woman
also heard the scream, but shrieks like that were apparently common in bawdy
Whitechapel.

Inspector Abberline clearly believed Hutchinson's detailed account, but had to wonder
about Hutchinson's motivation for following Mary and her client. He said he had known
her for several years and had given her money more than once. Perhaps he was fond of
Mary or just worried about her with this particular client. There had to be some reason
that he would take such an interest and even follow the two of them to Miller's Court.
Abberline instructed a couple of policemen to walk around with Hutchinson in the hopes
that they would spot Mary's client. One cannot help wondering if Hutchinson did not make
up this story to throw suspicion off of himself. However, for some reason the police did
not pursue him as a suspect and disseminated the description that he gave to all of the
police stations.

As winter set in, the frantic police activity began to slow. All suspects had been
interrogated and leads came to a dead end. It appeared that Jack the Ripper had left the
scene for good. However, there were two murders that were similar in nature that should
be mentioned.

The first was Alice McKenzie who was found dead in July of 1889. She too had died from
the slashing of her carotid artery. If this was another victim of Jack the Ripper, the
wounds to her throat and abdomen were different than the other murders. Drs. Bond and
Phillips disagreed as to whether it was Jack or not.

In February of 1891, a pretty prostitute named Frances Coles was found with her throat
cut. Dr. Phillips did not believe that Jack the Ripper was responsible and suspicion fell
upon a man who had a quarrel with her.

At any rate, the Jack the Ripper file was closed in 1892, the same year in which Inspector
Abberline retired. The Ripper murders were over, but the legend lived on.

Before looking at specific suspects, let's summarize what is known about Jack the Ripper
from forensic surgeons and possible eyewitnesses.

From the testimony of the various eyewitnesses which police took most seriously, certain
probabilities emerge about the killer. One must keep in mind the word probable since
eyewitness accounts, particularly under conditions of dim lighting, are notoriously
inaccurate in certain details even when offered by honest competent eyewitnesses.

The following is a list of probabilities about the Ripper:

* A white male
* Average or below average height
* Between 20 and 40 years of age in 1888
* Did not dress as laborer or indigent poor
* Had lodgings in the East End
* Did have medical expertise, despite 1-2 opinions to contrary
* May have been foreigner
* Right-handed
* Had a regular job since the murders all occurred on weekends
* Was single so that he could roam streets at all hours

Developing persuasive cases about Jack the Ripper suspects has become a profitable
cottage industry for at least one hundred years. Many of these books promote one suspect
or another as the "real Jack the Ripper." Usually the author conveniently compiles
"evidence" that fits his pet theory and denigrates or ignores facts that don't support that
theory. Given the vast number of suspects and books promoting particular suspects, a
reader must be very skeptical of any new "final solutions" to the crimes.

Despite the thousands of hours of work on this case, there is not yet one suspect for
which a strong unimpeachable case can be made. One remains hopeful that someday a
suspect will emerge with better credentials than the ones currently promoted.

With those caveats in mind, certain suspects have garnered more interest than others and
will be listed in this chapter. A few major suspects will be dealt with briefly in subsequent
chapters.

Sir Melville Macnaghten succeeded Sir Charles Warren as the Chief Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police in June of 1889 after the Ripper murders had officially ended.
However, the investigation was ongoing and Macnaghten had complete access to police
files. His final report addresses his thoughts on why the murders came to an end with the
monstrous destruction of Mary Kelly and the identity of the three key suspects he believed
could be Jack the Ripper:

A much more rational theory is that the murderer's brain gave way altogether after his
awful glut in Miller's Court, and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible
alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations, that he was by them
confined in some asylum.

No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer: many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but
no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one. I may mention the cases of 3 men, any
one of whom would have been...(likely) to have committed this series of murders:

(1) A Mr. M. J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family, who disappeared at the time
of the Miller's Court murder, & whose body was found in the Thames on 31st December
-- or about seven weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private
information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the
murderer.

(2) Kosminski, a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to
many years' indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, specially of the
prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum
about March 1889. There were many circumstances connected with this man which made
him a strong 'suspect.'

(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a
lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man's antecedents were of the worst possible
type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.

Each one of these three major suspects that Macnaghten identified is addressed in
subsequent chapters, as are several other major theories. A few of the many suspects held
up by authors over the years is addressed in the chapter entitled "Other Suspects."

The most important detective in the murder series was Chief Inspector Frederick George
Abberline. He did not agree with Sir Melville Macnaghten on the viability of the three
suspects listed above. In 1903, he said: "You can state most emphatically that Scotland
Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago."

However, Chief Inspector Abberline did eventually have a favorite suspect of his own, one
George Chapman, who was hanged in 1903 for poisoning his wife.

The theory that a royal conspiracy was behind the murders is a very popular one. Not
only is it the premise of the recent movie From Hell with Johnny Depp and Heather
Graham, it has spawned made-for-TV movies and documentaries and books.

This most appealing theory unfolds like this: Prince Albert Victor, known popularly as
Eddy, was the grandson of Queen Victoria and in direct line to the throne of England. His
father later became King Edward VII. Had Eddy outlived his father, he would have
become King of England.

Eddy frequently went slumming in the Whitechapel area. He met and had an affair with a
shop girl named Annie Crook who he kept in an apartment there. Annie became pregnant
with his child and, according to one version of the story, married Eddy secretly in a
Roman Catholic wedding. Other versions have the child being born out of wedlock.

Marrying or impregnating a Catholic girl of low social standing was a definite no-no for a
future king and wind of this scandal got back to grandma, who insisted on a resolution to
the problem. The prime minister delegated this task to Queen Victorias physician, Sir
William Gull.

Dr. Gull had Annie taken away to a hospital where he savaged her memory and intellect,
leaving her institutionalized for the rest of her life. Mary Kelly was caring for Annies
royal daughter, named Alice Margaret, when Annie was kidnapped. Mary Kelly, along
with her friends, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, and Elizabeth Stride, all knew about the
relationship between Annie Crook and the prince as well as their infant daughter. But they
couldnt keep their mouths shut and thus became a major liability to the Crown.

Again Dr. Gull was asked for his help, this time in permanently silencing Mary Kelly and
her friends. To explain the sudden demise of these troublesome whores, Dr. Gull cleverly
created the persona of Jack the Ripper, a frenzied lust murderer with some degree of
medical expertise.

Gulls trusty coachman locates each of the friends of Mary Kelly and persuades them
individually to get into the coach. Dr. Gull then murders each woman, mutilates her in
increasingly savage ways and leaves her dead on the street. Mary and her dwindling group
of friends believe that a vicious gang that has threatened them in the past is responsible for
the murders. Dr. Gull saves Mary for last and subjects her to ghoulish butchery.

One variation of the theory has Dr. Gull, whose intellect has been impaired by a stroke,
becoming a kind of Masonic ritual executioner. Not only does Gull go to great lengths to
create the belief that a sex-crazed doctor has perpetrated the series of murders, he also
weaves into that creation some obscure ancient Masonic lore. Gulls Masonic group,
which is the virtual Whos Who of the London upper class, includes top police officials
like Sir Robert Anderson who help Gull in his efforts to protect the throne.

Everybody loves a conspiracy theory and no doubt this one will endure for a long time
despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it and quite a lot of reason to doubt
that there is any truth to it at all.

There did exist a woman named Annie Crook who worked in a shop in Cleveland Street
and she had an illegitimate daughter named Alice Margaret.

But there is nothing to connect her to a relationship with Eddy, whose sexual preferences
were rumored to be men rather than women. Homosexuality was against the law in
Victorian England and a man of Eddys social standing would have to be very discreet if
he were homosexually inclined.

Cleveland Street was the home of a brothel that catered to wealthy homosexuals. The
brothel was raided, giving rise to strong rumors that Eddy was one of the patrons there,
but there is no existing evidence of his presence there at the time of the raid.

Also, there is nothing to connect Annie Crook to Mary Kelly or to connect Mary Kelly to
any of the other victims of Jack the Ripper. There is no evidence to suggest that they even
knew each other at all and it is most unlikely that they were a tightly knit group of friends
or it would have been discovered in the interviews that police had with the families and
friends of each victim.

The victims of Jack the Ripper were murdered where they were found, not in a coach or at
some other location. Also, from witnesses in the crime scene areas, it is very unlikely that
more than one man carried out the crimes.

Regarding Dr. Gulls ability to be Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow in The Complete
Jack the Ripper points out:

Medically the slight stroke that Gull had in 1887 was the first attack of severe paralysis.
Although he recovered from it, its effects were serious enough to prohibit him from
further medical practice. Taken with the fact that he was 70 years old at this time, this is
surely enough to cast doubts on the story of his roaming about WhitechapelFinally, Gull
did not die in a lunatic asylum. He died at home on 29 January 1890, after a third stroke
which left him speechless.

Also, there is nothing to suggest that the Ripper murders had anything whatsoever to do
with the Masons. Nor is it known whether Dr. Gull, Sir Robert Anderson or any of the
other high level police officials involved in the Ripper murders were even members of the
Freemasons.

Would the Crown have resorted to the flamboyant murder of five unfortunate women in
order to protect itself? Donald Rumbelow explains the Royal Marriages Act, which was
designed by George III to prevent his sons from marrying against his wishes:

Under this Act, any such marriage as that between Eddy and Annie could have been set
aside as illegal, since (1) Eddy was under 25 years old at the time of the marriage; and (2)
he had married without the Queens consent.

Finally, as John Douglas and Mark Olshaker state in The Cases That Haunt Us, the
frenzied butchery of the Ripper murders is the work of a disorganized, paranoid
offender, not a person who could continue functioning and interacting with people in a
relatively normal way. Dr. Gull simply does not fit this profile.

There are a number of variants to the Royal Conspiracy Theory. One has Eddy being Jack
the Ripper. Suffering from tertiary syphilis, he goes into murderous rages and haunts the
streets of Whitechapel in search of victims. That is, until his keepers catch on to this and
lock him up until his death from syphilis.

There is no supporting evidence for this variation either. Royal records show Eddy as a
victim of the influenza epidemic of 1892. Also, several years after the Ripper murders in
1891, Eddy was named the Duke of Clarence, not a title that would have been bestowed
on a person that was violently insane from tertiary syphilis. While Eddy did not possess a
brilliant mind, he was always considered a nice person and was not in any way inclined to
violence.

While there were rumors about Eddys sexual proclivities during his lifetime, there was
never any indication that police or anyone else at that time thought of him as a suspect in
the Ripper murders. Indeed, Eddy had pretty unshakeable alibis for all of the murders,
often being far from London when they occurred.

Another variant on the Royal Conspiracy Theory was that Eddys tutor at Cambridge,
James Kenneth Stephen, was Jack the Ripper: after Eddy ended a homosexual relationship
with his tutor, Stephen committed the murders for revenge.

While it was true that Stephen was Eddys tutor, there is no evidence of a homosexual
relationship between them. A few years after Eddy left Cambridge, Stephens brain was
seriously damaged in an accident and he eventually died in an asylum. The emotional and
mental problems that plagued Stephen after his accident gave rise to some violent phrases
in his poetry, but that certainly doesnt add up to being a serial killer. Like the other
variations of the Royal Conspiracy Theory, this one has no evidence to support it either.

Variants of the Royal Conspiracy will continue to prosper because they lend themselves to
movies and books. They are dramatic stories that explain Jack the Ripper in motives that
we can all understand unlike the frenzied evil that drives a brutal serial killer.

In 1992, Ripperologists were provided a rare opportunity to sharpen their teeth. Michael
Barrett, a scrap metal dealer from Liverpool, came forward with a diary reputedly written
by a cotton broker named James Maybrick who died in 1889. In this diary, James
Maybrick confesses to being Jack the Ripper.

Barrett says that his friend Tony Devereux gave him the diary, but Devereux never
explained how it had gotten into his hands. Devereux was dead and his family had no
knowledge of the diary at all.

For over 100 years, scholars wondered why the Ripper murders had begun suddenly in
August of 1888 with the murder of Polly Nichols and then stopped just as abruptly in
November of that same year with the murder of Mary Kelly. The Maybrick diary, if it was
authentic, provided the answer.

If James Maybrick were Jack the Ripper, his death in 1889 would explain why the murders
ended when they did.

James Maybrick was a cotton merchant who began his business in London in the early
1870s. He traveled to the United States to open an office in Virginia and returned several
years later. He had contracted malaria in the U.S. and was taking a combination of arsenic
and strychnine to keep it under control. The medication was addictive and he continued
to take arsenic until his death.

Maybrick brought home with him a beautiful, wealthy and socially prominent wife.
18-year-old Florence Chandler (Florie) was less than half Maybricks age, but they fell in
love immediately and married soon afterwards.

The 1880s brought bad luck to the business and marriage of the Maybricks. Poor
economic conditions in the U.S. and England hurt them financially at a time when they
overextended themselves. In 1888, James and Florie and their two children moved into a
huge mansion outside Liverpool. James Maybrick escaped his financial worries with
increasing amounts of drugs, arsenic included, plus another woman. When Florie found
that despite their financial straits, that her husband was supporting a mistress and his
illegitimate children, she gave up on him. She took up with a younger man.


In April of 1889, Florie bought some fly papers and soaked them to get out the arsenic to
prepare a cream for her face, which had broken out just before some big social event. At
the same time, James Maybrick, who was continuing to take his arsenic powders, became
sick and died May 11, 1889.

Florie was charged with murdering her husband with arsenic. After a very hasty and
unfair trial, she was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The judge had not
allowed any evidence of James Maybricks long arsenic addiction to be introduced into the
trial. She spent 15 years in jail before she was finally released. The judge in her trial was
the father of J.K. Stephen, the tutor of Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), and who was a Ripper
suspect. The judge died a few years later in a hospital for the insane.

While Maybrick was never a suspect during his life, his alleged diary focused an enormous
amount of scrutiny on him after 1992. Many experts analyzed both the diary and the life
of James Maybrick. The actual volume in which the diary was written was from the
Victorian times, but such volumes are available in antique shops. Quite a few pages at the
beginning of the volume had been removed, suggesting that it might have been partially
used for some other purpose before it became the Maybrick diary. Several experts
claimed the ink was modern.

Ripper expert Martin Fido found many anachronisms in the text and Scotland Yard
determined that the handwriting had been altered to add Victorian flourishes. More
problematic is that there were inaccuracies in the accounts of the murders that seem to
have been taken from newspaper accounts. For example, Philip Sugden says of the
murder of Mary Kelly,

We are told that the various parts of her body were strewn all over the room, that her
severed breasts were placed on the bedside table and that the killer took the key of the
room away with him. None of these statements are true.

John Douglas and Mark Olshaker reject James Maybrick as a Ripper candidate based on
his personality and history:

Even more to the point, how does a fifty-year-old man with a family, children, and no
sociopathy suddenly blossom into a disorganized serial killer? He cant, and doesnt.
Anyone who thinks his situation through enough to decide that he wants to kill prostitutes
to get back at his wife but must do so on trips to another city, where hell hide out, stalk
women of the night, rip them up, and then return to his own world and home, would not
exactly be disorganized. No one plans that carefully, then goes into such a frenzy of
sexual pathology.

Finally, in 1995, a number of experts who labeled the Maybrick diary a brazen hoax are
backed up by Michael Barretts confession: I, Michael Barratt (sic) was the author of the
original diary of Jack the Ripper and my wife, Anne Barrett, hand wrote it from my
typed notes Even so, the Maybrick diary is still a subject of controversy, despite the
evidence that it was a forgery.

Montague John Druitt was born in 1857 in Dorset, the son of a surgeon. Druitt graduated
with a degree in classics and went to teach at a boarding school in Blackheath. He was
very oriented towards sports and played hockey and cricket. In his spare time he studied
law and became a lawyer.

In 1885 his father died and a couple of years afterwards his mother was institutionalized
for depression and paranoid delusions. His family had a very pronounced history of
depression and suicide.

Despite the tragedies in his life and a genetic propensity towards depression, Druitt
prospered financially and socially in the 1880s. He was very secure financially and had
inherited money from both parents. He had a very good teaching position and had become
very active in many sports. The social circles in which he moved were very respectable.

However, all was not as well as it seemed because his body was found floating in the
Thames River at the end of December 1888, where it had been immersed for weeks. He
had been dismissed from his teaching position, probably around the end of November. He
left a suicide note, which was found by his brother: "Since Friday I felt I was going to be
like mother, and the best thing for me was to die."

There does not seem to be any real evidence as to why Macnaghten considered him a
serious suspect. The only suggestion is that cryptic message of Macnaghten's: "from
private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been
the murderer." Macnaghten claimed he had destroyed all of the relevant documents, so the
answer may never be known. Thus far, no one has been able to come up with any credible
evidence to suggest that Druitt was even a violent person or "sexually insane," as
Macnaghten stated, let alone Jack the Ripper. Chief Inspector Abberline who was the
most knowledgeable person in the police department about the Ripper murders did not
consider Druitt a suspect.

Philip Sugden compares Druitt to the eyewitness accounts of the Ripper. While Druitt is
within right age category and wore a moustache, his build is too slight to have been
described by any of the eyewitnesses. The person they saw was anywhere from medium
build to stout. Also, Druitt hardly looked foreign or Jewish. He did not live nor frequent
the East End and there was no train service between his lodging in Blackheath and
London that would allow him to commit the murders and return home. Plus in the death of
Annie Chapman at 5:30 a.m., it would have been very unlikely that Druitt could have
murdered her, cleaned himself up and caught a train back to Blackheath in time for a
cricket game he played at 11:30 a.m.

In summary, Macnaghten was no fool and he certainly had access to all Ripper suspect
records, many of which no longer exist. So, there may have been some important evidence
about Druitt to support his suspicion. However, without that evidence, it is difficult to see
why Druitt is a suspect. One can explain his suicide at the end of November as the tragic
end of a losing fight with hereditary depression. With so many people in his family afflicted
with mental illness, he may have recognized the symptoms in himself and committed
suicide.
As Macnaghten's second suspect, Aaron Kosminski, is described as "a Polish Jew &
resident of Whitechapel, insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a
great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal
tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many
circumstances connected with this man which made him a strong suspect."

Inspector Swanson added that Kosminski "was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to
Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards." Philip Sugden chased down Kosminski's
records and found a lot of discrepancies between police statements and the hospital
records. According to Sugden, "Kosminski was not committed to Colney Hatch in 1889
but in 1891. And far from dying shortly afterwards, he lived for another 28 years.

Dr. Houchin, when he certified Kosminski's insanity, described his behavior: " He declares
that he is guided & his movements controlled by an instinct that informs his mind; he says
that he knows the movements of all mankind; he refuses food from others because he is
told to do so and eats out of the gutter for the same reason." A man named Jacob Cohen
claimed that Kosminski took a knife and threatened his sister's life.

However, Maurice Whitfield, Relieving Officer for the Western District of Mile End Old
Town, who prepared papers for the doctors at Colney Hatch, described Kosminski as not
dangerous to others or suicidal.

Kosminski was admitted to Colney Hatch in February of 1891 and stayed for three years.
There was only one mention in his record of any aggressive behavior, even though his
mental state had deteriorated: "Incoherent; at times excited and violent -- a few days ago
he took up a chair, and attempted to strike the charge attendant;" The medical
superintendent at Colney Hatch summarized Kosminski as neither suicidal or dangerous to
others, but simply "incoherent; usually quiet; health fair."

Kosminski was committed for the last 25 years of his life to Leavesden, a home for adult
imbeciles as a "chronic harmless lunatic, idiot or imbecile." In those 25 years, he was
occasionally troublesome, but not violent. He retreated more and more into his own
world. "Patient does not know his age or how long he has been here. He had
hallucinations of sight & hearing & is at times very obstinate. Untidy but clean, does no
work."

The only bit of evidence amassed against Kosminski was a reputedly positive identification
by one of the eyewitnesses, mostly likely Joseph Lawende. Inspector Swanson indicates
that the positive identification of Kosminski took place at the "Seaside Home," which was
a police convalescent center in Brighton. This identification took place no earlier than
March 1890 when the home was opened and most likely some 2 years or more after the
original sighting by the eyewitness in 1888. Lawende, when he made his statements in the
Mitre Square murder, said that he would not be able to identify the murderer again. Then,
after more than two years, he makes a positive identification of a murderer he saw briefly
in dim light?

Kosminski was small and slender of build, which does not fit Lawende's description of the
killer as medium build, nor did Lawende describe the person he saw as a foreigner. Nor
did Kosminski possess any anatomical knowledge. Sugden in his research makes another
important point: "Kosminski's incarceration took place more than two years after the
Miller Court murder. If Kosminski was the killer, therefore, we have to accept that after
committing five or six murders in three months he quietly went to ground and remained
inactive for another two years three months."

Is this then our Jack the Ripper? Probably not. More likely the harmless imbecile he is
documented to be.

Michael Ostrog is the last and least plausible of Sir Melville Macnaghten's three suspects.
He was a thief and confidence man who used many aliases. He often represented himself
as an impoverished Polish nobleman. He spent a good amount of his life in jail, but he was
completely unrepentant. In 1874, after Ostrog was convicted of stealing a dozen books,
the Buckinghamshire Advertiser summed him up:

Ostrog is no ordinary offender, but a man in the prime of life with a clever head, a good
education and polished manners, who would be certain to succeed in almost any honest
line of life to which he might devote himself, but who, nevertheless, is an inveterate
criminal...It is impossible to gauge the mental condition of a man of such intellectual and
personal advantages, who would run the risk of ten years' penal servitude for such a
miserable stake.

He spent the next ten years or so in various prisons. It worked to Ostrog's favor to
occasionally show a little insanity during his trials so that his behavior could be looked at
in a softer light. Many people believed that he was acting, but the ruse worked and he was
transferred from prison to a lunatic asylum where he registered himself as a Jewish doctor.

At the time of the Whitechapel murders, he was wanted by the police for failure to report
his whereabouts. Why was Ostrog even a suspect? He had claimed to be a surgeon; he
was a known criminal; and he had been in a lunatic asylum. His lying had made him a
suspect even though he was no more a surgeon than he was a Polish nobleman. His
insanity was conjured up when it suited him.

It is worthwhile to compare Ostrog as a suspect anyway. He was not a violent criminal
and there is no record that he ever assaulted a woman. More importantly, he was too old
-- in his fifties or sixties -- in 1888 and he was too tall --5 ft 11 inches -- to fit any of the
eyewitness descriptions of the killer.

Ostrog, like Druitt and Kosminski, are not plausible candidates and may reflect the
propensity of high police officials to deny that they failed to catch such a high profile
criminal despite all the resources they had to use.

George Chapman's real name was Severin Antoniovich Klosowski when he was born in
Poland in 1865. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and later went on to complete his
studies at a hospital in Warsaw. His records show that he was "diligent, of exemplary
conduct, and studied with zeal the science of surgery."

For reasons that are not clear, he immigrated to London early in 1887. He took a job
working as a hairdresser's assistant for five months and then opened a barbershop of his
own at 126 Cable Street, St. George's-in-the-East. He was most likely at this Whitechapel
address during the Ripper murders. In 1890, he worked in a barbershop at the corner of
Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, very close to where Martha Tabram was
murdered in August of 1888.

Klosowski married Lucy Baderski, expecting that the wife he left in Poland wouldn't find
out about it. The first wife moved to London for awhile, but appeared to give him up after
Baderski bore him a son in 1890. The son died of pneumonia in March of 1891 and the
couple moved to Jersey City in New Jersey.

He first showed his violent streak when he attacked his wife. She claimed that he "held her
down on the bed, and pressed his face against her mouth to keep her from screaming. At
that moment a customer entered the shop immediately in front of the room, and Klosowski
got up to attend him. Lucy chanced to see a handle protruding from underneath the pillow.
She found to her horror that it was a sharp and formidable knife, which she promptly hid.
Later, Klosowski deliberately told her that he meant to have cut her head off, and pointed
to a place in the room where he meant to have buried her. She said, "'But the neighbors
would have asked where I had gone to."

"Oh," retorted Klosowski calmly. " I should simply have told them that you had gone back
to New York."

Lucy went back to London alone and bore him a daughter in May of 1892. In June of that
year he returned to London, but his relationship with Lucy did not continue long. In 1893,
he moved in with and impregnated Annie Chapman (obviously not the woman who died at
the hands of the Ripper in 1888) but the relationship ended in 1894 because of
Klosowski's philandering.

He changed his name to George Chapman and soon lived in a common law arrangement
with Mary Spink, who turned over to him her inheritance of 500 pounds. They set up a
barbershop, which prospered because of their "musical shaves." Mary played the piano
while George took care of the barbering.

While they prospered financially, their domestic life was turbulent. George beat his wife
frequently. He bought some tartar emetic, a colorless, odorless and nearly tasteless poison
containing antimony. In small doses it brings on a gradual painful death. Interestingly
enough, the drug has the effect of preserving its victim's body for years after death.

When the musical barbershop's novelty wore off, it went out of business and George
ended up working as manager in a pub. About the same time, Mary Spink began to suffer
from severe stomach problems, which caused her death in 1897. Tuberculosis was the
cause of death listed.
Soon he had a live-in arrangement with Bessie Taylor, but treated her with the same abuse
as his former women, once threatening her with a gun. Bessie experienced the same
stomach problems as her predecessor and died in 1901 from "exhaustion from vomiting
and diarrhea."

George found another "wife" called Maud Marsh and treated her just as badly as his other
wives. Maud began to suffer from the same stomach illness. Her mother was suspicious
and called in another doctor. Chapman was frightened and gave Maud a huge dose of
poison, which killed her the following day. Chapman was arrested when Maud's body was
found to contain a lethal amount of antimony.

His other two wives were exhumed and found remarkably preserved from the amount of
antimony in their bodies. While Chapman was charged with three murders, he was
convicted only of Maud's. He was hanged on April 7, 1903.

Retired Chief Inspector Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette:

As I say, there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and
you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper
being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the
arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel;
there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when Chapman
went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed
there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is
well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of
an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with
more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by Chapman's wife of the
attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored.

There were other factors that led to Chapman being a suspect: He was single at that time
and had the freedom to roam around at all hours of the night and morning; he worked a
regular job which kept him occupied during the week but allowed him weekends free
when the murders all occurred. He was violent and homicidal with women and committed
multiple murders of women.

There were, however discrepancies. One was age. Many eyewitnesses thought the killer
was between 30 and 40 years old, while Chapman was 23 in 1888. Perhaps he looked
older than his years. A more significant discrepancy was the difference between the Ripper
murders and Chapman's poisonings. Abberline attempted to address that issue in the
PallMall Gazette:

As to the question of the dissimilarity of character in the crimes which one hears so much
about, I cannot see why one man should not have done both, provided he had the
professional knowledge, and this is admitted in Chapman's case. A man who could watch
his wives being slowly tortured to death by poison, as he did, was capable of anything; and
the fact that he should have attempted, in such a cold-blooded manner, to murder his first
wife with a knife in New Jersey, makes one more inclined to believe in the theory that he
was mixed up in the two series of crimes.

Did Chapman murder a woman named Carrie Brown in Jersey City by strangulation,
followed by mutilation? Possible, in the sense that Chapman may have been in New Jersey
on April 24,1891, though no direct evidence implicates him.

In summary, there is a great deal to be said for suspecting George Chapman. The question
that remains is whether or not the terrible mutilator known as Jack the Ripper changed his
style to become the smooth poisoner George Chapman some years later.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942), a very highly regarded British painter, has become a semi
celebrity this year as American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has made him the subject
of her new book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed. "I do believe 100 per
cent that the artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper," she said.

For anyone who follows Ripper scholarship, this event by itself a big ho hum. Dozens of
writers promoting dozens of books over more than 10 decades have claimed to have
discovered the identity of Jack the Ripper. There is no reason to assume that this
phenomenon will not endure for another 10 decades.

What makes this particular book promotion special is that Cornwell is a respected crime
novelist, the creator of the fictional medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, and a person very
familiar with state-of-the-art forensic techniques. Even more extraordinary is that she
spent an alleged $6 million of her own money on the Sickert investigation. To prove her
theory, Ms. Cornwell hired art and forensics experts and bought 30 Sikert paintings.
Cornwells forensic team analyzed DNA samples from 55 letters, envelopes and stamps
sent by Mr. Sickert and his first wife, Ellen, Montague John Druitt, another Ripper
suspect, and some of the many letters which were signed Jack the Ripper.

Not that this will in any way hurt sales of her book, but Ripper experts are very skeptical
of Cornwalls claim and her very expensive investigation. Retired police officer Stewart
Evans, now a crime historian and author of four Ripper books, dismissed Ms. Cornwell's
theory as "nonsense, devoid of any evidence whatsoever." The British newspaper {The
Guardian} reported on December 8, 2001 that:

The American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell was accused of monstrous stupidity for
ripping up a canvas to prove that the Victorian painter Walter Sickert was Jack the
Ripper. Even in the context of the crackpot conspiracy theories, elaborate frauds and
career-destroying obsessions that London's most grisly whodunnit has spawned,
Cornwell's investigation is extreme. Not only did she have one canvas cut up in the vain
hope of finding a clue to link Sickert to the murder and mutilation of five prostitutes, she
spent £2m buying up 31 more of his paintings, some of his letters and even his writing
desk.

But Cornwell's claims - which are to form the basis of her next book - were met with
derision yesterday by Sickert experts and biographers outraged that one of his paintings
had been sacrificed "to add credence to this silly theory". Andrew Patrick, of the Fine Arts
Society, who refused to say which paintings she had bought from him, said: "Everyone
knows this stuff about Sickert is nonsense." Richard Shone, who curated the last big
Sickert show at the Royal Academy in London in 1992, said: "I can't believe she has done
this, it's such a red herring. It all sounds monstrously stupid to me. Is she so obsessed that
she doesn't mind the destruction of a painting by such a very fine artist to add credence to
this silly theory?" He added: "Sickert was interested in the music hall, the theatrical and
low life, and he played around with these themes like Degas, his mentor. He always
painted from photographs, and was one of the first artists to do so."

Although Cornwell found no DNA on the clutch of Scotland Yards Ripper letters, most
or all of which are believed to be fakes, to compare with samples taken from Sickert's desk
and canvasses, she cites one achievement. One of the dubious Ripper letters had the same
watermark as Sickert's writing paper, which he had received from his father.

Letters attributed to Jack the Ripper sent to the police have been preserved under plastic,
which degrades DNA, but a former Scotland Yard curator found a letter that had never
been sent to the archive. Although the letter had DNA from several people on it, she
believes there is a partial connection.

Cornwell told Reuters on October 29, 2002 that she discovered that a Ripper letter
written from Manchester on November 22, 1888 had the same watermark stationary used
by Walter and Ellen Sickert after their marriage three years earlier.

Cornwell said that some of Sickert's paintings bear a chilling resemblance to photographs
of Jack the Ripper's victims and that some of the Ripper's letters contained phrases used
by the famous painter Whistler that were often mocked by his student Sickert.

Walter Richard Sickert was born in Munich on May 31, 1860. His mother was an English
woman, his father a Danish artist employed in Germany as an illustrator on a comic
journal. In 1868 the family settled in England.

Sickert's early work was heavily influenced by Whistler and Degas.

Net Canvas lists these events as the major ones in Sickerts life:

His life slipped into a regular pattern, unbroken for 15 years. In 1885 he married the
daughter of a Liberal politician. He made numerous paintings from his sketches of the
London music halls and their audiences, or held evening classes. In 1893 he opened an art
school in London under Whistler's patronage.

Sickert's friendship with the dictatorial Whistler ended after a court case in which they
took opposite sides. In 1899 Sickert was divorced and went to live in Venice, Dieppe, and
Paris for six years. Back in London in 1905, he set up a studio in Soho and took rooms in
Camden Town. His output was now almost exclusively music hall scenes and the faded life
around him. He taught at the Westminster Institute, started a school for etching, and held
shows at London and Paris galleries. In 1911 Sickert founded the Camden Town Group,
enlarged and renamed the London Group three years later.

Sickert, late in life

Sickert became an associate of the Royal Academy in 1924 and an academician ten years
later. In 1941 Sickert was honored with a one-man exhibition at the National Gallery in
London. The next year he died in Bath, England, on January 22.

On October 30, 2002, The Ottawa Citizen said that Mr. Sickert was put on the suspect
list for the Ripper killings about 25 years ago, but that theory was discounted by art
historians and biographers. He painted naked prostitutes in attitudes of near death or
sleep, and produced a series of works called the Camden Town drawing, featuring a naked
prostitute on a bed with a clothed man. In one drawing, the man has his hands around the
woman's neck.

Like so many Ripper book authors, Cornwell takes certain facts of her Ripper candidates
life and twists them around to make them seem damning. For example, Wolf
Vanderlinden in The Art of Murder focuses one of Cornwells central premises:

Several general questions have been raised about Walter Sickerts art and its supposed
connection to the Whitechapel murders. Patricia Cornwell, for instance, has pointed out
that Sickert liked to paint prostitutes. That this would be considered to be evidence,
albeit circumstantial, is perplexing. Sickert did indeed paint prostitutes as did many artists
of his day - Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec all used prostitutes as models. They
were some of the few women that could be easily found to pose naked for an artist in late-
Victorian and early-Edwardian society. It is also important to ask at what point in his
artistic career did Sickert start to paint prostitutes? Around the time of the Ripper
murders? No, this began much later in his career in Dieppe and Venice. Before that he had
painted mostly landscapes, cityscapes and some portraits. He started painting a series of
nudes lying on iron bedsteads in Neuville in 1902, and although the models were not
necessarily prostitutes, Sickert did begin painting prostitutes in Venice in 1903-1904.

As Sickert wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche from Venice "From 9 to 4, it is an
uninterrupted joy, caused by these pretty, little, obliging models who laugh and
unembarrassedly be themselves while posing like angels. They are glad to be there, and are
not in a hurry." 13 These are not the words of a practised serial killer talking about his
preferred victims but rather an artist who is enjoying the free and easy-going nature of his
new models.

Another aspect of Sickerts work has been commented on by Stephen Knight: the titles
of various paintings. Sickert often re-titled his work, and so one painting might have two
or three titles. A working title might change into a finished title at one exhibit, which
might then change again for another showing. Sickert enjoyed using titles that told the
story of the painting or offered the viewer an interpretation of the painting. He did this
with such abandon that no real significance should be taken from the title of any Sickert
painting. For an example, look at his supposed Ripper related painting The Camden Town
Murder, also titled What Shall We Do For the Rent? (circa 1908). The painting is of a man
sitting on the edge of a bed, eyes downcast. Behind him lies a naked woman. With the title
The Camden Town Murder, the woman is obviously dead and the man is either her killer,
filled with remorse, or her lover who has found the body and who sits in stunned
mourning. Change to the alternate title - What Shall We Do For the Rent? - and now the
picture is totally different. The man sits on the bed feeling the weight of his financial
problems while his wife or girlfriend lies next to him, her hand gently resting on his knee,
offering him some small, tender support.
painting The Camden Town Murder, also titled What Shall We Do For the Rent? (circa
1908)

Walter Sickert painting The Camden Town Murder, also titled What Shall We Do For the
Rent? (circa 1908)

Like the paintings in the section on the conspiracy theory, Sickerts paintings in the
Camden Town series do not leave a clear indication that they represent what has been
claimed of them. Patricia Cornwell will try to claim that they are malevolent, sinister
depictions of a mans hatred and contempt for women, but that is a rather naive opinion of
the work of Walter Sickert. If no artist ever tried to prick our sensibilities and show us
things we would rather ignore, then what is the value of art to society? Let me leave this
section with this observation. When asked why, if Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, did
he wait almost twenty years to start painting his victims?

In summary, while Ms. Cornwell distinguishes herself from the myriad of other Ripper
finders in the scope of her expenditures, the result of all this effort is little better than the
much more modest budgets of the average Ripper finder. Despite this, no doubt her book
will be a best seller and it will be made into an entertaining movie, whether it is nonsense
or not.

Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, the Duke of Clarence, was known as Eddy. He
was the grandson of Queen Victoria and was born in 1864. He fell short of any royal
ambitions for him and was not distinguished by any important positive traits. However,
lazy, aimless and spoiled that he might have, he was not an evil or violent man. He died
from influenza in the epidemic of 1892.

The first notion that he was a suspect in the Ripper murders appeared in 1962 in Phillippe
Jullien's book, Edouard VII. Dr. Thomas Stowell published an article in 1970 accusing
Eddy of being Jack the Ripper, basing his theory upon some papers of Sir William Gull.
Stowell claimed that Gull was Eddy's doctor and was treating the prince for syphilis. The
disease supposedly caused Eddy to go insane and commit the Whitechapel murders.

None of this can be proven however since Stowell died shortly after publishing his theories
and burned his papers. Gull's papers have not been found.

Scholars have pounced upon this theory and discredited it. One key factor is that royal
records show that Eddy was not anywhere close to London for the most important murder
dates, and was in fact as far away as Scotland at the time of the murder of Stride and
Eddowes.

Also, Eddy, who was not known for his sparkling intelligence, did not possess the medical
knowledge to be a credible Ripper suspect. But that has not stopped the presses from
printing up yet another book, Prince Jack by Frank Spiering naming Eddy as the Ripper.


FRANCIS TUMBLETY
(1833-1903)

A more recent suspect emerged in Evans and Gainey's 1995 book, Jack the Ripper: First
American Serial Killer. He was born either in Canada or Ireland in 1833. The family found
its way to Rochester, NY by 1849.

First reports of Francis are not promising. In 1848 he was described by neighbors as "a
dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared-for, good-for-nothing boy...utterly devoid of
education." In 1850, he moved to Detroit and set up a practice as a physician sometime
later. There is no indication that he ever finished school or even attended medical school.
Despite that detail, he became quite a prosperous doctor.

The portrait of Tumblety which appeared on the front cover of his second booklet, 1889

The portrait of Tumblety which appeared on the front cover of his second booklet, 1889
He moved all across North America setting up various medical practices and living in
flamboyant splendor. Occasionally he would run afoul of the law and would set up his
practice somewhere else.

At one point he went to Liverpool in 1874 and carried on a homosexual affair with Sir
Henry Hall Caine. When he returned to New York, he became known for his "mania for
the company of young men and grown-up youths." He was also known as despising
women, particularly "fallen women."

Tumblety returned to England in June of 1888 and was arrested for homosexual activities.
He was then charged on suspicion in the Whitechapel murders. He jumped bail on
November 24 and fled to France and then onward to New York. Police in New York were
on the lookout for him and finally found him. He was not arrested because there was no
proof that he was implicated in the Ripper murders.

Eventually, he moved back to Rochester and lived with his sister. He died in 1903 in St.
Louis, after earning considerable wealth as a medical quack.

While there were numerous newspaper articles on Tumblety in New York papers, English
papers seemed silent on the subject. It was only in 1993 that Stewart Evans found a letter
of Chief Inspector John Littlechild: "amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely
one, was a Dr. T. He was an American quack named Tumblety and was at one time a
frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of
police, there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a
'Sycopathia Sexualis' subject he was not known as a 'Sadist' (which the murderer
unquestionably was) but his feelings toward women were remarkable and bitter in the
extreme, a fact on record."

All in all, he is an interesting suspect and proof that there is still information that can be
unearthed after all these years about Ripper suspects. However, there is no direct proof
linking Tumblety to the Whitechapel murders. There are a few factors that appear to
disqualify him as a credible subject: (1) born in 1833, he would have been 55 years of age
in 1888, far too old to be the man spotted by eyewitnesses, (2) he had no medical training,
despite his income as a quack, and (3) while his sexual proclivities may have in 1888 been
criminal, they are not today, (4) there is nothing to suggest that he was violent to women,
even though he disliked them. (5) homosexual serial killers usually prey upon their own
sex, not the opposite sex.