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Jack the Ripper 

Jack the Ripper is a pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of London, England, in late 1888. The name originated in a letter sent to the London Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer.

The victims were women earning income as prostitutes. Most victims’ throats were slit, after which the bodies were mutilated. The removal of internal organs from three of the victims led some officials at the time of the murders to propose that the killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge.

Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer because of the savagery of the attacks and the failure of the police to capture the murderer.

Because the killer’s identity has never been confirmed, the legends surrounding the murders have become a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and pseudohistory. Many authors, historians, and amateur detectives have proposed theories about the identity of the killer and his victims.

Known Victims

Metropolitan Police files show that the investigation began in 1888 and eventually came to encompass eleven separate murders, stretching from 3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891, known in the police docket as the “Whitechapel murders”. In addition, authors and historians have connected at least seven other murders and violent attacks with Jack the Ripper. Among the eleven murders actively investigated by the police, five are almost universally agreed upon as the work of a single killer, collectively called the “canonical five” victims:

• Mary Ann Nichols (nicknamed “Polly”) killed Friday 31 August 1888. Her body was discovered by a man named Charles Cross at about 3:40 A.M. on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck’s Row (now Durward Street), a back street in Whitechapel 200 yards from the London Hospital. Her throat was severed deeply by two cuts; the lower part of the abdomen was partly ripped open by a deep, jagged wound. There also were several incisions running across the abdomen, and three or four similar cuts on the right side caused by the same knife used violently and downwards.
• Annie Chapman (maiden name Eliza Ann Smith, nicknamed “Dark Annie”) killed Saturday 8 September 1888. Her body was discovered about 6 a.m., lying on the ground near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Like Mary Ann Nichols’s, her throat was severed by two cuts, one deeper than the other. The abdomen was ripped entirely open and the uterus was removed.
• Elizabeth Stride (nicknamed “Long Liz”) killed Sunday 30 September 1888. Her body was discovered about 1 a.m., lying on the ground in Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street (now Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. There was one clear-cut incision on the neck; the cause of death was massive blood loss from the nearly severed main artery on the left side. The cut through the tissues on the right side was more superficial, and tapered off below the right jaw. That there also were no mutilations to the abdomen has left some uncertainty about the identity of Elizabeth’s murderer, along with the suggestion her killer was disturbed during the attack.
• Catherine Eddowes (also known as “Kate Conway” and “Mary Ann Kelly,” from the surnames of her two common-law husbands, Thomas Conway and John Kelly) killed Sunday 30 September 1888 (the same day as the previous victim, Elizabeth Stride). Her body was found in Mitre Square, in the City of London. The throat was, as in the former two cases, severed by two cuts; the abdomen was ripped open by a long, deep, jagged wound. The left kidney and the major part of the uterus had been removed. She was 46. Her murder, and the murder of Elizabeth Stride would go on to be called “The Double Event” in the media, and across London.
• Mary Jane Kelly (called herself “Marie Jeanette Kelly” after a trip to Paris, nicknamed “Ginger”) killed Friday 9 November 1888. Her gruesomely mutilated body was discovered shortly after 10:45 A.M., lying on the bed in the single room where she lived at 13 Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields. Her throat had been severed down to the spine, and her abdomen virtually emptied of its organs. Her heart was missing.

The authority of this list rests on a number of authors’ opinions, but historically the idea has been based upon the 1894 notes of Sir Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Department. Macnaghten did not join the force until the year after the murders; and his memorandum, which came to light in 1959, contains serious factual errors about possible suspects. There is considerable disagreement about the value of Macnaghten’s assessment of the number of victims. Some researchers have posited that the series may not have been the work of a single murderer, but of an unknown larger number of killers acting independently. Authors Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow argue that the “canonical five” is a “Ripper myth” and that the probable number of victims could range from three (Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes) to six (the previous three, plus Stride, Kelly, and Martha Tabram) or more. Macnaghten’s opinion of which crimes were committed by the same killer was not shared by other investigating officers, such as Inspector Frederick Abberline.

Except Stride, whose attack may have been interrupted, mutilations of the “canonical five” victims became increasingly severe as the series of murders proceeded. Nichols and Stride were not missing any organs; but Chapman’s uterus was taken, and Eddowes had her uterus and a kidney carried away and her face mutilated. While only Kelly’s heart was missing from her crime scene, many of her internal organs were removed and left in her room.

The “canonical five” murders were generally perpetrated in the dark of night, on or close to a weekend, in a secluded site to which the public could gain access, and on a pattern of dates either at the end of a month or a week or so after. Yet every case differed from this pattern in some manner. Besides the differences already mentioned, Eddowes was the only victim killed within the City of London, though close to the boundary between the City and the metropolis. Nichols was the only victim to be found on an open street, albeit a dark and deserted one. Many sources state that Chapman was killed after the sun had started to rise, though that was not the opinion of the police or the doctors who examined the body. Kelly’s murder ended six weeks of inactivity for the murderer. (A week elapsed between the Nichols and Chapman murders; three between Chapman and the “double event”.)

The large number of horrific attacks against women during this era adds some uncertainty as to exactly how many victims were killed by the same man. Most experts point to deep throat slashes, abdominal and genital-area mutilation, removal of internal organs, and progressive facial mutilations as the distinctive features of Jack the Ripper’s modus operandi.

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