19th-century London was no stranger to the concept of gruesome murder. As I’ve just recently been discussing, they had been reading about it for some time. From the cannibalistic highwaymen said to haunt rural roads to murderous innkeepers and the demon barber, Sweeney Todd, the stories of arch-killers filled the popular penny dreadfuls. And while these were largely fiction, there was no shortage of real violent crime either, especially in the slums of the East End. Many were the daylight robberies, the assaults, the drunken rapes committed in this seedy underbelly of a city and society transformed by the industrial revolution, and murder was a known scourge there. In 1811, a family living in tenements near the Ratcliffe Highway was entirely annihilated by an intruder. The violence of the attack was shocking. Even the children had been brutally slain. A bloody maul that appeared to be the murder weapon was found at the scene. Twelve days later, another family was likewise slaughtered, and the suspect found guilty of the murders “cheated the hangman” by taking his own life. At the time, this murder case was one of the most notorious. Seventeen years later, the case of Burke and Hare took the limelight. William Burke and William Hare were body snatchers, also called “resurrection men,” providing cadavers under the table for anatomical study. As Scottish law limited the human remains that could be used for such purposes, and graveyards had taken to securing their dead in iron cages called mortsafes, there was something of a shortage of specimens, which of course encouraged the illegal procurement of such cadavers. Burke and Hare were very much like the murderous innkeepers of penny blood stories, and indeed may have inspired such stories, as before their killing spree, they sold the body of a lodger who had died naturally to an anatomist. Thereafter, when another lodger was ill, they didn’t wait for her natural death, but rather killed her and likewise sold her remains. In all, Burke and Hare killed sixteen people, suffocating them and profiting by the sale of their corpses. Perhaps most horrific were the murders of Amelia Dyer, the so-called Ogress of Reading, a baby farmer who adopted unwanted infants for a living and strangled many of them so that she would not have to actually care for them. She is suspected of killing 400 or more babies, making her potentially the most prolific serial killer in history. As horrifying and mind-boggling as all these crimes were, there was a shared motive that could at least be comprehended. They all appear to have been committed by financially struggling individuals for the purposes of acquiring money—they were economic murders. Dyer killed babies to enable her to adopt more, each of whom she was paid to take. The financial motivation of Burke and Hare is quite clear; once they had been paid for the body of the first, each lodger came to represent a financial temptation to them, worth more dead than alive. And the Ratcliffe Highway killer, it was believed, had broken into the rooms of those families and brutally killed all of them with the intention of burglary, as the first had occurred on a pay day, and a watch was missing from the second scene. Murder itself was something Victorians could wrap their minds around, so long as there was an understandable motive. Domestic murders too existed, of course, with husbands killing wives, and wives killing husbands. Crimes of passion were not difficult to understand, nor were crimes for economic gain. It was certainly shocking when a killer took numerous victims, like the killers mentioned, but if they had done it for some clear benefit, the public could at least move on from the unfortunate incidents. The fact that such heinous acts were perpetrated for money was at least comprehensible and pointed to the societal evils of hardship and inequality being at least partially to blame, and the culprits being caught certainly helped them move on as well. Soon, however, a new sort of murderer would appear, there in the dark and dirty corners of London’s East End. This killer too would claim numerous victims, with shocking and stomach-turning violence, but what made this killer different was that there was no comprehensible motive. It was the dawning of a new era of maniac killers, and this one would be remembered forever, for he was never caught.

As I have previously argued, to understand a killer and their killings, rather than resorting to unhelpful notions about pure evil, we should instead consider the environment as a factor. Surely genetic predisposition might play a role in the development of pathologies, but nurture must be accounted for as well as nature, so we cannot truly understand the Ripper murders without some understanding of the terrible place in which they occurred: the aforementioned slums of the East End, and specifically Whitechapel. As is almost always the case, the wealthy and privileged claimed a specific quarter of the city while the poor were relegated to another, and in times of great inequality, slums like these become overcrowded, unable to contain the growing number of those who are poverty stricken. Mid- to late-19th-century London was one such time, and the slums of the East End were full to bursting. It was called “outcast London,” and it was the shame of British society. With poor sanitation and drainage systems, the streets of these slums were filthy, which brought terrible vermin problems, from rats to roaches, but to privileged Victorians, the human beings in these slums were themselves vermin. Those who worked were dock laborers, costermongers or handcart merchants, butchers struggling to find meat, and tailors who toiled in sweatshops. England’s Poor Laws, intended to help employ and house the poor, resulted in the Victorian workhouse, where children were forced into hard labor and endured terrible abuse and neglect. Family dwellings were crowded, but more crowded still were the common lodging houses, or dosshouses, in which “dossers” paid nightly for a place to sleep—typically a mattress swarming with vermin, but sometimes even just a rope to lean on for the night. Alcoholism was rampant, and when dossers took casual day work, they often spent their earnings on drink before they secured their bed for the night. With even fewer work opportunities than the men, the women in these slums often earned their drink and doss money by prostitution. At mid-century, one estimate had it that 1 in every sixteen London women was a prostitute, but those 1 in 16 were concentrated in the slums, and those with no rooms to take their patrons to, plied their trade in the streets. So few were the lampposts in these slums that, at night, many a street and alley were entirely dark, giving these women plenty of places to do their business, but this darkness, in addition to the abject poverty of the area, also encouraged rampant crime. Though police did patrol these neighborhoods, there were streets down which even police officers dared not venture unless in groups. In 1875, in an effort to address the overcrowding of East End slums, the city and its Metropolitan Board began to buy slum property and force out residents, which displacement, of course, only resulted in far worse overcrowding and homelessness in the remaining slums, like Whitechapel. In 1887, just a year before the Ripper murders, the economic hardships reached a boiling point, and a mass protest against unemployment took place at Trafalgar Square. The demonstration erupted into violence; 75 were injured and 400 arrested. It became known as Bloody Sunday. It was in this atmosphere, among fears of an uprising of the poor, criticism of the ineffectuality of the police, and disgrace over the degraded conditions of many London residents, that in the slum of Whitechapel, someone began to brutally murder and mutilate the very dosshouse prostitutes who were acknowledged to symbolize the most pressing social problems of the age.

An illustration of the violence on Bloody Sunday, a demonstration over economic conditions in London a year before the Whitechapel Murders.

The first murder attributed to the Ripper, though perhaps not actually his first victim, as we will see, was discovered my market porters on Buck’s Row on the morning of August 31st, 1888. Only one lamp illuminated this street, and it stood far off at the opposite end of the road. As it was still dark, they could not see the blood, but the policeman they fetched, with his bullseye lantern, was able to discern that the woman was not just sleeping off a drunk but dead, her throat cut twice in such a vicious manner that the wound went all the way back to her spine. The ensuing medical examination showed bruising around the jaw, perhaps from being throttled, and terrible mutilations of the abdomen and genitals. She had been disemboweled and stabbed in the vagina. Her name, it was later learned, was Mary Ann Nichols, “Polly” colloquially. She had for years been estranged from her husband and children because of her drinking. Indeed, on the day before her murder, she had earned enough money to sleep in safety three times over, but had spent it all on drink. That night, turned away for having no doss money, she remarked that she would have it soon enough, boasting about “what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” Her limbs were still warm when she was found. It seems the killer had left her there only a half hour before her discovery. Then, a little more than a week later, on the morning of September 8th, a second victim was discovered: Annie Chapman, called “Siffey” and “Dark Annie,” another woman who had separated from her husband and children and had for years been living in dosshouses, earning her lodgings taking on crochet work, selling flowers, and, more occasionally, sex work. A year and a half earlier, she had sadly learned that her husband passed and her children had been sent off to various institutions. Her body was found by the back doors of her lodging house, less than half a mile from the site of the previous murder, and this time the killer seemed to have taken his time. As before, Annie’s throat had been cut with a jagged, two-stroke, back-and-forth motion, nearly severing her head, but this time the murderer seemed to be playing with her viscera. He did not just cut across her belly, he removed the skin of her abdomen in flaps. He took out her small intestines and placed them over her right shoulder. He then carefully removed the uterus, with such precision that the doctor who would thereafter examine her remains concluded that her murderer must have had some anatomical expertise. The killer also removed her rings and what meager coins she carried and set them at her feet, as if to make clear that this had been no robbery. Unlike the previous murder, Annie was actually seen alive only a half hour before her body was discovered with the person who presumably murdered her. Here we have the first potential eye-witness description of Jack the Ripper: He was said to be dark or swarthy, meaning essentially not a white man, perhaps not an Englishman. He was around 40 years old, genteel in his apparel though somewhat shabby, and wearing a brown deer-stalker hat, which many today know better as the Sherlock Holmes style of hat. With this second murder, and a pattern emerging, so too did theories about the killer’s identity arise.

One early theory after Polly’s murder was that there was a gang of men going around robbing prostitutes and killing those who refused to surrender their money. There was good reason to believe this. During April of that year, another sex worker had been attacked by four robbers not far from where Polly had been found, and she had been treated at the hospital for similar wounds, such as having been stabbed in her genitals. She afterward died from an infection. Then, earlier in August, another woman had been found with 39 stab wounds, and it was believed that this gang was active again, but Polly had no money to kill her over, so this theory made little sense, and the purposeful laying by of Dark Annie’s rings and coins seemed designed to signal to the public that these were not robberies. Almost immediately, among the crowds that gathered around Annie’s body, some began to suggest that a Jew must have done it and to harass Jews in the streets, and there was a sizable population of Jewish immigrants in the East End and Whitechapel specifically at the time, such that, a few years later, the Sunday Magazine called it “the Jewish colony in London.” Of course, when it was learned that a witness had seen Annie with a “dark” foreign-looking figure, that only exacerbated the rumors, and newspapers were only too happy to amplify this speculation. The East London Observer asserted “that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime, and that it must have been done by a Jew.” The theory that Jack the Ripper was a Polish Jew continues to thrive, even today, and at the time, with press coverage like that, it threatened to throw Whitechapel further into lawlessness. But newspapers of the day didn’t much mind stirring up controversy and spreading false information. Another rumor they spread was that the handkerchief tied around Dark Annie’s neck was not her own and had been put on her by the murderer. This turned out to be false. And another rumor that made the rounds was that the murderer had left a message on a nearby wall that read, “Five; fifteen more and then I give myself up.” No such message was left, but that didn’t stop it from being repeated in newspapers as far away as San Diego that autumn. For a long while, the newspapers did not have a catchy name for this killer. When it was clear that a lone killer was stalking unfortunate victims in the slums, they called him the “Whitechapel murderer,” or for more flavor, they called him the “Whitechapel maniac” or the “Whitechapel fiend.” But early on, some ventured to call him “Leather Apron,” based on another rumor.

An 1888 newspaper illustration depicting the suspicion and paranoia that gripped London in the wake of the Whitechapel Murders.

After Polly’s death, the initial inquiries of police turned up not only the rumor about a gang robbing and stabbing prostitutes, but also the lead that a certain man who wore a leather apron had been mistreating prostitutes, to the point that he was feared and avoided. They all called him Leather Apron, since they didn’t know his name, and they said he also sometimes wore a deer-stalker hat. Like the rumored gang, this fellow was said to be demanding money from the sex workers he harassed and beating them if they failed to comply. When the body of Dark Annie was discovered, a wet leather apron was also found close to a nearby water spigot, as if it had been washed and left there. Was this the murderer’s leather apron, and had he been forced to abandon it while in the act of washing blood from it? When the eyewitness description of the man last seen with Annie mentioned a deer-stalker, it seemed they had a suspect, and one police sergeant was certain that this character, this Leather Apron, was none other than Jack Pizer, a local bootmaker who, as a Polish Jew, further fit the burgeoning profile of the killer, misguided as it may have been. Eventually they found Pizer hiding in the home of some friends because he had been named by newspapers as the Whitechapel fiend. They also found long knives that might have been the murder weapons among his belongings, knives he used in his bootmaker’s trade. However, the leather apron found at the scene was later identified as belonging to someone else who wore it while working in a nearby cellar workshop, and the owner’s mother stated that she had washed it and left it there by the water tap. Then it was discovered that Jack Pizer had alibis for both murders, having been in a lodging house during Polly’s murder and having actually been talking to a policeman while watching a fire at the docks during Annie’s murder. In the end, Pizer, who claimed that he had only been identified as Leather Apron by the police sergeant because of a personal grudge between the two, was cleared of charges and he successfully sued one newspaper for libeling him in calling him the killer.

At the same time that Pizer was arrested, though, a second suspect, William Piggot, was also arrested for his resemblance to the Leather Apron character. He had been discovered in a pub, covered in blood, with possible defensive wounds on his hands, and when questioned, his behavior was erratic. His rambling explanation of his wounds was that he had tried to help a woman who was having a fit and she’d bitten him. But it had also been discovered that he was carrying a bundle of blood-stained clothing and had recently wiped blood from his shoes. The fact that Annie Chapman’s body had been discovered at 6am less than half an hour after her death had suggested that the killer must have walked down the street in the clear light of day while covered in blood, and this led to much criticism of the police. How had they not caught this boldfaced killer? Of course, the tools of their trade at the time, which mostly consisted of catching a criminal in the act or fleeing from a scene, or relied on the testimony of informers, did not help them much with this new sort of lone skulking predator. Areas were policed on foot. With no radios for getting in contact with other officers, they relied on whistles. Crime scene investigation consisted mostly of a medical examination of the deceased’s wounds. Fingerprinting was not an accepted science, and even blood typing was not a known technique. Forensics were rudimentary. The police presence in Whitechapel would be increased, but it was not until Annie’s death that the reality of the situation really set in and investigations were taken more seriously. As for the idea that a person covered in blood walking the streets of Whitechapel should have been easy to spot, this was a notion held by those who did not understand the reality of the slums. As I explained in my recent patron exclusive about the story of Sweeney Todd, the streets of the East End slums were sometimes flooded with blood and with discarded animal corpses because of the overcrowding and the demand for cheap food, such as the pies from the Sweeney Todd story. Butchers transformed their cellars into makeshift slaughterhouses, cutting up horses and other animals, and cat’s meat men pushed handcarts full of the chopped up remains from these butchers through the streets, typically trailed by stray cats. And with the lack of sanitation and the poor drainage systems, blood and animal matter sometimes choked the gutters, such that many boots were covered in blood. And with the frequency of drunken brawls in these slums, the fact was that it just wasn’t uncommon for people to have blood on them. Nevertheless, Piggott was suspicious enough to be arrested, and his unhinged behavior while in custody led to his being locked away in an insane asylum, and it must have seemed like the police had actually caught their maniac. However, a little more than 2 weeks after the arrests of Pizer and Piggott, after the former was exonerated and while the latter remained institutionalized, two more murders occurred, on the same day, proving that Piggott was not the culprit.

Contemporary newspaper illustration depicting the discovery of the first Ripper victim

The first to be discovered was Elizabeth Stride, in a court off Berner Street, and even as that scene was being examined by a policeman, news reached him that a second body had been found, that of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. Both had their throats cut in the typical Ripper manner, but Stride had not been disemboweled. Because of this, some suggest Stride was not a Ripper victim, but most researchers who study the crimes contend that the only reason for this double event was that the murderer was interrupted before he could finish his ritual and had to flee. The notion that he was driven by compulsions to see his bloody deed out to its grisly conclusion further explains why he took so many risks with Eddowes, whom he killed in a square with three entrances and nearby warehouses with night watchmen making their rounds and right across from the home of a policeman. Despite these risks, he concluded his act with Eddowes, not only cutting her throat but also eviscerating her, cutting her from rectum to ribcage and removing organs as trophies—the uterus and the left kidney this time. But there were new mutilations as well, as the killer cut of her nose, split her eyelids, and gouged triangles into her cheeks beneath her eyes, transforming her into a kind of gruesome clown. Both women were, like the other victims, what would have then been called “unfortunate women,” living in poverty, with former husbands and partners from whom they had become estranged, now subsisting by performing honest work where they could, such as cleaning, and further relying on prostitution to get by. With this escalation, it seemed that the killer was growing bolder, perhaps even throwing his crimes in the face of the public and the police who had failed to catch him. And there is some further reason to believe this, for on the night of the double murder, the killer appears to have possibly left a message behind, scrawled on a wall as he was previously rumored to have done. Less than half a mile from the Eddowes murder scene in Mitre Square, on Goulston Street, a blood-stained piece of her apron, which had been cut away, was found near a staircase, on the wall of which was written, according to varying reports, either “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” or “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” First, even if this graffito was discovered near a genuine piece of Eddowes’s apron, it is not certain that the two were related. For example, Eddowes herself may have removed the piece of her apron, used it as a sanitary napkin and dropped it herself. Second, the confusing double negative of the graffito raises the question of whether it was meant to defend or accuse Jews of the murders. If it was left by the murderer, then was he revealing that he was a Jew or that he wasn’t? This strange message has led some to hypothesize that the Ripper murders were an elaborate frame-up all along, meant to stoke public anger and violence against the Polish Jew immigrant community. And an anti-Semitic riot is certainly what police feared when they found the Goulston Street graffito, which is why they erased it.

There was further reason for the police to believe the Goulston Street graffito was unrelated to the case, though. That reason was that its writing did not match that of another apparent message from the killer that had been received. Days before the double murder, when some had begun to hope that the killings were done, a letter was received by the Central News Agency and forwarded to Scotland Yard only a day before the Stride and Eddowes killings. It was addressed “Dear Boss,” and it mocked the police efforts to find “me,” especially the entire Leather Apron debacle. The letter was written in red ink, and the author explained that he had saved his victims’ blood and intended to write it with that, but that it “went thick like glue,” so he had to make due with red ink. The playful tone of the letter led the news agency to believe it was a hoax, but they forwarded it to Scotland Yard because it specifically said he would clip the next victim’s ears off and send them to police. The letter writer said he “shan’t quit ripping them” because he was “down on whores,” and it was signed “Jack the Ripper.” Though news agencies thought it a hoax, they published anyway, and the name stuck, and thereafter, another correspondence was received using the name. A postcard was sent to the news agency dated the day that Stride and Eddowes were discovered, which said, among other things, “Double event this time” and mentioned the first, Stride, had “squealed a bit” so that he “[c]ouldn’t finish straight off.” This was given as an excuse for why ears were not removed and sent to the police, as previously promised. Since some of these details would not have been public knowledge that morning, it was first thought the postcard might have been genuine and might prove the veracity of the original letter as well. However, the card was postmarked the next day, when these details were publicly known, and the fact was that the handwriting of the letter and postcard didn’t even clearly match. Another letter appeared a couple weeks later, this one not signed Jack the Ripper, but only with the statement that it had been sent “From hell.” Enclosed in a box delivered with the letter was a piece of a kidney. The letter said, “I send you half the Kidne I took from one women preserved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise.” So the specter of cannibalism entered the story. A doctor afterward analyzed the kidney and determined it was human, and that it was from the left side, which corresponded to the fact that Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney was taken. However, the doctor seems to have given contradictory opinions on the kidney, and the fact that it had been preserved in spirits meant that it could have been taken from any anatomist’s lab or anatomical museum to play a gruesome prank. Indeed, after the doctor examined it, he too received a letter signed by Jack the Ripper, whose handwriting again didn’t match the others. As important as the letters may have seemed to the case, in the end, they may only be evidence of how obsessed the public had become with the murders, and of how much public opinion was turning against the police, who were more and more seen as ineffectual.

Handwriting comparison, courtesy Rumbelow.

Indeed, even the authorities themselves would have agreed that their response to the murders could have been improved. Their investigation was fragmented because it was being undertaken simultaneously by numerous divisions—the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, and the Central Office of Scotland Yard—and they did not coordinate or share information as they should have, which the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren himself complained about. But it was Warren who would end up being the scapegoat for the public’s ire over the continued failure to capture the murderer. Warren refused to seek money for a reward, which many thought would bring the killer to justice. His reason was that offering rewards for the capture of criminals frequently led to conspiracies to frame innocent men in order to collect the rewards. These were called Blood Money Conspiracies, and there had been famous scandals about them in London about 60 years earlier. With the police refusing to put up rewards, a group of local tradesmen formed a Vigilance Committee and began not only seeking money to put up their own reward but also petitioning for Commissioner Warren to be removed from his position. In what came to be called the War on Warren, they leveled numerous accusations of neglect against him: he had not brought the full strength of the Metropolitan police to bear in the search for the killer, he had transferred inexperienced investigators with no local knowledge to districts where they were useless, and he had never changed up old beat patrols, making it easier for the killer to predict when it would be safe to carry out his crimes. It is certainly true that there were police missteps, and that Warren was himself responsible for some of them. He was too hesitant to buy and use bloodhounds, for one. For another, he was negligent with some crime scene investigations—it was on his orders that the Goulston Street graffito was erased. Nevertheless, he was also being maligned unfairly in many respects. He was the face of the investigation, after all, for better or worse. More than a month after the double murder of Stride and Eddowes, with only conflicting witness descriptions of people seen with the victims and few suspects but no strong evidence, Sir Charles Warren finally resigned in disgrace. The very next day, the fifth and final canonical victim of Jack the Ripper was found, indoors rather than out in the streets, in the most horrific condition imaginable.

Like the previous victims, Mary Jane Kelly was a poverty-stricken woman who lived in the East End, had previously been married and had until recently been living with a man but was then making her own way, working in brothels. Unlike the other victims, she was only 25 years old, and she wasn’t staying in a lodging-house. She was not out prostituting herself to earn money for a bed in a dosshouse. She had her own place, Number 13 Miller’s Court, a 12-foot square room, formerly a parlor that had been partitioned off as a rental. This meant that Kelly had somewhere to take her clients; therefore, it also meant that, when she had her fatal assignation with Jack the Ripper, he had privacy to perform his heinous mutilations. Whereas, in the streets, it was estimated that he only took five to seven minutes ripping his victims, he spent something like two hours on Kelly, and it showed. Like the others, he cut her throat down to the vertebrae, disemboweled her, and placed her viscera around her. Whereas in the other killings he tended to set the victims’ intestines near their head, this time he spread them around, putting some at her feet, some on a bedside table, and some beneath her head like a pillow. This time he also removed her breasts, and he even cut the meat away from one thigh, denuding it like a butcher, leaving the bone visible. While in the past he had done some mutilation to his victims’ faces, there was actually nothing left of Mary Jane Kelly’s face. While twice before the murderer had taken a victim’s uterus with him, and parts of other organs were sometimes missing as well, a kidney here, a bladder there, from Mary Jane Kelly he took her heart. Some have suggested that Mary Jane Kelly may not have even been a victim of the Ripper. The differences in not only the circumstances but also the wounds inflicted are enough to suggest that it could have been a crime of passion or done for some other reason, and that it may have just been made to look like a Ripper slaying, in other words, a copycat. In 1939, one author suggested she had been murdered by an insane midwife who was performing an abortion on her, an entirely theoretical murderer he called “Jill the Ripper.” A more recent author has suggested, because of the evidence that something had been burned in the fireplace there , that the murderer had made some ritual sacrifice, which certainly would not match the Ripper’s modus operandi. Nevertheless, she is largely considered the fifth and final victim of the so-called “canonical five,” even if there is good reason to suspect that she, and perhaps Elizabeth Stride, who only had her throat cut, may be apocryphal additions to the Ripper’s kill count.

Contemporary newspaper illustration of the discovery of Kelly’s body in her Miller’s Court room.

Regardless of whether Kelly was a Ripper victim, just as there is disagreement over whether Polly was the first victim, there is further debate over whether Kelly was the last, for murders in Whitechapel would continue to occur in the aftermath. One of these was a strangling and clearly unlike the Ripper murders, but the wounds of a few others were brutal and reminiscent enough of the killings the previous fall that some continued to believe the Ripper was still active. While some have thought that the privacy Mary Jane Kelly’s room provided, and the time he took in the act of killer her, might have somehow allowed him to sate his compulsions, and that taking her heart may have somehow been symbolic of the finality of this last murder, forensic profilers typically suggest that serial murderers rarely just cease their habits, which are psychological rituals they become compelled to enact. More likely, if Kelly’s was the final murder, then the murders only ceased because the murderer had traveled elsewhere, was institutionalized or imprisoned, or had died. But just because the murders stopped did not mean that the investigation stopped as well. Scotland Yard and the police had their suspects, and in the years that followed, other suspects would emerge. As the Ripper case became the stuff of legend and literature, clever writers and independent researchers also wanted in on the action, digging up old leads and naming new suspects. Today, these enthusiasts have invented their own field of study, Ripperology, and there are numerous books published, often putting forth a new suspect, proposing some unlikely conspiracy theory, or dredging up an old suspect to make a case for why they were always the best suspect. They have titles like The True Face of Jack the Ripper, Naming Jack the Ripper, and Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution. In the second and final part of this series, I will consider the proposed culprits and endeavor to demonstrate why, no matter what these book titles claim, the identity of the Whitechapel Murderer remains unknown.

Jack the Ripper - Part One: The Canonical Five

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