During the height of Jack the Ripper’s murders, from September to November 1888, the police and news agencies received thousands of letters regarding the case. Those most well known, of course, were those signed with the name Jack the Ripper, and others purporting to be from the killer himself, such as the “From Hell” letter, but those were just the tip of the mail pile. The majority were from Londoners who had become obsessed with the case. While at first, women in Whitechapel and elsewhere were terrified to go out of doors at all, unless they were in a group, eventually, talk of Jack became so common that women tended to joke that they would be “the next for Jack” when they were going out at night. Whitechapel had become a tinderbox, ready to erupt in vigilante violence at any moment. On one occasion, when a policeman pursued a local ne’er-do-well on foot, someone shouted that it was the Ripper, and the next thing you know, a mob joined the pursuit, shouting to lynch the man, who was actually only wanted for throwing a brick at a policeman. And it wasn’t just the residents of the East End that thought of little else but the Ripper. Letters came in from all over, many suggesting ways that the police might be able to catch the murderer. Some insisted the police should dress as women, while other proposed elaborate safeguards be worn by potential victims, like ring mail shirts and steel plates around the throat, or even rudimentary tazing devices designed to deliver electric shocks to those who grasped someone’s neck. Every suspicious piece of bathroom graffiti was reported, and even the visions that were had in dreams and the messages received in seances were dutifully forwarded to the authorities, many pointing the finger at actual people and overwhelming the police with a glut of suspects and useless leads. Some speculated that he must be diseased, perhaps a syphilitic, and that his affliction had caused him to lose the use of his manhood, thus prompting him to take out his frustrated and perverted sexual desires in a destructive way. Suddenly everyone was an alienist and a detective. One woman insisted that the crimes had been perpetrated by an escaped ape who ripped the victims and then made his escape by bounding over walls and returning to his cage. Clearly she had taken the notion from a popular story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which a detective deduces that a pair of murders was committed by an orangutan. Many were the East End poor who believed the murderer, who many had become convinced was a doctor, must be some rich and morally bankrupt West Ender coming to the slums to prey upon the disadvantaged, while many wealthy residents elsewhere believed it could only a debauched resident of the East End could sink to performing such terrible crimes. Likewise, it was claimed, over and over, that an Englishman could never do such things. When it wasn’t a Jew being blamed, some letters suggested it must have been some other foreigner. The superstitions of Chinese and Malays, some letters claimed, might lead them to remove organs for their folk medicine. Likewise it was said the Hill tribes of Northeast India made use of the generative organs in their rites, and other Indian tribes used poison needles to induce instant death, which could explain the quickness with which Jack was able to overcome his victims. Some even suggested that Jack might be one of the Thuggee highway killers of India, claiming his murders were actually cult sacrifices to Kali, which as I have discussed at length was itself a total myth about the bands of stranglers called Thugs. So voracious was the appetite for theories and claims about the identity of Jack the Ripper that some even made a career from cooking them up, even back then. One such was the grandstanding psychiatrist L. Forbes Winslow, who claimed in an interview published in newspapers that he had evidence proving the identity of the Ripper and that if the police would but lend him six constables, he could catch the killer. When a Chief Inspector actually showed up to question him, though, Winslow suggested the newspaper had misquoted him and said he never intended to suggest he knew the killer’s identity. It turns out Winslow’s only leads, about an escaped lunatic and a lodger who talked to himself and said disparaging things about prostitutes, were both thoroughly investigated by police and found to lack any merit. But L. Forbes Winslow continued to agitate the public in regards to his theories on the Ripper case, claiming for years afterward that it was actually his activism that had forced the Ripper to cease his murders and leave Britain. His persistent injection of himself into the narrative actually led police to consider him as a suspect at one point. And he serves as a very good analogy for many other researchers and writers who through the years have named their own suspects, based on frequently dubious evidence, in order to sell books and make a name for themselves as not only an expert—a Ripperologist—but as the person who finally solved the Ripper murders.

Lest it be presumed that the police were so useless they had to rely on outlandish theories suggested by letter writers, it should be emphasized that the police did have their own suspects. In fact, they had several, all along. After the Leather Apron/John Pizer debacle, they of course had to tread more lightly and keep their suspicions closer to the vest, but from the research of Ripperologists, we have come to better understand who the police were actually looking into. For example, one early suspect was Jacob Isenschmid. He was Swiss, and thus a foreigner. He was a butcher, and thus possessed of enough anatomical knowledge to fit the profile. He was known to have violently attacked several women in Whitechapel, resulting in his being committed and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. Just days after the Annie Chapman murder, two doctors suggested him as a suspect to police, and when questioned, his own wife also thought him capable of the acts, reporting that he was always out of the house with no explanation and carrying large knives when he didn’t need to, and that he had more than once threatened to murder her. However, like some previous suspects, Isenschmid was in the hospital when the Stride and Eddowes double murder occurred, which eliminated him as a suspect. While the police were derided in the press as ineffective, and a commissioner was even driven to resign in disgrace, the fact of the matter is that they simply did not have irrefutable evidence or any strong leads. More than one victim had been seen with a man shortly before their murders, and while some of these witness descriptions seemed to line up, others did not at all. Some had Jack wearing a long coat, others a short cutaway coat. Some had him wearing a deer stalker while others had him wearing a sailor’s cap or other headwear entirely. More importantly, since clothing can be changed, some said he had darker skin while others said his complexion was “fair,” meaning white. There was even disagreement over how many murderers they might be looking for. While most of the pathologists who had examined the corpses of the Canonical Five led the police to think one maniac was responsible, others, such as Dr. Bagster Phillips, believed that more than one killer was active, attributing the Stride and Kelly murders to some other murderer. While the handwriting on the various Dear Boss and From Hell letters were generally thought not to match, and even today to any with even an untrained eye they do not seem consistent, leading police to view most of them as hoaxes and all of them as unreliable, some, like Dr. Thomas Dutton, became convinced that they were almost all written in the same hand, and that even the Goulston Street graffito’s message had been written by the same man. Dutton’s supposed opinion on matters should be taken with salt, though, as we will later see. There was also dispute among the pathologists over the level of anatomical expertise the killer must have had. Some said he must have been an expert physician or anatomist, something that the writer of the Dear Boss letters made a point of laughing at, but others suggested that the removal of organs was not so precise, with some often only being partially removed, and the violence of the wounds pointed more to a butcher or even someone who had little to no professional knowledge or education in anatomy. There was the further possibility, then, that it may have been a resurrectionist, someone who, like Burke and Hare, hoped to earn money by killing and selling the dead to an anatomist. This wouldn’t really make a great deal of sense, though, since the bodies had been so terribly mutilated and left where they’d been killed, but a certain pathological museum associated with a medical school did reach out to the police with an explanation. They revealed that a mysterious American had come around offering 20 Pounds sterling for specimens of the human uterus. Apparently, he was publishing some anatomical document and intended to provide a uterus specimen with each copy, which meant he needed a great many. Although the museum turned him away, saying there was no way to acquire so many uteri, he kept pestering them and began making similar inquiries at other institutions. Since the Ripper frequently took that organ from his victims, this may have provided some clearer motive for the murders, but it changes little. Whoever the Ripper was, even if he profited by his bloody trophies, he was still compelled to mutilate his victims in heinous ways. And some were not missing their uterus, showing that the act could not have been purely about that. It would seem, then, that despite this lead, the police were left in the same position. Nevertheless, even with all this uncertainty, some compelling suspects did emerge.

A sensational article by L. Forbes Winslow.

Frederick George Abberline was an Inspector First-Class at Scotland Yard who, after the murder Mary Ann Nichols or Polly, the first Ripper victim, was transferred back to Whitechapel due to his knowledge of the district, having previously served in the area with the Metropolitan Police. His chief suspect in the Ripper murders was one George Chapman, also known as Ludwig Schloski, a Polish immigrant whose real name was Seweryn Kłosowski and who had settled in Whitechapel just before the murders began. During the course of Abberline’s many interviews with Whitechapel residents, he spoke with Kłosowski’s wife, who told the inspector that her husband went out at night for hours at a time, without explanation given. This of course is not proof of anything, but 15 years later, Kłosowski was convicted of murdering three women, his mistresses, and Abberline wrote to the arresting officer to congratulate him, claiming, “You've got Jack the Ripper at last!” In reality, though Kłosowski was known to beat up the women in his life, there is hardly anything to suggest he was capable of the Ripper crimes. His murders were poisonings, which is about as different as can be from the mutilations perpetrated by Jack. Nevertheless, Abberline liked him better than other suspects. He personally interrogated Joseph Barnett, the lover of Mary Jane Kelly, in the aftermath of the Miller’s Court slaying, and though some later writers like Barnett for at least Kelly’s murder if not the others, Abberline cleared him. One witness who had supposedly seen Kelly enter her room with a man who might have been the Ripper, and who would later be suspected as the Ripper himself, George Hutchinson, was likewise interviewed by Abberline, and the inspector believed his account. Perhaps Abberline was too trusting. After all, he put little stock in the theory that Montague John Druitt was the Ripper, and there is an argument to be made that Druitt was one of the prime suspects of the crimes, and certainly a favorite of later investigators, such as the Assistant Police Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, who investigated the crimes a few years afterward. Indeed, Macnaghten started his investigation of the case hearing rumors about Druitt, whose family, it was said, believed him to have been the Ripper. Macnaghten, an Eton graduate, had some upper crust connections that gave him an insider advantage while investigating Druitt. However, it remains clear that Macnaghten also had some major misconceptions about Druitt. In his report, he described Druitt as a doctor, which would have fit the profile of the Ripper, but in reality Druitt had been a barrister, or lawyer. Macnaghten also called Druitt “sexually insane,” and while mental health problems did run in Druitt’s family, other researchers have suggested that Druitt may have only been gay, and that this is what led to his ostracism and melancholia. Really the only concrete reason for suspecting Druitt was that he committed suicide shortly after the last of the Canonical Five murders, after which the killing ceased, but that is not really evidence at all, and in fact, his not living in Whitechapel and records of his playing cricket in Dorset, some 130 miles from Whitechapel, the very day after the first murder, does seem to exonerate him.

Despite the fact that Macnaghten was not involved in the initial investigation and his report contains factual errors and dubious assumptions, after it came to light in 1975, it became something of a bible for Ripperologists. It is because of the Macnaghten Memoranda that the notion of the Canonical Five victims is so prominent today. In it, he discusses some of the other murders being attributed to the Ripper at the time—Martha Tabram, Alice McKenzie, and Frances Coles—and he indicates that they don’t seem related. He even insinuates that James Thomas Sadler, who had been arrested on suspicion of the latter murder but was released for lack of evidence, may have been responsible for McKenzie’s death as well as Coles’s, but was likely not the Ripper. Besides Druitt, the other two suspects Macnaghten named in his memo also still remain prime candidates for Jack, indicating how influential the memo has been in Ripperology. One of these was Russian Michael Ostrog, a petty criminal known for swindlery and theft. He had been released from prison early in 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, and was considered a known threat because a Police Gazette article suggested that he remained dangerous. Among the many lies that this con man told about his past was that he had formerly been a surgeon in the Navy, and since the police were looking for doctors that could be suspects, this falsehood came back to bite him. However, there was never any sign of violent tendencies in his record, despite Macnaghten claiming he was “detained…as a homicidal maniac,” and more recently, a Ripperologist named Philip Sugden totally exonerated him, proving that Ostrog had been jailed in France during the murders. That leaves only one more suspect named in the Macnaghten memoranda: a Polish Jew named Kosminski whom he said “became insane” and “had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies.” The name Kosminski was also written down as a potential suspect by another Chief Inspector in the margins of a memoir written by an assistant police commissioner just next to a passage that talked about a witness identifying a certain Polish Jew as being the person he had seen with a victim. However, that passage is very vague, there is no other record of such an identification, Macnaghten states explicitly that no such identification occurred, and the name Kosminski may have been written into the margins there as a guess, based on Macnaghten’s naming of the suspect. The fact is that no one really knows anything about this Kosminski because no one knows who he was. Since Macnaghten claims he was committed to an asylum in March 1889, some search was made of asylum records in later years, and one Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew from Whitechapel, was institutionalized around that time, but he was non-violent, a paranoid with auditory hallucinations, perhaps schizophrenic but not homicidal, as Macnaghten claimed. The same Ripperologist who tracked down the name Aaron Kosminski suggested Macnaghten had confused the name and may have actually meant another, more violent patient named David Cohen who, he claimed, was one and the same as another Whitechapel resident named Nathan Kaminski. However, his argument is pure speculation, presuming that Cohen, a tailor, and Kaminski, a bootmaker, were actually the same person, asserting without evidence that he was actually Leather Apron, and relying on an elaborate mistaken identity explanation to assert that he was a main suspect even though his name was never recorded by police as a person of interest.

Macnaghten’s Memoranda were actually written in order to refute a theory then being promoted in London newspapers that Jack was a certain medical student named Thomas Cutbush, who a few years after the murders was declared insane after stabbing some women. Macnaghten was emphatic in denying that Cutbush was the Ripper, pointing out that Cutbush’s mental health troubles were owing to his contraction of syphilis, and making it clear that Cutbush’s crimes, which entailed stabbing two women in the buttocks, were likely inspired by some other similar attacks a couple years earlier and were nothing like the Ripper crimes. He states, “It will be noticed that the fury of the [Ripper] mutilations increased in each case, and, seemingly, the appetite only became sharpened by indulgence. It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November ’88, and been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl’s behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards.” The struggle between police and the media had long been an issue. While the police had been developing their suspects through quiet house searches and interrogations, the newspapers loudly proclaimed one suspect after another. One favorite was Dr. Thomas Cream, an abortionist who had served ten years in prison in America for poisoning the husband of his mistress and afterward moved to London, where he began murdering women. Dubbed the Lambeth Poisoner, the marked difference in his method of killing should alone have eliminated him as a suspect, as should the fact that he was actually still imprisoned in America during the Ripper crimes, but a rumor that at his hanging, his final words were “I am Jack the…” before the scaffold fell and silenced him was just too juicy not to print. Later writers would make the baseless claim that Cream had a double, and that the two were both murderers, each covering for the other and providing each other alibis. It would not be the last unsupported claim about Ripper doubles. Equally sensational and cooked up to sell newspapers was the theory, put forward by one Robert Donston Stephenson that the killer was an occultist and black magician. Stephenson, a journalist, was himself interested in the “occult sciences” and took a keen interest in the murders. He would eventually write an article for the Pall Mall Gazette that named a certain doctor at London Hospital, Morgan Davies, as Jack the Ripper. The hospital was less than 200 yards from the location of the first murder, and Stephenson claimed that, while convalescing in the hospital during the murders, Dr. Davies had discussed the murders with him in suspicious detail. Rather than make Davies a suspect, however, his efforts only had the effect of making Stephenson himself a suspect. But as Stephenson had checked himself into the hospital during the murders, and as the ward in which Stephenson was housed would not allow him to leave and return, much as other suspects who were in some sort of custody at the time of the murders, Stephenson too had an airtight alibi.

Even American newspapers got in on the action when in November 1888 New York papers reported that one Dr. Francis Tumblety had been arrested for indecency and questioned in relation to the Whitechapel Murders, and had thereafter jumped bail and returned to America. Tumblety was of particular interest to American readers because more than two decades earlier, in 1865, he had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. He had been released after three weeks as there was no evidence to connect him to with Lincoln’s murder, but his reputation would thereafter always be tainted. And in some ways, Tumblety made good sense as a Ripper suspect. He was a doctor, he was an apparent misogynist known to express his disgust and hatred of female sex workers, and he owned a collection of uteri in jars that he said came from “every class of woman.” This last detail even suggested he might have been the American who was going around London museums offering cash for uterus specimens. However, he was a known pederast, with more interest in adolescent boys than in women, and he was less of a doctor than a quack, known for peddling cure-all elixirs. Certainly he could not have committed the Mary Jane Kelly murder, which occurred while he was in police custody, and the authorities did not seem all that interested in him as a suspect, showing little concern that he had skipped bail and fled the country. Regardless, American law enforcement and press hounded him for much of his life, and no further evidence of his being a murderer was ever uncovered. But this did not stop him from being featured as the chief suspect in books and documentaries that would appear in the 1990s. And this is typical of many Ripperologist theories. They resurrect some old suspect long exonerated, whom law enforcement at the time had little reason to believe was the killer, and dig deeper to insinuate there might have been more there. So Charles Allen Lechmere, the market porter who discovered the first victim, was transformed into a Ripper suspect because of research that, while he claimed to have only been with the body for a few minutes, the route he typically took suggested he was with her around nine minutes, as if people can’t have a poor sense of time or consider less than ten minutes to be a “few minutes.” And cases of mistaken identity often lead Ripperologists to new suspects. Take for example, the Leather Apron debacle, which led to two different cases of mistaken identity already mentioned in part one, Pizer and Piggott. Ripperologists took this further. The name of Macnaghten’s escaped lunatic, Kosminski, led Ripperologist Martin Fido to conclude that Macnaghten had meant David Cohen, whom he imagined was actually the false name of another person named Kaminsky, and that this was the real Leather Apron. And if that weren’t convoluted enough, over the course of Fido’s research, one red herring was another Jew who had been institutionalized named Hyam Hyams, and though Fido eliminated him has a suspect, later Ripperologists latched onto him as Jack the Ripper. It is a cannibalistic process, where Ripperologists pore over the extensive literature looking for figures that haven’t been focused on recently in order to build new theories and sell books. In a way, these Ripperologists are like the Ripper themselves, stalking these dark and well-trod avenues for victims of their own.

Colorful Ripper suspect Francis Tumblety.

As the murders and the murderer faded into the past but refused to be forgotten, the field of Ripperology was born, and Ripperologists and their theories had credibility issues from the start. Mostly those who wrote about Jack the Ripper were journalists and police who had worked the investigation and wrote about their theories in later memoirs, but arguably the first Ripperologist proper was Leonard Matters, an Australian-born British politician. In his 1929 book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, he told a story he had supposedly learned while living in Buenos Aires about a West End surgeon whose son had visited a number of sex workers and come down with a venereal disease that caused him to deteriorate and die. This surgeon, which Matters gave the pseudonym Dr. Stanley, apparently then committed the Ripper murders to enact vengeance for his son’s fate, and after he killed Mary Jane Kelly, he fled to Argentina, where he would confess everything on his deathbed. Matters presents the story as a rumor and one he cannot confirm, using no real names, but claims that his inquiries turned up some corroborating evidence for it, such as the confession being printed in a Spanish-language newspaper. Others who have tried to investigate this story, however, have turned up nothing, and the consensus is that Matters made it up to sell his book. It was the first such book to present a novel solution and suspect, and this would end up being a common, even an expected feature of future Ripperologist works, many of which would not shrink from falsifying their theories. Take, for example, the theory that a Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick, was Jack the Ripper. This individual lived and died having never been connected to the crimes. The only thing of note about his life was that his wife slowly poisoned him to death with arsenic. But about 50 years later, an unemployed Liverpudlian made headlines when he came into possession of Maybrick’s diary, in which he confessed to being Jack the Ripper. Suspicion of a hoax was immediate, since the story of how he’d come into possession of the diary kept changing. Tests of its ink did not immediately prove it a fake, but later tests for a certain preservative did indicate its ink was more modern. Moreover, skeptics pointed to factual inconsistencies in its contents proving its inauthenticity, and document experts came to believe the handwriting style was inconsistent with Victorian norms. Finally, two years later, its owner confessed to having forged it in order to make money. Nevertheless, 8 years later, in 2003, a Ripperologist still had no qualms about relying on it as evidence that Maybrick was not only the Ripper, but also the Servant Girl Annihilator, an Austin, Texas serial killer, and in 2015, yet another Ripperologist relied on this known forgery in a book claiming Maybrick’s brother was the real Ripper. So we see that Ripperologists are a parasitic kind of researcher. Rather than practicing true empiricism, building on what has been genuinely learned in previous investigations, they recycle again and again long disproven theories, tweaking them to create new suspects, casting doubt on facts and muddying the waters entirely.

More than one theory, in fact, has rested on documents that appear to be hoaxes. In 1923, a French journalist, William Le Queux wrote in his memoirs that he had seen an unfinished manuscript written by Rasputin about “Great Russian Criminals,” in which Rasputin named a certain Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, revealing that he was actually an agent of the Russian Secret Police living undercover in London, and that he had committed the Ripper atrocities for the sole purpose of creating unrest and discrediting Scotland Yard, which if it were true was definitely accomplished. However, it turns out that the source of this information, named in the manuscript, was a known liar and Russian provocateur who had only been three years old when the murders took place. As in other cases, however, the unreliability of this manuscript did not stop later Ripperologists from weaving elaborate theories around it. In 1959, historian Donald McCormick wrote his own Ripper book, claiming to have confirmed aspects of the Pedachenko story, suggesting that this Russian spy was actually a double or doppelganger for the other well-known suspect, Seweryn Kłosowski, and occasionally assumed that suspect’s identity. However, his sources were dubious, especially his principal source, the purported papers of Dr. Dutton, the aforementioned individual who claimed to have matched up the Ripper’s handwriting. In fact, the manuscript of Dutton’s book on Jack the Ripper, which was McCormick’s principal source, is now lost, if it ever existed, surviving now only in what McCormick claims to have read in it when he was supposedly allowed to examine it in 1932, and it appears, based on historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, that McCormick’s claims about it were a fiction. Indeed, much of his career was tainted by accusations of fraud and hoaxes cooked up to sell his books. And this too muddies the waters, making it hard to separate fact from fiction in the case of Jack the Ripper. For example, McCormick’s claims about Dr. Thomas Dutton affect numerous other theories. Many theories about the killer surround the handwriting of the letters signed Jack the Ripper, and the From Hell letter, for example. I can look at these letters myself and see quite plainly that they do not match, the From Hell letter being nearly illegible, the letter to the medical examiner who studied the kidney mailed with it more legible but blocky and awkward, and the two previous correspondence, the original Dear Boss letter and the Saucy Jack postcard, not matching in a very obvious way in that the cursive letters of the former mostly flow together and connect while that of the latter are mostly written as separate characters. Yet the idea of the handwriting matching largely persists because McCormick claimed Dutton had determined it did, through microphotography. He even claimed that Dutton believed the Goulston Street graffito matched and that he had photographed it as well, even though there is no evidence of such photographs ever being taken before the message was erased. And the simple fact that microphotography didn’t exist at the time seems to prove that all of these claims are totally apocryphal.

William Le Queux, originator of the Pedachenko story.

The Pedachenko story was not the only dubious Jack the Ripper theory that descended into baseless conspiracy claims, either. Many were the theories that there must have been some kind of cover-up for the murders not to have been solved. For example, there was James Kelly, who had murdered his wife in 1883 and then escaped from Broadmoor Asylum early in 1888. Police took an early interest in him as the killer but eventually eliminated him, and more than one Ripperologist claims that this could only be a cover-up, that the police were hiding the killer’s known identity for fear it made them look incompetent. This seems hard to believe, though, since they already looked incompetent, and revealing that they knew the identity of the killer might actually have made them look more competent, even if they were unable to capture him. Similarly, Thomas Cutbush, whom newspapers were suggesting was the Ripper and which theory Melville Macnaghten wrote his memo to argue against, was the nephew of a police superintendent, leading Ripperologists to again cry police cover-up. Then there is the Masonic conspiracy theory, which centered around the Goulston Street graffito, which again, we only have conflicting reports about since, despite what McCormick claims, no known photographs exist of it. It centered on the reported spelling of the word “Juwes,” which of course was odd. One claim had it that this was the Yiddish spelling, and thus it further implicated the Jewish community in Whitechapel. But that was untrue. Other claims had it that there was no language or dialect in which this was a typical spelling, and this would lead to the claim that it was actually a reference to Masonic lore, in which three apprentice masons names Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum murder the legendary Master Mason Hiram Abiff. To further corroborate this theory, it was pointed out that the victims’ mutilations, the cutting of the throat, the disembowelment, and even specifically the placing of the viscera over the victims’ shoulders, was exactly the same as the secret penalties of Freemasonry. In Masonic ritual initiation, one swears that if they betray the order, there will be “the penalties of having their throats cut from ear to ear” and of having their “vitals…thrown over [their] left shoulder.” Well, this sounds quite damning until you look at it more closely. First, it is a stretch to identify the word Juwes with Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum. A more rational explanation is that it was the French word for Jews, “Juives,” and the “I” and “v,” joined together perhaps in cursive, looked like a “w.” Second, the Masonic initiation ceremony also talks about the ripping out of tongues, which wasn’t done to the victims, and in fact, it speaks of the “left breast [being] torn open” and the “heart and vitals [being] taken from thence” to be thrown over the shoulder, so it doesn’t appear to be referring to disembowelment at all. Lastly, it just doesn’t make sense as a coherent conspiracy. This penalty was symbolic, first off, and it would not have been enacted against some random sex workers. Women weren’t allowed to be Freemasons, and thus weren’t subject to the penalty, which again, was just a ritual symbol. Freemasonry was so common and popular among men in the late 19th century that, actually, knowledge of its lore and rituals was not really “secret,” per se, and even if the killer was using some Masonic symbolism, it really only indicated that the police should be searching for a maniac who had some passing familiarity with Masonic ritual. It would not have been evidence of a Masonic conspiracy.

The theories of Ripperologists are too numerous for me to address in a single episode. Indeed, the principal supporter of the Masonic conspiracy, Stephen Knight, who has named specific Masonic conspirators who, embarrassingly, weren’t actually Freemasons, is also responsible for a far larger conspiracy theory surrounding the Ripper murders than just this Masonic theory. His “final solution” goes all the way to the top, to a royal cover-up, and implicates numerous individuals, all of whom have been named themselves in derivative Ripper theories by other Ripperologists. It's so convoluted that I won’t delve into it here, but patrons of the podcast on Patreon will hear a full exclusive about the theory. Ripperologists go to sometimes ridiculous lengths to find new and interesting suspects. For example, one claim names Oscar Wilde’s lover as the Ripper, asserting that Wilde knew it and that his classic story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, revealed the truth. Another theory had it that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was the real culprit. Yet another accuses Vincent Van Gogh. And no matter how unlikely their theories might be, as we have seen with the various forgeries and hoaxes they produce, these authors will not shrink from concocting evidence for their books. Sometimes it even has the cast of legitimate science to it. For example, one suspect highlighted by the hoaxer Donald McCormick, and later folded into the conspiracy theories of Stephen Knight, was Walter Sickert, a German artist about whom I’ll be speaking in detail in the forthcoming patron exclusive. In the early 2000s, popular crime novelist Patricia Cornwell claimed that using a DNA profile supposedly taken from the Ripper letters, which again, were probably not even written by the killer, she was able to match his DNA to that of Sickert, using a profile likewise taken from one of his letters. Scholarly analysis of her claims casts doubt not only on the legitimacy of the DNA profiles she acquired and their comparison, but also on the suspect of Sickert, based on evidence that he wasn’t even in England at the time of the killings. In the end, every single suspect put forward can be either irrefutably eliminated or the case against them suffers from a distinct lack of concrete evidence, relying only on circumstance, opportunity, and rumor. So despite what many Ripperology books may claim, nothing has been solved, and this, perhaps the most famous murder mystery in history, is still as shrouded in uncertainty as ever.

Jack the Ripper - Part Two: Ripperology

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