It was a cooler afternoon in London, and I had dressed for rain. Waterproof shoes, a rain coat, warm leggings. Because the tour would commence, rain or shine, sunny or cloudy, ready or not. Which, I fell into the “not” category on the knowledge front. Before setting out for this Jack the Ripper walking tour, I had only heard bits and pieces – The foggy streets of 1800s London. Some guy in a nice hat and cape. Some stabbing. Targeting certain types of women. And maybe left-handed (serial killing – another accusation flung at lefties…).
Yep, that’s about all I knew when my husband, a good friend, and I gathered at a rendezvous point just outside of the Whitechapel district. Our tour guide had already arrived, a very friendly looking fellow named Rob, sporting a Jack the Ripper t-shirt and a roller bag that held some projector equipment. Which meant there were going to be some visual aids. Oh boy…
I was nervous right from the off. Because as much as I love history, I leave the serial killer department alone for a reason. It’s just out of my league. A warped part of the human mind that I simply can’t spend too much time dwelling on. Yet there I stood in cloudy London, and it was time to depart for the tour. A romp through the twisting and turning alley ways in a part of London that felt shadowy. Eerie. As if the infamy of Jack the Ripper still clung to the buildings and streets.
I learned a lot on the tour. A lot more than I really wanted to. The first thing being that the Jack the Ripper murders were far more brutal and sickening than I ever realized. The details actually made my stomach turn. They are, in fact, far too ghastly for me to share here, not just to keep from getting sick, but out of respect to the women who lost their lives in such a sadistic manner. So fear not, there will be no murder-scene detail in this post.
What I did think was important to cover though, something that stood out to me as I walked, watched, and listened, was the real story. Because like any story of infamy, so much of the Jack the Ripper episode has been swallowed up by myths and legends. Twisted tales. Theories that somehow morphed into reality. Even our friendly tour guide admitted that his t-shirt, while perfectly on theme, presented a version of the notorious killer that was not real.
So, for a historical Halloween post, and armed with my newfound knowledge, I’m going to separate some of the myths from the reality. Or at least, I’m going to take a stab at it. (Ugh! I don’t know why I do it, I’m sorry). Ready or not… here we go.
The Look
This was a myth I myself fell victim to. Jack the Ripper is portrayed all over the place as a charming, suave, and dapper fellow dressed in his night club best. A suit, a cape, and a top hat. This was one of the first myths that our tour guide busted, while setting a historical tone for the time period (which was 1888). Rob painted a very realistic picture of the Whitechapel of this time – buildings crammed in too tight. Mazes of dark, narrow alley ways. Sweltering work factories. Smog so thick that at night, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Exhausted, homeless workers sleeping in coffin rooms or rope gangs (just as awful as it sounds). This was the London that Jack the Ripper operated in, and he would have dressed accordingly to lure his victims – work pants, a work shirt, suspenders, and a hat. But no top hat. Just a normal working-day hat.
The Victims
As the identity of Jack the Ripper has never been confirmed, the jury is out on how many people he actually killed. Especially since a shocking number of murders took place around this time (1888 to 1891), all put under the umbrella term of the “Whitechapel Murders.” There are eleven separate murders in this file, but it’s unlikely that all of them were the Ripper’s work. As I learned on my tour, there are an established “canonical five” murders that are, without a doubt, committed by Jack the Ripper, all of them taking place in 1888. In this article, we will focus only on those five. They are – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelley.
The Suspects
The most dizzying part of any investigation into Jack the Ripper, because there are currently over one hundred suspects, ranging from the chillingly believable to the utterly ridiculous (I mean… Lewis Carroll? That guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland??). Based on the nature of the killings, the fact that they occurred within a relatively short distance of each other, and the times they occurred, investigators were on the hunt for someone who lived locally, and who had at least some surgical knowledge. Others were inclined to blame a more affluent personality who ventured into Whitechapel from a wealthier surrounding district. With so little to go on, we may never know exactly who terrorized the streets of Whitechapel in 1888. And that’s why everyone under the sun has been named as a suspect at some point. Below are three of the theories that I found the most interesting. As to their truth – well, it’s up for debate.
–DNA Evidence?
In 2014, a British Author, Russell Edwards, claimed he had “unmasked” Jack the Ripper after decades upon decades of mystery. Using DNA evidence he had a scientist collect off a silk shawl allegedly found at one of the crime scenes (that of Catherine Eddowes), Edwards claimed that he had identified Jack the Ripper as one Aaron Kosminski. A Polish Immigrant and hairdresser who lived in Whitechapel at the time of the murders.
It wasn’t the first time Kosminski’s name had been tossed around by “Ripperologists” – those who have wholly dedicated themselves to the study of this case. In fact, the two top London investigators working on the frontlines to nab the killer mention a “Kosminski” in their files. Although, they do not provide a first name, which was destined to lead to some confusion later on. In these files, published years after the fact, they claim that Kosminski was positively ID’d as the Ripper by an eyewitness, but the case against him stalled when said eyewitness would not give them official testimony.
Sir Melville Macnaghten, a former Assistant Chief Constable of the London Metropolitan Police, and arguably the first Ripperologist, named Kosminski as one of the “Macnaghten’s Three” in his Ripper-famous 1894 Memoranda. In addition to other circumstantial evidence that he laid out (Kosminski lived in close proximity to the murders, was a prime suspect of the police, and showed overt signs of mental illness), Macnaghten claimed that Kosminski had a dangerous hatred towards women, especially working women. To top all this off, there is an official London record of an Aaron Kosminski who was declared clinically insane in 1891, and he spent the rest of his life in various asylums, where he died in 1919.
It certainly paints Kosminski in an unflattering light, but no physical evidence emerged until this alleged DNA sample of 2014, which seemed open and shut at first. I mean, DNA is pretty hard to argue with, right? Well, the first questions arose from scientific peers, who, in the absence of an official peer review, were curious as to what process was actually used to extract the DNA. Then questions started swirling around the shawl itself – and whether Eddowes, known to be very poor, would even own a silk shawl. The shawl, which had been passed around at various auctions and gone through an entire network of private owners, also might have been too tainted to get any accurate DNA from. Eventually, enough holes appeared in the theory that it was discredited by the scientific community, and another study conducted with the same shawl in 2019. The results were more or less inconclusive, given yet more questions and concerns raised about the accuracy of the extracting process.
So, while many past and present Ripperologists are quick to throw some shade at Aaron Kosminski, he has yet to be definitively proven, with DNA or otherwise, as Jack the Ripper.
–H.H. Holmes is Jack the Ripper?
I first heard this theory at a family dinner (ah – the things we discuss at family dinners). Even though I knew little of Jack the Ripper at the time, I did know something of H.H. Holmes, being a big fan of Mr. Erik Larson and his Devil in the White City.
I won’t go into the myriads of gruesome details here, but the basics are thus – H.H. Holmes (Herman Webster Mudgett) became infamous as America’s first serial killer. He is especially known for his alleged “Murder Castle” where, during the Chicago World’s Fair, he lured unsuspecting young women and subjected them to a twisted maze of secret rooms, torture chambers, starvation, burning, and other generally horrific ways to die. Holmes was caught and arrested in 1894, and at the time, he claimed a whopping twenty-seven victims. But modern-day experts claim this might be exaggerated. In fact, the whole story of the Murder Castle might be exaggerated, as a quick Wikipedia search will tell you.
However, interest in H.H. Holmes continues unabated, especially since his great-great grandson penned a book that accused him of being Jack the Ripper. Using diaries he inherited from Holmes, lawyer and writer Jeff Mudgett, in his popular book Bloodstains, places Holmes in London at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, details his crafty medical knowledge, shows similarities in handwriting samples, and points out that Holmes returning to the U.S. could explain why the Ripper murders abruptly stopped. It made for a compelling argument, enough so that it spawned a TV show and a whole hell of a lot of gossip. Yet my friend Rob the tour guide, and the internet at large, has some serious doubts.
The first big crack in the theory is that despite what any journals may claim, it’s unclear if Holmes was in London at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Several eyewitnesses place him in Chicago in 1888, overseeing construction of the hotel that would later be deemed a Murder Castle. Other experts, Rob included, pointed out the stark differences in the killing style. Where Jack the Ripper had a flare for throat-slashing and gory surgical mutilation, Holmes was more of a calculated killer who relied primarily on suffocation and quietly disposing of the bodies. Or luring people into an elaborate Murder Castle. Believe what you want. And finally, Rob and many modern experts point out the psyche behind the Holmes killings, assuming you can properly analyze the psyche of someone like that. Holmes was a con-man, who seemed more likely to kill people who got in the way of his cons. Whereas Jack the Ripper killed for the sadistic sake of killing.
All things considered, while the Holmes – Ripper theory continues to be a hot topic in the Ripperology world, many experts agree that it’s highly unlikely the two are connected. But it makes for some damn fine television.
–A Guilty Conscious?
This was another one of the theories mentioned on our walking tour. On December 31 of 1888, the body of Montague John Druitt was pulled out of the Thames River. He had been there over a month, and his death was a suspected suicide.
And he might have been Jack the Ripper.
The evidence against Druitt is more than a little compelling. He came from a middle-class family of doctors, which gave him access to a plethora of medical knowledge. He also had quite a background of mental illness in his family. And our friend Melville Macnaghten (see “DNA Evidence” above) gave Druitt the top spot in his famous “Macnaghten’s Three” Memoranda. There is some evidence that Druitt’s own family firmly believed he was the Ripper, and that he killed himself out of guilt and/or to escape coming justice. Which would certainly explain why the murders stopped when they did.
While the circumstantial evidence against Druitt is interesting, it’s far from a smoking gun. Or a bloody knife. While Druitt did come from a family of doctors, he wasn’t one himself – instead being a barrister and assistant schoolmaster in Blackheath. As for his mental soundness, he was well enough to continue in both his law practice and his position at the school until just before his suicide, despite the Whitechapel murders going on all around him. He didn’t start to crack until he was let go, for unclear reasons, from his post at the school in November 1888, and many modern experts think this is the reason he killed himself. There is also little to no evidence linking Druitt to Whitechapel.
Was Druitt Jack the Ripper? He might have been, or he might not have been. That’s about where history has landed on the subject.
*****
As much as I’d like to keep going, especially since there are some truly baffling suspect theories out there, there’s only so much sorting out we can do in a blog post, and my stomach is starting to turn again. But you might like to know that some good did come out of this terrible nightmare. In the wake of the Ripper scourge – attention was drawn to the deplorable conditions in Whitechapel, and efforts were made at improving them. People became more aware of things like public safety and better working conditions. More worth was put on human life.
As it always should be, because each life has incredible value. As for the Rippers out there… what makes a person do such a terrible thing? What goes wrong in their minds? It’s a question I find myself asking often enough in this age of school shootings and gun violence. While I don’t have the answers there, not even close, I do think it’s become quite obvious, as it might have to the people of London in 1888, that we need to take better care of those around us. To pay closer attention and reach our hands out more. Bring a human touch into a virtual world. Because it makes a difference. It always makes a difference.
So, be good to each other out there. Be safe. Be human. And always remember the buddy system.
SOURCES
The Jack the Ripper Tour — click here to book your own!
Jack-the-Ripper.org
Wikipedia
All photos taken in Whitechapel by M.B. Henry — for more photography, click here.
Are you a Ripperologist? Do you have some theories? Please share them in the comments below!