7 August: Jack the Ripper

On this date in 1888 Jack the Ripper claimed his first known victim. For three months he murdered and mutilated prostitutes in London's East End. He was never caught.

1. There are five murders generally assumed to have been carried out by Jack the Ripper; those of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly who are known as the "canonical five" between 31 August and 9 November 1888. However, as many as eleven different murders in the area were included in the investigation, including that of Martha Tabram, killed on 7 August 1888.
2. The name "Jack the Ripper" came from a letter from someone claiming to be the killer, which was printed in newspapers at the time. The author of the letter signed himself as "Jack the Ripper" and the name stuck.
3. Police at the time referred to him as "the Whitechapel Murderer" or "Leather Apron".
4. There were actually hundreds of letters from people claiming to be the killer, mostly dismissed as hoaxes, including the one mentioned above. At the time, cheap newspapers and magazines were gaining prominence and there is a theory that the newspapers composed the letters themselves in order to sell more copies. Certainly Jack the Ripper was the first serial killer to get publicity of that magnitude. One of the letters was attached to a box containing half a human kidney preserved in ethanol. Eddowes' left kidney had been removed by the killer. The writer claimed that he "fried and ate" the missing kidney half. With string beans and a good chianti? It didn't say.
5. Typically, the victims had had their throats cut and their bodies mutilated in a way which led to the belief that the Ripper was a surgeon. Or a butcher. Even Queen Victoria had an opinion. She thought it must be a butcher or cattle drover on one of the cattle boats that plied between London and mainland Europe, docking in London on a Thursday or Friday and leaving on Sunday. The killings took place at weekends and Whitechapel was close to the London Docks. The police looked into it but there was no one boat docked in London at the times of all the murders, nor any transfer of crew between the boats that could implicate anyone.
6. The police investigation proceeded not unlike it would today with the collection of forensic material, house to house inquiries and interviewing of suspects. More than 2,000 people were interviewed, "upwards of 300" people were investigated, and 80 people were detained. However, they were all ruled out and Jack the Ripper was never caught.
7. The police weren't the only people looking for him. A group of volunteer citizens in London's East End called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee weren't satisfied with the way the official investigation was going, and so they took to the streets looking for suspicious looking people. They petitioned the government to raise a reward for information about the killer, and hired private detectives.
8. A Jack the Ripper Museum opened in Cable Street, Whitechapel in 2015. Founded by Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe. its exhibits include the whistle used by police constable Edward Watkins to summon help when he discovered the body of Catherine Eddowes, another victim, PC Watkins' notebook, Handcuffs and truncheon and a recreation of the police station in Leman Street where detectives attempted to identify the murderer. There is, however, no waxwork figure of Jack the Ripper at Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors because they have a policy of not making models of people unless they know what that person looked like. Instead, he is shown as a shadow.
9. Because the perp was never caught, speculation has always been rife about whodunnit. Suspects have included: Seweryn Kłosowski, "the borough poisoner", hanged in 1903 for poisoning three of his wives and who'd been living in Whitechapel and working as a barber at the time of the murders; John Pizer, coincidentally known as "Leather Apron". He had a prior conviction for a stabbing offence, but had alibis for at least two of the murders; Thomas Neill Cream, a doctor specialising in abortions who was hanged for poisoning the husband of his mistress - it's alleged his last words were "I am Jack the..." but police officials who attended his execution never mentioned this; Thomas Hayne Cutbush, a medical student sent to Lambeth Infirmary in 1891 after stabbing a woman in the bum. He was thought to de suffering from delusions caused by syphilis; Frederick Bailey Deeming, who murdered his first wife and four children in Rainhill near St. Helens, Lancashire, in 1891. He emigrated to Australia with his second wife, and murdered her as well. He boasted that he was Jack the Ripper, but had watertight alibis in that he was in prison or abroad when the Ripper murders happened.
10. Writers have been coming up with theories about who Jack the Ripper was ever since. Fictional suspects have included William Withey Gull, physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria; Sir John Williams obstetrician to Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Beatrice; The Duke of Clarence and Avondale; and even Lewis Carroll. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went so far as to suggest that it wasn't Jack the Ripper at all, but Jill the Ripper - a woman committed the murders. Jill the Ripper may have been, or posed as, a midwife to gain the trust of her victims. It wouldn't have been unusual for a midwife to have blood on her clothes so she wouldn't have been suspected. Another similar theory was proposed by author John Morris, who pointed the finger at Sir John Williams' wife, Lizzie, who was sent mad by her inability to have children and carried out frenzied attacks on women who could.