Jack the Ripper

English murderer
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Jack the Ripper, pseudonymous murderer of at least five women, all prostitutes, in or near the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, between August and November 1888. The case is one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of English crime.

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Some dozen murders between 1888 and 1892 have been speculatively attributed to Jack the Ripper, but five are considered canonical: Mary Ann Nichols (found August 31), Annie Chapman (found September 8), Elizabeth Stride (found September 30), Catherine Eddowes (found September 30), and Mary Jane Kelly (found November 9). All but one of Jack the Ripper’s victims were killed while soliciting customers on the street. In each instance the victim’s throat was cut, and the body was usually mutilated in a manner indicating that the murderer had at least some knowledge of human anatomy. On one occasion half of a human kidney, which may have been extracted from a murder victim, was mailed to the police. The authorities also received a series of taunting notes from a person calling himself Jack the Ripper and purporting to be the murderer. Strenuous and sometimes curious efforts were made to identify and trap the killer, all to no avail. A great public uproar over the failure to arrest the murderer was raised against the home secretary and the London police commissioner, who resigned soon afterward.

The case has retained its hold on the popular imagination, in part because known instances of serial murder were much rarer at the time than they are today. Jack the Ripper has provided themes for numerous literary and dramatic works. Perhaps the most notable was the horror novel The Lodger (1913) by Marie Adelaide Lowndes, which inspired numerous films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). More than 100 books about the case have been published, many of which offer conjectures as to the true identity of the murderer and the circumstances surrounding the crimes—including that the murders were part of an occult or Masonic plot and that the police were covering up for highly placed culprits, perhaps even members of the royal family. The best-known of these conspiracy-theory works is Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s award-winning graphic novel From Hell (1991–96), which was later adapted into a movie (2001). Many of these books, however, are based on fraudulent claims and documents. The most commonly cited suspects are Montague Druitt, a barrister and teacher with an interest in surgery who was said to be insane and who disappeared after the final murders and was later found dead; Michael Ostrog, a Russian criminal and physician who had been placed in an asylum because of his homicidal tendencies; and Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew and a resident of Whitechapel who was known to have a great animus toward women (particularly prostitutes) and who was hospitalized in an asylum several months after the last murder. Several notable Londoners of the era, such as the painter Walter Sickert and the physician Sir William Gull, also have been subjects of such speculation. The murder sites have become the locus of a macabre tourist industry in London.

John Philip JenkinsThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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