In the autumn of 1888 a killer worked a few streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, in the East End of London, and was never caught. Five murders are generally treated as his: Mary Ann Nichols on August 31, Annie Chapman on September 8, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes within an hour of each other on September 30, and Mary Jane Kelly on November 9. All five were poor women who took casual money from men. All were killed at night within about a mile of each other. Their throats were cut, and in every case but Stride's, where the killer appears to have been interrupted, the bodies were opened and organs taken. The Metropolitan Police file on the Whitechapel murders covers eleven killings between 1888 and 1891, and which of them belong to one hand has been disputed ever since.
The name arrived by post. A letter to the Central News Agency dated September 25 and signed Jack the Ripper was passed to Scotland Yard, and its publication after the double murder of Stride and Eddowes fixed the name on the case. Most researchers regard it as a journalist's invention, and the magazine's own account puts it on Frederick Best of The Star, a claim that has been repeated for decades without ever being proven. A second item, the From Hell letter sent to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October, arrived with half a human kidney. It is the one piece of correspondence some historians still take seriously.
The investigation was run by the Metropolitan Police in Whitechapel and the City of London force in Mitre Square, with the two forces sharing little. There was no forensic science to apply, no fingerprinting, and no reliable description. Hundreds of men were questioned. The suspects named in surviving official papers are Montague John Druitt, a barrister who drowned himself weeks after the last murder, Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber committed to an asylum, and Michael Ostrog, a con man, all three listed in Sir Melville Macnaghten's 1894 memorandum. Everything since has been argument. The painter Walter Sickert, Queen Victoria's grandson Prince Albert Victor, and the Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick have all been proposed, and none of the cases has held up under examination.
What survived best was the picture. The top hat, the cape and the Gladstone bag came from the press of the day and from film, notably Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger in 1927, which cast the killer as a gentleman and set the template every adaptation has followed. The Star, a new paper running on tabloid instincts, sold two hundred thousand copies a day on the murders and once paid libel damages to a Jewish bookmaker it had named as the killer. The mythology outgrew the case within a generation.
The murders remain unsolved. The women are steadily better remembered than they were, and the suspects keep coming.