For more than a century the five women killed in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888 were described, in the police files and in almost everything written since, as prostitutes. The research of the last few years, most prominently the historian Hallie Rubenhold's 2019 book The Five, does not support it. Of the five, only Mary Jane Kelly was certainly working in the sex trade at the time she died, and there is no evidence that Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman or Catherine Eddowes ever did so at all.
What they had in common was not their work. Four of the five were homeless, in the language of the time houseless, sleeping in doorways and stairwells and on the street because they could not raise the fourpence for a bed. All five were drinking heavily. All five had been knocked out of ordinary life by something ordinary: a marriage that failed, a child who died, a husband's allowance that stopped when he did.
Mary Ann Nichols was forty-three. She was called Polly. She had married a printer, William Nichols, and had five children, and when the marriage ended she moved between lodging houses and workhouses for the rest of her life. In the spring of 1888 she took a job as a domestic servant in Wandsworth and wrote to her father that she was doing well. She left it within weeks, having stolen clothing worth a few pounds.
Annie Chapman was forty-seven. She had lived respectably in Windsor as the wife of a coachman, in a household with a servant. Her daughter Emily died of meningitis at twelve. Another child was disabled. The marriage collapsed, and Annie moved to London on an allowance of ten shillings a week from her husband. He died on Christmas Day 1886 and the allowance stopped. She was dead within two years.
Elizabeth Stride was forty-four. She was Swedish, born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter outside Gothenburg, and she had been registered there as a prostitute in her twenties before coming to London in 1866 and marrying a carpenter named John Stride. For years she told people she had lost her husband and two of her children in the sinking of the Princess Alice on the Thames in 1878. It was not true. It was, in all likelihood, a story that got her charity.
Catherine Eddowes was forty-six, and her friends called her Kate. She could read and write, which most of the women around her could not, and she and Thomas Conway made a living for years selling chapbooks and gallows ballads at hangings and fairs. She had the letters TC tattooed on her forearm. She had spent the late summer of 1888 hop-picking in Kent and had walked back to London with a man named John Kelly.
Mary Jane Kelly was about twenty-five and almost nothing about her early life can be verified. She said she was Irish, that she had married young and been widowed, and that she had spent time in a Paris brothel. She was the youngest of the five by eighteen years, the only one who was certainly a prostitute, and the only one killed indoors.
Between August 31 and November 9, 1888 all five were murdered within about a mile of each other in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Nichols was found in Buck's Row, Chapman in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Stride in Dutfield's Yard and Eddowes in Mitre Square within an hour of each other on the night of September 30, and Kelly in her bed at 13 Miller's Court.
Each had her throat cut. In every case but Stride's, where the killer seems to have been disturbed, the abdomen was opened and organs were taken. Kelly, killed behind a locked door with time to work, was mutilated past recognition.
What was not found is as telling as what was. There was no sign of a struggle at any of the scenes. Nobody heard a scream. Every one of the women was lying down when she was attacked, and there was no evidence of sexual assault on any of them. Four of the five habitually slept outdoors. The likeliest reading of that evidence, and it is not the one the Victorian police worked from, is that he killed them where they lay asleep rather than meeting them as a client.
The name came from a letter. On September 25 the Central News Agency received a document signed Jack the Ripper, and after the double murder five days later the press printed it and the name stuck to the case permanently. Most researchers now believe a journalist wrote it. Several hundred more letters followed and nearly all are dismissed. The exception is the package sent to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October, addressed From Hell, which arrived with half a human kidney.
The investigation had nothing to work with. There was no fingerprinting, no blood typing and no useful description. Two forces were involved and did not cooperate: the Metropolitan Police had four of the murders and the City of London force had Mitre Square. Hundreds of men were questioned. Nobody was ever charged with any of it.
Three names appear in the surviving official papers, all in a confidential memorandum written by Sir Melville Macnaghten in 1894, six years after the fact and by a man who had not joined the force until 1889. They are Montague John Druitt, a barrister who drowned himself in the Thames weeks after the last murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber committed to an asylum; and Michael Ostrog, a confidence trickster later shown to have been in a French prison at the time.
Everything after that is argument. Walter Sickert the painter, Prince Albert Victor, the Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick and his brother Michael have all been named, and none of the cases has survived examination.
Kosminski is the one that will not go away, and the reason is a shawl.
In 2007 a researcher named Russell Edwards bought at auction a length of fabric said to have been taken from the scene of Catherine Eddowes's murder. He commissioned testing, and in 2014 announced that Kosminski was the killer. A peer-reviewed paper followed in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2019, by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of the University of Leeds, reporting a match between material on the shawl and living descendants of both Eddowes and Kosminski's sister Matilda. Edwards called it a hundred percent match.
Two problems have been put to it and neither has been answered.
The first is what was tested. Mitochondrial DNA passes down the maternal line unchanged, which means it cannot identify a person. It can only say that the material is consistent with everyone descended in the female line from a common ancestor, a group that may run to thousands of people. A mitochondrial match is not an identification and was never capable of being one.
The second is the shawl itself. Its chain of custody is broken and cannot be reconstructed. Inspector Collard of the City police cataloged what was at Mitre Square and recorded no shawl, either in his reports or at the inquest. Louhelainen has himself acknowledged the broken provenance and defects in the analysis, and has noted that Kosminski was a barber whose DNA could have reached the cloth by ordinary contact.
The claim has nonetheless produced a live legal question. Karen Miller, Eddowes's great-great-great-granddaughter, has applied for a fresh inquest into her ancestor's death, supported by descendants of other victims and by Kosminski's own family. In Britain that requires the consent of the Attorney General. Sir Michael Ellis refused in 2022 for want of sufficient new evidence, and in January 2025 Edwards's lawyers renewed the application to his successor, Richard Hermer, arguing that the new material would have justified a coroner in naming Kosminski for all five deaths. Hermer left office in July 2026 without any decision having been announced. The East London coroner, Nadia Persaud, has said she would not oppose it while doubting it would change the original verdict.
Miller's reason for pursuing it is the same objection the case has attracted for a century. The name has been sensationalized, she said; it has all been about him, and people have forgotten the victims, who got no justice at the time.
The mythology arrived early and it has never been dislodged. The top hat, the cape and the Gladstone bag are not from any witness statement; they come from the illustrated press and then from film, and specifically from Hitchcock's The Lodger in 1927, which made the killer a gentleman and set the pattern for everything after. The Star, a new halfpenny paper with tabloid instincts, sold two hundred thousand copies a day on the murders and had to pay libel damages to a Jewish bookmaker it named as the killer.
The Metropolitan Police file on the Whitechapel murders covers eleven killings between 1888 and 1891. Which of them belong to one hand has been disputed since the files were opened, and the figure of five is a later convention rather than a police finding.
The murders have never been solved and it is unlikely now that they can be. What has changed is the other half of the record. For most of the time since 1888 the five women existed in the literature as bodies in a sequence, described by their supposed trade and not much else. They were a printer's wife, a coachman's wife, a Swedish farm girl, a woman who sold ballads at hangings and could read, and a young woman from Ireland whose real name may not have been Mary Jane Kelly.