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 recent years, most prominently the historian Hallie Rubenhold's 2019 book The Five, does not support that. Of the five, Mary Jane Kelly was the only one earning her living through sex work at the time of her death. Elizabeth Stride had been registered as a prostitute in Sweden in her youth and later earned money that way at times in London. As Smithsonian magazine summarized Rubenhold's findings, there is no evidence tying Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman or Catherine Eddowes to prostitution at all.
What they had in common was not their work. Most of them were homeless and slept rough. All five drank. All five had been knocked out of ordinary life by ordinary things: a marriage that failed, a child who died, a husband's allowance that stopped when he did. "It is only by bringing these women back to life," Rubenhold wrote, "that we can silence the Ripper and what he represents."
This is their story, and the story of the hunt that failed to find the man who killed them.
The East End of 1888 was a district of docks, sweatshops, markets and common lodging houses, where a bed for the night cost fourpence and anyone who could not find it walked the streets until morning. Some lodging houses held hundreds of people. Crossingham's on Dorset Street catered for about three hundred. Much of the district was home to Jewish immigrants, and the autumn would show how close to the surface the hostility toward them lay.
Violence against women in the district was common enough that the first deaths of 1888 did not look like the start of anything. On April 3, Easter Monday night, Emma Smith, a woman of about forty-five who lived at 18 George Street, was attacked by a gang of three or four young men near Brick Lane. She walked back to her lodging house, was taken to the London Hospital, and died there. Before she lost consciousness she described her attackers. On August 7, the body of Martha Tabram was found on a stairway landing in George Yard Buildings, stabbed thirty-nine times. Both deaths were later folded into the police file on the "Whitechapel murders." Most researchers today do not believe either was the work of the man who came to be called Jack the Ripper.
Mary Ann Walker was born on August 26, 1845, in Dawes Court, off Shoe Lane near Fleet Street, the daughter of Edward Walker, a locksmith who became a blacksmith. On January 16, 1864, at St. Bride's Church, she married William Nichols, a printer's machinist, and they had five children between 1866 and 1879. For years they lived with her father and then in the Peabody Buildings in Stamford Street.
The marriage broke apart several times and for the last time in 1881. Her husband said she had left him "four or five times, if not six"; her father blamed the husband's affair with a nurse. In 1882 William stopped paying her an allowance, arguing that she was living with another man. From then on Polly moved between the Lambeth Workhouse, its infirmary, her father's house in Camberwell and, for about four years, the home of a blacksmith named Thomas Dew. In December 1887 she was found sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square.
In May 1888 the Lambeth Workhouse placed her as a domestic servant with Samuel and Sarah Cowdry, a teetotal, churchgoing couple in Wandsworth. She wrote to her father that she was settled in her new place, that the house was "a grand place inside, with trees and gardens back and front," and that her employers were "very nice people." She asked him to answer soon. He did, and heard nothing back. About two months later she left, taking clothing worth three pounds ten shillings. By August she was in Wilmott's lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, sharing a room with four other women, and then at the White House on Flower and Dean Street.
Her last night was wet and stormy, the sky lit red by two dock fires. Around 1:30 on the morning of Friday, August 31, the deputy at Thrawl Street turned her out of the kitchen because she did not have her bed money. She asked him to keep a bed for her and pointed to a little black bonnet no one had seen before. "I'll soon get my doss money," she said. "See what a jolly bonnet I've got now." At about 2:30 she met her roommate Emily Holland at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road. Polly was very drunk. She said she had had her lodging money three times that day and drunk it away, and that it would not be long before she was back. The two women talked for a few minutes, and Polly walked off east along Whitechapel Road.
At about 3:40, Charles Cross, a carman walking to work, saw a figure lying in the gateway of a stable yard in Buck's Row, a narrow street lit by a single gas lamp. He called over another carman, Robert Paul. Paul thought he felt a faint heartbeat. The two men pulled down her skirts for decency and went to find a policeman, telling PC Jonas Mizen. In the meantime PC John Neil had come on her on his beat. Dr. Rees Llewellyn, called from nearby, judged that she had been dead only a few minutes. Her throat had been cut, and her abdomen had been wounded. Emma Green, who slept in the house next to the gateway, heard nothing all night.
The coroner, Wynne Baxter, opened the inquest on September 1, and it ran on and off until September 23. Polly was identified by Mary Ann Monk, who had known her in the Lambeth Workhouse, and then by her husband. At the inquest her father, who had called her a drunkard, said of her: "I don't think she had any enemies, she was too good for that." She was buried on September 6 at the City of London Cemetery at Little Ilford, in a polished elm coffin. Her father, her husband and her eldest son paid for the funeral.
Annie Eliza Smith was born in September 1841, the daughter of George Smith, a soldier in the Life Guards. On May 1, 1869, she married John Chapman, a coachman, and they lived in the mews of west London before moving to Windsor in 1881, where he worked as a domestic coachman. They had three children: Emily Ruth, born in 1870, Annie Georgina, born in 1873, and John Alfred, born in 1880. John was disabled and was sent to a home. Emily died of meningitis at twelve.
Annie and John separated in 1884 or 1885; both drank. He sent her ten shillings a week until he died of cirrhosis on Christmas Day 1886. When she heard of his death she cried. Her friend Amelia Palmer said that even two years later Annie seemed downcast when she spoke of her children, and that since her husband's death she seemed to have given up. She lived for a time with a sieve maker, and her neighbors called her "Annie Siffey." By the summer of 1888 she was staying at Crossingham's lodging house at 35 Dorset Street, selling crochet work and flowers, and seeing a bricklayer's mate named Edward Stanley at weekends. In late August she ran into her brother, Fountain Smith, on Commercial Road. She told him she was hard up, and he gave her two shillings.
In the first week of September she was ill and bruised from a fight at the lodging house with a woman named Eliza Cooper. She told Amelia Palmer she might go to the casual ward for a day or two, and Palmer gave her twopence for tea and warned her not to spend it on rum. On the afternoon of Friday, September 7, Palmer found her standing in Dorset Street. "It's no use my giving way," Annie said. "I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings."
At about 1:35 on the morning of September 8 she came back to Crossingham's, eating a baked potato, and climbed to the deputy's office. She did not have the money for her bed. The deputy, Timothy Donovan, told her she could find money for beer but not for a bed. "Never mind, Tim," she said. "I'll soon be back." She asked the night watchman to make sure bed 29 was kept for her, and walked off toward Spitalfields Market.
At 4:45 a man named John Richardson, on his way to work, sat on the steps in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street to trim his boot, and saw nothing unusual. At 5:30 a woman named Elizabeth Long saw a man and a woman talking outside the house. She heard the man say "Will you?" and the woman answer "Yes." Long saw only the man's back. A few minutes later Albert Cadosch, in the next yard, heard a woman's voice say "No!" and something fall against the fence. Shortly before six, John Davis, a carman who lived in the house, found Annie Chapman in the yard. Her throat had been cut and she had been mutilated. Three brass rings she wore were gone.
Dr. George Bagster Phillips told the inquest that she had been seriously ill with disease of the lungs and of the membranes of the brain, that she had been badly fed, and that there was no sign of a struggle. He believed the killer had shown anatomical knowledge, a view that would be argued over for the rest of the series. Baxter's inquest opened on September 10 and closed on September 26. Her relatives buried her early on September 14 at Manor Park, in secret, so that no crowd would gather. The plate on the coffin read "Annie Chapman, died Sept. 8, 1888, aged 48 years."
After Hanbury Street the newspapers had a villain ready. Since the start of September they had been printing stories about a man known as "Leather Apron," said to threaten and attack women in the district, and the stories carried a plain anti-Jewish edge. The man was John Pizer, a Jewish boot finisher who lived at 22 Mulberry Street. On the morning of September 10, Sergeant William Thick of H Division arrested him at home. The police seized five knives; the stains on them proved to be rust. Pizer had alibis for both nights, and the police confirmed them: on the night Nichols died he had been in a lodging house on Holloway Road, and from September 6 until his arrest he had stayed indoors on his brother's advice. He was released the next evening. On September 12 he gave evidence at the Chapman inquest, where the jury foreman said they considered him cleared. "I wish to vindicate my character to the whole world," Pizer said. He later accepted ten pounds in settlement from The Star, which had led the Leather Apron coverage.
Two police forces shared the murders. Buck's Row, Hanbury Street, Berner Street and Dorset Street lay in the Metropolitan Police district, most of it in H Division, Whitechapel. H Division was led by Superintendent Thomas Arnold, a Crimean War veteran who had served most of his career in the East End, though he was on leave during the Tabram and Chapman murders. Its detectives answered to Inspector Edmund Reid. Mitre Square, where the fourth canonical victim died, lay inside the square mile of the City of London and belonged to the City of London Police, whose acting commissioner was Major Henry Smith and whose detective department was headed by Inspector James McWilliam.
In early September, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson of Scotland Yard was placed in overall charge of the Metropolitan inquiry. Every report passed across his desk, and the commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, described him as the "eyes & ears of the Commissioner." On the ground the work was coordinated by Inspector Frederick Abberline, who had spent nearly a decade in H Division before moving to Scotland Yard in 1887 and who knew the district and its people. The new head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Robert Anderson, had taken the post at the end of August. On September 8, the morning Chapman died, he left for Switzerland on sick leave, and he did not return until early October.
Outside the police, the district organized itself. On September 10 local tradesmen met at the Crown pub on Mile End Road and formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, with George Lusk as chairman. Its leading members, the press reported, included a builder, a cigar maker, a tailor, a picture-frame maker and a publican. The Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, refused requests to offer a government reward, so the committee raised its own, and Samuel Montagu offered a hundred pounds of his own. The committee also hired two private detectives, Grand and Batchelor, who among other things questioned a fruit seller named Matthew Packer, whose story about selling grapes to a man and a woman on Berner Street is now treated as highly doubtful.
The name came from a letter. Dated September 25 and received at the Central News Agency on September 27, it was signed "Jack the Ripper." The agency at first treated it as a joke and passed it to Scotland Yard on September 29. After the double murder the next night the police had copies made public, and the name stuck. On the morning of October 1 the agency received a postcard in the same handwriting, smeared with what looked like blood, which referred to a "double event" and was published at once. Because it seemed to know of the night's events, it was long taken as a sign of authenticity. It does not prove that: news of the two murders was all over London by the afternoon of September 30, and the Victorian post ran collections even on Sundays. Both Sir Robert Anderson and Sir Melville Macnaghten later wrote that they believed the letters were the work of a journalist, and that is still the majority view. In 2009 the researcher Andrew Cook publicly named a journalist, Frederick Best, as the likely author of the first letter.
Elisabeth Gustafsdotter was born on November 27, 1843, on a farm called Stora Tumlehed in Torslanda parish, north of Gothenburg, Sweden. At sixteen she went into domestic service in Gothenburg. In March 1865 she was registered by the city police as a prostitute, and in April she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She was treated for venereal disease that autumn and released from police supervision in November. In February 1866 she applied to move to the Swedish parish in London.
On March 7, 1869, she married a carpenter, John Stride, and for some years they ran coffee shops in Poplar. After the pleasure steamer Princess Alice sank in the Thames in 1878 with the loss of hundreds of lives, she told people that her husband and children had drowned in it and that she had been kicked in the mouth climbing the mast to escape. None of it was true. Her husband died of heart disease in 1884, and the post-mortem examination after her death found no injury to her palate. From 1882 she lodged on and off at 32 Flower and Dean Street, and from 1885 she lived with a waterside laborer, Michael Kidney, in a relationship both of them described as stormy. Lodgers called her "Long Liz" and said she would do a good turn for anyone. She earned money by sewing and cleaning, and the Swedish Church gave her alms twice in September 1888.
Kidney last saw her on September 25. The next day she was back at 32 Flower and Dean Street, and that week the philanthropist Dr. Thomas Barnardo visited the lodging-house kitchen and found the women there frightened and talking about the murders. When he later viewed Stride's body he recognized her as one of them. On Saturday, September 29, she cleaned two rooms at the lodging house and was paid sixpence. Between seven and eight that evening she left, handing a friend, Catherine Lane, a piece of green velvet to look after until she came back.
In the hours that followed several people saw a woman they took to be her with a man on or near Berner Street. At 12:35 PC William Smith saw her opposite the International Working Men's Educational Club, a radical club whose members were largely immigrant workers, with a young man carrying a newspaper parcel. At about 12:45 a Hungarian immigrant, Israel Schwartz, turning into Berner Street, saw a man stop a woman in the gateway of Dutfield's Yard beside the club, pull at her and throw her down. She screamed three times, not very loudly. A second man stood across the street lighting a pipe, and the attacker called out "Lipski," the name of a Jewish man hanged in 1887 for a murder in nearby Batty Street. Schwartz, alarmed, walked away and then ran when he found himself followed.
At one o'clock Louis Diemschutz drove his pony and cart into Dutfield's Yard. The pony shied. Unable to see in the unlit yard, he probed with his whip, found a woman lying on the ground, and went into the club for help. Her throat had been cut, but there was no other injury. She was still holding a small packet of cachous, breath sweets, in her left hand. Diemschutz believed his arrival had disturbed the killer, and Macnaghten later took the same view. Baxter's inquest sat from October 1 to October 23. Stride was buried on October 6 at the East London Cemetery in Plaistow, at the expense of the parish.
Catherine Eddowes was born on April 14, 1842, at Graisley Green in Wolverhampton, one of a large family of a tinplate worker, George Eddowes. Around 1848 her father and uncle walked to London looking for work during a strike, and she went to a charity school in Bermondsey until her mother's death broke up the family. She was sent back to an aunt in Wolverhampton. Friends later described her as intelligent and scholarly, with a fierce temper.
In the early 1860s she left home with Thomas Conway, a former soldier, and for years they traveled the Midlands selling cheap printed books and gallows ballads; on one occasion she sold a ballad at the hanging of her own cousin at Stafford in 1866. She had the letters TC tattooed in blue ink on her left forearm. They never married but had three children, a daughter, Annie, and two sons. In 1881 she and Conway split. She moved into Cooney's lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street and met John Kelly, who worked around the markets. The deputy at Cooney's described her as "a very jolly woman, often singing," and said she was not in the habit of walking the streets. Kelly said the same.
Every year the couple went hop picking in Kent. In 1888 they picked at Hunton, near Maidstone, did not do well, and walked back to London, arriving on Friday, September 28, with almost nothing. The next morning they pawned a pair of Kelly's boots, Kate taking them into the shop under the name Jane Kelly, and spent the half crown on tea, sugar and food. That afternoon she told Kelly she would go to Bermondsey to see if her daughter could give her some money, and promised to be back by four. Her daughter had moved, and there is no sign that Kate found her.
At 8:30 that evening a City constable, Louis Robinson, found her lying drunk on the pavement outside 29 Aldgate High Street, a crowd around her. He took her to Bishopsgate Police Station, where, asked her name, she said "Nothing." She slept, and after midnight she was heard singing softly in her cell. At 12:55 the jailer, PC George Hutt, judged her sober. She gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly, of 6 Fashion Street, and asked the time. Too late, he told her, to get anything more to drink. "I shall get a damn fine hiding when I get home," she said, and on her way out the door: "Good night, old cock." She turned not toward Flower and Dean Street but back toward Aldgate.
At about 1:35, three men leaving a club in Duke Street, Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy and Harry Harris, saw a woman talking to a man at the corner of Church Passage, the narrow lane into Mitre Square. She had her hand on his chest, not as if pushing him away. Lawende later recognized the clothes as hers. He described the man as about thirty, with a fair mustache and a cloth cap, looking something like a sailor, but said he doubted he would know him again. At about 1:45, PC Edward Watkins, walking his regular beat, turned his lamp into the darkest corner of Mitre Square and found her.
The City police surgeon, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, found that she had died within the previous half hour, that her throat had been cut first, that there had been no struggle, and that she could have made no sound. Her face had been cut and her abdomen opened, and the left kidney had been taken. Brown thought the killer knew where the organs lay, though the question of medical skill was never settled. The City coroner, Samuel Langham, held the inquest at the Golden Lane mortuary from October 4 to October 11.
Her funeral on October 8 was nothing like the others. Thousands of people lined the route from Golden Lane to the cemetery at Little Ilford, and police from both forces kept order. Her four sisters, two nieces and John Kelly followed the hearse. A local vestryman paid for the funeral and the City remitted the burial fees. The plate read "Catherine Eddowes, died Sept. 30, 1888, aged 43 years." She was forty-six.
At 2:55 on the morning of September 30, a little over an hour after Eddowes was found, PC Alfred Long found a bloodstained piece of her apron in the doorway of a block of dwellings on Goulston Street, on a line from Mitre Square back toward the lodging houses of Spitalfields. Above it, in chalk, was a line of writing. The officers who saw it did not agree on the wording. Long's version reads "The Juews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing"; Chief Inspector Swanson's has "Juwes"; a City detective, Daniel Halse, recalled "The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing." The copy Warren sent to the Home Office spells the word "Jewes."
Whether the killer wrote it or it was already there has been argued ever since, and the argument cannot be settled, because by dawn it was gone. Inspector McWilliam of the City Police had ordered it photographed, and City officers proposed removing only the contentious word first. But Goulston Street lay in the Metropolitan district, and the decision was Warren's. The writing was wiped off at about 5:30. He explained himself to the Home Secretary in a report dated November 6. The street, he wrote, would soon fill with Jewish vendors and Christian buyers. Superintendent Arnold had reported that the house was likely to be wrecked if the writing stayed, and Warren, from what he saw himself, "entirely concurred." Leaving it covered, or keeping part of it for an hour until it could be photographed, would not do in "the excited state of the population in London generally at the time." "I do not hesitate myself to say," he wrote, "that if that writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost."
He had reason to think so. Arnold reported that since the Leather Apron arrest "a strong feeling" existed against Jews generally in the district. On October 13 the acting Chief Rabbi wrote to Warren about a newspaper claim that the spelling "Jewes" was Yiddish, warning that "in the present state of excitement it is dangerous to the safety of the poor Jews in the East."
The double murder changed the scale of the inquiry. The City and Metropolitan detectives met daily; McWilliam reported that he saw Swanson every day, and relations between the two forces were better than legend has it. In the City, a house-to-house inquiry ordered by Inspector Edward Collard found Lawende and his friends. In the Metropolitan district, Swanson's reports record a house-to-house search of the whole area between the City boundary, Commercial Street, the Great Eastern Railway and Buxton Street. Some 80,000 handbills were left with householders. More than 2,000 lodgers in the common lodging houses were questioned. About 80 people were detained at police stations while their statements were checked, and the movements of upward of 300 more were traced. Officers visited 76 butchers and slaughterers and checked the characters of everyone they had employed in the previous six months. The Thames Police inquired among the sailors on ships in the river and the docks. Even three men from the American Exhibition who called themselves cowboys were tracked down and accounted for. The paperwork ran to 994 dockets. None of it produced a suspect who could be charged.
Warren tried something else. He arranged trials of two bloodhounds, Barnaby and Burgho, belonging to a Scarborough breeder, Edwin Brough. On October 8 they tracked a man across Regent's Park and then on the leash through Hyde Park after dark, and the next morning Warren twice played the hunted man himself. The press mocked him. The police never bought the dogs, Brough eventually took them home, and the idea that they would be waiting at the next scene proved to be an illusion.
On October 16, George Lusk received at his home in Mile End a small parcel containing half a human kidney and a letter headed "From hell." It claimed the writer had taken the kidney from "one woman" and ended "Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk." Lusk thought it a hoax at first, but he had it examined. A doctor said it was half of a left human kidney, but could not say whether it came from a woman or how long it had been out of a body. The City Police photographed the letter later that month and sent it to Scotland Yard, after which it disappeared. Whether it came from the killer turns on whether the kidney came from Eddowes, which cannot now be tested.
Almost everything known about Mary Jane Kelly's early life comes from what she told Joseph Barnett, the man she lived with, and some of it is probably embellished. She said she was born in Limerick and grew up in Wales, where her father worked in an ironworks; that at about sixteen she married a collier named Davies, who was killed in a mine explosion; that she went to Cardiff and then, in 1884, to London, where she worked in a high-class brothel in the West End and went to Paris with a gentleman, did not like it, and came back. A former landlady remembered her as an excellent scholar. Others said she spoke fluent Welsh. Friends described her as tall, fair and well liked, quiet when sober and loud when drinking.
She met Barnett, a Billingsgate fish porter, on Commercial Street on Good Friday, April 8, 1887. At their second meeting they agreed to live together. Early in 1888 they took a single room, 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street, in the middle of the same lodging-house district where Chapman had lived. That summer Barnett lost his job, and Kelly went back on the streets. On October 30 they quarreled and he moved out, objecting, he said, to her letting other women sleep in the room on cold nights. He kept visiting her almost every day.
On the evening of Thursday, November 8, Barnett called between about 7:30 and 8 and found her with a neighbor, Lizzie Albrook. Albrook remembered that Kelly warned her, as she often did, against going the way she had gone: "Whatever you do don't you do wrong and turn out as I did." Kelly told her she was sick of the life and wished she had the money to go home to Ireland. At 11:45 another neighbor, Mary Ann Cox, followed her into the court with a stout, shabbily dressed man with a carroty mustache who was carrying a pail of beer. "Goodnight," Kelly said, "I am going to sing." For the next hour or more the court heard her singing "A Violet from Mother's Grave." When a neighbor wanted to go down and complain, her husband stopped her: "You leave the poor woman alone."
At about two in the morning a laborer named George Hutchinson met her near Flower and Dean Street. She asked to borrow sixpence; he had nothing. He said he then watched her walk into Miller's Court with a well-dressed man with a dark mustache, and that he waited outside for about forty-five minutes. Hutchinson did not come forward until the evening of November 12, the day the inquest opened. Abberline questioned him and wrote that he believed the statement was true. Researchers have doubted parts of it ever since. Around four, two women in the court heard a faint cry of "Oh, murder!" Neither paid much attention; the cry was common in the district.
At 10:45 on the morning of November 9, the landlord, John McCarthy, sent his assistant, Thomas Bowyer, to collect the overdue rent. Bowyer got no answer at the locked door, pushed aside the curtain at the window and saw her body on the bed. McCarthy ran to Commercial Street Police Station. The door was locked, and the police, under Warren's standing instruction that no scene be disturbed until the bloodhounds arrived, waited for dogs that never came. It was several hours before Superintendent Arnold had McCarthy break the door open with an axe handle. Kelly had been killed in her bed and mutilated with a thoroughness that had not been possible in the street. Her clothes were folded on a chair.
The inquest opened on November 12 at Shoreditch Town Hall before the coroner, Dr. Macdonald. The jury viewed her body at the mortuary and then filed through the room at Miller's Court by candlelight. Barnett and McCarthy, wanting her buried as a Catholic, delayed the funeral. She was buried on November 19 at St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone. No member of her family could be found to attend.
The last canonical murder came at a moment of collapse at the top of the Metropolitan Police. Warren, long at odds with the Home Office and with his own detective branch, resigned on November 8, the eve of Kelly's death, and left the force. On November 10 the government, which had refused rewards all autumn, offered a pardon to anyone, other than the murderer himself, who came forward with information. No one came forward.
That same day Dr. Thomas Bond, a police surgeon who had examined Kelly, sent Anderson a written assessment of the five cases. "All five murders were no doubt committed by the same hand," he wrote. Unlike Phillips and Brown, he thought the killer had "no scientific nor anatomical knowledge," not even a butcher's. He pictured a solitary man "subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania," probably middle-aged, "neatly and respectably dressed," and likely to be "a quiet inoffensive looking man," living among people who might suspect he was "not quite right in his mind at times" and stay silent for fear of trouble.
Each woman's throat had been cut. In every case but Stride's, where the killer seems to have been interrupted, the abdomen was opened and organs were taken.
What was not found is as telling as what was. The inquests found that all the women died lying down. There was no sign of a struggle at any scene, and in the street killings no one reported hearing a scream. Rubenhold has pointed out that there was no evidence of sexual contact with any of them, and that several were found in places where homeless people slept. Her reading is that the killer found them asleep. "It's obvious they were reclining, they were sleeping," she told HISTORY. Rebecca Frost, author of The Ripper's Victims in Print, called it "a solid theory" that makes the killer less of a cunning figure: he "didn't even need the cunning to lure conscious women to their deaths." It is not the reading the Victorian police worked from. Against it, the accounts of Schwartz and Lawende, if they saw Stride and Eddowes, show at least two of the women awake and on their feet minutes before they died.
The police inquiry did not stop in November 1888, and neither did the deaths. In all, eleven killings between April 1888 and February 1891 went into the file on the "Whitechapel murders." The five canonical victims are a later convention, fixed largely by Macnaghten's memorandum of 1894, which said the murderer had "5 victims - & 5 victims only." Whether any of the others belong to the same man has been argued since. The four most often discussed are these.
Emma Smith was about forty-five and had lived at 18 George Street for some eighteen months. She told the hospital that she had been followed from Whitechapel Church by three or four young men, who beat and robbed her and inflicted the internal injury that killed her. Gangs that extorted money from women worked the district, and almost no researcher today counts her as a Ripper victim. The press did not link her to the series until September.
Martha Tabram was born Martha White in Southwark on May 10, 1849. She married a furniture packer, Henry Tabram, on Christmas Day 1869, had two sons, and separated from him in 1875 over her drinking. She lived for years with a carpenter, Henry Turner, who left her in July 1888. On the August Bank Holiday she spent the evening in pubs with a friend, Mary Ann Connelly, known as "Pearly Poll," and two soldiers, and at about 11:45 went off with one of them into George Yard. Her body was found at 4:45 the next morning. The soldiers were paraded, but Pearly Poll failed or refused to identify them. Because she was stabbed repeatedly rather than having her throat cut, Macnaghten excluded her, but her place in the series is still debated.
Alice McKenzie, about forty, known as "Clay Pipe" Alice for the pipe she smoked, worked as a washerwoman and charwoman for her Jewish neighbors and lived with a porter named John McCormack in a Gun Street lodging house. On July 17, 1889, PC Walter Andrews found her in Castle Alley, off Whitechapel High Street, her throat stabbed, minutes after he and another constable had passed through and found it empty. The doctors split. Phillips concluded she was not killed by the same man; Bond believed she was. Anderson thought it an ordinary murder. His superior, Commissioner James Monro, was inclined to believe it was the same killer and sent dozens of extra officers into the district.
Frances Coles, born in Bermondsey on September 17, 1859, the daughter of a bootmaker, told her family she still worked stoppering bottles at a chemist's in the Minories, long after she had lost the job. On February 13, 1891, PC Ernest Thompson, on his first night alone on the beat, found her in Swallow Gardens, a passage under a railway arch, her throat cut. She was still alive and opened and shut one eye; he heard footsteps retreating but was bound by procedure to stay with her. She died soon afterward. A ship's fireman, James Sadler, who had spent the day drinking with her, was charged with her murder, but witnesses had seen him helplessly drunk around the time she died, the inquest returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown, and the magistrate released him. Lawende was brought to look at Sadler and could not identify him.
The three suspects named in surviving official papers all appear in a confidential memorandum dated February 23, 1894, by Sir Melville Macnaghten, then chief constable of the Metropolitan CID, written to rebut a newspaper claim that a man named Thomas Cutbush was the killer. Macnaghten had not joined the force until 1889. "No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer," he wrote; "many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one."
Montague John Druitt was a barrister and schoolteacher whose body was found in the Thames on December 31, 1888, seven weeks after Kelly's murder. He had been dismissed from his post at a school in Blackheath at the end of November, his mother had been committed to an asylum that summer, and he left a note saying he feared he was going to be like her. An inquest found he had killed himself while of unsound mind. Macnaghten wrote that from "private information" he had little doubt Druitt's own family believed him guilty, but he described him as a doctor of about forty-one; Druitt was a barrister of thirty-one. He was playing cricket in Dorset on September 1, the day after Nichols died, and at Blackheath on the morning of September 8. There is very little evidence connecting him to the murders.
Aaron Kosminski was a Polish-born Jewish barber, born in about 1865, who lived in Whitechapel, was committed to an asylum, and died in one in 1919. Anderson later wrote that the killer was "a Polish Jew" and that this was "a definitely ascertained fact," and that a witness had identified him but would not testify. In the margin of his copy of Anderson's memoirs Swanson added that the suspect was sent to the Stepney workhouse and then to Colney Hatch asylum, "Kosminski was the suspect." Researchers have noted discrepancies between the real Aaron Kosminski and the man Anderson and Swanson describe, and there is no record that he was ever violent toward anyone.
Michael Ostrog was a Russian-born confidence trickster with a long record of theft. Macnaghten called him a "homicidal maniac." Records later found show he was sentenced to two years in prison in Paris on November 18, 1888, and researchers have concluded he was in French custody during the murders.
Other officers had other men. Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette in 1903 that he suspected Severin Klosowski, a Polish-born barber who worked in Whitechapel in the years around the murders and who, as George Chapman, was hanged at Wandsworth on April 7, 1903, for poisoning his partner Maud Marsh with antimony. In the same interview he admitted that Scotland Yard was "really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago." A letter written in 1913 by Chief Inspector John Littlechild named Francis Tumblety, an American quack herbalist who was arrested in London on November 7, 1888, on charges of gross indecency with men, released on bail, and fled to France and then New York under a false name. Major Henry Smith of the City Police wrote in 1910 that the killer had "completely beat me and every Police officer in London."
Everything after that is 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. Royal records, including Queen Victoria's journal, place Prince Albert Victor at Abergeldie in Scotland, lunching with the Queen, on the day of the double murder, and at Sandringham on the day Kelly died. The diary attributed to Maybrick, which surfaced in the early 1990s, is in all likelihood a hoax.
Kosminski is the name that will not go away, and the reason is a shawl. In 2007 an amateur researcher, Russell Edwards, bought at auction a length of fabric said to have been taken from the scene of Eddowes's murder by a policeman, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson. He commissioned DNA testing by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University, and in 2014 he announced that Kosminski was the killer. In March 2019 Louhelainen and David Miller of the University of Leeds published a paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences reporting that mitochondrial DNA from stains on the shawl matched a descendant of Eddowes and a descendant of Kosminski's family.
The paper was criticized at once. Mitochondrial DNA passes down the female line and is shared by large numbers of people, so a match cannot identify an individual. "Millions of people can have the same mtDNA profile," the forensic scientist Connie Bormans said; "it's used as an exclusion." The authors did not publish the full sequences, citing privacy, and the geneticist Turi King said they had analyzed only a few segments at low resolution, types that many people could share. The shawl's history is also weak. Simpson was a Metropolitan officer, but Mitre Square was a City of London case, and his beat was far away. The Ripper author Paul Begg said there was "no evidence that a shawl was connected with Catherine Eddowes' murder anyway." The fabric had been handled by many people over a century, including descendants. "For all we know, Kosminski was Jack the Ripper," King said, "but this paper unfortunately does not tell us that."
The claim has nonetheless produced a live legal question. In England a second inquest into a death needs the consent of the Attorney General before an application can go to the High Court. In 2022 the then Attorney General, Michael Ellis, refused one for Eddowes, finding there was not sufficient new evidence. In January 2025 Edwards's lawyers renewed the request, with the support of Karen Miller, Eddowes's great-great-great-granddaughter, and of Kosminski's relatives. "Now we need this inquest to legally name the killer," Miller said. Amanda Poulos, a descendant of Kosminski's family, said she was "more than happy to finally establish what really happened." Another Eddowes descendant, Sharon Dutton, who still wears a brooch that belonged to Catherine, said: "We want justice for Catherine and all the other victims."
As of August 2026 no decision had been reported, and Edwards was still waiting. The Attorney General to whom the application was made, Richard Hermer, was removed from the post in a cabinet reshuffle in July 2026.
The image of the killer arrived early and has never been dislodged. The top hat, the cape and the doctor's bag come from illustrated papers and later from films, not from any witness. The men the witnesses described were ordinary: a man in a cloth cap who looked like a sailor, a stout man with a pail of beer, a young man with a newspaper parcel. Even the police could not agree on how many women he killed. Superintendent Arnold said in 1893 that no more than four of the murders were the work of one hand; Bond counted five; Monro was ready to add a sixth.
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 as bodies in a sequence, described by a trade most of them did not follow. They were a printer's wife who wrote to her father that she was doing well, a coachman's wife whose daughter died at twelve, a Swedish farm girl who invented a shipwreck, a woman who could read and sold ballads at hangings and sang in a police cell, and a young woman from Ireland who sang in her room on her last night and whose real story may never be known.
April 3, 1888: Emma Smith is attacked near Brick Lane; she dies in the London Hospital (disputed victim).
August 7, 1888: Martha Tabram is found dead in George Yard Buildings (disputed victim).
August 31, 1888: Mary Ann Nichols is found in Buck's Row.
Early September 1888: Chief Inspector Donald Swanson takes overall charge; Inspector Frederick Abberline returns to Whitechapel.
September 8, 1888: Annie Chapman is found at 29 Hanbury Street.
September 10, 1888: John Pizer, "Leather Apron," is arrested and later cleared; the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee is formed.
September 27, 1888: The "Dear Boss" letter signed "Jack the Ripper" reaches the Central News Agency.
September 30, 1888: Elizabeth Stride is found in Dutfield's Yard at 1:00 a.m. and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square at about 1:45; the Goulston Street writing is erased.
October 1, 1888: The "Saucy Jacky" postcard arrives.
October 8 and 9, 1888: Bloodhound trials in Regent's Park and Hyde Park.
October 16, 1888: George Lusk receives the "From hell" letter and half a kidney.
November 8, 1888: Sir Charles Warren resigns as commissioner.
November 9, 1888: Mary Jane Kelly is found at 13 Miller's Court.
November 10, 1888: A pardon is offered to accomplices; Dr. Thomas Bond sends his assessment to Anderson.
November 12, 1888: The Kelly inquest opens; George Hutchinson makes his statement.
December 31, 1888: Montague John Druitt's body is found in the Thames.
July 17, 1889: Alice McKenzie is found in Castle Alley (disputed victim).
February 13, 1891: Frances Coles is found in Swallow Gardens; James Sadler is charged and released (disputed victim).
February 23, 1894: Macnaghten writes his memorandum naming Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog.
March 2019: The shawl DNA paper is published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
January 2025: A renewed application for a new inquest into Catherine Eddowes's death is made to the Attorney General.