In February 1894, a London newspaper, The Sun, ran a series claiming that the Whitechapel murderer had been found. He was Thomas Cutbush, a young man from Kennington who had been arrested in 1891 for stabbing women from behind and been found insane. A senior Scotland Yard official, Melville Macnaghten, wrote a confidential memorandum in reply. It took Cutbush apart: the knife The Sun made so much of had been bought in Houndsditch in February 1891, more than two years after the murders ended. Then, almost in passing, Macnaghten wrote the sentence on which most of what is now said about Jack the Ripper rests. “The Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims,” he wrote, “& 5 victims only.”
That memorandum is the source of the “canonical five.” It is also the source of three of the best-known suspects, and it was written more than five years after the last of the five killings. A great deal of what passes for Ripper trivia turns out, when it is traced back, to be one official’s opinion, a newspaper’s invention or a later writer’s theory. What follows is what the record holds.
Macnaghten listed his five with dates and places. Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was found in Buck’s Row on August 31, 1888, with her throat cut. Annie Chapman was killed in Hanbury Street on September 8. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were both killed in the early hours of September 30, Stride in Berner Street, where her throat was cut and nothing more was done, and Eddowes in Mitre Square, with severe mutilation. Mary Jane Kelly was killed in her room at Miller’s Court on November 9. Hers, Macnaghten noted, was the only murder that took place indoors.
The police themselves did not keep to five. The Metropolitan Police file now in the National Archives holds case papers on eleven victims, among them Frances Coles, killed in 1891. Martha Tabram, killed in Whitechapel that August, is the name most often added to the list. Macnaghten argued against Cutbush partly on the ground that the real murderer would not have stopped after Miller’s Court and then started again two years later by “merely prodding a girl behind.” That was an argument, not a finding. Which of the eleven deaths belong to one man is still debated.
The case for adding a sixth name rests mostly on Martha Tabram. She was born Martha White in Southwark in 1849, married a furniture packer named Henry Tabram, had two sons, and by 1888 was living apart from both him and a later partner, Henry Turner, and getting by on selling trinkets and, Casebook’s compilation of the records says, on prostitution. On the night of the August Bank Holiday, Monday, August 6, 1888, she and a friend, Mary Ann Connelly, known as “Pearly Poll,” spent the evening drinking with two soldiers. Around 11:45 she went with one of them into George Yard.
At 3:30 the next morning a resident of George Yard Buildings, Alfred Crow, passed what he took to be someone sleeping on the first-floor landing. At 4:45 another resident, John Reeves, saw that the figure was lying in a pool of blood and went for a policeman. Dr. Timothy Killeen counted thirty-nine stab wounds, concentrated on the chest, belly and groin. In his opinion all but one were made by a right-handed attacker with what he called an “ordinary pen-knife”; one wound, to the breastbone, looked as though it had been made with a dagger or bayonet. The attack was a frenzy of stabbing rather than the pattern of the later killings, and Macnaghten left her off his list. Whether she belongs in the series is still argued.
The last of the eleven police files is Frances Coles’s. She was born in Bermondsey in 1859, a bootmaker’s daughter, and had once worked stoppering bottles for a chemist in the Minories. At about 2:15 on the morning of February 13, 1891, Police Constable Ernest Thompson, on his first night patrolling alone, heard footsteps going away in the distance and then found her in the darkest corner of Swallow Gardens, a railway arch near Royal Mint Street, her throat cut and still bleeding. He stayed with her, as regulations required, and never knew whether the footsteps belonged to her killer. Nine years later, in 1900, Thompson was himself stabbed to death while trying to clear a brawl at a coffeehouse.
The police charged James Sadler, a fifty-three-year-old ship’s fireman who had spent the previous day drinking with her. The inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown on February 27, and four days later the charge against Sadler was dropped; crowds cheered him outside the court. Macnaghten, among others, went on believing Sadler had killed Coles. No one has ever shown that the same hand killed her and the women of 1888.
The usual one-line description of the victims is that they were East End prostitutes. Macnaghten called them, in effect, that. The historian Hallie Rubenhold, who reconstructed the five women’s lives for her 2019 book The Five, found no evidence that Nichols, Chapman or Eddowes were selling sex. Kelly is the one whose death certificate gives prostitution as her occupation. Stride had been caught up years earlier in Sweden’s state-regulated prostitution system, but had made her living in other ways in London. What the women shared, Rubenhold argued, was poverty, abuse and homelessness.
The records give them back some of their lives. Polly Nichols was born Mary Ann Walker in 1845, a blacksmith’s daughter, and married William Nichols in 1864. They had five children. At the inquest her father said she was nearly forty-four, “but it must be owned that she looked ten years younger.” Catherine Eddowes had been to school, had sold chapbooks with her partner Thomas Conway, and was buried with about five hundred people following. She was born in Wolverhampton in April 1842, and friends described her, according to the records Casebook has gathered, as intelligent and scholarly, with a fierce temper. Elizabeth Stride was born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter on a farm in Torslanda parish, north of Gothenburg, in November 1843; lodgers said she would do “a good turn for anyone.” Mary Jane Kelly was about twenty-five. Almost everything known of her early life comes from what she told her partner, Joseph Barnett: that she was born in Limerick and grew up in Wales. Her landlord, John McCarthy, called her “a very quiet woman” when she was sober. Because she was a Catholic, Barnett and McCarthy wanted her buried with the rites of her church, and she was laid in a public grave at St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone. Annie Chapman was born Annie Eliza Smith in September 1841, married a coachman, John Chapman, in 1869, and lived with him in Windsor, where he worked as a domestic coachman; one of their three children, Emily, died of meningitis at twelve. The couple separated in the mid-1880s, and by 1888 she was living at Crossingham’s lodging house in Dorset Street. Her relatives paid for her funeral on September 14 and kept it secret, so that only they attended. Polly Nichols was buried on September 6, 1888, in the City of London Cemetery; the funeral was paid for by her father, her estranged husband and her eldest son, and in 1996 the cemetery marked her grave with a plaque.
The timetable of each murder comes from inquest testimony and police reports, and it is tighter than most retellings suggest.
Polly Nichols’s last known conversation was with Emily Holland, who had shared a room with her, on the Whitechapel Road in the small hours of August 31. Nichols said she had had her lodging money three times that day and drunk it away. “It won’t be long before I’m back,” she said, and walked off east. At 3:15 a constable walked through Buck’s Row and saw nothing. Twenty-five to thirty minutes later, Charles Cross, a carman on his way to work at Pickfords, saw a woman lying in a gateway and called over another passing workman, Robert Paul. “Come and look over here, there’s a woman,” Cross said. Paul thought he felt a faint heartbeat. Neither wanted to be late for work, so they straightened her skirts and went to tell the first policeman they met. By then Police Constable John Neil had found the body on his own. Dr. Rees Llewellyn, called from nearby, said life had been extinct “but a few minutes.”
On September 8 a carman named John Richardson sat on the back steps of 29 Hanbury Street at about 4:45 a.m. to trim a piece of leather from his boot, a yard from where Annie Chapman’s body would later lie, and saw nothing. At 5:30 Elizabeth Long, who had just heard the brewery clock strike the half hour, passed a man and a woman against the shutters of number 29 and heard him say “Will you?” and her answer “Yes.” She saw only his back. Dr. George Bagster Phillips told the inquest there were “indications of anatomical knowledge” in what had been done to Chapman.
The double event of September 30 has the most witnesses. At about 11 the night before, two laborers going into the Bricklayer’s Arms on Settles Street saw Elizabeth Stride leaving with a short man with a dark moustache. It was raining hard. “He was hugging and kissing her,” one of them, J. Best, said later, “and as he seemed a respectably dressed man, we were rather astonished.” Whether that man had anything to do with her death is unknown. At about 12:45 a.m., according to the police summary of his statement in the Home Office file, Israel Schwartz turned into Berner Street and saw a man stop and speak to a woman in a gateway, try to pull her into the street, and throw her down; she screamed three times, “but not very loudly.” The man called out “Lipski,” apparently to a second man across the road, and Schwartz walked away, then ran when the second man seemed to follow him. Taken to the mortuary, he identified Elizabeth Stride as the woman he had seen. A police reviewer noted “serious differences” between Schwartz’s description of the man and a constable’s description of a man seen with Stride earlier, and concluded that if Schwartz was right, his man was “the more probable” murderer. At 1:00 a.m. Louis Diemschutz drove his pony cart into Dutfield’s Yard and found her. Her throat had been cut, and nothing more had been done.
Catherine Eddowes had spent much of that evening in a police cell. At 8:30 the evening before, a City constable found her lying drunk on the pavement in Aldgate High Street, and she was taken to Bishopsgate police station. Asked her name, she said “Nothing.” By one in the morning the gaoler, George Hutt, judged her sober enough to release. She gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly and an address in Fashion Street, asked the time, and was told it was too late to get anything more to drink. “I shall get a damn fine hiding when I get home,” she said. As she went out she called back, “Goodnight, old cock,” and turned left, away from the quickest way to her lodgings and toward Houndsditch, which passed the end of the street leading to Mitre Square.
In the City, at around 1:35, Joseph Lawende and two companions leaving a club saw a man and a woman talking at the corner of Church Passage, which led into Mitre Square. Ten minutes later Police Constable Edward Watkins found Catherine Eddowes in the square. A police report of October 19, 1888, gave the description of the man: “age 30 ht. 5 ft. 7 or 8 in. comp. fair fair moustache, medium built,” in a loose pepper-and-salt jacket and a grey cloth cap, with a reddish handkerchief knotted round his neck, and with the appearance of a sailor. Lawende himself told the inquest he doubted whether he would know the man again, and the City Solicitor asked that no further description be given in open court.
Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, the City police surgeon, gave the cause of Eddowes’s death as “haemorrhage from the left common carotid artery,” said death was immediate and the mutilations were done afterward, and judged the abdominal wounds to have been made with a knife “six inches or longer.” He believed the killer had “considerable knowledge of the position of the organs” and that the mutilations would have taken at least five minutes.
On the morning of November 9, John McCarthy, who owned the rooms in Miller’s Court, sent his man Thomas Bowyer to collect overdue rent from Mary Kelly. At 10:45 Bowyer got no answer, pushed aside the curtain at the broken window and saw her body. Dr. Thomas Bond’s report on the post-mortem was lost for almost a century; it was returned anonymously to Scotland Yard in 1987.
The inquests and the police inventories kept small details of the women’s last days that seldom reach the trivia lists.
Polly Nichols had tried to get out of the workhouse only months before she died. In May 1888 Lambeth Workhouse placed her as a servant with Samuel and Sarah Cowdry at a house called “Ingleside” on Rose Hill Road, Wandsworth. She wrote to her father that she was “settled in my new place” and asked him to “Answer soon, please.” About two months later she walked out, taking clothing worth £3 10s. By late August she was moving between common lodging houses: a room at 18 Thrawl Street shared with four other women at 4d a night, then, from August 24, the White House in Flower and Dean Street, where men and women could share a bed. Turned out of a lodging-house kitchen in the small hours of August 31 because she had no money for a bed, she pointed to a small black bonnet nobody had seen before. “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now,” she said. At the mortuary Inspector John Spratling listed her clothes; two petticoats were stenciled “Lambeth Workhouse.” A woman who had known her there, Mary Ann Monk, identified her, and her husband William confirmed it.
Annie Chapman was ill and nearly penniless in her last week. Around the end of August she fought with another lodger, Eliza Cooper; the witnesses could not agree on the date, but she was seen with a black eye. On September 3 she showed her bruised chest to her friend Amelia Palmer and talked of going hop picking. On the afternoon of the 7th, sober, she told Palmer she had to pull herself together and find some money or she would have no lodgings. The man who usually paid for her bed at weekends, a bricklayer’s mate named Edward Stanley who called himself “the Pensioner,” was not with her. At 1:35 a.m. on September 8 she came back to Crossingham’s eating a baked potato and was refused a bed by the deputy, Timothy Donovan, who told her she could find money for beer but not for a bed. She asked the watchman, John Evans, known to the lodgers as “Brummy,” to make sure the bed was kept for her, and went out. In her pocket was a torn piece of envelope wrapped around two pills. It carried the crest of the Sussex Regiment and a London postmark of August 28, 1888, and it led nowhere. Three brass rings she had been wearing were gone from her finger. Shortly after 5:30, Albert Cadosch, in the yard next door, heard a woman say “No!” and then something fall against the fence. A little before 6, John Davis, a carman who lived on the third floor of number 29, went down to the yard and found her.
Elizabeth Stride’s last afternoon was ordinary. On September 29 she cleaned two rooms at the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street, and the deputy, Elizabeth Tanner, paid her sixpence. Between 7 and 8 that evening she went out, leaving a piece of green velvet with a fellow lodger, Catherine Lane, and asking a barber, Charles Preston, to lend her his clothes brush; he could not find it. The watchman, Thomas Bates, said she looked “quite cheerful.” When she was found, her left hand still held a packet of cachous, small sweets used to freshen the breath. The story she told in London, that her husband and children had drowned when the pleasure steamer Princess Alice sank in the Thames in 1878 and that her mouth had been hurt in the wreck, was not true. John Stride died of heart disease in 1884, and the post-mortem found no injury to her palate. Casebook’s researchers suggest she may have told the story to win help from the Swedish church. A greengrocer, Matthew Packer, later claimed he had sold her and a man some grapes that night. Dr. Phillips said she had not eaten grapes, and Packer’s account is generally treated as unreliable.
Catherine Eddowes had walked home from Kent. She and her partner, John Kelly, went hop picking every year, and in 1888 they worked near Maidstone, at Hunton. It went badly, and they walked back to London, arriving on Friday, September 28, with almost nothing. At about 8 the next morning Kelly’s boots went to a pawnbroker in Church Street for 2s 6d, pledged in the name “Jane Kelly.” Her belongings, listed after her death, included two clay pipes, tins of tea and sugar, six pieces of soap, a comb, a table knife, a teaspoon, a red leather cigarette case, a thimble and a mustard tin holding two pawn tickets, one for those boots. A report that she had come back to London to claim the reward because she thought she knew the murderer circulated at the time; nothing corroborates it. On October 8 she was buried in an elm coffin at the City of London Cemetery at Little Ilford. The plate gave her age as forty-three. Her four sisters and John Kelly were among the mourners, and the Daily Telegraph reported thousands of people along the route.
Mary Jane Kelly’s last night had more witnesses than any of the others. At 11:45 p.m. on November 8, a neighbor in Miller’s Court, Mary Ann Cox, saw her go into her room with a stout man carrying a pail of beer. “Goodnight, I am going to sing,” Kelly told her, and Cox heard her singing “A Violet from Mother’s Grave” at midnight and again at about one. Another resident, Catherine Pickett, wanted to go and complain about the noise at 12:30 and was stopped by her husband: “You leave the poor woman alone.” At about 4, Elizabeth Prater, woken by her kitten, heard a faint cry of “Oh, murder!” Sarah Lewis, who was staying in the court that night, heard it too. Neither did anything; such cries were common in the district. Kelly was buried on November 19 at Leytonstone, and Casebook’s record notes that no member of her family could be found to attend.
On Monday, November 12, at 6 p.m., after Kelly’s inquest had closed, an unemployed laborer named George Hutchinson walked into Commercial Street police station. He said he had known Kelly for about three years. At about 2 a.m. on the 9th she had asked him to lend her sixpence; he had none, and she walked on and was picked up by a man whom Hutchinson followed and watched. His description of that man is the most detailed of the case: about 34 or 35, 5 feet 6 inches tall, pale, with dark eyes and a slight moustache curled up at the ends, in a long dark coat trimmed with astrakhan, a dark felt hat, a very thick gold chain, a white linen collar and a black tie fixed with a horseshoe pin. Hutchinson said he waited outside the court until about 3. Abberline questioned him that night and reported that he was “of opinion his statement is true.”
Later writers have been less trusting. Hutchinson waited three days to come forward, stood outside the court for a long time, and recalled far more than most witnesses ever do. Several authors have turned him from a witness into a suspect. That is a theory; there is no evidence that he was anything other than what he said.
Most of the testimony quoted in Ripper books comes from the coroners’ inquests, and the dates alone say something. Nichols’s inquest sat on four days between September 1 and 22. Chapman’s sat on five days between September 10 and 26, and Stride’s on five days between October 1 and 23. Eddowes’s, held in the City because Mitre Square lay inside it, took two days, October 4 and 11. Kelly’s was heard and finished in a single day.
It was John Pizer who gave the strangest evidence at the Chapman inquest. On September 12 the man the newspapers had called “Leather Apron” stood up in the Working Lads’ Institute and said that, yes, he was known by that nickname, and that he had been “the object of a false suspicion.” The coroner, Baxter, told the jury his statements had been corroborated, and the foreman said the jury considered him cleared.
Kelly’s inquest, on November 12 at Shoreditch Town Hall, began with a quarrel. Before the jury was sworn, one juror objected that the murder had happened in Whitechapel, not in their district, and another said Mr. Baxter was his coroner. The coroner, Dr. Macdonald, member of Parliament and coroner for the North-Eastern District of Middlesex, rebuked them and said jurisdiction lay where the body lay. Joseph Barnett told the court he had recognized her only by her ear and her eyes. Caroline Maxwell swore she had seen Kelly alive at about 8:30 that morning, several hours after the time the medical evidence pointed to, though she admitted she did not know her well. The jury decided it had heard enough, did not adjourn, and returned a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.
Before anyone had heard of Jack the Ripper, the East End was looking for “Leather Apron.” Women in Whitechapel spoke of a man by that name who bullied and attacked street women. On September 5 The Star ran the headline “A NOISELESS MIDNIGHT TERROR” and described the man’s face as “of a marked Hebrew type,” and the next day it reported that “a number of the street wanderers are in nightly terror of ‘Leather-Apron.’” A police inspector, Joseph Helson, had already reported on September 7 that a man named Jack Pizer, alias Leather Apron, had ill-used prostitutes, adding that “there is no evidence whatsoever against him.” After Annie Chapman was found on the 8th, crowds in Hanbury Street shouted “Down with the Jews,” and extra police had to be sent.
At about 9 on the morning of Monday, September 10, Sergeant William Thick arrested John Pizer at 22 Mulberry Street. “You know you are Leather Apron,” Thick told him. Police took five knives from the house; stains on them turned out to be rust. Pizer had alibis for both murders, police checked them, and he was released the next day. Within days The Star was calling his arrest “a police blunder.” According to the journalist Lincoln Springfield, The Star’s sub-editor met Pizer before he could see a lawyer and settled any libel claim for £10 in gold. That account comes from the newspaperman’s own recollection.
Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was a soldier first. A Royal Engineer from 1857, he served in Palestine from 1867 to 1870, was badly wounded in southern Africa, and was knighted after tracking down the killers of Professor Edward Palmer’s party in Egypt in 1882. He became commissioner in March 1886. On October 17, 1888, he wrote to the Home Office, “I look upon this series of murders as unique in the history of our country.” He never publicly named a suspect, and he resigned on November 8, 1888, the day before Mary Kelly was killed. He went on to fight in the Boer War and died in 1927.
Robert Anderson, the head of the CID, took up his post in August 1888, replacing James Monro, as the murders began. A Dublin lawyer, he had come to London in 1876 to work against the Fenians and had run an informer inside the movement. In retirement he was the most certain man in the case. In 1907 he wrote that the killer “had been safely caged in an Asylum”; in his 1910 memoir he called the man’s identity as a Polish Jew “a definitely ascertained fact”; and in 1920 he wrote that “there was no doubt whatever as to the identity of the criminal.” He never named him. He believed the “Dear Boss” letter was the work of “an enterprising London journalist.” He died in 1918.
Donald Swanson, a Scot from Thurso who had joined the force in 1868, was a chief inspector at Scotland Yard in 1888. Macnaghten called him “a very capable officer,” and Swanson called Anderson his “old master.” In his own copy of Anderson’s memoir he pencilled notes that name the suspect: “Kosminski was the suspect,” and the man, he wrote, was sent to Stepney Workhouse, then to Colney Hatch asylum, and “died shortly afterwards.” Aaron Kosminski in fact lived until 1919, one of the discrepancies researchers point to. As early as 1895 the Pall Mall Gazette reported that Swanson believed the murderer was a man “who is now dead.” He died in 1924.
Frederick Abberline is the detective everyone knows from films. Born in Blandford, Dorset, in 1843, he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1863 and spent nearly nine years in Whitechapel’s H Division from 1878 before moving to Scotland Yard in November 1887, so he knew the district well when the murders began. In 1889 he investigated the Cleveland Street scandal, and he resigned in 1892 after twenty-nine years. In 1903, after the poisoner George Chapman was convicted, Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette, “I cannot help feeling that this is the man we struggled so hard to capture fifteen years ago.” He died in Bournemouth in 1929. Casebook notes that he was buried at Wimborne, apparently the same cemetery as Montague Druitt.
Edmund Reid, local inspector and head of the CID in H Division in 1888, had joined the force in 1872 and retired in 1896. Superintendent Thomas Arnold, who commanded H Division and had the Goulston Street writing sponged away, told the Eastern Post in 1893 that “not more than four of these murders were committed by the same hand.” He named Chapman, Nichols, Stride and Kelly; whether he was leaving out Eddowes is unclear.
The City of London Police ran the Eddowes case under Henry Smith, then the force’s chief superintendent and later its commissioner. His 1910 memoir, From Constable to Commissioner, was frank about the result: the murderer “completely beat me and every Police officer in London,” and “I have no more idea now where he lived than I had twenty years ago.”
Melville Macnaghten, the author of the famous memorandum, had no first-hand part in the 1888 investigation. A tea planter in India, he had been beaten by land rioters in 1881 and befriended there by Monro. Monro offered him a post at the Metropolitan Police in 1887, Warren blocked it, and he joined only in June 1889, after all five murders. In his 1914 memoir, Days of My Years, he wrote that the killer probably took his own life “soon after the Dorset Street affair,” and he told the Daily Mail he had “a very clear idea who he was.”
The “Saucy Jacky” postcard reached the Central News Agency on the morning of October 1, 1888, postmarked the same day and written in red pencil or crayon, with smears on both sides that looked like blood. “I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip,” it began, and it promised “Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time,” adding that “number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off.” It has often been held up as genuine because it seemed to know of the double event before the papers did. Casebook’s analysis disagrees: news of both murders spread across London on September 30, and with frequent Sunday collections the card could easily have been written and posted after the news was out. A Plymouth man, Fred Jago, wrote to The Times suggesting that the bloody thumbprint on the card might identify the writer. Fingerprinting had been offered to the Metropolitan Police in 1886 and turned down. The original card is missing; the National Archives holds the 1888 police copy.
The “Dear Boss” letter has had an odd life of its own. It had disappeared from the official files by 1928. In 1950 Philip Loftus saw it at the home of Gerald Donner, Macnaghten’s grandson. After Donner’s death it vanished again, and in November 1987 it came back to Scotland Yard anonymously, in a brown envelope posted from Croydon. Macnaghten had written that “it is certain to my mind that it was not the mad miscreant who had committed the murders,” and spoke of “the stained forefinger of the journalist.”
The journalist most often named is Frederick Best. In 1966 the magazine Crime and Detection published a claim that Best, as an old man in 1931, said he and a colleague from the provinces wrote the Ripper letters “to keep the business alive.” In 2009 the author Andrew Cook named Best as the writer of “Dear Boss,” and a handwriting examiner, Elaine Quigley, said she did not think anyone else had written it. The evidence is suggestive, not conclusive; a supposed 1890 letter Cook cites against Best has no verified provenance.
On October 29 another letter signed “Jack the Ripper” went to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, the London Hospital pathologist who had examined the Lusk kidney. It insisted the kidney was a left one and promised “another bit of innerds.” It drew little attention at the time. In 2001 the Ripper historian Donald Rumbelow, who owned it, gave it to the Public Record Office. Patricia Cornwell later used it in her case against the painter Walter Sickert, reporting that mitochondrial DNA from the stamp matched other Sickert letters; Casebook points out that a mitochondrial profile of that kind could match more than 400,000 people. That claim remains disputed.
After the double event, a bloodhound breeder, Percy Lindley, wrote to The Times on October 2 that a hound on a fresh trail “might have done what the police failed in.” Warren doubted that a dog could pick one scent out of a crowded London pavement, but he tried it. A Scarborough breeder, Edwin Brough, brought two hounds, Barnaby and Burgho, to London. On the frosty morning of Monday, October 8, they followed a young man with a fifteen-minute start for nearly a mile across Regent’s Park, and that evening they worked on the leash in Hyde Park. At 7 the next morning they ran six trials before the commissioner, and twice Warren himself was the man being hunted. He pronounced himself satisfied but would not commit to buying them. Brough took them back. Burgho went off to a dog show in Brighton, and a story that the hounds had been lost while tracking on Tooting Common was denied by their minder, who said it came from a mix-up over a sheep-killing. When Mary Kelly was found on November 9, the police held back from entering her room in the hope that dogs would come. They did not, and in the end the door was forced with an axe handle.
The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee was founded by local tradesmen at a meeting in the Crown public house, 74 Mile End Road, on September 10, 1888, two days after Chapman’s murder. The landlord, Joseph Aarons, was treasurer, a man named B. Harris was secretary, and George Lusk was elected chairman. The committee petitioned for a government reward; the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, refused. So the committee offered its own reward and hired two private detectives, recorded as Mr. Grand and J. H. Batchelor, to make inquiries independently of the police. That public role is why the parcel with the kidney was addressed to Lusk. By 1890 Albert Bachert, a much noisier figure whom the authorities liked less, had become chairman.
The idea that the killer had medical training was in circulation within weeks; the “Dear Boss” letter of September 25 already joked, “They say I’m a doctor now.” The doctors who examined the women did not speak with one voice. Phillips saw “indications of anatomical knowledge” in Chapman’s case, and went further at the resumed inquest: the work seemed that of someone with expert knowledge, and he did not think he could have done it himself in under a quarter of an hour, or, working deliberately as a surgeon would, in less than “the best part of an hour.” Brown, after Mitre Square, thought the killer had “considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them,” and that it took “a great deal of medical knowledge” to remove the kidney; yet he also said the parts taken “would be of no use for any professional purpose.” In Tabram’s case Killeen thought most of the wounds had been made by a right-handed man with an ordinary pocket knife. The often-repeated claim that the Ripper was left-handed is hard to trace to any firm statement in the records opened for this article. Medical opinion in 1888 was a range of views, not a finding, and every “doctor” theory since has chosen the parts of it that suit.
The name “Jack the Ripper” did not come from the police or from the killer, so far as anyone has proved. It first appeared on a letter dated September 25, 1888, written in red ink and sent to the Central News Agency, which received it two days later. Beginning “Dear Boss,” it promised to clip the next victim’s ears off. A postcard to the same agency, written on October 1, referred to a “double event,” the two killings of September 30. In October George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a letter headed “From hell” with part of a human kidney; the writer claimed to have eaten the rest.
The “Dear Boss” letter is a strange document to have given a killer his name. “I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled,” it says, and it is signed “Yours truly, Jack the Ripper,” with the line “Dont mind me giving the trade name” beneath. A postscript adds, “They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha.” The Central News Agency at first treated it as a joke and sent it to Scotland Yard on September 29 with a covering note saying so. Then, on September 30, Catherine Eddowes was killed, and her killer had cut at her ear. The Daily Telegraph printed the letter on October 1, and a facsimile appeared in the Evening News a few days later. From then on, the name belonged to the murderer.
The Lusk letter arrived on October 16 in a small cardboard box with half a human kidney. It reads in part: “From hell. Mr Lusk, Sor I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman and prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise.” It is signed “Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.” Lusk thought it a hoax, and probably a dog’s kidney, and put it in a drawer until other members of the Vigilance Committee persuaded him to have it examined. The press soon reported that Dr. Thomas Openshaw of the London Hospital had pronounced it a “ginny” kidney from a woman of about forty-five who drank heavily, which pointed to Eddowes. The next day Openshaw told The Star that it was half of a left human kidney, but that he could not say whether it came from a woman or how long ago it had been removed, because it had been preserved in spirits. That correction rarely makes the trivia lists. The letter itself was photographed by the City Police in October 1888 and has been missing ever since.
Two details have kept the Lusk letter at the top of the “genuine” list. A shopkeeper’s daughter, Emily Marsh, said that on October 15 a man with an Irish accent came into her father’s leather shop in Jubilee Street, looked at the Vigilance Committee’s reward poster in the window, and asked for Lusk’s address, which she read to him from a newspaper without the house number. The parcel that reached Lusk had no house number on it either, and the letter’s “Sor” and “Mishter” read to some researchers like a stage Irish accent. A handwriting examiner, Thomas Mann, later judged the writer semi-literate and unused to writing. None of this identifies anyone.
None of these has ever been proven genuine, and the great majority of the letters that poured in were taken for hoaxes. John Littlechild, a former Scotland Yard officer, wrote privately in 1913 that it was generally believed at the Yard that a Central News journalist, Tom Bullen, had coined the name, and that his chief, Charles Moore, was probably the real inventor. “It was a smart piece of journalistic work,” Littlechild wrote.
At 2:55 on the morning of September 30, Police Constable Alfred Long found a bloodstained piece of Catherine Eddowes’s apron in the doorway of Wentworth Dwellings in Goulston Street. Above it, in chalk, was a line of writing. Long’s inquest wording was “The Juews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing,” and he copied it into his pocketbook.
The writing was wiped off before daylight, and the order came from the top. In a confidential report to the Home Office dated November 6, 1888, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, explained that when he reached Leman Street station shortly before 5 a.m., Superintendent Thomas Arnold had already sent an inspector to Goulston Street with a sponge. Warren went to look for himself. The writing was on the jamb of an open doorway and could not be covered without the covering being torn away. A discussion took place, he wrote, about whether part of it could be left for an hour until it could be photographed. But it was getting light, the street would soon be crowded with Jewish traders and Christian buyers, and feeling against Jews was already running high. Told that if the writing stayed the house would probably be wrecked, which he believed himself, Warren “considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once,” having first had it copied.
Long said the apron had not been there when he passed at 2:20. He could not say whether the writing had been. Whether the killer wrote it at all has never been settled. The apron piece establishes only that whoever carried it passed that doorway after the Mitre Square murder.
Macnaghten named three men “any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush.” The first was Montague John Druitt, whom he described as a doctor “of good family.” Druitt was in fact the son of a doctor, educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford. His body was found in the Thames on December 31, 1888, about seven weeks after Kelly’s murder. Macnaghten wrote that from private information he had little doubt Druitt’s own family believed him to be the murderer. He did not say what the information was.
The record of Druitt’s death is more specific than the rumors about it. The constable who searched the body listed four large stones in each pocket, a little over two pounds in cash, two cheques for fifty and sixteen pounds, a silver watch, and a return train ticket dated December 1. His brother William told the inquest that Montague had got into serious trouble at the school in Blackheath where he was an assistant master and had been dismissed; the date is unclear, the reason was not recorded, and later claims about it are conjecture. Researchers have also pointed out that Druitt was playing cricket in Dorset on September 1, the day after Nichols died, and at Blackheath at 11:30 on the morning of September 8, six hours after Annie Chapman was seen alive in Hanbury Street. That does not prove he was innocent. It does make the case against him harder to sustain than Macnaghten’s few lines suggest.
The second was “Kosminski,” a Polish Jew living in Whitechapel who, Macnaghten wrote, had “a great hatred of women” and was removed to an asylum about March 1889. Two other senior officials, Robert Anderson and Donald Swanson, later wrote that this suspect had been identified by a witness who then refused to testify against a fellow Jew, so no charge was brought. The man usually identified as Macnaghten’s Kosminski, Aaron Kosminski, a hairdresser born in 1864 or 1865 who died in 1919, is not known to have been violent, and researchers have noted discrepancies between him and the man the officials described.
The third, Michael Ostrog, was a career thief and confidence man with a long string of aliases and convictions. Macnaghten wrote that his whereabouts during the murders could never be established. His record, as researchers later pieced it together, ran from a theft at an Oxford college in 1863 under the name Max Grief Gosslar through a string of aliases such as Count Sobieski, prison terms and asylum stays. He was released in March 1888 as “cured,” was listed in the Police Gazette that October as a “dangerous man” who had failed to report, and was sentenced in Paris to two years for theft on November 18, 1888. If that record is right, he was before a French court nine days after Mary Kelly died. He was committed to an asylum in 1891 and drops out of the record after 1904. He is now rarely taken seriously as a suspect.
In his private letter of 1913, Littlechild named an American quack doctor, Francis Tumblety, as “a very likely” suspect, and said Scotland Yard had kept “a large dossier” on him. Tumblety, he wrote, was arrested at the time of the murders on unrelated charges of indecency, jumped bail and fled to Boulogne. The letter that named him surfaced only in 1993, when the researcher Stewart Evans acquired it; its authenticity is not disputed. Much of what is said about Tumblety’s hatred of women goes back to an account attributed to a Colonel Dunham, who described a dinner at which Tumblety was asked why he had invited no women. “No, Colonel, I don’t know any such cattle,” Tumblety is quoted as replying, before showing his guests a room of glass jars filled with anatomical specimens. It is a vivid story and a second-hand one. None of the four was ever charged.
Some of the theories that fill Ripper books began as idle questions. In 1939 William Stewart’s Jack the Ripper: A New Theory argued that the killer might have been a woman, a midwife or abortionist who could move about at night, explain away blood on her clothes and had some knowledge of anatomy. Casebook traces the idea back to a conversation said to have taken place between Inspector Frederick Abberline and a doctor, Thomas Dutton. Stewart compared the case with that of Mary Pearcey, who killed her lover’s wife and child in 1890. “Jill the Ripper” has never had any evidence behind it beyond those questions.
Lewis Carroll’s turn came in 1996, when Richard Wallace’s Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend claimed that Charles Dodgson and an Oxford colleague, Thomas Vere Bayne, had committed the murders and that Dodgson had hidden confessions in his books as anagrams. Wallace produced them by rearranging passages such as one from The Nursery Alice. As Casebook’s assessment notes, his anagrams barely make grammatical sense, and he left out or changed letters he could not fit. There is no other evidence at all.
The most famous Ripper theory is also among the weakest. It holds that the murders were a royal and Masonic conspiracy to hide a secret marriage of Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson, and that the royal surgeon Sir William Gull carried them out. It grew from a 1970 article by Dr. Thomas Stowell in The Criminologist that pointed, without naming him, at the prince, and from Stephen Knight’s 1978 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Knight’s account drew heavily on Joseph Sickert, who claimed to be the son of the painter Walter Sickert, and whose testimony was later recanted. The theory reached its widest audience through Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell and the film made from it. In Knight’s version, Gull carried out the killings with the help of a coachman, John Netley, as a Masonic warning. Critics had dismissed Gull because he had suffered a stroke a few years before the murders; Knight answered that it had been a slight one. None of it rests on more than Joseph Sickert’s story.
Court and royal records tell against it. According to the reference work Jack the Ripper: A to Z, the prince was in Yorkshire when Polly Nichols was killed, at the cavalry barracks in York when Annie Chapman was killed, at Abergeldie in Scotland at the time of the double event, and Queen Victoria recorded in her journal that he lunched with her on September 30, and at Sandringham when Mary Kelly was killed.
The most recent claim to have solved the case rests on a length of silk. In March 2019 two scientists, Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of the University of Leeds, published a paper online in the Journal of Forensic Sciences reporting that mitochondrial DNA from stains on a shawl, said to have been found beside Catherine Eddowes, matched a descendant of Eddowes and a descendant of Aaron Kosminski’s family. The results had first appeared in Russell Edwards’s 2014 book Naming Jack the Ripper. The paper even suggested the killer had brown hair and brown eyes, while conceding that those traits were “surely not unique.”
Critics answered at once. Paul Begg noted that the policeman said to have taken the shawl, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, was a Metropolitan officer, while Mitre Square was a City of London case, and that nothing in the record links any shawl to the murder. The geneticist Turi King said the methods were described too vaguely to be checked, that only a few segments of mitochondrial DNA had been examined at low resolution, types thousands of people could share, and that the cloth had been handled for over a century, including by descendants. The forensic scientist Connie Bormans called mitochondrial DNA “one of the least informative” tests, normally used to exclude people rather than identify them. The identification remains unproven.
It has nonetheless produced a live legal request. In England, a fresh inquest needs the consent of the Attorney General before an application can go to the High Court. An earlier request was refused by Michael Ellis, who found there was not sufficient new evidence. In January 2025 Edwards renewed the request, backed by Karen Miller, a descendant of Eddowes, who said “we need this inquest to legally name the killer,” and by a descendant of Kosminski’s family, Amanda Poulos. As of the A&E report’s latest update, on August 12, 2026, Edwards was still waiting, and no decision had been announced.
The Ripper’s afterlife in fiction began early. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Lodger, published in 1913, grew from Walter Sickert’s belief that his rooms in Camden Town had once housed the murderer; a stage version she co-wrote followed in 1915. Alfred Hitchcock’s film of it opened on February 14, 1927, with Ivor Novello as the mysterious lodger. Hitchcock later called it “my first picture,” though it was not his first as director, and he had to soften the ending because his star’s reputation would not allow him to be the killer. The fog-bound streets of that film set the look of most Ripper films since.
Murder by Decree put Sherlock Holmes, played by Christopher Plummer, with James Mason as Watson, on the trail of the royal conspiracy from Stephen Knight’s book; much of its East End was filmed on Bankside, south of the Thames. Michael Caine played Abberline in a four-part television drama in 1988, the centenary year, which also took up the royal theory. Johnny Depp played Abberline in the film of From Hell, which gave the inspector drug-induced visions the real man never had.
The shelf of books is longer than any film list. The officials wrote first: Anderson’s The Lighter Side of My Official Life and Smith’s From Constable to Commissioner in 1910, and Macnaghten’s Days of My Years in 1914. Then came the theorists, from William Stewart’s midwife in 1939 and Stephen Knight’s royal plot in 1978 to Richard Wallace’s anagrams in 1996, Andrew Cook’s journalist in 2009 and Russell Edwards’s shawl in 2014. Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, in 2019, turned the attention back to the women.
• April 7, 1888: The inquest on Emma Smith, attacked in Whitechapel days earlier, is the first of the eleven Whitechapel murder inquests Casebook lists. • August 7, 1888: Martha Tabram is found on the landing of George Yard Buildings. • August 31: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols is killed in Buck’s Row. • September 8: Annie Chapman is killed in the yard of 29 Hanbury Street. • September 10: John Pizer is arrested as “Leather Apron”; the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee is founded at the Crown in Mile End Road. • September 27: The Central News Agency receives the “Dear Boss” letter, dated September 25. • September 30: Elizabeth Stride is killed in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square; a piece of Eddowes’s apron and the chalked writing are found in Goulston Street. • October 1: The “Saucy Jacky” postcard arrives; the Daily Telegraph prints the “Dear Boss” letter. • October 8 and 9: The bloodhounds Barnaby and Burgho are tried in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park. • October 16: George Lusk receives the “From hell” letter and half a kidney. • November 8: Sir Charles Warren resigns. • November 9: Mary Jane Kelly is killed in Miller’s Court. • November 12: Kelly’s inquest is held and closed in one day; George Hutchinson makes his statement. • December 31: Montague Druitt’s body is recovered from the Thames. • February 13, 1891: Frances Coles is killed at Swallow Gardens; James Sadler is charged and later released. • February 23, 1894: Macnaghten writes his memorandum naming the “5 victims only” and three suspects. • 1913: Littlechild’s letter names Francis Tumblety; the document surfaces in 1993. • 1987: Dr. Bond’s report on Mary Kelly is returned anonymously to Scotland Yard; in November the “Dear Boss” letter comes back the same way, in an envelope posted from Croydon. • March 2019: The shawl DNA paper appears in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. • January 2025: A renewed request for a new inquest into Eddowes’s death is made public.
No one was ever charged with the Whitechapel murders. The police documents that survive record what senior officers believed years afterward, and they do not agree with one another: Macnaghten listed three men, Littlechild preferred Tumblety, and Anderson and Swanson pointed to Kosminski. Every later identification, from the royal conspiracy to the painters, poets and children’s authors who have since been named in books, rests on a theory rather than a record.
What can be said with confidence is shorter than the trivia lists. Between August and November 1888, at least five women were murdered in and around Whitechapel. All but one were killed outdoors, and four of the five were mutilated. A letter-writer named the killer; the police never did. The man who drew up the most famous list of victims did so to discredit a newspaper, six years later, and wrote at the time that no one had ever seen the Whitechapel murderer.