The Gospel According To Jack The Ripper [Part 2 of 5]

By now public hysteria grew to the point that sixteen tradesmen in the area formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, electing George Lusk (a local builder) as chairman.  The sixteen patrolled the streets of Whitechapel at night, hoping to either apprehend or at least scare off the killer.  On October 16th, Lusk received a small package with a note purportedly written by the murderer.

In the package was half of a preserved human kidney which the accompanying letter claimed came from Eddowes.

The kidney showed evidence of what was then called Bright’s disease (i.e., nephritis), an ailment Eddowes suffered from.

That sent public hysteria zooming through the roof and for a long while the letter was presumed authentic.

But the portion of the kidney sent to Lusk did not contain the renal artery and vein or the ureter, which could be compared to Eddowes’ coroner report to see if they matched.  The preserved in alcohol kidney could have been a medical specimen cut in such a way to hide its origin.

On top of everything else, the handwriting in the letter did not match.

Numerous hoax messages came in, with the police concluding all of them to be hoaxes committed by pranksters or journalists [sic!] trying to gin up their circulations.

Realizing they failed to adequately protect the residents of Whitechapel, the Metropolitan Police launched a task force to investigate all murders in the district, but especially unsolved cases with female victims. 

They started their list with two murders that occurred before Mary Ann Nichols’ killing and continued well on into 1891 when they finally closed the overall investigation.

They didn’t solve many murders, but they did determine that among the eleven unsolved murders of women to occur during that period, most could be attributed to conventional motives (robbery, personal animosity, etc.).

Three involved spectacular dismemberments, the Thames Torso Murders, crimes the police associated with a single murderer separate and apart from the Ripper murders.

Did this mean two serial killers worked the streets of Whitechapel at the same time?  Perhaps, but this is an act of presupposition on the part of the police.

They presumed all attacks on women would be by a single suspect.

But Emma Elizabeth Smith, the very first victim chronologically, did not die immediately but lived on long enough to tell the police three or four young men assaulted and robbed her. 

In the case of the Thames murders, the possibility of gang related violence can’t be discounted.  In each case, the heads were never recovered, only one victim was ever identified, Elizabeth Jackson.  With the body parts scattered over a wide area, it represents a significant effort if the work of one individual but if done by a gang, a much more manageable task.

Jackson worked as a prostitute, and evidence from the other victims suggests they, too, might have been sex workers.  The possibility a criminal gang targeted them for some infraction, dismembering the bodies and scattering them about to both hide the victims’ identities and to terrorize other prostitutes to submit to the gang’s demands is certainly no less plausible than a separate, solitary serial killer operating at the same time as the Ripper.

The problem with the task force’s findings is that they came too late to inform the public.  By the time the task force shut down its investigation, much of the public assumed the Ripper killed a dozen victims or more.

Too much is never enough.

While the initial hullabaloo about the Whitechapel murders died down, interest in the identity of the infamous Ripper remained unabated. 

Over the years scores of researchers published their findings and speculations.

The less scrupulous and most sensationalistic attribute up to sixteen murders to the Ripper, some suggesting he moved overseas to commit more murders elsewhere.

A few go so far as to accuse him of killing victims for whom there is no evidence of their existence, much less any report of their murder.

Slightly less sensational are those who attribute eleven murders -- all those under the Whitechapel task force investigation -- to the Ripper.  As noted, several of these fall outside the Ripper’s known pattern.

The numbers dip down from there.  As researchers focus more on the facts rather than presupposition, their numbers of attributed killings drops to eight or nine.  More scrupulous researchers say six or seven.  Even then the lists do not match, with some researchers citing victims other researchers dismiss.

But there are five that everyone agrees on, the so-called “canonical five.”

1. Mary Ann Nichols, age 43 (murdered Friday, August 31, 1888)

2. Annie Chapman, age 47 (Saturday, September 8, 1888)

3. Elizabeth Stride, age 45 (Sunday, September 30, 1888)

4. Catharine Eddowes, age 46 (Sunday, September 30, 1888)

5. Mary Jane Kelly, age 25 (Friday, November 9, 1888)

But here again we face the problem of presupposition.  Both investigators of the era and researchers of today assume Stride and Kelly were killed by the same person who murdered Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes despite a lack of evidence linking them to previous killings.

I refer you to the excellent Casebook:  Jack The Ripper website.  Scroll down to the description of his modus operandi.

The Ripper committed his crimes late at night out in the open, targeting intoxicated woman who would be slow to respond to his attack.  He killed them face-to-face, carefully positioning their bodies on the ground to minimize any blood that might come from their neck wounds.

He must have worked quickly, ready to flee at the first sound of someone approaching.  A question I never see asked by Ripperologists is “Where did he go after he committed his murders?”

Since he took post mortem trophies from at least two victims, I would say wherever he went, it was close by.  I base this on the trophies.  He would be in a hurry, not so much to escape detection but to get back and examine what he took.

If the Ripper killed Elizabeth Stride, he didn’t place her body on the ground in the same manner he did with other victims to facilitate his post-mortem mutilations.  It’s fair to argue he was interrupted and needed to flee before being discovered thus preventing him from positioning her in his preferred manner, but that leads to another issue.

Stride was last seen alive talking to a man at around 12:45am Sunday, September30 / Monday, October 1.  She was found dead fifteen minutes later at 1am Monday, October 1.

Eddowes was last seen alive at 1:35am Monday, October 1.  She’s found murdered approximately ten minutes later.

Here are the problems:

The distance between Stride’s murder and Eddowes’ is slightly more than a mile.  Assuming the murderer remained cool enough to walk, not run and draw suspicion to himself, he could easily get to Eddowes’ murder site in 20-25 minutes.

This would require him deciding he could approach and attack her without fear of being spotted again, then to commit the murder and subsequent mutilations (and more on that in a bit) in ten minutes.

I strongly suspect the 12:45am eyewitnesses misidentified the woman they saw that night; at the inquest they could only identify her by the clothes she wore.

The murderer typically worked fast, but it’s estimated it would take him at least fifteen minutes to inflict the wounds on Eddowes’ body.

He was brazen, but not so much as to endanger his freedom.

© Buzz Dixon