The Gospel According To Jack The Ripper [Part 1 of 5]

For Halloween this year I’m running a 5 part series on Jack the Ripper.  These posts will be 80% Ripperology, 20% theology.  The theology comes at the end after a break, so you ghouls can wallow in the grue and gore up to there.

The Claim

Recently historian Russell Edwards claimed DNA evidence found on the shawl of one of the victims identifies Aaron Kosminski -- a then-23 year old Polish immigrant who worked as a barber -- as the murderer known today as Jack the Ripper.

Yeah, okay, maybe.

Critics of Edwards’ findings complain he didn’t release any original data or submit his conclusions to peer scientific review.

I’m no expert on DNA forensics, but I’m not going to claim the findings are flawed.  For the moment I’m willing so say based on what little Edwards revealed, coupled with Kosminski being identified at the time as a suspect (among many, to be fair), there’s a good chance we now know who killed Catherine Eddowes, and presumably Mary Ann Nichols and Anne Chapman as well.

But have we identified the Ripper?

Well, that depends entirely on who we presuppose the Ripper to be.

In one sense, there are three Jack the Rippers:

The Jack of popular culture.

The Jack of history.

The Jack of facts.

Let’s plunge through to get the story under the story.

”Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper”

Before the Ripper, there was Mr. Hyde.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde is one of the three ur-texts of horror fiction (Frankenstein and Dracula are the other two, of course).

The story proved a sensation when published in 1886, exposing bourgeois Victorians to the den of depravity readers of penny-dreadfuls (the English equivalent of dime novels) already knew existed in the poorer quarters.

In addition to the penny-dreadfuls, many newspapers of the era also regularly published sensational news stories of murder and mayhem.

In London, these news stories typically occurred in and around the area known as Whitechapel.

Whitechapel in those days featured more murders, assaults, and robberies that any other area in London.  An impoverished neighborhood, it offered refuge to people unable to find employment or lodging elsewhere in London.

Then as now, such neighborhoods attract a disproportionate amount of crime, so news from Whitechapel was hardly news.

But while notorious murderers were well known and plenty in those days, their killings all possessed a rational motive of some sort:  Robbery, eliminating a witness, rivalry, etc. 

What Mr. Hyde represented in fiction was a different kind of murderer.  We know serials killers exist throughout human history and in all cultures, but Stevenson’s novella identified a new type of murderer, a thrill killer who committed mayhem for the sheer pleasure of killing.

So London was primed for Jack before he showed up.

From April 3, 1888 to February 13, 1891 eleven unsolved murders of females in the Whitechapel and adjoining area were documented by the police.  In popular perception, these easily became attributable to a single individual; in reality, only a fraction may have been committed by a single individual (there may have been a second serial killer operating in Whitechapel at that time, but more on that later).

These murders were sensationalized by the press, and when police failed to make progress on them, the idea they might be the work of a single individual soon colored many people’s thinking.

For reasons unclear today, the police deemed the killings over by early 1891. 

Conspiracy enthusiasts read all sorts of implications into this, but the truth may be simply the police realized very few unsolved crimes in Whitechapel were connected.

By then Jack the Ripper took root in the public consciousness, not just in London and Great Britain, but around the world. 

From this a vast pop culture mythos of Jack spread and multiplied, feeding off itself.

Case in Point: In 1943 Robert Bloch wrote “Your Truly, Jack The Ripper” in which the motive for the murders proved to be sacrifices to a supernatural entity to ensure the murderer’s continued immortality.  In 1967 he expanded on this idea with “Wolf In The Fold” an episode of the original Star Trek TV series in which an alien intelligence possesses various characters to commit Ripper-esque murders throughout history and into space.  That same year his story “A Toy For Juliette” (in which Jack is transported into the future by a time traveler) appeared in Dangerous Visions, an original anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, another Star Trek writer.  Ellison, a friend of Bloch’s, felt inspired by this story to write a semi-sequel, “Prowler In The City At The Edge Of The World” (a callback to the title of his Star Trek episode, “The City On The Edge Of Forever”).  Ellison then wrote “Knife In The Darkness” in 1968 for the TV series, Cimarron Strip in which Jack finds his way out to the American West.

Multiply this a hundredfold in popular entertainment over the last century and one quickly realizes what “everybody knows” about the Ripper murders is highly suspect.

”From Hell, Mr. Lusk”

The popular press of 1888 London regularly reported on sensational crimes, but with the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman sharing unique characteristics, for the first time such murders where not attributed to an unknown killer but rather to a ///fiend///, one soon dubbed “Leather Apron” by locals (on the presumption the killer must have worn one to keep his clothes from being soaked in blood, but more on that later).

However, on September 27th of that year, shortly before the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, the Central News Agency (a news distribution service that specialized in sensational and often highly embellished stories) received a letter purportedly from the killer, promising more murders and offering to cut off the next victim’s ears to mail to the police.

The writer of the letter signed it “Jack the Ripper.”

Now, it’s important to state that almost all serious researchers into the Whitechapel murders consider all purported correspondence from the killer to be hoaxes.  The Central News Agency withheld the letter from the public.  However, three days later the murderer ///did/// strike again.

And the very next day, the Central News Agency received a postcard purporting to be from the murderer, claiming to have planned a double murder but needing to flee Stride’s body for fear of discovery not having time to cut off Eddowes’ ears.

///Now/// the Central News Agency went public with the letter and postcard.  The Metropolitan Police allowed other newspapers to show photographic copies of the letter in hopes of the public being able to identify the handwriting.

What made these letters convincing at first was the impression the postcard was mailed on September 30th, the day of the “double event” as the writer called it.

However, it soon became apparent that the mailbox in which the postcard was mailed was collected on the morning of October 1 (hand sorted delivery in 1888 being a helluva lot faster than computer aided delivery in 2025; go figure) and that early reports of the two killings already made early morning editions.

Upon learning this, the police immediately suspected a hoax by the Central News Agency itself, going so far as to name the journalist whom they suspected being behind it. 

The Central News Agency certainly possessed the means, motive, and opportunity to commit such a hoax as well as a well demonstrated history of just making up large hunks of their reportage.  If two sensational sex crimes boosted their circulation, why, just imagine what four would do…

© Buzz Dixon