JACK THE RIPPER
©Lee Paul

He came out of the mists of the night, holding the residents of Whitechapel in a grip of terror unsurpassed by anyone or anything since. His victims were the women of the streets whom he slashed and killed in a style that became his bloody trademark. Dozens of detectives---and detective writers---advanced theories to his identity, but no one ever finally settled the question. To this day, his brutal crimes remain baffling, fascinating, and unsolved. Jack the Ripper was a London killer whose name became legend.

The district of Whitechapel lies in the heart of London's East End. It the late 1880s, it was the worst slum in England, a virtual rabbit warren of narrow alleys and streets, stinking courtyards and terraces. The inhabitants were the poorest of London's poor, a polyglot community of immigrants and cockneys whose families had lived there for centuries with little more than utter desperation. The area was totally unlike any found in the whole of the British Empire. It reeked of disease and starvation, apathy and pathos. Even the deadened fibers of the damp air had a lifestyle all its own. Nothing was normal, yet everything belonged. Squalor and despair never surprised or shocked anyone.

Whitechapel never slept. Someone was always on the streets trying to survive. The whole East End seethed in warehouses, gin shops, opium dens, and brothels. Street traders were everywhere, and street performers of enormous variety proliferated. Shabby shops stayed open long after midnight. Public houses closed at three o'clock in the morning only to open for liquid breakfast three hours later. Neighbors thought nothing of making casual calls at all hours of the night. It was a haven for freaks and society's outcasts. In some areas of the district, police would only venture in groups, and in others, they would not venture at all.

At nightfall, the East End was smothered in darkness. Gas and electric lighting, which had been available in the better areas of London since the early 1800s, didn't extend into the poverty-stricken area. Whitechapel's oil-lamps and candles left a dismal and sinister illumination. It was a place where crime stalked unmolested---until one dark night in August, 1888, when the gruesome work of a slashing knife made Whitechapel famous.

It is not entirely possible to account for the Ripper's fame, but a good part of it must be due to the time and place of the crimes. It was Victorian London, and the murders were a shock to society---not so much because violent crime of that nature was so rare, but because it threw light on a segment of society that the comfortable Victorians preferred to ignore or pretend didn't exist. Also, the Ripper's crimes were sex crimes of the most savage sort, and to puritanical Victorians who practically denied the existence of sex, the murders forced them to acknowledge a whole side of life that they had worked hard and successfully to suppress.

The first known crime of Jack the Ripper took place in the dark early hours of 1 September 1888. On a dimly-lit, narrow cobbled street known as Buck's Row, John Paul wearily made his way home from work shortly after three o'clock in the morning. The street was lined with the blank wall of a warehouse on one side and shabbly terraced houses on the other, and as John Paul trudged over the cobblestones, he was surprised to hear a man's voice call out to him from the inky blackness up ahead. Stepping cautiously in the direction of the voice, he soon spied a man crouching over what looked like a bundle of rags across the street in front of a stable entrance.

When George Cross could see John Paul approaching, he motioned to a woman lying prostrate and face down in the gutter. "Give me a hand getting this woman on her feet," he said. Thinking that she was drunk, which was not at all uncommon at any hour in that neighborhood, the two men reached under her shoulders. They immediately recoiled as warm stickiness engulfed their hands. Rolling her over, Cross choked back a strangled scream.

The men stared with fascinated horror at two gaping wounds running the width of the woman's neck, almost severing her head. The ugly slits were cut deep to the spinal cord, and blood still oozed into a crimson pool on the ground. The woman's skirts were pulled high above her knees, giving the appearance of rape.

Eyeing each other with suspicion, the two men straightened her clothing and set out together to find the police---terrified of the dark and terrified of each other.

By the time John Paul and George Cross found Police Constable Haine, Police Constable Neil was shining his lantern on the woman's lifeless body. Doctor Llewellyn, who lived near Buck's Row, was summoned to perform the initial examination in the gutter. Even though the doctor had the illumination of four police lanterns, he still failed to notice that the woman had been disemboweled and mutilated horribly.

The body was taken to the mortuary where two paupers were paid to strip it of its clothing while a police officer stood by taking notes. When the two petticoats were removed, the officer was horrified to discover that the victim's stomach had been savagely ripped open and slashed many times from her ribs to her pelvis. Several deep cuts ran across her midsection, which had repeatedly been ripped and slashed. The killer had also used the knife, which police later speculated might have had a blade of eight inches, on her vagina.

The victim was forty-two-year-old Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, a prostitute who had been living day-to-day in a common lodging house on Thrawl Street, one of the worst slums in the poverty-stricken area. Only a few hours earlier, she had been turned away by the proprietor for lack of money for a bed. "I'll soon get the money," she slurred as she drunkenly reeled off down the street. "I've got a such pretty bonnet."

The police investigation revealed that she was still legally married to William Nichols and had five children, but her drinking and general slovenliness had resulted in him kicking her out in 1881. She was no longer beautiful with most of her front teeth missing, and she wasn't able to hold down a decent job. She usually ended up drifting from man to man, engaging in petty larceny on the side. It didn't take long for her to become pathetically drab and old before her time. Her husband, who hadn't seen her for more than three years, was moved to murmur at the coroner's office, "I forgive you for everything, now that I have seen you like this."

The violence of the crime created a minor sensation in Whitechapel and then quickly died down. The murder of a prostitute was not all that uncommon, and people soon went about their business as if nothing had happened. But not so the newspapers. Polly's murder was the third vicious murder of a prostitute that summer, and it created a newspaper frenzy. One report in the Star stated, "The knife, which must have been a large and sharp one, was jabbed into the deceased at the lower part of the abdomen and then drawn upwards not once, but twice. The first cut veered to the right, slitting up the groin and passing over the left hip, but the second cut went straight upward along the centre of the body, and reaching to the breast-bone. Such horrible work could only be the work of a maniac."

Maniac or not, Whitechapel had seen nothing yet. One week later, the Ripper would strike again.

During the interim, the police, finding no apparent motive for the murder of Polly Nichols, or for the murders of Emma Smith on 3 April and Martha Tabram on 7 August, concluded that the motive was an "intense hatred of prostitutes." Emma had died after a vicious attack from a gang of four men in Osborne Street. Somehow she had managed to drag herself to London Hospital, but she had been ravaged with some object---possibly an iron bar---which had been rammed into her vagina with such force that it had penetrated the uterus. She died from peritonitis. Martha had been found dead on a landing in George Yards Building, stabbed thirty-nine times with a long, thin knife or bayonet. There was even another murder in July, but since the police only had pieces of the female corpse fished from the River Thames, no identification was ever made.

One week after the murder of Polly Nickols, the "intense hatred of prostitutes" theory gained momentum with the discovery of Annie Chapman's body in Hanbury Street.

Hanbury Street ran eastward from Spitalfields, London's major meat market, to Whitechapel. It passed through an area that was once the most feared area in the East End. Indeed, it had been a notorious rookery for infamous characters for more than two centuries, and the narrow streets were still thickly populated with thieves, prostitutes, and beggars of all types, despite several attempts at reform. The district was composed of dingy, three-storied buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above them. Most of the buildings had cramped courtyards in the back with long, narrow passageways running through the buildings from the streets. Such arrangements provided ideal rendezvous locations for prostitutes and their clients.

John Davis was an elderly butcher living in one of the flats over a barber shop at Number Twenty-nine Hanbury Street. At six o'clock the Saturday morning of 8 September, he started through the courtyard on his way to work at Spitalfields. As accustomed as he was to the sight of blood, outside Number Twenty-seven, he encountered a sight which turned his stomach.

Davis found the mangled remains of a woman discarded in the familiar pattern of a rape victim. She lay on her back, knees drawn up and outwards, feet resting on the ground, her dirty black skirts pulled above her knees. Her hands were raised with the palms outwards, and her left arm rested across her left breast. Her face was clearly visible. But what so horrified Davis was that her entrails were scattered everywhere.

As Davis staggered screaming from the courtyard, windows were thrown up and gaping faces peered down. Crowds gathered along the street outside and at the doors of the passageways. Some residents around the courtyard sold tickets for access to window views. When Davis finally returned with Detective Inspector Joseph Chandler, the crowd was so thick, the detective had to push his way through it. Reaching the body, the Inspector discovered someone had mercifully covered it with a tarpaulin.

Divisional Surgeon Doctor George Bagster-Phillips was called. He rolled back the tarpaulin, revealing a gruesome sight. Above the dead woman's right shoulder were pieces of her abdomen and her small intestine---still attached by a slender cord that ran back to the rest of the intestines inside her body. More flaps of skin from the abdomen were strewn at the left shoulder, soaking in blood. As Bagster-Phillips's nimble fingers untied the blood-drenched handkerchief around her neck, the head rolled sideways. It was attached to the body by only a thin strip of skin.

There were two brass rings and two bright new coins near her feet, and at her head were two pills wrapped in paper and a torn scrap of envelope. Turning the envelope over, the doctor read the postmark, "London 28 Aug 1888." Nearby under a water tap, which projected about three feet from the body, lay a wadded, soaking-wet, leather apron.

"Dark Annie," as she was known, was already dying of consumption when the Ripper found her. Like Polly Nichols, Annie was a prostitute. It was her only means of support after her husband died in 1886. She was forty-seven-years-old, but she looked much older, and with the loss of her front teeth, presumably in one of her frequent brawls, she presented no attractive sight. Yet she never lacked for clients. On the night of her death, she had enough money for lodging, but for some unknown reason, she chose to remain on the streets. At 5:30 that morning, she was seen haggling with a man outside Number Twenty-nine by two women. By six o'clock, she was dead.

The savagery of Annie's murder was deemed unprintable by The Times, but the Lancet had no such qualms. It printed, "The abdomen had been entirely laid open; the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body, and placed on the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis, the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these parts could be found."

The coroner's inquest took place the next day. Doctor Bagster-Phillips maintained that the minimum time needed for an expert to perform such butchery would be fifteen minutes. He considered the killings "deftly and fairly skillfully" performed. The Coroner, noting that the womb had been removed, concluded that `both Nichols and Chapman had been murdered for some object, to secure some pathological specimen from the abdomen.' His statement made the public and police sit up and take notice.

Annie Chapman's murder sent a chill through Whitechapel, and the district hummed with rumors. One story went that the killer carried his knives in a little black bag, and riots broke out as hysterical crowds chased anyone who carried such an item. The whole area swarmed with uniformed police anxiously looking for the killer, and dozens of innocent suspects were arrested as the result. In addition, a group of businessmen formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. They lined up private detectives and civilian volunteers to patrol the area, but it was all to no avail. The Ripper had left no clues, and a grisly crime was only days away.

It was raining at midnight on 29 September...a monotonous, sluggish rain that left everything feeling cold and clammy to the touch. The only signs of any life in the damp haze came from a two-wheeled pony cart slowly advancing down Berner Street toward the dark courtyard at the back of a workingman's club at the end of the street. An oil-skinned driver named Louis Diemschultz hunched over the reins, anticipating the end of his journey. Despite the darkness, the pony was sure-footed. The animal turned obediently into the long, narrow entrance---and shied to the left in terror.

The passageway was about twenty feet long, nine feet wide, and lay in total darkness. Diemschultz heard footsteps fading into the hollow emptyness, but he could see no one. He tapped the pony to go forward, but the creature would not move, other than to press itself further against the left-hand wall as if sensing something in the inky void. Diemschultz reached over and prodded the blackness with his whip. He felt the resistance of something large and soft. Striking a match, he saw in the flickering light an outline that sent him reeling from the courtyard in terror.

Lying in a sodden heap was the still-warm body of a middle-aged woman. Her blood mingled with the rain, and spread in all directions as it raced madly through the crevices between the irregular cobblestones, until it dammed in pools large enough to spawn rivulets in still other directions. The woman was clothed in a black velvet, feather-trimmed jacket over a black dress which was hitched up to reveal white stockings and dark boots. At her breast was a red rose, all crumpled and streaked with crimson, and her bloodstained fingers were locked around a fragrant sachet of breath-sweetener lozenges. At her throat was a wide, silk scarf soaked in blood from the savage slash that had cut her neck from ear to ear all the way to the spine. Except for an attempt to cut off one ear, she was untouched anywhere else. Jack the Ripper, it seemed, had been interrupted in his hellish purpose.

Even as the police gathered in the shadows at the end of Berner Street, the Ripper struck again. Unable to perform his usual mutilations in the dark alley of the courtyard, he sought another victim less than five streets away. The Ripper's second murder of the evening took place in Mitre Square.

Mitre Square was not the sort of location for any extremely violent crime like that of the Ripper's. It lay behind the church of St. Katherine Cree in Leadenhall Street, and although still a slum of the worst sort, it was flanked by a couple of apartment houses. Indeed, a City of London policeman lived in one. Along the opposite side were three large tea warehouses guarded by a permanently employed watchman. In addition, a police constable checked the square every fifteen minutes.

There were only three entrances to the square. Two were pedestrian paths, which the patrolling constable used mostly on his rounds at night. The last entrance at the southwest corner was large enough for carriages to call at the tea warehouses. The watchman, a retired policeman named George Morris, watched his square like a hawk. He was aware of anyone in the square at night, including an occasional cat prowling in the dark. His was a quiet square, and he was incredibly proud of it. At 1:30 in the morning, he paused in his duties to make himself another cup of tea.

At the same time George Morris put the kettle on the stove for his tea, Police Constable Watkins walked through the square and found it deserted. Fifteen minutes later, Watkins was pounding on the door of the warehouse for George Morris. "For God's sake, man," Watkins frantically cried, "come out and assist me. Another woman has been ripped open!"

George Morris and Constable Watkins reached the carriage entrance in seconds. Spread-eagled on the pavement, her shape outlined in blood, was the body of a woman. Her dress with its gay pattern of bright daisies and golden lilies was pushed to her waist and bunched on her chest together with her undergarments. Her stomach lay wide open, the intestines detached and scattered about the right shoulder in a bloody, veined mass. Other internal organs adorned her left arm. As if that wasn't bad enough, when the two men's eyes followed the wavering lantern light upwards, they were horrified to discover her throat nearly ripped out and her face all but hacked away.

From the moment he had been interrupted in his gruesome mission in the dark courtyard on Berner Street, it had taken the Ripper a mere forty-five minutes to find, murder, and butcher his second victim. He had done it with such swiftness and skill that the watchman sitting just a few yards away never heard a thing.

As incredible as it seems, the Ripper got away unseen even though the streets were swarming with police constables and members of the Viligance Committee out looking for him. There were also the usual Saturday night crowds. But the Ripper, who had just committed his bloodiest crime and must have been covered in gore, made his way through the streets without being noticed.

He did leave a trail. At a little-known public sink off nearby Dorset Street, the Ripper stopped to wash the blood from his hands. The bloody water in the bottom of the sink offered mute testimony that the Ripper was well-acquainted with the streets of Whitechapel. A block further in Goulston Street, Police Constable Alfred Long discovered two clues. The first was a bloody piece of the last victim's apron lying outside the doors of the flats which formed Wentworth Dwellings. The second was hastily scrawled in white chalk on the wall inside the doors at numbers 118 and 119: "THE JUWES ARE NOT THE MEN THAT WILL BE BLAMED FOR NOTHING." Some of the words were smeared with blood. It was 2:55 in the morning and the constable knew the words had not been there thirty-five minutes earlier.

London at that time had two police departments wearing two different uniforms and answering to two different authorities: the City of London Police and the Metropolitan Police. The City police had an area just one-mile square and came under the control of the independent committee of aldermen. The Metropolitan Police watched over the enormous sprawl of the remainder of the metropolis, and answered directly to the Home Secretary. Jurisdiction in the latest two murders wasn't going to be easy...the Ripper had just crossed the boundary lines.

Major Henry Smith, the City of London Police Commissioner, rushed to Mitre Square. Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, arrived at Goulston Street. A divisional chief in the Metropolitan area, Superintendent Arnold, fearing a riot from anti-semitic groups because of the writing on the wall, wanted the message at Goulston Street rubbed out. A City detective wanted it photographed. It was five o'clock in the morning, dawn was less than an hour away, and people were beginning to stir. Sir Charles made the decision. With his own hand, the Commissioner rubbed out the message. It was to prove a colossal mistake---one from which he would never recover.

It took two weeks to properly identify the first of the Ripper's victims from that bloody September night. Her name was Elizabeth Stride, but like most of the prostitutes in the East End, she went by a nickname---"Long Liz." She had lived in the area almost twenty years, ever since arriving from her native Sweden. The Swedish church in Trinity Square showed her maiden name as Gustaafsdotter, and a later entry showed she had married John Thomas Stride, but the police were never able to trace John Stride. Since Long Liz herself had often claimed that her husband had drowned in a tragic national boating accident aboard the steamer Princess Alice, which had been run down by a coal ship on the River Thames a full ten years earlier, the police were finally forced to accept it as fact, even though no John Stride was listed as among the passengers on the doomed crowded pleasure craft.

At the inquest, a collection of men stepped forward to say they had lived with Liz Stride at various times. The pastor from the Swedish church, who had identified the body, gallantly suggested she earned her living by sewing, but the testimony from the inquest emphatically suggested otherwise. The Ripper had not deviated in his choice of victim. It is also interesting to note that Long Liz had been seen and heard by several individuals during the evening, including a police constable on the job at 12:30 that morning and a late night supper-seeker fifteen minutes later. It was the latter who heard her say, "Not tonight. Some other night." Twenty minutes later, she was dead.

The second victim was quickly identified as Catherine "Kate" Eddowes. She was well-known to the police, having worked the streets in a small area of Whitechapel for years. In fact, she had been in police custody at the Bishopsgate Police Station less than an hour before she was killed, having been found lying drunk on the pavement by the patrolling constable. Shortly after one o'clock that morning, the police let her go, and she left the police station singing loudly on her way toward the fate awaiting her in Mitre Square---a short twenty-five minute walk into oblivion.

Kate Eddowes had once been married to Thomas Conway and even had his initials tatooed on her arm, but he had left her when she was twenty-six-years-old, and she had resorted to prostitution as a means of support. Her current common-law mate was John Kelly. She had lived with him for seven years and even used the name Kelly in some of her business transactions.

John Kelly was genuinely fond of Kate. When they came up short of funds, he allowed her to pawn his boots for the money to buy food. He showed up barefoot to tearfully identify the body. He also said Kate claimed to know who the Ripper was.

Kate Eddowes was only forty-three-years-old when she died, but she looked twice that age. Despite testimony by John Kelly that stated Kate pawned things for money to buy food, the pathologist found her to be incredibly thin. The pathologist further discovered that she was dying of Bright's disease, a condition known then as "ginny kidney" which was brought on by an excessive intake of alcohol. He concluded she would have been dead within a year, but the doctor only had one kidney for comparison---Jack the Ripper had removed and taken the other one.

A few days later, the chairman of the Vigilance Committee, George Lusk, received a cardboard box at his office. Inside was a revolting, bloody object, and an unpunctuated note which read,

"From Hell

Mr Lusk sir I send you half the kidne I took from one woman prasarved for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer.

Signed. Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk."

George Lusk sent the object to Major Smith who had it examined by two pathologists. Both doctors concluded the kidney came from a woman about forty-five-years-old in an advanced state of Bright's Disease. Furthermore, the kidney had about one inch of renal artery attached. A human female renal artery is about three inches long---and two inches had been left in the body of Kate Eddowes. The package was definitely from Jack the Ripper.

The newspapers, police, and the Viligance Committee received thousands of letters purporting to be from the killer, and indeed, sixteen of them may have been genuine as they contained details not known to the general public and were all written by the same hand. One, addressed to the Central News Agency on Fleet Street and posted in East London on 28 September, two days before the murders of Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride, boasted of the crimes. It was written in red ink and signed, "Jack the Ripper." The name stuck and from that point onward, the name became synonymous with any horrific slashing crime committed anywhere in the world. Assuming that the writer of the letter and the murderer were one and the same person, then the invention of the name that has gone down in history must be accorded to the murderer himself.

After the savagery of the Eddowes murder, Whitechapel became flooded with police and private investigators...so many, in fact, that they began arresting one another. Even Queen Victoria, three miles away in the comforts of her home in Buckingham Palace, took an avid interest in the case. But no clue to the Ripper was found. On 8 November, under heavy criticism for failing to apprehend the Ripper, and no doubt smarting from the tongue-lashing the public continued to give him for foolishly destroying the writing on the wall in Glouston Street, the Commissioner of Police, Sir Charles Warren, resigned.

The morning of 10 November 1888 found the streets of Whitechapel fairly serene. It had been six weeks since the last Ripper murder, and except for the occasional petty squabbles that occurred when thieves fell out among themselves, nothing serious had happened in the way of crime since the Viligance Committee and the police had increased their patrols. Many of the residents were beginning to believe the horror had passed, that the Ripper had satiated his lust for blood when he had killed Catherine Eddowes. So it was that at eleven o'clock that Saturday morning, grocery story proprietor John McCarthy thought nothing of sending his employee, Thomas Bowyer, down the alley to collect the rent due from Mary Jane Kelly of Number Thirteen, Miller's Court.

Miller's Court was a small yard barely fifteen feet wide. To reach it, one had to traverse a brick tunnel about three feet wide forming a miserable dark alley extending about twenty feet from Dorset Street. On the corner of the court, running the length of the alley and fronting Dorset Street, was John McCarthy's grocery shop. The place was locally known as "McCarthy's Rents" because McCarthy owned two of the six pitiful houses in the court.

The houses on Dorset Street backed onto the court. One such place was Number Twenty-six, Dorset Street, whose ground floor had been partitioned to form Number Thirteen, Miller's Court---a dismal, sparsely-furnished room which was rented by Mary Jane Kelly (her real name was Marie Jeannette Kelly). Mary had lived there since the previous March. Described by her peers in the East End as the lowest form of prostitute, she must have had some redeeming qualities because she had kept the room for eight months while falling three months in arrears on her rent.

In a part of London riddled with disease and poverty, Mary Kelly shone like a beacon. She was a Celtic beauty with raven black, waist-length hair, blue eyes, and a youthful attractiveness and bearing at age twenty-five that made her instantly recognizable to all in the area. She took to living with Joseph Kelly in the squalid confines of the twelve foot square room---until 30 October when she brought home a girlfriend to share more than the accommodations. When her friend moved in, Joe moved out.

The sun was shining brightly as Thomas Bowyer entered Miller's Court. He liked Mary and looked forward to seeing her, even if it was to haggle for the rent. He knocked at the faded door and got no answer. He tried the handle, but it was locked. He peered through the grimy glass of the window, but the curtains were drawn. The lower of the four panes, the one nearest the door, was broken. He gingerly put his hand through and lifted the tattered muslin. What he saw sent him staggering, totally incoherent, back to McCarthy's shop.

John McCarthy could barely understand the pale, wild-eyed man standing before him, but he ran for the courtyard when Bowyer squeaked, "Number Thirteen. Oh my God. Jack the..."

McCarthy felt his pulse hammering in his temples as he pulled the muslin aside and peered into the gloomy interior of Mary Kelly's room. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight, and then he wished he hadn't looked. What was left of Mary Kelly was lying on a cot next to a small table. The mass of raw flesh looked for all the world like some butcher's carcass, and he could tell that it was human only from the shape. The face had been skinned, the ears and nose had been cut off, and the head hung sideways---grotesquely severed by the deep slash that had slit the throat from ear to ear.

As his eyes traveled downward from the horror of the face, he saw the remains of a linen undergarment still clinging to the body through the blood. The horror intensified. The abdomen was ripped open and both breasts were cut off. The left shoulder had been chopped through so that the arm hung on the body by skin only. Both thighs down to the feet were stripped of flesh and the leg bones gleamed white in the dull light. Most of the internal organs were removed, and something---the liver?---lay between the feet. The heart lay on the pillow. One arm and hand rested in the mess that had been her stomach. Blood had spurted everywhere and lay in a pool beneath the body and under the bed.

McCarthy closed his eyes, forcing back the vomit creeping into the back of his throat. With a shudder, he took one last look, and then retched violently. Draped around the room like some awful yuletide decoration were the bloody intestines. Neatly piled on the wooden table next to the cot was the missing skin---carefully mounded next to the breasts and kidneys.

At the inquest, Joseph Kelly, whose real name was Joseph Barnett, reported, "I have seen the body, and I identify it by the hair and eyes which is all that I recognize."

Within a month of the murder of Mary Kelly, the extra police were withdrawn and the Whitechapel Viligance Committee was told to disband because their services were no longer required. Some of the members were privately told that Jack the Ripper was dead, having drowned himself in the River Thames. But the police never identified the man, and their evidence, if any, was never made public.

The Ripper's reign of terror might have been over, but the mystery to his identity only deepened. Who was the killer? How had he escaped into the blackness of the night, sight unseen, with all the men out looking for him? Why did he stop his bloody rampage with the destruction of Mary Kelly? Why were the police so sure he was dead? The questions are many, and all go unanswered. It is as if the moment the Ripper stepped out of Number Thirteen, he ceased to exist.

It was generally acknowledged that with the murder of Mary Kelly, the Ripper had achieved the ultimate in his perverted goals. Her death was the only one to take place indoors. He had killed her about two o'clock in the morning and then taken a leisurely two hours mutilating the body. In committing the crime, he had removed a three-month-old fetus, which was never found.

Sir Melville Macnaghten became the chief investigator for the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard in 1889, six months after the last of the Ripper crimes. He was an astute Commissioner and his confidential notes, now known as the Macnaghten Papers, provided historians with important clues. For years, as a reminder of the unsolved crimes, he kept on his desk a photograph of the mutilated remains of Mary Kelly. A curious fact is that the photograph, like all the surviving photographs of the Ripper victims, was taken by the City of London Police, in spite of the fact that Miller's Court lay in Metropolitan territorial jurisdiction.

Sir Melville established that the Ripper had only five victims. In a memorandum in 1903, after numerous rumors of Jack the Ripper slaying, decapitating, and disemboweling several prostitutes from 1889 to 1891, which was long after the police professed the Ripper to be dead, Macnaghten wrote: "Now the Whitechapel murderer had five victims, and five victims only. Nichols; Chapman; Stride; Eddowes; Kelly."

Over the years, "Hunt the Ripper" has been a game played by many sleuths, and there is no lack of suspects. Even the police had many theories to his identity. They knew the Ripper was left-handed after the first murder. Numerous witnesses to the various crimes testified to seeing a man of medium height, about five feet, six inches tall, with light hair and a full mustache. One witness, George Hutchinson, actually saw Mary Kelly escort a man into her room shortly before two o'clock on the morning of her death. The stranger was about thirty-five, dressed in high-button boots and spats and had a black tie with a horseshoe pin flashing in the dim lamplight. A light waistcoat with a heavy gold chain dangling down to end in a shimmering red jewel, and a long dark coat trimmed at collar and cuffs with curly lamb's wool completed the description. Hutchinson thought the stranger a mite too smartly dressed for Whitechapel, and he tried to get a look into the stranger's face. But it was to no avail. The stranger pulled his soft felt hat over his eyes, shielding his features.

The police also clearly believed that the killer would be muddy and bloodstained after the crimes. But it assumed two not necessarily true: one, that the victim would be lying on the ground; and two, that the blood from the carotid artery in the throat would have to gush some three feet in order to reach the killer.

It seems unlikely that the prostitutes of Whitechapel would lie down on damp, irregular, hard stones with their clients. More logically, they would be standing, leaning against a wall. And if they were leaning against the wall, they would be most likely to face it with their heavy skirts hiked up onto their backs. In this position, it would be easy for the killer to slit the throat, letting the initial surge of gore gush out and saturate the ground.

In the early investigations, the police were also looking for someone wearing a leather apron, or someone associated with a slaughterhouse. Leather aprons were found at the scenes of two of the crimes, and although they could have been used by the killer---indeed, some took to calling the killer "Leather Apron" before the infamous note sent by the killer identifying himself as "Jack the Ripper"---the leather aprons belonged to residents living in the area. The owners of the aprons worked in the bloody meat industry in Spitalfields, and they hung their washed garments out to dry each night.

There was no lack of theories. Because the Ripper's mutilations were carried out with such precision, many thought the killer was a mad physician. A prime suspect was a Russian immigrant living in the area who was named Mikhail Ostrog, also known as Doctor Alexander Pedachenko and Vassily Konavalov. He was a qualified doctor...and a raving maniac. He disappeared after the Kelly murder, was finally traced back to Russia in 1891, and was caught mutilating a woman he had killed.

Another suspect was the fleshed-out creation of Police Constable Robert Spicer. Spicer called his suspect "Doctor Merchant," a man who was thirty-seven-years-old with a history of mental instability. The suspect died of tuberculosis in a London hospital in December 1888, just weeks after Mary Kelly died.

One prime suspect, and one that Sir Melville Macnaghten apparently privately endorsed, was Montague Thomas Druitt. Druitt was a doctor and a failed lawyer from a good family. His cousin had a surgery in the East End, and Druitt was known to travel the area frequently. Described by his own relatives as sexually insane, he committed suicide in December by drowning himself in the River Thames. He left behind a suicide note, but if the note contained a confession, no one---except the police---knew it. The note has remained secret. Macnaghten once cryptically commented that his greatest regret was that he had "become a detective officer six months after Jack the Ripper committed suicide."

In the Black Museum at Scotland Yard, there is a plaster death-mask of Frederick Deeming, which was for many years pointed out as the face of Jack the Ripper. He confessed to being the infamous killer in the spring of 1892 when he was under sentence of death in Australia for killing a woman he claimed gave him a venereal disease. He considered that all such women should be exterminated. The notes and papers he penned in his death cell were destroyed after his execution in 1892. Although he pleaded innocent to the crime which convicted him, he never recanted his confession of being Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps the most notorious suspect was His Royal Highness, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, grandson of Queen Victoria, and eldest son of the future King Edward VII. Prince Albert, nicknamed Eddy, would have succeeded to the throne of England, but he died mysteriously in January 1892, which left the succession to his younger brother who became King George V in 1911.

The theory that Eddy was the Ripper hit the newspapers in 1970 when a retired surgeon, Doctor Thomas Stowell, made public the results of research he had done forty years earlier. He had thoroughly examined the private papers of Sir William Gull, the personal private physician of Queen Victoria. Sir William had, reported Stowell, unmistakably pointed the finger of guilt at the young Prince. Stowell insisted that the Prince did not die of the great European influenza epidemic of 1892 as reported, but had instead, died of "syphilitic softening of the brain" in a private mental home near Sandringham. Stowell claimed Gull had written so in his notes.

Since Sir William Gull, left, is supposed to have died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1890, it seems unlikely that he would know the details of Prince Albert's death in 1892. Yet, Sir William knew the royal family. He was the Physician Extraordinary to the Queen, and Physician in Ordinary to the Prince of Wales and the Royal Family. He had written of the downward path of Eddy from an early age and had surmised that an acute attack of typhoid, together with the Duke's youthfulness, had left Eddy poorly equipped to resist the four-stage disease of syphilis he had contracted in 1879.

No one will ever really know what was the basis for Stowell's theory and claims. Thomas Stowell died shortly after the story hit the news, and his family destroyed all his papers and notes. Nothing remains.

As incredible as the Duke of Clarence theory was, an even stranger story postulated itself three years later. This one had Sir William Gull, with carriage driver John Netley and another, unidentified man, working as a team as Jack the Ripper. By curious coincidence, the web woven by this trio also encompassed Eddy, Prince Albert. And for this theory to be true, it had to involve an astonishing catalogue of intrigue, death lists, conspiracy by leading Freemasons, kidnapping, and a government cover-up on a monumental scale.

Joseph Sickert, who claimed to be the son of Walter Sickert, an artist whose family had moved closely within the Royal Court of Denmark of which Princess Alexandra of Denmark was Eddy's mother, told a remarkable story in 1973. He claimed his father was approached by Princess Alexandra to privately school Eddy in the arts, thus breaking the stranglehold she felt the Victorian courts held on the Prince's personality. In 1884, Walter Sickert introduced Eddy to a beautiful, illiterate, young shop girl named Annie Elizabeth Crook. The following year, Annie gave birth to a daughter by Eddy, named Alice Margaret. Eddy and Annie then married in a Roman Catholic wedding ceremony at St. Saviour's church---and the rumors spread to Whitehall.

When Queen Victoria heard of the affair, she ordered her Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, to break the liaison. Lord Salisbury knew he had to move quickly. There was growing unrest toward the British monarchy, and many thought Victoria would be the last monarch. The Irish despised her, her subjects laughed at her son's voracious sexual appetite, and many hated what the sovereignty stood for. Now her simple-minded grandson had married a Catholic commoner and fathered a child. If word of that got out, the monarchy was over. Salisbury could see the seeds of ferment and revolution increasing at an alarming rate.

Salisbury entrusted the mission of parting the lovers to Sir William Gull, left, the seventy-two year old Physician Extraordinary to Her Majesty. Sir William, accompanied by the coachman, John Netly, and one other unidentified man, kidnapped Annie and the Prince. The Prince was returned to the royal court, and Annie was taken to Guy's Hospital, where an operation performed by Sir William in an effort to erase her dangerous secrets left her rendered insane.

The baby, Alice Margaret, was cared for by a friend of Annie's. The nanny's name was Mary Kelly. According to Joseph Sickert, his father recounted that Mary told the royal secret to a number of Whitechapel prostitutes: Nichols, Chapman, and Stride. And between them, they devised a blackmail scheme. This prompted Sir William, the coachman, and one other to commit the Jack the Ripper crimes.

Joseph Sickert also said the baby Alice became the ward of Walter Sickert and eventually his mistress. She bore Walter a son---himself, Joseph. Joseph Sickert also said that his father claimed the third man was Sir Robert Anderson, a leading Freemason who had been appointed the head of the Criminal Investigation Division on the eve of Polly Nichols's murder. Other researchers claim the third man was Walter Sickert and not the police chief.

Another interesting point to this theory is the Mason angle. Sir William was an active and dedicated member in the worldwide brotherhood of Freemasons. Author Stephen Knight, whose meetings with Joseph Sickert were recounted in his book, Jack the Ripper---The Final Solution, postulated that Lord Salisbury's fears of anarchic revolution, which would not only have removed the monarchy, but Freemasonry as well, prompted Sir William to murder in the ritual style of an ancient legend associated with the building of King Solomon's Temple.

According to the legend, three apprentice Masons were accused of murdering the Grand Master in charge of building the Temple by slitting open the abdomen and grouping the entrails on the shoulders. It was said the the word "Juwes" in the message that Sir Charles Warren had personally removed from the wall, referred not to Jews, but to Juwes---the three legendary killers. Only a Freemason would have understood the connection in the word, and there weren't many Freemasons in Whitechapel.

There are many reasons to discount Sickert's story as rubbish, the chief one being that Sir William had suffered a stroke in 1887 and thought incapable of committing the murders. Also, Annie Crook, although a commoner, was Church of England and not Roman Catholic. She had further left her rooms a full year before she was supposedly kidnapped and rendered insane. In fact, she was found living a normal life until she died in 1920.

On the other hand, Sir William did have sadistic tendencies. With the help of the coachman, he could have committed the crimes, something many feel was born out by the visions of a well-known mystic.

At the time of the murders, a journalist named Robert James Lees was working in Fleet Street. Not only was he a good journalist, he was also a distinguished Spiritualist. Considered one of the leading mediums of his day, he was received on more than one occasion at Balmoral and Buckingham Palace by Queen Victoria herself, beginning when he was only nineteen-years-old.

During the late summer and autumn of 1888 when the Ripper began to run rampant in the East End, Lees began to have visions. The police, desperate for clues, listened to him with incredulity. Lees predicted the first three murders, describing them in detail, and was so shaken by his visions, that he followed his doctor's advice and took a vacation with his family on the continent of Europe. While he was gone, he had no more visions, but also while he was gone, the murders occurred.

Shortly after the fourth murder, he was seated on a bus when a stranger boarded. Looking at the man, Lees went icy cold. When the man got off the bus, Lees followed. The journey took him through Hyde Park into an affluent area of the West End. When he lost the suspect at a cab stand, Lees reported his suspicions to a policeman directing traffic. Although the policeman took no action, he did write down what Lees said.

It was before Mary Kelly's murder that Lees had another vision. This time he went straight to Scotland Yard and demanded to speak to the investigator in charge of the Ripper case. His premonition was taken very seriously by the police. Upon the discovery of Mary Kelly's body, he was taken to Miller's Court and used as a human bloodhound. He led the police, mile after mile, into the West End of London---straight to an elegant house which was the home of one of London's most prominent physicians.

Under delicate questioning, the doctor's wife broke down. She described how she had discovered shortly after her marriage that the doctor had a mania for inflicting pain, how he had tortured the cat, how he had once almost killed their son when the child was four years old, how his personality was a true Jekyll and Hyde.

A specially formed commission certified the doctor insane, and he was placed in a private asylum, where he died several years later. To account for his disappearance, his sudden death from heart failure was announced, and a bogus funeral was arranged---complete with a stone-weighted coffin. For his work in tracking the Ripper, Robert Lees received a life pension from the government and was sworn to secrecy. Lees' daughter, years later, said her father had identified the Ripper as one of the royal physicians.

Also, as outlandish as it seems, there was yet another theory advanced by the police---that Jack the Ripper was actually "Jill the Ripper." According to British writer, John Godwin, this would explain how the Ripper was able to escape so easily. "A female, even when stained with blood, wouldn't have rated a second glance during the East End panic." As a woman, she could have walked anywhere at any time with the assurance that she wouldn't register with any witnesses because all their observation faculties would be focused on men! The woman killer could have been a midwife, which would account for her knowledge of anatomy. She would also be familiar---even friendly---with half the street girls in the district, nearly all of whom had children. She could carry surgical knives as belonging to her tools of trade. And she could approach any woman without putting the woman on guard.

Did the police really know who Jack the Ripper was? The answer may be impossible to confirm. Every so often Ripperologists advance new theories and new suspects, some of them reasonably viable.

William Booth, for instance, founder of the Salvation Army, had a male secretary who predicted the murders in his dreams. Following one murder, the man vanished, leaving Booth convinced the secretary was the Ripper. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that the Ripper was female---a berserk midwife. His first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was inspired from the crimes. John Morrison maintains that Scotland Yard covered up the identity of Mary Kelly's killer for more than a century. He claims the Ripper was her common-law husband, James Kelly, a convicted wife murderer who had escaped from a criminal lunatic asylum. Any prostitute he questioned in his search for Mary, whom he intended to kill for deserting him during his trial, he murdered to cover his tracks. When he finally got to Mary and exacted his revenge, his mission was completed---he had no need to murder again.

Maybe. Then again, maybe not. The facts about Jack the Ripper are sparse, and all the evidence is circumstantial. Time finally caught up with Jack and he has moved on, but everyone is left to still puzzle and ponder his true identity. There is only one real truth...no one really knows.

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