Author’s Note

Jack the Ripper: Man or Myth? (or Miss!)

Eleven decades of fascination with the sadistic serial killer whom the police never caught have given rise to endless ideas, stories and beliefs about his crimes and his identity. As Lacey says, ‘Jack was a real man, but he’s become a myth.’ Here are some of my favourite daft Jack theories.

1. Jack was a prince of the realm. Any mention of Jack the Ripper will invariably be met with: ‘Wasn’t he a member of the royal family?’ The royal in question was Prince Albert Victor, grandson to Queen Victoria and in direct line to the throne, who allegedly contracted syphilis after an assignation with a prostitute. His subsequent murderous rampage was hushed up by the authorities (who possibly had Masonic connections) to protect the queen from scandal. It’s a lovely idea, but the prince’s whereabouts on any given date are a matter of public record and he was, sadly, nowhere near Whitechapel when the murders took place. We all love a royal conspiracy, but this one simply doesn’t stack up.

2. Jack was a surgeon who collected internal organs. Annie Chapman and Catharine Eddowes were both partially disembowelled and are believed to have been missing organs. This gave rise to the theory that the Ripper himself took the organs and must have been surgically trained in order to locate and remove them. Equally likely, though, is that the organs were taken some time after death by unsupervised and unscrupulous mortuary assistants, who knew their value on the black market. Jack may well have had nothing more than the most basic knowledge of anatomy.

3. The Ripper was a smartly dressed gentleman who carried a Gladstone bag. Countless depictions of the Ripper portray him as a Victorian ‘toff’, an elegant gentleman who easily lured women to their deaths. In fact, the relatively few eye-witness accounts differ so much in terms of age, appearance, dress, nationality, that it is impossible to form any reliable idea of what Jack looked like. Certainly, there are as many accounts of his being roughly dressed as there are of his being respectable. The Gladstone bag arises from two eye-witness accounts of passers-by carrying ‘shiny black bags’. Although nothing concrete connects either bag-owner with the crimes, these reports gave rise to a dozen or more black-bag stories, to the point where mere ownership of such an article became a cause for suspicion.

4. The Ripper was the subject of a massive police and Masonic cover-up. A barely literate chalk-written message near the site of Catharine Eddowes’ murder, referring to ‘Juwes’, along with similarities between the murder and a certain Masonic legend, gave rise to the theory that the Ripper killings were part of a Masonic conspiracy. In reality, the graffiti may have been completely unconnected with the murder, whilst the link between the word ‘Juwes’ and three Masonic murderers, Jubela, Jubelo, Jubelum (the Juwes – are you keeping up?) is pure speculation. As far as the police are concerned, they faced massive public, press and government pressure to identify the killer, not to conceal his identity, and it is hard to believe that over a hundred years later, hard evidence of a cover-up would not have emerged.

5. The Ripper taunted the police with letters and postcards. During the months of the murders and for several years afterwards, the police, the press and even prominent members of the public received letters supposedly from the killer. Many of them were signed ‘Jack the Ripper’; one was accompanied by a human kidney. The letters have been subjected to endless investigations by police and independent experts of various kinds and are generally believed to be fake. In recent years, the crime writer Patricia Cornwell built a very convincing case that the artist Walter Sickert was the author of many of the letters. She fell short, in my view at least, of proving that Sickert was also the killer.

And finally …

6. Jack was a woman. Inspector Abbeline, the officer in charge of the original investigation, took seriously the theory that the killer could have been female, and so we should too. If, as was argued at the time, the Ripper was a midwife, she would have been able to leave her house and wander the streets in the small hours without attracting undue attention, her bloodstained clothing would not have been remarked upon, she would have been able to approach women without alarming them and would have had the medical knowledge a) to subdue her victims and b) to locate and remove reproductive organs. True, there is no direct evidence to suggest a woman committed these crimes, but until the worldwide jury agrees on one prime male suspect, I think Jill the Ripper has to stay in the mix.