Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened by an Investigator, from the Evidence to the Wildest Theories

In the autumn of 1888, in a London district where the police estimated 1,200 prostitutes and 62 brothels, five women were killed within ten weeks. The killer was never caught. Since then more than a hundred suspects have been proposed, from a Polish barber to a grandson of Queen Victoria, from an Impressionist painter to the author of Alice in Wonderland.

Jack the Ripper is the most famous cold case in history, and for that very reason the most contaminated: by fake letters, by the newspapers of the time, by books promising the "final solution" and by films. In this article I apply the same method I used for Hitler's death in the bunker: first the established facts, then the hypotheses in order of strength, and finally the wildest theories put to the test. I add two things the case demands: a search for similar murders elsewhere in the world, and a criminal profile of the killer.

A note on method. The sources on this case are endless and largely second-hand: the original files are incomplete, many documents have been lost, and the newspapers of the time printed rumours as facts. It is an open file: new documents or studies could lead me to correct some information or to change my mind on some assessments, and if that happens I will update the article.

1. The scene: Whitechapel, 1888

Whitechapel and neighbouring Spitalfields were the poor heart of the East End. The district had about 80,000 inhabitants; every night around 8,500 people slept in 233 common lodging houses, where a bed cost a few pence. In October 1888 the Metropolitan Police estimated 1,200 prostitutes and 62 brothels in Whitechapel. For many women on their own, often alcoholic and in their forties, selling themselves on the street was how they paid for that night's bed.

It was also a district of immigration, with a large Jewish community from Eastern Europe. That detail weighs on the whole investigation, as we will see.

2. The victims: eleven in the file, five "canonical"

The Metropolitan Police file on the Whitechapel murders covers eleven murders of women, from 1888 to 1891.

The five in bold are the canonical victims, those that the head of the CID, Melville Macnaghten, attributed in 1894 to a single killer: "5 victims, and 5 victims only". For the others, investigators at the time and historians today are divided.

Without dwelling on gruesome detail, what matters for the analysis is the modus operandi:

• Nichols: found around 3:40 am by a carman, Charles Cross. Throat cut, abdomen wounded. A constable had passed the spot at 3:15 and seen nothing.
• Chapman: found just before 6 am in the yard of an occupied house. Throat cut and abdominal organs removed.
• Stride: found around 1 am. A single cut to the throat and no mutilation: the killer is thought to have been interrupted.
• Eddowes: found at 1:45 am, less than an hour after Stride, about a fifteen-minute walk away. She had been released from Bishopsgate police station at around 1 am. Severe mutilation, left kidney removed. The only canonical case in the City, and therefore investigated by a different force, the City of London Police.
• Kelly: the only victim killed indoors, in her own room. Found at 10:45 am by the young man sent to collect the rent. The most extreme mutilations: the killer had time and cover.

This table already shows three things an investigator looks for: escalation (the mutilations increase from the first victim to the last), risk (Chapman in an occupied yard at dawn, Eddowes minutes after a police patrol) and knowledge of the ground (the killer moves and vanishes within minutes in a maze of alleys).

3. The witnesses: what they really saw

Nobody saw a murder. Some witnesses saw a victim with a man shortly before her death.

For an investigator, these statements have obvious problems:

• They do not agree. The descriptions range from a dark, shabby man over 40 to a thirty-year-old with a fair moustache. They may refer to different men: the victims met many clients.
• Conditions were poor. Dark alleys, gas lighting, a few seconds of observation.
• Some are suspect. Hutchinson's description is too detailed for a night-time encounter, and it came late. Inspector Abberline believed him; many modern researchers do not.
• Prejudice weighs. "Foreign appearance", "Jewish appearance": in a district riven by antisemitism, the description risks saying more about the observer than about the observed.

4. The letters: the first great case of media disinformation

The police and the newspapers received hundreds of letters signed by the killer. Three are the best known.

As early as 7 October 1888, journalist George R. Sims suggested the letters were the work of a colleague. In 1913 Chief Inspector John Littlechild, in a letter to Sims himself, named a Central News journalist, Thomas Bulling. And in 1931 another journalist, Fred Best, reportedly confessed to writing letters to "keep the business alive".

The analyst's lesson: the killer's very name, "Jack the Ripper", is probably a journalistic invention. It is one of the first documented examples of the media creating a character and an identity for an unknown criminal, and of how the media echo produces more false reports: the letters imitated the letters.

5. The Goulston Street graffito and the shadow of antisemitism

At 2:55 am on the night of the double murder, PC Alfred Long found a bloodstained piece of Eddowes's apron in the doorway of a block of flats in Goulston Street. On the wall above was a chalk message. Long's version read: "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing"; a City detective recorded a different wording. Even the transcription is disputed.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, ordered it erased before dawn, fearing antisemitic riots in an area largely inhabited by Jews. The City Police wanted it photographed first. It was copied, but never photographed.

We do not know whether the killer wrote it: the apron is a certain exhibit, the graffito is not. But the context is clear. In early September a rumour had spread about a Jew nicknamed "Leather Apron" who threatened prostitutes with a knife; on 10 September a Jewish bootmaker, John Pizer, was arrested, released the next day because he had an alibi, and later won damages from at least one newspaper.

Readers of my article on the Manzoni plague will recognise the mechanism: a frightened city looks for a culprit among "outsiders" and turns suspicion into certainty. In Milan in 1630 it was the plague-spreaders; in Whitechapel in 1888 it was "Leather Apron".

6. The investigation: what the police did

The investigation was huge for its time. Investigators interviewed more than 2,000 people, investigated over 300 and detained 80.

• Frederick Abberline, a Scotland Yard inspector, coordinated detectives on the ground.
• Donald Swanson, a Chief Inspector, oversaw the case from headquarters.
• Robert Anderson became head of the CID in 1888, but spent about a month in Switzerland on sick leave at the height of the murders.
• Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner, was overwhelmed by criticism and resigned around the time of the Kelly murder. Sources give different dates for his actual departure, between 8 November and 1 December 1888.
• Two bloodhounds, Barnaby and Burgho, were also tried out in Regent's Park and Hyde Park. On the day of the Kelly murder the police waited two hours outside the room for them before learning they were not available.
• Local tradesmen set up the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, led by builder George Lusk, with night patrols and private detectives.

Photography and the myth of the eye

As a photographer, one detail interests me in particular. Mary Jane Kelly is the only victim photographed at the crime scene: the others were photographed at the mortuary, and the Mitre Square scene was drawn. The Miller's Court photographs are among the earliest surviving examples of crime scene photography, although it cannot be claimed that they were the very first.

The myth of optography also circulated: the idea that a dead person's eye retains the last image it saw. Detective Walter Dew recalled in his 1938 memoir that Kelly's eyes were photographed as a "forlorn hope". No official record confirms it, and the technique had already been discredited by physiologist Wilhelm Kühne's experiments.

7. The first criminal profile in history: Dr Thomas Bond

On 10 November 1888, the day after the Kelly murder, police surgeon Thomas Bond sent Anderson a report now regarded as one of the first criminal profiles in history. His key phrases:

• "All five murders were no doubt committed by the same hand."
• The mutilations were inflicted by a person who had "no scientific nor anatomical knowledge", "not even the technical knowledge of a butcher".
• The killer was "a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring", subject to "periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania".
• Probably "a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle aged and neatly and respectably dressed", perhaps wearing a cloak or overcoat that would hide the blood.
• "Solitary and eccentric in his habits", "without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension".
• Possibly living "among respectable persons" who knew his character and whom only the prospect of a reward might persuade to speak.

Not all doctors agreed: surgeon George Bagster Phillips, who examined Chapman, believed instead that the killer had some anatomical knowledge. This disagreement has fuelled the "killer doctor" theories ever since.

8. The suspects: from the most solid to the most fanciful

The police suspects of the time

In 1894 Macnaghten wrote a memorandum, partly to rebut a newspaper accusing one Thomas Cutbush, naming three "more likely" suspects. Together with other names that emerge from police papers, these are the candidates with some documentary basis.

The shawl DNA

In 2014 author Russell Edwards published Naming Jack the Ripper, based on geneticist Jari Louhelainen's analyses of a shawl said to have belonged to Eddowes; in 2019 the results were published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. The mitochondrial DNA pointed to Kosminski.

The criticisms are serious, and as an investigator I consider them decisive:

• Chain of custody: the shawl was supposedly taken by a Metropolitan Police officer, but the Eddowes case belonged to the City; no document of the time mentions a shawl at the scene.
• Contamination: the shawl was handled for more than a century.
• Method: mitochondrial DNA is not unique to an individual; geneticist Turi King pointed out that thousands of people could share the same result. The full sequences were not published, and other geneticists disputed the interpretation of the data.

It is the same problem we saw with Hitler's remains: without a chain of custody, even the best science produces a fragile result.

Other suspects with some hook

• Charles Cross (Charles Allen Lechmere), the carman who found Nichols. He gave the police his stepfather's surname instead of his own, and some researchers argue his timings do not add up. The evidence is purely circumstantial.
• Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly's former partner, questioned for four hours and released.
• James Kelly, who escaped from Broadmoor asylum in January 1888 after murdering his wife. A speculative hypothesis.

The impossible suspects

Some names come up often but are ruled out by the facts:

• Thomas Neill Cream, a poisoner hanged in 1892: he was in Joliet prison, Illinois, from 1881 to July 1891. The legend of his last words on the gallows, "I am Jack the…", comes only from the hangman.
• Frederick Deeming, who murdered his wives and children in England and Australia: in 1888 he was in South Africa or in prison, and the police ruled him out as early as 1892.
• H. H. Holmes, the Chicago serial killer: in 1888 he was building his "castle" in the United States.

9. The sensational theories

10. The royal and Masonic theory

This is the best-known theory, thanks to cinema and to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell. In short: Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria's grandson, had secretly married a Catholic woman from Whitechapel; to cover up the scandal, the Queen's physician Sir William Gull, helped by a coachman and by the painter Sickert, eliminated the women who knew the secret, in a Masonic ritual.

The theory comes from the story of Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be Sickert's son, broadcast by the BBC in 1973 and turned into a book by Stephen Knight in 1976 (Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution). Put to the test, it collapses:

• Gorman himself told the Sunday Times on 18 June 1978 that it was "a hoax", "a whopping fib".
• The prince is recorded at Balmoral on the night of the double murder of 30 September 1888, according to the Court Circular published in The Times, and in all likelihood at Sandringham on 9 November.
• Gull was over seventy and had suffered a stroke in 1887.
• Some of the people the theory casts as Freemasons were not.

"Juwes" and Freemasonry

Knight claimed that the word "Juwes" in the Goulston Street graffito referred to Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the three murderers of Hiram Abiff in Masonic legend, and that Warren erased it to protect his "brothers". But there is no evidence that anyone called those figures "Juwes" before Knight, and we do not even know whether the killer wrote the graffito.

There is, however, one true fact, and it is fair to acknowledge it: Sir Charles Warren really was a high-profile Freemason. He was the first Master of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, a London lodge devoted to historical research on Freemasonry, with a warrant dated 28 November 1884 and consecrated on 12 January 1886. It is a real fact, but it proves nothing about the case: the lodge was not based in Whitechapel, and no document links Freemasonry to the murders.

The district's "chapel"

Like many people, I remembered that a chapel, perhaps a Masonic one, was linked to the murders in the district. I checked, and the answer is interesting because it shows how legends are born. There are three candidates:

Conclusion: the district is named after a chapel, but not a Masonic one. The "Masonic chapel" of collective memory is almost certainly a fusion of three true but separate elements: Hawksmoor's church (and its architect, who became a Freemason later), Warren's real Freemasonry and Knight's discredited theory, popularised by From Hell.

11. The occult theory

The key figure is Robert Donston Stephenson, who called himself "Roslyn D'Onston", a journalist with an interest in the occult. He was a patient at the London Hospital in Whitechapel from 26 July to 7 December 1888, and during those months he wrote to the police with theories about the case. According to the most widely cited version, he argued in the Pall Mall Gazette that the killer was a black magician using the organs for rituals.

Two women in his circle, the Theosophist writer Mabel Collins and Baroness Vittoria Cremers, came to suspect him. Cremers told occultist Aleister Crowley that she had found ties stiffened with blood in his trunk. Crowley repeated the story in one of his writings: it is third-hand testimony. Cremers also claimed that the murder sites formed a cross; checking the map does not bear this out.

In 2001 writer Ivor Edwards proposed that the sites had been chosen in advance according to a ritual geometric pattern, the vesica piscis.

Assessment:

• Hospital records and night rosters, studied by researchers in the 2000s, indicate that Stephenson could not leave his ward at night.
• The case against him rests almost entirely on his own boasts and on second- or third-hand stories.
• The "geometries" of the sites are a classic analytical error: with five points on a map you can draw almost any figure. The murders instead cluster in a small area within walking distance and on weekend nights, which is explained by habits, work and paydays far better than by a ritual.
• I found no serious source linking the murders to phases of the moon.

12. Similar murders around the world: the same hand?

Between 1884 and 1892, newspapers around the world attributed to "Jack" murders that happened far from London. I checked them one by one.

Result: no murder outside Whitechapel has ever been linked to the Ripper with documentary evidence. The interesting point is another one: a media case generates copycats and phantom news, just as today a viral story produces dozens of unverified "similar cases". It is the same mechanism I described in the news story of the suspected plague in Irkutsk.

13. The criminal profile

Now the most delicate part. A profile does not give a name: it narrows the field. Mine starts from the historical profiles and from the crime scene data.

The sources of the profile

• Thomas Bond (1888): a solitary, cool man, respectable in appearance, with no anatomical knowledge, subject to periodic homicidal mania.
• John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood, FBI (1988): prepared for a television programme marking the centenary. According to available summaries: a white male aged 25–35, living in Whitechapel or Spitalfields, a loner, probably unmarried, with a job that let him work alone, ordinary and timid in appearance, full of resentment. A "disorganised" killer, and therefore unlikely to have written letters to the press. Douglas pointed to a type similar to Kosminski or to David Cohen, another Jewish immigrant committed to an asylum in 1888.
• Kim Rossmo, geographic profiling: the most likely home area is around Flower and Dean Street and Thrawl Street, between Commercial Street and Brick Lane, the same lodging-house area where many victims lived. Rossmo himself warns that the result cannot be verified, because the killer's address is unknown.

The crime scene data

The profile

Putting these sources together, the most consistent profile is this:

• A local man, living or working in the area between Whitechapel and Spitalfields, probably in or near the lodging-house district.
• Aged between 25 and 40, physically strong.
• Ordinary in appearance, enough not to frighten the victims and not to draw the attention of the police and neighbours. Probably not the "gentleman in a top hat" of the cinematic imagination.
• A loner, with poor relationships with women and deep resentment towards them.
• With a job or routine that left him free on weekend nights and allowed him to get home or wash without being noticed. Theories about a job that accustoms one to blood, such as butchery, are plausible but unproven: the doctors of the time disagreed about his anatomical skill.
• Not the author of the letters, almost certainly.
• The end of the murders explained by an external event: death, committal or departure.

This profile fits the "local" suspects, such as Kosminski, better than the celebrity ones: princes, painters, royal physicians. But a profile is a tool for steering an investigation, not evidence: many men in Whitechapel in 1888 matched this description.

14. What the case teaches investigators today

It is the same method I apply in investigations and OSINT analysis for my clients and in historical research: separating what is documented from what is told, and accepting that sometimes the honest answer is a file that is still open.

Main sources: Wikipedia entries on the Whitechapel murders, the individual victims and the suspects, with their primary sources; Dr Thomas Bond's report of 10 November 1888; Melville Macnaghten's memorandum (1894); Quatuor Coronati Lodge, historical page on its founders; Live Science and Smithsonian Magazine on the criticisms of the shawl DNA analysis (2019); reprints of contemporary newspapers collected by jack-the-ripper-tour.com; Environmental Criminology Research Inc. on Kim Rossmo's geographic profile.