Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Murders of 1888

Jack the Ripper is the name given to an unidentified killer who murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London’s East End between 31 August and 9 November 1888. The killings caused panic across the capital, an enormous police hunt and a newspaper sensation that spread around the world. Because no one was ever charged, the case became the most famous unsolved crime in history and a lasting symbol of the dark side of Victorian London.

Background: Whitechapel in 1888

Whitechapel lay just east of the City of London, the wealthy financial district. By the 1880s it was one of the poorest and most overcrowded parts of the capital. Thousands of people lived in common lodging houses, paying a few pence a night for a bed, and many families shared single rooms. Recent immigrants, including large numbers of Jews from the Russian Empire, crowded into the area alongside dock workers, labourers and street traders.

Poverty pushed many women into casual sex work to pay for a bed or a meal. In 1888 the Metropolitan Police estimated that there were about 1,200 women working as prostitutes in Whitechapel and some 60 brothels. Violence, heavy drinking and crime were common, and the area had already featured in reports by social investigators and missionaries.

Victorian London had grown rapidly, and problems of sanitation and housing, from the Great Stink of 1858 onward, had pushed reformers to pay attention to its poorest districts. The Ripper murders would bring those conditions to national attention in a dramatic way.

The canonical five murders

Although several women were murdered in Whitechapel in 1888, five killings in a span of ten weeks are most often linked to a single killer. Researchers call them the canonical five. All the victims had their throats cut, and in most cases the bodies were mutilated, a feature that distinguished these crimes from ordinary street violence.

• Mary Ann Nichols, 43, was found in Buck’s Row in the early hours of Friday 31 August 1888.
• Annie Chapman, 47, was found in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, on the morning of 8 September.
• Elizabeth Stride, 44, a Swedish-born woman, was found in Dutfield’s Yard off Berner Street at about 1 am on 30 September. The killer seems to have been interrupted.
• Catherine Eddowes, 46, was found in Mitre Square, just inside the City of London, less than an hour later on the same night. The two killings became known as the “double event”.
• Mary Jane Kelly, around 25, was killed inside her rented room at 13 Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields, and found on the morning of 9 November.

The killings took place within about a square mile, mostly at night or before dawn, in places where the killer could approach a victim unseen and escape into the maze of streets.

The police investigation

The murders fell mainly under the Metropolitan Police’s H Division, which covered Whitechapel. Scotland Yard sent experienced detectives, including Inspector Frederick Abberline, who knew the district, and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson was put in overall charge of the case. Because Mitre Square lay in the City, the murder of Catherine Eddowes was handled by the separate City of London Police.

Detectives questioned thousands of people, searched lodging houses and followed up hundreds of tips. Early suspicion fell on a man nicknamed “Leather Apron”; a bootmaker, John Pizer, was arrested in September but released after he proved he had alibis. On the night of the double event a piece of Eddowes’s bloodstained apron was found in a doorway in Goulston Street beneath a chalked message that mentioned “Juwes”. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, ordered the writing to be wiped off before it could be photographed, fearing anti-Jewish riots, a decision that was widely criticised.

Forensic science was very limited. There was no fingerprinting in British police work until 1901 and no means of identifying individuals from blood. The police experimented with bloodhounds in October 1888 without success. Warren, under heavy attack in the press over the case and other policing controversies, resigned in November 1888.

Letters and the press

The case became a media phenomenon. Cheap daily papers and illustrated weeklies covered every detail and printed rumours, rival theories and sketches. Newspapers such as The Star, founded in January 1888, used the murders to attack the police and the government.

On 27 September the Central News Agency received a letter dated 25 September, written in red ink and signed “Jack the Ripper”. This Dear Boss letter gave the killer the name by which he has been known ever since. A postcard signed “Saucy Jacky” followed on 1 October. On 16 October George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a small box containing half of a human kidney and a letter headed “From hell”.

Hundreds of other letters claiming to be from the murderer arrived over the following months. Many senior officers believed that the Dear Boss letter and the postcard had been written by a journalist, and most historians regard nearly all the letters as hoaxes. The authenticity of the Lusk letter and kidney is still debated.

Local residents, angry at the lack of progress, formed vigilance committees that patrolled the streets at night and offered rewards. The Home Office refused to offer an official reward, in line with policy at the time.

The end of the murders

After Mary Jane Kelly’s death the series appeared to end. Further murders of women in Whitechapel, including those of Alice McKenzie in July 1889 and Frances Coles in February 1891, were investigated as possible Ripper crimes, but most researchers believe they were committed by others. The Whitechapel murders file, covering eleven killings from April 1888 to February 1891, was closed in 1892.

Why the killings stopped is unknown. Theories include the killer’s death, suicide, imprisonment, committal to an asylum or emigration, but none can be proved.

Suspects

More than a hundred people have been put forward as the Ripper. The suspects most often discussed include:

In 2014 a book claimed that DNA from a shawl said to have been found near Eddowes’s body pointed to Kosminski. Scientists and historians have criticised both the provenance of the shawl and the methods used, and the claim is not generally accepted.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Ripper was a royal or a surgeon in a top hat. The theory that Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor was involved has been disproved; court circulars and other records place him far from London at the time of several murders. The image of a caped gentleman with a doctor’s bag owes more to theatre and film than to witness statements, which mostly described men of ordinary appearance.

Myth: the killer must have had surgical skill. Doctors at the time disagreed about how much anatomical knowledge the killer had, and some thought it was no more than a butcher or slaughterman might have.

Fact: the victims were real women with real lives. For decades they were remembered only as nameless victims. Recent research has recovered details of their families, work and struggles, shifting attention back to the women themselves.

Legacy

The Ripper case changed the way crime was reported, showing how mass-circulation newspapers could turn a murder series into national entertainment, a style of coverage the same press would bring to scandals such as the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. It also exposed the poverty of the East End to middle-class readers, adding weight to campaigns for slum clearance and housing reform in the following decades.

“Ripperology” has become a field of its own, with books, societies, walking tours and endless new theories. The case has inspired novels, films and television, and the Ripper’s name became shorthand for a serial killer long before that term existed. Many historians and writers now argue that the fascination with the unknown killer should not overshadow the lives of the women who died.

Timeline

• 1888, 31 August: Mary Ann Nichols is found murdered in Buck’s Row.
• 1888, 8 September: Annie Chapman is found in the yard of 29 Hanbury Street.
• 1888, 10 September: The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee is formed; John Pizer is arrested and later cleared.
• 1888, 27 September: The Dear Boss letter, signed “Jack the Ripper”, reaches the Central News Agency.
• 1888, 30 September: Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes are murdered in the “double event”.
• 1888, 16 October: George Lusk receives the “From hell” letter and part of a kidney.
• 1888, 9 November: Mary Jane Kelly is found murdered in Miller’s Court; Sir Charles Warren resigns as Commissioner around the same time.
• 1891, 13 February: Frances Coles, the last victim in the Whitechapel murders file, is killed.
• 1894: Sir Melville Macnaghten writes his memorandum naming three suspects.

Why it matters

The Whitechapel murders of 1888 combined extreme poverty, a struggling police force and a new mass press into a story that still grips the public more than a century later. They remain a case study in the limits of Victorian policing and in how society treats both crime and its victims.