Jack the Ripper is an alias given to an unidentified serial killer (or killers) active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of London, England in the latter half of 1888. The name is taken from a letter to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer, published at the time of the killings.

The legends surrounding the Ripper murders have become a combination of genuine historical research, conspiracy theory, and folklore. The lack of a confirmed identity for the killer has allowed Ripperologists — the term used within the field for the authors, historians and amateur detectives who study the case — to accuse a wide variety of individuals of being the Ripper. Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer owing to the savagery of the attacks and the failure of the police in their attempts to capture the Ripper, sometimes missing the murderer at his crime scenes by mere minutes.

The victims were women earning income as casual prostitutes. The Ripper murders were perpetrated in public or semi-public places; the victim's throat was cut, after which the body was mutilated. Some believe that the victims were first strangled in order to silence them and to explain the lack of reported blood at the crime scenes. The removal of internal organs from some victims led some officials at the time of the murders to propose that the killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge.

The number and names of the Ripper's victims are the subject of much debate. The canonical five are a subset of the eleven victims listed in the police file documenting what were called "the Whitechapel murders."

The most widely accepted list, referred to within the field of Ripperology as the canonical five, includes the following five prostitutes (or presumed prostitute in Eddowes' case) in the East End of London:

* Mary Ann Nichols (maiden name Mary Ann Walker, nicknamed "Polly"), born on August 26, 1845, and killed on Friday, August 31, 1888. Nichols' body was discovered at about 3:40 in the morning on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck's Row (since renamed Durward Street), a back street in Whitechapel two hundred yards from the London Hospital. * Annie Chapman (maiden name Eliza Ann Smith, nicknamed "Dark Annie"), born in September 1841 and killed on Saturday, September 8, 1888. Chapman's body was discovered about 6:00 in the morning lying on the ground near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. * Elizabeth Stride (maiden name Elisabeth Gustafsdotter, nicknamed "Long Liz"), born in Sweden on November 27, 1843, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888. Stride's body was discovered close to 1:00 in the morning, lying on the ground in Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street (since renamed Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. * Catherine Eddowes (used the aliases "Kate Conway" and "Mary Ann Kelly," from the surnames of her two common-law husbands Thomas Conway and John Kelly), born on April 14, 1842, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888, on the same day as the previous victim, Elizabeth Stride. Ripperologists refer to this circumstance as the "double event." Her body was found in Mitre Square, in the City of London. * Mary Jane Kelly (called herself "Marie Jeanette Kelly" after a trip to Paris, nicknamed "Ginger"), reportedly born in either the city of Limerick or County Limerick, Munster, Ireland c. 1863 and killed on Friday, November 9, 1888. Kelly's gruesomely mutilated body was discovered shortly after 10:45 a.m. lying on the bed in the single room where she lived at 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields.

The authority of this list rests on a number of authors' opinions, but the basis for these opinions mainly came from notes made privately in 1894 by Sir Melville Macnaghten as Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Department, which came to light in 1959. Macnaghten's papers reflected his own opinion which was not necessarily shared by the investigating officers (such as Inspector Frederick Abberline). Macnaghten did not join the force until the year after the murders, and his memorandum contained serious errors of fact about possible suspects. For this and other reasons, some Ripperologists prefer to remove one or more names from this list of canonical victims: typically Stride (who had no mutilations beyond a cut throat and, if one witness can be believed, was attacked in public) and/or Kelly (who was younger than other victims, murdered indoors, and whose mutilations were far more extensive than the others). Others prefer to expand the list by citing Martha Tabram and others as probable Ripper victims. Some researchers have even posited that the series may not have been the work of a single murderer, but of an unknown number of killers acting independently. Authors Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow argue that the "canonical five" is a "Ripper myth" and that the probable number of the Ripper's victims could range between three (Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes) and six (the previous three plus Stride, Kelly and Tabram) or even more.

Except for Stride (whose attack may have been interrupted), mutilations of the canonical five victims became continuously more severe as the series of murders proceeded. Nichols and Stride were not missing any organs, but Chapman's uterus was taken, and Eddowes had her uterus and a kidney carried away and her face mutilated. While only Kelly's heart was missing from her crime scene, many of her internal organs were removed and left in her room.

The five canonical murders were generally perpetrated in the dark of night, on or close to a weekend, in a secluded site to which the public could gain access, and on a pattern of dates either at the end of a month or a week or so after. Yet every case differed from this pattern in some manner. Besides the differences already mentioned, Eddowes was the only victim killed within the City of London, though close to the boundary between the City and the metropolis. Nichols was the only victim to be found on an open street, albeit a dark and deserted one. Many sources state that Chapman was killed after the sun had started to rise, though that was not the opinion of the police or the doctors who examined the body. Kelly's murder ended a six-week period of inactivity for the murderer. (A week elapsed between the Nichols and Chapman murders, and three between Chapman and the "double event.")

A major difficulty in identifying who was and was not a Ripper victim is the large number of horrific attacks against women during this era. Most experts point to deep throat slashes, mutilations to the victim's abdomen and genital area, removal of internal organs and progressive facial mutilations as the distinctive features of Jack the Ripper's modus operandi.

Victims of other contemporary and somewhat similar attacks and/or murders have also been suggested as additions to the list. These victims are generally poorly documented. They include:

* "Fairy Fay," a nickname for an unknown murder victim reportedly found on December 26, 1887 with "a stake thrust through her abdomen." It has been suggested that "Fairy Fay" was a creation of the press based upon confusion of the details of the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith with a separate non-fatal attack the previous Christmas. The name of "Fairy Fay" does not appear for this alleged victim until many years after the murders, and it seems to have been taken from a verse of a popular song called Polly Wolly Doodle that starts "Fare thee well my fairy fay." There were no recorded murders in Whitechapel at or around Christmas 1886 or 1887, and later newspaper reports that included a Christmas 1887 killing conspicuously did not list the Smith murder. Most authors agree that "Fairy Fay" never existed.

* Annie Millwood, born c. 1850, reportedly the victim of an attack on February 25, 1888. She was admitted to hospital with "numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body." She was discharged from hospital but died from apparently natural causes on March 31, 1888.

* Ada Wilson, reportedly the victim of an attack on March 28, 1888, resulting in two stabs in the neck. She survived the attack.

* Emma Elizabeth Smith, born c. 1843, was attacked in Osborn Street, Whitechapel April 3, 1888, and a blunt object was inserted into her vagina, rupturing her perineum. She survived the attack and managed to walk back to her lodging house with the injuries. Friends took her to hospital where she told police that she was attacked by two or three men, one of whom was a teenager. She fell into a coma and died on April 5, 1888. This was the first killing in the "Whitechapel murders" file in contemporary police files.

* Martha Tabram (name sometimes misspelled as Tabran; used the alias Emma Turner; maiden name Martha White), born on May 10, 1849, and killed on August 7, 1888. She had a total of 39 stab wounds. Of the non-canonical Whitechapel murders, Tabram is named most often as another possible Ripper victim, owing to the evident lack of obvious motive, the geographical and chronological proximity to the canonical attacks, and the remarkable savagery of the attack. The main difficulty with including Tabram is that the killer used a somewhat different modus operandi (stabbing, rather than slashing the throat and then cutting), but it is now accepted that a killer's modus operandi often changes, sometimes quite dramatically. Her body was found at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel. This was the second victim listed in the Whitechapel murders police file. (The third through seventh cases in the file are the canonical five listed above.)

* "The Whitehall Mystery," a term coined for the headless torso of a woman found in the basement of the new Metropolitan Police headquarters being built in Whitehall on October 2, 1888. An arm belonging to the body had previously been discovered floating in the Thames near Pimlico, and one of the legs was subsequently discovered buried near where the torso was found. The other limbs and head were never recovered and the body never identified.

* Annie Farmer, born in 1848, reportedly was the victim of an attack on November 21, 1888. She survived with only a superficial cut on her throat, apparently caused by a blunt knife. Police suspected that the wound was self-inflicted and did not investigate the case further.

* Rose Mylett (true name probably Catherine Mylett, but was also known as Catherine Millett, Elizabeth "Drunken Lizzie" Davis, "Fair" Alice Downey or simply "Fair Clara"), born in 1862 and died on December 20, 1888. She was reportedly strangled "by a cord drawn tightly round the neck," though some investigators believed that she had accidentally suffocated herself on the collar of her dress while in a drunken stupor. Her body was found in Clarke's Yard, High Street, Poplar. This was the eighth case listed in the Whitechapel murders file.

* Elizabeth Jackson, a prostitute whose various body parts were collected from the River Thames between May 31 and June 25 1889. She was reportedly identified by scars she had had prior to her disappearance and apparent murder.

* Alice McKenzie (nicknamed "Clay Pipe" Alice and used the alias Alice Bryant), born c. 1849 and killed on July 17, 1889. She died reportedly from the "severance of the left carotid artery" but several minor bruises and cuts were found on the body. Her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. This was the ninth crime listed in Whitechapel murders file.

* "The Pinchin Street Murder," a term coined after a torso was found in similar condition to "The Whitehall Mystery" (though the hands were not severed), on September 10, 1889. The body was found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. Unconfirmed speculation of the time was that the body belonged to Lydia Hart, a prostitute who had disappeared. "The Whitehall Mystery" and "The Pinchin Street Murder" have often been suggested to be the works of a serial killer, for which the nicknames "Torso Killer" or "Torso Murderer" have been suggested. Whether Jack the Ripper and the "Torso Killer" were the same person or separate serial killers of uncertain connection to each other (but active in the same area) has long been debated by Ripperologists. This was the tenth of the Whitechapel murders.

* Frances Coles (also known as Frances Coleman, Frances Hawkins and nicknamed "Carrotty Nell"), born in 1865 and killed on February 13, 1891. Minor wounds on the back of the head suggest that she was thrown violently to the ground before her throat was cut. Otherwise there were no mutilations to the body. Her body was found under a railway arch, Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. This was the eleventh and last of the victims included in the Whitechapel murders police file, which was closed as unsolved.

* Carrie Brown (nicknamed "Shakespeare", reportedly for quoting William Shakespeare's sonnets), born c. 1835 and killed April 24, 1891, in Manhattan, New York City. She was strangled with clothing and then mutilated with a knife. Her body was found with a large tear through her groin area and superficial cuts on her legs and back. No organs were removed from the scene, though an ovary was found upon the bed. Whether it was purposely removed or unintentionally dislodged during the mutilation is unknown. At the time, the murder was compared to those in Whitechapel though London police eventually ruled out any connection.

After the "double event" of the early morning of September 30, police searched the area near the crime scenes in an effort to locate a suspect, witnesses or evidence. At about 3:00 a.m., Constable Alfred Long discovered a bloodstained scrap of cloth in the stairwell of a tenement on Goulston Street. The cloth was later confirmed as part of Eddowes' apron.

There was writing in white chalk on the wall above where the apron was found. Long reported that the graffiti read:

"The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing."

Other police officers recalled a slightly different message:

"The Juwes are not The men That Will be Blamed for nothing."

Police Superintendent Thomas Arnold visited the scene and saw the graffiti. He feared that with daybreak and the beginning of the day's business, the message would be widely seen and might exacerbate the general Anti-Semitic sentiments of the populace. Since the Nichols murder, rumours had been circulating in the East End that the killings were the work of a Jew dubbed "Leather Apron." Religious tensions were already high, and there had already been many near-riots. Arnold ordered a man to be standing by with a sponge to erase the graffiti, while he consulted Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren. Covering the graffiti in order to allow time for a photographer to arrive was considered, but Arnold and Warren (who personally attended the scene) considered this to be too dangerous, and Warren later stated he "considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once."

While the writing was found in Metropolitan Police territory, the apron was from a victim killed in the City of London, which has a separate police service. Some officers disagreed with Arnold and Warren's decision, especially those representing the City of London Police, who thought the graffiti constituted part of a crime scene and should at least be photographed before being erased, but the message was wiped from the wall at approximately 5:30 a.m.

Most contemporary police concluded that the writing of the graffiti was a semi-literate attack on the area's Jewish population. Author Martin Fido notes that the graffiti included double negatives, a common feature of Cockney speech. He suggests that the graffiti might be translated into standard English as "The Jews are men who will not take responsibility for anything" and that the message was written by someone who believed he or she had been wronged by one of the many Jewish merchants or tradesmen in the area.

There is disagreement as to the importance of the graffiti in the Ripper case. Several possible explanations have been suggested by various authors:

* Author and conspiracy theorist Stephen Knight suggested that "Juwes" referred not to "Jews," but to Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the three killers of Hiram Abiff, a semi-legendary figure in Freemasonry, and furthermore, that the message was written by the killer (or killers) as part of a Masonic plot (however, there is no evidence that anyone prior to Knight had ever referred to those three figures by the term "Juwes") * The murderer wrote the graffiti and then dropped the piece of apron to indicate a link * The writing on the wall was already there and the murderer wanted to indicate a link in support of the message * The message was already there and the murderer dropped the scrap coincidentally, without interest in making a link (perhaps failing to notice the graffiti) * The writing was added sometime after the apron piece was dropped — presumably shortly after the murder (thought to have happened just before 1:45 a.m.) — but before the discovery of the scrap of apron at 3 a.m.

Over the course of the Ripper murders, the police and newspapers received many thousands of letters regarding the case. Some were from well-intentioned persons offering advice for catching the killer. The vast majority of these were deemed useless and subsequently ignored.

Perhaps more interesting were hundreds of letters which claimed to have been written by the killer himself. The vast majority of such letters are considered hoaxes. Many experts contend that none of them are genuine, but of the ones cited as perhaps genuine, either by period or modern authorities, three in particular are prominent:

* The "Dear Boss" letter, dated September 25, postmarked and received September 27, 1888, by the Central News Agency, was forwarded to Scotland Yard on September 29. Initially it was considered a hoax, but when Eddowes was found three days after the letter's postmark with one ear partially cut off, the letter's promise to "clip the ladys [sic] ears off" gained attention. Police published the letter on October 1, hoping someone would recognise the handwriting, but nothing came of this effort. The name "Jack the Ripper" was first used in this letter and gained worldwide notoriety after its publication. Most of the letters that followed copied the tone of this one. After the murders, police officials contended the letter had been a hoax by a local journalist.

* The "Saucy Jack" postcard, postmarked and received October 1, 1888, by the Central News Agency, had handwriting similar to the "Dear Boss" letter. It mentions that two victims — Stride and Eddowes — were killed very close to one another: "double event this time." It has been argued that the letter was mailed before the murders were publicised, making it unlikely that a crank would have such knowledge of the crime, though it was postmarked more than 24 hours after the killings took place, long after details were known by journalists and residents of the area. Police officials later claimed to have identified a specific journalist as the author of both this message and the earlier "Dear Boss" letter.

* The "From Hell" letter, also known as the "Lusk letter," postmarked October 15 and received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on October 16, 1888. Lusk opened a small box to discover half a human kidney, later said by a doctor to have been preserved in "spirits of wine" (ethanol). One of Eddowes' kidneys had been removed by the killer. The writer claimed that he had "fried and ate" the missing kidney half. There is some disagreement over the kidney: some contend it had belonged to Eddowes, while others argue it was "a macabre practical joke, and no more."

Some sources list another letter, dated September 17, 1888, as the first message to use the Jack the Ripper name. Most experts believe this was a modern fake inserted into police records in the 20th century, long after the killings took place. They note that the letter has neither an official police stamp verifying the date it was received nor the initials of the investigator who would have examined it if it were ever considered as potential evidence. It is also not mentioned in any surviving police document of the time.

Ongoing DNA tests on the still existing letters have yet to yield conclusive results.

Investigative techniques and awareness have progressed greatly since 1888. Many valuable forensic science techniques taken for granted today were unknown to the Victorian-era Metropolitan Police. The value of interpreting motives of serial killers, the concept of criminal profiling, fingerprinting, and other such knowledge and intelligence that have developed were poorly understood if not altogether unknown. Police recognised a sexual motive or element to the attacks, but were otherwise thoroughly unfamiliar with such crimes. Whilst the investigation was not nearly as sophisticated as police work is today, the detectives' inquiry included interviewing witnesses and residents of the area, following up tips from the public, and other standard police procedures. Common modern forensic investigation methods such as fingerprinting, DNA analysis and blood typing had not yet been developed.

The investigation into the Whitechapel murders was initially conducted by Whitechapel (H) Division C.I.D. headed by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid. After the Nichols murder, Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore, and Walter Andrews were sent from Central Office at Scotland Yard to assist. After the Eddowes murder, which occurred within the City of London, the City Police under Detective Inspector James McWilliam were also engaged.

A group of volunteer citizens in London's East End called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee patrolled the streets of London looking for suspicious characters, petitioned the government to raise a reward for information about the killer, and hired private detectives to question witnesses separate from the police. The committee was led by George Lusk in 1888. Albert Bachert, in 1889, claimed to be in charge of that group or a similar group.

On November 20 2006, the British television channel Five released an E-FIT-generated photo illustration showing what the researchers affiliated with the documentary believe the serial killer may have looked like. A former Metropolitan Police commander, John Grieve, was quoted as saying: "This is further than anyone else has got. It would have been enough for coppers to get out and start knocking on doors... they would have got him." Experts on the case, including author Stewart P. Evans, reacted with scepticism, noting that facial composites are usually only put together through direct questioning of a live witness and that various Victorian police officials investigating the Ripper killings stated that either no one had got a good look at the killer, or perhaps only one or two, but certainly not the alleged "13 witnesses" whose statements Grieve and others affiliated with the documentary claimed to have used as the basis for the image.

The Ripper murders mark an important watershed in modern British life. Whilst not the first serial killer, Jack the Ripper's case was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy. Reforms to the Stamp Act in 1855 had enabled the publication of inexpensive newspapers with wider circulation. These mushroomed later in the Victorian era to include mass-circulation newspapers as cheap as a halfpenny, along with popular magazines such as the Illustrated Police News, making the Ripper the beneficiary of previously unparalleled publicity. This, combined with the fact that no one was ever convicted of the murders, created a legend that cast a shadow over later serial killers.

Some believe that the killer's nickname was invented by newspapermen to make for a more interesting story that could sell more papers. This became standard media practice with examples such as the Boston Strangler, the Green River Killer, the Axeman of New Orleans, the Beltway Sniper, and the Hillside Strangler, besides the derivative Yorkshire Ripper almost a hundred years later and the unnamed perpetrator of the "Thames Nude Murders" of the 1960s, whom the press dubbed Jack the Stripper.

The poor of the East End had long been ignored by affluent society, but the nature of the murders and of the victims forcibly drew attention to their living conditions. This attention enabled social reformers of the time to finally gain the support of the "respectable classes." A letter from George Bernard Shaw to the Star newspaper commented sarcastically on these sudden concerns of the press:

Whilst we Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation and organization, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism.

Many theories about the identity of Jack the Ripper have been advanced. None have been entirely persuasive.

Jack the Ripper has been featured in a number of works of fiction and in popular culture, either as the central character or in a more peripheral role.

At the time of the murders, a theatrical version of Robert Louis Stevenson's book Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was being performed. The subject matter of horrific murder in the London streets drew much attention, even leading the star of the show to be accused by some members of the public of being the Ripper himself, although this theory was never taken seriously by the police.

In 2006, Jack the Ripper was selected by the BBC History Magazine and its readers as the worst Briton in history.

The legend of the Ripper is still promoted in the East End of London with many guided tours of the murder sites. The Ten Bells, a Victorian pub in Commercial Street that had been frequented by Jack the Ripper's victims, was the focus of such tours for many years. To capitalize on this business, the owners changed its name to the "Jack the Ripper" in the 1960s, but following protests by feminists and others, the pub returned to its old name.

To date more than 200 works of non-fiction have been published which deal exclusively with the Jack the Ripper murders, making it one of the most written-about true-crime subjects of the past century. Philip Sugden's The Complete History of Jack the Ripper is widely considered the best general overview of the case. Six periodicals about Jack the Ripper have been introduced since the early 1990s: Ripperana (1992-present), Ripperologist (1994-present, electronic format only since 2005), the Whitechapel Journal (1997–2000), Ripper Notes (1999-present), Ripperoo (2000–2003), and the The Whitechapel Society Journal (2005-present).

* The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, (2002) ISBN 0-7867-0276-1 * The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner, (2002) ISBN 0-7867-0768-2 * Jack the Ripper: The Facts by Paul Begg, (2004) ISBN 1-86105-687-7 * Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates by Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow, (2006) ISBN 0-7509-4228-2 * The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow, (Revised edition 2005) ISBN 0-425-11869-X * Ripperology by Robin Odell, (2006) ISBN 0-87338-861-5 * The Jack the Ripper A-Z by Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, (1996) ISBN 0-7472-5522-9 * The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (1999) edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, ISBN 0-7867-0626-0 * Casebook: Jack the Ripper edited by Stephen P. Ryder * Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (2001) by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner. Sutton: Stroud. ISBN 0-7509-2549-3

* Jack the Stripper * Långrocken (mysterious 1893 Swedish attacker of women some thought was Jack the Ripper) * Joseph Vacher (aka the French Ripper) * Yorkshire Ripper * The Blackout Ripper * Servant Girl Annihilator

* Casebook: Jack the Ripper has an extensive collection of contemporary newspaper reports related to the murders as well as articles by modern authors. * The Metropolitan Police history of Jack the Ripper discusses the investigation into the killings. * The National Archives - Jack the Ripper holds images and transcripts of letters claiming to be from Jack the Ripper. * Whitechapel Society 1888 is a social organization dedicated to the Ripper case. It holds bimonthly meetings in London and has its own newsletter.

Jack the Ripper Jack the Ripper