Who Was Jack the Ripper? What Lessons Can Be Learned

The Unexplained Files, Post 01

At half past two on the morning of 31 August 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was still trying to raise the money for a bed.

People called her Polly. She was forty-three, separated from her husband, and moving between workhouses and the common lodging houses of London’s East End. A few hours later, two carmen found her in Buck’s Row.

That is how this story begins. Not with a man in a cape. Not with a royal conspiracy. It begins with a woman who needed fourpence and did not have it.

A name enters the fog

Over the next ten weeks, four more women were killed: Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. History grouped them with Polly under the label “the canonical five”.

The label is useful, but history did not issue it with a stamp and signature. Police files gathered eleven deaths under the wider Whitechapel murders, and investigators have never agreed that one person committed all of them. Real investigations are rude like that. They refuse to arrange themselves neatly for the documentary producer.

Then a letter arrived at the Central News Agency. It was signed “Jack the Ripper”.

The letter may have been a hoax. Many historians think it probably was. But the name was perfect for the newspapers: short, violent and easy to remember. The killer had no confirmed face, yet suddenly he had a brand. Victorian London did not have Instagram, but it understood virality very well.

More than a century later, we still do not know who he was. He may have been one of the men questioned by police. He may have escaped their attention entirely. Every few years somebody announces a solution with the confidence of a Lagos uncle who has watched two YouTube videos and is now ready to address the United Nations.

The evidence remains less enthusiastic.

The police hunt a shadow

Whitechapel was crowded, poor and restless. Families slept in cramped rooms. Casual work could disappear in a day. Gas lamps lit some streets and left others to negotiate with darkness. Thousands of people moved through lodging houses, markets, pubs and narrow alleys.

The geography mattered. The women were not wandering through some theatrical wilderness waiting for a villain to arrive. They were moving through a living neighbourhood where bakers opened early, porters hauled goods, children slept behind thin walls and people knew which door might offer tea, work or a cheap bed. The killer operated among ordinary movement. That is more frightening than the fog-machine version because it is more believable. Danger did not announce itself with violin music. It blended into the shift workers, market traders and men heading home.

Witnesses offered fragments: a coat, a moustache, a conversation, a man seen briefly under poor light. Each fragment carried possibility, but none carried a name. Anyone who has tried to describe the stranger who brushed past them in a crowded Lagos market will understand the problem. By the time you agree on the colour of his shirt, three people have confidently supplied three different faces.

The police searched those streets, interviewed residents, followed tips and detained suspects. According to the London Museum’s account of the investigation, they did a great deal of work with very little of what we now call forensic science. There were no reliable fingerprints in routine police use, no CCTV and certainly no mobile phone quietly reporting that its owner had spent forty-seven suspicious minutes near Buck’s Row.

They had witnesses, medical examination and instinct. They also began looking inward, towards the mind of the unknown offender.

After Mary Jane Kelly’s death, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond studied the injuries and wrote about the likely killer’s strength, habits and mental condition. Psychologist David Canter later described Bond’s memorandum as probably the first offender profile.

Probably is carrying heavy luggage in that sentence.

Bond did not invent modern behavioural science in one afternoon, and his memorandum did not identify the murderer. Some of its language belongs firmly to Victorian medicine. Still, the question had shifted. The police were asking not only, “What happened?” but also, “What sort of person keeps doing this?”

That idea survives in behavioural analysis today. It can help narrow a search. It can also produce tunnel vision when a persuasive profile begins to feel more solid than the evidence. A theory is a torch. Useful in darkness, yes, but you should not mistake the torch for the road.

The newspapers discover a monster

The murders happened while cheap mass-circulation newspapers were fighting for readers. Fear sold papers. Mystery sold the next edition. An unnamed killer was alarming; “Jack the Ripper” was unforgettable.

The press did not invent the murders, but it gave the murderer a costume, a personality and permanent top billing. Historian Beth Fisher has written about how the press created the Ripper myth. Hundreds of letters claiming to come from the killer followed. The National Archives preserves many of them. Most were almost certainly nonsense.

Imagine investigating a serial murderer while every attention seeker with ink and postage is sending you a confession. Our own era would have added voice notes, anonymous X accounts and one badly lit TikTok from a man who “knows somebody inside Scotland Yard”.

The technology changes. Human beings remain loyal to mischief.

There is a lesson here for every newsroom, boardroom and WhatsApp group. Certainty travels first. Correction follows later, breathing heavily and asking whether anyone saved it a chair. The dramatic claim gets forwarded. The careful qualification is treated like small print.

Five women return to the story

For generations, the five women were casually described as prostitutes. Current historical work challenges that story. The London Museum notes that Mary Jane Kelly is the only one known to have been earning money through sex work when she was killed.

The others had worked as domestic servants, sold goods, run a coffeehouse, picked hops and taken the insecure jobs available to poor women. Some were mothers. All had full lives before history reduced them to a category.

This part bothers me more than the endless suspect lists.

When violence reaches somebody poor or living outside society’s approved lines, public conversation often puts the victim on trial. Why was she there? What was she wearing? Who did she know? We request a character reference before granting a human being sympathy.

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly were not required to be saints. None of us is. They had relationships, illnesses, bad decisions, private jokes and plans for the next morning. Poverty made them vulnerable. The labels applied afterwards made them easier to forget.

The killer received a dramatic nickname. The women received an argument about whether they were respectable enough.

There is something terribly wrong with that arrangement.

The suspect who keeps returning

The hunger for an ending has produced doctors, butchers, artists, aristocrats and members of the royal family. If you have ever attended a Nigerian family meeting, you know what happens when evidence is scarce: confidence expands to occupy the available space.

Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-born barber, is among the most discussed suspects. In 2019, researchers claimed that mitochondrial DNA from a shawl connected him to the crime scene of Catherine Eddowes.

The headlines behaved as though Scotland Yard could finally close the file.

There were serious problems. The shawl’s history is disputed and generations of handling create obvious contamination risks. Mitochondrial DNA is shared along maternal lines; it does not identify one individual the way a strong nuclear DNA profile can. Geneticist Felice Bedford’s critique of the analysis also questioned the disclosed sequence data and the strength of the claimed match.

Kosminski remains a suspect. He is not a solved case.

Science deserves respect, not worship. A laboratory result is only as trustworthy as the sample, the method, the reporting and the ability of somebody else to reproduce it. Put a white coat on weak evidence and it may look important, but it is still weak evidence.

We now carry the penny press in our pockets

Victorian readers waited for the next newspaper edition. We have push alerts, podcasts, autoplay and comment sections where everybody can become a detective before finishing breakfast.

True crime can help. It can recover overlooked evidence and return attention to forgotten victims. It can also turn suffering into weekly entertainment, complete with ominous music and a thumbnail face designed to improve the click-through rate.

A 2024 study in the International Journal of Communication examined popular American true-crime podcasts and found familiar problems: murdered women were often treated as a group, blamed in subtle ways and used as warnings for other women.

Whitechapel should have cured us of that habit. It did not.

I am not arguing that we should stop telling crime stories. Silence can protect powerful institutions and violent people. I am arguing for discipline. Mark the line between fact and theory. Say “we do not know” when we do not know. Do not turn a living person into a suspect because the episode needs a strong ending. And before publishing, ask whether the story remembers the victim as a person or merely uses her as scenery.

What remains in Whitechapel

Jack the Ripper was almost certainly not the supernatural phantom popular culture drew for us. He was a man who walked ordinary streets without looking remarkable enough to stop.

His anonymity has allowed every generation to remake him: foreigner, gentleman, doctor, madman, conspiracy and DNA result. We keep searching for his face because a face would make the story feel finished.

But the useful lessons are already visible. Police inference can illuminate and mislead. Media attention can expose danger and manufacture mythology. Poverty decides who faces the greatest risk. Prejudice decides whose story will be believed.

The more I read about this case, the less interested I become in giving Jack a face. He has stood in the centre of the picture long enough.

Polly Nichols. Annie Chapman. Elizabeth Stride. Catherine Eddowes. Mary Jane Kelly.

Let us give the women their names back.

What do you think: how much of our fascination with unsolved horror is about justice, and how much is simply about a good story? Share your view in the comments.