Who Was Jack the Ripper? What Lessons Can Be Learned

The Unexplained Files, Post 01

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

People called her Polly. She was forty-three, separated from her husband, living between workhouses and common lodging houses in the East End of London. Before dawn, two carmen found her in Buck’s Row. She became the first of five women whose deaths, over the next ten weeks, would be tied together under one name.

That name was not the killer’s. It may not even have been his idea.

By the end of that autumn, “Jack the Ripper” had become more than an unidentified murderer. He was a headline, a silhouette and a public obsession. The newspapers supplied the cape. Later storytellers supplied the fog. More than a century later, we are still supplying suspects.

What we have never supplied is an answer.

Five women, and a larger unsolved case

The familiar account centres on five women: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. These are the “canonical five”, killed between 31 August and 9 November 1888. The label is useful, but it is not a verdict delivered by history.

The police files grouped a wider sequence of eleven killings under the Whitechapel murders, stretching from 1888 to 1891. Then, as now, investigators disagreed about which crimes shared an offender. Modern researchers still do. Five is the conventional core, not a magically certain body count.

This distinction matters because mystery encourages tidiness. We like one villain, one pattern and one final reveal. Real investigations are untidy. Similar crimes can have different offenders. Different-looking crimes can have the same offender. Evidence disappears, witnesses conflict and people remember yesterday with today’s confidence.

Nobody knows who Jack the Ripper was. He may have been one of the men questioned at the time, one of the names promoted later, or someone who never entered the surviving record. No suspect was charged. Every confident solution has had to bridge gaps that the evidence itself does not bridge.

I know that is less satisfying than unveiling a doctor, a barber, an aristocrat or a member of the royal household. It is also more truthful. A mystery does not become solved because a theory has good lighting and ominous music.

When investigation began to look inward

The Metropolitan Police detective department was not brand new in 1888, but it was young. According to the London Museum’s case history, officers patrolled Whitechapel, pursued suspects and conducted thousands of interviews. They also worked without the forensic systems we now take for granted.

What they did have was observation, medical opinion and an emerging willingness to infer something about an unknown offender from what he had done.

On 10 November 1888, the day after Mary Jane Kelly was killed, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond offered an assessment of the likely murderer. He reasoned from the injuries and the circumstances of the attacks to the offender’s probable strength, manner, habits and mental state. Psychologist David Canter later described Bond’s work as probably the first offender profile. A useful recent account by forensic psychology researcher Jasmine MacDonald makes the wording clear: probably.

That one word keeps the history honest. Bond’s memorandum was a precursor to behavioural profiling, not the sudden invention of a mature scientific discipline. It had no validated database behind it and it did not identify the murderer. Some of its language belongs firmly to Victorian medicine. Modern profiling developed much later and remains an investigative aid, not a machine that prints a culprit’s name.

Still, there was a meaningful change in the question. The police were no longer asking only, “What happened here?” They were also asking, “What sort of person would do this repeatedly?” That instinct now appears in behavioural analysis, case linkage and geographical profiling. Intuition had not become science overnight. Patterns could narrow a search, but an attractive profile could narrow the mind too early.

The killer the newspapers helped to create

The murders arrived at an important moment in British media. Cheap, mass-circulation papers were competing for readers. Telegraph cables could move a London story across the Atlantic quickly. The halfpenny evening paper The Star reportedly reached sales of up to 300,000 copies a day during the murders, while penny weeklies expanded their coverage and gave increasingly prominent space to the case.

The press did not invent the deaths, and not every paper reported them in the same way. Yet it helped turn an unknown offender into a recognisable character. As historian Beth Fisher writes in History Today, newspapers amplified the terror and built the myth around him. Academic work on the period’s mass-circulation press shows how reporting, sensational fiction and advertising overlapped while the investigation was still active.

Then came the letters.

The “Dear Boss” letter, received by the Central News Agency in September 1888, used the name “Jack the Ripper” and taunted the authorities. It was reproduced and circulated, giving an invisible offender a voice and a brand. But it has never been proved genuine. It is widely regarded as a likely hoax, possibly produced by someone who understood the newspaper business. The National Archives holds hundreds of supposed Ripper letters. Their volume is evidence of public fever, not hundreds of authentic confessions.

We should also resist calling this the first media-made moral panic. Print-driven crime panics existed in London long before 1888. What the Ripper case did provide was an especially powerful early example of the modern crime spectacle: rapid distribution, commercial competition, official silence, public fear and a villain whose nickname was more memorable than the names of the dead.

There is a business lesson here, though it is not a comfortable one. Attention rewards certainty long before evidence earns it. In a Lagos boardroom, a newsroom or a WhatsApp group, the confident version will often travel first. The careful correction arrives later, removing its shoes at the door while the rumour has already entered every room.

The women hidden behind the nickname

The newspapers did more than build the killer’s legend. They also flattened the murdered women into a single story.

For generations, the canonical five were flattened into one description: prostitutes. Current historical work disputes that claim. The London Museum notes that Mary Jane Kelly is the only one known to have been earning money through sex work at the time she was killed. The others had worked as domestic servants, run a coffeehouse, sold goods, picked hops or taken whatever insecure work was available. Some were mothers. All five experienced poverty and unstable housing.

Victorian London was the capital of an empire and also a city in which families shared damp single rooms, casual work vanished without warning and a woman without money could move quickly from respectability to the workhouse or the street. The label attached to these women made their lives seem less complicated and their deaths easier to consume.

That old judgement still has descendants. When violence reaches a poor woman, a migrant, a sex worker or anyone living outside society’s approved lines, public conversation can quietly put the victim on trial. Where was she? Why was she there? What was she wearing? Who did she know? We ask for a character reference before offering a human being sympathy.

The five women were not symbols of perfect innocence. Nobody needs to be. They were people with work histories, relationships, illnesses, humour, failures and plans for the next morning. Their poverty increased their exposure to danger, while the way society described them reduced the urgency of seeing them whole.

That may be the hardest lesson in this case. Protection is rarely distributed equally. Neither is remembrance.

DNA, certainty and the suspect we want

In 2019, headlines announced that DNA had finally identified the killer as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-born barber who had appeared in historical suspicion around the case. The claim came from tests on a shawl said to have been connected to Catherine Eddowes. The authors published their study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences and reported mitochondrial DNA links to maternal relatives of Eddowes and Kosminski.

It sounded like the ending people had waited 131 years to hear. It was not one.

The shawl’s chain of custody is disputed, and its long history of handling creates an obvious contamination problem. More importantly, mitochondrial DNA is shared down maternal lines and does not identify one person in the way a unique nuclear DNA profile can. Geneticist Felice Bedford’s published critique of the 2019 analysis argued that only control regions were sequenced, that the underlying nucleotide results were not disclosed for independent verification, and that the reported matches could not support the identification claimed.

Kosminski remains a suspect. The DNA story did not convert him into a solved case.

This is where our appetite for closure can become an investigative weakness. A technical method carries authority, so we stop asking whether the sample is authentic, whether the comparison is discriminating enough and whether another laboratory can reproduce the result. Science is strongest when it makes its uncertainty visible. A headline usually prefers science wearing a judge’s wig.

From penny papers to true-crime feeds

Our technology has changed. Our appetite has not.

The penny weekly had a publication cycle. We have autoplay, push alerts, recommendation systems and comment sections that can turn every viewer into a detective before breakfast. A disputed theory can travel around the world before the person who posted it has finished checking the spelling of the suspect’s name.

True crime can do real good. It can recover neglected evidence, keep a cold case visible and return attention to a victim whose life was reduced to a file number. It can also make suffering into a format. A 2024 study in the International Journal of Communication, analysing fourteen popular American true-crime podcast episodes, found that murdered women were often represented as a dehumanised group, treated as partly complicit in their deaths and used as cautionary tales for other women.

That is uncomfortably close to what happened in Whitechapel. The platform is new. The old reflex survives inside it.

I do not think the answer is to stop telling crime stories. Silence can protect institutions and offenders too. The better answer is discipline. Separate fact from theory. Name uncertainty. Do not publish an accusation because it makes a better thumbnail. Ask what a victim’s family would learn from the story as carefully as you ask what the audience will feel. And remember that a person is more than the worst thing that happened to her.

What Whitechapel leaves us

Jack the Ripper was almost certainly not the caped phantom history has drawn for us. He was a man who moved through ordinary streets without looking remarkable enough to stop. His anonymity allowed each generation to remake him in its own image: foreigner, gentleman, doctor, madman, conspiracy, DNA result.

But the useful lessons are not hidden inside his identity.

They are in the police effort that showed both the promise and danger of inference. They are in a press that discovered fear could be packaged and sold. They are in a city whose wealth stood a short walk from desperate housing. They are in the ease with which five women became supporting characters in the story of the man who killed them.

The more I read about the case, the less interested I become in giving Jack a face. He has occupied the centre of the picture for long enough. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly deserve their names back.

Perhaps justice, at this distance, begins there: not with pretending we can solve what the evidence cannot, but with refusing to let mystery erase the people who paid its price.

What do you think: how much of our fascination with unsolved horror is really about justice, and how much is about the story? Drop your take in the comments.