Jack the Ripper was the pseudonym given to the murderer of at least five women in London’s East End district of Whitechapel between August and November of 1888. These killings remain among the most famous unsolved mysteries in English criminal history. While some dozen murders between 1888 and 1892 were speculatively linked to him, only five were considered by later researchers to be the work of the same killer: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. This grouping, known as the “canonical five,” was not an official designation at the time but a scholarly conclusion introduced by researcher Martin Fido in 1987.
For more than a century it was generally assumed that all of the victims were prostitutes, but modern scholarship has challenged this view. In her 2019 book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, British historian Hallie Rubenhold argued that Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes were not sex workers, that Stride may have resorted to soliciting only on rare occasions in times of dire poverty, and that the only verifiable prostitute among the victims was Kelly. Rather than being defined solely by their deaths, these women had lives shaped by poverty, broken families, illness, and homelessness. Nichols, for example, had once been married and a mother of five, while others had some education or connections to stable households before misfortune cast them into destitution. Rubenhold contends that their stigmatization as prostitutes was the result of the misogyny and class prejudice of Victorian society.
The murders themselves were brutal and alarming. In each case, the victim’s throat was cut, and most of the bodies were mutilated with a degree of precision that suggested at least some anatomical knowledge. On one occasion, half of a human kidney was mailed to the police, possibly taken from one of the victims, along with taunting letters signed “Jack the Ripper.” These sensational details, amplified by the press, intensified public panic and made the case a global sensation. The inability of the authorities to apprehend the killer drew sharp criticism from the public, and both the commissioner of the London police and the home secretary resigned in the wake of the scandal.
The mystery of the killer’s identity has fueled speculation for generations. Several men were regarded as possible suspects. Montague John Druitt, a barrister and teacher with some surgical knowledge, took his own life shortly after the final murder and was later named by police officials as a leading suspect, though no firm evidence linked him to the crimes. Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born conman and physician, was mentioned in official memoranda but is now thought to have been in France during the killings. Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jewish barber with documented mental illness and a history of hostility toward women, was confined to a mental asylum not long after the murders and has remained one of the most discussed suspects.
In recent years, forensic claims have revived debates about Kosminski’s culpability. A controversial study in 2014 and again in 2019 reported that mitochondrial DNA recovered from a shawl attributed to victim Catherine Eddowes matched that of Kosminski’s descendants. However, these findings have been criticized for lacking peer review and for methodological weaknesses, leaving the conclusion far from definitive. In 2023, a letter discovered in Australia and dating to 1889 alleged that Kosminski had attacked a woman with scissors, but its authenticity remains unproven.
The crimes left a profound mark on Victorian society. Whitechapel was one of London’s poorest districts, marked by overcrowding, squalor, and inadequate support for vulnerable women. The killings underscored the precarious existence of those living on the margins and highlighted systemic social inequalities. At the same time, the case’s failure to be solved created lasting distrust in the institutions charged with protecting the public.
Jack the Ripper has since become a cultural figure as much as a historical one. The case inspired a vast number of novels, plays, and films, among them Marie Adelaide Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger, which was adapted into Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Today, the murder sites have even become stops on a thriving “Ripper tourism” industry in London, where visitors retrace the steps of 1888 on guided tours through Whitechapel.
The enduring fascination with Jack the Ripper lies not only in the mystery of the killer’s identity but also in the lives of the victims, whose stories reflect the hardships of women in a society marked by poverty, inequality, and prejudice. The case remains a haunting reminder of both the horrors of violence and the ways in which history often obscures the humanity of those it remembers only as victims.
Every time I read about Jack the Ripper, it gives me chills. Hard to imagine someone committing those crimes in the middle of London and never being caught. No CCTV, no DNA, no modern forensics—it makes sense why the mystery still fascinates people today.
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