Jack the Ripper: What the Police Actually Knew in 1888

On October 16, 1888, a man named George Lusk opened a small box that had arrived for him in the mail in London's East End.

Lusk was the head of a local citizens' group that had been patrolling the streets of Whitechapel, trying to catch a murderer the police could not.

Inside the box was half of a human kidney, preserved in alcohol.

With it was a letter. It began with two words: "From hell."

The writer claimed the kidney came from one of the murdered women. He said he had fried and eaten the other half.

It was signed: "Catch me when you can."

Nobody ever did.

This is the story of the Whitechapel murders, and the killer the world came to call Jack the Ripper.

Whitechapel, 1888

In 1888, Whitechapel was one of the poorest districts in London.

About eighty thousand people lived there. Many were immigrants, including Irish families and Jewish refugees who had fled violence in Eastern Europe. More than half of the children born in the East End died before they turned five.

Every night, about eighty-five hundred people slept in two hundred and thirty-three cheap lodging houses. A bed cost fourpence. If you could not afford a bed, for two pence you could sleep sitting up, leaning against a rope strung across the room.

The police estimated there were about twelve hundred women working as prostitutes in Whitechapel. Most did it because there was simply no other way to survive.

These were the people the killer chose.

The five women

Police in 1888 investigated a series of eleven murders in the area, from April 1888 to February 1891, in what was called the Whitechapel murders file. But five of those murders, all in the autumn of 1888, are the ones most closely linked together. Historians call them the "canonical five."

Their names were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.

Mary Ann Nichols was found at about three-forty in the morning on Friday, August 31, 1888, in a street called Buck's Row.

Annie Chapman was found at about six in the morning on Saturday, September 8, in the backyard of a house at 29 Hanbury Street, in Spitalfields.

Elizabeth Stride was found at about one in the morning on Sunday, September 30, in a yard off Berner Street. Her wounds were less extensive than the others, which made investigators think the killer may have been interrupted.

Less than an hour later, Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square, in the City of London.

Two murders in one night. The newspapers called it the "double event."

And on Friday, November 9, Mary Jane Kelly was found in her small rented room at 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street in Spitalfields. She was the only one of the five killed indoors.

All five were killed at night. Their throats were cut. In most of the cases, the bodies were mutilated, and the mutilations became more severe as the weeks went on. We are not going into those details here. They are in the sources, if you want them.

The police

Two police forces were involved. Most of the murders happened in the Metropolitan Police area. But Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes was found, was inside the City of London, which had its own separate police force.

The Metropolitan Police brought in experienced detectives from Scotland Yard, including Inspector Frederick Abberline, who knew the East End well.

The investigation was huge for its time. More than two thousand people were interviewed. More than three hundred were investigated. Eighty were detained. Because of the nature of the wounds, police visited dozens of butchers and slaughterhouse workers, and checked cattle boats on the river.

And yet, they had almost nothing to go on. No fingerprinting. No photographs of suspects. No forensic science as we know it. Witnesses described different men, in different clothes, in poor light.

Early on, police arrested a local Jewish bootmaker known by the nickname "Leather Apron." He had alibis for the murders, and was released. But the arrest helped fuel antisemitism in the district, which made the police very nervous.

The apron and the wall

On the night of the double event, the killer may have left a clue.

At about two fifty-five in the morning, a police officer found a bloodstained piece of cloth in the doorway of a tenement building on Goulston Street. It was a piece of Catherine Eddowes's apron. The killer had apparently cut it and carried it away.

Written in chalk on the wall above it was a message. It read: "The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing."

Nobody knows whether the killer wrote it. Chalk writing on walls was common in Whitechapel. But the police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was afraid it would spark attacks on the local Jewish community. Before dawn, he ordered it washed away.

It was never photographed.

"Dear Boss"

So where did the name "Jack the Ripper" come from?

On September 27, 1888, a London news agency received a letter. It was written in red ink and began, "Dear Boss." The writer bragged about the murders, said he would keep going, and promised to clip the ears of his next victim. He signed it "Jack the Ripper."

The news agency forwarded it to Scotland Yard. At first, police thought it was a hoax.

Then, a few days later, came the double event. And one of Catherine Eddowes's ears had been partly cut.

On October 1, the news agency received a postcard, in similar handwriting, that referred to the "double event." It became known as the "Saucy Jacky" postcard. But it was postmarked more than a day after the murders, when the news was already all over London.

Scotland Yard published copies of the letter and the postcard, hoping someone would recognize the handwriting. Instead, the name "Jack the Ripper" went around the world.

Many people, including some police officials at the time, came to believe the "Dear Boss" letter was written by a journalist, to sell newspapers. That has never been proven. But it means the most famous name in the history of crime may have been invented by a reporter.

"From Hell"

Police and newspapers received hundreds of letters claiming to be from the killer. Almost all were hoaxes.

But one has always stood apart.

George Lusk, the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group of local men who patrolled the streets and offered their own reward, received the small box on October 16.

The handwriting and style were very different from the "Dear Boss" letter. The spelling was rough. It was headed "From hell." And it came with half a human kidney, preserved in spirits.

Catherine Eddowes's left kidney had been taken by her killer.

A doctor at the London Hospital, Thomas Openshaw, examined the kidney. He said it was human, and from the left side. Newspapers at the time reported that he said much more, but he did not. He could not say whose it was.

To this day, people disagree about whether the kidney came from Catherine Eddowes, or was a sick prank by someone who had access to a hospital or a medical school.

The first profile

At the end of October, the head of the Metropolitan Police's detective department asked a police surgeon, Dr. Thomas Bond, for his opinion.

Bond's report is considered one of the earliest surviving offender profiles in history. He argued the killer did not have the skill of a surgeon or even a butcher. He described a solitary man, probably quiet and respectable-looking, subject to periodic attacks of violent mania.

Bond's report is dated November 10, 1888. The day before, Mary Jane Kelly had been killed, and Bond had examined her himself.

After her death, the canonical series stopped. There were more murders in the Whitechapel file over the next few years. Some may have been by the same person. Many historians think they were not.

More than a hundred suspects

Over the past century and more, more than a hundred people have been proposed as Jack the Ripper. Doctors. Butchers. Artists. Royalty. Police officers. Local residents. Famous writers.

Some theories are serious and well researched. Many are not. Some have relied on DNA tests on old objects, which experts have criticized as unreliable.

None of them has ever been proven.

What we still don't know

The Whitechapel murders changed London. The newspapers sold more than a million copies a day at the height of the panic. Public attention to the conditions of the East End helped lead to the slums being cleared over the following decades.

And the killer became a legend. The subject of hundreds of books, films, tours, and endless theories.

But it is worth remembering who the story is really about. Five women. Mary Ann Nichols. Annie Chapman. Elizabeth Stride. Catherine Eddowes. Mary Jane Kelly. Women living in desperate poverty, trying to survive, who were killed by someone who has never been named.

Who do you think Jack the Ripper was? Or do you think we will ever know?