Russian surgeon, Jewish hairdresser, woman, prince and even a relative of Meghan Markle: London serial killer Jack the Ripper could be one of these people, historians say. 130 years after London was shaken by a series of brutal murders, the personality of the maniac still excites the fantasy of detective lovers. Gazeta. Ru has collected versions of who killed prostitutes in the London slums.
August 1888 plunged the people of London into an atmosphere of fear 130 years ago. A serial killer appeared in the city, whose victims were prostitutes, residents of the Whitechapel slum. The unknown psychopath, who cruelly dealt with harlots, did not leave the newspaper pages for several months - the yellow press published all the new "facts" about Jack, most of which were invented by the journalists themselves.
Over time, the figure of this killer became so overgrown with urban legends and myths that it became almost folkloric.
Even the name of the killer may have been invented by the London journalists themselves. The nickname Jack the Ripper comes from a letter "Dear Boss …" sent to the Central News Agency. The author of the message claimed that he was the killer and signed with this pseudonym. Some historians believe that this letter was a falsification, composed by the correspondents themselves. The Ripper was also called the "Whitechapel Killer" and "The Leather Apron." The last nickname was given because, despite the brutality of the massacre of blood at the crime scene, there was little, and the police assumed that the Ripper himself was practically not stained with blood.
Jack's Five
From August 31 to November 9, five women were killed in Whitechapel. The throats were slit to the victims with strong blows from very sharp weapons, and then they were opened and the entrails were pulled out. It is speculated that at first the victim was strangled, and therefore no one in overcrowded Whitechapel ever heard the screams. Sometimes the policemen who made the rounds arrived at the crime scene literally a few minutes after the murder itself, but only found the tortured victim. Because of this, there were rumors about Jack's elusiveness and his superiority over the police.
Londoners were scared and the police were powerless. The maniac was never caught. The failure of the London police was explained by its inexperience - it was created only in 1829. During the investigation, the police interviewed about 2 thousand people, detained 80 of them, but none of the versions put forward was confirmed, and as a result, no murder charges were brought against any of the suspects.
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Yet Jack the Ripper brought about a change in the city.
From the fall of 1888, the streets of Whitechapel, and indeed the entire East End, where the area was located, became surprisingly safe.
The fact is that after the start of the investigation, many criminals and thugs left the dysfunctional East End, fearing that they would be mistaken for the Ripper, the police switched to a heightened mode of work, and the frightened citizens became more vigilant and reported to the police against everyone who called them even the slightest suspicion.
The Ripper case became so resonant that Queen Victoria herself proposed reforming the police in the English capital. In addition, unsolved murders and the Queen's indignation forced the resignation of the head of the British Police and the Home Secretary.
Who Jack the Ripper was has remained a mystery, which they have been trying to solve for 130 years. His name, profession, age and even gender are still unknown. And this gives space for exuberant imagination. Amateur detectives and historians are still trying to figure out who was hiding under the guise of the Ripper and have expressed a variety of versions.
Russian trace
John Plimmer, 31 years old at Scotland Yard, was convinced that the Whitechapel killer was the Russian surgeon Alexander Fedorchenko. The policeman pointed out that the psychological portrait he compiled and the information about Fedorchenko collected by the investigators in 1888 coincided.
Indirect evidence proving the detective's version was that Fedorchenko knew anatomy professionally, he had surgical experience and medical instruments. He lived in Wyatchepel, and the prostitutes trusted the doctor, so they let him in without fear.
Fedorchenko was interrogated at Scotland Yard on suspicion of murdering harlots, and after that he hastily left the country.
For the sake of investigation, the detective even traveled to Bulgaria to meet there with the famous soothsayer Vanga. He allegedly put a handkerchief in Vanga's hand, taken from the scene of one of the Ripper's murders. She said that the Ripper had seven victims, and after London he continued his atrocities in Poltava.
In the Poltava special archive, Plimmer got hold of a criminal case against the maniac Alexander Fedorchenko, who was actually accused of murdering several women in Ukraine. The surgeon was not given to the local police officers and just before the arrest he hanged himself in a rented room.
Barber-murderer
The Scotland Yard detectives who led the Ripper case in the 19th century had a different story. In 2006, the records of Chief Police Inspector Donald Swenson were released after his grandson, Neville Swenson, donated his grandfather's diary to the London Police Department.
Investigator Donald Swenson wrote down his thoughts in the margins of The Bright Side of My Service, authored by his immediate superior, Assistant Chief of Police Robert Anderson.
"It is a well established fact that the murders were committed by a Polish Jewish immigrant, Aaron Kosminski," reads Svenson's entry.
Kosminski came to England to work in 1882 and got a job as a barber in one of the hairdressers in Whitechapel.
The police detained him for a completely different reason - after trying to stab his sister.
During interrogations, Inspector Swenson was surprised by the detainee's striking similarity with eyewitness accounts of Jack the Ripper's appearance. But all efforts to prove Kosminski's involvement in atrocious crimes remained unsuccessful - interrogations of a barber suffering from a severe mental disorder did not lead to anything.
At the same time, the only witness who saw Jack the Ripper refused to identify him as Aaron Kosminski. “The only person who saw the killer well and did not hesitate to identify him at the confrontation, refused to confirm his testimony,” says the book by Robert Anderson.
As Donald Swenson clarifies in the margin of his boss's book, "the suspect, like Kosminski, was a Jew, and he understood that his testimony could lead to a conviction and execution of the criminal, so he did not dare to take responsibility for Kosminski's life."
During the investigation, no direct evidence was found against the detainee. And without proof, the police did not release the results of their investigation. Robert Anderson writes that disclosing the name of the perpetrator "will not benefit the public." Nevertheless, neither Anderson, nor Swenson, nor the other inspectors of Scotland Yard doubted that they were on the trail of the real killer.
There was no trial over Kosminski: after being accused of attempting to murder his sister, doctors pronounced him insane and sent him for compulsory treatment to the Brighton clinic, where he died in 1919.
Search a woman
The fifth victim of Jack the Ripper was named Mary Jane Kelly, she was also a London prostitute, but younger than the others (four victims were over 40, and Kelly was 25) and more attractive. For this reason, the girl earned more and could afford to rent a room. She became the only victim of the Ripper, whose corpse was found not on the street, but in her own living quarters.
In the fireplace at the crime scene, the police found the remains of burnt women's clothing. And here a new version was born - what if Jack the Ripper is actually a woman or disguised as a woman? This theory was supported by Arthur Conan Doyle. The writer suggested that the perpetrator was a professional midwife and helped women to give birth. In that case, the murderer would not arouse suspicion among prostitutes, and besides, no one would be surprised by the bloody clothes.
None of the victims were sexually assaulted, and the famous Letter from Hell, also credited to the Ripper, was written in a woman's hand.
Some researchers even named the alleged killer - midwife Lizzie Williams, wife of the royal physician John Williams, who was also suspected of being Jack the Ripper. It was believed that Lizzie went crazy on the basis of her infertility, and took revenge on the prostitutes by removing the reproductive organs from their bodies.
Encroached on sacred
In the second half of the 20th century, a version appeared in the British press according to which Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, was Jack the Ripper. Proponents of this theory pointed out that Albert was allegedly an avid visitor to Whitechapel brothels and was even close to the fifth victim of the ripper - Mary Jane Kelly.
Someone said that Albert caught syphilis in a brothel and thus took revenge on prostitutes. Others have argued that
one of the prostitutes gave birth to a child with Prince Albert, and he committed a series of murders to get rid of a dangerous witness and cover his tracks.
The handwriting of some of the letters that came to journalists on behalf of Jack the Ripper (most of these letters are fakes) was very similar to that of the prince.
However, it was soon possible to prove that the heir to the throne had an alibi: he was not in London on the days of the murders.
The duchess will be furious
In May of this year, Meghan Markle's cousin Jeff Mudget revealed in a documentary that he, and therefore the wife of Prince Harry, is a relative of Henry Holmes, who is considered America's first serial killer. At the same time, back in 2012, Mudget suggested that it was Holmes who was Jack the Ripper.
Henry Holmes was sentenced to death in the summer of 1896. On his account, according to various sources, from 27 to 350 victims. Most of the murders took place in Chicago, at the hotel he built.
According to Mudget, in order to find out all the details, he studied the archives of the FBI, CIA and Scotland Yard. Mudget compared Jack and Holmes's handwriting samples. “He refers to 'one expert recommended by the British Library' who concluded that both samples were done 'with one hand'. In addition, a computer program used by the Postal Service and the US Department of Justice concluded a 97.95% similarity,”writes RT.
However, Mudget did not specify which of the letters attributed to Jack he took. It is most likely that Mudget was trying to draw attention to his book about Henry Holmes with these statements, experts say.
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