Who was hiding under the nickname Jack the Ripper?
Invisible assassin
1883, August 7 - at 5 o'clock in the morning, a resident of an apartment building in London's East End, John Rivers, went to work and found a human body lying in a large pool of blood on the staircase. Reeves immediately called the police.
The police were able to quickly establish that this is the body of a local prostitute Martha Turner. Doctors counted 39 stab wounds on the victim's body. This murder did not cause much excitement among the police. The East End is one of London's poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods, and stabbing is no surprise.
Three weeks later, in the same area, a cabman found the body of another murdered woman in a roadside ditch. The police identified the murdered Mary Nichols, also a prostitute. Nichols's throat had been slit, and she was literally gutted. After the second corpse was found, the police doctor said that, in his opinion, the culprit should be good at surgery and that this is the same person who killed Turner (over time, this reckless statement will serve the investigation a disservice).
On September 8, an unknown maniac killed the prostitute Anne Chapman. The woman's throat was cut, her stomach was ripped open.
Panic seized London, especially the East End. No one doubted that all three murders were the work of one killer. It was obvious that he was killing prostitutes and taking pleasure in the murder he was committing. After inflicting a fatal blow on the victim, he continues to hack her body with fury.
The police did everything to arrest the maniac. They constantly carried out raids in the slums of London, detained vagrants, suspicious foreigners, previously convicted criminals, people with mental disabilities. There were many detainees, but everyone who was detained earlier and who later was released anyway, because after a thorough check it turned out that none of the detainees had anything to do with the murders in the East End.
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On September 27, the nickname "Jack the Ripper" was heard for the first time. This is how a letter was signed, which came to the British news agency allegedly on behalf of a maniac. In the letter, he boasted of the murders committed and promised not to stop them in the future.
On September 30, two women became victims of the killer at once. The first was found by a dray cab in one of the East End yards. The maniac managed to escape from the crime scene literally a minute before the coachman appeared. Blood was still gushing from the wound on the woman's neck. After 45 minutes. after this murder, the monster kills the prostitute Cat Eddowes, a 15-minute walk from the courtyard where the first murder of the day was committed. The killer cut Kat's body so that they could hardly identify her.
The next day, the news agency received a postcard signed "Jack the Ripper," in which he confessed to two new crimes and mocked the helplessness of the police. It has now been proven that both the letter and the postcard were a bad trick of some joker, but then they were perceived by the police as genuine messages from a maniac killer.
The authorities reinforced the London patrol service with police sent from other cities and brought military units to the streets. Soldiers of the Royal Guard patrolled the poorest neighborhoods of London. But all the measures taken and the efforts of the detectives of Scotland Yard were in vain. The maniac seemed to have become invisible.
A serious scandal erupted around the London police. The case of the ineffective work of the police was discussed at the highest government level. It was proposed to immediately resign the head of the London Criminal Investigation Commissioner Charles Warren. Even the aged Queen Victoria has personally expressed her dissatisfaction with the work of the London detectives.
On November 9, Jack the Ripper committed another murder. This time his victim was a pretty young Mary Kelly. The girl began her "career" on the panel, but for a year already she lived on the support of several rich old people. She was murdered in her cozy apartment on the first floor of a house on Dorset Street. This time, Jack the Ripper dismembered the victim's body into pieces and laid them neatly around the bloody torso.
London froze in horror and … nothing else happened. The maniac, as if sated with blood, disappeared. There were no more murders.
The titanic efforts of the police were in vain. The culprit remained unknown. The question also remained open: why did Jack the Ripper suddenly stop his murders?
Versions
There are many versions about who was hiding under the ominous nickname "Jack the Ripper".
The most popular version, which became almost official, was the assumption that Jack the Ripper was a fanatically religious doctor who, by killing prostitutes, wanted to eradicate vice in this way. According to this version, after the sixth crime, he committed suicide.
There are also more intricate versions. According to one of them, the killer was a surgeon whose goal was to find and kill Mary Kelly, who infected his son with syphilis. He allegedly killed all other women of easy virtue in the process of searching, so as not to leave witnesses.
There are also romantic assumptions, according to which the maniac was a brilliantly educated handsome aristocrat, under whose veneer dangerous madness was hidden. After the sixth murder, relatives found out how their relative was having fun at night, and probably hid him in a private clinic for the mentally ill.
Persistent rumors connected the name of the maniac with the Duke of Clarence, the grandson of Queen Victoria. Unfortunately for lovers of the scandalous secrets of the royal family, researchers have recently proved that at the time when at least two murders were committed, the duke was hunting in Scotland.
There is also a political version of events, especially the favorite of filmmakers, according to which Freemasons were behind the brutal killings in the East End.
Later, a voluntary candidate for "Jackie-Ripper" appeared. It was a certain Thomas Cream, whose adventures are described in detail in the book by Kir Bulychev “Conan Doyle and Jack the Ripper.
Cream was a doctor, sex maniac, marriage swindler and murderer at the same time. He made a living by clandestine abortion (abortion was widely prohibited at that time) and deliberately crippled several women during operations, making them disabled for life. Then he amused himself by poisoning London prostitutes with strychnine capsules, passing them off as medicine. Sentenced to death, Cream, even under the gallows, shouted that he was the famous Jack the Ripper. Journalists spread his confession to newspapers, ignoring the obvious absurdities of this sensation. When killing, Krim never used melee weapons, his weakness is poison. And besides, when London was in awe of Jack the Ripper, Cream was serving his sentence in the Illinois State Prison. As for his confession, then, as you can see, the criminal also had megalomania.
There was another person claiming to have solved the Jack the Ripper mystery. In 1890-1891, private detective Eugene Bong, who specialized in the private search for stolen goods, alternately contacted some English third-rate newspapers. Bong stated that in 1888 he conducted a private investigation in the East End and that he knew who was hiding under the devilish mask of Jack the Ripper. He hinted that the solution to the mystery is surprisingly simple and at the same time so unusual that the reading public will simply gasp.
Bong had a very bad reputation. He maintained suspicious connections in the criminal environment, was boastful and had a reputation for, to put it mildly, not a very truthful person. In addition, for his information, he demanded such an incredible amount for those times that not a single newspaper dared to conclude a deal with him. Moreover, at this time, readers' interest in Jack the Ripper had already fallen. Bong soon emigrated to America. English journalist and historian D. Weiss tried to find documentary information about his stay in the United States, but without much success. Weiss established that until 1895 Bong lived in Pittsburgh, where he tried, without much success, to engage in the same private investigation. Further traces of it are lost.
Jack the Ripper or Bloody Mary?
In our time, Jack the Ripper has again become the object of close interest of historians. From time to time, this or that researcher tries to unravel the age-old mystery. Moreover, all researchers make the same mistake - taking the materials of the police investigation as the basis of their research, they try to interpret them in a new way, without questioning the main statements of the detectives of the past. Let's try to fix this error.
The first conclusion of the police investigation is that all six murders were committed by the same person. Is it so?
Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the two murders, the first and the last, are different from the others. The first victim, Martha Turner, received 39 stab wounds in a dark stairwell. The nature of the wounds shows not so much the sadistic inclinations of the criminal, but rather the fact that the killer was in a fierce rage. For the East End, this murder is commonplace. There could be a jealous murder or a quarrel over money between a prostitute and her pimp. That is why Turner's murder did not cause much concern to the police.
The last murder is different in that for the first time the killer dealt with the victim not on the street, but in her apartment, dismembering her body, which he had never done before.
Thus, the work of Jack the Ripper, according to external signs, can undoubtedly be considered 4 murders.
The second conclusion of the investigation claims that all the murders have no motive, other than the abnormal inclinations of the maniac.
Perhaps this is so, but it should be noted that the cruelly mutilated bodies of the victims can serve as evidence of the killer's mental abnormality, and as evidence of an act of cruel revenge or the ritual of the murder being committed. Perhaps the police did not have to dwell solely on the version of the maniac, but more diligently look for other motives.
The third conclusion - the maniac was a representative of the educated strata of society and, most likely, a surgeon or a person versed in anatomy. This is the most precarious conclusion.
Modern forensic scientist Professor E. Barinov did not find in the description of the mutilated bodies any special indications that the killer was an expert on anatomy. One thing that can be noted is that the maniac had a good, sharpened knife, perhaps a surgical knife, but this in itself cannot indicate that the killer was a medic. Rumors about the killer doctor were circulated by the police authorities in order to justify their failures by the atypical personality of the criminal.
Many ordinary police officers were rather skeptical about this version. Rightly believing that in an atmosphere of universal fear, when all the newspapers trumpeted about the doctor-murderer, not a single woman of easy virtue late at night would go to a dark alley or an entrance with an unfamiliar well-dressed gentleman, especially in the East End, where it is a gentleman's dressed people rarely met during the day.
In our opinion, the solution to the mystery lies precisely in the downright discouraging gullibility of the victims. The maniac never pursued his victims, and they never resisted him. The East End is a densely populated area, and in the event of a noise of struggle, cries for help, they would probably have been recorded in the testimony of witnesses, but this was not. Until the last moment, the unfortunate did not suspect the danger. This was especially evident in the murder of Kat Eddowes. When the killer persuaded the woman to follow him into a dark alley, his clothes, according to the police, should have been in the blood of the previous victim, and yet the woman did not suspect anything.
During the investigation, the police suspected that the killer knew his victims well and enjoyed their full confidence. Therefore, they carefully checked pimps, brothel keepers, regular customers, owners and servants of bars and pubs visited by the victims. Each man's alibis were carefully checked for all six murders, but there was no result. Scotland Yard detectives failed not only to apprehend the killer, but also to identify at least one "promising" suspect.
Thus, discarding the romantic, unconfirmed assumptions about a child-loving surgeon, a fanatic doctor, a crazy aristocrat, we will come to a startling conclusion: in the conditions of fear and hysteria that gripped the East End, when women looked with horror at every man they met, carefree and a prostitute could safely follow Jack the Ripper at night only if … if Jack the Ripper was a woman!
This was precisely the elusiveness of the maniac. Both the stern "bobbies" sentry, combing the slums of London, and the wise inspectors in the offices of Scotland Yard were looking for a man and only a man. The very views of the people of the good old 19th century did not even allow the idea that a woman could be the author of terrible street attacks.
Who was this Jack the Ripper in a skirt?
This is where we get into the realm of speculation. In our opinion, the sixth victim of Jack the Ripper, Mary Kelly, should take the first place among the suspects. If we assume that it was she who was Jack the Ripper, then it becomes clear why the killings stopped immediately after her death. It should be noted that the double murder on September 30 took place a hundred meters from her apartment. We can only guess about the motives of the crimes. Perhaps the girl had some abnormal inclinations, but one cannot exclude an extremely cruel, but, in fact, ordinary revenge or some other reason.
Indirectly in favor of this assumption is evidenced by the records of interrogations of East End prostitutes, kept in the archives of Scotland Yard, when detectives of Scotland Yard collected information about the identities of the murdered women. "Workmates" described Mary Kelly as a very strange girl. Periods of deep apathy and despondency were easily replaced in her behavior by bouts of hysterical mirth. The friends saw the reason for this in the fact that Mary was smoking opium. Moreover, a year before the tragic events of 1883, the police arrested Mary Kelly for throwing herself at her with a razor in her hand during a quarrel with a friend in one of the bars.
As for the death of Kelly herself, then she may have been tracked down and killed by her lover, and most likely the pimp of one of the dead prostitutes. It cannot be ruled out that the apartment on Dorset Street was occupied by a whole group of businessmen, feeding on prostitution, whom little Mary had deprived of part of her income with her nightly entertainment. After all, when in the slums of the East End atrocities Jack the Ripper, prostitutes were afraid to go to work. The body of Mary Kelly was brutally dismembered, either simply out of malice, or in order to write off her murder at the expense of her own crimes.
If the assumptions made about the identity of Jack the Ripper are correct, then this story may well have been unearthed in 1888 by Eugene Bong, engaged in a private investigation in the slums of the East End. It was her that the loser detective wanted to tell the journalists.
V. Smirnov