In 1888 London was shocked by a series of brutal murders in the Whitechapel area. It was a slum area, where various dregs of society settled, among whom there were a lot of immigrants. Fights and stabbing happened every day, and the death of another prostitute from Whitechapel would not shock anyone if not for the circumstances.
All the victims of the serial killer, nicknamed Jack the Ripper, were prostitutes, and they were all killed in the same way: they slit their throats with strong blows from very sharp weapons, and then slit their peritoneum and ripped out their entrails. Sometimes some organs (uterus, bladder, kidneys) were taken away by the killer. There is an assumption that at first the victim was strangled. This explains the fact that no one in the overcrowded Whitechapel ever heard the screams of the victim.
How many victims Jack the Ripper actually had is still debated. They call a number from 4 to 15. In the literature about the Ripper, the so-called list of "canonical victims" of a maniac has been established. It includes five names and opens with Mary Ann Nichols, murdered on August 31, 1888. Completing the list is Mary Jane Kelly, murdered on November 9 of that year.
After the murder of Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper's creepy activities in London ceased.
The killer was never found, despite police efforts.
The personality and motives of Jack the Ripper still excite the imagination of the public and gave rise to a whole direction - "ripperology" (from the English Jack the Ripper), in which journalists, amateur detectives and historians produce new versions of who he really was Jack the Ripper?
The most popular are the following.
Montague John Druitt, lawyer and schoolteacher. In 1888, his body was found in the Thames. There were people in his family suffering from mental disorders. He was named the prime suspect because his death occurred shortly after the discovery of the fifth victim, after which the "Ripper-style" killings stopped. However, he was later excluded from the list of suspects.
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Severin Antonovich Klosovsky, Pole. Arriving in England, he took the name Chapman. Successively poisoned three of his wives and was hanged. The inspector who conducted the investigation into the Ripper case suspected Klosovsky of the murders of prostitutes, however, the Pole was a poisoner, and for a serial killer, a maniac, changing the methods of murder is almost impossible.
Mikhail Ostrog, also known as Dr. Grant, Claude Clayton, Orloff, Ashley Nabokoff, and half a dozen other names. He claimed that he served as a surgeon on the ship, which fits very well with the version that Jack the Ripper was familiar with medicine, human anatomy, and that he delivered his blows with a surgical instrument and with surgical precision. However, no evidence has been found that Ostrog was not just a crook and crook, but a serial killer.
Lizzie Williams is a midwife. The police were looking for a man with medical skills, whose clothes might be stained with blood. Who will pay attention to the humble midwife hurrying down the dark street? And who will be surprised that the midwife's clothes are splattered with blood? Lizzie Williams is said to have gone mad because of her infertility, which explains the fury with which she allegedly shredded the bodies of her victims, removing the reproductive organs.
There is also such a version: Jack the Ripper was Prince Albert, nephew of Queen Victoria. This version is supported by the fact that the scion of the royal family visited Whitechapel prostitutes, contracted syphilis from one of them, and even was close to Mary Jane Kelly, the last of the "canonical victims" of the maniac. In addition, the police received letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper (later they were declared tricks of journalists), and so, the handwriting of these letters was very similar to that of Prince Albert. All this is great, but the prince has an alibi. It is absolutely certain that he was not in London on the days of the murders.
There was a version that the killer was Charles Latuidge Dodgson, known to us as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. Some researchers have contrived to compose anagrams from letters that folded into the sentences of his books. This is how the saying “cut her throat from left ear to right” was “read”. However, if you set yourself such a task, then in a similar way in the books of any author you can find a hint of any crime.
And finally, the man who, apparently, was the very Jack the Ripper. Aaron Mordke Kosminski is a native of the Russian Empire, a Polish Jew, a hairdresser from Whitechapel. He was a suspect in the Jack the Ripper case, but nothing could be proved, since one of the witnesses, also a Jew, refused to testify against him. Aaron was released, but was soon captured by the police while trying to stab his sister. He was declared insane and was admitted to a clinic for the mentally ill. After Aaron was isolated, the murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel stopped.
Only recently, in 2014, it was possible to prove that it was Kosminski who was the serial killer, through DNA analysis from semen stains preserved on a shawl, which was found near the corpse of one of the Ripper's victims. One of the policemen liked the shawl, he took it from the crime scene and gave it to his wife. The shawl was subsequently sold at auction. The research was carried out by the associate professor of molecular biology from Liverpool Jari Louhelainen. The owners of the shawl, which, as it turned out, had never been washed, provided him with this rarity for research. Louhelainen has done a tremendous job of comparing the DNA preserved on the shawl with the DNA of all the living descendants of the people who were suspected of these terrible crimes. The DNA on the shawl and the DNA of Aaron Kosminski's descendants matched.