eleven murders, dating 3rd april 1888 to 13th february 1891...jack being his pseudonym, no one knows his true identity.
mary ann nichols murdered friday 31st august 1888
annie chapman murdered Saturday 8 September 1888
elizabeth stride killed Sunday 30 September 1888
catherine edowes killed Sunday 30 September 1888
mary jane kelly found dead Friday 9 November 1888
emma elizabeth smith attacked 3 April 1888
martha tabram killed 7 August 1888
rose nylett strangled 20 December 1888
alice mckenzie killed on 17 July 1889
"The Pinchin Street Torso" – a headless and legless torso of a woman found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel on 10 September 1889
frances coles killed on 13 February 1891
all victims brutally killed, and why? no one knows...perhaps it was his hate and detest of women? or perhaps for revenge? all we know is just as brutally they started so did they end.
letters where sent to the police, signed by jack himself, most hoaxes but one more than the rest percieved perhaps to be from him was the 'from hell' letter which was presented to scotland yard along with a box containing half a human kidney, although it was deemed to be 'more realistic' than the rest it was never officially stamped by the investigating officer of the time so whether it was deemed to be a hoax later on we will never know as neither did it get mentioned in later reports.
suspects:
Montague John Druitt
Montague John Druitt (15 August 1857 – 1 December 1888)[3] was born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England, the son of a prominent local physician. He was educated at Winchester College and New College Oxford.[4] He graduated from Oxford in 1880 and two years later was admitted to the Inner Temple and called to the bar in 1885. He practised as a barrister and a special pleader until his death. He was also employed as an assistant schoolmaster at George Valentine's boarding school, 9 Eliot Place, Blackheath from 1881 until he was dismissed shortly before his death in 1888.
His body was found floating in the River Thames off Thorneycroft's torpedo works near Chiswick on 31 December 1888. Medical examination suggested that his body was kept at the bottom of the river for about a month by stones placed in his pockets. The coroner's jury concluded that he committed suicide by drowning "whilst of unsound mind". It is suggested that Druitt was homosexual, and his dismissal from his post at the boys' school because of his homosexuality may have driven him to suicide.[5] His mother suffered from depression and died in an asylum in 1890.
His disappearance and death shortly after the fifth and last canonical murder (which took place on 9 November 1888) and alleged "private information" led Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten to name him as a suspect in a memorandum of 23 February 1894. However, Macnaghten incorrectly described the barrister as a doctor and his age is incorrectly given as 41 (he was 31 at the time of his death).[6] On 1 September, the day after the first canonical murder, Druitt was in Dorset playing cricket, and while he could have used his city legal chambers as a base from which to commit the murders, most experts believe that the killer was local to Whitechapel, whereas Druitt lived miles away in Kent.[7] Recently some[specify] have expressed doubts whether he committed suicide or was murdered. Recent research shows that between the Kelly murder and his death, he had been involved as legal representation in a court case. Inspector Frederick Abberline dismissed Druitt as a serious suspect.
George Chapman
Main article: George Chapman (murderer)
Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (alias George Chapman—no relation to victim Annie Chapman) (14 December 1865 – 7 April 1903) was born in Poland, but came to the United Kingdom sometime between 1887 and 1888, shortly before the start of the murders. He later (c. 1893/94) assumed the name of Chapman. Without question a duplicitous and cold character who undertook several aliases, he was guilty of successively poisoning three of his wives, crimes for which he was hanged in 1903. Author Philip Sugden says Chapman lived in Whitechapel, London, at the time of the killings, where he had been working as a barber,[8], but more recent research suggests otherwise.[citation needed] He was at one time Abberline's favoured suspect and is considered by a number of commentators, including Sugden and R. Michael Gordon, to be a likely suspect.
[edit] Aaron Kosminski
Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozminski; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish Jewish barber born in Kłodawa, who was certified insane and admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in February 1891. He was named as a suspect in Melville Macnaghten's memoranda, which stated that there were strong reasons for suspecting him, that he "had a great hatred of women, with strong homicidal tendencies", and that he strongly resembled "the man seen by a City PC" near Mitre Square. This is the only mention of any such sighting, and it has been suggested by some authors that Macnaghten really meant the City Police witness Joseph Lawende, though others suggest alternative explanations.
Written comments by former Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson and former Chief Inspector Donald Swanson claimed that the Ripper had been identified by the "only person who had a good view of the murderer", though some authors express skepticism that this identification ever happened, for a variety of reasons. Anderson and Swanson further stated that no prosecution was possible because the witness was not willing to offer testimony against a fellow Jew. In marginalia in his copy of Anderson's memoirs, Swanson said that this man was "Kosminski", adding that he had been watched at his brother's home in Whitechapel by the police, that he was taken to the asylum with his hands tied behind his back, and that he died shortly after. This last detail does not match Kosminski, who lived until 1919. The copy of Anderson's The Lighter Side of My Official Life containing the handwritten notes by Swanson was donated to Scotland Yard's Crime Museum in 2006.[9][10]
Kosminski does meet some of the criteria in the general profile of serial killers as outlined by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal profiler John Douglas and Robert Ressler. He may have lived close to the sites of the murders. Each victim was murdered within a mile of Goulston Street, where a bloodstained piece of one of the victim's clothing had been found, and a family with the surname Kosminski supposedly lived near Goulston Street.[11] However, he was described as harmless in the asylum, although he had once brandished a chair at asylum attendants. Reputedly, he threatened his sister with a knife. These two incidents are the only known indications of violent behaviour. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people, and a refusal to wash or bathe.
[edit] Michael Ostrog
Michael Ostrog (1833–1904?) was a Russian-born, professional con man.[3] He used numerous aliases and disguises. Among his many dubious claims was that he had once been a surgeon in the Russian navy. He was mentioned as a suspect by Macnaghten, who joined the case in 1889, the year after the "canonical five" victims were killed. Researchers have failed to find evidence that he committed crimes any more serious than fraud and theft.[12] Research by author Philip Sugden discovered prison records showing that Ostrog was jailed for petty offences in France during the Ripper murders. Ostrog is last mentioned alive in 1904, though his date of death is unknown.
[edit] John Pizer
John Pizer (1850–1897) was a Polish Jew who worked as a bootmaker in Whitechapel. After the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman in late August and early September 1888 respectively, Police Sergeant William Thicke arrested Pizer on 10 September 1888. Pizer was known as "Leather Apron", and Thicke apparently believed that he had committed a string of minor assaults on prostitutes. In the early days of the Whitechapel murders many locals suspected that "Leather Apron" was the killer. He was cleared of suspicion when it turned out that he had alibis for two of the murders. He was staying with relatives at the time of the first canonical murder, and he was talking with a police officer while watching a spectacular fire on the London Docks at the time of the second. Pizer and Thicke had known each other for years, and Pizer implied that his arrest was based on animosity and not evidence, though he did have a prior conviction for a stabbing offence. Pizer successfully sued for wrongful arrest, and was awarded monetary compensation by the law court.[13]
[edit] Francis Tumblety
Francis Tumblety (c. 1832–1903) was a seemingly uneducated or self-educated Irish-American from Rochester, New York. He earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada, and occasionally travelling across Europe as well.[3] He was commonly perceived as a misogynist and was connected to the deaths of some of his patients; he was charged by the authorities in Canada, but skipped the country. He was also charged with supplying herbs to procure an illegal abortion. He gained a reputation for his eccentric, ostentatious clothes, which were frequently of a military nature. Tumblety was arrested on 6 May 1865 in St. Louis, Missouri and incarcerated in the Old Capitol Prison, Washington, for complicity in the Abraham Lincoln assassination, but was later released as having no involvement.[14]
Tumblety was in England in 1888 and had visited the country on other occasions; during one such earlier trip he became closely acquainted with Victorian writer Thomas Henry Hall Caine, with whom it was suggested he had an affair and from whom he tried to borrow money. He claimed to have treated many famous English patients, including Charles Dickens, for a variety of illnesses. He was arrested on 7 November 1888, on charges of "gross indecency", apparently for engaging in homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. Awaiting trial, he instead fled the country for France on 24 November 1888, and thence to the United States.[15] It has been suggested that he was released on police bail before the final canonical murder of Mary Jane Kelly (on 9 November). Already notorious in the United States for his self-promotion and previous criminal charges, news of his arrest led some to suggest he was the Ripper.
After the initial media interest in Tumblety in 1888, he was mentioned as having been a Ripper suspect by former Detective Chief Inspector John George Littlechild of the Metropolitan Police in a letter to journalist and author George R. Sims, dated 23 September 1913 and rediscovered approximately 80 years later by author Stewart P. Evans.[3] Claims that Scotland Yard sent an officer to the United States in 1888 to try to bring Tumblety back in connection with the crimes have been disputed by recent research, although there are anecdotal American newspaper reports to suggest that this was the case.
He died in a St Louis hospital in 1903 due to a kidney ailment and is buried in Rochester, New York.
in any case if you follow the murders in detail, i believe it to be obvious that the murderer had to have some anatomical knowledge of the body, how else could he have removed the parts that he did?? he also had to have money as some of the removed parts where taken so carefully it couldnt have been a butcher but a doctor who could afford the right utensils, being that they had primitive knowledge of the body in that day and age. i also strongly suggest that he must have had a hatred for women otherwise he could not of violated them in such ways, and the fact that no body was found to have been 'sexually handled' would also suggest that his conotations lay elsewhere....
i guess that we will never know....but we can always have our own opinion on who jack the ripper was.
if your also into the story of jack the ripper a great film to watch to get a feel for it is 'FROM HELL' STARRING JOHNNY DEPP as the main investigator, it goes into depth of the murders themselves also taking the king of the period into suspicion. i find this film to be both interesting and intriguing bringing to light things which i did not think about before. 7/10
