Note to the squeamish: if you don’t enjoy reading about true crime, turn the page. Fair warning.
Everyone loves a mystery, and I think most people who look at a mystery ponder to themselves, “Can I solve this?”
That’s why I’ve been an amateur Ripperologist since I was about 14 years old. A Ripperologist is a detective who researches the crimes, history and possible identity of Jack the Ripper.
This criminal likely needs no introduction. Jack the Ripper was the nom de plume given by a London journalist to an unidentified serial killer who murdered five prostitutes in the poverty-stricken Whitechapel district of the city in the late summer and autumn of 1888. The Ripper’s modus operandi included killing the women by slashing their throats, but the most disturbing part of the Ripper’s story is what he did next. All five victims, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, were mutilated to varying degrees and most had parts of their bodies removed, apparently kept as souvenirs by the Ripper. Stride wasn’t mutilated at all.
It’s suspected a police officer happened by the murder, and the Ripper fled. However, he killed and mutilated Eddoes the same night. Kelly was mutilated so badly police had trouble identifying which end of her body was which.
To complicate the matter, a number of sensational letters were sent to London newspapers, who saw their circulations explode when Jack the Ripper stories were on the front page. One of the letters, later exposed as a forgery, was signed, “Yours truly, Jack the Ripper,” while another one, thought to be genuine, was signed only, “From hell.”
The London Metropolitan Police were baffled by the murders, and despite claims to the contrary, had no suspects during the fall of 1888, never arrested anyone for the murders and obviously had no idea how to handle the investigation.
They suspected a jealous husband or loan shark punishing the women, but that wasn’t the case. Some outlandish theories claim the Victorian royal family was involved with the murders, or that Freemasons killed the five penniless prostitutes as part of some heinous plot. Not so.
The evidence is obvious. For example, some of the ghastly mutilations, which I won’t repeat here, were so disturbing that police officers hardened to violence in London's east end had trouble looking at them. The poor women had, simply put, been butchered. Angry husbands and gangsters don’t perform such atrocities; serial killers will because the act itself has meaning in their demented minds.
Who was Jack the Ripper? Why did he start killing, and why did he stop? No one knows, and I suspect no one ever will. Perhaps that’s why Ripperologists are fascinated by these crimes.
In the 1937 opera Lulu by Alban Berg, the starring role is a young woman who destroys her life with bad choices, and eventually ends up working as a prostitute in a brothel. In the final scene of the play, Lulu’s fate worsens when she is murdered in her own room by Jack the Ripper.
As police clamber loudly up the stairs to Lulu’s room, the Ripper, climbing out of the window and knowing he’ll escape again, pauses, smiles to the audience and says, “I always was a lucky fellow.”
Stu Salkeld is editor of the St. Albert Gazette.
