Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s04e01 Episode Script
Who Was Jack the Ripper?
1
[bell tolls]
[woman screams]
[sinister music plays]
[screams]
[laughter]
The Ripper! He's done it again!
The Ripper has done it again!
[man 1] People have heard
the name of Jack the Ripper
even if they don't know
what Jack the Ripper did.
He was a terrible killer,
Jack the Ripper. Yeah.
And he was never caught or punished.
- What a clever fellow. Yay.
- [audience laughs]
[man 1] It happened
in Victorian times in London,
but there are books about Jack the Ripper
written in Japanese, Chinese,
Italian, and Spanish,
so the the name's around everywhere.
[man] Jack the Ripper!
[speaks in Japanese]
Stop using that stupid name!
Jack has taken on a life of his own
that's outside of what he actually did.
But when you realize
the full horror of the crimes,
your perspective changes.
The crimes were horrendous.
He tried to cut her nose off,
tried to cut an ear off,
put slashes and gashes all over.
He cuts out her heart.
[man 2] It really does
take your breath away.
If you think about it,
the mystery's popular for several reasons.
Firstly, Jack the Ripper frightened people
in a way that no killer
had ever done before,
and probably no killer's ever done since.
The other reason it's remained popular
is it's an ever-evolving story.
It happened over 135 years ago,
and yet we're still trying
to solve the mystery.
[unsettling music plays]
[music fades]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[man 2] In the early hours
of 31st August of 1888,
a policeman comes down his beat
in Whitechapel.
[tense music plays]
[man 2] Suddenly, he sees something
lying in a gateway.
As he gets closer,
he sees it's a woman lying on the ground.
He's got a lantern,
so he shines the lantern onto her
and sees that her throat's been cut.
What he doesn't see is that,
beneath her bloodstained clothing,
she's been disemboweled.
[woman] There were several people
living in the area.
There was even people in the very house
next to the gates in which she was found,
and they hear and see nothing.
It had obviously happened quietly
right under a window
where honest people
were sleeping in their beds.
It was a very, very ferocious attack.
[uneasy music plays]
At the mortuary, it was noticed
that there was a deep, jagged wound
from the from the breastbone
all the way down to the abdomen,
completely severing the tissue
in inside her stomach.
[uneasy music continues]
[Richard] When the authorities went around
saying, "Does anyone
recognize this person?"
she was identified
as someone they knew as Polly.
[Adam] Mary Ann Nichols,
commonly known as Polly,
she was 43 years old
at the time of her murder.
[Richard] Polly hadn't been
in the East End of London for long,
as far as we can tell.
But she'd become an alcoholic,
and that led to a downward spiral.
[Adam] And she was extremely poor,
living on her own,
struggling to earn a living
through casual prostitution.
[uneasy music plays]
[Richard] She had been
drinking that night,
and she didn't have the money
to pay for a bed,
so she was ejected
from a common lodging house.
[tense music plays]
[Lindsay] She'd gone out for sex work,
to raise money for a bed for the night.
Polly's last known words to the deputy
of the lodging house is actually,
"See what a jolly bonnet I've got now?"
So that's sort of the words
she was saying.
"I'm going out
to be able to to get a gentleman,
because see how beautiful I'm looking."
"I'll be back. Keep my bed.
I'll be back shortly."
And that's when she was attacked
and horribly mutilated.
[Adam] The killer put his fingers
around her throat,
killing her
before she had a chance to cry out.
In the East End in the 1880s,
murder wasn't as as common
as as you might think it was,
and so, Polly's murder
would have been probably seen
by the police at the time as a one-off.
[Lindsay] London in 1888
was the biggest city in the world.
You have the West End,
very rich, prosperous,
the East End, very, very poor.
Whitechapel was a district
within the East End of London.
It was an area where you had people
barely able to survive,
people living in poverty,
people literally starving to death.
[Lindsay] Off the main thoroughfares,
you had all these rat-infested alleyways
and courts.
Really, really horrific.
People living in awful conditions.
Many single women in the East End
couldn't afford their own house or flat.
So every day, they'd have to try
and scrape together four old pennies
for a bed for the night,
in what we call a common lodging house,
or doss-house.
And I say "beds,"
but in many of these places,
they were actually coffins
lined up in rows up against the walls.
A lot of the women would have to resort
to casual prostitution.
It was a case of what they needed to do
to to get that that income.
[Richard] There is a term for these women,
which was "unfortunates,"
because they'd fallen through the net.
[Lindsay] I think Jack the Ripper
targeted these women
because they were easy targets
and vulnerable ladies walking the streets.
If it was prostitution
that they used to survive,
they were the ones who knew the streets.
So, effectively, it was the victims
who chose the murder site.
Because of what they did,
they knew where to take their clients to
where there was
little danger of interruption.
So they chose, unwittingly,
the perfect place at which to be murdered.
[somber music plays]
[distant laughter]
[Lindsay] So Polly Nichols
is killed August 31st.
Literally a week later, on 8th September,
another murder takes place,
and that's Annie Chapman.
[Adam] Annie was found murdered
in the rear yard of Hanbury Street,
also in the East End,
close to where Polly was killed.
She was laying on her back, in the yard,
with her face towards the step.
She had terrible mutilations,
the same as Polly.
[Richard] The killer's taken a trophy.
He's cut out and gone off
with the womb of the victim,
which suggested
that the reason for the murder
had been specifically so the killer
could acquire that part of her anatomy.
Annie was the oldest of our victims.
She was 47 years old.
According to police reports,
Annie had no income whatsoever.
To survive, she started selling trinkets
on the streets.
When that didn't work, then she would
resort to casual prostitution.
Again, as with Polly Nichols,
on the night before her murder,
she hasn't got the money
to pay for her bed.
[tense music plays]
[Adam] So witnesses said she was
walking around, looking for a client,
and then, at some point that night,
a witness had seen Annie talking to a man
outside the front door
to 29 Hanbury Street,
but she didn't see his face.
She later said
he had the appearance of a foreigner
from the way he was dressed.
It's believed
that this was Jack the Ripper.
[Lindsay] And according to police records,
what we know happens next,
the two go through the entrance,
which was never locked, to Number 29.
It led into a passageway.
And the dark passageway
led into the backyard.
That's where Jack kills Annie.
[uneasy music plays]
[Adam] Staying at Number 27 Hanbury Street
at the time of Annie's murder,
which was the house next door,
uh, was a man a man named Albert Cadosch.
[Lindsay] He was going into the toilet,
which was at the bottom of the garden,
and he overhears a cry of "no"
and a thud against the fence.
And many believe that was actually
Annie's body hitting the fence.
[uneasy music continues]
[Adam] In all probability,
if he had looked over the fence,
he would have witnessed the murder
of Annie Chapman being committed.
[tense music plays]
[Lindsay] Annie's throat had been cut
from left to right,
back to the spinal column.
She'd been ripped up to the breastbone.
Her intestines had been taken out
and placed over her shoulder.
At her feet were several objects
from her calico pocket,
which had been cut open.
There was a comb, a piece of paper,
all sorts of things just out of her pocket
that she'd been wearing.
He'd laid them out,
almost systematically, at her feet.
Very bizarre.
[Richard] And because she's been mutilated
in the same way as Polly,
police believe that both murders
were by the same hand.
At the scene of the crime,
they're looking for any clues
that the murderer's left behind.
And that's when the police find
a freshly-washed leather apron
in the corner of the yard.
And they think, "Oh, we've got him.
We've got the murderer."
[Adam] And the reason
for that bit of excitement was,
after the murder of Polly Nichols,
the police were already investigating
a suspect known as Leather Apron.
At the time,
the prostitutes in Whitechapel
had started talking about this sinister
character called Leather Apron,
and they're convinced
this is the man responsible.
[Adam] Leather Apron was a man
named John Pizer who lived in Whitechapel.
He was a cobbler. For his work,
he naturally wore a leather apron.
So when they found the leather apron,
they dragged him off
down to the police station
where they gave him a good interrogation.
[Richard] Now, it turns out
the leather apron they found
has got nothing to do with the murder.
It was just a local resident
had cleaned his leather apron
and laid it over the, uh, fence
to dry off.
Pizer had cast-iron alibis
for the nights of the murders,
so he was then released as a suspect.
And it turns out he's only the first
of an awful lot of suspects in the case.
At this point, the police recognized
that there was, um,
something highly amiss in Whitechapel.
Two dreadful murders,
terrible mutilations,
most likely killed by the same hand.
[man 1] What was frightening was
that there was somebody out there
who wanted to kill you,
and you'd never met them,
you'd never done them any harm.
They weren't killing you for a reason.
[Richard] Horror starts to set in
about these murders.
People thought,
"What sort of monster would do this?"
[unsettling music plays]
There is a sense the killer
knew his way around Whitechapel.
Whitechapel, at the time,
was made up of lots of narrow alleyways,
twisty little passageways
that went between buildings.
All he needs to know
is where the nearest bolt-hole is
that he can get down quickly
and escape from the scene of the crime.
And then when he's made Whitechapel Road,
the busy main road
that goes through the heart of the area,
or Commercial Street,
the busy thoroughfares,
then he can just make his way
and lose himself in the crowds.
[Adam] The police, very early on,
took a decision not to speak to the press
about the activities they were undertaking
or their lines of investigation.
And, naturally, the press were looking
for sensational stories
and became frustrated
that there weren't any leads to act on
except the suspect Leather Apron.
[Lindsay] Then, on 27th September, 1888,
the Central News Agency received
a very interesting letter.
Written in red ink,
it starts, "Dear Boss, I keep on hearing
the police have caught me."
"They won't catch me just yet."
[Richard] Then it goes on to boast
in mocking terms about what he's done.
The police can't catch him.
[Lindsay] And at the end, it's signed,
"Yours truly, Jack the Ripper."
[sinister music plays]
"Dear Boss" letter's prob-probably
the most important document that we have
because it's the one
that gives us the name "Jack the Ripper."
It summarized what the chap
was doing to the ladies.
They were being ripped open.
That type of horror in a nickname,
Jack the Ripper, it's a newsman's dream!
[Paul] The murderer's now got a name,
so he's no longer a nebulous figure.
He has that name, Jack the Ripper.
[Richard] The problem is the majority
of police officers believe this letter
was the work
of an enterprising London journalist
known to senior Scotland Yard detectives.
So in other words, a journalist wrote
the letter. It was a journalistic hoax.
[Lindsay] Many people at the time,
including relevant police authorities,
did believe they actually knew
the identity of the person who did do it
and that that was a, uh, person
from the Central News Agency itself
trying to generate, um, you know,
excitement for the press.
So I personally don't think
the "Dear Boss" letter
was written by Jack the Ripper.
When they got the Ripper letter, there
doesn't appear to be one solid suspect
or lines of inquiry that the police
were following at that time.
Police were desperate for a breakthrough,
so they decided to make the letter public.
And it was reproduced
and put up on posters,
but also, it was put
in the newspapers as well.
Releasing it proved to be a mistake,
because that name
was so chillingly accurate,
Jack the Ripper, it caught on.
And hoaxers across the land
began reaching for their pens.
And throughout October, the police
were inundated with a barrage of letters,
many signed "Jack the Ripper."
And it became almost a national pastime,
writing letters signed "Jack the Ripper."
Every letter had to be read, assessed,
and, if ever possible,
followed up and the author traced,
so consequently,
the already overstretched detectives
are stretched almost to breaking point.
[unsettling music plays]
Then on 30th September,
within days of the police
receiving the "Dear Boss" letter,
the murderer struck again and carries out
two murders in less than an hour.
That night is what we we now call
the "Double Event Night."
[Adam] On this spot,
um, one o'clock in the morning,
Louis Diemschutz pulled his horse
and cart into the yard
immediately behind where I am now.
[horse neighs]
[Adam] And he saw the body of a woman.
It was Elizabeth Stride,
the third victim of Jack the Ripper.
[Lindsay] Elizabeth was Swedish.
She worked as a nanny for a while
to some children, and as a cleaner,
and then, sadly,
she got into prostitution.
[Adam] She'd come to England
when she was in her early twenties,
and she found herself, first in
around the Brick Lane area,
in the common lodging houses around there.
And, by the end of September,
she had earned herself a a few shillings
by cleaning the lodging house
she was staying in.
She decided to go out for the night
and spend what money she had made.
[ominous music plays]
When the body was found,
she had a scarf around her neck,
which had been twisted to one side,
and the knot pulled very, very tightly,
and there was a large, jagged cut,
which almost ran
to the level of that scarf,
as though it'd been used
almost as a guide by the killer.
There was a river of blood
running from the throat
down into the gutter
in the opposite corner.
Unlike our other victims,
she's only had her throat cut.
No mutilations.
Some people do believe that the reason
why Jack only cut Elizabeth's throat
was because he was disturbed by
that pony and cart coming into the yard.
Because he's been denied
the satisfaction of the mutilation,
the killer goes looking
for another victim.
[ominous music continues]
Forty-five minutes later,
in the City of London,
the body of Catherine Eddowes
is found in Mitre Square.
[unsettling music continues]
[music fades]
Where I'm standing here
was roughly where
Catherine Eddowes' body was found
on the night of the Double Event.
Catherine was born in Wolverhampton.
Eventually, her two parents die,
and she was placed into orphanages.
And she moves, eventually, to London
where she was known
as a sex worker at the time,
but maybe on a casual basis.
She was found around 1:45 in the morning
by, uh, the policeman, PC Watkins,
who was coming around the back,
around Mitre Street.
He comes into the square.
He search He's on his patrol.
He shines the lantern,
and he gets such a shock
when he sees the body here.
She wasn't there 15 minutes earlier.
She was the most horribly mutilated
of any victim up till that point.
This is another step up.
The throat's been cut.
She's been cut open.
V's have been cut into her cheeks,
V's into her eyelids,
part of the earlobe's been taken off,
tip of the nose.
Also, the killer's cut out and gone off
with the uterus and the left kidney.
[Lindsay] You only had one resident
on the square.
That was a policeman, Richard Pearce,
with his family, just sleeping there.
Policeman hears nothing,
and, amazingly, the night watchman
hears and sees nothing.
It's like a ghost kills her here.
[Adam] When Catherine was taken to the
City of London mortuary and undressed,
they noticed that the apron
she'd been wearing
was covered with blood,
uh, understandably,
but a portion of it was missing,
as though it had been cut off.
[Lindsay] After Catherine Eddowes' body
was found,
a policeman was walking down
Goulston Street.
He's shining his lantern into doorways,
making sure there's nobody hiding,
trying to find any weapons,
and sees blood in the entrance
to the model dwellings on Goulston Street.
And in the blood,
he sees a piece of material.
It's actually a section
of Catherine Eddowes' apron
cut off from her body in Mitre Square.
Some people believe the reason why
the actual apron was dropped there
was because the murderer
had wiped his hands and knife.
But why that specific doorway,
nobody knows.
[Adam] The thing about the blood
on the apron piece,
it could have been Catherine's, obviously,
from the horrific wounds.
It could have been
the killer's inadvertently cut himself
while carrying out the mutilations.
Unfortunately,
there was no blood types at that time,
so it was totally useless.
One of the things many Jack the Ripper
letters had been threatening
was they would send a body part
to the police.
[uneasy music plays]
[Lindsay] Two weeks
after the Double Event,
when Elizabeth and Catherine are killed,
a local man called George Lusk
receives a letter.
[Richard] He sat down to his dinner table
on 16th October,
and a small package was delivered
in the evening mail,
and he opened it,
and inside was the letter "from hell."
And with the letter
was half a human kidney.
[Richard] George Lusk was the head
of the Whitechapel Mile End
Vigilance Committee.
Basically, they would go out at night
and they'd patrol the streets,
and they'd keep suspicious characters
under surveillance.
So the letter
that arrived at Mr. Lusk's house said,
"Mr. Lusk, sir,
I send you half the kidney
I took from one woman."
"Preserved it for you."
"T'other piece I fried and ate.
It was very nice."
"I may send you the bloody knife
that took it out,
if you only wait a while longer."
"Signed, Catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk."
He's obviously saying he's a cannibal
and that he's actually eaten
a section of the victim's kidney.
Horrible.
With the Lusk letter,
there was a debate within the police
as to whether that was
actually Catherine's kidney.
Certainly, the medical opinions
at the time differed.
It was the correct kidney, though.
It was the left kidney, and Catherine
did have her left kidney taken away.
If that was Catherine's kidney,
then that means that letter is genuine,
and there's a 50/50 chance.
So I, personally,
have always believed in that letter
and believed that the Lusk letter
was genuine, but others disagree.
There are those who say
that it's the only genuine letter
that came from the murderer.
Personally, I don't believe it was.
I think it was probably
the joke of a medical student.
Uh, it was quite common for medical
students to get hold of body parts.
The point is that everybody got hooked
on this Jack the Ripper scare.
It's it's become
almost, uh, an obsession.
People are just, "I need to get involved.
I want to get involved."
[Adam] In the October of 1888,
the police had organized
a house-to-house search
in the whole of Whitechapel.
There were several hundred
houses, uh, searched.
A thousand people were investigated.
But they really didn't have, uh,
much of a lead to go on at all, really.
It's important to remember, in 1888,
the police were really limited
with the amount of, uh,
investigatory tools that they had.
[Paul] They didn't have simple things
like fingerprints,
and they certainly didn't have CCTV,
which would have enabled them
to to keep an eye on different areas.
[Richard] Basically,
the police investigation depended on
a search of the area.
Is there perhaps a footprint there
that they can use?
But none of the traditional methods
of detecting a crime are working.
We do have witnesses who say,
"Oh, I saw this. I saw that."
But we don't know
whether they did see the killer or not.
A lot of those who saw him talked about
him being about 5 ft. 6 in., 5 ft. 7 in.,
but, then again, that was probably
an average height for a man at the time.
Um, different ages from twenties
to forties, different clothing.
[Adam] The problem with
eyewitness identification at that time
is the lighting was extremely poor.
It's like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning,
and it's dark. We've got limited lighting.
How well do we notice things?
Often, witnesses can be quite wrong
accidentally in their descriptions.
[Adam] So, unfortunately, no one knew
what Jack the Ripper looked like.
[uneasy music plays]
[Richard] At this point, the police
are going through the East End,
searching for the murderer.
You've also got an interesting situation
where you've got lots of people
out in disguise
to try and catch the Ripper.
We know of three medical students
being used as decoys
to try and lure the murderer out.
[Paul] Men who dressed up as women,
wandering around the East End
in the hope of being attacked
by Jack the Ripper
so that they could catch him.
The women started to arm themselves.
So we have pictures of them
holding knives, guns, scissors,
knowing that, you know,
they have to go out on the streets.
They have nowhere else to go. They have
to get their four pennies for a bed.
But what an awful situation to be in,
to think that your next customer
could be your last.
[unsettling music plays]
[Richard] The whole of October
went by without any murders,
largely because the police presence
in the area has really been stepped up.
So nothing happened until the next murder
on 9th November.
And it is the worst in the series by far.
[unsettling music plays]
Mary Jane Kelly was in her mid-twenties,
so she's the youngest
of all of our ladies.
And, like the other victims,
she needed to get money,
so she worked as a lady of the night.
She has a room of her own in Whitechapel.
A man called Thomas Bowyer goes around
to collect rent from Mary Jane Kelly.
- He knocks on the door. Nothing.
- [knocking]
[Lindsay] So he goes around
to a side broken window.
He moves the curtain. [gasps]
And sees this horrific sight.
Absolutely shocking.
[Adam] Having the opportunity
in that locked room,
the killer could do whatever he wanted.
Mary Kelly's body
was completely eviscerated.
Her face was completely cut off,
breasts removed,
laying on the bed,
entrails all all around the place.
[Lindsay] She's killed indoors.
She's the only murder to have been
actually, uh, sort of happening indoors.
[Richard] The police took a photograph
of the body on the bed.
It's one of the earliest
crime scene photographs we have.
You you can't even think
it's a human being. It was horrendous.
[Lindsay] He'd cut off
three flaps of flesh,
put that on the bedside table.
He'd cut off and extracted
several sections of her abdominal area,
placed them around her body.
And if that's not enough,
he slices the flesh off from her thigh,
her thigh bone is exposed,
and then he cuts out her heart.
But sadly, Mary Jane Kelly's heart
was never found.
[Richard] The divisional police surgeon
to Scotland Yard, Dr. Thomas Bond,
he performed a postmortem on Mary Kelly
as she lay in her room.
[Adam] They said
that it looked as though Mary
potentially had been asleep
when she was attacked.
[Richard] Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant
Commissioner of Scotland Yard at the time,
sought the opinion of Dr. Thomas Bond
on the five murders.
Anderson sent him the inquest reports
on the deaths of Mary Nichols,
Annie Chapman,
Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes.
[Adam] Dr. Bond was known to have
have been consulted
on some of the most notorious cases
of the 1870s and 1880s
across the country, not just London.
After years of working for Scotland Yard,
he became interested
in the psyche of a killer.
He was trying to get an understanding
of how a murder was committed,
rather than just the the physical,
medical side of things.
Dr. Thomas Bond produced
what is probably the first attempt
at profiling a serial killer.
And on 10th November,
he submitted a report to Scotland Yard,
which really shaped a lot of the way
that we think about the the Ripper today.
[Richard] Bond talks about
the similarities between the murders.
He says that that it would have been
a surprise attack,
that they wouldn't have been expecting it.
The evidence does suggest
he was able, for some reason,
to overpower his victims very quickly
and render them unconscious.
[Adam] The idea that the victims
were killed while they were laying down
is a conclusion drawn up
by Dr. Bond in his report.
It certainly gives a lot of credence
because there were thumb marks
and finger marks
found on the necks of the victims,
which indicate they were strangled,
certainly into insensibility,
lowered to the ground,
and then had their throat cut.
And then the mutilations
were carried out after death.
[uneasy music plays]
[Adam] Certainly in the 1880s,
the idea of a serial killer
as we know it today simply didn't exist.
[Paul] It wasn't until the 1970s
that the term "serial killer"
became invented, as it were.
But in 1888, the general public
simply didn't believe
that there were people out there
who were killing without
what they perceived of as a as a motive.
So the press and the public came up
with suspects like the deranged doctor,
a midwife,
a butcher,
because they had various skills
that Jack the Ripper had.
A butcher would have anatomical knowledge,
but not necessarily surgical skill.
A doctor would have both, of course.
But the doctors at the time
were divided in their opinions
about whether or not the killer had
surgical skill and anatomical knowledge.
He certainly would appear to have known
where things were in in the human body
to be able to extract various things.
He would have been operating,
uh, in some cases,
in near to complete darkness.
I think he's got to have had
a degree of knowledge and skill
to have been able to do that.
[uneasy music plays]
We know the murders
weren't committed for robbery.
They weren't committed for revenge.
Not for any financial gain,
not for jealousy,
not because they're drunk.
It's been done purely for the satisfaction
of carrying out those mutilations.
[Adam] The mutilations became more
and more intense as the series progressed,
because that lower level of mutilations
wasn't enough
for him to get the thrill
that he was seeking.
They were committed
purely for a sexual thrill.
That motive, or or that sort
of mental outlook on on a perpetrator
hadn't been looked at all before.
In his report, Bond also gave his opinion
as to what the killer was like
in terms of character.
He was a a quiet, well-respected man,
probably dressed respectably.
He talks about
his living arrangements as well.
That he he probably had a room he could
at least a room he could retire to,
where he could clean himself up.
He talks about even his income,
that he's either got a private pension
or a private income.
He talks about
that he's living with his family.
His family might be shielding him.
[Lindsay] Many people back then thought
Jack the Ripper was possibly a lunatic
and therefore may have been
walking around the streets
sort of frothing from the mouth
and looking clearly very evil-looking
and not very well.
Clearly, the ladies of the night
are clever,
and they're not gonna approach
anybody like that.
I think the idea of Jack the Ripper
as an unknown assailant,
walking around deserted streets
in the early hours with a top hat,
carrying his black bag,
is an image which has has stayed with us
for over a hundred years.
When you look at the early silent movies
where there was a lady
being tied to a railway track, in danger,
the villain who did that
always had a top hat, black cloak,
usually a nice, big mustache.
Exactly the image
that you think of Jack the Ripper today.
And he really fits nicely into that
real perpetrator of terrible deeds.
[Paul] The black bag part
comes from a man who was seen
close to the murder of Elizabeth Stride.
And he was carrying a black bag,
but, in fact, he'd been doing business
somewhere and was just on his way home,
and he had a cast-iron alibi
and had nothing to do with it,
but the black bag stuck.
[uneasy music plays]
[Paul] Jack the Ripper with the top hat
and carrying the Gladstone bag
and wearing a cape,
I think would have probably
stood out like a sore thumb
in the East End of London
at [chuckles] at that time.
The real Jack the Ripper must have
been able to just walk the streets
without being particularly noticed
by anybody.
[Richard] And there were lots of
slaughterhouses in the area at the time,
and it was quite common to see people
in bloodstained clothing
walking around the area
in the early hours of the morning.
Just after Mary Kelly's murder,
something unusual happens.
[Adam] A bunch of time passed by
and the murders stop.
So why would the killer stop?
Had he satisfied his bloodlust
through the horrific mutilations of Mary?
If the murders have ended, something's
happened to the murderer. Has he died?
[Lindsay] He may have left the country,
may have gone on holiday,
may have been locked up for another crime.
Some people have have conjectured
that maybe he was in quite ill health.
And then some people thought
he may be a sailor.
Commit the murder, and then disappear
again on the boat going out again.
It's almost a perfect way
of of committing a murder.
[Richard] And then, of course,
there is the asylum theory.
The murders ended
because the killer went into an asylum.
Very early on in the investigation,
the police had an awful lot of suspects.
You've got people being pulled in, uh,
by the police on almost a conveyor belt.
[Adam] Every person
that was potentially sighted,
uh, acting in a suspicious manner,
or looked like someone
that had been seen by a witness,
they had to follow up their story.
And over the years,
there's obviously a lot of people,
for very good reasons,
who've done their own research
and come up with their own suspects.
And there are a handful of suspects
worth taking seriously.
[Lindsay] One suspect in the police files
is Montague John Druitt.
[Richard] Druitt was a barrister
in South London.
He was also a teacher as well.
Around about November 1888,
he was dismissed.
[Adam] His body was found floating
in the Thames on the last day of 1888.
[Richard] When the murders stopped,
one of the things the police thought
is he's committed suicide.
So they're looking
at all the suicides that take place
just after Mary Kelly's murder.
One suicide that comes forward
is that of Montague John Druitt.
According to the police reports,
his own family
thought that he was the murderer.
His brother testifies that, uh, he's
he's been mentally unstable for a time.
He's found a note saying
he felt he was going mad.
It's better that he should die.
But there's no firm evidence that points
to Druitt having visited Whitechapel,
let alone being seen with any of the women
on the nights of their murders.
It purely seems to come down to the fact
that he was found drowned in the Thames
at the end of that year.
[uneasy music plays]
[Richard] Dr. Francis Tumblety
is one of the most intriguing suspects.
He's the only one of the suspects
who was actually arrested for the murders
just before Mary Kelly's murder.
He was an American, and he was given bail,
and he skipped bail
and then went back to America.
When he was in New York,
Tumblety started giving interviews saying,
"Well, I was arrested
on on suspicion of being the murderer."
So Tumblety said,
"All I did was, I did what everybody did."
"I was fascinated, so I went into the area
to look at the murders."
And somehow he got himself arrested
on suspicion of having committed
the Jack the Ripper murders.
But, of course, there's no evidence
to suggest he was the killer.
[Adam] The last prime suspect
after Tumblety and Druitt
was just given the name Kosminski.
[Paul] The name Kosminski
appears to have come from police files.
They described him as a Polish Jew
who was put into an asylum.
We don't know who Kosminski was,
but a search was done,
and it does appear to have been
a fairly comprehensive search
of asylum records,
looking for a Kosminski.
And the only one that's been found
is a man called Aaron Kosminski.
[Adam] Aaron Kosminski
lived in Whitechapel.
He was a young Polish Jew.
But he didn't go to the asylum until 1891.
He was still wandering around Whitechapel
three years after Mary Kelly was killed,
so that doesn't really chime with the idea
that the suspect was taken off the street
soon after the last murder.
[Richard] Sir Robert Anderson
and Chief Inspector
Donald Sutherland Swanson,
the two highest-ranking officers
on the case,
both appear to have thought that a man
named Kosminski was the murderer.
Anderson and Swanson
were in the position to know
all the evidence against all the suspects,
and if they thought
the evidence against Kosminski
was stronger than the evidence
against any other suspect,
he has to be high on the list of suspects
of being Jack the Ripper.
The only problem is that, uh,
we can't say with any degree of certainty
that Aaron Kosminski is definitely
the Kosminski they had in mind.
[Adam] Over the years,
there's been more and more suspects
and various theories coming out.
And, in fact,
the Johnny Depp film From Hell
and the Michael Caine
1988 television series,
probably the two most well-known
fictional versions of the Ripper story,
both featured
Sir William Gull as the Ripper.
[sinister music plays]
[Lindsay] So Sir William Gull,
who has been claimed as the murderer
in nearly all the films you will ever see,
has being linked since the 1970s
with what we call
the Royal Conspiracy Theory.
So according to the theory,
Queen Victoria's grandson,
Prince Albert Victor,
had an affair with an East End prostitute,
and they had a baby.
A baby girl, Alice.
Alice had a nanny, Mary Jane Kelly.
Mary Jane had four friends.
Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman,
Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes.
And together, as a group, they set out
to blackmail the Crown and the government
with this secret knowledge about a baby.
Therefore, the royal doctor,
Sir William Gull,
was sent out to track them down
to kill them
to keep the secret silent forever.
The problem with that theory is that
Sir William Gull had had a stroke in 1887,
so he was physically incapable
of, uh, trundling around Whitechapel,
carrying out these murders
and mutilations.
[Lindsay] Sir William
was never a contemporary suspect.
His name does not appear
in any police files,
in any contemporary papers,
in any contemporary documentation
with this case whatsoever.
[Adam] And of course, when that theory
is completely debunked,
it stayed in the consciousness.
Many people just blame anybody
who was literally alive at the time.
And I think quite a lot of people
have been blamed with no real evidence,
because very few records, sadly, exist.
The Jack the Ripper murders, as most
people would tend to think of them,
were just over the autumn of 1888.
That's the murder of five victims
in a number of weeks.
But there's a police file
called the Whitechapel murders file,
which ranges from 1888
all the way through to 1891
and covers much more
than the five victims.
We don't know how many, if any,
of the other victims
in the Whitechapel murders wider file
may have been killed
by the Ripper as well.
[thunder rumbles]
[thunder crashes]
[Paul] There's a file,
which we refer to as the "suspects file,"
of people who were questioned
about the Ripper
and perhaps suspected of it
for a short while.
Um, that file's gone, and we don't know
wh what's happened to it.
[Adam] It was well-known
that in the years following the 1880s,
going into 1890s,
police officers were allowed to go
and examine the papers.
And it seems that right from that point,
certain sheets or reports,
photographs of the victims
that we have today,
were slowly weeded out, taken away,
removed by souvenir hunters.
Bond's report went missing from the files
for several years,
and when it was recovered,
sent anonymously to Scotland Yard.
[Paul] The "Dear Boss" letter
went missing.
And that, fortunately, was returned.
And some of the photographs
of the victims,
uh, have been discovered,
uh, in the last couple of decades.
It's a bit like putting together a jigsaw.
You have all these pieces,
and some of those pieces
don't actually fit that jigsaw.
And so you manage to put together
all the ones that seem to form a picture.
You get a picture. And then you get
chunks in the picture that are missing.
[Lindsay] It is frustrating,
as a crime historian,
not being able to say,
"This is the person that did it."
And more to the point,
to be able to solve these killings
for the victims' families and descendants,
because they are still out there.
[Richard] The more people look into it,
the more facts come to light,
and the more facts come to light,
then the story just evolves,
develops, and takes on,
uh, different aspects,
and goes off in directions that you would
never expect it to go off in.
Of course, we'd love to know
who Jack the Ripper was.
I mean, uh, the end of the mystery,
th that would be terrific.
What we would like is
any any new information.
Anything that people have got.
[Richard] There might be documents
out there that are in people's lofts.
They might be in people's cellars.
[Adam] I believe there's something
potentially out there
which could take the case much forward
and potentially solve it.
Somebody might, one day,
might open a trunk, might open a case,
and there's the evidence
that names Jack the Ripper.
But until that happens,
it's still a mystery.
[uneasy music plays]
[bell tolls]
[unsettling music plays]
[music ends]
[bell tolls]
[woman screams]
[sinister music plays]
[screams]
[laughter]
The Ripper! He's done it again!
The Ripper has done it again!
[man 1] People have heard
the name of Jack the Ripper
even if they don't know
what Jack the Ripper did.
He was a terrible killer,
Jack the Ripper. Yeah.
And he was never caught or punished.
- What a clever fellow. Yay.
- [audience laughs]
[man 1] It happened
in Victorian times in London,
but there are books about Jack the Ripper
written in Japanese, Chinese,
Italian, and Spanish,
so the the name's around everywhere.
[man] Jack the Ripper!
[speaks in Japanese]
Stop using that stupid name!
Jack has taken on a life of his own
that's outside of what he actually did.
But when you realize
the full horror of the crimes,
your perspective changes.
The crimes were horrendous.
He tried to cut her nose off,
tried to cut an ear off,
put slashes and gashes all over.
He cuts out her heart.
[man 2] It really does
take your breath away.
If you think about it,
the mystery's popular for several reasons.
Firstly, Jack the Ripper frightened people
in a way that no killer
had ever done before,
and probably no killer's ever done since.
The other reason it's remained popular
is it's an ever-evolving story.
It happened over 135 years ago,
and yet we're still trying
to solve the mystery.
[unsettling music plays]
[music fades]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[bell tolls]
[man 2] In the early hours
of 31st August of 1888,
a policeman comes down his beat
in Whitechapel.
[tense music plays]
[man 2] Suddenly, he sees something
lying in a gateway.
As he gets closer,
he sees it's a woman lying on the ground.
He's got a lantern,
so he shines the lantern onto her
and sees that her throat's been cut.
What he doesn't see is that,
beneath her bloodstained clothing,
she's been disemboweled.
[woman] There were several people
living in the area.
There was even people in the very house
next to the gates in which she was found,
and they hear and see nothing.
It had obviously happened quietly
right under a window
where honest people
were sleeping in their beds.
It was a very, very ferocious attack.
[uneasy music plays]
At the mortuary, it was noticed
that there was a deep, jagged wound
from the from the breastbone
all the way down to the abdomen,
completely severing the tissue
in inside her stomach.
[uneasy music continues]
[Richard] When the authorities went around
saying, "Does anyone
recognize this person?"
she was identified
as someone they knew as Polly.
[Adam] Mary Ann Nichols,
commonly known as Polly,
she was 43 years old
at the time of her murder.
[Richard] Polly hadn't been
in the East End of London for long,
as far as we can tell.
But she'd become an alcoholic,
and that led to a downward spiral.
[Adam] And she was extremely poor,
living on her own,
struggling to earn a living
through casual prostitution.
[uneasy music plays]
[Richard] She had been
drinking that night,
and she didn't have the money
to pay for a bed,
so she was ejected
from a common lodging house.
[tense music plays]
[Lindsay] She'd gone out for sex work,
to raise money for a bed for the night.
Polly's last known words to the deputy
of the lodging house is actually,
"See what a jolly bonnet I've got now?"
So that's sort of the words
she was saying.
"I'm going out
to be able to to get a gentleman,
because see how beautiful I'm looking."
"I'll be back. Keep my bed.
I'll be back shortly."
And that's when she was attacked
and horribly mutilated.
[Adam] The killer put his fingers
around her throat,
killing her
before she had a chance to cry out.
In the East End in the 1880s,
murder wasn't as as common
as as you might think it was,
and so, Polly's murder
would have been probably seen
by the police at the time as a one-off.
[Lindsay] London in 1888
was the biggest city in the world.
You have the West End,
very rich, prosperous,
the East End, very, very poor.
Whitechapel was a district
within the East End of London.
It was an area where you had people
barely able to survive,
people living in poverty,
people literally starving to death.
[Lindsay] Off the main thoroughfares,
you had all these rat-infested alleyways
and courts.
Really, really horrific.
People living in awful conditions.
Many single women in the East End
couldn't afford their own house or flat.
So every day, they'd have to try
and scrape together four old pennies
for a bed for the night,
in what we call a common lodging house,
or doss-house.
And I say "beds,"
but in many of these places,
they were actually coffins
lined up in rows up against the walls.
A lot of the women would have to resort
to casual prostitution.
It was a case of what they needed to do
to to get that that income.
[Richard] There is a term for these women,
which was "unfortunates,"
because they'd fallen through the net.
[Lindsay] I think Jack the Ripper
targeted these women
because they were easy targets
and vulnerable ladies walking the streets.
If it was prostitution
that they used to survive,
they were the ones who knew the streets.
So, effectively, it was the victims
who chose the murder site.
Because of what they did,
they knew where to take their clients to
where there was
little danger of interruption.
So they chose, unwittingly,
the perfect place at which to be murdered.
[somber music plays]
[distant laughter]
[Lindsay] So Polly Nichols
is killed August 31st.
Literally a week later, on 8th September,
another murder takes place,
and that's Annie Chapman.
[Adam] Annie was found murdered
in the rear yard of Hanbury Street,
also in the East End,
close to where Polly was killed.
She was laying on her back, in the yard,
with her face towards the step.
She had terrible mutilations,
the same as Polly.
[Richard] The killer's taken a trophy.
He's cut out and gone off
with the womb of the victim,
which suggested
that the reason for the murder
had been specifically so the killer
could acquire that part of her anatomy.
Annie was the oldest of our victims.
She was 47 years old.
According to police reports,
Annie had no income whatsoever.
To survive, she started selling trinkets
on the streets.
When that didn't work, then she would
resort to casual prostitution.
Again, as with Polly Nichols,
on the night before her murder,
she hasn't got the money
to pay for her bed.
[tense music plays]
[Adam] So witnesses said she was
walking around, looking for a client,
and then, at some point that night,
a witness had seen Annie talking to a man
outside the front door
to 29 Hanbury Street,
but she didn't see his face.
She later said
he had the appearance of a foreigner
from the way he was dressed.
It's believed
that this was Jack the Ripper.
[Lindsay] And according to police records,
what we know happens next,
the two go through the entrance,
which was never locked, to Number 29.
It led into a passageway.
And the dark passageway
led into the backyard.
That's where Jack kills Annie.
[uneasy music plays]
[Adam] Staying at Number 27 Hanbury Street
at the time of Annie's murder,
which was the house next door,
uh, was a man a man named Albert Cadosch.
[Lindsay] He was going into the toilet,
which was at the bottom of the garden,
and he overhears a cry of "no"
and a thud against the fence.
And many believe that was actually
Annie's body hitting the fence.
[uneasy music continues]
[Adam] In all probability,
if he had looked over the fence,
he would have witnessed the murder
of Annie Chapman being committed.
[tense music plays]
[Lindsay] Annie's throat had been cut
from left to right,
back to the spinal column.
She'd been ripped up to the breastbone.
Her intestines had been taken out
and placed over her shoulder.
At her feet were several objects
from her calico pocket,
which had been cut open.
There was a comb, a piece of paper,
all sorts of things just out of her pocket
that she'd been wearing.
He'd laid them out,
almost systematically, at her feet.
Very bizarre.
[Richard] And because she's been mutilated
in the same way as Polly,
police believe that both murders
were by the same hand.
At the scene of the crime,
they're looking for any clues
that the murderer's left behind.
And that's when the police find
a freshly-washed leather apron
in the corner of the yard.
And they think, "Oh, we've got him.
We've got the murderer."
[Adam] And the reason
for that bit of excitement was,
after the murder of Polly Nichols,
the police were already investigating
a suspect known as Leather Apron.
At the time,
the prostitutes in Whitechapel
had started talking about this sinister
character called Leather Apron,
and they're convinced
this is the man responsible.
[Adam] Leather Apron was a man
named John Pizer who lived in Whitechapel.
He was a cobbler. For his work,
he naturally wore a leather apron.
So when they found the leather apron,
they dragged him off
down to the police station
where they gave him a good interrogation.
[Richard] Now, it turns out
the leather apron they found
has got nothing to do with the murder.
It was just a local resident
had cleaned his leather apron
and laid it over the, uh, fence
to dry off.
Pizer had cast-iron alibis
for the nights of the murders,
so he was then released as a suspect.
And it turns out he's only the first
of an awful lot of suspects in the case.
At this point, the police recognized
that there was, um,
something highly amiss in Whitechapel.
Two dreadful murders,
terrible mutilations,
most likely killed by the same hand.
[man 1] What was frightening was
that there was somebody out there
who wanted to kill you,
and you'd never met them,
you'd never done them any harm.
They weren't killing you for a reason.
[Richard] Horror starts to set in
about these murders.
People thought,
"What sort of monster would do this?"
[unsettling music plays]
There is a sense the killer
knew his way around Whitechapel.
Whitechapel, at the time,
was made up of lots of narrow alleyways,
twisty little passageways
that went between buildings.
All he needs to know
is where the nearest bolt-hole is
that he can get down quickly
and escape from the scene of the crime.
And then when he's made Whitechapel Road,
the busy main road
that goes through the heart of the area,
or Commercial Street,
the busy thoroughfares,
then he can just make his way
and lose himself in the crowds.
[Adam] The police, very early on,
took a decision not to speak to the press
about the activities they were undertaking
or their lines of investigation.
And, naturally, the press were looking
for sensational stories
and became frustrated
that there weren't any leads to act on
except the suspect Leather Apron.
[Lindsay] Then, on 27th September, 1888,
the Central News Agency received
a very interesting letter.
Written in red ink,
it starts, "Dear Boss, I keep on hearing
the police have caught me."
"They won't catch me just yet."
[Richard] Then it goes on to boast
in mocking terms about what he's done.
The police can't catch him.
[Lindsay] And at the end, it's signed,
"Yours truly, Jack the Ripper."
[sinister music plays]
"Dear Boss" letter's prob-probably
the most important document that we have
because it's the one
that gives us the name "Jack the Ripper."
It summarized what the chap
was doing to the ladies.
They were being ripped open.
That type of horror in a nickname,
Jack the Ripper, it's a newsman's dream!
[Paul] The murderer's now got a name,
so he's no longer a nebulous figure.
He has that name, Jack the Ripper.
[Richard] The problem is the majority
of police officers believe this letter
was the work
of an enterprising London journalist
known to senior Scotland Yard detectives.
So in other words, a journalist wrote
the letter. It was a journalistic hoax.
[Lindsay] Many people at the time,
including relevant police authorities,
did believe they actually knew
the identity of the person who did do it
and that that was a, uh, person
from the Central News Agency itself
trying to generate, um, you know,
excitement for the press.
So I personally don't think
the "Dear Boss" letter
was written by Jack the Ripper.
When they got the Ripper letter, there
doesn't appear to be one solid suspect
or lines of inquiry that the police
were following at that time.
Police were desperate for a breakthrough,
so they decided to make the letter public.
And it was reproduced
and put up on posters,
but also, it was put
in the newspapers as well.
Releasing it proved to be a mistake,
because that name
was so chillingly accurate,
Jack the Ripper, it caught on.
And hoaxers across the land
began reaching for their pens.
And throughout October, the police
were inundated with a barrage of letters,
many signed "Jack the Ripper."
And it became almost a national pastime,
writing letters signed "Jack the Ripper."
Every letter had to be read, assessed,
and, if ever possible,
followed up and the author traced,
so consequently,
the already overstretched detectives
are stretched almost to breaking point.
[unsettling music plays]
Then on 30th September,
within days of the police
receiving the "Dear Boss" letter,
the murderer struck again and carries out
two murders in less than an hour.
That night is what we we now call
the "Double Event Night."
[Adam] On this spot,
um, one o'clock in the morning,
Louis Diemschutz pulled his horse
and cart into the yard
immediately behind where I am now.
[horse neighs]
[Adam] And he saw the body of a woman.
It was Elizabeth Stride,
the third victim of Jack the Ripper.
[Lindsay] Elizabeth was Swedish.
She worked as a nanny for a while
to some children, and as a cleaner,
and then, sadly,
she got into prostitution.
[Adam] She'd come to England
when she was in her early twenties,
and she found herself, first in
around the Brick Lane area,
in the common lodging houses around there.
And, by the end of September,
she had earned herself a a few shillings
by cleaning the lodging house
she was staying in.
She decided to go out for the night
and spend what money she had made.
[ominous music plays]
When the body was found,
she had a scarf around her neck,
which had been twisted to one side,
and the knot pulled very, very tightly,
and there was a large, jagged cut,
which almost ran
to the level of that scarf,
as though it'd been used
almost as a guide by the killer.
There was a river of blood
running from the throat
down into the gutter
in the opposite corner.
Unlike our other victims,
she's only had her throat cut.
No mutilations.
Some people do believe that the reason
why Jack only cut Elizabeth's throat
was because he was disturbed by
that pony and cart coming into the yard.
Because he's been denied
the satisfaction of the mutilation,
the killer goes looking
for another victim.
[ominous music continues]
Forty-five minutes later,
in the City of London,
the body of Catherine Eddowes
is found in Mitre Square.
[unsettling music continues]
[music fades]
Where I'm standing here
was roughly where
Catherine Eddowes' body was found
on the night of the Double Event.
Catherine was born in Wolverhampton.
Eventually, her two parents die,
and she was placed into orphanages.
And she moves, eventually, to London
where she was known
as a sex worker at the time,
but maybe on a casual basis.
She was found around 1:45 in the morning
by, uh, the policeman, PC Watkins,
who was coming around the back,
around Mitre Street.
He comes into the square.
He search He's on his patrol.
He shines the lantern,
and he gets such a shock
when he sees the body here.
She wasn't there 15 minutes earlier.
She was the most horribly mutilated
of any victim up till that point.
This is another step up.
The throat's been cut.
She's been cut open.
V's have been cut into her cheeks,
V's into her eyelids,
part of the earlobe's been taken off,
tip of the nose.
Also, the killer's cut out and gone off
with the uterus and the left kidney.
[Lindsay] You only had one resident
on the square.
That was a policeman, Richard Pearce,
with his family, just sleeping there.
Policeman hears nothing,
and, amazingly, the night watchman
hears and sees nothing.
It's like a ghost kills her here.
[Adam] When Catherine was taken to the
City of London mortuary and undressed,
they noticed that the apron
she'd been wearing
was covered with blood,
uh, understandably,
but a portion of it was missing,
as though it had been cut off.
[Lindsay] After Catherine Eddowes' body
was found,
a policeman was walking down
Goulston Street.
He's shining his lantern into doorways,
making sure there's nobody hiding,
trying to find any weapons,
and sees blood in the entrance
to the model dwellings on Goulston Street.
And in the blood,
he sees a piece of material.
It's actually a section
of Catherine Eddowes' apron
cut off from her body in Mitre Square.
Some people believe the reason why
the actual apron was dropped there
was because the murderer
had wiped his hands and knife.
But why that specific doorway,
nobody knows.
[Adam] The thing about the blood
on the apron piece,
it could have been Catherine's, obviously,
from the horrific wounds.
It could have been
the killer's inadvertently cut himself
while carrying out the mutilations.
Unfortunately,
there was no blood types at that time,
so it was totally useless.
One of the things many Jack the Ripper
letters had been threatening
was they would send a body part
to the police.
[uneasy music plays]
[Lindsay] Two weeks
after the Double Event,
when Elizabeth and Catherine are killed,
a local man called George Lusk
receives a letter.
[Richard] He sat down to his dinner table
on 16th October,
and a small package was delivered
in the evening mail,
and he opened it,
and inside was the letter "from hell."
And with the letter
was half a human kidney.
[Richard] George Lusk was the head
of the Whitechapel Mile End
Vigilance Committee.
Basically, they would go out at night
and they'd patrol the streets,
and they'd keep suspicious characters
under surveillance.
So the letter
that arrived at Mr. Lusk's house said,
"Mr. Lusk, sir,
I send you half the kidney
I took from one woman."
"Preserved it for you."
"T'other piece I fried and ate.
It was very nice."
"I may send you the bloody knife
that took it out,
if you only wait a while longer."
"Signed, Catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk."
He's obviously saying he's a cannibal
and that he's actually eaten
a section of the victim's kidney.
Horrible.
With the Lusk letter,
there was a debate within the police
as to whether that was
actually Catherine's kidney.
Certainly, the medical opinions
at the time differed.
It was the correct kidney, though.
It was the left kidney, and Catherine
did have her left kidney taken away.
If that was Catherine's kidney,
then that means that letter is genuine,
and there's a 50/50 chance.
So I, personally,
have always believed in that letter
and believed that the Lusk letter
was genuine, but others disagree.
There are those who say
that it's the only genuine letter
that came from the murderer.
Personally, I don't believe it was.
I think it was probably
the joke of a medical student.
Uh, it was quite common for medical
students to get hold of body parts.
The point is that everybody got hooked
on this Jack the Ripper scare.
It's it's become
almost, uh, an obsession.
People are just, "I need to get involved.
I want to get involved."
[Adam] In the October of 1888,
the police had organized
a house-to-house search
in the whole of Whitechapel.
There were several hundred
houses, uh, searched.
A thousand people were investigated.
But they really didn't have, uh,
much of a lead to go on at all, really.
It's important to remember, in 1888,
the police were really limited
with the amount of, uh,
investigatory tools that they had.
[Paul] They didn't have simple things
like fingerprints,
and they certainly didn't have CCTV,
which would have enabled them
to to keep an eye on different areas.
[Richard] Basically,
the police investigation depended on
a search of the area.
Is there perhaps a footprint there
that they can use?
But none of the traditional methods
of detecting a crime are working.
We do have witnesses who say,
"Oh, I saw this. I saw that."
But we don't know
whether they did see the killer or not.
A lot of those who saw him talked about
him being about 5 ft. 6 in., 5 ft. 7 in.,
but, then again, that was probably
an average height for a man at the time.
Um, different ages from twenties
to forties, different clothing.
[Adam] The problem with
eyewitness identification at that time
is the lighting was extremely poor.
It's like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning,
and it's dark. We've got limited lighting.
How well do we notice things?
Often, witnesses can be quite wrong
accidentally in their descriptions.
[Adam] So, unfortunately, no one knew
what Jack the Ripper looked like.
[uneasy music plays]
[Richard] At this point, the police
are going through the East End,
searching for the murderer.
You've also got an interesting situation
where you've got lots of people
out in disguise
to try and catch the Ripper.
We know of three medical students
being used as decoys
to try and lure the murderer out.
[Paul] Men who dressed up as women,
wandering around the East End
in the hope of being attacked
by Jack the Ripper
so that they could catch him.
The women started to arm themselves.
So we have pictures of them
holding knives, guns, scissors,
knowing that, you know,
they have to go out on the streets.
They have nowhere else to go. They have
to get their four pennies for a bed.
But what an awful situation to be in,
to think that your next customer
could be your last.
[unsettling music plays]
[Richard] The whole of October
went by without any murders,
largely because the police presence
in the area has really been stepped up.
So nothing happened until the next murder
on 9th November.
And it is the worst in the series by far.
[unsettling music plays]
Mary Jane Kelly was in her mid-twenties,
so she's the youngest
of all of our ladies.
And, like the other victims,
she needed to get money,
so she worked as a lady of the night.
She has a room of her own in Whitechapel.
A man called Thomas Bowyer goes around
to collect rent from Mary Jane Kelly.
- He knocks on the door. Nothing.
- [knocking]
[Lindsay] So he goes around
to a side broken window.
He moves the curtain. [gasps]
And sees this horrific sight.
Absolutely shocking.
[Adam] Having the opportunity
in that locked room,
the killer could do whatever he wanted.
Mary Kelly's body
was completely eviscerated.
Her face was completely cut off,
breasts removed,
laying on the bed,
entrails all all around the place.
[Lindsay] She's killed indoors.
She's the only murder to have been
actually, uh, sort of happening indoors.
[Richard] The police took a photograph
of the body on the bed.
It's one of the earliest
crime scene photographs we have.
You you can't even think
it's a human being. It was horrendous.
[Lindsay] He'd cut off
three flaps of flesh,
put that on the bedside table.
He'd cut off and extracted
several sections of her abdominal area,
placed them around her body.
And if that's not enough,
he slices the flesh off from her thigh,
her thigh bone is exposed,
and then he cuts out her heart.
But sadly, Mary Jane Kelly's heart
was never found.
[Richard] The divisional police surgeon
to Scotland Yard, Dr. Thomas Bond,
he performed a postmortem on Mary Kelly
as she lay in her room.
[Adam] They said
that it looked as though Mary
potentially had been asleep
when she was attacked.
[Richard] Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant
Commissioner of Scotland Yard at the time,
sought the opinion of Dr. Thomas Bond
on the five murders.
Anderson sent him the inquest reports
on the deaths of Mary Nichols,
Annie Chapman,
Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes.
[Adam] Dr. Bond was known to have
have been consulted
on some of the most notorious cases
of the 1870s and 1880s
across the country, not just London.
After years of working for Scotland Yard,
he became interested
in the psyche of a killer.
He was trying to get an understanding
of how a murder was committed,
rather than just the the physical,
medical side of things.
Dr. Thomas Bond produced
what is probably the first attempt
at profiling a serial killer.
And on 10th November,
he submitted a report to Scotland Yard,
which really shaped a lot of the way
that we think about the the Ripper today.
[Richard] Bond talks about
the similarities between the murders.
He says that that it would have been
a surprise attack,
that they wouldn't have been expecting it.
The evidence does suggest
he was able, for some reason,
to overpower his victims very quickly
and render them unconscious.
[Adam] The idea that the victims
were killed while they were laying down
is a conclusion drawn up
by Dr. Bond in his report.
It certainly gives a lot of credence
because there were thumb marks
and finger marks
found on the necks of the victims,
which indicate they were strangled,
certainly into insensibility,
lowered to the ground,
and then had their throat cut.
And then the mutilations
were carried out after death.
[uneasy music plays]
[Adam] Certainly in the 1880s,
the idea of a serial killer
as we know it today simply didn't exist.
[Paul] It wasn't until the 1970s
that the term "serial killer"
became invented, as it were.
But in 1888, the general public
simply didn't believe
that there were people out there
who were killing without
what they perceived of as a as a motive.
So the press and the public came up
with suspects like the deranged doctor,
a midwife,
a butcher,
because they had various skills
that Jack the Ripper had.
A butcher would have anatomical knowledge,
but not necessarily surgical skill.
A doctor would have both, of course.
But the doctors at the time
were divided in their opinions
about whether or not the killer had
surgical skill and anatomical knowledge.
He certainly would appear to have known
where things were in in the human body
to be able to extract various things.
He would have been operating,
uh, in some cases,
in near to complete darkness.
I think he's got to have had
a degree of knowledge and skill
to have been able to do that.
[uneasy music plays]
We know the murders
weren't committed for robbery.
They weren't committed for revenge.
Not for any financial gain,
not for jealousy,
not because they're drunk.
It's been done purely for the satisfaction
of carrying out those mutilations.
[Adam] The mutilations became more
and more intense as the series progressed,
because that lower level of mutilations
wasn't enough
for him to get the thrill
that he was seeking.
They were committed
purely for a sexual thrill.
That motive, or or that sort
of mental outlook on on a perpetrator
hadn't been looked at all before.
In his report, Bond also gave his opinion
as to what the killer was like
in terms of character.
He was a a quiet, well-respected man,
probably dressed respectably.
He talks about
his living arrangements as well.
That he he probably had a room he could
at least a room he could retire to,
where he could clean himself up.
He talks about even his income,
that he's either got a private pension
or a private income.
He talks about
that he's living with his family.
His family might be shielding him.
[Lindsay] Many people back then thought
Jack the Ripper was possibly a lunatic
and therefore may have been
walking around the streets
sort of frothing from the mouth
and looking clearly very evil-looking
and not very well.
Clearly, the ladies of the night
are clever,
and they're not gonna approach
anybody like that.
I think the idea of Jack the Ripper
as an unknown assailant,
walking around deserted streets
in the early hours with a top hat,
carrying his black bag,
is an image which has has stayed with us
for over a hundred years.
When you look at the early silent movies
where there was a lady
being tied to a railway track, in danger,
the villain who did that
always had a top hat, black cloak,
usually a nice, big mustache.
Exactly the image
that you think of Jack the Ripper today.
And he really fits nicely into that
real perpetrator of terrible deeds.
[Paul] The black bag part
comes from a man who was seen
close to the murder of Elizabeth Stride.
And he was carrying a black bag,
but, in fact, he'd been doing business
somewhere and was just on his way home,
and he had a cast-iron alibi
and had nothing to do with it,
but the black bag stuck.
[uneasy music plays]
[Paul] Jack the Ripper with the top hat
and carrying the Gladstone bag
and wearing a cape,
I think would have probably
stood out like a sore thumb
in the East End of London
at [chuckles] at that time.
The real Jack the Ripper must have
been able to just walk the streets
without being particularly noticed
by anybody.
[Richard] And there were lots of
slaughterhouses in the area at the time,
and it was quite common to see people
in bloodstained clothing
walking around the area
in the early hours of the morning.
Just after Mary Kelly's murder,
something unusual happens.
[Adam] A bunch of time passed by
and the murders stop.
So why would the killer stop?
Had he satisfied his bloodlust
through the horrific mutilations of Mary?
If the murders have ended, something's
happened to the murderer. Has he died?
[Lindsay] He may have left the country,
may have gone on holiday,
may have been locked up for another crime.
Some people have have conjectured
that maybe he was in quite ill health.
And then some people thought
he may be a sailor.
Commit the murder, and then disappear
again on the boat going out again.
It's almost a perfect way
of of committing a murder.
[Richard] And then, of course,
there is the asylum theory.
The murders ended
because the killer went into an asylum.
Very early on in the investigation,
the police had an awful lot of suspects.
You've got people being pulled in, uh,
by the police on almost a conveyor belt.
[Adam] Every person
that was potentially sighted,
uh, acting in a suspicious manner,
or looked like someone
that had been seen by a witness,
they had to follow up their story.
And over the years,
there's obviously a lot of people,
for very good reasons,
who've done their own research
and come up with their own suspects.
And there are a handful of suspects
worth taking seriously.
[Lindsay] One suspect in the police files
is Montague John Druitt.
[Richard] Druitt was a barrister
in South London.
He was also a teacher as well.
Around about November 1888,
he was dismissed.
[Adam] His body was found floating
in the Thames on the last day of 1888.
[Richard] When the murders stopped,
one of the things the police thought
is he's committed suicide.
So they're looking
at all the suicides that take place
just after Mary Kelly's murder.
One suicide that comes forward
is that of Montague John Druitt.
According to the police reports,
his own family
thought that he was the murderer.
His brother testifies that, uh, he's
he's been mentally unstable for a time.
He's found a note saying
he felt he was going mad.
It's better that he should die.
But there's no firm evidence that points
to Druitt having visited Whitechapel,
let alone being seen with any of the women
on the nights of their murders.
It purely seems to come down to the fact
that he was found drowned in the Thames
at the end of that year.
[uneasy music plays]
[Richard] Dr. Francis Tumblety
is one of the most intriguing suspects.
He's the only one of the suspects
who was actually arrested for the murders
just before Mary Kelly's murder.
He was an American, and he was given bail,
and he skipped bail
and then went back to America.
When he was in New York,
Tumblety started giving interviews saying,
"Well, I was arrested
on on suspicion of being the murderer."
So Tumblety said,
"All I did was, I did what everybody did."
"I was fascinated, so I went into the area
to look at the murders."
And somehow he got himself arrested
on suspicion of having committed
the Jack the Ripper murders.
But, of course, there's no evidence
to suggest he was the killer.
[Adam] The last prime suspect
after Tumblety and Druitt
was just given the name Kosminski.
[Paul] The name Kosminski
appears to have come from police files.
They described him as a Polish Jew
who was put into an asylum.
We don't know who Kosminski was,
but a search was done,
and it does appear to have been
a fairly comprehensive search
of asylum records,
looking for a Kosminski.
And the only one that's been found
is a man called Aaron Kosminski.
[Adam] Aaron Kosminski
lived in Whitechapel.
He was a young Polish Jew.
But he didn't go to the asylum until 1891.
He was still wandering around Whitechapel
three years after Mary Kelly was killed,
so that doesn't really chime with the idea
that the suspect was taken off the street
soon after the last murder.
[Richard] Sir Robert Anderson
and Chief Inspector
Donald Sutherland Swanson,
the two highest-ranking officers
on the case,
both appear to have thought that a man
named Kosminski was the murderer.
Anderson and Swanson
were in the position to know
all the evidence against all the suspects,
and if they thought
the evidence against Kosminski
was stronger than the evidence
against any other suspect,
he has to be high on the list of suspects
of being Jack the Ripper.
The only problem is that, uh,
we can't say with any degree of certainty
that Aaron Kosminski is definitely
the Kosminski they had in mind.
[Adam] Over the years,
there's been more and more suspects
and various theories coming out.
And, in fact,
the Johnny Depp film From Hell
and the Michael Caine
1988 television series,
probably the two most well-known
fictional versions of the Ripper story,
both featured
Sir William Gull as the Ripper.
[sinister music plays]
[Lindsay] So Sir William Gull,
who has been claimed as the murderer
in nearly all the films you will ever see,
has being linked since the 1970s
with what we call
the Royal Conspiracy Theory.
So according to the theory,
Queen Victoria's grandson,
Prince Albert Victor,
had an affair with an East End prostitute,
and they had a baby.
A baby girl, Alice.
Alice had a nanny, Mary Jane Kelly.
Mary Jane had four friends.
Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman,
Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes.
And together, as a group, they set out
to blackmail the Crown and the government
with this secret knowledge about a baby.
Therefore, the royal doctor,
Sir William Gull,
was sent out to track them down
to kill them
to keep the secret silent forever.
The problem with that theory is that
Sir William Gull had had a stroke in 1887,
so he was physically incapable
of, uh, trundling around Whitechapel,
carrying out these murders
and mutilations.
[Lindsay] Sir William
was never a contemporary suspect.
His name does not appear
in any police files,
in any contemporary papers,
in any contemporary documentation
with this case whatsoever.
[Adam] And of course, when that theory
is completely debunked,
it stayed in the consciousness.
Many people just blame anybody
who was literally alive at the time.
And I think quite a lot of people
have been blamed with no real evidence,
because very few records, sadly, exist.
The Jack the Ripper murders, as most
people would tend to think of them,
were just over the autumn of 1888.
That's the murder of five victims
in a number of weeks.
But there's a police file
called the Whitechapel murders file,
which ranges from 1888
all the way through to 1891
and covers much more
than the five victims.
We don't know how many, if any,
of the other victims
in the Whitechapel murders wider file
may have been killed
by the Ripper as well.
[thunder rumbles]
[thunder crashes]
[Paul] There's a file,
which we refer to as the "suspects file,"
of people who were questioned
about the Ripper
and perhaps suspected of it
for a short while.
Um, that file's gone, and we don't know
wh what's happened to it.
[Adam] It was well-known
that in the years following the 1880s,
going into 1890s,
police officers were allowed to go
and examine the papers.
And it seems that right from that point,
certain sheets or reports,
photographs of the victims
that we have today,
were slowly weeded out, taken away,
removed by souvenir hunters.
Bond's report went missing from the files
for several years,
and when it was recovered,
sent anonymously to Scotland Yard.
[Paul] The "Dear Boss" letter
went missing.
And that, fortunately, was returned.
And some of the photographs
of the victims,
uh, have been discovered,
uh, in the last couple of decades.
It's a bit like putting together a jigsaw.
You have all these pieces,
and some of those pieces
don't actually fit that jigsaw.
And so you manage to put together
all the ones that seem to form a picture.
You get a picture. And then you get
chunks in the picture that are missing.
[Lindsay] It is frustrating,
as a crime historian,
not being able to say,
"This is the person that did it."
And more to the point,
to be able to solve these killings
for the victims' families and descendants,
because they are still out there.
[Richard] The more people look into it,
the more facts come to light,
and the more facts come to light,
then the story just evolves,
develops, and takes on,
uh, different aspects,
and goes off in directions that you would
never expect it to go off in.
Of course, we'd love to know
who Jack the Ripper was.
I mean, uh, the end of the mystery,
th that would be terrific.
What we would like is
any any new information.
Anything that people have got.
[Richard] There might be documents
out there that are in people's lofts.
They might be in people's cellars.
[Adam] I believe there's something
potentially out there
which could take the case much forward
and potentially solve it.
Somebody might, one day,
might open a trunk, might open a case,
and there's the evidence
that names Jack the Ripper.
But until that happens,
it's still a mystery.
[uneasy music plays]
[bell tolls]
[unsettling music plays]
[music ends]