The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (26 page)

On the other hand, it’s also true that because of their severe personality problems, many serial killers end up working at menial jobs that are far beneath their intellectual capacities.

Jack the Ripper

The horrors began in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888. At roughly 3:45
A.M
., while walking down a deserted, dimly lit street in London’s East End, a market porter named George Cross stumbled upon what he took to be a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. Peering closer, he saw that the sprawling heap was the butchered body of a woman, later identified as a forty-two-year-old prostitute named Mary Anne Nicholls. Her throat had been slashed, her belly slit, her vagina mutilated with stab wounds.

Though no one could have suspected it at the time, the savaging of Mary Anne Nicholls was a grisly landmark in the history of crime. Not only was it the first in a string of killings that would send shock waves throughout London and, eventually, the world, but it also signified something even more momentous—the dawn of the modern age of serial sex murder.

A week after the Nicholls atrocity, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted forty-seven-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house a half mile from the site of the first murder. Chapman’s head was barely attached to
her body—the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spinal column. She had also been disembowelled.

The true identity of the killer would never be known. But several weeks later, the Metropolitan Police received a taunting
Letter
by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known by this grisly nickname—Jack the Ripper.

Two days after police received the Ripper’s letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Before he could commit any further atrocities on the victim, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching wagon. Hurrying away, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a forty-three-year-old prostitute who had just been released from a police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found lying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into a deserted square, where he slit her throat. Then, in the grip of a demoniacal frenzy, he disfigured her face, split her body from rectum to breastbone, removed her entrails, and carried off her left kidney.

“The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body. . . . The nose had been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the thighs, down to the feet, stripped of the flesh. . . . The entrails and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed by the murderer on the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach.”

From an 1888 newspaper description of Jack the Ripper’s final victim, Mary Kelly

The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. On
the evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her rooms. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse—disembowelling her, slicing off her nose and breasts, carving the flesh from her legs.

Following this outrage, the Whitechapel horrors came to an abrupt end. The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history into the realm of myth.

Since then, armchair detectives have proposed a host of suspects, from a kosher butcher to an heir apparent to the English throne (see
Ripper Theories
). Most of these “solutions” make for colorful reading, but the Ripper’s true identity remains what it has been for a hundred years—a tantalizing, probably insoluble mystery.

Ripper Theories

There is a basic (and disheartening) law of police work: if a case isn’t cracked right away, then the odds of ever solving it rapidly shrink to zero. So the chances of coming up with the solution to a hundred-year-old crime are essentially less than nil. Still, that hasn’t stopped a host of armchair detectives from offering up theories on the most tantalizing murder mystery of all: Who was the knife-wielding serial prostitute killer known as
Jack the Ripper?
For the most part, these theorists are harmless cranks, like the people who spend their time trying to prove that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, or that Amelia Earhart ended up in a Japanese nunnery. The most likely truth is that—like virtually every other serial killer in history—the Ripper was a complete nonentity whose only remarkable trait was a staggering capacity for violence. But—as is so often the case with reality—that simple explanation is infinitely less satisfying than more colorful alternatives. Following are some of the more entertaining hypotheses put forth by various “Ripperologists”:

1.
The Mad Russian.
Supposedly Rasputin himself wrote a book called
Great Russian Criminals
in which he claimed that Jack the Ripper was actually a deranged Russian doctor named Pedachenko, who was dispatched to London by the tsarist police in an effort to create consternation in England and embarrass the British authorities.

2. The Black Magician.
The Ripper was actually Dr. Roslyn D’Onston
Stephenson, a self-styled conjurer obsessed with the occult, who supposedly committed the East End murders as part of a satanic ritual.

3.
The Jewish Slaughterman.
A
shochet,
or kosher butcher, decided to use his carving skills on women of the night.

4.
Jill the Ripper.
The homicidal maniac was not a man at all but a demented London midwife.

5.
The Lodger.
An unnamed boarder in a London roominghouse acted suspiciously at the time of the Ripper murders and might have been the East End fiend. Although the vaguest of the Ripper solutions, this theory has distinguished itself as the basis for four entertaining movies, including an early Hitchcock thriller (see
Le Cinéma de Jack
).

6.
The Deadly Doctor.
A man named Dr. Stanley committed the murders as an act of revenge, after his son contracted syphilis from a prostitute.

7.
The Lethal Lawyer.
A failed attorney named Montague John Druitt committed the Ripper crimes, then drowned himself in the Thames.

8.
The Polish Poisoner.
A multiple murderer named Severin Klosowski (aka George Chapman), who poisoned three of his wives, presumably committed the Whitechapel slayings out of his pathological hatred of womankind in general.

9.
The Evil Aristocrat.
HRH Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence—Queen Victoria’s grandson and heir to the British throne—went on a killing spree after he was maddened by syphilis.

10.
The Crazed Cotton Merchant
A diary that surfaced in the early 1990s “revealed” that the Ripper was a drug-addicted businessman named James Maybrick. Unfortunately, the diary was declared a hoax by renowned document experts.

11.
The Psycho Painter.
Patricia Cornwell, the popular crime novelist with a flair for forensic science, spent six million dollars of her own money to prove that Victorian painter Walter Sickert was the real Ripper. Cornwell’s theory—set forth in her 2002 book
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed—
rests partly on Sickert’s penchant for dark, sexually disturbing subject matter and partly on some highly dubious DNA testing that indicated that Sickert could have been one of thousands of people who wrote a Ripper letter that might very well have been a hoax.

Despite the crowing subtitle of Cornwell’s book, most serious Ripperologists scoff at her theory. One reviewer (Caleb Carr, author of the bestselling historical thriller
The Alienist)
went so far as to demand that Cornwell issue a public apology for slandering Sickert’s reputation.