Profile of Jack the Ripper

The Misty City Mystery of the Century: Jack the Ripper

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, London was a dangerous city for the average inhabitant; in fact, it wasn't until 1829 that the Scottish Constabulary was established as the city's police force. More than half a century later, in 1888, under the growing light of the colonial empire, London was ostensibly a premier city for the safety of persons and property. At the bottom of Victorian society, however, there were many undercurrents of social and political change arising from hypocrisy, poverty and injustice, especially in the East End of London, known for its immigrants and poverty. Less than a mile square, the East End is home to around 40,000 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia, in addition to a large number of laborers from the lowest rungs of traditional British class society.

In order to survive, these East Enders, the men were fortunate enough to sell their labor for a pittance in nearby wholesale markets and on the docks, while the less fortunate were unemployed and living on the streets due to excessive competition for their labor. The women and children of the East End had to sell their labor for an average of eleven hours a day to make ends meet or to support their families in some 200 menial jobs such as weaving and chimney sweeping. The selling of flesh is a relatively well-paid trade for women. In 1888, there were an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 prostitutes in London, and the East End was one of the city's most heavily trafficked areas, and one of the most "low class".

Selected serial murders in Whitechapel

On the hot summer night of August 7, 1888, a workman found the body of a woman stabbed 39 times, nine of them across the throat, in a dark alleyway near Whitechapel in London's East End. The victim was Martha Turner, who was nearly 40 years old. The victim was Martha Turner, an alcoholic prostitute who had been living in the area for thirteen years (note 1).

At 3:45 a.m. on August 31, a coachman on his way to work found Mary Ann Nichols, a forty-three-year-old prostitute, in the desolate Bucks Row (now known as Durward Street, a hundred yards behind Whitechapel Tube Station), half a mile away. Mary Ann Nichols, a 43-year-old prostitute, was found lying in a pool of blood; it was not until the post-mortem examination later that afternoon that the unusual nature of the murder was revealed. The victim's face was badly bruised, her neck had been slashed twice, some of her incisors had fallen out, her lower abdomen and pubic area had been cut open, and her intestines had been pulled out of her abdominal cavity, which the coroner ruled to have been the result of a six- to eight-inch sharp blade.

The East End of London has always been a notorious neighborhood, and the Whitechapel area is known as the "East End of the East End". However, despite the high level of crime in the area, there have been very few fatal murders, not to mention the horrific brutality of Marianne's case. When Marianne's death became public, the media began to label it the Whitechapel murders, along with Marta's death and another murder that had occurred in the area earlier that year, as the Whitechapel murders, and reported on the brutality of the killers. The media's graphic images have caused anxiety among local residents, with women afraid to walk at night, police in plain clothes and residents organizing their own patrols. The media has speculated whether the killer will commit another crime after these emergency measures.

At 5:45 a.m. on the morning of September 8, an old car driver living on the third floor of a cheap rental apartment building saw a woman's body lying by the fence in his backyard, and almost fainted in shock. The police later investigated and proved that the 47-year-old dead Annie Chapman (Annie Chapman) was the victim. Annie Chapman was another prostitute; her neck was severed, she was disemboweled, her intestines were spread across her left breast, and she showed no signs of struggle. An autopsy revealed that some of her reproductive and urinary organs were missing, and concluded that the murder weapon was similar to the previous one.

On September 30th, at 1:00 am, Louis, a coachman, drove his horse on a dark road near his home. Louis lit a match and saw a woman on the ground, and after careful examination, it was a woman's body. The deceased is a 44-year-old prostitute of Swedish descent, Elizabeth Stead. Elizabeth Stride (Elizabeth Stride), throat slashed, but not disemboweled, died because the left carotid artery was cut and bleeding. The body was found next to a normal Jewish congregation (40 Berner St.), where dozens of Jews were still meeting at the time of the murder, and no one noticed anything strange outside the house.

While a large police force was concentrated around the scene of the murder, and there was a lot of talk about how the killer had done things differently, at 1:45 in the morning a police patrolman found another woman's body in a pocket square (Mitre Square, Aldgate) a few hundred yards away, mutilated and disfigured, with part of her kidney missing. According to the patrolman's account, there was nothing unusual when he passed by at 1:30am. Without exception, the victim was another prostitute: 46-year-old Catherine Eddowes. Catherine Eddowes.

Jack the Ripper

On September 27, a news agency received a letter written in red ink and fingerprinted by a person who, in a playful tone with a non-working-class tone, identified himself as the perpetrator of a series of murders and signed it Jack the Ripper; on October 1, the same agency received another postcard from the same person, which was found to be the same. The same unit received another postcard on October 1, which was attributed to the same person. The police did not take this clue seriously, believing it to be just one of the many pranks of the time (later studies have not been conclusive on the "authenticity" of these two letters). However, through the media, the name 'Jack the Ripper' became widespread and the whole of London, Britain and the world began to refer to the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders as 'Jack the Ripper'. But Jack, the extreme bloodthirsty psychopath, is not yet satisfied.

At 10:45 a.m. on November 9, the landlord sent a letter to Mary Kelly, who was six weeks behind in paying her rent. Mary was lying naked on the bed in a pool of blood, nose, ears and breasts were cut off, face, lower abdomen, a number of skin was cut off, disemboweled, the body organs were taken out part of the bed and the bedside table, the wall is bloodstained. The police later concluded that the murderer had been at work for at least two to three hours, making the death the most horrific of all the above murders. Mary Kelly. Mary Kelly, a 26-year-old woman of Irish descent who separated from her former cohabitant just days before her death, was the youngest and most beautiful of the serial victims and the only one with a permanent home.

Mary Kelly is the youngest and most beautiful of the serial victims, and the only one with a permanent home. Analyzing this series of cases, many of the same characteristics can be summarized:

All of the victims were cheap prostitutes at the bottom of the social ladder, and all had no fixed abode except for Mary Kelly. With the exception of Mary Kelly, none of the victims had a permanent residence.

Most of the victims had been married with children, but had separated from their families to live in the East End of London, and all had cohabitants.

All of the victims had moderate to severe alcohol problems; alcoholism was also often the reason why these victims left their families.

With the exception of the Mary Kelly case, all of the victims had moderate to severe alcohol problems. With the exception of the Mary Kelly case, all of the victims were seen on the street and intoxicated an hour or two before their bodies were found. (Katharine Eduardo was found drunk on the night of the murder. Katharine Eduardo, who had been detained for drunkenness and disorderly conduct the night of the murder, was released from the police station at 1:00 a.m. and found dead on the street at 1:45 a.m.).

Besides the case of Mary Kelly, who was found dead in the street at 3:00 a.m.

With the exception of the Mary Kelly case, where a neighbor heard a woman's cry for help at about 3 a.m. (murder), the rest of the murders appeared to have been silent, even though they took place not far from major thoroughfares and in the vicinity of many homes.

Police determined that none of the victims showed signs of a strong struggle before they died.

Thirty minutes to two hours before each of the murders, witnesses saw the victims talking to a strong, dignified man in his 30s who wore a beard and a cap.

At the time, the police were overwhelmed by a series of murders with unknown motives, untraceable crimes, and contradictory eyewitness testimonies. Faced with this unprecedented hot potato, the police were criticized for their ability to handle the case, and even Queen Victoria questioned the efficiency of the police, leading to a shake-up at the top of the police force. When the media heat died down, the police decided in 1892 to stop formally investigating the Whitechapel serial murders (note 2).

Who was Jack the Ripper?

After the Whitechapel murders, the police were slow to make progress, and the fearful locals would yell at the public to bring any suspicious-looking men to the police station, but most of these so-called suspects were immediately turned back by the police after questioning. After a few murders, the coroner's inquests concluded that the murderer should have knowledge of anatomy, based on the method of the knife and the time of the crime; 100 yards away from Marianne's body is the Royal London Hospital (Royal London Hospital), a huge building, which led to rumors that the murderer might be a nearby doctor; several local doctors were even followed by plainclothes policemen for a long time. As a result, until recent films, Jack the Ripper was depicted as a mysterious man in black, carrying surgical instruments in one hand, walking through the foggy streets of the East End into the darkness.

At the time, there was also a chauvinistic belief that the brutal, psychopathic Jack the Ripper must not have been a native Englishman, and the finger of suspicion was pointed at immigrants. Due to the anti-Semitic sentiments of the East End residents at the time, it was the Jewish immigrants who lived in the East End at the time who were most often suspected of being involved in the crime. It was also rumored that a Russian Anarchist had moved to Paris in the 1870s, where he went insane, murdered several prostitutes, and was incarcerated in an asylum; but he was released from the asylum and moved to the East End of London in 1988 before the consecutive murders took place, and then disappeared.

After the First World War, books on Jack the Ripper began to appear in Britain (the first being Leonard Matters's 1929 book The Mystery of Jack the Ripper). Since then, the craze for researching and trying to find out who Jack the Ripper was has continued, with the terms "ripperology" and "ripperologist" appearing, and books on the subject being published to date. These studies have identified dozens of dubious "Jacks", but the vast majority of these claims are in fact speculation for which the evidence is extremely weak. Among them, the "Royal Conspiracy Theory", which has become a habit of reasoning for some modern Britons, implicates Queen Victoria's grandson, the Duke of Clarence (who could have been the King, but died of influenza in 1893; rumor has it that he was secretly married to a lower-class society model and had a child, and that successive murders were the work of members of a secret society of aristocrats to cover up the fact), which is still the subject of a number of studies. ), there are still many people who believe that Buckingham Palace and Jack the Ripper were more or less connected.

Might Jack have been the midwife?

Conan Doyle, who began working on the Sherlock Holmes series shortly before the murder, claimed that his Holmesian theory was that the murderer was a man who disguised himself as a woman in order to avoid being seen. This "woman connection" was later developed into a theory that Jack the Ripper could have been a midwife, and that Jill the Ripper was a woman instead of Jack the Ripper.

The release of a secret police report in 1959, which had been sealed for 65 years, also caused ripples. In this report, dated 1894, the chief of police on the case positively identified the three most likely suspects as a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who had thrown himself into the Thames at the end of 1888 (note 3), a Polish-Jewish man who had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in March 1889, where he died shortly afterward (note 4), and an immigrant habitual shoplifter from Eastern Europe who had become slightly deranged. Based on subsequent research, it is not impossible that all three were Jack the Ripper; it is just that none of them were very likely.

More recently, two more subtle works have put forward two different theories. In his book on Jack the Ripper (note 5), an American pointed out in 1995 that the key to the identification of the murderer lay in the last of the consecutive murders, because this one, which was the finished version of the Ripper, had a number of characteristic discrepancies with the previous cases. As a result, the author concludes that the Ripper is in fact Mary Kelly's cohabitant, Joseph, who died in the last case. The author concludes that the Ripper is in fact Mary Kelly's cohabitant in the last case, Joseph Barnett. Joseph Barnett. Joseph was originally a relatively well-paid fishmonger, in July 1888 for theft was revoked fishmonger's license, living on odd jobs; has not had to show their faces on the street for a long time Mary because of the cohabitant's income declined, so they had to go back to the streets to resume their old jobs, and intends to break up with Joseph. According to the book's theory, Joseph first warned Mary by killing a succession of prostitutes, and then killed his girlfriend of a year and a half in the most brutal way.

Mystery diary authenticity

Another book published in 1998, more than 400 pages thick (Note 6), is related to the Jack the Ripper Diaries (Note 7), which were 'discovered' in Liverpool in the early 1990s. In April 1993, a local newspaper in Liverpool revealed the discovery of an old leather diary with black and gold trim, whose author claimed to be the enigmatic Jack the Ripper. Most 'Ripperologists' at the time, influenced by the earlier forgery of Hitler's diary, scoffed at the diary and immediately dismissed it as just another forgery gimmick. However, the movie's producer, Paul Feldman However, the film's producer, Paul Feldman, spent five years reviewing all the relevant archives and dating the ink and paper of the diary, the first 48 pages of which had been cut out with a knife, leaving only 63 pages of scribbled handwriting, and concluded that neither he nor any other expert could disprove the diary's authenticity. Particularly compelling were the statements in the diary, which were deliberately hidden by the police after the murder for the sake of the case, and which were not made public until more than a decade ago - while the diary itself was identified as having been written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The diary was written by a man named James Maybrick. The author of the diary was a Liverpool businessman named James Maybrick.

So, after 110 years, the mystery is finally solved? No - some 'Ripper scholars' say some of the questions they have raised still cannot be answered satisfactorily. The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity seems to have been answered in Liverpool, but like so many answers over the last 110 years, the answer is still not recognized as the right one. Jack the Ripper, a mystery novel that has been co-written by many people for more than a hundred years, seems to be one that will continue to be written again and again: to solve a classic mystery in the history of the world's criminals, and to find the answer to a mystery that may never be known for sure.

Britain's mystery of the century: Jack the Ripper is a famous painter

Xinhua (2003-05-22 13:55:23) Source: People's Daily Online

There have been many films and TV programs based on Jack the Ripper, the most recent of which is "From Hell," starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham.

From Aug. 31 to Nov. 9, 1889, five prostitutes were murdered in quick succession in London's Whitechapel district. The killer, who operated on foggy nights, called himself "Jack the Ripper". For more than a century, this historical mystery, which has shocked England, has attracted the interest of criminologists, police, politicians and writers, who have gone to great lengths to find the real culprit.

Since 1970, nearly 100 books have been published on the case, mentioning dozens of suspects, most notably Lewis Carroll, Prince Albert Victor, and Randolph Churchill, the father of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. However, no incontrovertible evidence has been found in any of these writings. American writer Patricia Cornwall after more than a year of extensive and meticulous research, to write a novel entitled "The End of Doubt - Portrait of a Killer", initially concluded that the British Impressionist painter Walter Sickert is the name of the Jack's "Ripper ". The book became a bestseller as soon as it was published in the United States in November 2002, with 750,000 copies sold in the United States alone, and 150,000 copies of the French translation of the novel sold in France.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942) was a disciple of Whistler and a friend of Degas. He was greatly influenced by Degas, and his 1912 work, The Dutchwoman, has been hailed as an heirloom. He was a man of secretive movements and liked to disguise himself, often renting studios in the murder-prone London borough of Whitechapel. As early as the 1970s, articles were written that viewed Sickert as an accomplice to Queen Victoria's physician, Sir William Gull, in the criminal murder of these prostitutes, but not much strong evidence was provided. Gurr was suspected of killing the prostitutes in order to cover up a royal scandal, as Queen Victoria's grandson, Albert Victor, had an illegitimate child with one of the prostitutes. Before Cornwall's novel was published, an Englishwoman named Jean Overton, in her book Art and Murder, also accused Sickert of being involved in the case, but her inference was not taken seriously.

During 2001, Cornwall hired a forensic pathologist named Kay Scatchard and found John Grieve, a retired prosecutor with a knack for sleuthing out difficult cases. It was he who guided the female writer to focus her attention on Sickert. Griff became suspicious from one of Sickert's famous paintings. The painting, titled Camden Towne the Killer, depicted a man sitting on the edge of a bed on which lay on her back a prostitute he had just murdered. The scene in the painting is remarkably similar to that of one of the five prostitutes killed at the time, as documented in police files.

Cornwall was already a detective novelist, and the discovery fueled her passion for writing. Her scrutiny of the artist's work further confirmed Grieve's hunch. Cornwall went on to study all the photographs taken by the police at the scene of the murder of the five prostitutes and at the morgue, and almost all of these shots found their way into Sickert's paintings. She said, "I saw a terrible specter in them, saw the shadow of a demon."

To further unravel the secrets of this case, Cornwall went to the lengths of spending 6 million euros on 32 of Sickert's paintings, as well as buying his overalls, brushes, drawing table, and the vast majority of his letters. Along with her experts, she made dozens of trips by private jet to England and France to investigate. To support her theories, she needed to find more evidence. With the consent of the British government, she hired experts to perform a DNA test on Sickert, and they found specimens of Sickle's DNA by scrutinizing his letters, gently scraping some of the paintings with a knife, and taking evidence from the armpit area of his overalls and his genital area. They also found a letter to Dr. Openshaw from the man who claimed to be "Jack the Ripper" with the killer's blood on the stamp of the envelope. The blood was tested and the DNA was an exact match to Sickert's. They also found this specimen on the stamp of a letter Sickert wrote to his wife.

Cornwall also found another coincidence: the paper used by the painter was the same brand as the paper used by Jack the Ripper to write his letters. The killer signed some of the letters as "Nemo," the stage name Sickert had used as an actor for a short time before taking up painting. Along with her systematic scientific investigation of Sickert, Cornwall also studied his biography, which also revealed a characterization of a man who was eccentric, tyrannical, and strangely manipulative. She also found a very important detail, Sickert had three surgical operations for penile fistula as a child, which may have caused him to suffer from impotence, unable to live a normal sex life, he is likely to be out of sexual perversion and the idea of killing prostitutes.

However, there are some who question Cornwall's conclusions. One is to say that artists like Sickert could not become serial killers; the second is to say that during the case, Sickert is living in France, someone wrote in the letter had seen him; there are also said that Sickert died in 1942, but the serial killings in London in 1891 on the cessation of serial killings, there has never been a serial killer to say, "I'm tired of washing my hands of the job. " Cornwall, however, stands by her assertion that the letter stating that she saw Sickert in France is undated. Besides, England and France were separated by only a channel, and it was very easy to come and go. Even if he had been living in France at the time, he could have returned to England at any time to commit the crime.

The publication of Cornwall's novel further increased Sickert's popularity, and the prices of his paintings soared. Last December, at an auction in New York, one of Sickert's oil paintings was sold for several times its previous price. (Text/Yang Rusheng)