Was the Ripper for Real?

While writing earlier today about the new Sherlock Holmes film project, I was reminded of a recent report from Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper about a more infamous 19th-century figure in the world of crime. According to that report, a new book called Jack the Ripper: Case Closed postulates that “Jack the Ripper was a forgery invented by journalists to link a series of unrelated murders and sell newspapers.” The book’s author, historian Dr. Arthur Cook, contends

that the famous letter bragging about the killings--signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ in the first-ever use of that name--was actually forged by journalists desperate to sell their newspaper.

Dr. Cook says streetwalkers Mary Nichols, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Kelly, Elizabeth Stride and Annie Chapman were killed by different men, as were the six other Whitechapel victims often added to the Ripper’s toll.

He takes his evidence from police and medical experts at the time who expressed doubts about the single killer theory even as it began to take hold on the public imagination.

The senior Whitechapel policeman at the time of the killings admitted in his retirement speech that he did not believe Mary Kelly was killed by ‘Jack the Ripper,’ Dr. Cook points out.

The assistant police surgeon who examined all five victims, Percy Clark, told the East London Observer in 1910: ‘I think perhaps one man was responsible for three of them. I would not like to say he did the others.’

However, comments like this were a drop in an ocean as the myth of the lone rogue killer took hold of the Victorian imagination.

You can read the full story here.

I haven’t as yet read Cook’s book, but my initial thought is that it’s an example of revisionist history, trying to tie events from an earlier era together into some fresh formulation. The fact is, though, that barring the release of some proof that the Ripper was merely a circulation-stimulating scheme by unscrupulous Victorian newsies, along with unassailable evidence of who really murdered those East End prostitutes, we can’t know for certain what role the papers of 1888 played in creating the Ripper legend.

And so the mystery continues.

READ MORE: “Is This Jack the Ripper?” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).