Anyone who studies Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders of the 1880s for any length of time will quickly realise that there is a big difference between the commonly accepted version of the Jack the Ripper story – the ‘pop culture’ version, it could be said – and the factual reality.
The striking thing is how little factual reality there actually is. There are remarkably few undisputed facts about the murders. After all, that’s one of the things that has made them such an enduring mystery and a source of intrigue for well over a century. ‘Jack the Ripper’ was never caught, and we know the murderer by his nickname. We don’t know who they were, or what the motivation for their horrible crimes was – if there was one. We don’t know why the murders that had terrorised the East End stopped as suddenly as they started. We don’t even know for sure whether the famous pseudonym was coined by the murderer or as a hoax by journalists.
But surely, we know the answer to the question ‘how many people did Jack the Ripper murder?’ You can’t have a murder spree or a serial killer without a definite body count, can you?
In fact, this is yet another aspect of the case that has been queried – if not outright disputed. The number of Jack the Ripper victims is still open to debate.
Modern-day tellings of the Jack the Ripper case usually list five women – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – as the ‘canonical five’ Jack the Ripper victims, killed between August and November 1888.
But anyone who reads up on the case will quickly notice two parallel terms in frequent use. These are ‘Jack the Ripper’ and the ‘Whitechapel Murders’. That term refers to a total of 11 unsolved murders of women in the East End of London, including the five usually ascribed to Jack the Ripper, that were committed between April 1888 and February 1891.
So, there is potential to more than double the number of Jack the Ripper victims beyond the ‘canonical five’. From 1888 to the present day, authors and investigators (including officials involved in the cases themselves) have set a wide range of murders at the hands of Jack the Ripper, between one – on the basis that there was no serial killer at work – to more than 11, sometimes including murders committed in other countries.
During the ‘Autumn of Terror’ in 1888, there was no consensus about how many of the murders in Whitechapel were the work of the murderer that came to be known to all as ‘Jack the Ripper’ – not least because it was not clear when his gruesome work had come to a stop.
The idea of the ‘canonical five’ was popularised by Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police between 1890 and 1903, and Assistant Commissioner from then until his retirement in 1913. Notably, this means that Macnaghten was not in the police force in 1888 and had no involvement in the actual investigation into Jack the Ripper. In fact, he took his leadership role at the very tail end of the broader Whitechapel Murders. However, he had access to the records of the case and the recollections of officials and investigators.
Macnaghten produced a keystone of ‘Ripperology’ in February 1894 when he wrote a memorandum to refute a new flurry of press speculation that the murders were committed by Thomas Cutbush. Macnaghten’s semi-official memo outlined why Cutbush could not be the murderer and outlined three other suspects who were of official interest. As well as naming Montague Druitt, ‘Kosminski’ (presumed to be Aaron Kosminski) and Michael Ostrog as these persons of interest in the memo, Macnaghten also stated that Jack the Ripper committed five murders.
He was quite explicit, writing that “the Whitechapel murderer had five victims – and five victims only”, starting with Mary Ann Nichols and ending with Mary Jane Kelly. He repeated this assertion in his 1913 autobiography.
This is the origin of the ‘canonical five’, setting out a distinction between Jack the Ripper victims and another six women killed in Whitechapel by other persons.
There is a lot of sense to the canonical five. All five women were killed in the same way – a single deep cut to the throat, severing their carotid artery – and then their bodies were mutilated post-mortem. That mutilation was focused on the abdominal area and shows an escalating level of severity, from the stab wounds inflicted on Mary Ann Nichols to the horrific evisceration of Mary Jane Kelly. The exception would be Elizabeth Stride, where it is assumed that the murderer was interrupted shortly after the actual murder and had to flee the scene, killing and mutilating Catherine Eddowes less than an hour later.
Despite the near-official endorsement of the ‘canonical five’, many authors and officials have proposed other numbers for the total of women murdered in Whitechapel.
For instance, Frederick Wensley, who was a detective who took part in street patrols in the East End during the investigation, wrote in his autobiography that Jack the Ripper committed six murders.
When Leonard Matters reinvigorated interest in the case with his 1929 book ‘The Mystery of Jack the Ripper’, he also put the number at six with the inclusion of Martha Tabram as a victim of the Ripper. Edwin Woodhall’s books of the 1930s took the same approach. William Stewart’s work of 1939 included Tabram but excluded Elizabeth Stride, thus creating a different list of five (as well as concluding that the murderer was a woman). Allan Barnard’s compendium work of the 1950s expanded Jack’s body count to seven, adding Emma Smith (the first victim in the Whitechapel murders series) to the list.
Interestingly, Smith and Tabram were commonly considered Jack the Ripper victims until Macnaghten’s memo became widely available to researchers in the 1960s and seemingly lending official weight to the notion of the ‘canonical five’.
Alice McKenzie was murdered in July 1889 by a left-right cut to her carotid artery and post-mortem wounds inflicted on her abdomen. Commissioner of Police James Monro and one of the investigating doctors believed her murder to be the work of the Ripper, but the other pathologist, Inspector Frederick Abberline and others assigned to the case disagreed, noting that the weapon and the nature of the slashes to Alice’s abdomen were smaller and less severe than the earlier cases.
The coroner acknowledged the possibility that this was an imitation of the famous Ripper crimes. However, some modern writers, such as Trevor Marriott, have included McKenzie in their list of Jack the Ripper victims.
Frances Coles was the last of the victims included in the Whitechapel case before the police file was closed. She was murdered in February 1891, being thrown to the ground before two cuts were made across her throat. She was found by a police constable just seconds after the attack and died before medical help could arrive. It has been suggested that, like Elizabeth Stride, Coles’ murder was also a case where the Ripper was disturbed by the arrival of others before he could mutilate the body.
Over the decades, these murdered women have been placed into almost every possible combination by authors and investigators looking to fix a number on the issue of how many people did Jack the Ripper kill?
Of the eleven official victims that are included in the Whitechapel murder case, it can be – and has been – argued that when fully considered, only two match the ‘classic’ characteristics of the murderer we know as ‘Jack the Ripper’. These are Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes. These women were pulled to the ground by their neckerchiefs, subdued by strangulation, killed with a cut to the throat and then had their abdomens cut open and their internal organs removed. It would be a bold author who suggested that these murders were entirely separate, although that hasn’t stopped some from making this claim.
The others all differ in some way – slight or significant – from this ‘modus operandi’, and this especially goes for those victims outside the ‘canonical five’ asserted by Macnaughten. Emma Smith was physically assaulted by multiple men. Rose Mylett was strangled, had no other injuries and possibly committed suicide or suffered an accidental death. The Pinchin Street Torso was the result of very different post-mortem activities from the other Ripper murders and was likely connected to a different contemporary series of murders throughout London. Martha Tabram was stabbed but not ‘Ripped’. Mary Ann Nichols had a cut throat and one deep and a few shallow slashes to her abdomen. Elizabeth Stride had no post-mortem injuries at all, so she has sometimes been excluded from the list. At the other end of the scale, the horrific mutilations inflicted on Mary Jane Kelly have also led some to consider her murder a separate crime.
Others have connected Jack the Ripper to cases beyond London. A favourite of the contemporary press was Dundee resident William Henry Bury, who had lived in London between 1887 and January 1889, shortly before suddenly moving to Scotland, where he strangled his wife and repeatedly stabbed her in the abdomen with a penknife.
Since Jack the Ripper was never caught, we will never know for certain how many people he killed and which of these women were and were not his victims. And none of the Whitechapel murders, whether the ‘canonical five’ or not, were ever solved. Murders in America have also been tied to Jack the Ripper, from serial killer H.H. Holmes in Chicago to the ‘New York Ripper’ murders of the 1910s.
One other mysterious element to the Jack the Ripper case that has intrigued people since 1888 is why the murders stopped. Of course, in the winter of 1888, no one knew that Mary Jane Kelly would be the last of the commonly accepted Jack the Ripper victims. The dates of the ‘canonical five’ murders had been spread unevenly through the ‘Autumn of Terror’, with some weeks passing between cases. This is why cases like Rose Mylett were initially touted as the return of the Ripper – they were expecting (and, in some parts of the less reputable press, even hoping for) another murder.
Sir Melville Macnaughten supplied his own account of why the murders ceased in late 1888, proposing that the increasing depravity of the murders indicated the Ripper’s declining mental state and that after the butchery of Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, “he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations, that he was by them confined in some asylum.” Chief Inspector Donald Swanson left notes stating that ‘Kosminski’ (presumably, as with the same name mentioned by Macnaughten, Aaron Kosminksi) was a suspect identified by a witness, who was taken to the London County Lunatic Asylum at Colney Hatch – Aaron Kosminksi died in an asylum in 1919.
Kosminski remains one of the top Jack the Ripper suspects. Macnaughten himself strongly favoured Montague Druitt, whose body was found in the River Thames on New Year’s Eve 1888 after committing suicide several weeks earlier. Macnaughten claimed to have evidence from Druitt’s family that they believed him to be Jack the Ripper, but this was never expanded on and cannot now be confirmed.
Other Metropolitan Police figures giving interviews or writing accounts in the 19th century stated their belief that the murders had stopped because the Ripper had been unknowingly apprehended and was either in prison for some other crime or was in an asylum due to their deteriorated mental state. It was also thought possible that the Ripper had been suffering from a degenerative illness – late-stage syphilis was a common proposal at the time – which would suggest a motive for killing and mutilating women and a reason why he stopped, being either disabled or killed by his condition.
Perhaps Jack the Ripper escaped London altogether. William Henry Bury moved to Dundee shortly after the last of the ‘canonical five’ murders and was convicted and hanged for murder within a year. More outlandish theories would have him fleeing abroad and committing murders in other countries through the late 19th and early 20th century.
![Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]](https://thejacktherippertour.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect1.jpg "Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]")
