Jack the Ripper has long been regarded as the first, and certainly the best-known, British serial killer. However, to this day, we still don’t know his identity.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that, fundamentally, the story of Jack the Ripper is of a criminal who got away with multiple brutal crimes. Accepting the consensus that one person killed the ‘canonical five’ victims, those are five murders – five lives ended – for which justice was never done. This is, of course, one aspect of why the story of Jack the Ripper has remained so fascinating for so many people. It is a story that hasn’t had a proper ending.
That leaves us to wonder exactly why the criminal came off better in the battle of wits between Jack the Ripper and the police. Below, we’ll discuss the key reasons why Jack the Ripper got away with his crimes.
If you were to design a time and place for a successful serial killer, it would be hard to come up with a better location than Whitechapel in 1888.
It was overcrowded, with over 30,000 residents in its 189 acres (more than twice the population density of the densest London borough today), and three times that many came and went from the area each day for work or to seek pleasure.
Although often represented as one huge poverty-stricken slum, one thing that made Whitechapel so compelling and so horrifying to commentators in the 1880s was its contrasts. The main roads were lined with prosperous commercial properties and middle-class residences of white-collar workers and business owners. But just a few yards away, on the backstreets and alleyways, was some of the direst poverty and most squalid conditions anywhere in the country.
Casual labour (hired only by the day) in the area’s docks, markets and factories or dangerous sweatshops was badly paid and exhausting. Such work rarely matched rent and living costs, so many Whitechapel residents became mired in debt or drifted on the streets and in the infamous doss houses.
A temporary escape from this crushing poverty could be sought in one of Whitechapel’s 45 pubs (one on virtually every street corner) or 62 brothels. The latter accommodated an estimated 1200 prostitutes, and several hundred more – predominantly the most destitute and desperate women -sought clients and carried out their trade on the streets. These women were especially vulnerable to assault, rape or murder.
Much of this crime was carried out by Whitechapel’s infamous street gangs, who fought each other to maintain their ‘patch’ and extorted local residents and businesses with protection rackets.
All these factors – overcrowding, a continual flow of people in and out, high unemployment, low wages, illegal businesses, poverty, drunkenness, gangs, immigration, radical politics and a built environment of maze-like backstreets, dark corners and ramshackle buildings – meant that crime of all sorts was a constant presence in parts of Whitechapel. Robbery, assault, rape and murder were common in the side streets and squares away from the main roads. Fights between drunken men, singly and in groups, happened almost every evening.
These fights could be over trivial matters, personal feuds, linked to racial or political tensions, over women (including the areas prostitutes), and could also take the form of domestic violence between partners. Deliberate or accidental injuries were a common feature of these brawls, as were robberies and other forms of assault. Those involved could quickly melt into crowds or disappear into Whitechapel’s maze-like architecture. The common cry at the time when being attacked or witnessing assault was “Oh, Murder!” Multiple accounts taken by the police investigating the Whitechapel murders said that such cries were so common that they did not warrant any special attention. Even if the cry didn’t mean that a murder was actually taking place, the violent death rate in Whitechapel in the 1880s was about 40 in every 1000 – over four times the London average.
In 1888, as now, the Metropolitan Police was the largest police force in the country. But whereas today’s Met has over 30,000 police officers on its strength to police Greater London’s 8.9 million people, in 1888 there were fewer than 15,000 Metropolitan Police officers to handle a population of five million, with only around 300 of that number being detectives. Whitechapel came under the Met’s ‘H Division’, which in 1888 mustered fewer than 550 police officers and just 15 detectives. They were responsible for policing an area with a total population of over 175,000, which included some of the poorest and most crime-ridden areas of London.
As well as a sheer lack of numbers, the policing of Whitechapel was made more difficult by the geography of the area – the warren of streets, alleys and passages made it hard to track people and easy for criminals to escape. Many policemen did not venture off the main streets when alone on their regular ‘beat’, and there were some streets (such as Dorset Street and Flower and Dean Street – the latter posited as the residence for Jack the Ripper in a 21st century Metropolitan Police analysis) so infamously hostile to outsiders that the police did not enter them at all unless in large force.
British police forces of the time were focused more on maintaining order, apprehending those caught in the act and protecting property rather than more modern concepts such as deterrence, community engagement and criminal investigation. Police constables were selected for their good character and physical strength rather than their education or analytic intelligence. Detectives and more senior officers were promoted from within the rank, meaning that those leading the investigation often had no secondary education beyond what had been learned ‘on the job’.
Victorian society generally held that those in poverty brought their plight on themselves – it was a result of personal failings. Crime, even violent murder, was simply part of a situation of their own making. That the Ripper’s victims were prostitutes and many of them had proven problems with alcohol only added further to the widespread lack of sympathy and priority for the murders.
This especially applied to the earlier Whitechapel murders in 1888, before the especially gruesome ‘canonical five’ murders ascribed to Jack the Ripper which were so sensational that they could not be ignored. Locals had suffered a spree of attacks by ‘Leather Apron’ in the spring of 1888 which were largely overlooked by the authorities until the Ripper murders. These prevalent attitudes toward the poor, women and prostitutes affected the theories and practice of the investigation.
So did attitudes to race. Prejudice against immigrants in general and certain ethnicities – Irish and Jewish people – in particular, blighted the investigation. The police were simultaneously influenced by the prejudices of those carrying out the investigation and limited by their attempts not to stoke racial violence by publicly investigating or suspecting people from these targeted groups.
The hostility that kept the police out of certain parts of Whitechapel was not uncommon in areas of extreme poverty – the living and working conditions gave locals few reasons to look favourably on the forces of law and order and the society that valued them so little. Even among the non-criminal and respectable residents of Whitechapel, there was a strong sense of community (which could further strengthen along religious, ethnic or racial lines) that varied from suspicion of the police to outright refusal to cooperate.
For instance, the Irish community in Whitechapel had specific grievances against the Metropolitan Police for the actions of its Commissioner, Charles Warren, who deployed 2000 police officers and 400 soldiers against a large demonstration protesting conditions and political repression in Ireland in Trafalgar Square the year before the Whitechapel Murders.
However, it should not be thought that Whitechapel brought Jack the Ripper on itself by being uncooperative. While the police did run up against a certain amount of ‘stonewalling’, this was most often amongst existing criminal groups in the area who potentially had the most useful information but also the greatest chance of incriminating themselves – the gang leaders, the pimps, the drug den owners, the slumlords and the political radicals.
Many of the more law-abiding but impoverished residents of Whitechapel instead felt only frustration that the poverty and crime that blighted their district had gone unaddressed. They expressed this frustration, and the fear they felt having a violent murderer in their midst, to the journalists and reporters who descended on Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888 and a common thread was anger at the lack of effective policing.
Another common complaint was that the police investigation was not asking the right people. Many Whitechapel residents, from prostitutes who knew the victims to local traders and business owners, had their own ideas of who Jack the Ripper was, but were never approached by the police and found it hard to be taken seriously when they ventured information themselves. This was in large part due to the ingrained attitudes in the police which reflected wider attitudes at the time among ‘respectable’ Victorian society, that Whitechapel couldn’t be helped or even deserved its fate.
All these attitudes and prejudices combined to muddy the waters of what was already a difficult investigation, making the job of an under-sized and under-skilled police force even more difficult and making it easier for Jack the Ripper to escape justice.
From the vantage point of the 21st century it can be hard to appreciate exactly how few resources and techniques were available to investigators in 1888. When considering why were the police unable to catch Jack the Ripper, it must be remembered that, by modern standards, they had virtually nothing to work with.
Even fingerprinting was in its infancy as a theory – it had first been suggested as a way of identifying individuals in 1880, would first be used in policing in 1892 and Scotland Yard would not adopt it as an investigative technique until 1901. The discovery of blood typing was over a decade away. DNA wouldn’t be understood for another 50 years and wouldn’t be used forensically for another century.
Forensic pathology of the 1880s could usually identify how and when the victim died, but specifics of how injuries were made and in what order rested mainly on the judgement and experience of the doctor making the investigation. In the case of the Ripper murders, the doctors differed on their opinion of whether the murder and mutilation of the victims demonstrated anatomical and surgical knowledge – this led to the initial investigation looking for suspects with medical training and only later was this theory dropped.
There was no CCTV. The primary detection technique was eye-witness accounts – now understood to be extremely variable and hard to rely on. In 1888 the various witnesses to the multiple murders often gave contradictory information that made it hard for investigators to make progress. Even the most honest accounts were based on passing encounters between strangers on dark streets late at night.
The police did circulate posters and over 80,000 leaflets throughout Whitechapel seeking information, but this tended to result in an overwhelming majority of chancers and vendetta-seekers drowning out any useful intelligence. Door-to-door searches, systematic questioning of people in lodging houses and doss houses and undercover police took too long to organise, even longer to gather information and could not be done at a useful scale given Whitechapel’s population and environment.
Jack the Ripper was the first ‘celebrity’ criminal. By the 1880s there were hundreds of newspapers and magazines available in London, at prices affordable by anyone. The Whitechapel Murders made for the perfect news story – gory violence, lurid accounts of the Whitechapel sex trade, shocking poverty, an ever-changing parade of suspects and numerous theories to promote, all under the banner of current events and public interest. And it was all happening within an easy bus or tram ride of the newspaper offices. Media commentary was now happening almost by the hour and was being circulated throughout the world. This was something no previous police investigation had had to deal with.
This new audience also led to the Met receiving a deluge of theories, advice and ‘leads’. With virtually no forensic techniques available, detective work in 1888 revolved around eyewitness statements and received information. But the thousands of letters sent to the Met and the newspapers swamped any attempts to sift them for useful information.
Notably over 300 letters and postcards were received by the police or the press purporting to be from the murderer. Only two of these (the famous ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘Saucy Jack’ postcard) were eventually deemed to be credible, but even these have had their authenticity disputed. The dozens of other items of correspondence absorbed a huge amount of police time and effort to process. Many of these letters were sent to the police by less scrupulous newspapers to keep Jack the Ripper in the headlines.
At the same time, many parts of the press openly agitated against particular racial, social or political groups. They blamed their targets for the murders, suggesting suspects based only on rumour and prejudice and then piling pressure on the police for not bringing in the ‘obvious’ suspects. When the Met failed to produce the favoured suspect (or, as the weeks went by, any suspect at all) the press began claims of incompetence and corruption within the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office.
While modern officials may be used to having a strategy for dealing with media campaigns, this was something new for the already hard-pressed Met to grapple with and caused further complications for the investigation.
On the matter of criminal profiling, we must not lay the reasons for Jack the Ripper escaping justice entirely on the challenges presented by Whitechapel and the limitations and mistakes of the Metropolitan Police. When it came to the battle between Jack the Ripper and the police, the murderer had a part to play in his own ‘success’.
A basic divide in modern criminal profiling is between ‘organised’ and ‘disorganised’ criminals. Organised criminals plan their crimes, control the time and place of the crimes, display a level of selection of their victims and take steps to avoid being suspected or captured. Disorganised criminals act spontaneously, often in a confused or distressed state of mind, and often leave evidence or make other mistakes that lead to their swift capture.
Whoever the Ripper was, he displayed what would now be seen as clear signs of being an organised killer. He chose his victims with care; regardless of any proposed psychological motivations, street prostitutes would be vulnerable out on the streets in the hours of darkness, could be approached without suspicion and would unknowingly lead their murderer to a secluded spot. And murdered prostitutes in Whitechapel would not be treated with the prominence or priority that a spree of murders of ‘respectable’ women in the West End would. He chose the time and place; late at night when the streets were quiet and darkness masked the murder and his escape, while Whitechapel and its surroundings presented plenty of opportunities for both carrying out the deed and escape.
Beyond being sex workers in Whitechapel, no other connections could be drawn between the victims – they did not know each other and had no other mutual acquaintances or connections that may have started a thread of investigation. The Ripper clearly took steps to prevent suspicion falling on him in the time between his murders, when he managed to blend back into whatever life he led without unusual behaviour or appearance.
These are the hallmarks of an organised killer, and this organisation managed to outwit the efforts of the Metropolitan Police, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, the press and amateur investigators. Even this basic profiling theory wasn’t conceived in 1888 – the Met felt that to carry out repeated acts of the violence, speed and anatomical nature of the Ripper’s, the murderer would have to be insane, disorganised and of a criminal nature. They were looking for someone unusual, but modern analysis suggests that the Ripper blended into ordinary life in Whitechapel. So, they started their investigation and prevention on the wrong basis and never caught up.
If you were around in 1888, do you think Jack the Ripper would have gotten away with it? Why not find out by booking into one of our tours? You’ll follow in the footsteps of the notorious killer, discovering his every move, and try piecing his identity together.
![Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]](https://thejacktherippertour.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect1.jpg "Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]")
