Mystery 9 of 15
9. Who Was Jack the Ripper?
Few unidentified criminals have become as famous as Jack the Ripper.
In 1888, a series of brutal murders terrified London’s Whitechapel district. Five women, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, are commonly grouped together as the killer’s “canonical five” victims.
The murders generated enormous newspaper attention and a flood of letters from people claiming to be the killer. One of those communications helped popularize the name “Jack the Ripper,” although the letter itself may have been a hoax.
Police investigated numerous suspects, and later writers have added many more. Doctors, butchers, criminals, aristocrats, immigrants, artists, and members of the royal family’s social circle have all been accused at one time or another.
Modern attempts to solve the case have used everything from geographic profiling to DNA testing.
Why It Is Still a Mystery
No suspect has ever been established conclusively as the killer.
Some modern claims sound impressive until questions about provenance, contamination, DNA interpretation, or the underlying historical evidence are examined. The evidence preserved from 1888 simply was not collected with 21st-century forensic testing in mind.
More than a century later, Jack the Ripper remains an unidentified killer rather than a solved historical case.
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