WARNING: This article contains photographs and diagrams of a graphic and disturbing nature.

Footfalls on an empty street. Gas streetlamps with their open flames fill the air with dim, flickering yellow light. Thick, white, smokey fog. The distant clatter of hooves and cartwheels. A bullseye lantern shining weakly through the misty gloom of a poorly-lit public thoroughfare. Suddenly, a pause, followed minutes later, by the loud, desperate ‘chreeep!’ of a police-whistle! The alarm has been sounded! From all quarters, officers run to the scene of a ghastly crime, to witness the work of a madman, and so begins one of the most famous cases in criminal history.

The year is 1888. Queen Victoria is on the throne. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is making a name for himself with a little-known private detective named Sherlock Holmes; in the United States, the Great Blizzard of ’88 paralyizes the eastern seaboard under several feet of ice and snow. And in the district of Whitechapel in the slums of London, a man known as Jack the Ripper starts one of the most famous series of crimes ever known to mankind…

Who Was ‘Jack the Ripper’?

To begin at the beginning, the Ripper’s identity was never firmly established. For over 120 years, the name, likeness, the mindset and the motivations of the Ripper, have remained a complete mystery to everyone but him. But suffice to say that Jack the Ripper has remained one of the most, if not the most famous serial-killer in recorded history. But who was he, and what did he do that makes him so famous? Why is it that there are documentaries and films and books and tours of London all centered around a guy who we know Jack-all about? Surely, to have lasted over a century at the top-spot on the Top 10 Most Famous Murderers List, he must’ve done something real fancy, like sliced open a screaming baby and cooked spaghetti and meatballs with its innards, right? And then stuffed the carcass and turned it into a pie! Yeah that’s it…Right?

No.

Officially, Jack the Ripper killed only five victims, and none of them were babies. But then again, why? There have been murderers in history who butchered, tortured and killed dozens, even hundreds of victims, and yet their names are lost to history. And yet a Victorian-era nobody who no living person has seen since 1888, remains king of killers. Why?

It is because the Ripper represented the ultimate ‘whodunnit?’ mystery. No witnesses, no clues, no convictions…nothing. It is because, despite the frantic efforts of everyone from Queen Victoria (literally) down to ordinary London citizens, he managed to escape capture and was never brought to justice for crimes that would make Ed Gein look like a chef chopping up veggies for stew. It is because, for four months in 1888, Jack the Ripper terrorised the citizens of London with a series of crimes so gruesome and grisly, that he remains famous today as one of the greatest killers in history.

Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, London

The Ripper’s hunting-ground was a seedy, dangerous, impoverished, working-class neighbourhood in London’s East End, called Whitechapel, in the borough known as Tower Hamlets (due to its close proximity to the Tower of London). These days, Whitechapel is still a working-class neighbourhood with many warehouses and industry-buildings there, but it is a shadow of its former self, for the Whitechapel of 1888 was something akin to Hell on Earth.

The East End of London was always the industrial end of town. It was here that there were docks, slaughterhouses, brothels, opium dens, drinking dens, public houses, doss-houses (cheap boarding-houses), tanneries, paint-manufacturies, warehouses and other establishments and industires bound to make the air stink and the people poor. The Industrial Revolution had brought thousands of people to London and many of the poorest thousands ended up crammed into the East End. People in Whitechapel were especially poor, living in overcrowded, filthy tenements, often cramming as many as nine people into each room. And this was just for those who could find a cheap room. For those with no money at all, they literally ended up on the streets, often entire families were shoved out the door with the clothes on their backs. If they were lucky, they ended up in workhouses. Life was cheap, wages low, and unemployment rampant. Murder was not an everyday occurence in Whitechapel, but it wasn’t something that happened once in a blue moon, either. The residents of the neighbourhood were used to finding corpses of people who had been killed by one way or another. But the Ripper blew that nonchalance and indifference away like a fan against a candle.

When the Ripper murders started, the already longsuffering people of Whitechapel, troubled by unemployment, crime, poverty, starvation and widespread alcoholism, had yet one more life-shattering thing to worry about, thrown into the storm of their unhappy existences: The crimes of a homocidal maniac.

Whitechapel was a poor suburb. Streets varied from wide thoroughfares to narrow alleyways, large, open crossroads and obscure courtyards and squares. At night, the streets were poorly lit by dim, gas-fired lamps. The darkness gave the Ripper the perfect setting to carry out his grisly crimes, away from the prying eyes of the public. It’s probably little wonder that people started feeling as scared as they did.

The Victims and the Crimes

All streets and addresses mentioned in this part of the article are correct to 1888. The current names of any streets renamed since 1888 will be provided in brackets.

The unknown serial-killer known as Jack the Ripper officially killed only five victims, although some people have theorised that he may have killed up to a dozen people. His victims were East End prostitutes in their forties; women who were destitute, impoverished, almost certainly homeless and who had to sell themselves to make a scraping of a living. His five, official victims were, in order of death:

Mary-Ann Nichols (‘Polly’ Nichols).
Annie Chapman.
Elizabeth Stride (‘Long Liz’).
Catherine Eddowes.
Mary-Jane Kelly.

Friday, 31st August, 1888

Two men, Charles Cross and Robert Paul, are on their way to work. Cross finds the body of Polly Nichols outside the locked gates to a slaughterhouse in Buck’s Row (Durward St), Whitechapel. The time is 3:40am. Cross calls to Paul and together, they casually examine the body. Nichols’ skirts had been pulled up, and the two men pull them down again to give her some decency. Mr. Paul examines the body a bit closer and checks for a pulse. He thinks he feels a weak heartbeat. The two men leave the body, determined to notify the first policeman that they find.

Shortly after the men leave, PC John Neil, out on his beat, comes through Bucks Row. He spots the body by the light of his lantern and raises the alarm with his police-whistle. He is soon joined by PC John Thain, and shortly after, by PC Jonas Mizen, who had already been alerted to the presence of the body after meeting Cross and Paul on their way to work. A doctor is summoned to examine the body and remove it from the scene of the crime.

While Neil and Mizen stay with the body, Thain leaves to find the nearest physician, Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn who lives nearby. Llewellyn examines the body and declares death to have happened only a few minutes ago.

In the nearest mortuary, an inventory of Nichols’s posessions is taken by Insp. John Spratling, and a postmortem examination is performed on Nichols by Dr. Llewellyn. He determines that…:

“Five teeth were missing, and there was a slight laceration of the tongue. There was a bruise running along the lower part of the jaw on the right side of the face. That might have been caused by a blow from a fist or pressure from a thumb. There was a circular bruise on the left side of the face which also might have been inflicted by the pressure of the fingers. On the left side of the neck, about 1 in. below the jaw, there was an incision about 4 in. in length, and ran from a point immediately below the ear. On the same side, but an inch below, and commencing about 1 in. in front of it, was a circular incision, which terminated at a point about 3 in. below the right jaw. That incision completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed. The incision was about 8 in. in length. the cuts must have been caused by a long-bladed knife, moderately sharp, and used with great violence. No blood was found on the breast, either of the body or the clothes. There were no injuries about the body until just about the lower part of the abdomen. Two or three inches from the left side was a wound running in a jagged manner. The wound was a very deep one, and the tissues were cut through. There were several incisions running across the abdomen. There were three or four similar cuts running downwards, on the right side, all of which had been caused by a knife which had been used violently and downwards. the injuries were form left to right and might have been done by a left handed person. All the injuries had been caused by the same instrument.”

The Times newspaper

While at the mortuary, this photograph was taken of Nichols’s head

Mary-Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was buried on Thursday, 6th of September, 1888.

Polly Nichols’s death certificate

Saturday, 8th September, 1888

Just two days after the Ripper’s first victim was laid to rest at the age of 43, his next victim was found brutally murdered. Her name was Annie Chapman, called ‘Dark Annie’ by some of her friends. Her body was found in the back yard of a common lodging-house at 29 Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, by a carman called John Davis, who lived on the third floor of No. 29, with his family.

At 5:30am, on the morning of the 8th of September, Albert Cadosh, a carpenter who lived next door at No. 27, came outside into the neighbouring back yard, which was barely any larger than the one next door, to relieve himself and answer a call of nature. While so-doing, he heard noises next door at No. 29. He heard one word: “No!”, and then the sound of something hitting the fence between the two houses, said fence being only five feet tall. Cadosh thought nothing of it, hitched up his pants and sauntered back inside. This was the only time when someone might possibly have spotted the Ripper. All Cadosh had to do was walk over to the fence and look over the top, and he would’ve seen Jack the Ripper. Shortly before six in the morning, Davis came into the back yard of his tenement to find the body of Annie Chapman. Her injuries were described as follows, by Dr. George B. Phillips:

“The left arm was placed across the left breast. The legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side. The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips. The tongue was evidently much swollen. The front teeth were perfect as far as the first molar, top and bottom and very fine teeth they were. The body was terribly mutilated…the stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but was evidently commencing. He noticed that the throat was dissevered deeply.; that the incision through the skin were jagged and reached right round the neck…On the wooden paling between the yard in question and the next, smears of blood, corresponding to where the head of the deceased lay, were to be seen. These were about 14 inches from the ground, and immediately above the part where the blood from the neck lay”

After Davis discovered the body, he left some men to guard it, before running to the nearest police-station in Commercial Street to alert the authorities. At approximately 6:30am, Dr. George Bagster Phillips arrived, to examine the body.

Phillips believed that the Ripper may have some knowledge of human anatomy. The knife used was long and thin, possibly a surgical knife. Phillips estimated that the time taken to kill and butcher the victim could have taken anywhere from fifteen minutes to nearly an hour, working in the dark, pitch-black, with no light, and without making a sound.

Chapman’s body was taken to the mortuary and a postmorten examination was carried out. A photograph of her face was also taken at this point:

Chapman’s body was laid to rest on Friday, the 14th of September, 1888.

Sunday, 30th September, 1888

It’s 1:00am in the morning. Jewellery-salesman Louis Diemschutz is driving along Berner Street, heading towards The International Workers’ Educational Club, of which he is a member. At the end of Berner Street, he turns into a space called Dutfield’s Yard. At the entrance, his horse is spooked and refuses to move forward. Diemschutz dismounts from his cart and heads into the pitch black square by himself, holding his whip out in front of him to feel the way. He finds the body of Elizabeth Stride, the Ripper’s third victim. At first, he thinks that Stride is drunk or asleep. He strikes a match to examine the body…and then runs into his clubhouse for help.

Men return with lanterns for better illumination and Diemschutz takes them to the body. Stride’s body is still warm, indicating that the woman was killed only a few minutes ago. It’s widely believed that the Ripper was still in the yard when Diemschutz entered it with his horse and cart, startling the Ripper and causing him to hide, leaving him unable to mutilate the body. When the corpse is discovered, he flees westwards…

Dr. Fredrick Blackwell of 100, Commercial Road, is summoned to examine the body and pronounces death at the scene. The constable on the beat is summoned and police backup soon arrives. The body is taken to the mortuary and examined. The injuries, as recorded by Dr. G.B. Phillips, who conducted the last few postmortem examinations reads as follows:

“The body was lying on the near side, with the face turned toward the wall, the head up the yard and the feet toward the street. The left arm was extended and there was a packet of cachous in the left hand. The right arm was over the belly, the back of the hand and wrist had on it clotted blood. The legs were drawn up with the feet close to the wall. The body and face were warm and the hand cold. The legs were quite warm. Deceased had a silk handkerchief round her neck, and it appeared to be slightly torn. I have since ascertained it was cut. This corresponded with the right angle of the jaw. The throat was deeply gashed and there was an abrasion of the skin about one and a half inches in diameter, apparently stained with blood, under her right arm.

At three o’clock p.m. on Monday at St. George’s Mortuary, Dr. Blackwell and I made a post mortem examination. Rigor mortis was still thoroughly marked. There was mud on the left side of the face and it was matted in the head. The Body was fairly nourished. Over both shoulders, especially the right, and under the collarbone and in front of the chest there was a bluish discoloration, which I have watched and have seen on two occasions since.

There was a clear-cut incision on the neck. It was six inches in length and commenced two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw, one half inch in over an undivided muscle, and then becoming deeper, dividing the sheath. The cut was very clean and deviated a little downwards. The arteries and other vessels contained in the sheath were all cut through. The cut through the tissues on the right side was more superficial, and tailed off to about two inches below the right angle of the jaw. The deep vessels on that side were uninjured. From this is was evident that the hemorrhage was caused through the partial severance of the left carotid artery.

Decomposition had commenced in the skin. Dark brown spots were on the anterior surface of the left chin. There was a deformity in the bones of the right leg, which was not straight, but bowed forwards. There was no recent external injury save to the neck. The body being washed more thoroughly I could see some healing sores. The lobe of the left ear was torn as if from the removal or wearing through of an earring, but it was thoroughly healed. On removing the scalp there was no sign of extravasation of blood.

The heart was small, the left ventricle firmly contracted, and the right slightly so. There was no clot in the pulmonary artery, but the right ventricle was full of dark clot. The left was firmly contracted as to be absolutely empty. The stomach was large and the mucous membrane only congested. It contained partly digested food, apparently consisting of cheese, potato, and farinaceous powder. All the teeth on the lower left jaw were absent.”

The death certificate of Elizabeth Stride

The night of the 30th of September, 1888, was going to be a memorable one. Not only was the Ripper nearly caught in the act, but because this was the only time that he killed two people in one night.

The Ripper’s fourth victim, and second on the night of the ‘Double Event’, was Catherine Eddowes.

While everyone’s attention was drawn to the death of Elizabeth Stride, the Ripper headed west, until he reached a small square called Mitre Square, in the City of London. Here, he kills Catherine Eddowes, whose body is discovered at 1:45am by PC Edward Watkins.

The interesting thing about Eddowes’s death is that she might very well not have been killed at all that night, if not for the actions of the police, who released her from a holding-cell at the Bishopsgate Police Station.

At 8:30 on the night of the 29th, Eddowes was arrested by the police for drunk and disorderly conduct. She was taken to the nearest police station at Bishopsgate and was locked up there from 8:50pm until 1:00am the next day. After sleeping off her drunkeness, Eddowes is released from the station and sent off on her way.

Sometime before 1:45, she meets the Ripper. He takes her to Mitre Square, where he kills her, rips her apart and leaves the body to be found by the police. Despite the fact that it was an enclosed square, nobody heard a thing. The people living in the houses around the square heard nothing. A poiceman and his family living in a house just a few yards away, heard nothing. Not even PC Watkins, whose beat took him right through the square, heard anything. The Ripper must have worked very fast, because Watkins passed through the square every fifteen minutes. At 1:30am, Watkins entered Mitre Square to find nothing out of the ordinary. When he returned at 1:45, he found a disemboweled corpse in the corner of the yard.

Eddowes’s body had been brutally butchered, almost hacked to pieces. These photos show the sheer extent of the Ripper’s damage:

Eddowes’s body, before she was…ehm…reassembled

Her body, sewn up, upon the completion of the postmortem examination

Dr. Fredrick Gordon Brown was called to the scene of the Eddowes murder. His report is shown below. Its sheer length is a testament to the Ripper’s savagery:

“The body was on its back, the head turned to left shoulder. The arms by the side of the body as if they had fallen there. Both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent. The left leg extended in a line with the body. The abdomen was exposed. Right leg bent at the thigh and knee. The throat cut across.

The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder — they were smeared over with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. The lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through.

There was a quantity of clotted blood on the pavement on the left side of the neck round the shoulder and upper part of arm, and fluid blood-coloured serum which had flowed under the neck to the right shoulder, the pavement sloping in that direction.

Body was quite warm. No death stiffening had taken place. She must have been dead most likely within the half hour. We looked for superficial bruises and saw none. No blood on the skin of the abdomen or secretion of any kind on the thighs. No spurting of blood on the bricks or pavement around. No marks of blood below the middle of the body. Several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed. There was no blood on the front of the clothes. There were no traces of recent connexion.

When the body arrived at Golden Lane, some of the blood was dispersed through the removal of the body to the mortuary. The clothes were taken off carefully from the body. A piece of deceased’s ear dropped from the clothing. I made a post mortem examination at half past two on Sunday afternoon. Rigor mortis was well marked; body not quite cold. Green discoloration over the abdomen.

After washing the left hand carefully, a bruise the size of a sixpence, recent and red, was discovered on the back of the left hand between the thumb and first finger. A few small bruises on right shin of older date. The hands and arms were bronzed. No bruises on the scalp, the back of the body, or the elbows.

The face was very much mutilated. There was a cut about a quarter of an inch through the lower left eyelid, dividing the structures completely through. The upper eyelid on that side, there was a scratch through the skin on the left upper eyelid, near to the angle of the nose. The right eyelid was cut through to about half an inch.
There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose, extending from the left border of the nasal bone down near the angle of the jaw on the right side of the cheek. This cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth.

The tip of the nose was quite detached by an oblique cut from the bottom of the nasal bone to where the wings of the nose join on to the face. A cut from this divided the upper lip and extended through the substance of the gum over the right upper lateral incisor tooth. About half an inch from the top of the nose was another oblique cut. There was a cut on the right angle of the mouth as if the cut of a point of a knife. The cut extended an inch and a half, parallel with the lower lip.

There was on each side of cheek a cut which peeled up the skin, forming a triangular flap about an inch and a half. On the left cheek there were two abrasions of the epithelium under the left ear. The throat was cut across to the extent of about six or seven inches. A superficial cut commenced about an inch and a half below the lobe below, and about two and a half inches behind the left ear, and extended across the throat to about three inches below the lobe of the right ear.

The big muscle across the throat was divided through on the left side. The large vessels on the left side of the neck were severed. The larynx was severed below the vocal chord. All the deep structures were severed to the bone, the knife marking intervertebral cartilages. The sheath of the vessels on the right side was just opened.

The carotid artery had a fine hole opening, the internal jugular vein was opened about an inch and a half — not divided. The blood vessels contained clot. All these injuries were performed by a sharp instrument like a knife, and pointed. The cause of death was haemorrhage from the left common carotid artery. The death was immediate and the mutilations were inflicted after death.

We examined the abdomen. The front walls were laid open from the breast bones to the pubes. The cut commenced opposite the enciform cartilage. The incision went upwards, not penetrating the skin that was over the sternum. It then divided the enciform cartilage. The knife must have cut obliquely at the expense of that cartilage. Behind this, the liver was stabbed as if by the point of a sharp instrument. Below this was another incision into the liver of about two and a half inches, and below this the left lobe of the liver was slit through by a vertical cut. Two cuts were shewn by a jagging of the skin on the left side.

The abdominal walls were divided in the middle line to within a quarter of an inch of the navel. The cut then took a horizontal course for two inches and a half towards the right side. It then divided round the navel on the left side, and made a parallel incision to the former horizontal incision, leaving the navel on a tongue of skin. Attached to the navel was two and a half inches of the lower part of the rectus muscle on the left side of the abdomen. The incision then took an oblique direction to the right and was shelving. The incision went down the right side of the vagina and rectum for half an inch behind the rectum.

There was a stab of about an inch on the left groin. This was done by a pointed instrument. Below this was a cut of three inches going through all tissues making a wound of the peritoneum about the same extent.

An inch below the crease of the thigh was a cut extending from the anterior spine of the ilium obliquely down the inner side of the left thigh and separating the left labium, forming a flap of skin up to the groin. The left rectus muscle was not detached. There was a flap of skin formed by the right thigh, attaching the right labium, and extending up to the spine of the ilium. The muscles on the right side inserted into the frontal ligaments were cut through.

The skin was retracted through the whole of the cut through the abdomen, but the vessels were not clotted. Nor had there been any appreciable bleeding from the vessels. I draw the conclusion that the act was made after death, and there would not have been much blood on the murderer. The cut was made by someone on the right side of the body, kneeling below the middle of the body.

I removed the content of the stomach and placed it in a jar for further examination. There seemed very little in it in the way of food or fluid, but from the cut end partly digested farinaceous food escaped. The intestines had been detached to a large extent from the mesentery. About two feet of the colon was cut away. The sigmoid flexure was invaginated into the rectum very tightly.

Right kidney was pale, bloodless with slight congestion of the base of the pyramids.

There was a cut from the upper part of the slit on the under surface of the liver to the left side, and another cut at right angles to this, which were about an inch and a half deep and two and a half inches long. Liver itself was healthy.

The gall bladder contained bile. The pancreas was cut, but not through, on the left side of the spinal column. Three and a half inches of the lower border of the spleen by half an inch was attached only to the peritoneum. The peritoneal lining was cut through on the left side and the left kidney carefully taken out and removed. The left renal artery was cut through. I would say that someone who knew the position of the kidney must have done it.

The lining membrane over the uterus was cut through. The womb was cut through horizontally, leaving a stump of three quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb had been taken away with some of the ligaments. The vagina and cervix of the womb was uninjured. The bladder was healthy and uninjured, and contained three or four ounces of water. There was a tongue-like cut through the anterior wall of the abdominal aorta. The other organs were healthy. There were no indications of connexion.

I believe the wound in the throat was first inflicted. I believe she must have been lying on the ground. The wounds on the face and abdomen prove that they were inflicted by a sharp, pointed knife, and that in the abdomen by one six inches or longer.

I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them. It required a great deal of medical knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed. The parts removed would be of no use for any professional purpose. I think the perpetrator of this act had sufficient time, or he would not have nicked the lower eyelids. It would take at least five minutes. I cannot assign any reason for the parts being taken away. I feel sure that there was no struggle, and believe it was the act of one person.

The throat had been so instantly severed that no noise could have been emitted. I should not expect much blood to have been found on the person who had inflicted these wounds. The wounds could not have been self-inflicted.”

The Double Event of the 30th of September sent Victorian London into Red Alert. Everyone was scared, even the people who didn’t live in the East End! Queen Victoria herself stated that:

“This new and most ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be”

The police were frantic now. They followed up each and every single lead to the best of their ability. They did doorknocks, speaking to every single person (almost literally) in the East End. In some cases, every single house in a street was doorknocked by police, and officers interviewed every single person they could find, for information about Jack the Ripper.

For the whole of October, nothing happened, although exhaustive public and police-efforts to track down the Ripper continued. Vigilante organisations were set up, rewards were offered and every single suspect was checked, shadowed, interviewed, arrested, released, checked, checked and rechecked. Every single clue and lead, no matter how stupid or irrelevant, was followed as keenly as if the murder-weapon had just been laid on the evidence-table.

By the end of October, people started relaxing. The killer had gone underground. He was in hiding. He was dead. He had fled the country. He had done something that meant he wouldn’t kill again.

Or so they thought.

Friday, 9th November, 1888

It was the great misfortune of Mr. Thomas Bowyer, on the 9th of November, the Lord Mayor’s Day, to go around collecting rent. He headed into a small square known as Miller’s Court where he intended to call on Mary Jane Kelly. Finding the door locked and receiving no answer to his knocks, Mr. Bowyer went around the side of the building to peep into the room through a broken window. Pushing aside the curtains to reach for the door-handle of the door (the room was so small that it was perfectly possible to do this), Bowyer caught the remains of Mary Kelly lying on the bed in the corner of the room. He was so horrified at what he saw, that he ran to find the police as soon as he could.

The last murder of Jack the Ripper is unique in many ways. To begin with, Kelly was a lot younger than the other victims. Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes were all in their forties. Kelly was just twenty-five. Kelly was the only victim to have a permanent address (13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel). She was the only victim killed indoors, and her body was the most mutilated of them all. Kelly’s body was the only one of the Ripper’s victims to be photographed as she was found, where she was found.

When the police arrived, they opened the door and entered the room. What greeted them was a scene of absolute carnage. Mary Kelly had literally been ripped to pieces. Chunks of her body lay all over the place and blood was everywhere. The Ripper had really gone to work on her, slicing and cutting and gouging away so much flesh that her skull was exposed. Her face was so badly mutilated that it wasn’t even recognisable. Her entire body had been sliced open like a French roll and her innards pulled out and her organs were heaped on the bedside table. The official report stated that the heart was ‘absent’. A fire had obviously burned in the room overnight, and it was one of such intensity that the tea-kettle hanging over the hearth was partially melted from the heat.

Mary Jane Kelly’s body, photographed as found by police

Kelly’s death and subsequent butchery sent shockwaves of an unprecedented scale through London. Sir Charles Warren, commissioner for the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), resigned in disgrace on the same day. On the 10th of November, the Home Office issued an official Royal Pardon from Queen Victoria herself, for “anyone but the killer” who might come forth with information leading to the Ripper’s apprehension.

Death cetificate of Mary Jane Kelly (written here as Marie Jeanette Kelly)

The postmortem report by Dr. Thomas Bond, a police surgeon, on the condition of Mary Jane Kelly’s body, reads as follows:

Letters from the Ripper?

One of the most famous elements of the Jack the Ripper case was the number of letters sent to police-officials and newspaper-editors throughout the duration of the crimes. Many were considered to be hoaxes, but a handful were believed to be genuine. Here they are, for you to read:

Text:

25th Sept, 1888

“Dear Boss,

I keep hearing the police have caught me, but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and won’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope. Haha! The next job I do, I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the…

…police officers just for jolly; wouldn’t you? Keep this letter back ’till I do a bit more work. Then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp, I want to get to work right away, if I get a chance.

Good Luck,

Yours Truly,

Jack the Ripper

Don’t mind me giving the trade name.

Wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands, curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now.Ha ha“

This card was sent after the “Double Event” of September 30th. It reads:

“I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. ha not the time to get ears for police. thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

Jack the Ripper”

From hell.
Mr Lusk,
Sor
I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman and prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

signed
Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk

This last communication did indeed contain half a human kidney which was widely believed to have come from Catherine Eddowes, however, medical science at the time was not able to say this definitely.

Catching the Ripper

Trying to catch Jack the Ripper was like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a sieve. The police simply couldn’t do it, no matter how hard they tried. Even today, capturing serial-killers takes months, years, in some cases, even decades of investigation. These days we think it’s easy, it’s just a matter of blood, DNA, fingerprints and skin-flakes. However, we have to remember that in 1888, none of these things were available to the police of the era. The Scotland Yard of the 1880s, although advanced for the period, had only rudimentary scientific investigative techniques. Fingerprinting had existed as a form of identification before then, but it would not be used in criminal investigations until the turn of the century. DNA and blood analysis did not exist and criminal profiling and modern criminal psychology did not exist.

At the time, a frustrated young doctor named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing of a detective named Sherlock Holmes. Holmes solved crimes through delicate, careful observation and meticulous examination of EVERYTHING in a crime-scene, no matter how trivial it was. If the police had followed Holmes’s lead of applying observation, deduction, analysis and inference to their investigations, maybe they would have gotten somewhere, but in 1888, when Holmes’s reputation was still being established, no right-minded policeman was going to follow the investigative techniques of a fictional detective!

Victorian-era CSI and investigating crimes in general, was thorough, but generally inconclusive. It was customary to try and clean up crime-scenes as quickly as possible, not to photograph it, measure it or collect evidence. This is one of the things that made the death of Mary Kelly so unique. She was the only Ripper victim who was photographed EXACTLY as she was found. Officers did not have a rogue’s gallery of known criminals to pour through. If they wanted information, they had to go out and find it. They had to hammer on doors and take down witness statments (which were rarely helpful) and they had to be incredibly alert. In most cases, the only way to apprehend a criminal was to literally catch him in the act. Rewards were sometimes placed in newspapers for information leading to the recovery of stolen goods, or information leading to the arrest of a wanted criminal.

Clues in the Ripper case were few and far between. The only clue that the Ripper ever really left, was a scrap of cloth, ripped from one of his victim’s aprons, which he used to clean his knife. Above the spot where the scrap of apron was found, was a piece of grafitti, which read:

“The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing”

Whether it was ever written by the Ripper, or whether the presence of this grafitti even means anything, is uncertain. It was never photographed and exists now, only in the handwritten copies of the police-officers who saw fit to write it down.

The Ripper’s success in eluding the police, despite the very energetic efforts of two police-forces, thousands of men and investigation of everything down to the tiniest and most absurd detail, makes Jack the Ripper one of the most successful serial killers in history. Ripper suspects number in their dozens, ranging from relative nobodies, to His Royal Highness, Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria. Theories have floated around for over a hundred years, as to who the killer is. It was generally believed by the police at the time, that one Aaron Kosminski was the killer, but he was never brought to trial because as a Jew, fellow Jews refused to testify against him. He was eventually confined to a lunatic asylum, where he eventually died. Did authorities capture Jack the Ripper in Kosminski? Or did the real Rpper escape justice? Nobody will ever know.

The Rock; United States Federal Penitentiary: Alcatraz Island, one of the most famous and legendary maximum-security prisons of the 20th century. A Pacific hideaway for America’s most hardened criminals, and possibly the most famous prison in the entire world. What else could be more fascinating than a big house on an island in the middle of a bay surrounded in fog, that’s filled with the meanest, hardest, most dangerous men in the entire country? A place accessible only by boat, which cross the San Francisco Bay where man-eating sharks swim through the waters, to deter escapees?

The History of Alcatraz Island

Located a bit more than a mile off the coast of San Francisco, California, is a small island. The Spanish who arrived in California in the 18th Century gave this island the name ‘La Isla de los Alcatraces’: The Isle of the Pelicans.

From almost the very day it was discovered, Alcatraz was used for protective purposes. When California joined the United States as its 31st state in 1850, the US Army started taking a very big interest in Alcatraz. Considering that the island was right in the middle of the bay, the most obvious first action was one of shipping safety. The first lighthouse on the US West Coast was erected on Alcatraz in 1854. It lasted just over fifty years until the 1906 earthquake put it out of action. It was torn down and was replaced by another lighthouse on Alcatraz in 1909 (which still stands and operates today).

Initially, the US Army decided to make Alcatraz an island fortress, building barracks on the island and setting up gun-batteries along its perimeter. A total of 108 cannons were placed around the edges of the island, to protect the San Francisco Bay Area against naval attacks during the Civil War. The guns were never fired, and soon, soldiers began to find a new purpose for Alcatraz…a military prison.

Throughout the Civil War, Confederate sympathizers and the crews of privateer vessels were locked up on Alcatraz and from 1861, when the war started, until 1865, when it ended, hundreds of captured Confederate soldiers were housed here. In 1868, Alcatraz was officially turned into a military prison, and it was soon to recieve even more inmates. The Spanish-American War of the 1890s swelled the prison’s inmate-population from twenty-six, at the start of the war, to over 450 by its end.

In 1906, the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire levelled the famous coastal city, destroying several houses, public buildings and…the city’s prisons. Desperate to find somewhere to house these criminals, the city’s government shipped them to Alcatraz where they could be locked up in the military prison there, until further notice.

The Birth of The Rock

The 1906 earthquake levelled San Francisco, and the famous city by the bay was razed to the ground by the fires that started shortly after. With the city’s prisons destroyed, the local government had its criminals sent to Alcatraz to serve out the rest of their sentences, and so the island got its first taste of what it would soon become most famous for: housing hardened criminals.

The 1920s and the 1930s saw a dramatic rise in crime throughout the USA. Prohibition, followed by the Great Depression, had sparked an unprecedented crimewave, and gangsters, bootleggers, confidence-men, pimps, bank-robbers and the owners of illegal gambling dens were popping up like mushrooms. In the 30s, the American government started sitting up and taking notice, and all kinds of law enforcement agencies, from the FBI downwards, started rounding up all these crooks and shoving them in jail.

Unfortunately, these guys were too hot for jails to hold them, and time and time again, they busted out and went on the rampage all over again, or, they managed to bribe prison guards and get special priveliges inside prison, which allowed them to run their criminal empires, even from behind bars…Al Capone did this, and bank-robber John Dillinger managed to bust out of jail twice! It soon became painfully obvious that a new, super-prison, a real, hardcore maximum-security prison, was needed to lock these guys away for good. Enter Alcatraz.

The idea of building a prison on Alcatraz Island first emerged in the early 1930s. The United States Department of Justice acquired the island and its facilities in 1933 and were determined to make it a super-prison. Unfortunately…this was the Depression, and the money, which was desperately needed to upgrade the island’s aging military facilities into a working prison, was nowhere to be found. The Department appealed to Congress for help and funds, but were refused. But then, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, stepped in. Having a super-prison to house all the guys who were giving him ulcers, was something he liked the sound of, very much indeed. With his…persistence, influence, pestering…call it what you will…the Department managed to get the funds to start renovations.

Alcatraz Island. The cellhouse is in the middle of the island. On the right is the Alcatraz lighthouse (built 1909, still operational today). To the right of the lighthouse are the ruins of the warden’s house, destroyed during an Indian occupation of the island after it closed in 1963.

The Main Cellhouse on Alcatraz was renovated, fences were repaired, guard-towers were put in, barracks for guards, prison staff and even their families, were either constructed or fashioned out of existing buildings, and the latest security-devices, such as mechanically-operated (later, electronically-operated) doors and metal-detectors were put in. Watch-towers had powerful searchlights and the guards up the top were all armed. Around the inside perimeter of the Main Cellhouse, an enclosed, metal walkway known as the Gun Gallery was constructed. From here, armed guards could stare down into the cellblocks below, and keep an eye on the prisoners.

One of the two-tier gun-galleries that run all around the inside of the main cellhouse.

Open for Business

In 1934, Alcatraz was opened for business, and the warden sent out an ‘open invitation’, so to speak, to all his other warden-buddies, inviting them to send to Alcatraz, all their hardest and most dangerous criminals. He would take care of them. The other wardens jumped at the idea, and soon prisoners were being shipped to Alcatraz in boatloads.

Getting to Alcatraz was quite an ordeal. When you arrived in San Francisco, you were put on the prison ferry. What followed was a choppy, mile and a half boat-ride across the San Francisco Bay towards the island. Once on the island, you were dumped into a prison truck and driven up towards the Main Cellhouse. When you arrived there, you were given a body-search, you were ordered to have a shower, you were given your blue, prison jumpsuit and then you were led to your cell.

There were four cellblocks on ‘The Rock’, as it came to be known. They were called A, B, C and D blocks. They were set out, side by side, lengthwise. A, B and C blocks were for the general prison population; D block was the Solitary Confinement block. The majority of the prisoners were housed in B and C blocks (one prisoner to each cell) and a few in A block. Only prisoners who misbehaved were locked in D-block.

A typical cell on Alcatraz. Not much space, huh?

One of the renovations made to Alcatraz in the 1930s was the introduction of ‘toolproof’ bars. These bars were specially designed to be untamperable. Originally, the bars on the cell-doors were just flat, steel bars, welded together. Unfortunately, these, with enough persistence, could be filed through, bent open and rendered completely useless as a form of imprisonment.

D Block, solitary confinement on Alcatraz.

The newer, ‘toolproof’ bars were specially designed to make filing through the bars almost impossible. They worked like this:

Instead of the ordinary, flat, steel bars, the doors had tubular steel bars in them, instead. The tubular steel bars were stronger and harder to saw through, but with enough persistence, again, you could cut through the bars. To remedy this defect, the new bars were filled with lots of iron rods. This gave the bars extra strength, and there was more metal to file through! But apart from that, the rattling of the iron rods inside the bars, when someone tried to file through them, was very loud. Once someone started filing…everyone and their brother knew what was going on…especially the guards. Only B and C blocks were upgraded with toolproof bars, however. This being the Depression, there wasn’t enough funds to also upgrade A-block, which is why it was not very much used.

“Broadway”, the main corridor of the Main Cellhouse, between B and C blocks.

The prisoners had their own names for certain parts of the prison. The main corridor between B and C blocks was called ‘Broadway’; the area at the end of ‘Broadway’, in front of the prison’s dining-hall, was called ‘Times Square’. The cellhouse dining-room was called the ‘Gas Chamber’. This was an apt name; as the dining-hall was one of the places where prisoners could harm other prisoners, or prison-guards (because they now had knives and forks!). The prison officials built canisters of tear-gas into the ceiling of the dining-hall. In the event of a riot, the gas could be released, to aid prison-guards in their attempts to restore order.

The dining-hall on Alcatraz. Note the small, round gas-canisters attached to the rafters.

A closeup of one of the tear-gas canisters inside Alcatraz’s dining-hall.

The Daily Grind

Once you were on The Rock, one thing that immediately got to you, was the Daily Grind. This was the boring, slow, monotonous daily routine which happened seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with almost no exceptions.

7:00am. You woke up, roused by the cellhouse bell. Your cell was tiny and cold. How tiny? Five feet wide, nine feet long, about six and a half feet high. You could barely get up and stretch your arms!

7:20am. The cell-doors were opened (by a special set of levers). Prisoners stepped outside their cells and waited. They were not allowed to talk and they were not allowed to look anywhere except directly across the corridor.

7:30am. Breakfast. Prisoners were allowed to talk (quietly!). They were allowed to eat as much as they liked, but were not allowed to waste food. All silverware was meticulously counted by the guards. A stray fork or knife could be fashioned into a deadly weapon.

7:50am. Breakfast finishes. Prisoners on work-details line up. Prisoners not on work-details are led back to their cells. Work-details included working in the laundry, the woodwork shop, the metalworking shop, cleaning the cellhouse or working in the prison library.

8:00am. Prisoners are led to the buildings where they will work. They have to pass through the metal-detector (called the ‘snitch-box’ by the inmates) on their way out of the cellhouse.

8:20am. Prisoners started work.

10:00am. Prisoners are allowed a short break.

10:08am. Work recommences, until 11:35am.

11:35am. Work finishes. Prisoners stand to be counted.

12:00 Noon. Lunch, for 20 minutes.

From 12:20-1:00pm, prisoners are locked in their cells and counted again. After this, they’re led back to work.

At 4:40pm, the prisoners have dinner. Dinner ends at 5:00pm. Prisoners are sent back to their cells and locked in for the night.

5:30pm. Another head-count.

11:30pm. A final headcount. Lights out.

Famous Prisoners and Escapes

Alcatraz boasted some very famous prisoners in its 29 years of operation. Al Capone, Robert Stroud, Alvin Karpis and Machine-Gun Kelly, to name but a few. Al Capone had a job cleaning the cellhouse and was known as the Wop with the Mop.

Alcatraz was often toted as being ‘escape-proof’. It was said that the one and a half miles from the island to San Francisco was too cold to swim, that the currents were too strong and that the bay had man-eating sharks in it! Well…the bay did have sharks…but they were harmless, sand sharks, but the guards encouraged the ‘man-eater’ rumors to scare the prisoners, anyway.

Despite all this, despite all the security measures, there were escapes from Alcatraz. A total of thirty-six prisoners tried to escape from The Rock, in fourteen separate attempts. Only a handful of these were ever successful…although how successful is still debated.

The two most famous escapes were the ‘Battle of Alcatraz’, from the 2nd-4th of May, 1946, in which two guards and three prisoners were killed by gunfire and grenades, and the 1962 escape involving the Anglin brothers.

In the ‘Battle of Alcatraz’ of May, 1946, it took several prison guards, plus two platoons of US Marines to regain control of the cellhouse. The botched escape-attempt, in which the prisoners hoped to escape to the exercise yard, scale the wall and make it to the sea, was foiled when the key put into the lock of the door to the yard, proved to be the wrong one. The lock jammed and the men found their escape-route cut off. A furious gun-battle ensued between prison guards and the prisoners who had managed to obtain firearms from dead prison officers. The prisoners who had started the ‘battle’ were eventually killed by grenades, thrown into the space where they were holed up, by prison guards and the marines who were sent to storm the cellhouse.

The other famous escape-attempt happened in 1962, when three men, the Anglin Brothers, John and Clarence, and their friend, Frank Morris, busted out of the cellhouse by chipping away at ventilation-grills under their cell sinks and finding their way through the utility-corridors to the roof of the cellhouse. Once on the roof, they climbed down the outside of the building and made it down to the sea without being spotted. Here, they fashioned a raft out of raincoats and managed to paddle away from the island and were never seen again. This daring escape was depicted in the film “Escape from Alcatraz”, starring Clint Eastwood. The popular science show “Mythbusters” carried out a similar escape from Alcatraz to see just how plausible such an event was. They concluded that a successful escape from the island-prison like this, was plausible, and that the men might really have managed to escape from the most famous prison in the world!

The end of The Rock

Rising maintanence costs, combined with the bad publicity of all the escape-attempts, meant that Alcatraz was beginning to become a big burden on the US government. One of the biggest problems with Alcatraz was that it cost so damn much money to run! Nothing grew on Alcatraz. It didn’t even have any soil! Everything that the prison officials wanted for Alcatraz, from building materials to topsoil for plants, to food, all had to be shipped to the island. This made it a very expensive prison to run. To add to this: cost-cutting measures taken during the Depression, when money was tight, meant that the prison was in desperate need of repair by the early 1960s. Corrosion caused by the salt-water used to flush the prison toilets (just one of the several cost-cutting measures), meant that the plumping and the structural integrity of some of the buildings, was greatly compromised.

The escape attempts from Alcatraz had proven to the US public that people could escape from their legendary ‘inescapable prison’ and that even jammed on a rock in the middle of a bay, wasn’t enough to stop hardened criminals. People lost their confidence in Alcatraz, and in 1963, after 29 years of operation, the prison closed for good.

The Legend of Alcatraz

Even though it was only used for barely more than two dozen years, Alcatraz remains the most famous prison in the world. It recieves over one million tourists a year, who, like so many thousands of prisoners before them, took the ferry across the bay towards the island, only this time, they go there to explore, and not to be locked up. The prison has been the location of at least three films and when J.K. Rowling wrote her “Harry Potter” series, her maximum-security wizarding prison was very similar to Alcatraz. It was in the midde of the North Sea, it was considered inescapable and it even had a similar name: Azkaban. And just like Alcatraz, it was considered the scariest prison in the world.

Azkaban Prison as it appears in the Harry Potter films.