From Hell, Indeed

Jack the Ripper: The First Serial Killer
of Street People

by Randall Reed Busang

PC Neil discovers Mary Ann Nichols' body in Buck's Row, Jack the Ripper's victim.
Source: Famous Crimes Past and Present by S. P. Ryder.
This graphic and many more can be found at "Casebook: Jack the Ripper Photograph and Illustration Archive" (www.casebook.org) compiled by John Bennett and Robert Clack.

The fall season from September to November brings a reminder of London's "Autumn of Terror." In the fall of 1888, from August 31 to November 9, Jack the Ripper, the first serial killer of street people on record, terrorized London as he plied his gruesome trade on a series of alcoholic street prostitutes in Whitechapel, London's worst slum.

Far from being the bawdy charmers depicted in films based on the Ripper legend, the real victims were first cousins to today's so-called bag ladies: middle-aged women dressed in ugly castoffs with graying hair, decayed and missing teeth, and dwelling in poverty.

Once respectably employed as maids and cleaning ladies, these victims of the Ripper had drifted into alcoholic destitution. Nearly all had children. Most commonly, the victim had left a husband and children to live with a series of male alcoholics. Such women were known as "threepenny whores," three pence (roughly equivalent to an American quarter) being the price of a glass of cheap gin.

The reality behind legends surrounding the Jack the Ripper killings is a close parallel to accounts of contemporary murders of homeless people, down to confusion over the victims' real names and histories, and even the real number of victims.

Scotland Yard police at the time attributed only five murders to the Ripper: those of Mary Ann Nichols, Anne Chapman, Catharine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride and Mary Kelly. Only these five victims exhibited the ritualistic postmortem mutilations of the Ripper. (The victim was murdered by strangulation. Then the killer cut her throat and disemboweled her, taking her kidney or uterus as a souvenir.)

Latter-day criminologists, however, believe the Ripper may have been responsible for as many as 12 murders between mid-August of 1888 and early 1891.

The very fact that the Ripper killings continue to attract interest and remain the subject of serious study makes them unique. Never before or since has murder of the homeless received such attention from the press or police. Today's wave of murders and violent assaults of homeless people in America has been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream press.

The official website devoted to a study of Jack the Ripper's crimes (www.casebook.org) contains a wealth of material for, and by, criminologists, sociologists and amateurs alike.

Many latter-day serial murderers have victimized street people, most especially street prostitutes. Atlanta call girl Dolores French, a lobbyist for reform of prostitution laws, said many, if not most, serial killers have confessed to "practicing" on street prostitutes before embarking on a major killing spree.

The "Green River Killer" of Seattle and Long Island's Joel Rifkin are the most notorious prostitute killers, racking up staggering victim counts. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of murdering at least 48 women in the Seattle and Tacoma areas in the early 1980s; most of Ridgway's victims were prostitutes. Joel Rifkin was the serial killer of 18 women, most of them street prostitutes, from 1989 to 1993.

There have been many others, some destined to remain undetected. Many of these serial-killer cases have passed unnoticed by the general public and have long since been forgotten, yet "Jack the Ripper" and "Whitechapel" have an abiding resonance in the public memory.

Jack the Ripper's continued notoriety can be attributed in large part to the vast amount of coverage London's newspapers devoted to the Whitechapel murders. Then there is the tantalizing puzzle that remains: The killer was never identified.

British literacy at the time was surprisingly high; about 80 percent of the public was able to read -- and did. Radio, movies and television had yet to be invented. People sought entertainment from the ferociously competitive London daily newspapers.

Initially, several reform-minded socialist newspapers publicized the first Ripper murders, hoping to draw public attention to the deplorable conditions in the East End -- and these papers experienced a dramatic bonanza in sales.

Then came the well-known "Ripper Letters." Most police believed the letters to be the work of an enterprising, unscrupulous journalist. The chilling sobriquet, "Jack the Ripper," a masterstroke in invoking terror, was almost surely an invention of a wordsmith.

This ploy, if that is what it was, succeeded beyond its author's wildest expectations: Panic swept London.

As the autumn continued and panic intensified, Scotland Yard was deluged with letters - at the rate of a hundred a week. Newspapers as far distant as the New York Times featured coverage of the Ripper murders.

Modern criminologists believe the real killer behind Jack the Ripper legends must have fit the classic serial killer profile developed by FBI agent Robert Resseler, and was a young, working-class, white male living in or near Whitechapel. According to Resseler, a serial murderer always commits his first murder in or near his own neighborhood.

Resseler's psychological profiling has been largely replaced by geographic profiling, developed in 1985 by Liverpool criminologist Professor David Canter. Since most crime is a matter of opportunity, "location, location, location" is even more important for criminals than for real estate agents. Geographic profiling involves mapping the location of each incident in a crime series and locating its geographic center. The perpetrator's home or headquarters will be found there.

Scotland Yard's Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten listed three men as long-term suspects in the original Ripper murder investigation: M.J. Druitt, Aaron Kosminski and Michael Ostrog.
Kosminski, a young Polish immigrant Jew, lived only one-eighth of a mile from the geographic center of the murders.

Kosminski, age 24 in 1888, lived with his family just south of Whitechapel in a community of East European immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe. The Jewish quarter was quiet, low-crime and respectable; but residents had only to walk a few blocks to step into the heart of Whitechapel -- memorably described as a "reeking sewer," notorious for having the highest incidence of prostitutes anywhere in London.

Kosminski, probably exposed to violence and rape during the pogroms, had a local reputation as a "crazy." Kosminski was taken to an asylum by police in early 1891 (after which time the murders of London prostitutes ceased), and spent the remainder of his life institutionalized.

It is entirely possible that London police officials had identified the young immigrant as the killer and had detectives whisk him off the streets and into an asylum as quietly as possible to avoid an explosion of anti-Semitic violence in the volatile East End. Yet most analysts of the past and present doubt Kosminski's guilt.

***
The police cover-up, if it existed, inadvertently fueled decades of speculation as to Jack the Ripper's identity, including many portraits in film and fiction.

The coroner who examined Mary Ann Nichols initially said the killer was a doctor or medical student, an opinion repeatedly refuted later in the police investigation. But an image took shape in the public mind, and endures today: that of an elegant, top-hatted "toff" prowling the slums, medical bag in hand, the better to cut the throats of hapless street women.

The most recent films based on the Ripper legends, such as "From Hell" starring Johnny Depp, make use of British author Stephen Knight's book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Knight's wildly implausible claims about the Ripper murders were immediately popular as he linked the old doctor-murderer story to claims of a vast Masonic and police cover-up shielding the rich and famous -- that is, the British royals.

Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor, heir presumptive to the throne, had, it seems, secretly married and fathered a daughter with a Whitechapel woman. In order to silence her five closest friends (the original Ripper victims), the Queen's physician, Sir William Gull, supposedly was recruited to murder them.

The facts that no record of a marriage exists and that Dr. Gull was a senior citizen in a wheelchair at the time of the Ripper murders, never fazed Stephen Knight and his many fans. The consumptive prince, who died before he could ascend to the throne, did pay regular visits to Whitechapel, though - to visit a homosexual brothel there.

***
Homeless people remain the most vulnerable sector of the population; and serial murderers are, on the whole, scavengers. On the lookout for an easy victim, most will take anyone they can pick off from the destitute fringe.

Disappearances among the homeless population often go largely unnoticed for weeks, months, years -- often forever. Nobody cares. Family may be entirely absent or out of touch. This is most especially true of transient prostitutes, who are perceived as supporting an undesirable habit -- addiction to drugs or alcohol -- by an immoral lifestyle.

In the typical serial murder case, victims and killer alike are losers or outcasts who spend their lives as objects of indifference and contempt.

Society's unacknowledged serial killers, superrich slumlords and drug distributors, continue their luxurious lifestyles at the expense of countless victims, secure behind layers of high-priced lawyers. Superrich rock, sports and film stars glamorize drugs and sexual violence to the high-priced adulation of the young.

I remember going to North Berkeley at the height of last winter's rainy season and passing half a dozen pricey, glass-fronted restaurants filled with affluent diners, munching away, oblivious to the homeless begging outside in the freezing rain. Nope, nobody cares.

The new, ever-increasing homeless population represents a frightening indictment of a society not merely come full circle back to the cruelty of Dickens' era, but gone full throttle beyond it.
In our materialistic society, the greatest crime is to be poor.

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