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WHO WAS JACK THE RIPPER?
CATCH ME WHEN YOU CAN.
Please note the following is the copyright of Richard Jones and may not be copied or reproduced without his express permission in writing.
Jack the Ripper is the world’s most famous serial killer. Yet his reign of terror lasted a mere 10 weeks and was confined to a small area of the Victorian Metropolis. It is difficult today to say how many victims he actually had, though it is generally agreed that there were five. These five were Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly. The first victim, Mary Nichols, was murdered on August 31st 1888. The final victim, Mary Kelly, was murdered on 9th November 1888.
The killings took place in one of the most crime ridden parts of Victorian London, and all the victims were common street prostitutes. The question that has eluded dedicated researchers for over a hundred years now is who was Jack the Ripper? Obviously today it is virtually impossible to answer this question with 100% certainty. We can look at what the detectives of the time, those who investigated the killings, had to say. But in order to even attempt to answer the question we must first ask and answer another question. What happened to Jack the Ripper to stop him killing?
If we accept that Mary Kelly was the last victim of Jack the Ripper, then we must also accept that something happened to the killer shortly after the bloodbath in Miller’s Court (the place where Mary Kelly lived and where she was murdered in the early hours of 9th November 1888). Murderers such as this don’t stop killing. They may lie low for a while, perhaps even for many years. But the desire to kill remains and can be re-awakened at anytime, unless something happens to the murderer to stop him.
In the case of Jack the Ripper that something was doubtless one of four things. He may have died, possibly by his own hand, shortly after he killed Mary Kelly. He may have been living with his family and they either realised he was insane and incarcerated him in a lunatic asylum, or possibly even handed him over to the police. A third, though unlikely, explanation is that he moved somewhere else continued killing and the connection was never made. This is an unlikely explanation since the murders were reported all over the world, and had a similar killing spree occurred somewhere else there is little doubt that the connection would have been made. The fourth and most likely scenario, however, is that at some stage in the days or months that followed the murder of Mary Kelly the police finally got the break they’d been hoping for since the killings began, and Jack the Ripper was finally caught. So having considered the options as to what happened to the murderer we can now turn our attentions to the question everybody wants to know. Who was he?
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