Who Was Jack the Ripper?: All the Suspects Revealed

By Members of H Division Crime Club

An international organization of Jack the Ripper experts reveal the most likely suspects in this ultimate true crime guide.
 
Jack the Ripper is the ultimate cold case. While the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 have remained unsolved for more than a century, hundreds of theories have been suggested as to the killer's identity. Despite numerous books claiming to unmask the infamous Victorian villain, none have come close . . . . until now.
 
The H:Division Crime Club is the world's largest body of experts on the Jack the Ripper murders. Now leading members of H:Division share their research into each suspect, drawing on original police reports, eye witness accounts and authoritative analysis. With each chapter discussing a separate suspect in detail, H:Division uses 21st century profiling techniques, H:Division reveals the men most likely to have been Jack the Ripper.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526748737

Book preview

Introduction

The H:Division Memorandum

Did anyone see the Whitechapel murderer? This has never really been ascertained. Many homicidal maniacs were suspected at the time, and have been for the last 130 years. But no conclusive proof could be thrown on any one of them. We may mention the cases of eleven men whom we feel are the most likely, or best suited, to have been in the position to have committed the Jack the Ripper murders. Some of them were in and around the area at the time and others were mentioned by police officials involved in the case. We have also included and acknowledged a twelfth suspect who embodies the very real possibility that the killer never came under the attention of the police and thus must, and always will, remain a person(s) unknown.

We have listed the following alphabetically so as not to suggest a particular personal preference.

1. Albert Bachert – a resident of the Whitechapel area and a man who injected himself into the murder inquiry. His mannerisms and characteristics aroused much suspicion and make him a person of interest. Mystery still remains as to what actually happened to him. It has been suggested his background and actions are similar to the profile of some serial killers.

2. Joseph Barnett – the only suspect with a direct link to one of the Ripper victims. This man was the one-time lover of Mary Jane Kelly and knew the area well. His appearance matched some eyewitness descriptions and some of his characteristics match the profile put forward by the FBI in the 1980s as the type of person the Ripper would have been. There is also circumstantial evidence which makes him a strong suspect.

3. William Bury – resident of the East End during the canonical five murders and a proven killer whose later crimes bore a striking similarity to the Whitechapel murders. He was hanged for the murder of his wife in 1889 and remains the last man to be hanged in the city of Dundee, Scotland. There were many circumstances in this individual’s life which suggests he could have been the man known as Jack the Ripper.

4. David Cohen – a Polish Jew, living in Whitechapel, who had homicidal tendencies and was confined to a lunatic asylum shortly after the last of the canonical five murders. There is great confusion surrounding the identity of this individual which may involve a possible mix up with the details surrounding the suspect known as Kosminski.

5. Montague John Druitt – a teacher and barrister from a good family who disappeared within weeks of the Miller’s Court murder and whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31 December, about seven weeks after that murder. There were several suspicious circumstances surrounding this man, including a suggestion that he was sexually insane. According to one senior officer, there was little doubt that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

6. George Hutchinson – came late to the party as his first appearance was after the inquest of Mary Kelly when he went to the police with a statement about meeting her on the morning of her death. It was the very detailed nature of this statement which led later researchers to look at him more closely, and he was first named as the killer in 1998. Since then many have considered him to be a very strong suspect.

7. Kosminski – regarded by many to be Aaron Kosminski, a low-classed Polish Jew and resident of Whitechapel. There is great debate regarding this individual and some senior police sources suggest that he may have been positively identified as the killer. There are also many circumstances connected with this man that make him a strong suspect.

8. Charles Lechmere (also known as Cross) – this person was originally brought to the attention of the police as a witness who claimed to have discovered the body of the woman murdered in Buck’s Row. There is evidence to suggest this man not only lied about his true identity, but may have also lied about whether he discovered the body. His time alone with the victim also raises much suspicion.

9. Jacob Levy – a man who knew the local area well. Jacob had a history of violence, criminal behaviour and mental instability. Being a butcher, he was skilled with a knife and also possessed the anatomical knowledge necessary to commit the mutilations that were seen on the victims. There is evidence to suggest police strongly suspected a man who worked on the same street as Levy.

10. Robert Mann – a mortuary attendant who came to the attention of the police through Inspector Helson and Sergeant Enright. The officers found him difficult whilst handling the bodies of four of the victims. His workplace, located in the heart of the Ripper’s killing ground, provided the suspect with a solitary environment in which to come and go undetected. He had access to surgeons’ scalpels and was experienced in watching post mortems being carried out. There were also close similarities between the suspect and Dr Bond’s psychological profile of the killer.

11. Dr Francis Tumblety – an Irish-American self-styled quack and a compulsive slummer of the East End. He had a public hatred of women and may have matched a couple of eyewitness descriptions of the killer. He was charged with certain ‘vices’ but jumped his bail and fled the country. Some sources suggest he may have been the same vile fellow who was pestering pathological museums for any spare body parts. A faction at Scotland Yard, including the Irish Branch, took him very seriously as the likely Whitechapel fiend.

12. Person(s) unknown – the Whitechapel murderer may never have come to the attention of the police and thus positive proof of the Ripper’s identity will always remain a mystery. However, with modern criminal profiling and the study of similar killers, it may be possible to pinpoint the type of individual he was.

Chapter 1

Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders 1888-1891

By Richard C. Cobb

After 130 years, we may never know for certain the true identity of Jack the Ripper, not, at least, to everyone’s satisfaction. The Victorian police force was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of misinformation, blind alleys and red herrings; perhaps more significantly, the apparent luck of an assassin who has since become the world’s most infamous murderer.

The brutality and randomness of these crimes took the investigating authorities and the civilians they served by surprise, for there was little or no precedent. There was no other case like it for which the police could turn to for advice and guidance in apprehending the culprit. Having no real forensic knowledge, CCTV cameras, criminal databases, two-way radio or fingerprint detection, which were still several decades away, the limitations of the investigative techniques available to the London police at the time made the task of finding the Ripper a lot harder than it would have been, had those murders taken place in the twenty-first century.

So much has been written about the Whitechapel murders that it would be impossible to condense all the information collected into one chapter of a book. So, for now, it’s best to give a brief rundown of the murders and the world in which Jack the Ripper and his unfortunate victims lived. There have been far more in-depth studies conducted by some of the best names in the field and I would encourage anyone wanting to learn more about the police investigation into the Ripper murders to read the excellent work undertaken by authors and researchers such as Paul Begg, Stewart Evans, Martin Fido, Keith Skinner and Philip Sugden.

So where do I start today? Perhaps it’s best to describe the world in which Jack the Ripper lived.

By 1888, London was the largest capital in the world and the centre of the ever-increasing British Empire. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for over fifty years and the public face of Britain reflected Victoria’s lifestyle; proud, dignified and above all, distinguished.

It was the centre of empire, culture, finance, communication and transportation, with an emerging mass media called the new journalism, later to be dubbed the tabloids.

However, right on its doorstep in the East End lay the district of Whitechapel. Seedy by any standards, it was a crime-ridden sordid quarter where 78,000 residents lived in abject poverty. It was an area of doss houses, sweatshops, abattoirs, overcrowded slums, pubs and a few shops and warehouses, leavened with a row or two of respectably kept cottages.

Whitechapel housed London’s worst slums and the poverty of its inhabitants was appalling. Malnutrition and disease were so widespread that its inhabitants had about a fifty per cent chance of living past the age of 5 years old.

Here, three classes existed:

•The poor (builders, labourers, shopkeepers, dock workers and tailors).

•The very poor (women who were usually seamstresses, weavers or launderers, and children).

•The homeless (who lived in a permanent state of deprivation).

Whitechapel was also the immigrant district due, in part, to the large influx of Jewish, Irish and Russian transport ships docking nearby in Limehouse. The potato famine had seen a deluge of Irish immigrants in the mid 1800s, along with the Jewish population who arrived in their thousands whilst fleeing persecution in Russia, Germany and Poland. In just a single decade, the Jewish population had risen to over 50,000.

All these different nationalities had one thing in common: every day was a struggle for survival.

The West End of London was undergoing massive renovation and prosperity, opening up new concert halls, music halls, restaurants and hotels. As the city expanded, cheap housing was being demolished to make way for warehouses and business offices, which forced more people into smaller areas.

Overcrowding and a shortage of housing created the abyss of Whitechapel. For most of the population in the East End, one lived and died in the neighbourhood in which they were born. Hope was in short supply.

A maze of entries, alleyways and courtyards were lit by single gas lamps, giving out only about six feet of light, and in between this was a darkness so thick, that you would struggle to see your own hand in front of your face. Sanitation was practically non-existent and people would throw their raw sewage into the street, making the stench of the district unbearable.

For the poor and destitute, common lodging houses offered a bed for the night. Here you would be cramped into a small dormitory with up to eighty others and for four pence you could get a bed, which was practically a coffin lying on the ground. For tuppence you could lean against a rope, which was tied from one end of the wall to the other. Every night 8,500 men, women and children would seek shelter within these walls.

These doss houses lay just off the main roads of Commercial Street. Areas such as Thrawl Street, Flower and Dean and Dorset Street (a street so bad the police, allegedly, wouldn’t go down unless they were in teams of four) were run by greedy landlords that had one motto: ‘No pay no stay.’ No money meant the night in doorways, lavatories or huddled up in the church park.

For men, work could sometimes be obtained down by the docks, offloading ships or as market porters. For women, work was scarce and any work they could find paid very little to be able to survive, so out of sheer desperation many turned to the oldest profession in the world, prostitution.

According to one account, the women of the East End at the time were so destitute that they would sell themselves for as little as three pence, or a stale loaf of bread. In October 1888, the Metropolitan Police estimated there were over 1,200 prostitutes working the streets in Whitechapel alone. This was almost certainly an underestimate, for sheer want drove many more to occasional prostitution.

This was their only means of income and survival. With the little money they earned, most would seek comfort in alcohol as the only refuge from reality. Drink was cheap and drunkenness rife, at any time of day or night, leading to brutality and violence. Brawls were commonplace and, as one Whitechapel inhabitant put it, cries of ‘Murder!’ were ‘nothing unusual in the