The face of evil - psychotic murderers; includes related article - Cover Story

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Eugene H. Methvin

Victorian Psycho

THE Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London, caused a sensation that has never died out. Between the autumn of 1888, when the grisly murders took place, and World War II, half a dozen books on the case were published. Between the end of the war and 1980 nine books appeared, and since 1980 there have been more than twenty. Jack has turned up in novels, short stories, films, and TV shows (Robert Bloch even brought the Ripper onto the USS Enterprise in one of the most daring episodes of Star Trek). No other murder case has provoked anything like this ballooning bibliography. There is now even a quarterly journal devoted to the topic, Ripperana. Philip Sugden's Complete History of Jack the Ripper (Orbit, 1994) offers the most thorough, sober, and scholarly narrative that has yet appeared, as well as the most painstaking analysis of the evidence. Anyone who wants to look into the case without wasting time on tosh linking the killings with the royal family or the Freemasons should start with Sugden. To be sure, his account will not be the last word.

Why all the interest? In our day we have become unhappily familiar with serial killers and sex maniacs. To the Victorian mind, however, the Whitechapel murders represented something new, strange, and terrifying. They were reported and embellished in the London newspapers and immediately picked up by the foreign press. In this way the Ripper murders sent shock waves throughout Europe, the United States, and what was then the colonial world.

The sobriquet Jack the Ripper clearly played a part in seizing and holding public attention. Yet there is no good reason to believe that the killer gave himself that title. The name first appeared at the foot of a letter sent to the Central News Agency after the second murder. Neither that letter nor any of the other Ripper letters sent to the press, Scotland Yard, or the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee have been firmly linked to the murderer. Leading Scotland Yard officers were sure that the first Jack the Ripper letter was the work of a journalist. Most students of the case agreed. In part, then, he was a media invention.

Five murders, all of prostitutes, are definitely credited to the Ripper, and one or two others might have been his. The body of Polly Nichols was found in Bucks Row around 3:40 A.M. on August 31. Her throat had been cut, and she had been mutilated in the abdomen. She was considered by Scotland Yard to have been the first Ripper victim. But two other prostitutes had been murdered with knives in Whitechapel earlier in the year. These other murders were never cleared up, and there is reason to attribute at least one of them to the Ripper. At any rate, the hue and cry now began in earnest, and Whitechapel was inundated with police. To no avail. On the morning of September 8, Annie Chapman was found dead and mutilated in Hanbury Street. At 1 A.M. on September 30, Elizabeth Stride was found dead in Berner Street. Only 45 minutes later the body of Catharine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square. It seemed the killer had been interrupted while cutting up his first victim that night. Elizabeth Stride was only lightly mutilated, whereas Catharine Eddowes was the worst yet.