Criminal logo

The Real Mystery of Jack the Ripper

Why wasn't he caught?

By Paul PencePublished 7 months ago 5 min read
5

Jack the Ripper.

A hundred and thirty years ago, just uttering the name would send a chill through your spine. A savagely brutal serial killer who was never identified. His crimes didn’t need amplifying and embellishing by the sensationalist press of the day – they were truly horrific -- but that didn’t stop the newspapers from ascribing murder after murder, not only in London but throughout the world, as the work of the same madman, amplifying every gory detail along the way.

As the murders reached their 100th anniversary in the 1980’s, a fever-pitch of speculation made the murders a cover-up of a royal affair, the work of a secret society, or even acts of evil by supernatural forces.

But in the last 30 years, we have changed.

As a society, we’ve discovered that serial killers are all-too common. Perhaps they are still thankfully rare in real life, but in the artificial existences we all live through television, we are faced with serial killers over and over and over. And we are shown that they aren’t supernatural, they aren’t random, and their choices and patterns can be identified. In the last 30 years, television has turned us all into armchair behavioral analysts.

None of the sensationalism of the last 130 years is necessary to explain what happened in London’s Whitechapel slums.

Jack the Ripper wasn’t a prince whose crimes were covered up by the London police. He wasn’t a insane surgeon who used precision and intellect. He wasn’t a fiction created by a secret society to take the blame for their rituals. He didn’t murder 100 women on a spree that spanned four continents and 50 years.

Stripping away the breathless hysteria and supposition, we know that there were five victims, all prostitutes barely eking out an existence in the most impoverished portion of the city. Not seven, definitely not 100. Five. They were killed late at night, when few people would be out on the streets.

The killer used a hefty, long-bladed knife, not a scalpel. There was no surgical precision, but neither were the cuts done in a random frenzy. Sparing the horrid details as much as possible, he cut his victim’s throats which silenced them, then as much as time allowed he cut their faces and bodies in ways that showed his hatred of women.

And there was no royal carriage to whisk him away – he fled on foot after one murder.

There were two witnesses. One gave a good description of his face and clothing from a distance of 20 or 30 feet. The second was a police constable who came face-to-face with the Ripper just before discovering the body of his 4th victim.

We may never know his name, but we do know who he was.

He was a disturbed man with fits of violence whose behavior made people shy away from him. He hated women in general and prostitutes in particular, likely from his upbringing in grinding poverty. His mother was likely a prostitute, or he was at least raised around them. He hated women so much that he wouldn't be able to keep quiet about it. Everyone who spent more than a few minutes in his presence would know how he felt about them.

He would take menial jobs, possibly in the many slaughterhouses in London’s slums, but his violent outbursts and antisocial attitudes means that he wouldn’t hold down a job for long before he was fired and had to look for more work.

We know from the location of the murders that he had no place of his own to commit his crimes, so he was living on the streets. With no place to call home, he likely carried his murder weapon with him even when he wasn’t stalking his next victim, and as the key to temporarily satisfying his compulsion to kill prostitutes he would guard it like the greatest treasure he had ever owned. He would wear dark clothing that would hide the blood of his victims.

The police of the day may not have been behavioral analysts, but they were certainly intelligent, well reasoned, and highly motivated. They would have come to the same conclusions as any modern-era criminologist would come to. They identified what to look for, they assigned massive manpower to scour Whitechapel, they questioned witnesses, they had a description, and they would have caught him.

While we might encounter fictional serial killers on TV so often that we yawn at the idea that the Ripper was so easy for armchair analysts to profile, there is one really intriguing mystery remaining. Why was he never caught?

That then is the real mystery. There is near certainty that the police would have caught him. But they didn’t.

A good part of the wild speculation of the 1980’s was based on the fact that the police should have caught him, they behaved strangely in a few places, and then when the murders stopped they quickly stopped looking. The police acted suspiciously, so the writers decided that they were purposefully protecting someone of power and influence.

But you don’t need to go that far to explain the police behavior.

Instead of protecting the prince’s doctor or whatever wild speculation they came up with, it is simple to explain everything by realizing that the police were protecting themselves.

Some of the constables in Whitechapel would often stand watch for the prostitutes who worked in their area, staying close enough to come running if a customer became unmanageable. The constable who came face-to-face with him might have been there for exactly that reason. He was, at the least, a trained observer who could have identified the killer if he had been caught.

Demands for action was at a fever pitch. Vigilantes roamed the streets with the approval of the police. Anyone acting suspiciously was stopped, questioned, and searched. At one point, a knife that might have been the murder weapon was found abandoned, likely the killer had ditched it, thinking he was about to be stopped. If so, the police actually had the murderer in their hands, but let him go.

The hysterical public pushed the police into going outside the law – they rounded up anyone who fit the physical and behavioral description and if they could find justification they’d send them to the insane asylum.

At least one person suspected of being the Ripper was found drowned in the river, his pockets filled with rocks.

The murders stopped and never restarted.

The police covered corruption, incompetence, and heavy-handed circumvention of the justice system, but they did catch the Ripper. He is likely one of the men sent to the asylum to later die of neglect and mistreatment.

We may never know his name, but we can consider the joint mysteries of who he was and why the police behaved the way they did completely solved.

investigationfact or fiction
5

About the Creator

Paul Pence

A true renaissance man in the traditional sense of the term, Paul leads a life too full to summarize in a bio. Arts, sciences, philosophy, politics, humor, history, languages... just about everything catches his attention.

Travel and Tourism

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments (3)

Sign in to comment
  • Rachel Deeming5 months ago

    Great article about Jack the Ripper and your theory of why he was never caught has logic to it. Who knows? It will be one of the enduring mysteries, I think.

  • Kure Garba7 months ago

    Nice story. Can you help me to open a stripe account I will pay for it can you?

  • Kendall Defoe 7 months ago

    You have cleared out a lot of the nonsense and myths about the man (four continents?). And have you seen the film "Time after Time"? You might appreciate their take on the Ripper story.

Find us on social media

Miscellaneous links

  • Explore
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Support

© 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.