Everyone has heard at least one time about Jack the Ripper, the man who in the years to come will become the prototype of the serial killer, inspiring thousands of novels, movies and tv series.
It’s 1888, and the londoners are witnessing one bloody tragedy after another in Whitechapel (a district in the East End):
- 03:45, friday 31 august: Mary Ann Nichols (43 years old)
- 06:00, saturday 8 september: Annie Chapman (47 years old)
- 01:00, friday 30 september: Elizabeth Stride (44 years old)
- 01:00, friday 30 september: Catherine Eddowes (46 years old)
- 10:45, friday 9 november: Mary Jane Kelly (25 years old)
All of these women have two things in common: what they did for work, in fact they were all prostitutes; and their cause of death; every one of them was found violently slaughtered (almost to the point of beheading them), their internal organs removed, and ferocious mutilation were all over their bodies (abdomen, private parts and face) These six women are the only confirmed victims of our mysterious serial killer, but counting every hypothesis we could reach 16 murders. These deaths rose suspicions in the Scotland Yard investigators, they started to suspect that there was a single person behind all of these tragic events. Thomas Bond, forensic doctor and profiler, created a profile of this individual: a physically fit man, bold and imperturbable at the same time. An apparently harmless individual, middle-aged and well-dressed (maybe with a cape). He also hypothesized a condition called Satyriasis, a sexual deviance identifiable with hypersexuality. Furthermore, Bond believed that this suspect didn’t have any anatomical knowledge: therefore he couldn’t have been a surgeon or a butcher, because of the lack of precision of the cuts. Bond interpreted these homicides as of sexual nature and, even without signs of sexual violence, associated with choleric elements and mysoginy.
While the police was groping in the dark, they received numerous letters regarding the murderer (some were from kindhearted people who wanted to provide informations, others impersonated the killer); while the majority of them was deemed unreliable, three of them had a different fate:
- “Dear Boss” (dated 25th of September and received by the Central News Agency on the 27th): it was the first signed by “Jack the Ripper”, but the police deemed it unreliable
- “Saucy Jack” (received on the 1st of October): here Jack announces the murder of two victims in the same night, thing that has actually happened the night of the 30th of September
- “From Hell” (received by George Lusk, chief of the district vigilance commission): This letter was accompanied by a box containing half a human kidney preserved in ethanol, a kidney which was identified as belonging to Catherine Eddowes
Years passed and the year 2007 arrived, and Russell Edwards (a British researcher) has recently bought a shawl from a descendant of a cop who worked on Catherine Eddowes’s crime scene. At this point Edwards decided to run a mitochondrial DNA test on the shawl, comparing it to Aaron Kosminski’s older brother’s great great grandson, and they found a nearly perfect match. Aaron was a Polish immigrant who worked as a barber in London, until he was put in a mental asylum in 1891 with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Even at that time Kosminski was deemed as a primary suspect: he was a barber, so he knew how to handle a knife, without the need of any anatomical knowledge; and he nearly killed his sister with a knife, matching with the misogynist, choleric and violent profile described by Bond.
After this breath-taking discovery, Karen Miller (a woman who claimed to be a descendant of Catherine Eddowes) has called on social media to reopen the investigation with the help of the most modern DNA analysis technologies. Miller, addressing the Mail, invoked the necessity to give a definitive name to the killer through legal means in order to bring justice to the victims. Even though we will never know for sure who this dark figure was, it is curious to see how the aura of mystery around him still influences our world today.How Jack the Ripper has influenced hundreds of artists, including writers, painters and directors. The mystery of Jack still arouses in us this weird fascination for the macabre, as happens with Frankenstein, Dracula and all the horror films of the years to come.